The Middlewesterner

THIS AND THAT AND THIS AND THAT

Need a last minute

stocking stuffer? Let me remind one and all that every child needs to grow up listening to the Trinity (Doc Abbick, Dean Schechinger, and Tom Montag) CD, Fairy Tales & Nonsense, which you can order here (or you simply listen to two minutes of each song).

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Trinity is hard at work on our second album, which will be devoted to original train songs. I'd like to call it "Plain Trains," but I doubt the others will oblige. I've got the lyrics written, mostly; one or the other of them may still need to be revised to fit the music. Indeed, Dean has written most of the music already. And I have figured out my basslines for five of the songs, with seven or eight or nine to go, depending on how many songs we decide to put on the album. My fingers are sore from practicing, but Doc says if your fingers get sore, you need to improve your technique. Sore fingers or not, I am still having way too much fun.

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A five thousand word excerpt from Peter's Story, which I co-authored with Peter Pizzino, appeared in the December issue of Milwaukee Magazine.

On November 27, Jane Hampden of WUWM aired an interview she conducted with Peter and me. You can listen to the interview here - you have to scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the audio file.

Peter and I gave a presentation and signed books at the Schwartz Bookshop on Downer Avenue in Milwaukee on December 4. The event was written up in Schwartz's electronic newsletter, temporarily here (scroll about 3/4 of the way down the page).

There are two things which keep people away from an event such as a reading/book signing. Bad weather is one. Good weather is the other. In our case, we encountered about four inches of snow in the two hours before our presentation. Even so, some fifteen people showed up to listen and talk and buy books. And thanks to Stacy at the store for taking such good care of us!

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My guitar-pickin' friend Doug and I played music yesterday in the afternoon. Well, actually what we did was record two instrumentals, "Under the Double Eagle" and "Bully of the Town." Doug had bought a portable 4-track digital "recording studio" recently, which is about the size of mass market paperback, and we wanted to try it out. Doug played rhythm guitar on one track and lead guitar on another, and I played bass a third. The recorder is a remarkable little gadget, and Doug says "You don't have to be an engineer to run it."

The recordings were for practice: (1) Doug got to practice using the recorder: and (2) I will practice the songs using the CD Doug made for me of our session. We'll record "keeper copies" sometime later.

Afterwards Mary and I and Doug and his wife went out for supper, to celebrate our 38th wedding anniversary and Doug's birthday. Happy Anniversary to Us. Happy Birthday to Doug.

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I had an e-mail earlier this week from the Mari Sandoz Society, asking to use some words about visiting Mari's gravesite from one of my blog posts. Cindy Evert Christ, the Communications Coordinator, wrote: "We are planning an excursion to Mari’s grave after our annual conference in Chadron March 27-29, 2008. I am not sure how I want to use your words—in a flyer for the conference, the newsletter, etc.—but I would like permission to use what you have written about Mari’s gravesite."

Of course, I am honored to have my words used to honor the memory of Mari Sandoz, and I told Cindy that the Society was free to use the passage now and forever as they see fit.

The paragraphs in question appear about the middle of this post, starting with "You want it to mean something" and continuing to "Thank you, Mari" and the asterisk.

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I have one more session with my Creative Nonfiction students at Lakeland College before I have to turn in the final grades. We'll meet on Wednesday, the 12th, to discuss the remaining papers of their fourth major assignment, and if we have time we'll also talk about what they have learned to "see" during the course of the semester. Each week in their journals I had the students record a "What I Saw" passage, some observation out of their experience which might warrant recording as prose. For the final session they need to summarize what they've learned about how they "see." Since one actually learns to write pretty much on his own, I figure my task as a teacher this semester has been to help the students learn to see, so they have something to write about.

Well, then, yes, I do liberally mark up their papers. I told them at the beginning of the semester that I'd treat their work as if I were an editor having at a manuscript. And that's pretty much what I've done. If they study the red ink, they'll learn something more about writing from my emendations.

I don't know how those who teach three or four classes per semester are able to do it. I have one class, and it's all I can take care of. Every time I get to teach, I am reminded again how much I admire those who do it as a profession. It's hard work.

Teachers are our unsung heroes.

So I'd like to recommend that, if you have teachers who were important in your formation, write them this holiday season to say how much they meant to you, and thank them.

It will be good for the teachers to hear it. It will be good for you to say it.

TRINITY'S FAIRY TALES & NONSENSE IS NOW AVAILABLE - YUHAA!

Well, folks, the album,

Fairy Tales & Nonsense by Trinity (Doc Abbick, Dean Schechinger, and Tom Montag) is now available, or will be later today!

And it is listed as an "Editor's Pick." Yuhaa!

You can go to CDBaby.com and read a bit about the album, here. Or better yet, you can listen to as much as two minutes of each of the twelve songs on the album:

1. Frog Prince
2. Brementown Musicians
3. Pied Piper
4. Cinderella
5. Red Riding Hood
6. Jack and the Beanstalk
7. Hansel and Gretel
8. Three Little Pigs
9. Snow White
10 Sleeping Beauty
11. Switchy [nonsense song]
12. Rapunzel

If you'll remember, I am the culprit who wrote the lyrics and I play bass on ten of the tunes; Dean Schechinger wrote the music, plays some guitar, and sings his killer harmonies; and Doc Abbick, good ol' Doc, God bless you, Doc, he sings all the lead vocals, plays the main guitar, and makes words and music sound utterly terrific.

We had a good time creating the album and, of course, we thought it sounded good, but we might prejudiced. Yet the album is an "Editor's Pick," did I mention that!

Go ahead, click on the link to Fairy Tales & Nonsense and take a listen. If you'll like what you hear, you can buy a copy right then and there; or better yet, buy two copies and get a 40% discount. You, too, can live happily ever after.

Say it with me: Yu-haa.

TRINITY RE-UNION IN SIOUX CITY DOC AND THE BOYS ON SATURDAY NIGHT

I have been terribly

busy these past couple of months, culminating this past weekend with the Trinity Prep re-union in Sioux City, Iowa. The re-union was coordinated by Dan Klein from the Class of '67 (thanks, Dan!) for all of the school's graduates who cared to attend, and nearly fifty of us did. We had pizza on Friday night in one of the buildings at Trinity Heights, which grew up on of the rubble of the Trinity Prep buildings once they'd been torn down. On Saturday we had chicken and ribs catered in at the same facility. One of the evenings we got our class pictures taken, those of us who showed up. Most of us were staying at the Quality Inn near the intersection of Hamilton Boulevard and I-29.

My classmates Doc Abbick and Dean Schechinger had played guitars and sang together during the hootenanny phase of our high school years, and Doc thought it would be a great idea if they could do some singing again during the re-union. He asked Dan Klein if there would be a room available at the hotel for just such a use. Somehow Doc and Dean got booked for Saturday night in the lounge at our hotel.

Somehow I invigled myelf an invitation to play bass for Doc and Dean; and Doc recruited his son, Chuck, a real musician, to play keyboards with us and give us some class.

Upon a Friday last month, Dean drove four hours from his home in Omaha for rehearsal at Doc's house outside Junction City, Kansas. Upon the same Friday, I drove eleven hours from Fairwater. We rehearsed for three hours on Friday night and for nine hours on Saturday, and ended up preparing about forty songs in four sets. Then, on Sunday, the vagabond musicians drove home. Chuck, being the real musician, would come up to speed during our sound check at the hotel lounge before Show Time.

We did set up our gear on Saturday afternoon, and did our sound check, and found that Chuck knew the songs and knew how to kick them off and wrap them up and how to lay in the bridge here and to take a ride there, and how to lay down an A-minor ninth at the end of "House of the Rising Sun" that would make them cry.

Chuck stayed to watch the equipment in the lounge while the other three of us went out to Trinity Heights for some chicken and ribs and some comradery with our classmates. What a wonderful get-together. I hadn't seen most of those fellows in forty-two years!

And then it was Show Time - 9 p.m. on Saturday night. We had rehearsed four sets, but didn't know if we would need four sets. What if nobody showed up? What if everybody who showed up walked out sometime during the first set? What if we got heckled?

Well, about 9:05 p.m. in came all those Trinity Prep fellows, and some of their adventuresome wives. And about 9:06 p.m. Doc and the Boys kicked off the first song and it sounded pretty good. The audience started stomping and hooting and hollering. We rolled into four or five of those old folk-songs that Doc and Dean used to sing, and an old Hank Williams' tune, and so on. We wrapped up the first set with a rousing version of "Sioux City Sue."

Doc and the Boys. From left: Tom Montag, Dean Schechinger, Chuck Abbick, Doc Abbick

People were still stomping and hooting and hollering as we tied up that Sioux City girl with the ol' lasso and got her branded. And we took a break. A short break, because we didn't want to lose the audience. We kicked off the second set with "Kansas City," and everybody was still stomping.

The bass-player for Doc and the Boys, your humble scribe.

And they kept stomping and hooting and hollering through all four sets. We played every song we had prepared, ending with "Will the Circle Be Unbroken" about 12:45 a.m., I suppose. The last note of the last line of the last song died away and we said thanks and good night. People lingered to talk as we took down the equipment and got it loaded. Then Doc and the Boys went out for some breakfast.

We had to rate the evening a success.

THIS IS JANUARY YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS

Most of our bags

are packed. Most of our attention would be focused on getting out of here, except for all the weedy things of life, like Mary having to go in and work for part of the day. Yet this afternoon we'll head to Milwaukee and find our diving compatriot, The Honorable Almost-Doctor-Bob, and locate some supper; and then we'll drive down to our hotel near O'Hare. The plane for Cozumel leaves at 5:50 a.m. on Wednesday and we'll be on it.

Before sleep on Wednesday night I intend to complete The Cozumel Trifecta - a fish torta at the little fish taco stand along the sidewalk on the way to the grocery store; a grande bowl of pozole at that terrific pozole stand a few blocks from Hotel Pepita; and one of "the best beef tacos on the island" from Johnnie Bravo's for dessert.

And then nothing but a week of laziness. Mary's brother does not have a dozen students with him this year, so I won't feel like a camel helping to haul equipment and tanks for them. This year we won't have much of anything to haul but ourselves, and I don't intend to over-do in that department either. Isn't the point of a vacation to vacate? That's what I am going to do for the week: vege-vacate. The homefront will be suitable cared for, so truly there'll be nothing for us to do but relax.

Well, except that Tom will be looking at the drafts of the first eight chapters of Peter's Story he is taking with him.

Did you notice how casually I dropped in that first eight chapters...? Yep, I have kept my shoulder to the wheel these past weeks, and my nose to the grindstone; and, yep, that position was pretty uncomfortable, yet I was able to complete drafts of the first eight chapters and have them to take with me. I'll work on them and sip cool libations (notice the plural) while sitting in the courtyard of the Hotel Pepita. Yep, eight chapters drafted; four or five to go. Cool libations.

You can be sure, folks, it won't be all work and no play.

We will return late on January 10.

In the meantime, nothing will be posed here, not even the old reliable "Morning Drive Journal," for we have entered that portion of the journal where Mary and I took our very first diving trip to Cozumel in January, and there is no "Morning Drive" to report. This is our sixth trip.

We'll be back on the air by January 12, I suppose. In the meantime, good people, relax and talk amongst yourselves.

Adios.

LISTEN UP! SUBMISSIONS ARE INVITED FOR QARRTSILUNI'S "FIRST TIME" THEME

"Don't make me get my willow switch,"

my Gramma used to say, and we knew we had to listen.

"Don't make me get my willow switch," I say now, inviting you again to submit your work for Qarrtsiluni's "First Time" theme. Kasturi Mattern and I are guest-editors for this edition, and we'll be reading submissions through December 15, for publication throughout November and December.

There is a first time for everything, so the theme is wide open. We don't want to limit you with any suggestions, yet you can see what some of your compadres have offered here and here and here. There'll be a short story going up tomorrow.

We are looking for memoir and essay, for poetry, fiction, photography, artwork. For a form that perhaps we'd be seeing for the very first time. Length limit is 3,000 words.

Don't make me get my willow switch....

TONIGHT I READ AT VILLAGE BOOKSMITH, BARABOO; MONDAY I MEET WITH STUDENTS IN OHIO

Tonight at 7:30 p.m. Kimberly Blanchette

and I will be reading at The Village Booksmith at 526 Oak Street, Baraboo, Wisconsin, as part of the store's "Second Friday Poetry" series. You may remember that I met Kimberly at the Wisconsin Writers Conference last June. If you are in Baraboo tonight, stop by the store. Annie has the coffee on. You can find The Village Booksmith by locating the cannon on the courthouse square in Baraboo: it points right at the bookstore. Our reading will be followed by an open mic, so bring some poems.

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On Saturday, I'll head to Dekalb, Illinois, for supper with the Illinois contingent of the family. Then Sunday morning after breakfast I'll head east: on Monday I am scheduled to meet with two of Charlie Mescher's senior English classes at the high school in Maria Stein, Ohio. I did this last spring, too, for last year's seniors. Charlie's class with the writing emphasis is again using my memoir Curlew: Home as a textbook as they learn to write personal nonfiction narrative prose of their own. His class with the emphasis on American poetry will be asking me questions about my "99 Propositions" and I'll be trying to answer them. Perhaps they'll want to play Stump the Poet, that is, to ask me questions for which I cannot fabricate suitable felicitous answers.

I find meeting the young writers in Charlie's classes to be personally rewarding, and I love to preach my Gospel of Commonplace Beauty. That is, I will encourage them to write about this middlewestern world of ours, and its people; I will tell them that here be The Stuff of Literature, just as rich as that to be found anywhere. Of course, they must learn to see, and to see how their local truths are generally true; then they must learn to record what they see as truly as is humanly possible. Excellence in both seeing the world and recording the experience is achieved by practice, practice, practice, and revision, revision, revision. That is, by seeing and seeing and seeing (repeated observation), and then by seeing again (re-vision). The Stuff of Literature, it's right here, right now, all the time.

I'll be there in time for supper on Sunday, Charlie, and this year I have not forgotten there's a one hour time difference between Wisconsin and Ohio!

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I will be back at The Middlewesterner's control panel on Wednesday, folks. See you then....

SUBMISSIONS INVITED FOR "FIRST TIME" THEME AT QARRTSILUNI

Along with Kasturi

of Not Native Fruit, I am guest-editing the November-December edition of the online magazine qarrtsiluni. The theme this time is "First Time." We are now inviting your submissions. This is the way we describe what we're looking for:

First time. There's a first time for everything. The obvious: first kiss, first love, first sex. The first day of school. Less obvious: first time around the block, first poem, first loss, first Christmas you remember. This first time for everything theme is wide open, so we don't want to limit you with our suggestions. Surprise us!

We are looking for memoir and essay, for poetry, fiction, photography, artwork. For a form that perhaps we'd be seeing for the very first time.

Submissions may begin immediately and will be considered through December 15, for publication throughout November and December. The word limit remains at 3,000.

Qarrtsiluni is "an experiment in online literary and artistic collaboration. The title comes from an Alaskan Inuit word that means 'sitting together in the darkness, waiting for something to burst.' Qarrtsiluni began publishing on September 20, 2005." Along with Lorianne of Hoarded Ordinaries, I've previously guest-edited the "Finding Home" theme for qarrtsiluni. "First Time" will be the ninth theme explored at the magazine. The managing editors for this excellent venture are Beth from Cassandra Pages and Dave from via negativa.

Information on how to submit work for our consideration can be found here. First-time contributors are especially welcome. Send us your best stuff!

THERE HE GOES WHERE HE STOPS NOBODY KNOWS

I'm not saying that I have a busy month

ahead of me, but I'll tell ya: I don't know if I'll make it til August 5th without a nap or two.

