The Bone-eye: A Writer's Adventures

Finding the Tusk in Tuscaloosa

2011-11-20T11:25:00.000-08:00

Here is a table full fabulous graduate students from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. For three days I conducted a class with a few dozen students, many of whom joined me for pizza at Mellow Mushroom, where I got to try a squash-based pizza and a steak dinner on a crust. The names of the people moving clockwise from me (stage left) with you and moving to the right are: Dara Ewing (of course), Saiyde Meerzai, Laurel Billings, Stephen Thomas, Kenny Kruse, Emma Furman, Ashley Chambers, Katie Berger, Rachel Adams, and Andy Johnson.

I was treated kindly by Dara Ewing, Assistant to the Director, Program in Creative Writing. Dara drove me both ways from and to the airport in Birmingham, kept me fed and happy, as well as up to date about all the goings on about the campus. Wendy Rawlings, Director of the program, bought me a nice glass of wine with dinner on the night of my reading, since the official university money can't go toward the purchase of liquor, no matter what sort of alcohol-soaked artists they bring in. The campus was gearing up for a big football game, and on my last night there, about a thousand portable toilets appeared in the quad.

At my reading, I was introduced by Tessa Fontaine, who gave me the most excellent modular introduction imaginable. It was a little difficult to follow her fabulousness. Afterward, I was lucky enough to get to chat with Michael Martone, whose hair looks better than everybody else's hair. A wonderful Book Arts student, Stephanie Jacobs made a broadsheet of my short short "Donkey Foal," and it was so gorgeous that they were all snatched up. I had a couple extras, but can't seem to find them. Maybe I'll get Stephanie to take a picture of one and post it somewhere.

Below see two photos from the hotel I stayed at on the campus. I'm posed here with fiction writer Kellie Wells, who now teaches at U of A. and her excellent boyfriend Tom. Farther below see my elbow on the tusk of Tuscaloosa. I did buy Chris a Crimson Tide T-shirt.

Harvest update!

2011-10-26T20:19:00.001-07:00

Okay,so the elderberry wine is at 11 percent alcohol already, so this picture of me in my Bull Men's Fiction shirt is a little outdated. It shows me at the stage of smashing the elderberries in my fingers. Grapes are big enough that one can get in the bathtub or a trough and stomp around on them, but elderberries must be pinched between your fingers, or at the very least smashed in the closed fists and it takes a really long time to pulverize them. You can't use a food processor or do anything else that would smash the seeds inside, because then the wine would be bitter, so human hands are the best tool. Let me give a shout out to Bull Men's Fiction Here's their website where you can read all kinds of fascinating manly literary stuff: http://bullmensfiction.com/

I put the pulp inside my primary fermenter in mesh bag, so that when I needed to remove the pulp a week later, I could just remove the bag and squeeze it and let all the juice drip through it. Now it is happily fermenting in the kitchen, smelling wonderful.

Once the wine was under control. I moved on to the pawpaws. I wasn't keen on going pawpaw picking until my ma said that pawpaws were part of my heritage and she wasn't always going to be there to pick pawpaws and that I really had to visit all her favorite patches with her to make sure that I knew where they were. Well, it was a windfall. Or rather, a tree-shake. You can't pick the fruits from the branches, but must wait until they fall. Shaking the tree to make them fall is okay. Here are a few of them. They are America's largest native fruit, custardy, papaya-like, mango-like, banana-like. Di Seuss, the famous poet said they are "a melange of all fruits." If you haven't tried one, you're missing out!

Next week we'll look into the osage orange harvest!

We Need Your Comstock Stories!

2011-10-17T17:41:00.000-07:00

Tell Us Your Comstock Stories!

The Comstock Township Library and Comstock writer Bonnie Jo Campbell want to hear your little stories, and soon (by November 1). The stories or anecdotes must be true and short and have some connection to Comstock, Michigan or nearby areas or Comstock folks. The stories might be historical or they might have taken place last week. We want to hear about your lives, your families, and your bodies, minds and souls. Humor is always welcome, so we hope you’ll have fun with this.

A few years ago, I worked with the Comstock Township Library to collect big and little stories from folks who have a connection to my hometown, and we got about seventy submissions, all of which were a delight to read. Some people wrote about farming or local businesses, some wrote about tragedies and comedies, some wrote about their favorite local eccentrics, past and present. Some just told what life was like in a different time or about landmarks that have disappeared. Nellie Buckhout wrote about the circus elephant that died and ended up at the old rendering works on East Main. Susanna Campbell wrote several stories, one about the time her milkcow got in the oat bin.

This autumn I’m working with the library again, and I want to encourage anyone with a current or past Comstock connection to share stories with us. We are especially interested in the kinds of stories that you like to tell around the table when your family and friends get together. These can be a few sentences or several pages. The due date is November 1, and you can drop off your work in person, mail it, or send it electronically on or before November 1. You can also contact me through my website (www.bonniejocampbell.com). I’m going to choose a few favorites and the library will give prizes. Anyone who is interested in telling or hearing stories can get together with us at the library at 7pm, November 10. All are welcome for a fun evening of storytelling.

Tell us about local people (or animals) that you think we should notice or remember ● Perhaps you have stories about people and their jobs (celery, corset-making, Bell’s beer) ● Farming and livestock ● Interesting houses ● Church activities and personalities ●Nature (poison ivy?) ●Native American relics ● Tragedies (train wrecks, tornadoes, untimely deaths) ● Celebrations odd and ordinary ● Girl scout or Boy scout or 4-H experiences ● Encounters with the police or other authorities ● Interesting crimes ● Meeting a famous person ● Remarkable student-teacher relationships ● Personal successes and failures ● Learning to drive ● Love in surprising places ● Weddings ● Funerals ● Weird relatives ● Special abilities that some people have ● Experiences on the roads, river, streams or railroad tracks

If you want to see what folks wrote the last time around, you can find it all in a volume in the local history room of the Comstock library. Oh, and we’re willing to expand the boundaries of Comstock if you have a story that comes close---maybe something from Galesburg or the fairgrounds. If you know somebody who wants to tell a story rather than write it, we can find somebody to transcribe it for you. Writers do not need to be Comstock residents. The library’s phone number is 345-0136.

Below, I am pasting in an old newsletter from 2005 featuring some Comstock stories. I look forward to hearing from you. BJC

The Letter Parade April 2005

Comstock Story Project

For the last month or so, I have been collecting stories about Comstock: anecdotes, profiles and informative pieces, for a project I’m doing for the Comstock Township Library. The pieces can be historical or contemporary. They can be as short as a few lines or as long as a few pages, and can be written by locals or by outsiders looking in. I’m not looking for profound insight or literary merit; I’m just hoping to create, through the different visions and voices, a kind of patchwork of Comstock and its people, past and present. I’m reprinting a few pieces of my own here, plus some other family contributions that might give a sense of at least one neighborhood. Seventy-five pages of these stories are now collected in a spiral bound book in the Comstock Library’s history room.

Tom in the Trees by Bonnie

My brother Tom lived in trees much of his early life. For a while he lived in what we called “the playhouse,” an old one-room wash-house built for my granny’s wringer washer, where we used to all hang out, but after that was partially burned down—probably by us smoking—Tom took to the trees. He was always a good climber, Tom, but that wasn’t the whole story; I think he just liked to be above it all, able to watch life from a superior position. He was untouchable up there. His forts started out simple, but his later tree houses were elaborate multi-level affairs that contained mattresses, stereos, a television, space heaters. He ran extension cords from the barns and workshop to keep himself powered. His biggest fort had a screened-in porch. In 1979 a tornado passed through Comstock and tore apart that last tree house; my brother George remembers going up to the barnyard afterward and seeing Tom’s stereo dangling from a tree by its electric cord, while much of the structural wood was scattered on the ground. Tom is the middle of us five kids, and back then he had pale skin, through which you could see blue veins, and also the most marvelous thick hair, nearly white and long enough that it formed pipe curls. He never would ride the bus to school, and until he got a driver’s license he rode his bike in all weather. My sister Sheila reminds me that Tom used to wear sweaters to school in the cold mornings but that he wouldn’t want to wear them home when it was warmer, so he stored them in his locker, until his locker was full. Then he’d stuff all his sweaters inside one sweater and make Sheila carry it home on the bus for him. She called it Tom’s sweater ball. Tom slept in his tree houses summer and winter—one winter he installed a wood stove. And I think one of his cats used to stay up there with him. Tom says this last tree fort, was a twelve-by-twelve shed that he disassembled on the ground and reassembled in the trees. The amazing thing is that none of these tree houses collapsed while he was in it.
Tom says, “The fact that we were not maimed by one of these works of architecture was due to my constant following of Frank Lloyd Wright’s principles. You had to take into account the fluid dynamics of the wind blowing through the trees.” Tom remembers lying on his back, staring at the trees, toking a joint, and getting one of those energy spurts that only a sixteen year old could understand, one for whom “even drugs could not quell his emotions.”
Tom is forty-two now and still a great builder. Recently he constructed an elaborate deck on his house, which is set high above Long Lake.

Comstock Kid Stories from Terry Herlihy (Terry was born in 1944)

1. Our Comstock house was downstream from a rendering works, run by my friend Doug Hahn's dad. They had ice-cold bottles of kool-aid pop for two cents in the break room, but the smell was so horrendously awful you couldn't tell cherry from grape. My beagle Pepper loved the place. All over the field around the plant there were piles of hair ten feet high and full of worms. The plant rendered dead meat into tallow and dumped the rest into the creek where it would drift past the house and pollute the ponds downstream.
Doug had a fat hound dog that was always pregnant or nursing a dozen pups. The older pups would stay around long enough to knock up Mom so after 10 generations they were almost as good as clones.
Doug was really afraid of his dad. One time we were fishing in Morrow lake and he pulled his lure out of the water to avoid hooking a big bass ‘cause he thought it might break the line and get him beaten up for losing the lure. He really got his ass kicked when he threw a huge cherry bomb with the wick burned down to nothing into his dad's furnace. He should have stuck to losing lures. Another time we were launching corks out of bottles using dry ice and water as a propellant. Then we got bored with chasing corks decided to launch the bottles. After Doug walked in the launch path for a better view, my mom took him to the hospital to get his head sewed up.

2. From the time I was two until I was nine, my mom was a Girl Scout leader, and I got dragged all over. On one hike, I was near the rear when the whole troop walked upstream along the creek, above where the third dam used to be, in the muck or morrow or whatever that gook is. It was practically like quicksand. In minutes, Mom and about 15 scouts were up to their arm pits, some of them way out from solid ground. Because I weighed only about 45 pounds, I could crawl out with branches for the girls to crawl up on. It took an hour to get them all out.
Before Girl Scout cookies, the Comstock troop had everyone saving newspaper and magazines, which they picked up and sold to the paper mills in Kalamazoo. When the cookie deal hit, the troop blew off all the paper savers, but I had a little wagon (the one that is still at the family cottage), and I picked up all the paper and magazines until I had a truckload, and then dad would bring a truck home from work to take the stuff to the paper mill. Sometimes Dad would charge me a dime a mile for the truck so I would give him a dollar out of the 35 dollars I would get.
The girl scouts never picked up returnable bottles to raise money so they were pretty much mine. I would walk from school every day and turn them in at each store along the way, and that kept me funded, so I could buy with candy, pop and gum to rot out my teeth as fast as they could grow in. Also money was good for buying every comic book I wanted, including Uncle Scrooge McDuck, Little Lulu, and Bugs Bunny.
I was also in the 4-H club, and my dad taught me photography with an old box camera. Either the 4-H or scouts taught me to identify birds and trees, but I moved to Chicago before I could win a stuffed turtle like my sister Susy got.
The Korean War ran up scrap steel prices way up to current prices for a while. It's amazing how much stuff I found laying around in the woods, like plows, racks, pieces of cars and bikes, and they would add up to a truck load in a jiffy, like $75 less $1 for dad the trucker.
I buried a box in the ground to see what critters would fall in at night. I caught lots of toads, frogs, and turtles, and a shrew that bit my finger badly. I worried for months about whether it had had rabies. I left the box there for years, but I built ramps for the shrews to get out. I also filled the trees with ladders and platforms and dug tunnels in the ground, trenches covered with boards and dirt.
The science teacher came to 2nd grade to ask where the frogs on top of each other might be found (they do that when they lay eggs). I didn't want to embarrass her in front of the class, but we all knew that every last frog egg had been laid weeks before

3. Dick Ackerman lived just north of us on on 26th Street. When we were in second grade, in 1956, Dick Ackerman and I had a contest for how many pairs of pants we could wear to school one minus-20 F day. He had seven. I had six. He got busted when he mooned the principal when he only meant to pull down pair number six.
Dick and I used to swim in the pond, and that was always followed by leach removal with a saltshaker. Dick held the record for the most leaches, about 27 or so at one time. I used to show Dick all the critters along the path I took to school (along the pond), the biggest turtles, the loudest frog, etc. Once in the winter I went through the ice and was black with muck to the neck. I continued on to school, but they sent me home to change. In the summer we would spend hours foraging for dewberries, wild strawberries, blackberries, and random raspberries. Mushrooms too, though puff balls and moral mushrooms were the only ones I knew. I would pick puffballs as big as softballs and my mom would fry them for me. Usually, though, they were already gone to spores, and we would stomp them into dust. That dust wasn't anywhere near as dense as the dust we would make in Dick's dad's garage throwing dirt in the air for hours until our lungs were so full of dust we couldn't breathe. I don't know why we did that.
Dick Ackerman tried to invent the waterproof cherry bomb by lighting and putting one in a jar, but it went off while he was screwing on the lid. He and I did lots of kid stuff like making a blast furnace behind the house with a piece of stove exhaust duct and some granite blocks. It could melt glass pretty well. We caught northern pike in the creek with an orange sack and coat hanger fishnets. Dick found a rifle that we kept hidden. We would have killed ourselves if we knew how to buy ammo. I liked the fact that Dick didn't kill frogs and turtles like everyone else did. There was a myth about the mulberry tree in Dick’s yard: he said it had been planted in 5 lbs of sugar and that was why its fruit was white and sweet.
Dick’s mom and dad on a hot day would take us to Pickerel lake which was about 100 F and filled with floating cotexes and other trash. On the drive there and back, Dick’s dad and mom drank a case or so of Pfeiffer's beer and threw the bottles out of the car. (This was also the height of polio season). One summer Dick grew a watermelon, watching it for months, and his brother ate it just when Dick was going to pick it. Dick claimed that he fell out of the tree house above our stable and landed right on my sister’s horse. We used to play cards with Dick's brother's deck of cards, which featured photos of naked people doing weird stuff on them. Dick claimed to have introduced the girls of 26th Street to sex and claimed to have some resultant descendants. The last time I saw him we were driving around at 100 mph on back roads with Listerine for brake fluid (so it wouldn't freeze).
The fact that I was forbidden to see Dick sort of cut down on our contact, but I'm sure I would have tried out his homemade scuba tanks with him if I had been there. Instead, he tried them out alone in the upper pond, and he drowned. He was seventeen or eighteen, I think.

4. Don't forget Herman the Railroad crossing guy. When a train came, he would get out of his shack with a paddle to stop cars. When we kids finished spending all our money on candy or pop at Reed's or the Beer Store, we would hang out with Herman in his shack. He would bore us with stories of doing the same railroad job up the line somewhere. His paddle was a smaller version of the stop/slow paddles of held up by the highway flag-people.
In the summer the best swimming was at Lambeck's creek, which was what they called the creek upstream of the rendering works. Upstream of the place it wasn't full of floating hunks of dead stuff. Mr. Lambeck had neat stuffed animals all over his cabin, not beanie-baby-type animals but dead deer heads and creatures all over his walls.
I would go all these places with my dog Pepper. He actually accomplished the romantic feats Dick bragged about. There were farmers who actually shot at us from their farms, surrounded by half-beagle half-pedigreed pups.

The Hill House by Bonnie

In the summer, my mother expected all of us kids to be outside doing something, and often we spent the entire day on the run, riding horses, taking walks, staging neighborhood battles between good and evil. As I recall, the only kids we thought were evil were Gerry Mattimore and Tom Bloom, and sometimes if we weren’t battling them, we hung out with them, though they had once killed one of our laying hens. My brother Mike’s best friend was Roy Hill and he was always with us Campbell kids, whether we were building tree forts or stealing road signs, or slogging upstream in the Comstock Creek. Roy developed a method of getting rid of bloodsuckers without salt; he stuck the end of a certain kind of stick into the leech’s head and twisted in a certain way, and the leech came off. My brother Mike recently reminded me that all the girls liked Roy, but that Roy didn’t really like girls though nobody (including Roy) really knew what that meant back then. Roy lived on Worden Street in a house where the upstairs bedroom plaster walls revealed a lot of plaster lathe; he lived with his sister Diane, his mother Una, a woman they called Aunt Gloria, and Gloria’s daughter Rose. Una was a small thin chain smoker who liked to laugh. Aunt Gloria was gigantic and rather grumpy, and she kept a secret food stash of decadent sweet things in a locked metal cupboard. In retrospect, it seems clear Gloria and Una were domestic partners. One day Gloria fell through the rotting porch boards outside the house’s back door, and she was so big they had to lift her out with a tow truck winch. Roy moved to Florida when he was about nineteen. He came back once or twice after that to visit, and then ten or twelve years ago he died in an automobile accident.
When the road commission put in the new K Avenue and closed off the Worden Street railroad crossing, only one house was taken down, the mustard colored Hill House. Before they put tore it down, I went there and tried to look in the boarded up windows, to see where Aunt Gloria’s metal cupboard. As far as I could tell, Roy and Diane had mostly survived on white bread and margarine and whatever junk food they bought at the beer store. I talked to the neighbors, the June & George Boney, and they expressed sadness about the Hill House coming down and about the Worden Street rail crossing being closed down. They told me a story about their realtor getting her car stuck on the tracks—she got out and let the train take her car down the line, even though it contained a briefcase with a thousand dollars in it. June described another event, seeing her neighbors, a mother and a grandmother, hit by the train and killed before her eyes, while she was watching their children. The Boneys said that Una had died and that Roy’s sister Diane still lived somewhere around town. The Boney house was a mirror image of the Hill House, though the Boney’s had always looked more kept-up. June Boney told me that they’d gotten a call a few years ago, and they’d heard an almost undecipherable female voice, like a little girl’s voice, asking them, “please come get me. I’m ready to come home.” The voice deteriorated into weeping. Then a nurse came on the line and apologized, said it was Gloria, mostly out of her mind, just talking crazy.

