Boats & boulders
September 12, 2012 § Leave a comment
We decided to canoe the St. Croix River. My sister, her husband, me, and my best friend. This river keeps drawing me back to where it winds between two of the Upper Midwest’s finest states, Minnesota and Wisconsin. As states go, you might call these two frenemies. Football fiercely divides us. Yet we are variations on a theme.
The small towns here in Wisconsin remind me so much of my Minnesota childhood. The geography of hills and trees, water, woods, and farmland – it’s the same. The snowmobiles. The jetskis. The shabby cafes, the corner gas stations that also sell bait, and the Dairy Queen in every town. Rows of cabins along lakes. Small golf courses. Many small churches and their faithful parishioners. There is one such church across the street. I listen to the bells.
The St. Croix makes for a happy meeting place for me and my Minnesota-dwelling favorite people. So. We found ourselves in canoes on the water.
We love boats.
A small island in the middle of the water simply had to be explored.
Chats with friends in nature are always welcome.
Canoe trips in general are welcome.
I wasn’t ready to be done. Next time, I want to camp overnight somewhere amidst evergreens and stars and the hooting and howling of wild creatures.
Instead, while the other three headed back to the Cities, I wandered around the boulders and potholes on the Minnesota side of Interstates Park.
Creepy.
Then I found a spot on a rock where the river view and the light were just right. I sat there and thought. I read. I journaled. I prayed. I let my spirit get all settled, and the day wound down.
As it should.
Happy sights of the day
August 19, 2012 § 2 Comments
1. A birthday cake (flavor-of-the-week) ice cream cone from Leo’s. Two scoops.
2. Yarns, yarns, yarns, and three ladies watching me sort through skeins and books and then inviting me to their Thursday knitting nights. The textures and colors in that little store just ask for you to take the stuff in your hands and make something of it.
3. An old honey tin, the size of a paint can, advertising an apiary from Thorp, Wisconsin – the very town where our family van broke down on this summer’s vacation. (I laughed, and bought it.)
4. A Corgi named Tillie.
5. A man in a striped shirt guiding a young, merry sounding couple in a gondola down the St. Croix River.
6. Two bi-planes gliding low over that same river, nearly skimming the surface before I lost sight of them.
7. A young man with black hair and a camera case, walking in front of me easy as can be, by himself this Sunday evening. When I stopped walking, turned around, and crouched down to peer under the bridge to where the planes had gone, I looked back to see him, 20 yards away, doing the same thing.
8. Twelve flowers in a glass on the kitchen counter. Zinnias and black-eyed Susans leftover from yesterday’s event. Such cheerful faces.
Riding the Neighbors’ Horses – Paperback
March 17, 2012 § 2 Comments
The novel is up on Amazon and ready for purchase! Be angels and pass it along to any horse-crazy kids (or grown-ups) you know, won’t you?
You can find it here: Riding the Neighbors’ Horses
Mosaic
March 7, 2012 § Leave a comment
On Saturday, my family and I went to the Minneapolis Institute of Art. This mosaic, which hangs in a hallway and which we almost sauntered right past, was created in Syria around 4 or 5 A.D. In another room we saw a statue from several centuries B.C. I have been to many museums and marveled at much art. Still these things sort of stop me in my tracks. First: it is amazing that they are so very old, and have somehow managed to last until today, and even found homes in the Midwestern United States. Second: it is a wonderful thing that art in itself is so timeless, so instinctive, and so intrinsic to humanity. That in all times and cultures it has sprung forth. Yes. Art matters.
Leif Enger and the outlaw journeys
January 7, 2012 § 1 Comment
I must put in a word for Leif Enger. Not as if he needs a word put in for him, by me; his debut novel, Peace Like a River, established itself as a bestseller years ago. I actually am reading this one second – as many times as I stumbled across the book while going to college, working in a bookstore, generally hanging with literary sorts – I didn’t, for some reason, feel the need to dive in with everyone else. (Sometimes I am contrary and refuse to read what is most popular. I did the same with Angela’s Ashes. Years later I picked it up and scarfed it down with the right combination of sorrow and appreciation.)