1. Tomorrow I leave for a week in Eaton, Ohio. Home on Friday, July 7th. Eaton, my focus community for the strip of Ohio which falls within the middlewest, is celebrating the 200th anniversary of its founding. I gotta be there for that.

2. On Saturday, July 8th, I head to West Bend, Iowa, for the big Montag reunion on Sunday, July 9. How big is it? I have 139 first cousins, if that gives you a clue. My dad is one of 17 children, and that's just the Henry Montag clan; the families of Henry's brothers and sisters will be there too and that was a big family even by the old Iowa standards.

3. After the family reunion, I'll head four hours west, to Sioux City, Iowa, to visit my friends Phil and Terry Hey. Phil is the author of How It Seems To Me, which my press, MWPH Books, published last year. He says he has three big bulbs of garlic for me. I said, "I'll be right there." Phil's garlic is worth the drive. It will also be nice to see Phil and Terry again, I might add, and to meet the one of their three horses I haven't already been introduced to. In a recent e-mail, Phil asked me what I wanted for breakfast on Monday morning before my return to Wisconsin. I said, "last paragraph, p. 13, Curlew: Home." He said, "I checked the citation. I can do it." I'll be home late on Monday night.

4. On Thursday, July 13, Mary and I will fly to Colorado to visit daughter Jessica and son-in-law Tait Brink in Ft. Collins. Jessica got a new position within the Forest Service, which required the transfer to Ft. Collins. They have bought a house, and we're going out to see the place, and them, and Ft. Collins. Home on July 17th.

5. I have an appointment at the dentist in Ripon to get my teeth cleaned at 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday, July 18th. Why in the world would I tell you that?

6. Because after I get my teeth cleaned on Tuesday, July 18th, I'll head to Dekalb, Illinois, to house-sit at daughter Jenifer's house while she is at a conference. Home on Friday night, July 21.

7. I will work all day Saturday and Sunday, July 22-23, at Fairwater's big community event, the Jim Town/Bill Town Celebration, sponsored by the Fairwater Historical Society, the Lions Club, the American Legion, the Fire Department, Zion Lutheran Church, etc. It's all day both days.

8. On Friday, July 28th, Mary and I will leave for a week of canoeing in the Boundary Waters on the Canadian side of the border. I'll be back home on August 5th... assuming I make it that far....

This evening, my friend Charlie Mescher and his wife Jane will be stopping here for supper and an overnight visit on their way home to Ohio from a vacation in Bayfield, Wisconsin. Mary has made jambalaya; we'll have cornbread to go with it, and a big green salad; strawberries and ice cream for dessert. We'll fix 'em breakfast in the morning, then when Charlie and Jane head for home, I'll head for Eaton, Ohio.

In the meantime, through the wonders of technology, you'll find "Lines" put up here every day, you'll find the usual "Morning Drive Journal" entries, sometimes you'll find Ivan Burgess's Echo Echo (if I've been home to type up the newest issues). There'll be Saturday Poems on at least some of the Saturdays. Who knows what else - perhaps an occasional post about my adventures on the rare occasions I touch down here?

Oh, and in my free time, I'll be plucking my new flat-top acoustic bass, just delivered yesterday. What's a guy who is most definitely not a musician doing with this new acoustic bass, two electric basses, a dobro, two electric lap steels, and part interest in a pedal steel? Oh, and part interest in the stand-up double-bass, Big Bertha? Well, that's the price you have to pay if you like to hang out with musicians.

And that whistling sound you hear in the distance? That's the rush of wind as I try to get through July. If you listen real careful you might hear me saying, "Tom, come on, just put your head down and GO."

"Tom, I mean it, come on, just put your head down now and GO!"

MR. BURNS IS A PROMISING YOUNG WRITER: TAKE A LOOK

Mr. Burns over at Controlled Burns

is a promising young writer. He has twice been a student of mine, I am pleased to say, though his talent is his own. I have at best given him some encouragement and some suggestions. He is building his own arresting portfolio of written work one piece at a time. How good do I think he is? You might go look at this piece about a farmer and judge for yourself.

BEN ZEN FINDS A FRIEND

My Ben Zen has found a friend,

a young Buddhist nun in Korea, Soen Joon of one robe, one bowl. Soen Joon's women and Ben are having conversation. Go listen in, here. Those women understand how Ben is best handled, I think. Have a laugh with us.

A TRIP TO CENTRAL PENNSYLVANIA AND MONTREAL

I am home. I have been to central Pennsylvania, to Montreal, back to central Pennsylvania; I alighted in Fairwater for a day and a half, then went off to Baraboo for two days of the Wisconsin Writers Conference where I did two readings from my farm writings and twice made my presentation on "Lorine's Toolbox." And now I am home.

Here follows a report of my travels east. Truth has many faces: you can check my version of events against reports from Rachel, Lorianne, qB's photos, Leslee, Leslee again, mole, mole again, and Dave.

As always, it was good to travel, it was good to come home.

I was one of a swarm

of bloggers who showed up in Montreal on or about June 2-4 for a meet-up. That's what you call it, I guess, when a group of bloggers who know each other over the internet get together for real-life-face-to-face conversation, a blogger meet-up.

If I have to explain it to you, why I drove to central Pennsylvania to pick up fellow blogger Dave Bonta and his friend The Sylph and why together we headed north to Montreal - if I have to explain it to you, you won't get it. Either you understand, I've found, or you don't. Explaining it won't enlighten the unenlightened. It's that you get it, or you don't get it. And admittedly understanding doesn't necessarily prove one is a better person; nor does not understanding prove otherwise.

I arrived in central Pennsylvania early enough that Dave and I had a day together to spend exploring Plummer's Hollow where he lives, and Tyrone, and State College. Dave showed me the power pole where the local bears communicate with each other; I did not actually get to see a bear, but Dave and his niece did, after I'd returned to Wisconsin. Dave showed me the vernal pond that was now a dry depression in the woods. I saw the trees that an ice storm brought down a few years ago. Dave regularly writes about Plummer's Hollow on his blog, and in my mind I had formed a picture of the terrain. Now, having walked ridge and meadow, I know Plummer's Hollow in my very muscles. My knowledge of the landscape of Dave's home is different now, fuller, though not necessarily any better. A writer brings particulars into sharp relief on his blog: reading Dave's, I have seen Plummer's Hollow in sharp relief; now I have also seen it in its variegated green entirety.

On our way north to Montreal, Dave and The Sylph and I camped Thursday night at Letchworth State Park in New York. The gorge is said to be the Grand Canyon of the east. It is a grand old gorge.

We put up our tents at our campsite and Dave got scolded by a pair of Cooper's hawks. We walked park trails. We watched the lower waterfalls. We saw Ma Merganser and four little merganserlings swim against the torrent of the waterfalls, to feed on rocks nearby. We visited a Seneca meeting lodge on the grounds, and the cabin that had belonged to the daughter of Mary Jemison - Mary Jemison being a white woman held captive by Indians, who lived out her life in that culture. We got dampened in a bit of drizzle during supper, as darkness came on. We slept.

We arrived at the edge of Montreal about 5:30 p.m. Friday evening. There was plenty of traffic, but not much in the way of road rage. Oh, we did see a fellow shake his fist at someone who cut him off - it was just like in the movies - and a bird got flipped in return, but that was about the extent of it. We weren't in Los Angeles.

We discovered that the youth hostel where we intended to stay had lost our reservations. One doesn't always recognize good fortune in the guise of such a predicament, I know, but this was good fortune. The woman who told us they didn't have our reservations and didn't have three rooms for us called to a "sister" youth hostel down the street, which did have three rooms, with a separate entrance, with a bit of a living room with couch and table and chairs, with its own bathroom. It was on the ground floor, and you entered beneath the concrete stairs that led to the rest of the youth hostel above. It was as if the Clan of the Cave Bear had been offered its own private cave. We got what we wanted and didn't know to ask for.

We were late getting to the hotel where we were to meet up with the other bloggers and look for supper. Those other bloggers, they were very patient folks and waited for us to show. Or was it, as was the case much of the weekend, bodies at rest tend to stay at rest? In any case, we were not too late for supper.

Where would we eat? We swarmed the Latin Quarter along Rue St. Denis and found The Thai Restaurant. That was its name - The Thai Restaurant. It was upstairs and they had a table for the ten or eleven or twelve of us outside on the patio. They had beer and coffee and wine to fuel our conversation. I ordered Pad Thai, which dish, you know, is humankind's single greatest culinary achievement; or else I was Thai in some previous incarnation. (I would have Pad Thai again on Saturday and once more on the drive back to central Pennsylvania from Montreal. This, I've been told with some assurance, is a clear sign of a complusive personality - Pad Thai three times on one long weekend.)

The Thai Restaurant found a table for the ten or eleven or twelve of us, as did several other restaurants over the course of the weekend. The waiter or waitress cheerfully brought us individual checks. I fell in love with every waitress I saw - oh, speak French to me. That French attitude you hear so much about? We didn't see any evidence of it, not in the restaurants, not in the stores, not on the streets. Montreal was a lovely place for a blogger meet-up.

Saturday was rainy, which did little to dampen our spirits. We swarmed the Old City and found a place under an awning that would let us sip espresso or latte or tea while it rained, and nibble Indian fry bread with cranberries, and talk. We were served by a fur-trader's wench, in costume.

Talk. That's what bloggers do when they get together, you know, these strangers, these virtual friends. They talk, and they become face-to-face friends. We are born into certain families and as much as we might love them we didn't have much choice in the matter; we fall in among friends in our communities, often from a limited selection to choose from. But a blogger meet-up of this sort is like attending a happy family reunion with a family you have carefully chosen for yourself.

How do you know these guys aren't axe murderers, some people might want to ask. I don't know. How do you know the guy you're going to see about the used car he's advertising isn't an axe murderer? You don't. You make your choices and take your chances.

Meeting face-to-face with a bunch of the bloggers you read regularly is everything like meeting a bunch of your friends for a few beers after work. Except that we who have never before met probably know each other better than you know your friends. In person, these bloggers are as they appear on their blogs, only more so. More intensely so. More profusely so. More colorfully so.

So what do you do for a whole blogger weekend? You eat. You talk. You sip espresso. You walk in the rain. You talk. You eat. You watch other bloggers take photographs. Not photographs of normal, ordinary reality. Photographs of patterns of shape and line and color. Of disembodied reflections in store windows. Of staircases and naked mannikins. You talk some more, eat some more, have more coffee. You laugh. You laugh a lot.

And, damn, all of a sudden it is Monday morning and time to face reality. Time to head back to central Pennsylvannia to drop off Dave and The Sylph. Time to think about heading for Wisconsin, about going home, back to that other reality. Saying good-bye is difficult. You've got to do it, and you do. With promises of another meet-up, some other city, some time in the future.

Watch for us in your neighborhood. You'll know us when you see us. We'll be the swarming bloggers.

Dave Bonta on swarming here. So different from our adventure, yet so much the same?

NOT ALL WHO WANDER ARE LOST

This afternoon we hold the memorial

for Mary's mother, Kathryn Whitford. We'll gather at "the farm" in Marquette County, Wisconsin, where Kay's ashes have been set down next to her husband Philip's and her brother Clay's, next to our sister-in-law Karen Whitford's, next to our friend Meredith Ackley's, and Meredith's mother Gladys's. It is a small ceremony - some fifty of family, neighbors, friends, and former colleauges will be in attendance. Both of our daughters are home this weekend and are involved in the ceremony, providing memories of Grandmother. Then Jenifer will read an appropriate passage from Thoreau's journals; and Jessica, who made Kay's last martini last September, will make another martini, will give each family member a sip of it, and - to say goodbye - will pour the remainder on Kay's grave. There won't be a lot of God-talk - that's not our way. Quite simply, we will hold her in our memory this afternoon, and will promise to continue holding her in memory.

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Tomorrow Fairwater will hold its Memorial Day parade and celebration. I'll be responsible for manning the "Fairwater Mercantile," as usual, while the museum is open after the parade. The parade and a visit to the museum's display honoring those from Fairwater who served in the Armed Forces are simple but powerful community rituals, and I'm happy to have a small part in them.

*

Once my responsibilities at the museum have been completed on Monday, I'll climb into the cockpit of my little Saturn and head east. Sometime later afternoon on Tuesday, I expect to be in Dave Bonta's Plummer's Hollow. That's in Pennsylvania, folks. I think on Wednesday Dave will be showing me his neighborhood. Imagine having Dave as a personal tour guide! I can't wait. On Thursday we'll gather up a friend of his and head north towards Montreal, with some camping in New York along the way. We'll spend the weekend at a youth hostel in Montreal. Apparently the youth hostel doesn't have a problem housing greybeards, although Dave said his friend didn't check with them to see if they honored AARP discounts for the likes of me. (I think that was a dig about my age, don't you? Dave: Respect your elders!) In Montreal we'll be meeting up with some blog-buddies, drinking a lot of coffee and no doubt occasionally something stronger than coffee, and talking. And talking, talking, talking. And hanging out, eating some good food, and talking. Did I mention we'll probably do some talking?

There are, of course, two kinds of people in the world: those who get it that I am going to Montreal to meet up with some of the bloggers I read reguarly; and those who don't get it. I've found that if they don't get it, trying to explain it doesn't help.

*

My schedule in Pennsylvania, New York, and Montreal is fluid, but the dead certainty is that I have to be back to Wisconsin by Thursday, June 8th, to check into my motel room in Baraboo. The Wisconsin Writers Conference is being held June 9-10 at UW-Baraboo/Rock County and I'll make two presentations of my talk "Lorine's Toolbox: A Working Poet Examines Niedecker's Poetics" and give two readings from my prose and poetry about farm life. I finished my preparation for "Lorine's Toolbox" on Friday! I'll be able to put together my readings while I am on the road, no problem.

*

I'll be home and back at it here on Sunday, June 11. In the meantime you will continue to find the daily "Lines" poems here, the Sunday "Text for Today's Sermon," and the Morning Drive Journal entries. I also have the next selection from Ivan Burgess's Echo Echo set to go up on Tuesday, May 30, and a special "Saturday's Poem" for June 3.

In the meantime, please remember that not all who wander are lost.

While I am gone, think kindly of me, if you think of me at all.

OF THE COZUMEL TRIFECTA AND OTHER HOT & HUMID DOINGS: YES, WE ARE HOME

The Cozumel Trifecta -

that would be, all on the same day, to eat a fish torta at the little sidewalk cafe which serves the best fish tacos on the island AND a bowl of pazole (grande) at the pazole place a block north of Hotel Pepita AND a beef taco at Johnnie Bravo's. Our plane landed in San Miguel, Cozumel, about 12:30 p.m. on Monday, and I completed the Trifecta before bedtime. As we like to say, "another sucky day in paradise."

*

We heard that it snowed in Wisconsin while we were in Cozumel. I almost thought "oh, those poor people," but I had problems of my own: "another sucky day in paradise."

*

The reefs are colorless beyond belief. Even at a depth of 80 feet, sand now covers much of the beauty of the coral-heads. Everything looked as if it were layered thickly with ash. So far as I could tell, Hurricane Wilma was not kind to any of the reefs. There are small signs that a recovery is taking place, i.e. here and there little reef creatures lift their heads. The overall gestalt is of a world gone grey.

*

San Miguel is recovering from the hurricane. Along the ocean, government buildings, hotels, and resorts have been damaged or destroyed. We saw sailors with machine-guns at the port, guarding the shell of an empty building, walls gone here and there. The pazole place we love has a new tin roof. Much of the city has been re-painted. Even so, near the square, you can see through the paint that the water had been nearly waist deep. Prices have gone up - taxis are more expensive; food is more expensive. The people of the island stay cheerful: they keep rebuilding, one cement block at a time. They know pace: a little today, a little more tomorrow. They have lived hard lives, so what is another hardship?