The Power Plant, by Michael Campbell

The Kalamazoo River passes through Galesburg, Comstock, Kalamazoo. Many years ago my Grandfather as a general contractor (Herlihy Mid-Continent Company) had the winning bid to build a power plant in Comstock. As part of the construction, a dam had to be built providing a reserve of water. This would later be called Morrow or Kilowatt Lake.
It would be about forty years ago when I started riding a bus to Comstock East Elementary School. One thing that was very noticeable along the route was the power plant near M-96 and North 28th Street. It was an area called East Comstock, near the school. Dozens of coal cars would be lined up to heat water for the steam turbines. Heavy black smoke poured from the stacks, leaving a light layer of soot on the playground. During the winter we would still pick up and eat a handful of snow in spite of the color.
I got used to seeing the plant, but there were still times that stood out, such as waiting for coal cars to reach the side rails and release steam. The violent steam discharge would happen abruptly and end the same way. Imagine the sound of nearby jet or thunder.
The power plant still exist today, with its landmark twin stacks but only generates a few megawatts with its hydroelectric generators.

What We Did For Fun in the 40's, by Joanna Herlihy

I most vividly remember the years 1942-45 when I was 8 to 11 years old. World War 2 dominated Comstock then—war news, ration books, big brothers and fathers going into the service. War dominated our play too. My next door neighbor on Prospect Ave, Keith Bunting, led a commando unit with headquarters in a homemade shack. We regularly participated in maneuvers, wearing army helmets and carrying improvised weapons. Keith recounted army stories from his brother Allen who was stationed in India. I led exercises with the younger children, parading with flag, baton and drums.
Field exercises flowed over into outdoor endurance activities such as hikes and cook-outs. The most rigorous hike was east along the river, past St. Anthony's toward the power plant--rigorous because of the underbrush and the fear of rattlesnakes. We had all heard of the man who was bitten by a rattlesnake near the dam. He ran a mile back to town for help and then died.
We hiked north of the tracks too, into the woods behind the castle on the hill, taking care not to step on the cow pies in Farmer Snow's pasture. We hiked along the path past the 2nd pond to the 3rd pond--which disappeared when the dam broke at the end of the 40's. There was a spooky abandoned mill by the 3rd dam (someone said it was a rug cleaning factory). We crawled under it then. Around 1950 the Lawrences tore it down and built a handsome house. We didn't hike further north by the 3rd pond. That was rendering works territory.
Swimming was never simple. The river was full of grass with bloodsuckers. Sometimes we waded across the river; nobody had a boat and we never really swam there. The ponds weren't so attractive for swimming either with all the muck on the bottom and strange creatures. The best swimming was a mile north of the tracks at Lyons Lake, upstream from the rendering works. The water was so clear you could see the deep drop-offs in the old marl pit. Winter sports were great. The 1st pond was the best for skating. It seemed like the whole town was there, skating for hours in the cold weather, day and night. Kids my age sometimes ventured to join in crack-the-whip with the big kids. My feet would be so cold when I got home. My mother made me soak them in cold water to avoid frostbite.
The best sledding was down the hill behind the old high school with a bend at the bottom by the Allen's house, coming out by the I.O.O.F. hall. Other hills were blacklisted by memories of past accidents. Having the railroad tracks at the bottom of the steepest hill was a bummer. The most fun of all for me was when I could go with my friend Nancy Parkhurst to the Saturday night dances at the I.O.O.F. hall. The evening program was interspersed with dances like the schottische which children like me could join in.
Other nighttime fun may have happened only in my neighborhood. There was a season when Keith Bunting would periodically announce that we should be on the look out for the Green Hornet that night. The word would spread to all the neighborhood children. We might be out in the dusk playing hide and seek when the strike would come. And we would all chase the hooded Hornet without success. The rumor was that Mickey Ott played the role of the popular radio show character, but nobody ever proved his identity.
Night was the best time by the river, too. I'll never forget the moonlight reflecting from the ripples by the sycamore tree.

Mike Pierce, by Christopher Magson

Mike Pierce and his girlfriend rented a house on the north side of Kilowatt Lake, near the power plant. He worked at the paper mill with me in Parchment.
At the mill, management decided to crack down on drug use and Mike ended up selling some pot to a plant—a blond chubby woman with bad skin and caked make-up, a woman who was apparently working for the Michigan state police. He was fired of course and jail time seemed inevitable. He had done some time in prison at one point and decided he would not be able to do time again. He made a pipe bomb and lit it off in his back yard while his head was resting on it. The police wanted his girlfriend to identify him, but she kept repeating “there’s nothing left, there’s just nothing left.” He had a few bad habits, such as the pornography he kept in his locker at work, and using overpowering cologne. Really, though, he was just an aging hippie in a paper mill and there was no harm in him.

The Furnace of the “H” House, by Bonnie

While my mother was away this March (2005) at a folk festival with her gentleman friend Loring, the boiler pipes in her attic burst and hundreds of gallons of water poured into what was my old bedroom. It poured from the attic pipes through the ceiling, through the light socket and through the newly revealed divisions between the sections of ceiling plaster. My mother had inadvertently turned off the heat, and the water stopped circulating, froze in the pipes and burst. It was only by sheer chance that I happened to stop by the house shortly after the pipes burst. Had a few more hours passed, the damage might have been irreparable. When I got there, it sounded as though someone was running the bathtub faucet full blast. My brother George zoomed over, and while I moved books out of the room, and placed and emptied tubs and buckets strategically, George figured out how to shut off the water at the furnace. Two days later my brother Tom sweated new copper pipe and repaired the damage. Almost everything important dried out.
My mother has lived most of her life in the house she now occupies on 26th Street. She was a little girl when my grandfather, Frank Herlihy, built it in the shape of an H, for Herlihy. There is one hilltop position from which a person might get the view that shows to advantage that letter of the alphabet. Otherwise it is simply a rambling house that is expensive to heat, because of the surface area and the many windows. There are two four by ten foot picture windows and eight-eight windows that are 2'x5', each with four panes.
This was not the first time the furnace has given us trouble. I should mention that the original oil burner furnace, in place for forty years, was a massive gray thing (insulated by what was probably asbestos) occupying an entire small room (called the “furnace pit”) and resembling an elephant. When I was in high school, my mother got the idea of saving money by converting this old boiler from oil back to coal, so that she could burn wood in the coal box, and during this time us kids often awoke in winter with skims of ice upon our bedside water glasses. Because wood is not so intensely energy packed as coal, the wood burner scenario required constant attention, constant feeding of wood into the fire box, even to keep the house moderately warm. One year my mother took a trip to California with Uncle Terry, in March, and the kids she’d left in charge didn’t keep the fire going. The pipes burst in the concrete floor. Luckily at that time I was away at College.
There was one time before that when I was about seven, when we were away visiting my grandparents in St. Joe, and we got home after supper, and found the entire interior of the house and everything in it coated with black soot. My mother said the furnace had exploded. At the time I was grateful we had not been there, but now I think, Wow! That must have been something. Years later we were still finding patches of soot on the tops of doorframes.
My mother says she was about eleven when her father was showing her how to kick start the furnace using the re-set button. She had to know this because they were leaving her alone for a weekend. He pressed the re-set button right after the furnace had quit cycling, so he and my Mom were next to it when it exploded. Apparently the box had been really hot since it had just turned off, and starting it again blew the door open and sent soot everywhere, onto my mother and grandfather especially.

The Dam Story by Susanna

Comstock in the early days had a series of three ponds and dams. The first pond next to the RR tracks ran a machine shop. The second pond was ornamental. Above the stone decorative waterfall was a wooden timber dam on which a sawmill was located. A 100 year old lady was my source of information: Maude Lockwood.
Now we come to the third pond. Research is sketchy, but on-going. My father built this house on the Comstock Creek between the second and third ponds in 1946 and 47. Mr. Lawrence who we bought the property from showed us the old mill wheel of the grain mill under his house built over the old building. It could be still in place. The third pond dam was earth with a skin of concrete.
We youths were told to keep away from this dam, which was heavily sandbagged and seriously leaking. Of course we went there every day and also to the nearby grape vine swing that would take you 25 feet up in the air. Then we’d hang out and guess when the dam would bust. We knew it was going to happen (I was 8 or 9). Of course our parents didn’t know we were hanging out on the perforated dam, leaking gallons of pond water.
And then one night at 3:00 a.m. while we were asleep, it busted. Wow! Wading gleefully in mud up to our necks the next day with handfuls of fish, turtles, frogs and muck. It took out the old sawmill dam and so lowered our pond level for all time. There was massive outflow. It went 12 feet on the banks but it didn’t break the other dams.
Only a few pieces of concrete remain of that third dam. It was a huge mess of muck and slime for a few years until it stabilized, and now is just marshy.
Back then the rumor was that someone dynamited the dam because it was so dangerous to us kids. More recently, a local source told me that a Mr. Hunt had dynamited the dam because he was so annoyed at the Kalamazoo Rendering Works for dumping animal waste into the third pond. The DNR has no record of the third pond, though they were able to date the first and second pond dams at about 1890.
My property on the creek still has the mill races that diverted water from the overflow from the third pond during this active period as a grain mill.

Oats and Old Red, by Susanna

One summer day in 1969 I wandered in to visit my farmer friends in the old home place. The parents were absent due to a crisis down in Missouri. My friends had pretty much maxed out their credit cards on seed and farm stuff, parts, etc.
They offered me a great deal on oats, which as a horse and donkey trader, I had use for all the time. What I didn’t have was an oat bin. I paid in advance for the grain and went home and constructed an amazing bin (it lasted 1969-2003). Old Red, my Hereford-Ayrshire milk cow watched with interest.
The first load I shoveled into my new bin, with Red watching curiously. The second load followed, but some children crisis happened and I went to the house to settle it and took way too much time. When I came back to unload, the cow had a guilty look on her bovine mug.
I emptied the truck and considered it a good deal and a job done.
However, as happens on the farm, it was not done. About 4 hours later and of course after-hours for the vet (as with kids after-clinic hours), Red began huge moos of a desperate nature. In my absence she had stuffed herself on oats.
There was only one vet on call, in Augusta, and when I reached him he said he’d promised for 3 weeks to take his wife out for her birthday, and he’d stood her up, and she was near divorcing him.
He told me to cut the fittings off a piece of garden hose and shove it down the cow to let out the oat gas and call him back.
I snuck up on the cow with the hose and a huge amount of disgusting gas came seething out, so I called the vet to report the results. He replied, “You didn’t leave it in long enough, do it again.” This time the cow was wise to me. A Battle Royal. If any more oat gas came out, I was not aware of it while I was being trampled. Red and I survived in our relationship for years to come.

Charlene, by Susanna

One Christmas vacation—in those boring days for the kids after the day, before the New Year’s Eve stuff—the phone rings.
It’s Mister Tom Taylor, extremely excited. “Dahlin, Charlene drowned in the pond. Do you want her?”
Now, I realized that the victim was indeed a cow, and with a houseful of serious carnivores it would be a plus to harvest one, but I had to ask. “How long ago did she drown?”
“Forty-five minutes ago,” replied Tom. “She was fine this morning. She walked out onto the ice to get a drink of water and went through.” Tom’s care of his livestock was always a bit sketchy. I would have broken the ice for my cows.
As I mentioned, a bunch of kids on a vacation plus idle adults made up quite a crew. We arrived in several trucks to (indeed) see a cow floating upside down in a pond a hundred feet from shore. Now what?
Tom was accompanied by Jack Polk (a bane of my existence from years ago when working at Herlihy’s, the guy who disappeared at noon after my payroll was finished.)
The first bright idea was to launch a boat. Unfortunately a family of woodchucks had filled it two-thirds full with dirt. We dug it out and launched it on the pond. Meantime, son Tom hd found a hundred feet of cable and clamps and hitched it to the 1970 Ford four-by-four.
The boat crew fell through the ice but they did manage to hook onto the cow.
An unforgettable sight. An upside down cow bouncing across the ice at 20 miles per hour.
Then it was time for the serious stuff. I had to gut her—thank God no calf—perhaps she suicided—and our saw dealer put vegetable oil in a new saw to do the honors of cutting and we took her to a no-questions-asked shady meat cutting place.
In retrospect, Charlene was one great cow, providing entertainment as well as eating.

Comstock Beer Service by Bonnie

When we were kids, the Beer Store, as we called it, was owned by Don Phillips, who lived across the creek from us. Back then, the Beer Store had the coldest freezer in town and we bought our ice cream there. Often on Sunday nights my mother would buy us kids a half gallon of Neopolitan ice cream, the pink, white and brown stuff. It was frozen too solid to scoop, and we couldn’t stand to wait for it to thaw, and so Mom would cut it for us with a big butcher knife into slices resembling the flags of some European nation. We’d also buy ice cream treats during the day sometimes, to take down and eat under the bridge, in the “tunnel.” The “tunnel” was an old underpass beneath the railroad tracks and E. Michigan that had been half-heartedly gated shut, but we just walked around the gate. The concrete was crumbling and it sometimes smelled like urine or worse, but the creek was fast and shallow there. We’d get orange push-ups or vanilla ice cream sandwiches or vanilla ice cream bars, nutty buddies, or something that had some crushed cakey stuff on it in strawberry or chocolate, and we’d wade in the water, avoiding the broken glass littering the pebbled creek bed. I was somewhat interested in adventure as a youth, but mostly I was interested in sweets.
Once when my brother Tom and sister Sheila were at the Beer Store, we told our dog Brownie to stay put outside the door. She was a black and white dog, so there was no explaining why we called her “Brownie.” In any case, when a westbound train came, she did not stay put. She ran out in front of the train in order to keep it from getting away and ended up slipping under the cowcatcher. As soon as the train had passed, we ran to the tracks and found Brownie there in the center, lying perfect still, dazed, with a bit of hair shorn off the top of her head but panting and very much alive. We called my mom, who came and picked us all up. Mom brought a gunnysack, assuming that “Brownie got ran over by the train” meant a bloody mess. It took Brownie three days to recover enough to walk, and though her hearing was never very good after that, she lived on fine for several years

Hillbilly Heaven by Bonnie

Between the years I was eleven and fifteen, everybody hung out at Hillbilly Heaven, drinking contraband alcohol, smoking pot and cigarettes, making out and listening to music. Hillbilly Heaven was what we called the top flat part of the Balkema’s gravel pit before Balkema gouged so much of it away to sell as bank run gravel. Apparently Balkema didn’t mind kids parking there, and it was nice to have somewhere to go. I could walk there from our house in about fifteen minutes, so long as the concrete block and plank bridge across the creek wasn’t out. During the daytime I often rode my horse Sparky there, up and down the hills, and I studied the trash that people had left, liquor bottles and empty cigarette packs. But really, all things considered, the kids were pretty well behaved at Hillbilly Heaven and didn’t litter very much. I remember the time that Mark Mort, who was handsome and had his driver’s license, kicked my neighbor Margaret Boer out of his car because she wouldn’t make out with him. Margaret Boer was tall and willowy with long, thick dark hair, but her Dutch Reform parents were very strict, and I wonder what she was even doing up there. Years later she and Mark Mort got together again; they married and had three kids. Now they’re divorced.

Also: Other stories of interest include Denise Martin’s observation of a train wreck, Jaci Dillon’s memories of Kite Fest, Jamie Blake’s visit to the Tap Room, Peter Green’s memories about going to the cottage and his story of the great cherry theft, Linda Green Metzler’s appreciation of Susanna’s chickens’ eggs, Margaret von Steinen’s appreciation for Comstock’s small town life, and lots of stories that refer to the rendering works and to the dead elephant that ended up there. Let me know if you want to see any of these and I’ll ask the authors’ permission to share them online. In any case, they are all in a spiral bound volume at the Comstock Library.

The Writers and Donkeys of Missoula Montana

2011-10-11T11:26:00.001-07:00

What a great (whirlwind) visit to the http://www.humanitiesmontana.org/programs/fob/index.php in Missoula, Montana! Chris & Julia LaTray picked me up at the airport and most generously got me to the Holiday Inn where all the action was. The first day was rain, but the panel on Living and Writing the American West was bright and shiny. It included Dan Aadland, Rick Bass, Judy Blunt, William Kittredge, Melissa Kwasny, Kris Saknussemm, Robert Wrigley, Williard Wyman, moderated by Russel Rowland. Folks discussed the fictional west vs. the real west, issues of manhood, and Native American issues. Robert Wrigley said the west "allowed for the possibility of wildness." Williard Wyman said the existence of the West meant that "We don't have to hang ourselves." Judy Blunt gracefully handled an audience question about why the university "allowed" some students of European heritage to say something unkind to a student of Native American heritage. ("People come into our university with different life experiences...") After the panel included I thanked Rick Bass for saying my book was "Singular and hypnotic."