Enger drew me in, instead, with So Brave, Young, and Handsome, a novel which, you might guess, got me with its title. But it wasn’t about dashing young cowboys as I suspected on first glance. Instead it follows a postman, a family man named Monte Becket who’s had a one-hit wonder of a book and is trying, and failing, to write another. He happens to meet an older, gentle, drifter of a man who turns out to be a former outlaw. And this man has a dream, and it is of the wife of his youth, and he feels that he needs to go and find her and apologize for the past. So our postman-narrator gets invited to accompany him, and what adventures follow!
As much as the plot is rollicking and suspenseful enough that it tugs you along, what I (having spent most of my twenties trying to understand and practice the craft of writing) kept feeling so terribly happy about were two other things: (1) that his characters are colorful, believable, unique, and endearing – you want to spend time with them; and (2) that he uses language with such understated skill as he goes about unfolding his story. Beautiful, as one who has read and listened and practiced and revised extensively can make a story – can structure phrases, sentences, and moments. All throughout I would find myself pausing and even catching my breath, because that is what happens when something goes beyond what you expect, even when you have high expectations, with the deftness and subtlety of the perfect extra detail, the unexpected observation.
So I went to the horse barn raving about So Brave, Young, and Handsome. My boss was about to go off for a trip and needed something to read, and in the airport she found Enger’s other book, Peace Like a River. She sent me a text after skimming the first few pages, telling me how excited she was to read it; when I ran into her next the first thing she said to me was, “Love the book!” And when she finished she lent it to me. And now I am reading with the same kind of reaction I had to the first – hunger for the story, gladness to be reading, thankfulness for the kinds of writers who remain true to their art and yet, somehow, have also managed to make their work accessible to the general public (a feat that seems to be trickier than one would hope, and a source of frustration for many writers, who are torn between writing something with meaning or writing something that will sell). This story follows a boy named Reuben, and his sister and father, as they head West looking for the brother and son who has become a 20th century outlaw. I love this family. I want to know them. I feel as if I do.
Read his books! That’s all I’m saying.
Here are links to where you can find them, or your library likely has them:
P.S. He’s a Minnesota writer. Which is even better.
A Lake Superior Poem
December 19, 2011 § 2 Comments
My graduate school and poet friend Amy just chased her heart north, to the North Shore of Lake Superior. I am so glad for her, especially because this place is one of my homes, too – never a place I have lived, but I place I have known myself to belong to, to be somehow intangibly (and yet, so very tangibly) connected to, smitten with, inspired by. It is a place I crave.
The summer after I graduated from high school, my family took a trip up to the Lake of the Woods, into Canada, and down along the North Shore Drive. When we reached the lake we had been in the van bickering and bored for too long, and then we’d gotten out at a rest stop and stumbled upon a trail. Suddenly we were all in better tempers, as the water reached blue into the distance and the breeze whisked its way around us.
And there was a moment when I stood on the rocky shore and felt my chest fill so terribly, wonderfully full. And I felt my heart know I belong here. For a long while I outlined my plans for the small house I would have where the waves rush and fall against the rocks and the pines.
I have since then known that same feeling in other places, though not so many as to make this one decrease in significance. Instead I am glad to find them, to gather them like precious stones. A few years ago three friends and I went up to ski at Lutsen, and I got to see my lake in winter. Several weeks later I wrote this poem.
—–
askance
at winter’s edge of shoreline, Lake Superior breaks into glass,
shards that creak and clink when we step softly across.
white-blue sky reaches down to the distant blue-black
where ice gives way and water moves free. now and then,
a rumble and groan. we keep close to shore. hold a stillness.
listening, it is, for beginners. only common sense in asking
the lake if we might cross its cracks and heaves, if
we might find the rare structures of winter on water.
—–
Riding the Neighbors’ Horses – Ebook Release!
December 13, 2011 § 8 Comments
Hey everyone! My juvenile fiction novel is available as an ebook as of today!
You can purchase it here:
The book will also be available in hard copy, hopefully later this month or early next year. Updates and excerpts to come!
Synopsis:
When twelve-year-old Susan Abbot befriends Nan and Ralph Whiting, the children of the horse trainer down the road, she has the chance to ride some of the best horses in Minnesota. But her desire to ride conflicts with her father’s distrust of horses – and the next-door neighbors who own them. In a golden 1920s summer, Susan reaches for independence, and finds she must weigh her relationships alongside her dreams.
Kinds of Honey 