*

There is a new little sidewalk cafe in town, which I must recommend. It has three or four white plastic tables on a platform along the sidewalk, and a window opening into the kitchen through which our waiter/waitress sent our orders and received our hot and steaming food. Consistently wonderful food. Consistently exceptional service. It is a family operation. By the time we return in January, I expect they will have knocked a door through the wall to create inside seating. At the rate their business is growing, they will need to. The special on Sunday night was tamales, wrapped in banana leaves instead of corn husks, Yucatan-style. "These could not be fresher," the man in charge told us. "My sister just finished making them." I had already eaten several fish sandwiches there during the week, so I knew the food was good. "These are the best tamales I've ever eaten," everyone said - Mary and her brother, Dr. Phil; and Dr. Phil's wife, Miss Susan; Dr. Bob, the divemaster certifying Dr. Phil's biology students for diving. They are right: these are best tamales you'll find anywhere. Before our plane flew out on Monday, Mary and I went back for Huevos Rancheros. "Tom, these are the best huevos rancheros I've ever had," Mary said. "Mmm-mmm-mmm," I said in agreement. The place is called La Altenita, and it sits just southeast of the intersection of Av. 15 Norte and Av. Benito Juarez, in the shadow of San Miguel's water tower. As we were leaving on Sunday evening, the fellow in charge had said: "Tell all your friends by Internet about us. Tell them to come eat here." I said I would, and that's what I'm doing: Friends, when you're on Cozumel, stop at La Altenita for a fish torta or a tamale or one of their wonderful shrimp tacos, or perhaps the best huevos rancheros in the universe.

*

It was hot and humid on the island. Every day was another sucky day in paradise. I got sun-burned. My hands are tanned right up to my wrists, where the sleeves of my exposure suit have made a straight sharp distinction between light and dark. We walked four miles every morning, dripping sweat. You'd take a shower, and then you'd need to take a shower again. We heard it snowed in Wisconsin. Heh-heh-heh. Eventually we had to get on the plane and come home. Not so funny any more, that snow.

*

We are home.

HERE WE GO AGAIN: A WEEK OF SCUBA DIVING IN COZUMEL

It is dirty work

but somebody has to do it. Bright and early tomorrow morning, Mary and I fly out of Chicago for a week of scuba diving in Cozumel. Of course, we'll have to have pazole at the tin-roofed shanty two blocks from our room at Hotel Pepita in downtown San Miguel; on the way back to our room from a meal of pazole, no doubt for dessert we'll have one of "the best beef tacos on the island" at Johnnie Bravo's little stand halfway back. And, yes, we'll find "the best fish tacos on the island" at another little stand on the way to the grocery store, though what I always order is "the best fish torta on the island." And I hope the Miss Dollar cantina is still operating; Miss Dollar has terrific food at great prices and hasn't been discovered yet by the typical visitor to the island.

Friends who have recently returned from Cozumel say it is "hot and humid" down there. Imagine. Yep, it's dirty work, but somebody has to do it.

We'll be home on May 16th. Our attack cats and house-tenders know their responsibilities, so the homefront will be well cared for. And when you stop to visit at The Middlewesterner, you can expect to read "Lines" and "Morning Drive Journal" and "Saturday's Poem" as usual. "Notes from the Vagabond Journal" will resume after we return.

Oh, I can almost taste it, my everyday-after-dinner-treat from the little shop on the way to the square: pineapple mixed with chili powder and frozen on a stick. Mmm-mmm. I'm not kidding: it's good. I may not want to get on the plane to come home.

Adios, amigos!

AN HONOR AND A PRIVILEGE TO PRESENT KOEHLER AWARD LAST NIGHT AT LAKELAND COLLEGE

I was at Lakeland College last night, at the 144th Graduation Celebration, to present an award to one of the graduating seniors. When my turn came, I got to the podium and said, "Many of you may not know me. That might be by design. I am here to present an award that is so hush-hush I think they would only trust someone who is on campus just one day a week."

I was presenting the Clarence Koehler Award, which is given to the Lakeland graduate who best exemplifies the Lakeland spirit during his or her years at the school, as evidenced by participation in and support of college programs and activities. Just to be eligible for consideration, a graduating senior needs to have done all undergraduate work at Lakeland and to have maintained a GPA of at least 2.75.

Then the Lakeland faculty and staff, students, leaders of organizations, and the administration - and maybe even Musko, the Lakeland College mascot - all vote for those students they feel have lived the Lakeland spirit in their day-to-day lives on campus. Each of the top ten candidates has to provide information about his or her major, academic achievements, service to Lakeland and the community, and student activities.

"All of the top candidates for the Koehler Award can take justifiable pride in their years at Lakeland," I said. "They have worked hard and played hard and they have been concerned not only about their studies but also about the Lakeland community and the larger community around them. Let's give all of them a round of applause."

Yet the Koehler Award can go to one student only. And this year, it went to a fellow who had been on the Dean's List, who'd had Nemschoff and Presidential Scholarships, and who'd been named an Employee of the Year on campus. A student who has been a campus compact fellow, a campus ambassador, an admissions tour coordinator, and an orientation leader. He has been an assistant for the Great Lakes Writers Festival and he graduates with a writing major.

"It is my honor and privilege," I said, "to present the Koehler Award to a fine young man whom I know as a fine young writer – Ross Fale."

Indeed, Ross has a fine talent. He was a stand-out in my course on "Writing Creative Nonfiction" during the fall semester, 2004, and again in "Advanced Composition" this past semester. I have no doubt that before long you will be reading him in the magazines.

It was an honor for me to shake Ross's hand and give him the Koehler Award; and it has been a great privilege to help him shape his talent.

Congratulations, Ross!

WHISKEY POSTS

Whiskey posts

an Interesting Thought.

So I post this response:

And so are you....

THE MORNING NEWS THE VAGABOND GOES WANDERING BACK LATE ON SUNDAY

Even before the sun comes up

this morning I will be headed east-southeast, swinging wide of Chicago, of course, then turning due east, toward Mercer County, Ohio. I'll be staying tonight in Celina, Ohio, with Charlie Mescher who teaches the College English II class at Marion Local High School in Maria Stein, Ohio, that used my memoir, Curlew: Home, as one of their texts this year. I have volunteered to do a Q&A session with Charlie's students; and Charlie and his wife have volunteered to put me up during my stay.

I'm headed east-southeast, and I'll take mostly backroad across Indiana into Ohio, in order to get a sense of the great flatness to be found there. You can be sure I'll keep notes on the landscape and report back here when I return. I'll report on my experience with the students in that College English II class as well. What kinds of questions do they ask? Did they stump me and leave me speechless?

On Friday, I'll take another back route across Indiana, to Fowler, one of my Vagabond focus communities. I'll spend Friday afternoon and Saturday there, doing interviews, taking in the Friday night movie at the theater in Fowler, which is a restored art deco classic run by the group of volunteers that saved the building from the most terrible of fates: being turned into a warehouse. I've already had a tour of the theater, when it was empty; now I want to see it in action, doing what such grand dame of a theater does on any given Friday night. I want to smell the popcorn and get a peek behind the scenes, behind the screen. Maybe, just maybe, I'll catch a glimpse of the ghost of the original owner, the man who built the theater 65 years ago.

On Saturday, the Benton County High School girls' basketball team will be playing in the state tournament, and if they win their 11 a.m. game, they'll have to play again in the evening. Perhaps I will see some of the Indiana Girls' State Basketball Play-offs. Benton County High plays in Monticello, which is 40 miles northeast of Fowler. I should also have time on Saturday for a tour of the barn where the great Dan Patch was born. If you don't know who Dan Patch is, don't tell anybody in Oxford, Indiana, 'cuz they're likely to slap you silly. Just google "Dan Patch" plus "1:55"and you should find out everything you need to know.

I will take a leisurely drive home on Sunday, once again swinging wide of Chicago. You know why: it once took me nearly five hours to drive from the Indiana state line to the Wisconsin state line on a route following the Chicago tollways and skyway. Accordingly, I had to cast the city out. Yet she persists, and still I have to swing wide of her.

In my absence, you will see the usual "Lines" each morning, and the "Morning Drive Journal," and on Saturday the "Saturday Poem." You won't see any "Morning News" while I'm gone, but you'll get an earful when I get back, you betcha.

Okay, farmboy, get on that plough-horse and ride, ride, ride.

NEW YORK POET MEREDITH TREDE READS AT "FOOT OF THE LAKE" POETRY EVENT

Meredith Trede, a poet

from Sleepy Hollow, New York, read from her poetry at a Foot of the Lake gathering last night in the Windhover Center, Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. With her husband, Trede operates a management consulting business; and if her business consulting is anything like her poetry, her clients are well-served indeed.

Trede has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence and a Master's in business development as well. Her poetry has been published in Paris Review, Nebraska Review, West Branch, Diner, and The MacGuffin. Quite a large swatch of her work, forty-some pages, I believe, also appears in Desire Path from Toadlily Press.

Many of the poems Trede read last night come out of her experience growing up in a tenement building in New York City, and out of the lives (and in the voices) of the residents of that building.

Trede spoke of the hardship in Ireland in 1845, calling it "The Hunger" and "The Famine" and "The Shame." As a new bride, she didn't know any better and made potatoes every night. Her poem cautions: "Some confuse person with potato."

All those Irish girls in the Catholic school Trede attended were named Patricia or Mary Ann - saints' names. Trede was named Meredith for the heroine of a popular novel her father was reading when she was born. At her baptism, the priest held her and said, "No, not Meredith. In church we must call her by a saint's name." Her father took the baby back from the priest and said, "In my church, Meredith is a saint's name." An awkward moment of silence, perhaps, before the priest said, "And so it shall be here, too." And all her life, it seems, she has been trying to live up to the measure of that other Meredith, the one her father read of.

Her parents were a practical sort, working class folks, and even today with her two-sided career, business and poetry, her mother's question still rings for Trede: "When are you going to make up your mind about what you're going to do with your life?"

Trede's mother was Irish; her father was not. Trede was well along in school before she realized that not everyone hated the English. And the lilt of her grandmother's command still echoes: "Don't be getting above yourself."

Trede read a poem of an encounter with her ex-husband at the cheese line in a grocery market; it ends: "and I hold the high ground, managing not to brag about myself in the cheese line."

At one point during her reading, Trede confided that "this started out to be a poem about Einstein. If I didn't tell you, you'd never know that." Like many of her other poems, it became a poem about family.

At another point, Trede said: "Every story moves on and around, without getting to pick subject or author."

She read from a poem, and I think she was talking to herself in it: "elegy, eulogy, literary logarithm - you write...."

She wrote scripts for skits as a child; she wrote poems. But when Trede married at age 20, "that part of my life went away." Trede started writing about fifteen years ago, and I think we are fortunate she did.

The first half of her life, Trede tells us, she tried to get away from those voices of the tenement, those people, that place where "the higher the floor, the lower the rent," where "secrets echo in the narrow air." And in this part of her life, she is trying to reclaim them. "To save myself," she wrote, "I thought I could disavow you." Yet now she knows, as we know, that you get into heaven not by denying where you've come from, but by accepting it.

LONG DISTANCE: POEMS BY MARK VINZ PUBLISHED BY MWPH BOOKS

Yesterday I waited for the delivery truck

with eager anticipation. I am publishing Mark Vinz's book of poems, Long Distance, and finished copies were due back from the printer. Of course, the truck arrived later than it was supposed to. I could hardly contain my waiting. Publishing a good book by someone else is as exciting to me as having a book of my own published.

Finally the truck arrived and got unloaded. I brought a box of the books into the house, opened it, held the book in my hands. It was like praying. Then I set to work stuffing forty envelopes with review copies that will go in the mail today.

The "official" publication date for Long Distance is April 15th. "Publication date" is a fiction of the book industry created for promotional purposes. We abide by the fiction to the extent that it helps us get books reviewed. Beyond that, if I have books in the house, and you send me money, I'll ship you one.

Vinz is a fine middlewestern poet, and these are terrific poems; it is his first book in nearly a decade, I believe, and it is worth the wait.

Below I'm printing the news release announcing the book's publication. It goes out with the review copies today.

---

Mark Vinz's new book of poems, Long Distance, is set for release April 15, 2006, by MWPH Books, according to Tom Montag, editor of the small middlewestern imprint. The book brings together 84 of Vinz's poems written over the past ten years. From the first poem in the collection on, it is clear that Vinz is in and of this great rolling middle of America, that he knows and loves this place and these people he has lived among, these backroads, the mementos, the omens and the emblems of our lives.

"These poems are filled with a sane, decent, clear-eyed melancholy," says Minnesota writer Bill Holm of Vinz's poetry. "The world, and our life, has limits, and we reach them. 'These things that weigh me down... I'll have to start giving away.' That's Mark Vinz's great gift to readers: memories of rooms, people, landscapes loved and named with clarity and affection, interior travels where the past finds wisdom in clouds, grass, kitchens, backroads."

Some of the poems from Long Distance appeared previously in such magazines as Flyway, Great River Review, The Hudson Review, Midwest Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, Ruah, Saturday's Poem at The Middlewesterner, Solo, and South Dakota Review, as well as such anthologies as Getting By: Stories of Working Lives; Seeing the Blue Between: Advice and Inspiration for Young Poets; Visiting Frost: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Robert Frost; and Wherever Home Begins: 100 Contemporary Poems.

Vinz was born in Rugby, North Dakota, grew up in Minneapolis and the Kansas City area, attended the Universities of Kansas and New Mexico, and since 1968 has taught at Minnesota State University Moorhead, where he also served as the first coordinator of the university's Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program.

His previous collections include Climbing the Stairs, Mixed Blessings, Late Night Calls (prose poems), Minnesota Gothic, and Affinities (the last two in collaboration with photographer Wayne Gudmundson). Vinz edited the poetry journal Dacotah Territory during the 1970s and since then has been editor for Dacotah Territory Press, which has published a number of short collections by writers in the region. He has also co-edited several anthologies, including Common Ground: A Gathering of Poems on Rural Life; Beyond Borders: New Writing from Manitoba, Minnesota, Saskatchewan, and the Dakotas; Inheriting the Land: Contemporary Voices from the Midwest; Imagining Home: Writing from the Midwest; The Party Train: An Anthology of North American Prose Poetry; and The Talking of Hands: Unpublished Writing by New Rivers Press Authors.

A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, Vinz has also won the New Rivers Press Minnesota Voices competition, Milkweed Editions’ "Seeing Double" competition, six Pen Syndicated Fiction awards, and three Minnesota Book Awards. In the spring of 2005, Larry Woiwode named him an Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota.

Long Distance (104 pp., trade paper, $12.50 + $2 shipping & handling) is available from MWPH Books, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931.

PEN & BRUSH

I received my contributor's copy

of Pen & Brush: A Collection of the Best Illustrations & Their Poems by David Kopitzke from Hummingbird's First Fifteen Years (Hummingbird Press, 2005). It is a collection of Kopitzke's fine-lined illustrations, along with the poems which inspired them. My poem, "On Accomplishment," is one of the poems:

You've got to start plowing and
stop talking about the plow.

The note that Koptizke sent me says: "Many thanks for allowing me to include your poem in Pen & Brush. 'On Accomplishment' transports me to a field on Washington Island where I sketched your plow."

Hummingbird is a magazine of the short poem, many of them almost Oriental in texture and surprise. In his brief introduction to this selection of his work, Koptizke notes: "Poetry and painting are combined in the hanging scroll that occupies a place of honor in every traditional Japanese home. That these two art forms appear together as one and are revered is what inspired me to approach Phyllis Walsh with the idea for this small volume."