After a lovely reception, the LaTrays and I went to dinner with Garth, owner of Shakespeare & Company bookstore, and Karen, Garth's wife. Here's a photo

The short story panel the following morning included Glen Chamberlain Alan Heathcock, Shann Ray, Melanie Rae Thon, moderated nicely by David Abrams. My panel later included Jonathon Evison, Joe Henry, Jenny Shank and was moderated by Kim Anderson. Jonathan Evison was something; not only is his book West of Here brilliant, but he has two more books ready to go (he said) and he only sleeps four hours a night. The greatest thing about the panel was that Kim Anderson said that Once Upon a River qualified as Western Fiction according to every description except its taking place on (and being written on) the wrong side of the Mississippi.

Other highlights included meeting Jenny and some other University of Montana writing students--I'm so sorry, gals, that I stuck you with my bill for coffee when I ran out of there! The most exciting gal might have been Laura K. Ferguson, author of a book called My Life as Laura: Or How I Searched for Laura Ingalls Wilder and Found Myself. She was one of Judy Blunt's students and has invited me to Athens, Ohio to drink Donkey Coffee. Speaking of Donkeys, Julia LaTray is a fashion designer, and her company Donkey Girl Fashions pays spiritual tribute to the great animal. Here she and I stand under her sign at the craft market. Also Chris's Mom Becky was there, and she was swell.

Here is Chris La Tray's blog about the Montana Festival of the Book

http://chrislatray.com/2011/10/11/friends-come-and-then-they-go/

Here is a picture of me with donkey wearing a Donkey Girl shirt:

Happy Birthday Mary Szpur

2011-09-30T19:42:00.000-07:00

This photo is of Nancy Garrity, taken at Mary Szpur's birthday party earlier this month. Mary & Nancy's neighbor in Chicago is (pictured below) Christy Webber, and she showed up with this stuffed raccoon. Her dog is Oscar.

I've traveled to Douglas, Michigan to Mary's birthday party since 2004. September 2 comes at the right time to take a break, usually labor day weekend. Mary's been a great pal of mine since 1983, when we both led a bicycle tour in Eastern Europe. We found we got along well because we both worried a lot, and that made sure that the trip went smoothly. We formed a company called Goulash Tours, Inc. and went on a couple more trips together after that, and we've had other adventures as well, though not as many as we would like, since everybody is so darned busy. Mary has gone through a couple of careers, as I have, and she has settled into being a Physician Assistant. She's a great writer, and once wrote a series of brilliant essays about working as part of the medical staff in a prison in Illinois. She's been a great supporter of my writing, and has spent way too much money on copies of my books for her friends.

The food was delicious, cooked mostly by Nancy and Bill Fry. Bill cooked Cornell Chicken from a newspaper recipe and it very moist. The wine, as always, was very good.

So, thank you Mary, for being such a great pal, and Happy Birthday!

Because Christopher wasn't able to join us at Mary's party this year (he was working), we didn't get the usual excellent photos. Below is a photo Chris took in 2010 at Mary's party using a timer, so he could be in the photo. The people in this photo include Peter Larson, Bill Fry, Carla Vissers, Mike Dempsey, Jan Rogatz, Nancy Garrity, Chris Magson, and Mary herself and me. Not in that order.

Also at the party this year (not pictured) were Nancy's sailing shipmates from 2011 Race to Mackinac T 10 Class winner boat Erica: Michael and Barb Kaczor, and Peter Good and Susan Havenga.

By the way, Christy is president and founder of Christy Webber Landscaping. She is originally from Michigan, I'm proud to say. Her son Oliver (not pictured) was at the party, after having helped Nancy make the birthday cupcakes.

Lofty Visit to Minneapolis / St. Paul!

2011-09-21T11:01:00.000-07:00

Great visit to Minneapolis! What a pleasure to read at the Loft!

Alicia Conroy and Chris Schmid kindly allowed me to stay with them in Minneapolis, just a few blocks from the River Parkway, so early on Thursday I borrowed one of Chris's twenty three-speeds (A Schwinn Alicia called "Big Blue") and I set out for a fifteen mile ride. I visited Micawbers Books in St. Anthony Park (St. Paul) to sign some stock, and then ate at the fabulous Finnish Bistro around the corner. While I normally don't order crab cakes in the midwest, I took a chance and it paid off. Yum! Then I biked to Common Good Books, the store owned by Garrison Keillor. I biked around by the campus of St. where my pal Leslie Adrienne Miller teaches (we missed you, Leslie!). Then I traveled south along the River Parkway to cross the river and then headed north back to Chris and Alicia. I hadn't been feeling so joyful of late, but crabcakes and a three hour bike ride is just what it takes.

The reading at The Loft was so lovely. A great audience asked great questions. Some friends of Heidi's Bell's (Randy & Sabrina) showed up to say hello, Dodd Demas came by and took my picture next to a "reserved" sign and said it was false advertising. Afterward, some of us went out to Spill The Wine (folks included fiction writer Alicia Conroy, poet Kathryn Kaysar, Loft Program Director Jerod Santek, Loft Employee Lucas Schulze, and former Poet Laureate of Kansas Denise Low-Weso, who happens to be current President of the Board AWP.) I was so interested in the conversation, the wine, and the little plates of food that I didn't think to take a photo of us with my phone.

I wish that Laurie Hertzel, Books Editor at the Star Tribune had joined us. She generously publicized my reading and then she even wrote a review of my reading!

http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/books/129953563.html

The following morning I was also distracted by the delightful company of my companions, this time at Day By Day, a breakfast joint that at one time was staffed by Alcoholics, where I breakfasted with Alicia, Chris and the fabulous Lisa Durose, who has said that she wants to be my official biographer. I said okay because I know I could beat her up if I had to in order to make her say the right thing. She said that the snake infestation problem in her St. Paul yard and basement has improved slightly.

The photos attached are of the 3-speed bike Chris Schmid let me ride--he says he tinkers with the bikes more than he rides them. (And if only I had taken a photo of Lucas Schulze, you would have seen how handsome and French he looks!).

Donkey Foal: a very short story

2011-09-07T17:20:00.001-07:00

This story appeared in The Southern Review 2010, and this baby donkey is Don Quixote, and he is one day old in this photo. The Mama is Jenny, RIP. Jack is tied to a tree in the background.

Donkey Foal

Us six kids paraded our new donkey baby around town on its tiny black hooves, still soft from the womb, and shouted with joy to folks, Come look! Pet the donkey for a quarter! how cute! how fuzzy! Long‑legged and knock‑kneed, big‑eyed and soft as a plush toy! You can't resist! We walked him into town, past the equestrian statue and under the bridge. When we had enough donations we tied his neck rope to the no‑parking sign and went into the candy store to buy sour fruit poppers and super jaw busters. We exited in a line, oldest to youngest, as was our habit, and one by one, we saw no donkey, no neck rope. When we stopped rattling our candy wrappers and all fell silent for the first time that day, we could hear the mama donkey braying from almost a mile away, braying for her baby, whom she hadn't nursed in hours. We ran in six directions and searched the town, searched at home too, but found not a tiny turd, not a tuft of soft hair. We marched back to the farm togetherin a solemn line. We knew that we should not have been going around talking about cute; all morning we should have pointed and said to passersby: Look how vulnerable! How fragile! Our sign should not have read Pet the fuzzy baby for a quarter, but rather, Life is a grave responsibility. When the plump curly‑haired woman said, Look how sweet! we should have shaken our heads. We should have said, Look more closely, ma'am. See how death sleeps beneath all skin! See how death stares back at you through bright new eyes!

Photos are by Jerry Campbell.

The Southern Review Spring 2009 was edited by Jeanne Leiby (1964-2011), whom we love and miss.

Grand Visit to Grand Rapids

2011-09-05T18:47:00.000-07:00

The Grand Rapids library is gorgeous, a big old-fashioned library with columns, finished in 1904, paid for by the benefactor and native son Martin A. Ryerson Jr., son of a Michigan lumber baron who was a benefactor of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Chicago (one of my alma maters), and other institutions. I read on the third floor in the Ryerson Auditorum, featuring high ceilings, arched windows and crown moulding. The patrons were smart and asked good questions. One guy asked why my characters didn't swear more. Another guy said it was hard to take what happened with Margo's boat. I agreed. In the photo above, you'll see me in the auditorium with Emily from Schuler Books in Grand Rapids, and with Chris Byron, who works at the library and organized my reading. The guy who said that about the boat was Robert VanderMolen, a Grand Rapids poet and manly character (a friend of Larry Tenharmsel, of course!). We chatted on the steps outside the library for a long time, waiting for Chris to get out of work. Here's one photo that shows the two of us and another that shows the front of the library. If I hadn't worried about my drive home, I would have tagged along with him and Chris for a drink.

Once Upon a River goes to the Rockies

2011-08-27T09:09:00.000-07:00

Look at these gorgeous faces! These women read Once Upon a River in their book group called, I think, Winos Who Read, just before my visit to the Bookworm in Edwards, Colorado. At the Bookworm, I got to hang out with Besse, who organizes events at the store, and also with Heather Sappenfield, formerly my MFA student, now smarter and more prolific than the rest of us. She gave me my first mountain biking lesson... on a mountain! (Heather tells me we were on the Village to Village Trail on first Beaver Creek Mountain and then on Arrowhead Mountain.) She also loaned me (and then gave me) the lovely bright blue and white flowered biking jersey I'm wearing below. She told me I was a good student because I didn't fall and didn't chicken out at any point. Heather is not only an official mountain bike instructor, but she races and wins! (And she went above and beyond all reasonable duties and drove me two and a half hours each way to the Denver airport from her home in Avon.) After my visit at the Bookworm, I was escorted out to dinner around the corner at Etown by Heather, Besse and a very exciting women named Anuschka, who had done all sorts of things around the world and was now studying auto repair. There I had my first ever fish tacos. Thanks Heather! Thanks Besse! Thanks Bookworm!

And finally, here we are at the Molly Brown House in Denver. Since we were there, Heather has written a story that involves Molly Brown. Like I said, she's prolific.

Jaimy & I meet up North

2011-08-17T20:38:00.000-07:00

I've been up north, visiting bookstores in order to promote Once Upon a River, and on Thursday, Aug 11, I met up with my MFA advisor Jaimy Gordon at McLean & Eakin Booksellers in Petoskey, Michigan to have a discussion mostly about my book, but also about Jaimy's Lord of Misrule, which won the 2010 National Book Award. In case you haven't read that book, do it now--it's a wild ride.

Jaimy, as usual, was brilliant and said lots of interesting things. She and I were commiserating that many of the reviewers of our books seem to be mostly summarizing the plots, and she said she intended to never again put so much plot into a novel.
We found that our books had many other things in common. Her young female protagonist Maggie had the given name Margaret, same as my Margo Crane does.

Notice that I got to sit in the special YELLOW CHAIR, because my book was newer than Jaimy's (and I think she was already in the yellow chair earlier this year.) In this photo (take by darling Christopher), I was describing some of the details of the sex scenes in Jaimy's book. After the Q&A, the owners Jessilyn & Matt Norcross gave both of us Kilwin chocolates, made right there in Petoskey. Yum!

Hay Day

2011-08-01T19:12:00.000-07:00

The temperature was 98 degrees, the humidity was 98 percent, and the sky was clouding over, threatening rain on our 200 bales of hay, but our fine crew went out with two trucks. My big Ford F-350 with dual back wheels held 85 bales, and my brother's Diesel Ford truck held 35 bales. I'm pretty rugged, but I'll confess that I felt a little nauseous after loading my truck. Pictured here with me are my little brother Geo, martial artist Jamie Blake, the soon-to-be married niece Kellee with Nich Martin, my nephew Jonathon, little J., and nephew Matt. When we got the hay home and in the barn, Susanna had turned on the old Chrysler Air Conditioning unit and her house was nice and cool. We drank some Budweisers and felt the contentment that people feel when they have worked hard.

There was one little tragedy. A garter snake got baled up with the hay and we found the poor guy all limp sticking out between two leaves of hay. Here he is after Jonathon removed him from the hay and put him on the hood of my truck. On a sweeter note, I found this lovely logo on an old crib mattress spring in the barnyard.

Literary Life Bookstore, Grand Rapids

2011-07-30T18:35:00.001-07:00

What a great visit at Literary Life Bookstore in Grand Rapids where we had a meet and greet at this charming place. In this photo are Marsha Meyers (of Portage Library), Michael Dunn (artist, husb. of Marsha Meyer), Jennifer (of Lit Life Books), BJC, my niece, Zach who works at bookstore, Gina Bea (of Kalamazoo), George Dila (of Ludington Writers), Judith (of the universe). Below see Steve Helderman, having me sign a copy of hardcover Women & Other Animals. (I don't think there are any of those left at Univ. of Massachusetts Press.) Not pictured here is Caitlin Horrocks, another Michigan writer who is in the New York Times Book Review this week! I bought her book, This is Not My City, and had her sign it for me.

Great Lakes, Great Books, Great Visit

2011-07-26T11:09:00.000-07:00

What a pleasure to head up to Big Rapids, Michigan to see my old pal Lynn Anderson, who manages Great Lakes Books. I've read from all four of my books at her store, and she always beats the band to get out the local folks, and she also provides snacks. This time she collected some river gear (oars, paddles, nets, nautical rope) and had a great display, as shown in this photo. For this photo Lynn also let me hold the .22 rifle her mother gave her. It's pretty old, and I didn't see a maker's mark on it, but it has a sweet octagonal barrel. The audience asked good questions and we had a great conversation about life, writing, and all that connects them.

In the photo see me with Lynn Anderson, and Mary and Bob Loesch who provided the birds-eye maple canoe paddles and the old oar. The rest of the display was from Levi Vermeer, Cathy Johnson, and Jared Frank, GLBS employees.

Women & Children First

2011-07-17T19:22:00.001-07:00

Mary Szpur sent these great photos from my Thursday July 14 reading at Women & Children First in Chicago.

Here's Reviewer Donna Seaman.

Here's Pacific University MFA graduate Amy Merrick & pal.

Here is Melanie Kubale

Becky Frey, Nancy Garrity, Jackie Loewe, and Jill Pollack (of Story Studio Chicago)

Here's Playwright Jack Helbig & Sherry Kent with super child Margaret, aspiring gymnast.

Here's Librarian Karen Miller, who graduated high school with me.

Here's Publicist Sheryl Johnston, Ann Christophersen & Linda Bubon, co-owners of bookstore.

Many more were present, but were not caught on film.

Boswell Books in Milwaukee

2011-07-16T07:48:00.000-07:00

Even though I read at the other Milwaukee area bookstore on Wednesday night, Daniel Goldin of Boswell Books picked me up at Hotel Metro Thursday morning and drove me to his bookstore, where he bought me coffee. He and Stacie Michelle Williams and I made funny chatter and bitched and said outrageous things, and time passed very quickly. I read on his blog that he decided not to quote me, and that is a good thing, because, well, the company was sort of intoxicating and I felt a little drunk.

I did not tackle Daniel and wrestle him to the ground (he's not a real physical guy he said. His saying this made the professional in me me decide to politely resist hugging him... though, then, I sort of wanted to hug him more, or else wrestle him to ground), but when he dropped at the train station, he offered a complicated series of handshakes that made me feel very close to him.

The main thing is, look how good looking he and Stacie are. I mean, really. You would have said crazy things, too. And just so you know, the blue in Daniel's shirt exactly matched his eyes.

The train station in Milwaukee is very attractive, and within the attractive structure there is an attractive little cafe. However, this cafe features packaged salads with labels that are misleading--or rather, wrong! The tuna salad said the ingredients were "tuna, mayo, peas, onions" while in fact the salad was mostly pasta with only a smear of tuna. I mean, really.

And I was off to Chicago.

Milwaukee!

2011-07-14T07:47:00.000-07:00

What a pleasure to read at Next Chapter Books. A bunch of smart people were in the audience, including a few old pals and some new friends. This was the first time that a publisher has assigned me a Minder, and she (Mary) graciously retrieved me from my late train and got me to the best hotel in Milwaukee, Hotel Metro, where I got to be in the Master Suite!

Pictured are Mary Gielow(my minder), Sharon (pal of Jan, who is Carla's pal) Lanora (bookstore owner), Jennifer Singleton Miller (Pacific Univ. grad), Emmyline (daughter of Jennifer), Carla Vissers (my pal), Jan (Carla's pal). What fun!

You may have heard Lanora, owner at Next Chapter, on the NPR show "The Story," with Dick Gordon, where she described how she ended up an owner of the store. Here's the link to her store
http://www.nextchapterbookshop.com/

The Book is Released, Ready to Eat

2011-07-12T10:52:00.000-07:00

Thanks everyone for a great party at Bell's Brewery. There are so many great photos on facebook (if you're friends with any of the following folks, check out their posts Chris Magson, Lee Ann Johnson, Gary Allen, Mark Dando, Gina Betcher)

I'm attaching the photos of the edible books. The winner (top) was Kellee Campbell, with carrot cake topped with river-green frosting, brown sugar for sand, a rowboat made of chocolate brownies and gummy fish. Also edible plants.

One of the other edible delights was this stack of four books cake, and I'm eating it right now, and it's so good, absolutely delicious and I don't know who made it. Please let me know if you know.

Also, Jane Nuyen's cake is pictured here. She was so sweet to drive all the way from St. Louis to come to the party, and then I just put her to work. Also, dear sweet Mariel Watson showed up and was willing to mind the door and hand out door prize tickets for three hours straight. Thanks Sass Havilar for handing out the door prizes.