Pen & Brush holds holds Kopitzke's drawings and work by 24 Hummingbird contributors, with poems of two to fourteen lines. 56 pp., 27 illustrations, dustjacket, and artist's bio. The book is $15 postpaid. Order from David Kopitzke, 15490 Bur Oak Lane, Richland Center, WI 53581.

"FINDING HOME" IS NEXT UP AT QARRTSILUNI

"Finding Home" is the theme,

Lorianne from Hoarded Ordinaries and I are the editors, qarrtsiluni is the publication, and now is the time. Your submissions are soliticted. We're looking for essays, fiction, poetry, and artwork appropriate to the theme of "finding home." You know better than we do what that means to you.

Be warned, however, that we're aware this is a theme that could get maudlin, and we'll push back against that; you may send us work filled with "sentiment," but do not send us sentimental work, because we'll send it back.

Qarrtsiluni is "an experiment in online literary and artistic collaboration. The title comes from an Alaskan Inuit word for sitting together in the darkness, waiting for something to burst." This is a collaborative literary blog; themes and editors rotate monthly.

Submission guidelines and further information can be found at qarrtsiluni. Your submission needs to come to us in electronic format, preferably MS-Word for text. You can submit your work to me, if you wish. We will accept submissions between now and December 27th.

THE MIDDLEWESTERNER IS TEACHING ADVANCED COMP AT LAKELAND COLLEGE FOR THE SPRING SEMESTER 2006

I don't have the contract in hand yet,

but I can't wait any longer to tell you. I have been asked to teach Advanced Composition at Lakeland College for the spring semester, 2006. You may remember that, early this month, I was moping about how I missed teaching. Well, I had barely put that post up when I received the call asking if I'd be interested in the Advanced Comp assignment. Seems that Karl Elder, who would otherwise teach the course, will be on sabbatical in the spring; yet there are four students, at least, who require Advanced Composition in order to graduate in May. The class roster, at last count, is up to six.

When I taught Writing Creative Nonfiction in the fall semester of 2004 at Lakeland, I met my class for 50 minutes on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. The drive over to Lakeland took an hour and fifteen minutes, I taught for 50 minutes, and then I drove the hour and fifteen minutes back home. This time I will meet students once a week for three periods in a row, which saves me five hours of driving time each week.

I spent much of yesterday starting my class preparation, and I'll continue working on my lesson plans this week and next. The thought of needing to fill a three-period session once a week for 15 weeks strikes fear into my heart: I calm myself by making damn sure I know what I'll be covering in each session.

With the Creative Nonfiction course, though certainly I was paid well enough, I remember calculating that the re-imbursement amounted to about fifteen cents for each hour worked; I expect the same will be true with Advanced Comp. (I swear I don't know how full-time staff find enough hours in the day to teach their several classes. My admiration for those who teach full-time went up immeasurably during my stint with Creative Nonfiction.)  As Mary reminds me, "You know you're not doing it for the money, Tom."

No, I'm not doing it for the money. I'm doing it for the joy of being able to share what I know. I'm doing it for the  dual rewards of being able to learn at least as much as my students learn and being able to soak up the bright enthusiasm and excitement of Lakeland's advanced writing students.

Here we go!

WHO KNEW?

The Middlewesterner has been beseiged,

since we put up our post about the e-mail we received on November 23, with hits looking for "admin@cia.gov" or "I-Worm Sober.CF" or such information. Indeed, such search strings account for about 50% of our recent visitors. No wonder, for The Middlewesterner currrently comes up as the first link in a list of 365 when Google searches for "admin@cia.gov". People are coming from all around the world looking for information. Some of them, especially those in Middle Eastern countries, may be more than a little nervous.

Sometimes you make a little joke and it comes back to bite you - "Sir, you is a idiot." Sometimes you don't know the full consequences of a tiny action. We're honored to be #1 at something, of course, yet we'd much rather visitors came searching for things middlewestern. Ah, well.

DON'T OPEN E-MAIL FROM ADMIN@CIA.GOV ATTACHMENT CONTAINS THE VIRUS I-Worm/Sober.CF

Perhaps you've heard the warning

from the FBI about the unsolicted e-mail purportedly from the agency alerting computer users that their Internet surfing is being monitored? The recipient is instructed to answer the questions in an attachment which - I'm assuming - contains a virus. Well, here comes the same scam with a CIA address. Fortunately, my antivirus is on top of the whole business. I hope yours is too.

Dear Sir/Madam,

we have logged your IP-address on more than 30 illegal Websites.

Important:
Please answer our questions!
The list of questions are attached.

Yours faithfully,
Steven Allison

++++ Central Intelligence Agency -CIA-
++++ Office of Public Affairs
++++ Washington, D.C. 20505

I would add: ONLY 30 ILLEGAL WEB SITES?? That's all you've logged??

Oh, and who taught you subject/verb agreement? "A list... are attached??" Sir, you is a idiot....

LITERARY DAYS

We've just had a few days of the literary life.

On Thursday night I went to Milwaukee for the 25th anniversary celebration for Woodland Pattern Book Center. It was held in a fine old house on the east side. Many members of the book center's board of directors were about, but also some poets and fiction writers, including my friend Martha Bergland, author of A Farm Under a Lake and Idle Curiosity. We all made the customary small talk, me holding my glass of soda as if it were white wine. I had an hour and fifteen minute drive home.

There were words of appreciation all around, for the survival of such an endeavor across twenty-five years takes team effort of a tremendous sort. When Woodland pillar Karl Gartung spoke, he reminded me that twenty-nine years ago I interviewed him to manage Boox, Inc., the pre-cursor to Woodland Pattrn. I had forgotten that interview: it seems like two lifetimes ago.

On Friday night Mary and I drove to Sheboygan to enjoy poetry and music at the Z-Spot - Espresso & Coffee. Bill Weidner, voice and guitar, was trading licks with poet Karl Elder. It was a lovely entwined alternation of song and poem from 7-10 p.m., though, I confess, with the hour and fifteen minute drive home we didn't stay til the last dog was hanged. We were on hand to see John Rosenwald of Beloit Poetry Journal present Karl Elder with his Chad Walsh Award in front of the gathered audience. You may remember we announced that Karl won the award here a few days ago. Good coffee. Good poetry. Good music. Oh, that all of life could be so lovely as those few hours.

The Woodland Pattern 25th Anniversary Celebration was quite a collection of events. Mary and I made it back to Milwaukee for a reading on Sunday afternoon, but there were other events on Friday and Saturday. On Friday evening, for instance, there were readings by Lisa Jarnot, Terri Kapsalis, and Peggy Hong, along with a film screening with Jennifer Montgomery.

Jarnot's most recent book of poems is Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions, Chicago). She's working ona biography of Robert Duncan which will be published next year by University of California Press. She teaches creative writing at Brooklyn College.

Terry Kapsalis is the author of Public Privates: Performing Gynecology from Both Ends of the Speculum (Duke University Press). She teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Peggy Hong is author of Three Truths and a Lie (Water Press and Media) and Lies and Fables and The Sister Who Swallows the Ocean (CrowLadies Press). She teaches at Alverno College in Milwaukee.

Jennifer Montgomery has created several films, most recently Transitional Objects (2000) and Threads of Belonging (2003). She teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago's School of Art and Design.

On Saturday morning, Lisa Jarnot taught a poetry workshop titled "Basic Elements," covering the building blocks of poetrty from vowels, consonants, and syllable clusters to the larger structures of phrases, lines, and stanzas.

Saturday afternoon Martha Bergland taught "Understanding and Revealing Character in Fiction."

The Saturday evening program featured Roberto Harrison, Kiki Anderson, and small press icons Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, publishers of Burning Deck Press and poets each in his and her own right. Keith's newest book is The Real Subject from Omnidawn Press; he teaches at Brown University. Rosmarie's recent poetry includes Blindsight (New Directions) and Love, Like Pronouns (Omnidawn). Her book of essays, Dissonance, has just been published by the University of Alabama Press.

Roberto Harrison has published several chapbooks, most recently Mola, bus, and Mani. He has two full-length collections forthcoming: Os (subpress) and Counter Daemons (Litmus). He works as a Systems Librarian at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Kiki Anderson "is a writer and bass player and the co-director of Jody Monroe Gallery." She has taught at Woodland Pattern's summer writing camp for the past two years.

It was the Sunday afternoon event that Mary and I made it to: readings by Martha Bergland and Wanda Coleman.

Martha's first novel, A Farm Under a Lake, was published in 1989 by Graywolf; her second, Idle Curiosity, in 1997, again by Graywolf. She read a story which - unlike most of her fiction - she said "this one was really true."

High energy Wanda Coleman read second and last. No one would want to read after Wanda reads. Though she was suffering a fever and the chills and had a catch in her throat, she was still HIGH ENERGY. Her most recent books are Ostinato Vamps (Pitt Poetry Series), Wanda Coleman's Greatest Hits (Pudding House), and The Riot Inside Me (Godine/Black Sparrow). She has been a Guggenheim fellow and is an Emmy award-winning script-writer. Listening to her present her work is like taking hold of a hot electric wire and not being able to let go.

The 25th Anniversary Celebration was going to conclude Sunday evening with music by Chris Burns, Thomas Gaudynski, Dave Gelting, Jeff Klatt, Josh Lesniak, Mike Lucas, Jon Mueller, Steve Nelson-Raney, Hal Rammel, Chris Rosenau, Jim Schoenecker, and Jason Wietlispach, which concert we were not able to stay in town for. Those fellows would be playing individually and would be jamming too. Sorry to miss that.

Okay, let's have a BIG round of applause for Karl Gartung and Ann Kingsury, for their devotion to the cause of new writing, lo, these past twenty-five years, and for all the staff members and board members and volunteers who have helped to keep Woodland Pattern alive and kickin'. And I mean kickin'. Here's to another twenty-five years.

PLEASE NOTE: I will very shortly be strong-arming you as I do each year for contributions for the Woodland Pattern "Poetry Marathon" fund-raiser coming up in January. To read for five minutes at the Poetry Marathon, a poet needs to bring in pledges of a certain amount and can, of course, exceed the minimum. Which I did last year, enough so that I took the title for the largest amount raised by any of the poets reading at the marathon. This is a title I intend to defend most stoutly this coming January, so you might as well find your checkbooks: you know I'm holding my hand out already. I have no shame when it comes to raising money for Woodland Pattern. Make your checks payable to "Woodland Pattern" and send them to: Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931. They need to be in my hand before January 28th.

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - HEADING HOME

Now I'm driving home from the Marshall Fesitval, buoyed

by all I've seen and heard during the week, all those poets and writers preserving the stories that I worry will be lost. I admit it: driving to Marshall a week ago, I was feeling down, feeling ignored and neglected and rejected by the world around me. I had been chewing on despair for several months; it was a real Whine Festival, my drive to Marshall. Partly, as Mary says, I overload myself by wanting too much, and then I'm disappointed. I want it all, and can't have it. Partly the world has been ignoring or neglecting or rejecting my work, or so it  has seemed. It wears on you after while. Partly I enjoyed the teaching I did last fall and have no such opportunities now. And partly I hadn't been making the kind of progress with my work that I wanted. Waah, waah, waah....

Now I am so heartened by what I've seen and heard this past week. There are people all across this landscape ensuring that our stories will not be lost, that we shall not have lived in vain. This celebration of rural writers was the single largest concentration of terrific writers I have ever been honored to be in the company of. It was clear how much hard work had gone into preparation for the festival; the organizers, the volunteers, and all those behind the scenes deserve a big round of applause. They did a terrific job. It was non-stop wall-to-wall rural writing of a very high caliber. My hosts, Dan and Mo Stores, were wonderful; they took good care of me; we would sit in the evening with a glass of wine, recounting our day to each other. At the Festival, there was recognition, I think, that the work I am doing is important; and the people I respect know it. People seemed interested in my Vagabond project. Dave Evans, Poet Laureate of South Dakota, talked to me about it the day after the presentation. Bill Holm mentioned it to me. And some of the other poets and writers. They see it as another, different way to drill into this land of ours.

I had to be encouraged at the Festival: writers I admire know my efforts. It's no longer so easy to think I am "unrecognized" when Dave Etter knows who I am. And Bill Kloefkorn does. And Dave Evans does. And such.

I realized at the Festival, too, that it does not matter so much who is saving the stories, as that they are being saved. And they are. I can take comfort in the recognition when I'm feeling gloomy; whether I'm saving them, or someone else is, they are being set down for future generations.

Robert Bly said the problem with younger poets is that they are too much concerned with themselves and not enough concerned with poetry. That poetry is about more than making a name for oneself. I'm not sure this charge applies only to younger poets. I think we have a problem, sometimes, as human beings, seeing beyond the tips of our noses. We keep thinking it's about us, when there is a larger, broader, greater world we need to grasp. I carry that flaw myself and sometimes forget that it's about more than me. Part of the truth about me, I'm afraid, is that as much or as often as I might say my writing is about those of whom I write, it is also about me, about my need to tell their stories, about my need to be recognized. I am not as selfless as I sometimes let on. So this writer's festival was a good reminder for me. As difficult as it is to let go of me, me, me, I think a writer who would be true to this place and its materials needs to forget himself or herself in the collecion and presentation of our world. To be here and not-here. Is it bad to want recognition? Yes, in so far as disappointment immobilizes me. I need to become transparent, yet achieving transparency is not easy for my prideful soul. Correction starts with recognition of the problem. There is no need to wish for that which doesn't matter. Let the stories be saved. The rest is empty whispering.

As far as teaching goes, I have decided that I will teach if the opportunity comes along, but I shall not waste great effort trying to create such opportunities. My job is to write. I shall do what I am put here for, which is to witness who we are; to witness, and to testify to it in my writing. Teaching what I know, what I've taught myself, I am as good a teacher as I have known, the kind I wish I'd had when I was starting out as a writer. Yet, with all the writing I want to do, it is foolish for me to expend my energy trying to find opportunities to teach; someone else should do the administrative work. I shall do the writing.

I must say I have been pleased with the progress I made in September on "Peter's Story" during my "writer's retreat" at the farm. I've got a total of eight chapters now in first rough draft, out of nine or ten total. I have done some follow-up interviews with Peter, and have those transcribed. I have additional tapes that Peter and his friend Ann have recorded which I need to listen to and pull the morsels out of. I have a sense of the arc of the story. I enjoyed the time away from ordinary responsibilities during those two and a half weeks I was at the farm, the low key pace of things. And yet while I wasn't pressured, I got a lot done. I enjoyed the isolation, too, I guess, the time alone. Perhaps I need a little more of that kind of "retreat" in my life.

I have not done as well with work on my Vagabond project. My presentation about that work at the Marshall Festival has served as a reminder that I need to get back on the Vagabond trail; I need to get back to talking to the folks in my focus communities, sharing their lives. And I shall. The beauty of the project is that it allows me to process a world beyond the wind in my own head. There is joy in meeting, interviewing, and trying to understand real live middlewestern people. Sometimes as writers we think we know, and really we don't have the least clue. We haven't been there, haven't done that, and haven't yet met the people who know. The Vagabond project lets me see the places and meet the people and get some input beyond my own notions of how things are. Yeah, I recognize that what I see and hear I process in my way, that I find my pattern. Yet I am not creating out of nothing - that's the difference.

I don't want to be a best-selling author. I don't want to be a rock-n-roll star. I do want a few good readers. There is a level of readership and recognition which would fit me, and I don't think I'm there yet. I do need readers to tell me "you speak for and to us," the way some of them did with Curlew: Home. The Marshall Festival has given me hope that finding such readers is possible. I come away, as I say, on this ocean of prairie: buoyed.

Sheen of the sun,
The push of wind -
What richness!

The scruff of this
Land blesses us.

I smell the earth.
I say: Take me!

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - 58

Friday, 3:30 p.m., Ghent, Minnesota

David Pichaske introduced Linda Hasselstrom, reading what sounded like a poem about her life titled "How You Do It," each line another achievement, each stanza another decade. "That's the first introduction that has ever made me cry," Linda said, coming to the podium.

"When a poet dies," Hasselstrom said, "nothing happens.... No one shoots the poet's typewriter beside the open grave...."

"Being the last poet on the last day of the Marshall Festival is a heavy responsiblity...."

"All these connections intertwine and wrap around us...."

She read a Leo Dangel poem that "is now in half the ranch kitchens in my neighborhood" because it is "so absolutely true...."

"And I know I'm never going to get my foot back in that boot...."

"You never know when a poem might find you...."

"It seemed to me on Friday you might need a little humor...."

"Was the muse speaking to me in a new way?"

"OK, good, a little humor here, but now I'm gonna get serious.... I have to do something about cows...."

"If you have to rely on New York publishers, many of you will not get published in your lifetime and beyond...."

"Very few people live a life free from the influence of cows...."

"... they stopped talking to her when she married a sheep farmer. They thought sheep had to be killed to be sheared...."

"... learning how cows and people can survive here.... Those folks have earned the right to be called ranchers...."

"... 40 acres, 10 acres - those are home sites, not ranches...."

"Wrong - a farm is not a ranch...."

"The term 'corporate rancher' is an oxymoron...."

"To be called a rancher, you have to own the ranch and be able to call the cows by name...."

"Willows shiver, the stream breathes; if I look, she'll be there; if I follow, she'll be here...."

On the proposal to create a large African wildlife park across the Great Plains: "Monkeys in small towns, that would be sustainable economic development for some - no wages.... Can your snowmobile outrun a cheetah?"

"A lot of people read drafts here, and I can't resist...."

"Driving is designed for writers...."

"This is for the fat man from New York who said I wasn't smart enough to be a poet...."

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - 57

Friday, 2:30 p.m. - Ghent, Minnesota

On Friday afternoon, the Marshall Festival proceedings moved from campus to the Community Hall in Ghent, Minnesota, some four miles to the northwest of Marshall. The featured readers for the afternoon, wrapping up the festival, were Stephen Dunn and Linda Hasselstrom.

Stephen Dunn is the author of some thirteen books of poetry, including Different Hours and The Insistence of Beauty. He also has two books of prose, Riffs and Reciprocities and Walking Light: Memoirs & Essays on Poetry. Dunn once taught at Southwest Minnesota State University; he now lives in western Maryland with his wife, Barbara Hurd.

Dunn told us that, yes, his first teaching job right out of school at Syracuse was at SMSU; he lived in Cottonwood, Minnesota, then. "It was an important time for me," he said. "It helped me get over my eastern parochialism...."

"We have lived in this town, disappeared on this prairie...."

"The sky was the prairie's double...."

"The town was how we huddled against such forces...."

"The trailer home with broken window is someone's life...."

In Cottonwood, Dunn said, "people said hello to you on the street. Prior to that, only perverts said hello to me...."

"I've always wanted to do this, and they think I'm normal...."

"How the weather made good neighbors of many people...."

"In the dead-battery dawn...."

"The cold took over our lives...."

"Come February, some of us needed to scream, divorce...."

"It was no big thing to him, the savior - just two men in the same cold...."

"It was my fault, Al's wife said later - that he was bluffing when he should have been running...."

"... told her everything, or as husbands do, some of everything...."

"My first experience with the omnipresence of sky was here...."

"... the way the words of uninteresting people are true but don't matter...."

"Good weather almost kept us from despair...."

"I trusted snow culture more than all the others...."

"... learning that oracles never lived in places other than us...."

"... the dead god rising into -ism after -ism...."

"That other, my neediest ear...."

God, to the scapegoat: "What they've done to you is just one more of their sins...."

Crows are always in three's, she told him. If they're not, "the others are nearby, she said, hidden in trees...."

"The beautiful is always unfair...."

"Because he was a cat, he disappeared without good-byes...."

"What is tedium, the walls ask...."

"It was how the lonely dressed...."

"... who by temperament and profession wanted to cure, so he was not useful...."

"Now this is a poem I read only to the best audiences...."

Students discussing another student's poem: "... you fuck em and call it making love... you tell em what they want to hear.... you're the kind of guy who gives fucking a bad name...."

Dunn, about the same poem: "Somehow gymasium seems like the wrong word. How about boathouse, I said...."

"You can't teach disbelief to a child...."

"You can't say to your child, 'Evolution Loves You'...."

"Trust us: your secrets differentiate you from no one...."

"If only you could raise your hypocrisy to the level of art...."

"We do worry there may not be enough quarrel in you...."

"The more you expose yourself, the more you become unrecognizable...."

"... the terrible hurts, the pleasures of hurting...."

"... saying Foucault, like some lost prayer of the tenured...."

"A couple of love poems, and then one more, and then I'll stop...."

"I knew desperate was unattractive...."

"To be invulnerable is to be alone...."

"... cheek bones and breasts - evidence that evolution doesn't care about fairness...."

"Go down to the old cemetery. You'll see there is nothing definitive to be said...."

"... how obscene it is for some of us to complain...."

Of companions: "Say that they provided a better way to be alone...."

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - 56

Friday, noon

The Friday lunch session was a roundtable discussion titled "Land and Gender as They Influence Women's Writing." It featured Linda Hasselstrom (LH), Barbara Hurd (BH), Cris Mazza (CM), and Ingrid Hill (IH).

LH: "... the media fluff around writing...."

LH: "... sometimes just being a role model.... I conduct my own life...."

LH: How women laugh in the company of men: "... never roar.... never squirt milk out our noses.... we giggle.... smile sweetly past the gurgle in our throat...."

LH: "... buried several hundred students, most of them alive...."

LH: "... classes where models laugh through gritted teeth...."

BH: "I was perplexed by the title.... When I'm writing, I'm barely there, let alone present as a woman...."

BH: "My being a twin brings as much to the page as being a woman does...."

BH: "Underground for hours with people you don't know, you become almost without identity...."

BH: Regarding the usual markers of who people are: "Those things become invisible...."

BH: "I very much like to be alone in a cave if I can stand it...."

BH: "... some space in me opening up...."

BH: A man came back in the darkness of the cave to the place where she had stopped: "I couldn't picture which man this was...."

BH: "... gesture or courage or supplication...."

BH: "... a place where we could both talk and listen...."

BH: "... he said he could see my aura.... Imagine it? No...."

BH: "Curiously a dispassionate interested in what we were saying...."

BH: "Spaciousness, not claustrophobia...."

BH: "... blind, but its body studded with vibration-receptors...."

BH: Talking in the cave with the man who had come back: "... not the parrying sexual selves we usually bring...."

BH: "... a loss of self-consciousness, including my consciousness of myself as a woman...."

BH: "A transcendence of gender when totally focused on other...."

CM: "My brother and I got our fishing poles the same Christmas."

CM: "The moments when gender was an issue: when I couldn't play Little Leauge; when I had to tell them I was a boy to get a paper route, then got fired when they found out I was a girl; when I couldn't play trombone because my Mom said trombones are for boys; when I said I wanted to major in agriculture in college and my Mom said I didn't want to...."

CM: "When I am fishing, there is no female or male in me...."

CM: Of California: "They say we have no seasons...."

IH: "No one but God is watching the girl on the hill...."

IH: "The shape of the land is a painter's delight...."

IH: "... where the land moves like a woman's hand...."

IH: "... romanticization of the land, the way women have been romanticized...."

IH: "Many photographers see women as landscape...."

IH: "My married name is Hill.... What I was looking for all my childhood was hills...."

IH: "Hill in Finnish? Maki...."

IH: "People were rooted in the land in ways we are not today...."

IH: "Mama Mountain, a place to nestle...."

Phrases I heard during the discussion:

"We're not letting you go early.... We'll do something else...."

"There's no panel on Land and Gender as They Influence Men's Writing...."

"We're all nice polite well-brought-up women...."

"So much from the male perspective...."

"Why don't you do anthologies of men's writing, a man asked me. Why don't you, I asked him."

"Men want to conquer the land.... women want to nestle...."

"When we think about people's relationship to the land, not just about writers' relationship, we see that there aren't a lot of women 'in the field....'"

"The tests said I should be a forester. That's not what the high school counselor told me...."

"We need to spend time alone on the land - that was not always safe for a woman in the past...."

"A new voice, not speaking for male or female, but speaking for the land...."

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - 55

Friday, 11:00 a.m.

Richard Terrill is author of Coming Late to Rachmaninoff, a collection of poems, and Fakebook: Improvisations on a Journey Back to Jazz and Saturday Night in Baoding: A China Memoir, both creative nonfiction. He teaches in the MFA program at Minnestoa State University, Mankato and plays jazz saxophone with the Larry McDonough Quartet.

Of a painted turtle he found in the gravel along the side of the road, Terrill said, "she's laying eggs, on this one day something tells her it's time...."

"... which you probably know even if you don't know you know it...."

"We don't know where we are, really, or when...."

"Prayer is almost comical in this abundance...."

"Pieces of sunlight cut from a cloth of sky...."

"I took this rural thing real serious even though I live in a suburb...."

"... swearing at the carp that took my bait...."

"What used ot be prairie is torn up to feed us and pigs...."

"... as empty as the static between radio stations...."

"... over the field next to the lake, or the lake next to the field, the field next to the field...."

"The Holsteins have survived their days of grass...."

"I grew up with that, and was amused by their amusement...."

"The junk clutters not only our space but also our lives...."

"... the place that suggests to me what I have to settle for...."

"We have a narrow sense of 'we' in Wisconsin which on good days includes about everyone...."

"It's too bad the land can't live through what's happening to it...."

Of the cold: "It's proof that I exist...."

"The land is most itself when no one is there to take it in...."

"In my house, we were so near that we could not hear....."

"... so I could raise a stink in our churchy town...."

"... such sure knowing and later emptiness...."

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - 54

Friday, 10:30 a.m.

Doug Unger's second presentation this week was titled "Gone West: Farmers, Pirates, and Suitcase Ranchers." Unger was the son of one of these latter, a man who bought and sold ranches and moved from rugged place to more rugged place in an effort to get away from the encroachment of a world he wanted no part of.

Unger himself for awhile fought to preserve an older model of argiculture in the face of corporate ownership and "vertical integration." Eventually he left that effort.

"That voice inside stopped speaking...."

"... until I lost all patience and started insulting the callers...."

"This economy that's killing us...."

"... reduced to one-liner slogans...."

"I'm the son of... a suitcase rancher...."

"This was outhouse living...."

"... a more pure cowboy-country cattle ranch...."

"... which made no financial sense at all. 'Too many people,' he said."

"... not even he could take such blizzard-ridden isolation...."

"The first ever rodeo coach...."

"My brothers and I barely paid attention to his gunshots...."

"... set his bottle of bourbon and his nine-shot pistol out on the table like equal threats...."

"Mom's east and Dad's west...."

"We gradually tended to avoid going into town...."

"I was the kind of guy who had trouble keeping house plants alive...."

"Big pieces of this land were eventually sold off to pay the taxes...."

Of Little Britches Rodeo: "... organized child abuse...."

"I'll admit it: I don't like horses...."

"Some people are nomads... not as money-driven as pirates...."

"Nomads, farmers, pirates can define the history of the west...."

"Why my father could never stick to one place...."

"... some other ranch, more isolated and overgrown...."

The United States: "hungry not so much for territories as trajectories...."

"We would have kept moving but for age and heart failure...."

"Still restless, still filled with rage...."

"So little of it makes any difference...."

"In the long term, we'll all be dead...."

"Our stories are what we have, what we leave behind, the only evidence we were ever here...."

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - 53

Friday, 10:00 a.m.

Ingrid Hill has had an interesting life. She was born in New York City but spent her first seven years as a "navy-brat gypsy" before settling in New Orleans where her mother had grown up. She had eleven children in her first marriage, and when she was left a single mom she headed to graduate school where she met her second husband in a writer's group. Ursula, Under, the story of a girl trapped in an abandoned mineshaft or well in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, is Hill's first novel.

Hill mentioned "that geographical anomaly formerly known as New Orleans...."

She said her "second husband's grandfather died in a mine collapse...."

In the novel, a woman watching the news asks "Why are they wasting all that money and energy on that god-damn half-breed trailer-trash kid?" The rest of the book "is to answer that question," Hill said.

"... as if this were the first morning of the world...."

"... almost as if life were like a transit across a wee bit of land...."

"... too much hair for a two and a half year old to have had time to grow...."

"... sober as a church mouse, clear-spoken as a valedictorian...."

"... in weather as lovely as Eden's...."

"... he takes saunas seriously...."

"... this is, after all, hockey he is watching, and she might as well have asked him anything...."

"... otherness incarnate...."

"Finns and Norwegians did not worship together, even if both of them were Lutherans...."

"... the 80s were as distant as the glaciers...."

"'Nope, says Justin, 'birds are to fly.'"

"The deer, of course, will not be caught...."

"... afraid their voices will echo back at them from too deep an emptiness...."

"... and why in the name of anything would a well seem a relief...."

"Wandering into the forest, which is, after all, nowhere...."

"... his work boots seeming to shake the ground...."

"The bird's twittering seems obscene...."

"He feels as if he's going to throw up his innards...."

"'Yeah, right,' Jusin says, his eyes wide with terror...."

"... like a resurfacing memory...."

"... she cannot remember the names of the trees either...."

READINGS BY FENNELLY AND WATSON HIGHLIGHT 2005 GREAT LAKES WRITERS FESTIVAL AT LAKELAND COLLEGE

Poet Beth Ann Fennelly and novelist Larry Watson

were featured writers at the 2005 Great Lakes Writers Conference held at Lakeland College, Sheboygan, on Thursday and Friday, November 3-4, 2005. The writers read from their work Thursday morning at the college and Thursday evening at the Howards Grove Community Center, then again on Friday morning at the college. Lakeland College students, area high school students, and the general public were all on hand for the readings and for the three workshops each writer led on Thursday and Friday afternoons.

Fennelly, originally from Illinois, now lives and teaches in the Faulkner country of Oxford, Mississippi. She is the author of Open House and Tender Hooks. Her collection of essays, Great With Child, is forthcoming next April.

Watson, a native of Rugby, North Dakota and a long-time Wisconsin resident who taught many years at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, is now a Visiting Professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee. He is the author of In A Dark Time, Montana 1948, White Crosses, Laura, and Orchard.

*

Reading: Thursday Morning

Fennelly:
Fennelly said "I've heard about this conference for a long time. I congratulate you on having such a fine writer here as Karl Elder."

She has been thinking about the differences between the midwest and the south, and said she has "written one poem that might get me fired. Wisconsin may be far enough away that I can read it." It was about watching students jogging on the first nice day of spring. I mean, she was only watching as those fellows stretched their muscles on the first fine day of the new season, come on....

"... search for their shadows...."

"I have mated again. It is spring...."

"Students every year grow one year younger...."

"... hard to think of that... very very please God distant spring...."

"I should follow that poem with one for my husband...."

"Load train cars with as much as they could stand...."

"Your shame, your hope...."

"... except it was the first Japanese car the county had seen...."

"I have loved you for your shame...."

"For years you were valued as a donkey, for how much you could carry...."

"I would go back for a ride in our Toyota...."

"... a zipper as long as all of lower Alabama...."

"... a life starting just beyond the margins of this poem...."

Her mother sent copies of a book of  Fennelly's poems to all the relatives and got a note back from one of the aunts. "Beth Ann, you have to read this," her mother said. It was a nice little note, right up to the aunt's comment that "... your post-it notes really helped." So her mother was annotating or correcting the poems. "I wrote a bitchy little poem and felt better immediately," Fennelly said.