Also featured beautifully were Jaci Dillon's River Rock cookies!

A couple of party attendees wrote better blogs than this about the party:

In attendance were Tim Chilcote of Bull Men's Fiction, along with the magazine's founder. Tim filed this blog about the event:

http://bullmensfiction.blogspot.com/2011/07/once-upon-river-of-beer.html

Zinta Aistars, editor of The Smoking Poet, filed this report.

http://zintaaistars.blogspot.com/2011/07/flow-of-this-literary-river.html

Bathroom Snakes

2011-07-03T18:00:00.001-07:00

Okay, so we had to do some work on our plumbing, and this involved taking out the toilet and removing five feet of sewer pipe, and yes, it involved yours truly up to her elbows in raw sewage. Anyhow, so my brother Tom helped us figure out what to do. We had a bathroom snake for cleaning out the pipes (curled in bucket above), but while we had the toilet disconnected, while we were outside, apparently another snake made its way up the pipes and into the bathroom. We found it the next night. I saw it slide behind a shelf unit. At 3 AM, Christopher was able to grab it from the ceramic tile floor. Here it is, on Chris's hand, just as we were setting it free outdoors.

By the way, my brother the plumber is unemployed, so if you need some work done, now might be a good time. Let me know if you need his number

Female Faculty Party at Pacific Low Res MFA

2011-06-21T23:55:00.000-07:00

What a pleasure to come to Pacific University to visit my faculty pals! Here are posted some fabulous gals who were willing to don American Salvage tattoos for good sport. See here: Shelley Washburn, Judy Blunt, Rachael Toor, Sandra Alcosser, Kathlene Postma, BJC. Below see the full complement of Pacific female faculty in all their gorgeousness. Just so you know, Judy Blunt baked us a Persian Love Cake with candied rose petals. And the whole evening was was all about the love. (Pictured, in addition to those above, Dorianne Laux,Colleen Sump, Kellie Wells, Anne Hood, Laura Hendrie, Rachael Toor, Debra Gwartney.)

2011-06-21T23:54:00.001-07:00

Once Upon a River Book Events in K'zoo

2011-06-01T15:57:00.001-07:00

Once Upon a River

A new novel by Bonnie Jo Campbell - Books available for purchase July 5

Hometown Kalamazoo Book Release Fun

Wednesday, July 6

Michigan News Agency Meet & Greet 4:30 – 6:00

308 W. Michigan Ave, Kalamazoo, MI 49007, (269)343-5958

Hang out with BJC in your favorite downtown shop
Sample BJC's 2010 homemade elderberry wine
Once Upon a River Bookmarks & Refrigerator magnets
Meet sophisticated literary folks

Kalamazoo Public Library
Reading 7:00 pm

315 South Rose Street, Kalamazoo - (269) 342-9837

Reading followed by Question and Answer Period
At which author will reveal her writing secrets
Refreshments
Dean of Michigan News will sell books
Option to buy books in advance from Michigan News
so you can pick them up already signed at reading.

Sunday, July 10

Bell's Eccentric Cafe Book Release Party
2-6pm

355 E. Kalamazoo Ave., Kalamazoo (269)382-2332

Beer Garden outdoors, cool bar indoors, some food served, all kid friendly
Books for sale by Kazoo Books
Once Upon a River Edible Book Contest. Bring your entry and put it on the table. Somebody from the Kalamazoo Center for Book Arts will choose a winner and then we will eat the books, which we sort of hope are cakes.
Dress Like a Writer Contest (Carla Vissers will judge)
Door prizes
Pin the Tail on the Donkey
Once Upon a River souvenirs
American Salvage tattoos, new and improved.
Many remarkable writers, philosophers, readers, rogues, scallywags, and ne'er do wells from Michigan and beyond will be there, perhaps selling their own books.
Music by Neon Tetra, including Nich Martin, who is marrying author's niece

2011-05-30T19:17:00.000-07:00

Joyce O. Pines interviewed me for a Kalamazoo Gazette Article, and her husband Bradley Pines, recently retired from the Gazette came along to take the photos. We tried to meet at the Riverside Cafe in Comstock, so we could see the Kalamazoo River, but it closed at 4:00, so we met around the corner at Dotty's instead.

My brother George worked at Dotty's for a long time as a youth, washing dishes. My brother-in-law Matt Schwartz currently plays country music there on Tuesday nights for tips, so if you want some cheap/free country hits, head on down for dinner. I just tried to look up the address, and it seems this restaurant doesn't exist, or at least not under this name. But if you come, I promise it will be there, right in front of Niko's landing, whose address is listed as 5826 King Highway in Comstock.

It was great to talk with Joyce and Bradley for an hour over toast and coffee It was one of the first warmish days of spring, and Bradley was driving Joyce in a Mazda Miata, and he told me that it was a wedding present from Joyce. There's no rust, and it still looks good after a lot of years (I forget how many.)

We walked down to South Wenke Park, off King Highway, to take a few pictures.

I love that Joyce Pines uses her middle initial, because it makes her name sound like a sentence, "Joyce opines."

I hope the article in the Gazette is nice. Cheers! BJC

Lip Enhancements

2011-05-27T12:00:00.000-07:00

While Carla Vissers, Heidi Bell, and I plus husbands were in Douglas, Michigan recently we donned our wax lips. For the husbands, mustaches! Also, I dug out a vintage lips photo from the archives, 1999. Perhaps we've aged just fine, no need for collagen injections.

Visiting with Carla & Heidi & Husbands

2011-05-23T15:58:00.000-07:00

Carla Vissers and Heidi Bell and I got our MFAs together at Western Michigan University, and we used to get together often, a half dozen times a year. Nowadays it's harder to make time to meet up, but our friends Mary Szpur and Nancy Garrity volunteered their lovely weekend house in Douglas, Michigan (a block from Lake Michigan), to have our reunion, the first in something like a year. In the past we've gotten together to critique our writing, but this time it was just to hang out together. We brought our husbands, as well, which meant we had to make more food. It was a wonderful time, and Carla showed the rest of us the Drunk History website. Also we watched a movie that we didn't really like, called Splice. Below see Heidi, Carla, and the husbands, Christopher, Eric, Adam.

Here's the link to one of the Drunk History youtube videos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjZR1Rjj_p0

In Traverse City, with Wayne State University Pres,

2011-05-20T10:14:00.000-07:00

These people include: Annie Martin, Anne Marie Oomen, Jamie Jones, Jane Hoehner, David Early, Jack Driscoll, Lois Driscoll, Teresa Scollon, Kate Baker, guest, Kathy Wildfong, Jerry Dennis, Gail Dennis, Michael Zadoorian, Rita Zadoorian, Doug Stanton, Benjamin Busch, and me (BJC).

A bunch of us WSUP authors took part in a bunch of events in the Traverse City area, and it culminated with an event at the Opera House, in which Michael Delp interviewed three of us (Jack Driscoll, Mike Zadoorian, me) and asked tough questions in a beautiful old building.

(If any of you recognize anybody else, please tell me and I'll add their names. Not pictured is Michael Delp. He was out trying to figure out how to jumpstart his electric car, whose battery ran down during the Opera House event.)

The photos I wish I'd taken on the trip include a photo at Brilliant Books in Suttons Bay on one of the two nights I read there. Also, I wish I'd gotten a photo of Aaron Stander in his Interlochen radio recording studio. Also, it would have been great to photograph the six of us in the tiny studio at WTCM on Ron Jolly's show.

Taking a Literary Walk in Chelsea Michigan

2011-05-07T10:23:00.000-07:00

Chelsea, near Ann Arbor, is most famous for being the town where Jeff Daniels lives, and where his playhouse, The Purple Rose Theatre, is located, operated by Guy Sanville. The folks in Chelsea are into the arts of all kinds, and on April 16 they sent poets and prose writers out into the streets and the shops. I read with poet Zilka Joseph at the Just Imagine Bookstore.

Here is a photo of me with Zilka Joseph and Scott Beal (Dzanc writer-in-residence at Ann Arbor's Open School) sitting on the steps at the River Gallery, the owners of which offered their space for the after party. Other sponsors included Chelsea
District Library and Chelsea Center for the Arts.

Below are photos of me with the poet ML Leibler (also editor of anthology Working Words) and with my pal Sandra Xenakis of the Chelsea writers group.

The photos I wish I'd taken: I was walking down the street just before noon and met a huge person wearing a rabbit suit. He held out a can on which was written in block letters, "Help the mentally ill." There was no organization named on the can, and I thought that maybe we were cutting out the middle man. I gave him fifty cents, and he gave me a tootsie roll. Also, I meant to get a photo of me with Guy Sanville. I gave him copies of my books, suggested to him that maybe somebody should write a play from one of them. He suggested I do it and then had me sign all the books. Also, I didn't get a photo of Sara Wedell, adult services director at the library, who organized the writers; thank you, Sara.

Also reading were Laura Kasischke, Keith Taylor, Scott Beal, Jeff Kass, ML Leibler, and Bonnie Rose Marcus.

Here's a link to a story featuring readings by Scott Beal and Jeff Kass.
http://heritage.com/articles/2011/04/25/chelsea_standard/news/doc4db08616be4eb584114774.txt?viewmode=fullstory

Here's a link to me reading my story "Shotgun Wedding" at the Just Imagine bookstore, http://vimeo.com/22562635.

The City (Arts) Cousins and the Country (Arts) Cousins.

2011-04-27T19:45:00.000-07:00

I have been from one end of Michigan to the other, elite Arts Academy-wise. Last week I spent three days at the Cranbrook-Kingswood Academy, on their 300-acre campus in Bloomfield Hills, outside Detroit. The folks in the picture above are, from left to right, Rick Bowdy (adviser for the literary mag, Galimaufry), Bill Pistner, Miranda Crowl, Gordon Thompson, David Slater (all English teachers), BJC, Dmitri Moustakis (wild student), and Moneeka Settles (English teacher). At Cranbrook-Kingston I met with ten classes of students (most of them consisting of two or three classes of students brought together) and so I met a good portion of the students and English teachers.

Highlights included learning to pronounce the name of the school's literary magazine and learning about how Gordon makes beef jerky (see blog entry: http://hardsleeper43.blogspot.com/) Also, the campus itself is a pleasure, being on the National Historic Register. I was on the Cranbrook side of campus (the traditionally female side before it was an integrated school.) I'll attach a couple of photos that does not do justice to all the Art Deco or Arts & Craft stylings.

This week I'm in Traverse City, taking part in a Wayne State University Press extravaganza, and I've been sent to Interlochen Arts Academy in Interlochen, Michigan for a class visit and to give a quickie reading. This is my fourth visit to the Interlochen campus, and it is always a pleasure to enter the Writing House, the most beautiful building on the rambling wooded 1200-acre campus. As part of the promotions of the Wayne State University Press Made in Michigan series, they gave free books to all the students in the class I address. Happy students who get free books! Happy students who get to study art!

In this photo are Emily Nowak & Annie Martin (both from WSUP), BJC, Anne Marie Oomen, Micah Perrine, and Aime Merizon, office assistant at the Writing House. I also met Writer-in-Residence, Jen Percy, writer Ben Percy's sister, but she slipped away before I took the photo.

Sixty kids at looms outside Detroit and it's not child labor!

2011-04-25T16:41:00.000-07:00

Okay, I plan to write a real blog about my visit to Cranbrook-Kingswood Arts Academy (in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan) for ages K-12, but for now I just want to tell you that they have weaving classes galore and there are sixty huge looms. "One for each student," the weaving instructor told me. What else does she teach? I asked. "Just weaving," she said. I tried to take a photo of the big L-shaped room (two rooms really) of looms, and couldn't do it, not from inside or outside. Here are some of my attempts. I'll say here that the whole campus is a national historic landmark, and it's gorgeous, both in the historic buildings and in the 300 acres of land in which kiddos can run free. Many members of the faculty, as well as many students, live on the campus.

Bookish in Lansing, Michigan

2011-04-20T14:32:00.000-07:00

Saturday, April 2 was great fun. I spent the day at Rally of Writers in Lansing, and then, the frosting on the cake (or the spinach in the pie) came when I visited Everybody Reads Books & More in Lansing MI. This independent store was warm, inviting and full of fun, and the owner, Scott Harris, is a good-hearted soul. Be sure to check the place out next time you're in Lansing.

http://becauseeverybodyreads.com/

What a pleasure to see some good friends there, including Randall Glumm (formerly of Waystation Books), Bill Castanier (purveyor of all things literary and Michigan at www.mittenlit.org) and John Beck, (of MSU's Our Daily Work/Our Daily Lives brown bag series of readings and discussions), among others. All of them are in the photo--maybe you can pick them out.

Bill Castanier kindly provided me a good-sized chunk of the finest Greek-style spinach pie in the capital area, feta-rich from Roma's on Cedar Street in Lansing (Bill says, "Italian bakery which has been in Lansing nearly 50 years.) Scott also generously provided some spinach pie, which was received gratefully by all of us in attendance.

The real surprise for me was to arrive to find a video camera set up. And since I'm a girl who can't say no, I sat down and answered questions posed by Randy Glumm. And since I was too exhausted to make up some interesting lies, I answered all the questions honestly. The video tapes are now posted on a local arts & news website. I hope I didn't have any of that spinach pie in my teeth.

Here is the page where you can access the video clips, four of them, totaling about 45 minutes. I suggest you get some coffee or a drink if you're thinking of looking at these.

http://lansingonlinenews.com/arts/video-an-interlude-with-author-bonnie-jo-campbell/

As we were finishing up our spinach pie and packing our backs to leave the store, Randy was alarmed. He was wandering around with a rubber chicken, asking who had put it in his bag. No one confessed.

Turkeys attack author Bonnie Jo Campbell

2011-04-13T11:36:00.000-07:00

Rallying Writers for 24 years

2011-04-11T12:30:00.000-07:00

Last week I was given the honor of speaking to folks at lunchtime at the Rally of Writers in Lansing, Michigan, the longest-running writing conference in the state, now in its 24th year. It's a one-day event hosted by the Skaaldic society at which writers from Michigan and beyond get together to get inspired to write and publish more creatively. A few years ago I gave the keynote speech, and so I tried to cram all my experience into a fifty minute talk, and my effort appeared so labored that afterward a man came up to me, handed me a card from Toastmasters, and said, "We can help you." This year I had a simpler goal, to remind the writers they are part of an honorable tradition of Michigan writers. So I reminded them that right in Kalamazoo we have National Book Award winner Jaimy Gordon, MacArthur grant recipient Stuart Dybek, Newberry Award Winner and National Book Award finalist David Small, Juniper Prize winner Diane Seuss (she was sitting in the very room), and of course Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Ferber, author of Showboat. Cast your gaze out across whole state of Michigan and you get Nelson Algren (born in Detroit), Jim Harrison, Elmore Leonard, Thomas McGuane (born in Wayndotte), Terry McMillan (born in Port Huron), Joyce Carol Oates (lived here for a while), Poet Jim Daniels, Mitch Albom, Michael Moore, and Lev Raphael (who was sitting at the back of the room, being kind of rowdy and looking quite fetching.)In truth, I haven't scratched the surface here.

I also taught two sessions, one about brainstorming and another about publishing, and the folks sitting in were full of energy. As usual, I forgot to take photos until the last minute, so I grabbed some interesting characters hanging around at closing time and made them pose with me. The guy in the kilt is Kevin Riggs, one of the trio of organizers of this fabulous event (the other two are Linda Peckham and Mark Wolfgang, and I let them slip away un-photographed.) The woman I'm with in the middle photo is Andrea King Collier, author of (most recently) The Black Woman's Guide to Black Men's Health. The man in the photo below, in the glasses is author George Dila, creator of the organization Ludington Writers and fiction writer whose new book of stories, Big Hug, comes out in 2011 from Mayapple Press.

Skaaldic society is an organization for writers, and they meet once a month to share and discuss creative work. http://www.skaalds.com/
Rally of writers website: http://www.arallyofwriters.com/
Andrea King Collier's website: http://www.andreacollier.com/aboutandrea.html
Ludington Writers website: http://www.ludingtonwriters.com/

Ben Percy Strikes Fear Into Hearts at Hope College

2011-04-06T11:48:00.000-07:00

Last week I was fortunate to be in the company of Hope College’s visiting fiction writer, Benjamin Percy, whose new novel The Wilding is out from Graywolf Press. His next book, Red Moon, a psychological thriller is forthcoming in 2012. Ben was nice enough to blurb my new book, Once Upon a River. Pablo Peschiera, director of the visiting writers program, invited me to lunch with a few others at the Curragh, an Irish pub.

I teach with Ben in Oregon twice a year, and I’m always surprised how smart and personable he is, as well as by how deep his voice is. It’s like the voice of God, which probably sparked a little fear in hearts at this good Christian academy. In the last Pacific University residency, he talked about “Gorenography,” the use of too much violence and gore in writing, and I have complete faith, those students are cured of overusing violence. Ben’s article on the subject will appear in Poets & Writers magazine pretty soon. All that and he’s just turned 32.

In fact, he turned 32 on the day he was Holland, Michigan, which means he's young enough to be the love child of myself and that guy I meat behind the goat barn at the Kalamazoo County Fair in 1977. So, yes, at his Q&A, we did all sing happy birthday to him and gave him some cake. Here are a few of the things he talked about.

• Ben never considered writing as a career until a gal he had a crush on suggested it. (Yes, he married her.)

• Doggedness is more important than talent, he said.