"This apple is a symbol...."

"When she writes 'far-gone train' it means she plans to come home...."

"I thought I was really well prepared to be a mom, and then found out I wasn't," Fennelly said. There were surprises. "... And my hair starts falling out... just another thing they didn't tell you about child birth...."

"Yes, she is growing up, and I am dying down...."

"Even the suddenly slowly-dying need indulgences...."

"I've doubled the garlic in every recipe...."

"I wept in class, the way I always feared I would. And the students did not laugh at me...."

"My hair, anticipating everything...."

"The house finch busily weaving with strands of long red hair...."

"We found out we had a couple different ideas of parenting...."

"The interpreters have all the power and also all the confusion."

"My husband, the anti-tickler, disapproves...."

"Pure terror? Pure delight?"

"Just two more days til she goes out of town...."

To her daughter: "I've documented everything. Later, when you claim neglect, I have proof...."

"Cow-tipping - I think I did it three or four times at least...."

"Weighing a ton and worth a grand...."

"The meek, long-suffering cows...."

"I can't understand that I can't understand why whole countries hate our country...."

"Cow-tipping - I've done that.... who brags that no harm has come to me...."

"You guys are such a great audience...."

She finished up with her poem of advice to students on how to write poetry: "Sit in a white room without paper and think about the poacher who shot the wing off the eagle...."

"... its talons could tear the gauze fabric of sky...."

"... fly in the face of God that one last time...."

"Don't forget to breathe...."

Watson:
"Thanks for coming today," Watson said. "It's an honor to be part of this...." He read to us from Montana 1948.

"I've been digging post holes this morning and I've been dry all day...."

"... and hatred of fences...."

"You can't buy a better beer...."

"It's the best god-damn beer, but I'll have a Schlitz, thanks...."

"Look at that - August, and we've got leaves coming down already...."

"... faces east, my father said, that's the key...."

"... to be like the son they didn't have...."

"... a doctor comes around and they think he's the evil spirit...."

"Yes, she's staying here, she's staying here until she gets better...."

"If my mother said it, it was so...."

"... and my mother was suspicious of charm.... If your character was sound, you didn't need charm...."

"If a doctor is going to drive an old truck, maybe I should be patrolling the streets on horseback...."

"... her voice was steady and strong, but her pauses were wrong...."

"And you believe her?"

"Yes, I do."

"Wesley, would you listen to me...."

"I flinched.... before everything changes...."

"... born out of absolute determination...."

"When he gets these Indian girls where he wants them, he does what he wants to do...."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"... because I'm your husband... or because I'm the sheriff?"

"I wish you wouldn't have told the sheriff...."

"Did any of this happen to Marie?"

"Let's see if she's if she's awake, he said, and get on with it...."

"Charming, affable Uncle Frank was gone for good...."

*

Reading: Thursday Evening

Watson:
"Thank you, and thank you for coming tonight...."

"I swore I'd never be one of those people who pretended they were just deciding what they were going to read...."

"A Four Minute Story - time it...."

"They took a bottle of Chardonnay to MacDonald's...."

"... but the cold water seemed the medium in which they belonged...."

"... an unusual pattern, as if the lawn had served as a dance hall overnight...."

Watson read from his novel Orchard, mostly set in Door County, Wisconsin, in the 1950s.

"... an artist with an international reputation, but in Door County he's better known for his affairs with his models...."

"... babies and rifles - their shape gave instruction as to how they are to be carried...."

"... and sweat-soaked leather...."

"... in this narrow space the horse gave off so much heat she half-expected to see his body glow...."

"... and sneezed twice in the sudden sunlight...."

"... the rifle's bruised, dark steel...."

"It yelped and skittered sideways off the porch...."

"She looked squarely at him: 'I was going to shoot your horse....'"

"I dream about him [the horse]...."

"'There is no such word,' she whispered...."

"A fellow hard up for cash and in a hurry, that's a bad combination...."

"... as if his main concern was how the blue-black steel caught the light...."

"I thought you said it shoots straight...."

"It shoots straight, just a little high...."

"... that sign of neglect was just what caught his father's eye...."

"Henry had always felt a vacancy in his life for that lost season...."

"Where was the water, where was the sky...."

"Thanks for listening...."

Fennelly:
"I've had a great day...."

"I thought I'd start with a love poem [The Snake Charmer]...."

"How is it you love me so much?"

"When the snake loves, it's the fiercest kind of love...."

"By the time the journal came in the mail, he was this sad, lonely fellow...."

"Why we shouldn't write love poems...."

"He should have praised less and bought a dog...."

"Oh, aren't the poems stupid and devout...."

"We should write about what we know won't change...."

"Ah, poem, I am weak from love and you are sweet. Do not come home to shame me...."

"The things that stick with you are not the kind of things you anticipated...."

"I wonder if we choose what we recall...."

Of "Bite Me:" "I did not read this poem today because it takes a special audience...."

"... which feels like telling the wind No when it blows...."

"... and, Lord, did I push...."

"... and your father was terror and blood spatter...."

"... because you were crowning and had to eat your way out of me...."

"My husband thinks I should go around to high schools where kids are at risk of pregnancy. Wouldn't it be great - prophalactic poetry...."

Of the poet Jack Gilbert: "If only he could have had a baby, he would have found what he was looking for...."

"... and now he was 80 and wished to be in love again...."

"... so he could be inhabited and large...."

"The Secret kicked so that the mattress shook, but it didn't wake the husband...."

"... so I wrote The Revenge Poem, our tool as poets...."

"... sorry about the book. It was a joke. Don't put me in a poem...."

"Now he's fat. And bald...."

"Don't feel like you have to call Child Services or anything...."

"She learns the world by tasting it...."

"Wearing her yam goatee...."

"Beware small villains everywhere...."

"I'd keep heer safe forever...."

Of her daughter growing up and reading these poems about her: "I never thought of her getting old enough to read them...."

"You're the balloon, I'm the grasping hand...."

"I'm the resemblance you deny...."

"... that is my threat and my promise. Even if I'm dead, I'll meet you there...."

*

Reading: Friday Morning; and Q&A with Students

Fennelly:
"Thanks a lot for being here...."

"Karl Elder is a fabulous poet. I recommend you read him...."

"A lot of people in my family are about food - and I'm one of them. I express how I feel about people by how I feed them...."

"I'll crush pine nuts, unhinged...."

"... you will seem merely a generous portion...."

"... my saucy, my strongly seasoned love...."

"You could follow the recipe in the poem if you want. At the back of the book, I've got the measurements...."

"His drinking was different in sunshine...."

"... and slurred 'My Little Indian Princess'...."

"My sister was a little juvenile deliquent. I followed along in fear...."

"Such tasks belonged to the little sister...."

"... where every clerk and loafer knew your name...."

"... that silent sister who tagged along because she had to - I wouldn't like her either...."

"Poem Not To Be Read At Your Wedding...."

"I've listened to the sound of the stars...."

"The stars, how they see us from that distance...."

Fennelly told again about her mother amending her poems with post-it notes for the relatives: "... 'and your post-it notes really helped'...."

"... so I wrote a revenge poem...."

It was the only poem in her next collection that she hadn't sent to her mother before the book was published. When the book came out, her mother called and said "I know why you didn't show me that poem." Oh, God, Fennelly thought. "Why didn't I show you that poem, Mom?" "You wanted me to be honored at the tribute...."

"... roll and roll it, the way God must have packed the earth in his palms...."

"Suppose my tongue caught that mystery...."

"You are closest to something when naming what it's not...."

"... who rolled executions on his tongue like berries...."

"... as long as he has lips, he has a weapon...."

"... the sympathy of some fox...."

When she was teaching English as a Second Language, Fennelly asked her students to draw a picture of their families. One of the students turned in a blank page except for the notation: "I am a lonesome...."

On the disappearance of languages: "Does the ear grow numb mourning sounds it will never hear?"

"... sound out what's there, what's not...."

On the difficulty of translation: "'I am hung over.' In Czech, it's 'The monkeys swing inside my head.'"

"If she bites into the word, she'll be a lonesome...."

Watson:
"We're given the advice to write about what we know, but sometimes we like to write about what we don't know and work our way to understanding...."

She was, he read, "... a brush stroke of scarlet...."

An artist, on seeing a woman's face: "I'm too late. Another artist has already created this...."

"Maybe this is the year winter won't leave...."

"... the geometry of her jaw - she was undoubtedly her mother's daughter...."

"I always wished I could paint," Watson said. "Writing allows you to fulfill these desires...."

What the artist in The Orchard said, getting naked with his naked model: "I'm doing this not only because I need to know what you look like in the sunlight, but what it feels like...."

The model, who never initiated conversation, did: "As a child, I used to confuse sand and the sea.... I knew the sea was salt. I tasted it.... I thought the sand was salt tossed up by the ocean...."

And when the Norwegian fisherman whose son had drowned went out to sea and didn't come back, the people said: "Einar has found his little boy...."

The grains of sand, drying, fell off her breasts "... as if she and nature had concocted a little strip-tease...."

"Yet empty as it was, that painting was full of - is there any other word for it - presence...."

"The work is titled 'Absence and Desire....'"

Q&A Session:
How hard was it for you to get published? LW: It was easy, he said. His first novel got taken right away. "This isn't so hard," he thought. Then "what started as an easy process got very difficult. I couldn't publish another novel for 13 years...."

Is the writing industry very competitive? LW: I don't think of it as a competition.... Thinking about 'beating out other writers' is the wrong approach.

Where & when do you do your best writing? BAF: When I was young, I wrote at night, I wrote when I was sad. Now that I'm older, I have made writing my daily life. I sit at the desk and do it. I have become a morning writer. LW: I just say that I'll write every do. I do approach it as a job. I work on the novel every day, and maybe some in my journal or on a short story too.

Who are your favorite writers? BAF: Elizabeth Bishop, and then Plath, Sexton, and contemporary poets and some of the classics. Are you going to write your autobiography? No, I'm not interesting enough.... LW: J.D. Salinger, especially Catcher In the Rye. I didn't know you could write in a voice like that. And Hemingway - he made it look easy.

Why did you want to become a writer? LW: I like to make things. That's the satisfaction of writing - when you get done, there's something that didn't exist before. BAF: I loved reading and the way reading made me feel.

How do you get over writer's block? LW: I don't have it. I keep my standards very, very low. Once I get something on paper, I can possibly make it better. You can always put something on paper. BAF: When the writing is not going well, I go back to the books I love. Sometimes I trick myself with little exercises that get me writing. The cause of writer's block: you judge your writing too soon. First you have to let it be its wild self.

Do you censor yourself? BAF: I'm interested in writing abour relationships, and that can get you in trouble.... LW: Fiction announces it's made up. I wouldn't write something meant to hurt someone else.

Do you write from an outline? LW: I just go. No, I don't know how it's going to end.

How do you know when you're done? LW: The contract tells you when it has to be done.... It's done when it is as good as I can make it at this point. BAF: If you're scared of looking dumb, you'll never accomplish anything.

Have you ever written a sequel? LW: I thought of it, but I got the order wrong. I wrote a pre-quel.

What did you hate about your English classes in high school? LW: Diagramming sentences.

What are your favorite writing utensils? LW: I usually use a black pen on yellow paper. BAF: I'll use anything.

What's the difference between a good teacher and a bad teacher? LW: A good teacher let's students figure out how much they know, and the bad teacher shows off how much he knows.

How well do you know your characters? LW: You know these fictional characters better than you know real people.... I'm hanging around imaginary people a lot.... I hear them talking....

Do you want to write a screen play? LW: The form intrigues me, but I'd probably have difficulty with it. BAF: Someone said that having your novel made into a movie is like having your oxen made into bouillon.

How would your life be if you weren't a writer? BAF: I don't think I'd be very happy. Poetry has helped me be a better human being. LW: In that 13 years when I couldn't get published, I did a lot of whining, most of it to my wife. My wife would say: "So quit." She wasn't encouraging me to quit; she was reminding me why I write. BAF: My husband writes fiction. I tell him, "Oh, I'd never stoop so low as to write fiction...."

Are there specific things you like writing about? LW: Sometimes a region. BAF: My first book was about different things, the next one about family; I need to write about different things again. LW: Sometimes writing is a way not to be affected by things going on in the world.

Do you have a target audience when you write? LW: I don't for fiction. When I wrote reviews, I'd imagine who were the readers of that newspaper. For a novel, I'm writing for the thing itself, its demands.

2005 GREAT LAKES WRITERS FESTIVAL FEATURES POET BETH ANN FENNELLY AND NOVELIST LARRY WATSON

I spent yesterday

at The Great Lakes Writers Festival, Lakeland College, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, an event which this year features:

• Poet Beth Ann Fennelly, originally an Illinois girl who now lives and teaches in the Faulkner country of Oxford, Mississippi. She is the author of Open House and Tender Hooks.
• Novelist Larry Watson, a native of Rugby, North Dakota and a long-time Wisconsin resident who taught many years at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, and who is now a Visiting Professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee. Watson is the author of In A Dark Time, Montana 1948, White Crosses, Laura, and Orchard.

You may remember that I was one of the featured writers at last year's Great Lakes Writers Festival, along with poet Paul Zimmer.

Yesterday's events included readings by both of the writers in the morning and the evening and workshops in the afternoon. There will be readings again this morning, plus an afternoon workshop. On Sunday I will lay out my impressions of the Festival for you.

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - 52

Friday, 9:30 a.m.

Cris Mazza is the author of more than a dozen novels and collections of fiction, including Homeland. Her memoir is Indigenous/Growing Up in California. She also edited Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction and Chick-Lit 2. Originally from San Diego, Mazza now lives west of Chicago and is a professor in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

Mazza read us selections from the novel Homeland related to an incident in the narrator's childhood when father, mother, son, and daughter were hunting gamebirds and something terrible happened.

"... the outlaw deed now done, to kill a songbird or heron or raptor...."

"... but who was screaming, wasn't someone screaming...."

"We were the only people on the face of the earth...."

"Cactus apples... about the size of a small fist and extremely juicy...."

"... taking only the hearts from the waste...."

Hunting is "an activity you did as calmly and quietly as possible...."

"We were the bird-dogs...."

"The dark meat slid easily from the little bones...."

"The swell of dusty heat...."

"Not guilt, not exactly, maybe some twinge of adolescent sigh...."

"... just sucked the sound out of us and dispersed it...."

"... so a cast iron skillet was necessary equipment...."

"... giving our mother time to fish in a rare hour of solitude...."

"... the blood of his fish still on his arm...."

"Our angry boots kicked dust from old sleeping tents...."

"... a hiss like a long sigh...."

"Hear the fire's breath?"

"Is fire alive?"

"We screamed. Kept on screaming. But there was also an awful silence...."

"... which means none of them were bigger than a fist...."

"... something burning, something rotten...."

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - 51

Friday, 9:00 a.m.

"This is my first trip to Minnesota," Barbara Hurd said. "I'm still getting used to the accent, which you probably don't hear any more...."

Hurd is the author of Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling Through the Dark; The Singer's Temple; Stirring the Mudd: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination; and Objects in This Mirror. She teaches creative writing at Frostburg State University in Frostburg, Maryland.

Hurd's first trip into the darkness and tight enclosure in a cave resulted in a case of sheer terror. The second time she entered a cave, "I wasn't an idiot any more about my fear...." She took some trusted guides: "Do I want them in front of me, behind? ... an unruffled presence.... [like someone] who can show that divorce isn't fatal.... I want Debby in front of me, close enough that I can feel the heel of her boot.... making sure I can touch Debby's boot...."

She crawls foward in the darkness with "a steady piston-like action that I find comforting...."