• Film has a lot to teach literary fiction writers; so do blockbusters and genre writing have a lot to teach us.

• He likes to write until blood comes out of his eyes.

• He suggested undergraduates not go directly to grad school. He suggested 26 was the minimum age for going into an MFA program. (This seemed to shake the students up.) Meanwhile, a person should travel the world and have experiences.

• There are no prodigies in writing the way there are in music, he said.

• In an MFA program, it’s wise to focus on writing short stories. In a story, it’s easy to figure out where it goes wrong. Failure in a novel is a more complicated business to figure out (and to fix).

Here’s Ben’s website: http://www.benjaminpercy.com/

(In top photo, Ben, Carla, BJC; left to right: Ben Percy, Andrea Martin, Carla Vissers, BJC, Paul Hile (Hope College student), Pablo Peschiera; in bottom photo)

Eating Cactus in Battle Creek, Michigan

2011-03-25T09:43:00.001-07:00

What a pleasure to visit Kellogg Community College, to meet the students in Elizabeth Kerlikowske's American Literature class. The students were most generous with their praise of American Salvage, and they asked lots of smart questions. One gal was very disturbed about "The Solution to Brian's Problem" in the way the main character thinks reprehensible thoughts. I suspect that Elizabeth primed them by demanding they read something really boring before my book, so that they'd be suitably excited. They are a good-looking bunch. You can see them posed in this photo.

Before going to the class, Elizabeth took me to eat at Nina's, a Mexican restaurant where I was able to order both cactus (as part of the vegetarian plate) and real guacamole. Yum! Some students joined us, one of whom, Tyler, had just spent nine years living in Kazakhstan. We talked about the Kazakh love of eating horse meat. Also joining us was Overia and her guy friend, David, who was just out of the navy. Halfway through eating, we were joined by a KCC Art Instructor, Vickie VanAmedyan, who has recently starting writing poetry. After the reading, Elizabeth and I hung out in the "Quiet Dining Room" where the reading took place and chatted with students. The very last two hangers-on were these guys pictured above, Justin Boughton and Benjamin Norton. Mainly the picture serves as a reminder to me not to stand under a spotlight when posing for a photo.

Thank you, Elizabeth, for inviting me to the Cereal City for cactus and literary fun. And thank you for taking these photos (below) of your class--very cute!

Thank you, everyone, for all your help!

2011-03-22T11:15:00.000-07:00

Every completed book is a miracle and putting together Once Upon a River has involved the work of so many people, friends and acquaintances as well as many folks at the publisher, W.W. Norton. I want to thank the following individuals for helping me get this book together and started on promotion. The list is alphabetical. The sheer number of people who deserve thanks is humbling. I have included only the people who have helped in some particular way on this book--there are many more folks who have helped my writing career in a more general way (and maybe I can write a thank you note to them next.) Also, at the end I mention individuals who have not affected the concrete content of the book, but who are helping it get a better start in the world. Please let me know if you notice I have left someone out, and I'll add the person before I put this on my website.

Dorothy Allison—Thank you for writing the kind comment about my book for the jacket.
Rebecca Barnes—Thank you for reading over those first couple of chapters for me when I was at my wits' end and unable to see typos and grammatical errors.
Heidi Bell—Thank you reading several drafts of this book and giving me feedback. Thank you for taking 30 hours to read the first pass page proofs and straightening up my language, showing me all sorts of foolishness I’d allowed onto the page.
Gina Betcher—Thank you for reading my book draft and suggesting where I cut a few pages. You are most generous.
Jill Bialosky, Thank you for your shaping, your fine tuning, and your plain good sense. Working with you has been like taking a master class in revision. Thank you for believing in Margo Crane and for your many kindnesses throughout this process. (
Jamie Blake—Thank you for making time to read a draft of my story. You are still my secret weapon.
John Campbell—Thank you for taking the author photo that I could use on the book. You make me look thoughtful.
Susanna Campbell—Thank you for reading several drafts and for speaking your mind about it, even when I didn’t like hearing it. And thank you for knowing so darned much.
Thomas Campbell—Thanks, Tom, for telling me I had the wrong kind of boat on the river and for guiding me to the Playbuoy brand pontoon boat. It really adds to the fun of the book.
Bill Clegg—Thank you for selling this book at home and abroad, and for going above and beyond for me and my story, for reading and rereading. I can’t believe my good fortune in having you for an agent. Your editing wisdom is also much appreciated.
Dawgs Poetry Group--Thank you for chiming in on my first chapter, which I brought to you all: Marion Boyer, Anne Hutchinson, Elizabeth Kerlikowske, Nina Feirer, Amy Newday, Lynn Pattison, Elaine Seaman, etc.
Glenn Deutsch—Thank you meeting and critiquing with me in the early stages along with Lisa and Andy. As I recall, you were certain, from the beginning that this book would mean something to folks.
John Dufresne—Thank you for blurbing my book and allowing us to excerpt it for the cover. Your good humored, heartbreaking stories are an inspiration.
Friends-Thanks to all of you who chimed in with advice and information on topics from boating, fishing,and hunting to food products and fashions of the early 1980s. Perhaps most generous have been Laura Lee Washburn and John Dickmon,Larry Tenharmsel, Darla Biel, Dodd Demas, Kathy Jennings, Jennifer Singleton Miller, Ian Couch, Michael Dunn, and many others. Patrick Saunders, thanks for the use of your shotgun in the story.
Nancy Garrity & Mary Szpur—Thank you both for allowing Carla and Heidi and I to spend a few days together at the cabin in Douglas, where Carla and Heidi first read and critiqued this book. Special thanks to John Dickmon and Laura Lee Washburn, who always had interesting things to say. Who's the guy who told me what shotgun to use? I can't recall!
Jaimy Gordon—Thank you for teaching me that every word matters and that the world of language is not democratic. Thank you for writing me a such a wild, energetic blurb. (It’s because of you I cringe each time I use that word blurb.) Before my final editing, I looked back at the comments you wrote on my graduate school stories, and it was almost as good as taking one more workshop with you.
Godfrey Grant—Thank you for reading a draft of this book. Your thoughtful critique was very helpful, your questions about Margo so thought-provoking that I didn’t want to leave our meeting. Thank you for loaning me your fine mind.
Terence Herlihy—Thank you, Unca Terry, for teaching me about the St. Joseph River and for being the new keeper of Red House Island.
Joseph Heywood—Thank you for fishing in the Kalamazoo River and putting me in contact with Godfrey and Melvin.
Lee Ann Johnson—Thank you for proofreading my first couple chapters and for offering to do more.
Sheryl Johnston—Thank you for reading a draft, reassuring me, and pointing out a few mistakes.
Kalamazoo River--Many aspects of the Kalamazoo River have been f. Mainly fictionalized. I’ve made the river much deeper than it actually is. I'm inclined to change some of the river dynamics of the book to make it more realistic, but the beautiful map we’ve got in the front is already drawn, so we’ll leave it as it is, improbable though it may be.
Lindsey Kamyn—Thank you for helping me out with the shooting stuff.
Laura Kasischke—Thank you for your blurb, from which we excerpted for the jacket copy. Thank you for your support and for your poems.
Lisa Lenzo—Thank you for your help with this book, for reading it several times. Your sober, sensible, and sincere criticism has been so helpful. You have been a smart and generous readers and a fine writing friend.
Mimi Lipson—Thank you for doing a whirlwind weekend reading and identifying problem areas of the book. Thank you for chiming in online about the 1980s, and thank you particularly, for reminding me that we said “Sanka” rather than “decaf.”
Literary Figures-Odysseus and Huck Finn, for starters
Thomas Lynch—Thank you for the generous blurb, of which we used a portion on the jacket. (Also, thank you for taking care of donkeys!)
Christopher Magson—Thank you for everything, always.
Christopher Magson—Okay, in particular, the love, the time, the clever conversation, the health insurance.
Andy Mozina—Thank you Andy for being such a good pal, for always giving me the benefit of the doubt, and for teaching my work to your students. Thank you for reading several drafts and still seeing something new.
Norton Editorial staff: Thank you Mr. Cole, for copyediting, thank you proofreaders, thank you Alison Liss (assistant to Jill) who rendered edits into electronic messages for me.
Gary Peake, Master Bullseye Shooter. Thank you for sharing your expertise and philosophy and for your exquisite attention to every shot Margo takes. I still owe you many glasses of beer.
Ben Percy—Thank you for providing the very manly blurb for the jacket flap of Once Upon a River. It was a pleasure to teach with you in Oregon in January 2011.
Susan Ramsey-Thank you for reading this book and planting ideas in my head. You are very wise.
Diane Seuss—Thank you for reading my pages. Your comments were spot on, every time. Taking poetry classes from you these last few years has made my fiction better.
David Tartakoff—Thank you and Cheryl for that canoe trip down the St. Joe River with Frank Herlihy. I didn't realize at the time that was research! (And thank you for all your support of my writing.)
Melvin Visser—It was wonderful to meet you! Thank you for your thoughtful reading, for sharing your insights about Michigan, pollution, and the world.
Carla Vissers Thanks for all your help and support with this work and for reading multiple drafts. The times you and I and Heidi spent talking about writing at the Douglas, Michigan cabin has made all the difference for this book.
Shelley Washburn—Thanks to you and all my Pacific Low Res Faculty Members for making my working life joyful while I finished this book. That must have made the book better.

Also, many people who have not affected the CONTENT of the book have been important to the entry of the book into the world:
Norton Sales & Promotions folks-Bill Rusin, Dan Christiaens, and Kristin Keith promoted me and the book at the Winter Institute, and I want to thank all the reps for their support. Publicist Whitney Peeling has gotten the ball rolling for my book tour, and Erin Sinesky Lovett, back from leave, will be taking the baton.
Peter Matera—Thank you for the gorgeous new website. It’s a pleasure to behold and creates a sense of fun for Once Upon a River.

Also, the following people generously provided words of praise that did not end up on the book, but which is very much appreciated: Blurbers: Pinckney Benedict, Claire Davis, Jack Driscoll

Getting Naked in the Middle of the Day

2011-03-19T18:26:00.000-07:00

Well, it was sure nice to get naked in a strange place in the middle of the day on Friday. That was the day that I went to SolSpring and redeemed my coupon for massage therapy, a Christmas gift from Darling Christopher.

I saw that I could get a massage from an Advanced Bodyworkers for $98, a Level II practitioner for $78, and a Level I practitioner for $65. I suspect that I could have had a building custodian grope me for a little less. Because my gift certificate was for $100, I went whole hog. I skipped the facials, the salt and sugar scrubs, mud therapy, stone therapy, colon therapy, castor oil pack, ear candling, pedicures and waxing. Other than that, I told my capable masseuse to do with me what she would.

At first, when I arrived the new-age atmosphere made me nervous, and I was on edge because I was almost late, having been caught behind a train in Kalamazoo. (Yes, that still happens in Kalamazoo, that a daytime train can stop traffic for ten or fifteen minutes.)

It felt pretty great having my certified massage therapist ("advanced bodyworker") Monica (pictured above) pay attention to my scalp, my face, my neck and shoulders, my abdomen, and my legs and feet. The rooms of SolSpring were filled with relaxing music, relaxing smells. Even the light there was relaxing. I wonder if they're using the new fluorescents in there.

Chris had given me the gift of a massage because I was rather tense when I was finishing my novel, Once Upon a River. I developed an eye twitch in about September, during revision, and it stayed through February. But the third-pass page proofs are all turned in and even the jacket flap copy is all put to bed, with blurbs from the kindest folks. Booklist gave me a starred review and said the book might be a bestseller.

I can't tell from Monica's card what kind of massage it is that she does, but the effect was something like what happens when you work really hard in yoga. I felt that way when I left, as though I had just worked myself hard in a yoga class, only I hadn't done any work. It was yoga from the outside in. That makes me wonder if yoga is massage from the inside out.

This was my first official massage ever, though in the yoga class I used to take with Catherine Bastien, she used to massage our feet at the end, and that was great. And also, when I used to go to Eastern Europe, I sometimes went to the Hotel Gellert in Budapest and big ladies wearing clogs and bras would give us quick wet massages with soap while they argued about sports teams or maybe goulash soup recipes. Sometimes I think it's weird that I gave up a life of travel-fun in order to sit on my butt at a computer and write stories.

So my plan is to relax now for a few weeks. I'm trying to get eight hours of sleep every night all during the month of March. With the book finished, there should be no need to binge on chocolate, not even dark chocolate, not even the Madagascar single-malt chocolate I just bought at Aldi's. I go to Aldi's once a year, and each time they have better things there.

And of course I can't really relax. I'm working on my next book, called Rude Houses, kind of a disgusting version of Romeo & Juliet that takes place alongside the railroad tracks. I'm pretty nervous about it.

Vermont in Winter Without Skis

2011-03-14T16:02:00.000-07:00

What a great visit I had Burlington VT at UVM, University of Vermont. I got to meet students in fiction writer Nancy Welch's advanced writing class, gave a reading in a lovely room with stained glass windows, and then went out to dinner with some dynamic students. Pretty much all the smart things I said to the students got me knowing nods, since Nancy had already taught them everything I know. I also met Angela Patten, a poet on the faculty of UVM, author of Reliquaries (Salmon Poetry, 2007)

The photo above shows (from viewer's left to right) Ed Guardaro, Marsha Camp, my faculty host Nancy Welch, myself, and David Shames. The photo was taken by our good-humored waiter, who was a member of a Burlington band called Funk Wagon.

I stayed in a Hilton hotel called Doubletree, and it was surprisingly quaint, despite its Hilton-ness. The photo shows some of the amenities I could steal if I wanted. In the hotel restaurant, I made a happy new breakfast discovery: Grilled Oatmeal. The first morning I was home I made it for myself and Christopher. And I will make it for you if you come to my house at the right time of day.

It was a whirlwind visit to Vermont, but I enjoyed downtown Burlington, especially their walking mall, where, according to Nancy, folks still protest and hold rallies. The school is listed as a Hippie Haven on some websites, but Nancy says it's not so radical these days as it used to be. Not to dwell on food, but Nancy bought me lunch at the most wonderful downtown spot, called Penny Cluse--I got a dish that was basically cooked spinach with lots of stuff added to it. One fun surprise was how international the region felt, for being so close to the Canadian border. At the airport, no fewer than half the folks were speaking French. It made me feel cosmopolitan.

I look forward to reading Nancy Welch's book, The Road From Prosperity, shown here, published by Southern Methodist University Press. The stories take place in and around Lorain, Ohio.

The only thing I haven't figured out is: What does the "M" stand for in "UVM."

Tracy Kidder Comes to Kalamazoo

2011-03-11T08:57:00.000-08:00

Tracy Kidder read last night in Kalamazoo at Chenery Auditorium. He's the Pulitzer-prize winning author of our local Community Reads Book, Strength in What Remains. This is a book about a young Burundian medical student who escapes the bloodbath at home and makes his way to New York City. Then he makes his way back home to help people heal in a variety of simple and profound ways. I'm a quarter of the way through the book.

Mr. Kidder's writing is fine and artful and easy to read, and the structure of the book is smart and compelling, but most of what he talked about was the content of the book, its subject matter, and he particularly discussed Partners In Health, an organization doing productive (and very creative) work in improving medical care in third world countries. After some initial trouble with the AV equipment (Why are writers always cursed when it comes to AV equipment?). Information here:

http://www.pih.org

He said he doesn't like to read his work aloud much at presentations because it makes people fall asleep, especially it makes his wife fall asleep. He read a couple of very short passages.

One thing that's nice with being a writer of some local reputation is that it's easy for me to sidle up and meet the visiting writer. People around the writer (the handlers, I guess we could call them, Kalamazoo Public Library employees) assume such a visitor will want to meet me. Mr. Kidder had a cold, so he was feeling kind of lousy, and I think my personal energy was a bit much for him. Still he dutifully greeted me and John Lacko took our picture. In fact, he said he'd already met me at the National Book Critics Circle Awards in NYC, for which Strength in What Remains was a finalist. I guess my head was in the clouds that day. Anyway, it was nice to meet him again. He seems like a gentle, kind, and soulful person.

On TV talk shows, famous people who don't know each other are very friendly with one another, as though being on TV and in the movies makes them members of a secret organization. I've seen some hosts even hug people that they've hardly met just because they belong to that elite group of stars. I wonder if it's like that with the really famous writers, if there's a secret society of super authors where a person learns the real truths about writing's essential mysteries. That knowledge would make all the members so happy that they would feel joyful at encountering one another every time.

More info on the Kalamazoo Community Reads program here at this link:
http://www.kpl.gov/reading-together/2011/

Author photos -- What's an author to do?

2011-03-09T10:05:00.000-08:00

My new book, Once Upon a River, will be published in June, and so my editor and I are working on jacket flap content, and that includes an author photo. I have become more interested in taking photos recently, but I have not become more interested in being photographed. What photo should I use on the book, I wonder.

My pal Susan Ramsey applauded the author photo on my first book, saying she'd seen author with dog, but never author with donkey.

I've never liked head shots. I prefer full body shots, because that's how my parts work, all connected and juxtaposed, but author photos don't usually work that way.

Often I've come out looking too young in photos, say in this John Lacko photo (red tank top)and also Jerry Campbell took one of me at age 40 (blue shirt, fake pine tree in background) for which I look like I'm twenty. That seems all fine and good until the people who saw me in the photo see me in real life, looking like the old lady I am.

By the same token, there's something to be said for using an unattractive photo to advertise yourself, because then when you show up, you look young and lovely. Hence, a few times I've used the photo Chris took in which I'm wearing the cowboy hat. I look very severe and am not smiling.

Christopher is advocating for what I call the "ghost photo" as author photo. This was taken with his Speed Graphic without a flash, so I had to stay very still for a long time.

The real problem, too, is that, then you have to set something up and get someone to take a photo. And then you either have to boss that person around or be prepared to accept what they produce for you.

John Campbell (no relation) took the black and white photo I've been using (at the top of this page.) Probably this is the photo I will use for my new book.

I googled "best author photos" and "worst author photos" and found the two sets looked pretty much alike.

I found a blog identifying the worst culprits and cliches, including the "hand to face" photo, the "arm on back of couch" photo and the photo of author smoking.
http://flavorwire.com/117566/against-promotional-author-photographs

And here's a blog on which a guy named (just) Lane points out the difference in various author photos of the same person:
http://lanedav.us/2010/07/09/this-week-in-great-author-photos/

Lane writes, "I’ve decided that author photos are created in order to try and make the authors look as though they might belong at a fancy party, perhaps some kind of fundraiser at a schwanky zoo where you dine on cheese, puff pastry, and luke warm wine by the giraffe exhibit. Most authors, however, are just not that cool. They are socially awkward recluses. They bumble and mumble and lose their filter after two sips of chardonnay. Sometimes they like to dress up, but usually they look awkward doing so. Usually, they do not take good pictures."

I'd love to hear what any of you think about author photos, what you would love to see in an author photo.

Visiting Central Michigan University

2011-03-05T17:59:00.000-08:00

Darrin Doyle, my former classmate, author of THE GIRL WHO ATE KALAMAZOO, invited me to Mount Pleasant, Michigan to meet his students and give a reading. Before I went up there, my mom told me that there was no mountain there, but there had been a famous house of ill repute at which a certain amount of "mount" and "pleasant" was available.

Darrin and the other hipster faculty members took me to dinner with wine and dessert. I sat next to Jeffrey Bean, a poet, goes by the name "Bean," and we discovered that we were pretty much the same person with all the same inclinations and opinions. Also in attendance were faculty members Matt Roberson and Robert Fanning.

Courtney Doyle joined us because her parents had come to town and offered to babysit the two kids. Well, the reading went fine, and I talked to an interesting fellow who worked as a translator and told me that, unlike the citizens of most parts of the civilized world, the French don't really care about Shakespeare because they don't have great translations of the Bard. After the reading, I went out with Darrin, Courtney and a heap of students to a bar called Marty's. Above are pictured:

Jodi Mata is sitting beside me. Next to her is Joe Kane. Next to Joe is Alethea. On the other side of the table from me is Courtney Doyle, next to her is husb. Darrin, who is next to Mick McGrath.

The following day I finished my grading at the hotel in Mount Pleasant just in time to crash Darrin & Courtney for lunch. Actually, they had eaten already, but still provided me with a sandwich. While I ate, I had the good fortune to chat with Courtney's babysitting parents, Nancy and Charles, a topologist. I did not get to see Darrin's kids, but I met their new cat, Ham, just like the sandwich I was eating. Darrin & Courtney's house was great, especially the big main room, with big wood floors and big windows.

I felt bad that on the previous night the photographer didn't get to be in the group photo, so below note the guy with the beard as the photographer Tom Wheatley.

Also, the original photo did not feature Alethea's blue boots, so they are shown nicely in the photo below the photo of Tom. She says the boots are not particularly comfortable, but she loves them for other reasons. So does Joe.

Thank you Darrin, Courtney and everybody for the hospitality and the great conversation!

Artifactory, with Kalamazoo Mummy

2011-03-03T14:52:00.000-08:00

What fun it was to hear and read poetry with a Kalamazoo slant at the Kalamazoo Valley Museum on Sunday for "Poetry Artifactory VII." This Friends of Poetry event is called "artifactory" because the poems are supposed to relate to artifacts in the museum. Sometimes the connection was tenuous, but Curator Tom Dietz managed to come up with something to provide insight into each poem as a product of Kalamazoo.

This was an impressive bunch of published and new poets, including Elizabeth Kerlikowske,Jennifer Sweeney, Nina Feirer, Bob Post, LaTricia Phillips, Jared Randall, Deborah Gang, Aaron Leis, Brooks Eisenbise, Marion Boyer, Marie Bahlke, Elaine Seaman, Jill Marcuse, Susan Ramsey and Janet Ruth Heller. These authors ranged in ages from 12 to 92.

One poem, by Nina Feirer (pronounced "Fire") described with an artifact not yet in the museum, her father's red Hawaii print jacket. She says the jacket, made in Kalamazoo, was the hit of many parties in the 1960s.

(My poem was the sonnet "You Could Live at Meijer.")

Not present were Joseph Heywood (of the Woods Cop mystery series) and Kathleen McGookey, but other kind folks stood in to read their poems. All of the 2011 Artifactory poems are published in a sweet booklet put together by Friends of Poetry.

My brother Tom brought five-year-old Kennedy, but it turns out she's not ready for a literary reading. After the event, Christopher and I went upstairs and looked at the Kalamazoo Mummy. It is real. Susan Ramsey's poem addressed the mummy. Tom Dietz explained how the mummy got there from Egypt, via San Francisco, via some rich guy who kept the mummmy in his dining room until his wife said, "Either she goes, or I go." So the museum is the lucky recipient of this evocative and musty artifact.

Worrying About Walnuts

2011-03-01T22:02:00.001-08:00

These are some of the walnuts I've been worrying about, drying on a broiler pain on our wood stove. We heat the back of our house with this little wood stove. (And in case you were wondering, our wood pile is dwindling--it's been a cold winter.) The porcelain tile mural behind the stove is the Great Lakes and it extends on the other panel all the way out to the east coast, since that's where Christopher comes from. Both Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard are depicted. Also pictured in the photo is Christopher's keg of pear cider, which is superior, and in the red box are cured walnuts waiting to be cracked open. The walnuts on the broiler pan are huge, aren't they? I got them from a tree on MN Avenue; every time I rode my bike past, I stopped and filled up my paniers. Because I was short on time I didn't husk them in the fall, but have left them sitting on the back porch in their husk sludge, freezing and thawing. There were some wormy grubs living in the husk sludge. I have to clean that off before I can process the walnuts. Chris wonders if it's worth it. I eat the nut meats for breakfast and they are delicious. And any time you can just pick something off the ground and eat it and find it delicious, that is a triumph in this life.

Second Pass Page Proofs

2011-02-26T09:04:00.000-08:00

I was given a month to stare at my first-pass page proofs, but I get only five days to look at the second-pass page proofs of ONCE UPON A RIVER. Maybe my editor is hoping that less time will mean fewer changes and revisions. Given the tight time frame, it is surprising how many things seem more appealing than going through these pages once again. These activities include:

- Cleaning cupboards, marveling at all the jars of lentils
- Reading Chekhov stories, marveling at Chekhov and at life
- Chasing turkeys out of the yard with hockey stick
- Sorting through all the vitamins and over the counter medicines, checking dates, but not throwing away the old ones
- Training the donkeys to honk for treats
- Filming turkeys attacking our cars
- Sorting through my books to find some my mom hasn't read yet
- Sampling all the homemade wine and trying to guess the alcohol content
- Watching Chris make pancakes
- Eating pancakes
- Putting all my books in piles on the shelves to see if it allows for more books.
- Washing dishes, including all the wine glasses we haven't used, but which are getting dusty
- Riding exercise bike while reading Chekhov stories
- Making sock puppets that look like wild turkeys and sneaking outside Christopher's window to enact turkey-life dramas
- Packing for my Tuesday trip to Burlington, Vermont, preparing my one-quart ziplock bag of fluids and ointments
- Checking to see if the snowdrops are blooming under the snow
- Worrying about walnuts

The Trench

2011-02-22T18:14:00.000-08:00

Looking at the ice-glazed world out there, with downed power lines and jagged ridges of frozen slush, it is hard to believe we had a brief thaw over the weekend. Christopher had just gotten some help installing 100 Amp electrical service service out to his pole barn, and he saw the mild weather as an excellent time to bury his cable, which they had left lying on the snow. I advised waiting for spring, but Chris was determined to dig a 70 foot trench, and he even took a day off work to toil with shovel and San Angelo bar. He cursed the landfill with each half-brick and concrete chunk he had to dig out and remove by hand. Eventually, he called me into service, and I chopped roots and removed dirt and concrete on Saturday afternoon. I got up on the roof and took a photo so we'd remember where the cable was (see photo below), but the shadows of the trees were pretty distracting. We lay the cable about 18 inches down in the trench and then covered it over and walked on the dirt to pack it down. Now Christopher can run his 250v AC/DC Lincoln Idealarc welder, an old model that some folks call a tombstone welder because of the shape. It's as big as a jukebox. Now he's looking for chunks of metal that he can practice on.

2011-02-19T19:32:00.000-08:00

After six weeks of the elderberry wine fermenting in a carboy in the living room with a heater belt around it, I put the stuff into 22 bottles in order to do just a bit of aging. This is the fourth year I've made the wine, and so far so good. I tend to let all the sugar go to alcohol before I stop it in order to get a strong brew. I'm guessing this is just shy of 15%. Elderberry doesn't have to age as much as grape wine, so it will be ready to drink at the next garlic mustard pulling affair in May. So until then, we've got some left over from the 2009 crop. Cheers!

Good looking students! Visiting with English 111 at Oakland University

2011-02-16T10:01:00.001-08:00

It's always great to talk to students, and belatedly I'm wanting to give a shout-out to Dawn Newton's English 111 class at Oakland University. One afternoon in November, the class members and I talked via Skype. The students asked questions about the stories in American Salvage.

Dawn later wrote back to me saying, "In early December, I got to read 47 finals; I always give students lots of options when it comes to what they can write about, and so many of them chose to write about American Salvage characters, often referencing the things you said during our Skype visit in addition to their quotes from the text." Dawn said other nice things that I won't repeat here.

A pleasure to meet you, members of the English 111 Modern Literature class. You're gorgeous. --BJC

Reading in Allegan - Thank you, Thank you

2011-02-13T07:39:00.000-08:00

A lot of the material I write and read these days is rough stuff that makes folks worry that their neighbors are cooking methamphetamine in their garages or that they are suffering from untreated and festering wounds. So when I was preparing my reading in Allegan, Michigan, in deep dark of winter last night, I decided to read some funny material, my Meijer's poem, a dog story and a dog essay. The whole evening turned out to be one pleasant surprise after another.

I was joyfully overwhelmed by the atmosphere at the Griswold auditorium and by those in attendance (see below who of my pals were there). In fact, while I was being introduced, I was chitchatting with patrons of the arts at the back, and I had to grab my pages and run to the podium. I always get nervous and excited before a reading, and I'd had a couple glasses of fine wine (Thank you Bill Brooks), and so once I got on stage and shoved the big podium around a bit, I just started reading, almost with no pause or transition. So let me try to remedy that here.

I want to say here thank you to Linda Clark, chair of the Allegan Area Arts Council. She wrote the application for the grant that is allowing the City of Allegan to bring in literary and musical events this year for the "Inspire Me" series. A pleasure to meet you Linda. Thank you, Rick Klingenberg, Arts and Entertainment Assistant at City of Allegan for making this all possible. Also, Ann Perrigo, Director of Allegan District Library, who gave me a kind introduction. Her family name is an important one in Allegan; she is a descendant of Luther Perrigo, who started the Perrigo Company in 1887. Thank you to Gloria Tiller of Kazoo Books who traveled all the way to Allegan to sell just a few books. (Fabulous hat, Gloria.) I want to say thank you to the gal who made the delicious half-lemon, half-spice cake. And I want to shower with thanks my friends and family who trekked out on a cold night to Griswold auditoruim.

In attendance: Gina Betcher (rode along with me and she kept me feeling lively on the road) My Dad Rick, Leslie Campbell, Erin Campbell-Brooks, who invited me to a cocktail hour before the reading at Leslie's place on the Kalamazoo River in Allegan with gorgeous snacks. (I got a glimpse of my five year old nephew Campbell Brooks.) I was honored that the Tartakoffs (David, Cheryl, Ann Elizabeth)came from far away. Jamie Blake and her daughter Jada (six), Steve and Shawn Wager (who have been hibernating this winter) and Gary Peake (Bullseye Master shooter and pal)as well as the fabulous and well-traveled Sass Havilar. My Comstock High School classmate Susan Strayer Jennette came with her daughter.

And of course, I made some new friends. It was fun to meet the handsome (and reputedly fantastic, big-hearted) Allegan City Manager Rob Hillard after the reading.

Because I managed to not take any photos last night, I'm including a photo below of a weird mural that Darling Christopher photographed in downtown Allegan. He think it depicts hip-hop alien babies. (The above photo with smiley face volleyball was taken at a summer party. Ah, summer.)

Driving to the University of Michigan

2011-02-09T20:39:00.000-08:00

Just got home from Univ. of Michigan. Had a great visit with students at the Residential College (visited two classes), some of Laura Kasischke's fiction undergrads, and I met with some post-MFA fellowship students for lunch. Then I gave a reading in Keene Theater to a most pleasant crowd. Finished up with a fabulous dinner at the Pizza House with Laura Thomas, Lolita Hernandez and Keith Taylor. We talked about all kinds of subjects, including Mattie Maroun,Laura K's astounding productivity (new book of poetry out this year as well as new novel), and the optimism and brightness of Detroit of late. Keith Taylor told us that Detroit stirs with excitement.

Of course I took the extra half hour and stopped at Trader Joe's. It seems astounding that there is still not a Trader Joe's store in the western side of the state. Bought no small amount of reasonably priced wine.

The only trouble was the car. When I got up this morning I realized I should check the fluids. The only problem with that is that I cannot get my own hood to latch. It requires some manipulation with screwdrivers. So I opened the hood and found my oil two quarts low (yow!) and my antifreeze a quart low. I had one quart of oil and no antifreeze, so I waited until 8:00 a.m. to go to the Uncle Ed's oil change shop on Wynn Road (best oil shop on the planet). They topped me off and got my hood latched (using screwdrivers). After twenty miles into my 95 mile trip, my check engine light came on and stayed on the whole way. On the way home, after the fabulous dinner (minus the wine, I had no wine though there was wine in my car) the check engine light came on again. I was listening to American Rust by Phillipp Meyer on the CD player, such a bleak story, so well told, that I began to fear that this trip would end badly, as things went in the story. On the way to Ann Arbor, I should say, the day seemed all brightness and full of positivity because I was listening to P.G. Wodehouse's Right Ho, Jeeves. These Jeeves stories had me convinced that if my car broke down on the road I would have some interesting social experience that would bring about hilarity and clever wordplay.

The photo here was taken by Lolita Hernandez in the Keene Theater, and features two U of M students: Residential College undergrad fiction student Lena Cintron and one of the aforementioned post-MFA fellowship folks, Miriam Lawrence.

After the big snow

2011-02-05T19:52:00.001-08:00

The snowstorm came and went, leaving us with about a foot of white stuff on the ground. My brother Geo suffered the most. He plowed a high school parking lot for 16 hours on Wednesday and 13 hours on Thursday. And then on Friday morning he coughed the wrong way and threw out his back, cheating himself out of overtime he might have earned on Friday. See, ever since Comstock Public Schools privatized their custodial help and fired him, Geo has been working as a temp custodial worker for another school system. In sporting weather he lines all the sports fields for the games, for a low wage and no benefits. In winter, he salts the sidewalks and plows the parking lot, coming into work at midnight for the same low wage. They tend to send him home as soon as they can so they don’t have to pay him overtime, and of course he has no insurance. Geo is a person who cared about his job at Comstock, who went above and beyond, was willing and able to fix anything that wasn't working, saving the school money on maintenance. I’m guessing the folks they hired for custodial service will not fix the plumbing or do repairs to the woodwork. Also, who do we want hanging out in the school? An employee with 18-1/2 years of excellent service or whoever the temp service hires for minimum wage? This rush to privatization of services is a bad business in many ways. Oh, am I preaching? Shoot. I wasn’t going to do that in my blog. On a lighter note, here is Kellee, creating an icicle garden at Susanna’s house just before the big storm.

Staying Home from AWP

2011-01-31T10:28:00.000-08:00

Oh well. (Imagine me sitting here with a sad face.)

I guess I won't be going to AWP in Washington this week. Instead I will be checking my twitter feed for news on Thursday, Friday and Saturday of this week to find out what I'm missing. Indeed I will be super sad not to see everyone there, old friends from universities I've attended or visited, hardworking magazine editors (many of whom have either rejected or accepted my work!) and some of my current and former students.

On the other hand, it it will be nice to be safe indoors on the day that Chicago is expecting 18 inches of snow. Weather reports here say Michigan will get "at least a foot." My last flight out of Washington, two weeks ago, was canceled without a flake of snow falling.

So to all of you who are going to Washington, I wish you riveting panels full of writers arguing their points passionately and uttering quips that are worth jotting in your journals. I wish you poetry readings that are musical and prose readings that have you gripping your chairs for fear you’ll fall off. I wish you good socializing and lines that aren’t long, fine food and drink with sparkling friends.

And if I don’t see you before then, I’ll see you next year in Chicago. Cheers!

The photo here is the fabulous underground walkway at Detroit airport connecting terminals. The sound you would be hearing if you were there is a thunderstorm.