She could feel the cave walls, "... irregular as if a drunken plasterer had crawled in and slathered mud...."

"... her considerate sense...."

"I work these stones like a slow-motion, 3-D hopscotch...."

Her skin, she thinks, begins "to bloom into bruises...."

"It's a torture chamber, I think.... What cavers call a tightener, a squeeze...."

You can practice such situations in "... a play torture chamber for cavers..." but for full effect you'd have to "heap a mountain over your head...."

"You're on your belly, but there's a good four inches above your head...."

"Some curtain falls, blocks off your ability to be rational...."

"The air thick with dread...."

"It's a reckless instinct, thoughtless...."

"... as if I'm in a full-body straightjacket...."

"The stones have begun to edge closer...."

"Take a deep breath...."

"I will my limbs to be still...."

"The squeeze, says Buddhism, is the unbearable place which makes us want to be elsewhere...."

"All the evidence becomes palpable...."

"If you say Yes, disaster follows. If you say No, catastrophe...."

Buddhism says "study the stone...."

"Everything close to my face is stone...."

"Dishonesty [is] an enormous waste of time...."

"I'm suddenly grateful for the stone my body's stretched on...."

"Instead of myth and metaphor, maybe we should have studied mud and rock...."

"No matter how many times I squirm through a squeeze, it might always be this hard...."

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - 50

Thursday, 7:00 p.m.

By way of introduction, we were told that novelist Faith Sullivan has said: "I'll continue to write novels until my pencil runs out of lead." Sullivan was born and raised in southern Minnesota, where five of her seven novels are set. Most recently, she is the author of Gardenias, which continues the stories told in The Cape Ann and The Empress of One. Sullivan serves on the board of the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.

"I love coming down to Marshall," Sullivan said. "What a great audience."

"You can never explain to mountain-people or seaside-people what it is about the prairie that seeps into you," she said.

Sullivan read a poem by Minnesota poet Phoebe Hanson, "My Father Mows the Grass." She said we should be reading Hanson's work.

"Stopping in the cafe where the old geezers rather and talk, that's how you get to know a community," Sullivan said. I could not agree more wholeheartedly.

Sullivan read from her fiction: "Mrs. Wheeler needed to do this.... it was her duty to dot all the world's undotted i's...."

"Is poker a sin? Is it only a sin if you lose?"

"... her two hands, which were always red and wounded-looking...."

"Maybe nuns couldn't afford Jergen's Lotion...."

"She told us we could offer up our suffering, if we ever had any...."

"... and we fell apart into two's and three's...."

"... country girls on one side, town girls on the other...."

"... nor was the front yard any more showy than the house...."

"He was invited to dinner everywhere that a Catholic priest was welcome...."

"Everyone in town is going to know that your Papa lost last night...."

"I was frightened by the number itself, as if its size had power over me...."

"In those days I don't remember hearing the term 'mental illness.' You were crazy. That was it...."

"The air was pregnant with rain...." Reminds me of the opening of Ice Palace, where - if you remember - the air was also pregnant. I was only a youngster when I read that. I had to ask my mother, "How is that possible?" This is when figurative language first slapped me upside the head.

"Why wasn't the day dry and golden, as September days were meant to be...."

"Sally had hoped that she would not die before her seventh birthday...."

"Your mommie will be alright. The first day of school is hard...."

"She thought she might have to sit that way for a day or two because her imagining had failed her. She could not imagine getting up and facing the other children...."

"Strange weather, isn't it? Feels like Missouri...."

"That was her revenge for being rescued. Nobody likes the humiliation of being rescued, even when it was necessary...."

"The luxury of returning to the same characters again and again, seeing them a little differently...."

"His aunt Constance had been delicate, and had not gone out much...."

"... like something the cat dragged in...."

"No one ought to live without a tree...."

"A house is going to make a big difference in our life. It can do that...."

"To talk about novels seemed like an intimate thing, like touching...."

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - 49

Thursday, 3:00 p.m.

Mike Hazard has been artist-in-residence at the Center for International Education since 1972, teaching people how to make lively videos and making lively video portraits himself. As poet David Bengston says, "Mike Hazard is a video verb...."

Hazard presented a compilation he called "A Rural Reel," a selection from his portraits over the years which focused on the rural aspect of those he has profiled. "I'm lucky," he said. "There is such a gap between serious literature and popular film, I've had such a field to make films with writers...."

In preparing "A Rural Reel," he said, "it was stimulating to study my work...."

"I can't thank everyone - a cast of thousands...."

We saw Frederick Manfred examining a large rock; "a fundamental rib of the earth," he called it.

"I feel an old heat rising out of the rock," Manfred said.

"Where a farmer farms soils, a writer farms brain cells," Manfred said.

We saw Eugene McCarthy reading a poem to a group of people, a surprisingly good poem for one who would also be a politician, which career is opposite the poet's: the poet wants to tell the truth; the politician wants to get elected....

We saw the radical McDonald sisters. "Our parents didn't talk about religion but they did good works," one of them said. "That stuck with the children...." Our mean Republicans could learn from this.

"The greatest mother of them all is mother earth," one of them said. "We have a profound responsibility to honor the earth, to care for the earth...."

"Cats - they teach me how to purr," one of them said. "I say I'm gonna purr for the world...."

"It's simple things keeping us whole," one of them said.

We saw poet David Bengston "at the crossroads."

We saw Jim Northup, an Anishinaabe. "The bark jumps from the tree...."

"Question," Northup said, "do you have big mosquitoes on your rez?"

"Answer: Our mosquitoes have wood ticks...."

Then we saw a bit of middlewestern nonsense, "The Ducks of Hazard," with its nonlinear message; at least I think there was a message - it was certainly nonlinear. Just goes to show we middlewesterners do have a sense of humor. And we are persistent. "And one more time.... And one more time.... And one more time...."

We saw poet Mark Vinz reading his "Boy in the Woods."

We saw excerpts of a profile of Charles Beck that Hazard is working on; Beck is "one of the old craftsmen," making woodcuts.

"You have to be open to the accidents that happen," Beck said. "They might be better than what you planned." Hey, poets and essayists and fictioneers, let's pay attention to this notion of where beauty comes from: sometimes it's accidental. If what you write only follows your outline, it will be dull, dull, dull.

"Good art is not copying nature," Beck said, "but making a statement about what you're looking at...."

We saw poet Robert Bly, a somewhat younger Robert Bly.

We saw Tom McGrath. "I think I've change my mind," McGrath said. "I think I want to be reincarnated as a tree or a flower, not a horse...."

"The lank pastures of sleep...."

"We seem to be a people who forget our history about every fifteen minutes...."

"Then we all arrive in California, eating hamburgers the rest of our lives...."

"I believe a writer has got to know some place real well," McGrath said. "He uses it as a test of other places...."

"The faith of large and lonely women...."

"I want to rescue the past and control it so I can do something about the future...."

At the end of the "Rural Reel," Hazard took questions for a few minutes, and made this observation which has much broader application, I believe: "Everything behind the camera has to be equal to what is in front of the camera, or things are out of balance...."

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - 48

Thursday, 1:00 p.m.

Rebecca Fjelland Davis would talk to us about "Writing the Young Adult Novel." But, she said as she got to the podium, "I don't know what I did to deserve to have to follow Phil Dacey and Bill Holm...." It's a tough place to be yet she did well. You may remember that Davis read to us on Wednesday morning from her novel for young adults, Jake Riley: Irreparably Damaged.

Young adult, Davis said, is traditionally the ages 12-18. But there is some redefining of young adult literature now, and "a lot of these stories are for readers way beyond those ages...."

"Young adult literature falls into sevral abysses," she said, such as being dismissed as "genre." In one case, a library shelved a book with quite controversial content in the section for children's literature because "it was too fall for the young adult section...."

A new kind of young adult fiction is emerging, which is useful for teaching and has literary merit. Of one such book, a woman said "this is a great book for my kid, but I sure wish my husband would read it...."

The absolute requirement for young adult fiction: "the protagonist is a young person...."

So why on earth would anyone want to write fiction for young adults? "I haven't figured that out...."

The fiction "has to be character-driven," Davis said. "Slick doesn't last. Plot-driven doesn't last. What holds you to a book is the characters, characters you care about...."

Elements in fiction for young adults: "character; description mixed with action; voice; humor; story; edgy, but it can't be offensive; real world issues."

"Nobody told me I had to market my own book...."

"The publisher said 'we don't do anything for first time authors' and now I know I have to promote myself; and that's really hard for an Iowa, Lutheran, Norwegian girl...."

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - 47

Thursday, 12:30 p.m.

"He's large as life, and what could be bigger than that," Susan McLean said, introducing Bill Holm. Holm is in large part the reason Mary and I went to Iceland last April: his two essays about that hard northern land in his book Eccentric Islands made it seem intriguing.

"How we do miss Phil Dacey," Holm said at the start. "My goodness...."

But "now you've had your fun," he said, "so I'm gonna preach to you for a while...."

"... which I wrote on Monday. I thought I should have one hot off the press...."

Of the crow, he said: "No one has yet killed a crow with a car. Try it...."

Of the eagle: "... slow to the air, an eater of the rotten dead. We should have honored the crow...."

"One of the screws stripped on your old beliefs...."

"How I changed my diet and found God...."

"Iceland - it's absolute magic, plus George Bush is not the president...."

In Hofsos, where he has a house, Holm met an unusual fellow: "I don't tell him he's unusual, because he wouldn't believe it...."

"There are 42 more cell phones in Iceland than there are Icelanders...."

Holm tried to speak Icelandic to the Icelanders, but sometimes got this response: "Wouldn't it be better if we had this conversation in a language you actually spoke...."

In his Icelandic grammar book, Holm finds such sentences as "I shudder at tomatoes...." Now when is he going to have occasion to use that?

The Icelanders, Holm says, "are all Lutherans, which means nobody believes much of anything...."

"How dare we think we know God's musical taste...."

"... the delicacy of small things that grow in the Arctic...."

"It is a forest of one tree. One is enough; not another one for miles...."

"... immoveable as a breathing stone...."

"Christ still a blunt intstrument...."

"There's something dark at the bottom of American life...."

"We need to learn to feel pain...."

"Bush should be arrested and impeached...."

Holm marveled at this sentence he heard before the bombing started in Iraq: "An attack on Iraq could trigger a market rally...."

"I don't think we know what patriotism is, because we haven't been here long enough...."

Those Icelanders again, on being glad to get home: "The more bleak the place they live, the more they weep when they get back...."

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - 46

Thursday, noon

Susan McLean introduced poet Phil Dacey as "a pioneer in the new formalism" who writes in free verse as easily as in forms. I met Dacey a year ago this past August at the South Dakota Book Festival in Sioux Falls, and he subsequently invited me to be part of the Marshall Festival Celebration of Rural Writers. Subsequent to that, he moved to New York; he was invited to the Festival to read from his work, in lieu of serving as the Festival's director, a job now ably done by Judy Wilson.

Yes, Dacey does see some cultural differences between Marshall, Minnesota, and New York. "I lived for thirty-five years in Minnesota," he said, "and never once saw oral sex being performed on a roof top. This is a cultural difference...."

He read his poem about finding his neighbor's llama loose on the road, and leading it back home: "Oh, too much room and too little clue.... an unbelieveable string of chatter my invisible rein... Already I see him coming like a dream.... Let my epitaph be: he walked his llama home...."

Of the poems which followed: "The next four are in fact disguised llamas...."

"At my age, I had had enough of reason...."

"... a parade of firs...."

"... gently conducting the moon...."

Once, driving along at 60 m.p.h., Dacey said, he bumped his glasses off his face and they went flying out the window: "How could I find my glasses without my glasses.... unbroken, unscratched, unbent, and unperturbed.... I should throw myself out the window more often...."

Of another poem, he said, "my partner has indicated that her privacy would be compromised if I indicated she was the women in this poem. I am hereby not so indicating...."

"I not only noticed the apple, but the garden surrounding it...."

Dacey recalled a reading by Allen Ginsberg in Marshall, which event was preceded by "a rock star contract" specifying all the amenities and comforts the star required. The morning of the reading, Dacey got a frantic phone call from Ginsberg. "I know, don't tell me, you're cancelling the reading," Dacey feared. "No," Ginsberg said. What he wanted was to make sure that the honey the contract called for was mixed ahead of time into the tea that the contract called for: "You know how difficult it is working with honey in front of a large group...."

"Beyond bizarre," Dacey said, "honey as emergency...."

"Heaven is a place where it isn't difficult to work with honey in front of a large group...."

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - 45

Thursday, 10:30 a.m.

"Dave and I go back to the height of the career of Muhammad Ali," Phil Hey said by way of introducing South Dakota's Poet Laureate Dave Evans. "We cannot conceive of a world without the words of Shakespeare. I cannot think of poetry without thinking of Dave Evans."

Evans is a professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at South Dakota State University. He's been a Fulbright Scholar twice in China. He's the author of five books of poems, most recently The Bull Rider's Advice: New and Selected Poems.

"I should say bu-ull," Evans said, making the word dark and two-syllabled. "It comes out of the neck the way they say it...."

"What I'm saying is, it's up to you...."

"They live alone together.... They never talk but keep busy...."

"I think I wrote that too because I wanted to get 'Windex' in a poem...."

"The moon-hammered faces of the cattle...."

"Inside everything will be the same as it ever was...."

"The morning news Lava can't wash off...."

"... testing the odor of death...."

"The Man in the Rendering Room" was smiling "as if he figures he can grab joy out of anything I bring him...." This is one of the poems I would use when introducing poetry to people who think they are afraid of poetry. The "story" of the man in the rendering room will intrigue such readers or listeners, and they'll swallow the poem-ness of the poem without even knowing.

"Raking is one more habit I can do without...."

As Dave was reading, there was a woman somewhere behind me saying "Wow, that was a good one," again and again. How often do you hear that a a poetry reading: "Wow, that was a good one...."

"... sucks my cheeks dry as alum...."

Of a patient wrestler: "He knows two things very well - a winner never quits and eventually the guy with the scissorshold has to eat and sleep...."

"When pine cones fall in the stream, they simply follow the water...."

"... bodies dug out of snow deep as graves...."

"Why do I live in the valley? Ask the eagle...."

"... and began to forget...."

"The old Chevy has a new owner, the snow...."

"... the nimble silence of cougars...."

YOUNG POETS READ AT FOOT OF THE LAKE'S FIRST ANNUAL STUDENT POET INVITATIONAL IN FOND DU LAC

Last evening, nine young poets

from four Wisconsin colleges read at the Foot of the Lake Poetry Collective's "First Annual Student Poet Invitational" held at the Windhover Center for the Arts in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Karl Elder, Fessler Professor of Creative Writing and Poet in Residence at Lakeland College, Sheboygan, presented his students Lea Holz and James Shafstall. Pam Gem, poet and teacher from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, presented her students Matt Helsius and Jed Dawson. John Walser, poet and professor at Marian College, gave us his students Missy Bindert and Jon Daigle. And Ripon College poets David Graham and Kate Sontag introduced their students Allison Finseth, Josh English, and Adam Woods. Each of the young poets read two poems, a nice introduction, enough to fill the evening, not too much; enough to leave you wanting to know them ten years from now, fully fledged.

Someday, no doubt. we will be hearing more from these poets. You heard about them here first.

Elder described Lea Holz as "multi-talented;" she writes in at least three genres, he said; she is a paintner and a musician, too. Indeed, I can attest to Lea's talents, and James Shafstall's: both were students in my "Writing Creative Nonfiction" class at Lakeland last fall, and both of them got it right away and produced some wonderful prose. As Elder says, "I could not believe what I was seeing when I saw Lea's stuff."