Home From Traveling - Home to Heartbreak

2011-01-27T12:25:00.000-08:00

After the ABA Winter Institute, my flight home from Washington DC Reagan airport was canceled, and so instead of arriving at dinnertime, I arrived at 11:30 pm, just in time to see my neighbor's house burning to the ground. I love my neighbors Lynne and Mike, and they love their two German shepherds. Lynne has a soft spot for all living creatures, and this night was the coldest all year. She was running an electric blanket on the back porch to warm some feral kittens that had taken to sleeping there. The general consensus is that this blanket was the cause of the fire. Lynne, who is weak and in troubled health, made it out of the house with the two dogs just in time, with no shoes and no coat. Mike got home from work a few minutes later. Our road is a one-lane dead-end road, and the nearest fire hydrant, a third of a mile away, was frozen up, so they had to call for more hose and ran it to the next one. Meanwhile, the house burned. Everything. Every single thing gone. Lynne thinks about all the documents, including the family's civil war letters. Mike lost all his guns. Everybody around here is thinking about how much there is to lose. I think I'll back up my documents onto a thumb drive right now.

Post script: my neighbors at at a nearby motel with the dogs, dealing with the insurance company, trying to figure out what to do next. The Red Cross came in with some saving assistance. Everybody has been so nice, Lynne says, and her heart is breaking.

Meeting booksellers at Winter Institute 2011

2011-01-21T07:33:00.000-08:00

What an honor to be invited to hang with booksellers at the ABA Winter Institute. I wish I had taken a bunch of photos, but I was so engaged in conversation during the entire two and a half hour author reception that I forgot to take out my camera. As well as hundreds of fine North American booksellers, I met a Swedish bookstore owner. He says he sells lots of American books. I wore 4-inch heels in hopes that I would be the tallest author there, but I didn't manage to stand next to any other authors. Instead my hard-driving handler, Norton's super sales rep Dan Christiaens kept me sitting with a glass of wine signing advanced review copies (I have learned to call them ARCs). Also in attendance from Norton was Sales & Marketing Power-Boss (and sweetheart) Bill Rusin and Philadelphia-area Book Rep, the extraordinarily clever Kristin Keith. I shared my homemade candied orange peels with the booksellers, but was unable to make each of them a little origami boat as I had hoped to do. Last night the fine Norton folks treated me to dinner with a dozen booksellers at Farmers and Fishers in Georgetown, where the crab cakes were out of this world. How wonderful that in the same week I ate Oregon dungeness crab cakes and Maryland crab cakes. Now I'm heading to the airport, for what will hopefully be an uneventful couple of weeks at home.

(The folks pictured with me here are (above) Kate Levinson of Point Reyes Books and (below)the handsome Dan Christiaens. Thanks, Dan, for the photos here.)

Congratulations graduates of Pacific U. Low Res MFA

2011-01-16T07:26:00.000-08:00

What a pleasure to see some of my students graduate with such fine writing projects. Here are pictured Nancy Stebbins, Loranne Brown, Sue Staats, and Heather Sappenfield. The graduate reading of fiction, poetry and nonfiction on Friday night was one of the best readings ever, and we finished up with our banquet Saturday night, ate some fabulous crab cakes, drank some champagne. Lots of laughing, fun and clever banter. Today we all head home. Below are pictured Carla Vissers, Heidi Bell & yours truly from the year we graduated WMU with our MFAs.

A Second Life

2011-01-14T13:44:00.000-08:00

Not only do I have my fabulous Kalamazoo existence of husband, pals, family, donkeys, swamp acreage, elderberry wine, and dozens of jars of canned tomatoes, but I have somehow managed to have another life, here in Oregon, as part of Pacific University low residency program. I’m in my fifth residency, my third residency in Seaside, Oregon. My hotel room looks out onto the ocean, and the winds blow wildly outside. I feel so fortunate to be a part of this second life, peopled by writers and students I admire and love. The thought of leaving these folks on Sunday morning seems unbearable, but I am buoyed by the knowledge that I will see them again in June. And as the poet Leslie Miller said, if you all lived in my town, I wouldn’t get any work done. Here is a photo of the female faculty members at an evening get together hosted by non-fiction writer Judy Blunt, who made penguin hors doevres out of black olives, bits of carrot and cream cheese.
(pictured Shelley Washburn (director), Writers Leslie A. Miller, Laura Hendrie, Ellen Bass, Judy Blunt, Elinor Langer, Pam Houston, Rachael Toor, Claire Davis, Kellie Wells, and on the floor Mary Helen Stefaniak, Debra Gwartney, Tayari Jones, and me (BJC).

Revising the River Novel

2010-09-01T15:50:00.000-07:00

Revise Revise Revise. Nobody told me writing was going to be such hard work! Thank you, everyone, for all your support and kindness. If you're looking for me, you might not find me unless you come out to the Kerrytown Book Festival, September 12, at the Ann Arbor Farmer’s Market. I'm on a Michigan Lit panel at noon (Kerrytown Concert House) with Michael Zadoorian, Kristina Riggle & Wendy Webb. Moderator Eric Olsen. Okay, I'd better get back to work. Revise. Revise. ---BJC

Shooting Party

2010-07-26T07:57:00.000-07:00

It’s been ten days since I sent away my manuscript to Newyorkland and I have heard not a peep from neither editor nor agent. I could assume the worst, give in to despair, plan a new career, make plans to leave the country, but instead I ask my pals Shawn and Steve to host a shooting party in order to try out some of the shots in my story—Margo, my protagonist is a teenage sharp shooter. Mainly, I need to know what happens when you shoot a can of warm, shaken beer with a twenty gauge shotgun. Answer: it explodes joyfully and the aluminum can is shredded so beautifully that you don’t mind losing the ten-cent deposit on the can. The same happens when you hit it with a .22 hollow point bullet (that doesn’t happen in the book, but we just wanted to see.)

Perhaps you are wondering what happens when you shoot big zucchinis hanging from from trees? It’s not as exciting as I'd hoped it would be because of the lack of pressure inside the vegetables, but it’s still satisfying and the whole notion seems funny. Once when we were at my grandpa’s river cottage swatting mosquitoes, we saw some dark bodies floating down the river. We went out in the rowboat and chased down a half dozen zucchinis weighing between ten and fifteen pounds. My idea was to put shark fins on them and send them farther down the river, but my mom decided we would take them home and feed them to the pigs.

Some people asked why we wouldn't shoot watermelons, but that’s absurd. No Midwesterner would do that to a perfectly good, pleasure-giving watermelon. Zucchinis are the vegetable that keeps growing in our gardens and can’t be stopped. We would no more shoot a watermelon than we would shoot a birthday cake.

Our pal Gary Peake came to the party and gave shooting instructions to new and experienced shooters. He insisted that the new shooters stand close enough to the target to get a satisfying “grouping” so that they would have a positive experience and want to shoot again.

I’ve got a bolt-action Marlin .22 rifle, but in the book, my protagonist shoots with a .22 Marlin lever action rifle with open sites and no scope, and so Gary brought along a Henry lever action rifle to loan to me so I could get a sense of reloading it, so I could experience what my protagonist, Margo, was doing all day.

After the shooting, we ate brats and Italian sausage from the Hardings in Plainwell (it used to be the Big Top), and a yummy pasta salad made by Danielle, a new shooter. We discussed politics and philosophy of shooting. Darling Christopher has coined the term “gun-toting liberal,” by listing that as his political affiliation on Facebook. Many of us conclude that we don't want the weapons and the skills to use them all in the hands of our opponents. (And maybe some of the women here even want to be sure that the guns and skills aren’t all in the hands of men.)

Shawn is a big reader of fiction, and she is reading my book to see if moments of the book snag or slow her. Gary is reading the book to make sure I’ve got the shooting right. I don’t yet. Gary has been shooting for many decades, and he’s gotten as good as just about anybody. He is letting me know how to make some of Margo’s fantastical shots realistic: however gifted a shooter she is, I have to reduce some of the distances. He is right that the first thing is to make what happens in a realistic novel possible, and then (he suggests) we might even make it likely. And that way, even somebody who knows something about shooting can read the book and not roll his or her eyes.

That’s one of my many goals in finishing this outrageous book, to not induce eye rolling. The whole big book is improbable, but if I do my job, nobody will notice. They will just read on, without a snag, and marvel at what people will do.

(photo is of previous shooting party, Shawn Wagner, Kellee Campbell, BJC

Sent Manuscript to Bill & Jill

2010-07-18T19:15:00.000-07:00

So super agent Bill sold my river novel to super editor Jill at Norton in November 2009. That was a heady time, when I was a National Book Award finalist, when my name was on a few lips in NYC, where they make many of the big decisions about publishing books. So Bill and Jill read through my book and they made the deal. So I continued to work for seven or eight months, and now I've sent it off to them again in hopes that they like it even more. Heidi and Carla and Lisa and Andy and Jamie have read the book in its entirety, as have others: Godfrey and Melvin and my Christopher and my mom, Susanna, a few others have read parts. Susanna didn't like it (too much sex and violence), but the other readers said they did. I am grateful for all of my readers--many more have read portions of the book.

(Meanwhile Bill has become a bestselling author himself, with his book, PORTRAIT OF THE ADDICT AS A YOUNG MAN. He's all over the magazines, newspapers, radio, and TV. Jill, too, is a novelist.)

There is something heartbreaking about finishing a novel. When a novel is all unraveled and dragged out and undressed on the table, when the writer is working hard to find the shape of the thing, she can imagine it to be anything, to be all things, to not only contain truth and beauty but to define it. When the novel is amorphous, we can dream it will contain the seeds of literary or cultural revolution. But as I finish, I'm realizing this novel is just the one thing, it's just the novel it is, and I just hope it's compelling in its own way.

Old People Bitch About the Service

2010-06-14T17:06:00.000-07:00

Christopher and I don’t eat out much. We got a late start on Saturday but headed out to Pasta Pasta at about 1:30 pm. When we got there we discovered that they do not serve lunch on Saturday. (Visualize sad faces on us.) So we tried the nearby café. We picked up some menus only to have the young, attractive, slim waitress say we couldn’t order from them, but had to order from the brunch menu. Where was the brunch menu? She rolled her eyes at our request, walked around the room, opened drawers and otherwise searched disinterestedly for menus for a while and shook her head in frustration. We asked again, and she looked in some new place and found two. Brunch meant breakfast foods, so there was no lunch. Finally, suspecting we were just too old and unattractive, we left. Two other waitresses were sitting on the curb outside, and they devotedly avoided making eye contact with us.

At the next restaurant, the Studio Grill, the menu posted in the window suggested things were looking up, but they closed at two o’clock. We looked at our watches. A gal inside came out into the street and handed us coupons for a future visit. So we ended up at a reliable if expensive favorite restaurant. Chris ordered breakfast. I ordered a salad. I found a spider on my salad. It was alive, so I put it on the ledge behind me.

I took a deep breath and ate my salad. When I mentioned the spider to the waitress, she said she would tell the cook he should wash the salad better. Meanwhile, Chris had been watching the spider, seeing how it was not doing well on the ledge. Finally he put the spider on a coaster and brought it back to the table. I considered showing it to the waitress, but she didn’t come back for a long time. I got the feeling that she found us old and tiresome.

Though I tried not to look closely at my salad, and though I especially tried to avoid seeing a hair, I did eventually catch sight of a half-inch long dark straight hair on my plate. I removed it without paying undue attention to it. I didn’t even mention it to Chris, because I was worried that he would begin to find me old and tiresome if I kept complaining. Chris poured some water on the spider on the coaster, thinking maybe it just needed to be revived. It did not seem to be reviving, and the water made some of its legs stick together. I suggested we give the spider to the waitress so she know I wasn’t lying about finding a spider, to prove that I was not just trying to get special attention.

Chris, however, thought he wanted to take the spider outside; if it was in some sort of blue-cheese-induced spider coma, then it would revive, and if it was dead, then it could have a more natural passing into the next phase of spider existence. We tipped twenty percent and took our spider body on the coaster to a grassy area behind the Aldi’s. Chris holds out hope that even now it lives.

The photo above is of Mikey, Shawn & Chris making beautiful music.

Writing Advice I (Apparently) Gave

2010-05-03T20:38:00.000-07:00

Facebook Exchange about Writing Advice:

Bonnie Jo Campbell Hey, have I ever given any wise advice about writing to any of you? If you remember what it was, please let me know, especially if it was entertaining. I'm trying to come up with a little list for advising writers. Unfortunately I tend to forget any clever thing I say, instantly.
April 16 at 7:29pm · Comment · LikeUnlike
Ryan W. Bradley
you told me my stories will grab people by the balls and not let go. not advice so much, but i love it nonetheless.
April 16 at 7:30pm ·
Christina Marrocco Gilleran
I'm sure you said something clever to me about writing while you were out here, but I tend to forget any clever thing I hear. So, I'm no help.
April 16 at 7:30pm ·
Mike Magnuson
Actually, since you're making a list, that's some wise advice you once gave me: you said to make a list!
April 16 at 7:35pm ·
Diane Seuss
You told me not to date anyone moldy. Does that count?
April 16 at 7:44pm ·
Colleen Kolhoff Little
You told me to ask myself "what was the purpose of this story?" And make sure the audience can answer that at the end. Good advice.
April 16 at 7:48pm ·
Ingrid Hawkinson
You HAVE, but I can't remember exactly what you said. . .
April 16 at 7:49pm ·
Kristen Cox Roby
You gave us SO much great advice at Writing by Degrees in Binghamton! Here are some of the things I wrote down:
· Write about an unsolvable problem -- why else would you be writing?
· At the end of the story, "do the thing that you promised." (I think this great -- so boiled down and specific.)... See More
· Write an ending that "opens up" the story.
· At the end of your story (and I LOVE this one), focus on an image. Then, KEEP LOOKING.
· Write about the workplace -- too few people write about workers, the work they do, and the place they do it.
Hope this helps! I know you sure helped me as a writer with your craft talk.
April 16 at 8:14pm ·
Zinta Aistars
Your intro at the Kalamazoo Gazette Community Literary Awards last Sunday said it all, Bonnie.
April 16 at 8:41pm ·
Susan Ramsey
You said "I think stories with lies on them are better than stories without lies in them.". It's on my wall. Also, of course, "love is problematical."
April 16 at 8:53pm ·
Bonnie Jo Campbell
Thanks, everybody! You're jogging my memory
April 16 at 9:03pm ·
Elyse Valkyrie Durham
I distinctly remember the last day of class in which you said, "I have some advice that I always give people who tell me they want to be writers. So far, nobody's followed it. The advice is that you need to do something that will give yourself time to write--even if that means you live in a swamp." (I doubt those are exact words, but they've stuck with me these two years.)
April 16 at 9:08pm ·
Susan Ramsey
Well, Richard Rodriguez just said " There are some things so personal you can only tell them to strangers."
April 16 at 9:10pm ·
Sydney Frey
you said that if we want to throw in an anecdote, it only belongs in there if we can get under it and figure out what it's "about." i.e., yes, fine, be funny, but know what you're talking about...
April 16 at 10:19pm ·
Beckie Elgin
So many things...
One was during your craft talk on getting published in the June 09 residency at Pacific when you shared with us how incredibly hard it had been for YOU to get published. That made the rest of us sigh with relief.
Another... in suggesting changes in one of my stories you added, "But please don't do anything you are not absolutely comfortable with in your story."
We all love how you help us improve our stories, not make them your own.
See you soon!
April 16 at 11:22pm ·
Lisa Brigance
I remember deing discouraged in Miss Rose's class (in high school), and you were like, YOU CAN DO THIS, LISA. . . but weakling me, she was so strict, I bailed. You were amazing how gun ho you were , very kewl.
April 17 at 12:20am ·
Lee Ann Johnson
You told us how important writing groups are.
April 17 at 1:14am ·
Jill Doster Marcusse
In Con's class you said something to the effect....write outside your life, where your imagination kicks in, energy generates....I've found that very helpful.
April 17 at 6:40am ·
Gail Griffin
Bird by bird, baby. Wait, no: that was Anne Lamott. Still the best writing advice ever.
April 17 at 9:52am ·
Elizabeth Kerlikowske
Lower your expectations. It works everywhere.
April 17 at 10:20am ·
Dean Margaret Hauck
I really learned a lot from your analysis (at your library talk) of an incident that you then dealt with in a nonfiction form, then as a poem, which you read, and thirdly as a short story. But in the end YOU are the finest example for all of us who want to be writers.
April 17 at 11:33am ·
Jesse Green
thinks you told me to keep my day job. Wise indeed!
April 17 at 12:08pm ·
Terence Herlihy
you said a bunch of ideas at Columbia College in March 2010 like knowing who your readers are and have them read drafts.... editing and rewriting lots and lots but remembering the scraps ....knowing when you have found the end of a short story and stopping there were you working off of notes?
April 17 at 12:11pm ·
Monica Friedman
you said don't spend all your time talking about writing with writers--you've got to talk to real people more so you can write about real things. you also said that writers needed to jump on all opportunities to do unusual stuff, like visiting an abandoned hospital with jaimy gordon.
April 17 at 2:38pm ·
Sonia Lipson
write everyday, don't answer the phone
April 17 at 3:56pm ·
Jamie Blake
You told me to stick with my fabulous writers group and lots of other stuff!
April 17 at 5:46pm ·

The photo above was taken on a cell phone at lunch at Saginaw Valley State University. These folks include Katrina Alexis Robinson, Amelia Glebocki, and Linda Farynk, Melissa Seitz, BJC (not in that order). The lunch was fabulous and they gave me an award at the reading, the 2010 Stuart and Vernice Gross Award for Excellence in Literature. Thank you everybody at SVSU!