Lea's "Equinox:" "There was nothing gradual about it at all...." "As we walk, I let you and the light cover me...." "It's movement in the air after rain...." "On my canvas, the line beneath my brush is the seam between reality and reality...."

Lea's "Why Mothers Speak Harshly to Us:" "... as if, simply, this is what we do...." "Tough as overcooked meat...." "Because this is the only thing we know, this is the only thing left to do...."

Elder said he first met James Shafstall in an Advanced Composition course: "Pretty soon I started hearing these strange things out of his mouth" about how prose sentences and paragraphs are put together. James is a musician as well as a writer and has studied recording technology as well as word craft. In "Writing Creative Nonfiction," I remember, James saw right to the heart of every piece we discussed, and - in a few brief words - could explain what the piece was doing and how it was doing it.

James's "The Orgasm Theory:" "The thousand butterflies...." "In the moment of her exhiliration, you transform into the monarch...."

James's "Chickadee:" "Sometimes I wonder about that chickadee...." "Ha-ha-ha-chicka-hee-hee...."

Pam Gemin said she first heard Matt Helsius at an open mic on the UW-O campus and thought "This person has something to say. I hope he shows up in my class." And he did. Matt is also a painter and, Gemin said, his writing is very visual. She also indicated that he writes with "the uncapital i," and that he's good enough she lets him get away with it.

Matt's "To Richard:" "You knew tobacco had intentions to kill you...." "And this time you said you really meant it...." "... until the December you didn't open your eyes, until they lowered you into the grave...."

Matt's "Saturday:" "... absent-minded rhythm...." "... the curve of her glimmering eyelids...." "... pulls me into sleep...."

Gemin said that Jed Dawson was "a strong but not overpowering presence in workshops," able to speak clearly yet supportively about the work of other students. He is interested in baseball and film, Gemin said, "and what I like - the speaker in his poems is always a regular guy, the kind who would put his arm around you and say 'come into my world for a while.'"

Jed's "The Boy in the Yankee's Hat:" "This boy's downtown...." "... pounding their instruments as if administering gunslinger justice...." "The whisper of traffic like a faint, far-flung ocean...."

Jed's "Cradling Light in a Cupped Hand:" "You are the sun dappling the lake...." "Talking baseball to pass the time...." "A lonesome sailor tracking the North Star...." "Telling myself: Jed, you are in too deep this time...."

John Walser told of attending a Marian College hockey game. The home boys were playing a ranked team with a lot of big bruisers on it. "The smallest guy out there was pounding his body in cross-check," Walser said. "From class, I knew him as a gentle man." That was Jon Daigle, whose "first two poems for me were pretty awful. He has learned a lot." If it's any consolation, Jon, none of us want anyone reading our first two poems, which were not very good either....

Jon's "Jelly Dance:" "Is that what love is, no names but yelling?" "When they found more comfort in silence...."

Jon's "Happiness:" "You toasted the news and told me you were about to be a father...." "Water so blue one wonders where it ends and the sky begins...." "... bits of conversation between beers...." "I see what Sandberg was talking about...."

Of Missy Bindert, Walser said: "You know, it pisses a professor off when you see a student essay and it's as good as anything you can write." Missy is a senior and will soon be attending grad school in writing, "God willing."

Missy's "Kissing Time:" "Your kiss is more like an umbrella drink...." "Working man hands...." "Trapped and flattened as a dried butterfly...."

Missy's "White Trash Fairy Tale:" "Come away with me, pretty princess...." "Spinning wheels are so 16th century...." "She has a lot of apples in her basket, if you know what I mean...."

David Graham said that one of the joys of being a teacher is "taking credit for that which you have no right to take credit for." He was introducing Allison Finseth. He recalled once talking with Allison about how it was sometimes difficult for students to keep writing once they got out of the supportive environment of school. "Just try to stop me," Allison responded.

Allison's "Saturday Afternoon Return:" "... multiplies my despair...."

Allison's "Disbander-in-Chief:" "You shall speak of forever...." "The little ones will question...." "... comrades turned corpses...." "You shook hands with death but it swallowed us whole. Don't you remember...."

Josh English comes to Ripon, Wisconsin from Berea, Kentucky.

Josh's "Just To Have:" "I smoked my first cigarette behind your school, but did not attend...." "... green inundation holding the sky's colors...." "... ghost treads...."

Josh's "Three Part Nocturne:" "... subtler than moon light through a door hinge...." "A sad mystery to me that bird lives end on the ground...." "The codes of traction in stone...."

Kate Sontag introduced Adam Woods, who arrived in "a poet's outfit, yes...." His work, she says, has an incredibly range - traditional, free verse, rap - "all over the map in a real exciting way."

"It's pretty scary up here," Adam said as he stepped to the podium. He was perhaps the youngest of the students reading, a sophomore.

Adam's "The Development:" "Blue starlight in the briarpatch...." "... voice echoing sober again...." "... against the twilight night, against time...." "... things that no farm ever needs...."

"Okay, I'm gonna get a little profane here, I hope that's okay," Adam said, moving to a poem with the rhythm and urgency and language of rap: "Let's give blue collar guy his say...." "Stand up, America. Stand up...."

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - 44

Thursday, 10:00 a.m.

"It's an honor to be here," Ken McCullough said.

McCullough's recent books include: Obsidian Point and Walking Backwards. poetry; Left Hand, stories; and Crossing Three Wildernesses, a memoir of Pol Pot suvivor U Sam Oeur. He lives in Winona, Minnesota.

He tells of teaching a class in writing poems about nature: "Actually, they hated nature," he said of the students. "Mostly they wrote 'My body is turning to stone....'"

"I can hear the song of flowers driven inward...."

Of the star-gazing of mariners and shepherds: "What else to do with their time at night...."

"... snow with its simple thirst...."

"... like the inward sweep of a woman's back...."

"... backs of boulders basking in the sun...."

"To our Ben Franklin way of thinking about things...."

"When you hear a crow's call rise like hunger...."

"... the skin laid out for you to put on for the rest of your life...."

"... the glad ice on the stream of light...."

McCullough used the word "festooned" in a poem; I realized that I've never used that word in poetry or prose. Why? I would say "dressed" or "decorated," wouldn't I? I recognize there are words which don't fit my universe - festoon, basilisk, diatomes....

"... even the shadows are empty...."

"... what was missing from the rough draft was not left out...."

"Where have you been? What are you being?"

"The creek is a seep full of wild roses...."

"They say this land can break your heart...."

"... whatever the connection is between cats and pheasants...."

"This has absolutely nothing to do with writing about nature...."

"... space for five or six to sit and sing and speculate...."

"Our world was simple then... a time when every potato mound was fertilized with fish heads...."

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - 43

Thursday, 9:30 a.m.

Larry Gavin is a Minnesota poet, a graduate of Southwest Minnesota State University's Literature and Creative Writing Program - a home-grown boy come home, you might say. He is widely published in the outdoor magazines, is a senior editor of Midwest Fly Fishing magazine, and edits the "postcard magazine" called Tumbling Crane. Red Dragonfly Press published his chapbook of poems, Necessities, in 2004.

"I'm a high school English teacher," Gavin said. "That's what I do. How many of you have cell phones? Would you turn them on. Then when they ring and I look at you, you can go 'Wha-at?...'" He turned his own cell phone on and dialed his classroom, where there was a speaker system set up so his students could hear him give his reading.

When he put his poems in order for the reading, he said, he somehow marked them "1, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 5.... It doesn't do me any good to get organized...."

"Usually I start off with a poem I'm working on now...."

"There you go. I don't think it needs much work...."

"... with all the wonder the six o'clock news allows...."

"We all wait in the dark, think our own thoughts, and hope for the best...."

"I tried to hire someone to clean my house. No one would do it. My friend said, 'God, what happened....'"

"Ducks came so far on this wind they think they own it...."

"These days darkness always arrives faster than light...."

"We were still new-comers after fourteen years...."

In that small town, "I told my wife 'If you meet someone, just say Hello, Mr. Anderson, and you'll be okay....'"

"Perfect and distant, like permission to trespass...."

"I think this poem appeared in English Journal so everything is spelled right...."

"The eye suggests more than memory...."

He spoke of his son's predicament: "I'm a teacher. My wife's a teacher. He's pretty well screwed...."

"The sap is running against the winter, an act of faith...."

"The river unravels secrets on the valley floor...."

"A found poem," he said: "Weddings performed by bartender may not be completely legal in all states...."

"I never buy clothes; I get them from people. I bought nothing I have on...."

"... a celebration of gravity...."

"... opposing the politics of gravity...."

Weight-lifting "moves worlds a little bit at a time...."

There are differences between men and women, and they are more fundamental than gender. Gavin's wife asked him a question about a friend he'd just spent a couple hours with: "Why would I ask him that...."

"Sometimes I grab the wrong pile [of poems] and go to a fishing group with the 'smart poems'...."

"In the dark we imagine the shadows all objects cast...."

"Until we nearly become the air...."

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - 42

Thursday, 9:00 a.m.

Kent Meyers' presentation was called "Crossing the Missouri - Landscape, Place, and Character." You might say he was speaking directly to me when he said he would read selections from his fiction comparing "west river" South Dakota from "east river" and Minnesota. In South Dakota, you are either "west river" or "east river" and it is a real distinction in landscape, culture, and character. I have made the drive down through South Dakota along the 100th meridian and have seen the difference. I have traveled across South Dakota on Highway 212 from Redfield in "east river" to Lemmon in "west river." All along I have been trying to discern what changes when you cross the Missouri in South Dakota. You might say Meyers was speaking directly to me.

Meyers is the author of four books, including a collection of essays called The Witness of Combines. Light in the Crossing is his collection of short stories; The River Warren and The Work of Wolves are his novels. Meyers was born and raised in Minnesota and now lives in Spearfish, South Dakota, where he teaches at Black Hills State University.

Meyers said he is "interested in the deep stories that lie on the land...."

"The 'east river/west river' distinction is a divide from glaciation, a glacial divide...."

"It took me twenty years to learn to write from a western perspective, if I've learned...."

Of a piece he read about Minnesota: "Notice the trees...." and "So much wetness in that scene, so much mud...."

She restrained the horse, "because that's what he needed to learn...."

"You don't find sand bars in the Minnesota River...."

"How can you be so damn sure you know...."

"A very different river, obviously...."

Between Minnesota and west river South Dakota, "the notion of the power of water is different...."

"The real power in the west may be wind, rather than water...."

"Damn, you've got ignorance down to an art...."

Of wind vs. water: "It's interesting for me as a writer to see that change in my work...."

East river soils are glacial; west river soils are not so rich as that.

"In Minnesota, the pressure forcing things out of the earth is felt strongly...."

Land is "something people can love and can hate...."

An old rancher says: "I'm pretty damn sure I never did like stickin' my hand up inside a cow...."

"He looked at his fate when he was young and didn't like it, but it was his. Get on with it. Period...."

The land: "It grudges every second...."

"Like planting bad seed - just gone...."

Where mystery and power come from is different in those places. In Minnesota it comes from the river.

"Something in life that goes on beneath what you can see...."

"My heart kind of shriveled, being on that much water moving that fast...."

"If you can't get back to where you come from and you don't know where you're going, maybe you should stay put for a while...."

In west river South Dakota, one finds "kind of a sky world - the maze of the badlands, the break of the lands...."

"They felt as if they were walking into the sky...."

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - 41

Wednesday, 7:00 p.m.

This embarrassment: I had two pens with me, and ran out of ink in both of them one page into my notes on Greg Keeler's appearance at the Writer's Festival. Keeler was the only writer there who brought his guitar, and he used it.

Keeler has published seven collections of poetry and a memoir about his friend Richard Brautigan, written and co-written six musical comedies, drawn cartoons and illustrations, recorded twelve tapes/CDs of satirical songs, etc. etc. etc. His memoir, Trash Fish, is forthcoming from Confluence Press.

You begin to see why, during the introduction, we heard this quote about Keeler: "... my absolute favorite practioner of whatever the hell it is that he practices...."

"It's always amazing to have people show up to see me," Keeler said.

I think he's not easily embarrassed, singing this line in the song "Sheep-Watching Llama:" "We've got a llama salon, we call it the Llama-Rama...."

From his musical "Aliens & Canadians:" "Animal money is the Canadian way...."

And it was about here that my pen ran out of ink. Damn. What could I do but sit back and laugh....

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - 40

Wednesday, 4:00 p.m.

So it was something of a shock to move from three days of writing that is mostly beautiful to this instance of writing that is mostly useful, Jim Umhoefer on "Travel Writing & Photograhy - The Art of Seeing." Umhoefer has been published in the Sunday travel sections of the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, Kansas City Star, and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, as wellas in such magazines as Country, Better Homes & Gardens, Odyssey, The World & I, Snow Country, Motorhome, Trailer Life, Home & Away, and Minnesota Monthly.

"... lead and conclusion... most important...."

"If you want to know how to see a place, go with a five-year-old child. You'll get a lesson in seeing from a child - zero expectations, really in the moment...."

"The camera forces me to look at the world differently...."

"The first thing is what you see, both for writing and the camera part...."

"... been a while since I read this - let's see how I got out of it...."

"I completed the circle. I started at the end of the trip and end at the end of the trip...."

"I'm trying to see with a child's eyes...."

"Very rarely will you see a shot taken at eye level...."

"A marketable photo needs person, symbol, background, involvement. Scenic photographs are a dime a dozen...."

"I could spend have a page talking about this, but the photo does it quicker...."

"I'm standing on a rock wall for this picture. It embarrassed my wife. She doesn't like to come with me on these trips...."

"Shoot at an angle to the sun...."

"Three kinds of photographs: close-ups, mid-range, long-range...."

"The editor said: 'Where's the picture of the highway....'"

"... which brings up a good point about integrity...."

"The ads will tell you who the reader is...."

"The chipmunks are the true rulers of the wilderness...."

"My kids get a patience award...."

"... photo that sold the most because it implies action...."

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - 39

Wednesday, 3:30 p.m.

David Pichaske, in introducing David Steingass, said we'd get from him "good voice, deep images, a little bit of politics...."

Steingass has published several books of poetry, including Body Compass, American Handbook, Ratter, New Road, and Old Towns. He read to us from his Great Plains Lovesong and other of his poems, including one on "Make Poetry Pay:"

"This poem drains the pasta...."

"... and zest in each line...."

"I'm from Wisconsin now," Steingass said.

"The farm kids know whatever religion is, it's food...."

"Waste, the only sin, hulks eternally close...."

"Grocery shopping," Steingass thinks, "is one of the last connections with the great mythic content...."

The manager of the grocery store Steingass shops at "personifies the sin of gluttony. He's the personal sampler of every item in the store...."

"Behold the endive chirping like birds...."

The three principal characters in Great Plains are Native Son, Codger, and Greta Greatplains. "I tried not so much to interview, as Tom did, but to imagine...."

"I'm working with a very long line, a Walt Whitman line, contrasted with short breaks...."

"... being as buffaloes grow - thinking black holes...."

"No mountains make people vulnerable to slow curve...."

"Nothing sneaks up like an echo...."

"He never felt more alone, or nearer home...."

"What other home can your bones know?..."

"... glow like girl's bellies...."

"Greta's last wail - 'What could you know about hazy great plains days....'"

"The slower it moves, the more they find to admire...."

"Now, this moment, you begin to pay...."

"... was paper's soft crumple like grandparents' whispered talk...."

"Would kumquat not maintain an appropriate sense of humor...."

"Yes, here we are, goofy again...."

"The bear, who knows we are deadly...."

"All you forget led you here where the woods still begin...."

THE MARSHALL FESTIVAL - 38

Wednesday, 3:00 p.m.

A character named Montag, Tom Montag, talked about his middlewestern Vagabond project and read from his Vagabond journals. Blah... blah... blah....