Good Girls Eat Crepes

2010-04-25T20:20:00.001-07:00

Read Sunday at the Scarab Club in Detroit for the Downtown Literary Arts Series (host M.L. Leibler) with Detroit Mark James Andrews, Jerome Rothenberg (author of seventy books of poetry, new book with The Marick Press http://www.marickpress.com/) and Blair (Detroit Performance Poet). The Scarab Club was recently voted the best spot in Detroit to hear a poetry reading, and this one was fabulous, or at least the guys I got to listen to were great. And if any of you are putting bets on poets, I'd put one on Blair, who was dynamic. He and I traded books; his little tome is called MOONWALKING, and it's poems about Michael Jackson. He'll be at Kalamazoo College this week, I think. I met lots of other swell folks, writers and faculty members at Wayne State University and University of Detroit.

(The picture above shows (left to right) Blair, Jerome, me, and Mark in front of the fireplace in the second floor of the Scarab Club. See link for Scarab Club info below.)

Pal Jamie Blake came along with me to make the drive more fun--most of the drive was in the rain. We stopped in Ann Arbor to visit Trader Joe's, to buy goodies such as cheap brie and peanut satay sauce, plus goat yogurt for the cat. (I would have bought two cases of wine, but alas it was before noon when we stopped) Then we had lunch at Whole Foods. I bought for lunch a spinach feta cake. In my salad, I ate two kinds of quinoa. To us, these visits to Trader Joe's and Whole Foods seem exotic and luxurious.

Once we got to Detroit, Jamie helped me by selling my books, something I seem to be incapable of doing after a reading. Detroit was beautiful, really beautiful. The Scarab Club was spectacular, originally built as the Hopkins Club as a place where artists and patrons could hang out together. Jamie and I were peckish as we left and fortunately we found Paris Crepes, a shop on Woodward, run by Torya Blanchard offering about forty different types of crepes. I chose from the "savory" half of the menu and got a "Wendy" with blue cheese, dried cherries, spinach and dressing. Jamie chose from the the "sweet" side and got something that resembled a S'more. Both were astounding in flavor, and Jamie had a kind of sugar high all the way home. The sign outside read "Good Girls Eat Crepes" and below see a photo of Jamie posing with one of the movie posters in the place. Torya said she'd seen the movie, and it wasn't as good as the poster.

Here's a link to the Scarab Club: http://www.scarabclub.org/

Here's a link to an article about the crepe shop: http://www.944.com/articles/good-girls-eat-crepes-torya-blanchard-brings-french-flair-to-downtown-detroit/3210/

AWP Denver 2010

2010-04-11T18:33:00.000-07:00

Wow, what a trip! 23 hours to Denver via Amtrak, and I managed to get a cheap roomette on board, so I arrived refreshed, full of energy. By some lovely happenstance, my incredibly expensive Hyatt hotel room was ready at 8 a.m. so I got a shower and a trip to the "fitness center" before making my way to the convention center, a place where an awful lot of the literary writers of America would be showing up. Apparently there were over 9000 folks attending.

One highlight for me was the panel on memorable poetry. Norton Editor Extraordinaire Jill Bialosky said for her some of the most memorable poems were Sylvia Plath's "Daddy", Louise Gluck's "Mock Orange," Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art," Wallace Steven's "The Snow Man," and Emily Dickinson, "After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes." She also mentioned Gwendolyn Brooks "We Real Cool," and the Robert Frost, "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." Another panelist,poet Claudia Keelan, said she didn't like memorable poetry and didn't want her own poetry to be memorable.(She has a book just out from New Issues.) Lively conversation ensued!

Another great panel was Exploitation, Empowerment, and Everything In Between: Women on Writing Sex. I got to hear a former stripper and lap dancer talk about her work. She wore a huge flower in her hair. Rachel Kramer Bussel, author of PLEASE SIR talked about her experiences as a sex columnist and erotica editor, etc. Lively conversation ensued.

Michael Chabon spoke on Thursday night, and he said, among other things "The MFA program at Irvine made a man out of me ... Life is not a story, or if it is a story, it's not a very interesting story. To make it interesting you need to lie. Readers are imaginary friends, and in return for their friendship, you must keep things lively. A novel must sing for its supper. An autobiography is the last thing your friend wants." Lively conversation ensued.

The book fair was fabulous because everyone was in the same room, all the hundreds of tables. What a pleasure to see my two publishers (Norton and Wayne State Univ. Press) right across from each other. Great to see Mike Czy and Karen Craigo at the Mid-American table, Ryan Bradley of Artistically Declined Press with his new journal Sententia!, and John Domini signing books at the Red Hen table. I met folks at Meridian lit mag and I had a nice visit at the Press 53 table talking to the energetic and capable editor Kevin Morgan Watson, as well as several of his fiction authors.

Another highlight was Denver itself, including the big blue bear, four stories high, trying to get into the expo center where the bookstore was being held. Apparently the sculpture is by Lawrence Argent and is titled “I See What You Mean.” Denver is a great town, a beautiful downtown, which we were at the center of, with a free bus running up and down 16th Street, and trams. We were warned by several people not to drink too much; apparently, being a mile high in the air makes the alcohol hit you a little harder.

The highlight for me was taking part in the Southern Review 7th Anniversary reading. What a privilege to read with Steve Almond, Beth Ann Fennelly, David Kirby, and Sydney Lea. Perhaps I was inappropriate when I said "I love Southern Review, and I love Southern Review editor Jeanne Leiby." I just couldn't help it. She is so dynamic, and she makes being a part of the Southern Review family of writers so fun and cool. She arranged the Southern Review reception at the Blake Street Vault, so I spent the last two hours in Denver upstairs in that bar (downstairs was full of drunk sports fans, since the Rockies had just won their first game), eating food from steam trays: rattle snake and partridge and pork sausage, rocky mountain oysters, and tender little lamb steaks. And of course cheese cubes and veggies. At the event I chatted with fabulous Pacific students Heather Sappenfield and Darla Biel. I drank wine and let it go right to my head in the mile high city, and then I boarded my train for the 23 hour trip home. Bon Voyage, AWP. You rock (especially Jeanne Leiby rocks).

Chicago Visit -- Story Week

2010-03-28T17:36:00.000-07:00

There's no literary event like Story Week, put on by Columbia College in Chicago. There's no other literary shindig that features "Literary Rock and Roll" as their main event. I got to read at the Metro on Clark Street as a part of "Literary Rock and Roll," along with Marcus Sakey and Aleksander Hemon, as well as the wacky Marxist Bread and Puppet Theater, and it was something. First of all, I love reading when people are drinking. People seem happier when they're drinking. And so I read my poem "Trouble in the Meth Cave" and the other one about finding a human heart in a car wash in Paw Paw. Then I read "World of Gas" about Y2K.

The Columbia College folks have a whole different way of teaching writing, using improv techniques such as visualization and speaking with their hands and arms, and by the interactions I had with the students (in private conferences, at the bar, etc.) this method gets the juices flowing. And since there's a whole world of writing programs that are fundamentally the same, Columbia's program seems a welcome change.

On Monday, I got to hang out with the star of the event Joyce Carol Oates, ate lunch sitting next to her, and she was so darned civilized that I had to try to behave myself and use my indoor voice. Also at the meal was publicist extraordinaire Sheryl Johnston, Finalist for the Critic of the year award from the NBCC Donna Seaman, Chair of Fiction at Columbia Randall Albers, Fiction faculty member and NPR dude Gary Johnson. The table was rounded out by writer Gavin Cologne-Brookes, author, and his fabulous mathematician-to-be daughter Xenatasha.

On Wednesday, Ann Hemenway interviewed me on stage about all sort of writing issues, including attitude and process. I tried not to shame myself with the truth. I defended my earlier claim that writing a short story is rather like creating a mathematical proof.

Columbia College put me up in the 4-1/2 star Conrad Hotel on Rush Street, which even had a view of a bit of the lake, and it was only three short blocks from a Trader Joes. Darling Christopher joined me for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday nights, and we had great fun, especially after my Thursday night reading was over and I could relax (I changed my mind again and again, all day long, about what I was going to read.)

All the while I was there, I was feeling guilty about not writing (I'm trying to finish my novel.) It's funny that if your writing goes well, then you get opportunities that then take you away from your writing. Maybe that's a sort of evening-out of the success, to keep anybody people like me from writing too much. Anyhow, it was great to be in Chicago, especially to have dinner Friday night with Mary Szpur, Nancy Garrity and Michael Dempsey on a boat at the Columbia Yacht Club (no relation to Columbia College.) I ate skate wing. Nancy and Mike bought dinner, which was very generous. Thank you Nancy and Mike!

Christopher put lots of photos on facebook if you want to see them. I took this one of Chris and Uncle Terry downtown under the sign "sympathetic bartenders." The other photo is on the Yacht club boat.

Fun in the Priests' Residence in St. Paul

2010-03-21T20:23:00.000-07:00

Wow, I've been running around a lot lately, and my blog hasn't kept up. A week in St. Paul, Minnesota, at University of St. Thomas started with my being picked up at the airport by Chris Hallman (HOSPITAL FOR BAD POETS*), in a Smart Car. Lucky for Chris, I didn't have much luggage. He delivered me to the Priests' Residence, where I would spend six nights with kitchenette. The above is a photo taken (with tattoos) after my Univ. of St. Thomas reading, with Student Annie Kat Reece, Fiction writer Alicia Conroy (LIVES OF MAPMAKERS) and Chris Schmid. Highlights of visit included jogging on a trail along Mississippi River, being on Kerri Miller's Minnesota Public Radio morning show live for an hour, visiting Dr. Leslie Adrienne Miller's (THE RESURRECTION TRADE**) brilliant advanced creative writing students (who carefully read all the stories in American Salvage, one by one), visiting the Minneapolis YMCA with Alicia Conroy, who taught me what to do with a fitness ball, visiting Prof. Lisa Durose and partner Susan & child Desiree for vegetarian meal. (Below see a picture of the happy family.) Downers included not being able to buy wine after eight p.m. in St. Paul, and leaving my cell phone at the public radio station and having to have Nancy from KNOW meet me on the corner of Summit Ave and Cleveland in the dark of dawn to retrieve said phone. Nancy, if that was her real name, wore a trench coat.

*Also, by Chris Hallman, The Chess Artist, The Devil is a Gentleman, In Utopia, The Story of the Story.** Also, by Leslie Miller: Eat Quite Everything You See, Yesterday Had a Man in It, Ungodliness, and Staying Up For Love

National Book Critic Circle Awards

2010-03-12T11:59:00.000-08:00

My publicist at Norton, the fabulous Erin Lovett, said that the more often I blog, the more anyone will give a darn what I say. I'm skeptical, because in writing fiction I could write a whole lot of crappy stories, but I think I'm better off writing fewer better ones. But maybe I'm trying to compare apples and oranges. So, Erin Lovett, for you, I'll try to blog more often. And for Erin I'll get going on target practicing with my .22 rifle.

After the NBCC Awards last night, I touched Joyce Carol Oates. I shook her hand and congratulated her on the lifetime (she jokingly called it "posthumous") achievement award. I was a finalist for the fiction award, which the Englishwoman Hilary Mantel won. JCO said kindly that she had hoped one of the American gals had won the award; the American gals were Michelle Huneven (who slipped me candy and was super fun), Jayne Anne Phillips (NBA finalist), and myself. JCO shook my hand long enough that some of the magic might have soaked into my pores. I suspect that the next time I sit down to write, hopefully tomorrow morning, the stories might well flow river-ishly. Fingers crossed. I haven't washed my right hand, but have kept it safely in my pocket ever since.

By the way, Thank you Susan Ramsey, for helping me navigate in NYC Photo by Susan is of me sitting on a giant pair of lips in the bathroom of the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station.

More NBA Fun

2009-12-31T20:42:00.001-08:00

Just in case hell froze over, pigs flew, cows came home, I wrote an acceptance speech for the National Book Awards ceremony. Here's the stuff I had jotted down in case Satan was skating to work. In truth, it still makes sense despite my ending up only a mere finalist:

Holy Crap.

The impulse to write is not a sensible one. To arrange your life around writing makes no economic sense, and to drag your family into poverty along with you seems downright unfair. But today it all suddenly makes some sense.

I tried not to write. I studied math, but the impulse only became stronger, until I tossed aside a life filled with certainty and rational thought. And yet now my life suddenly makes an awful lot of sense.

This award is good news for writers who feel uncertain, for writers who choose to live in small towns in Michigan or Maine because they feel a profound connection to their own people and landscape. This is good news for writers who do not feel brilliant, but who want to work hard to get it right

This is good news for small presses, where editors labor without much recompense. This award is good news for academic presses, which more and more are publishing the important books that can’t find homes with bigger publishers

It’s also good news for the people who help me with my writing, the people who take time away from their own writing to do so, especially Heidi Bell, who is my first critic and the best line editor on the planet, also Carla Vissers, Andy Mozina and Lisa Lenzo. It is good news, because it turns out, those people weren’t wasting their time.

Thank you Wayne State Press, especially Annie Martin, creator and editor of the “Made in Michigan” imprint. Annie was patient with me as I tweaked the book—-more than tweaked it--I pulled stories out, put other stories, revised and reordered and re-titled until it finally settled into its rightful shape. She had faith in me while I embarked upon a process that even mathematical String Theory could not explain.

Thank you to my husband, Chris Magson, at home, who just got the Davis Loader on his 8-N tractor, and now he’s working on the bathroom plumbing so that we can have guests over again one of these days. And finally, I want to thank my donkeys, Jack and Don Quixote, because they have wonderful ears, and because I can’t live without their smell. Cheers!

(photo features left to right: Annie Martin (Wayne State Univ. Press editor), Margaret Erdman (publicist), BJC, Kristin Harpster Lawrence (managing editor), Jane Hoehner (Director of WSUP).

National Book Awards (2009) in New York.

2009-11-22T19:33:00.001-08:00

I feel as though I've been drunk for three weeks. And so it made sense that I drank too much at the National Book Awards banquet. It might have had something to do with a guy named Bill (from The Office, says Heidi Bell) sending me the first tequila, and then coming over to check that I drank it. And then somebody at my table (The Wayne State table) thinking we all needed more tequila. I usually alternate a glass of wine with a glass of water, but there were those waiters filling up my glass, so technically I never emptied a wine glass, thus never necessitating that glass of water. Heidi Bell & Carla Vissers, my trusty companions and hotel mates--we stayed at fabulous Park South Hotel--made the trip way more fun and helped me stay sane. In NYC, I met my new agent Bill Clegg, impossibly handsome and clever, to whom I swore my undying love, and my new editor Jill Bialosky, absurdly brilliant and beautiful, to whom I swore my undying loyalty. (Thank you, Jill, for buying lunch.) There was a lot of fussing on my part about clothing in NYC, that's what I remember. Ended up wearing short dress to Tuesday night finalists reading and long Gucci dress (borrowed from Rhoda Janzen) for Weds. night banquet. Note to self: decide upon elements of personal style so I never ever have to fuss that way again. Note to self: no moral framework requires me to drink gifts of tequila. The Wall Street Cipriani Club was magnificent for the banquet; Gore Vidal was weirdly riveting as he spoke, or rambled on (he started out with "If I had a speech, I'd give it now.") Also, we met Cousin Mimi Lipson & her writer guy Luc Sante, and film artist and projectionist Carolyn Kaylor at the Spanish restaurant in the Hotel Chelsea and, in case you are wondering Carolyn remains strikingly beautiful. Carla & Heidi and I rode the Staten Island Ferry and you can find Carla's photos of the whole trip on Flickr. Um, what else? Stroked James Franco's hair at the After-party on the Cipriani's balcony (barely remember this) and said to actress Lily Taylor, "You look familiar--are you a writer?" Assured poet Nick Flynn (who was with Lily Taylor) he was a favorite among us middle aged women poets in Kalamazoo. Um, had a fancy hairdressing man give me a french twist that cost me through the nose; maybe hair down would have been better in photos. Irish dude Colum McCann was gracious and friendly even before he won in the fiction category for his big New York novel; he came up and talked to Carla, Heidi & me, introducing us to his brother, wife and daughter. Young Adult finalist David Small (from Kalamazoo) and wife Sarah Stewart were a delight to chat with. Nonetheless, glad to be home, more than glad to not do any interviews for a while, glad hangovers pass, glad to get back to writing.

From the Finalist for the National Book Award

2009-10-19T19:32:00.000-07:00

The Finalist for the National Book Award has pumped up her bicycle tires and gone for a ride. She has washed several sinks of dishes, but has not vacuumed the floor in more than a week. Her concord grape wine has reached twelve and a half percent alcohol (yea!). Her leeks and tomatillos are harvested. The National Book Award finalist had her yearly exam today, and her PA commented, “There’s something strange about your ________,” and I had to explain about the National Book Award, and how such a status as finalist can warp space-time, even within a body. “You don’t have to take Xanax,” my health care provider offered. “We can put you on something that will time-release all day and all night. No more ups and downs” The Finalist for the National Book Award declined. The Finalist for the National Book Award has been given a clean bill of health, does not have fleas or lice or too much waxy build-up in the ears (though has a genetic predisposition to waxy build-up), but still something is nagging her, something more than having forgotten to give the cat a pill. Perhaps it is the desire to thank all her glorious friends again. Thank you, friends and family, for supporting me, for lifting me up with all the good wishes. I am awash in good wishes and good will, and I am feeling loved, loved, loved. I'm feeling appreciated. Thank you like a flight of birds setting off, like warm breezes and like wine flowing. And snacks! Snacks flowing too.

I'm pasting in a great picture of Darling Christopher, who puts up with the most from the Finalist for the National Book Award.

In case anyone wants to know more about all the buzz, here are a few articles:

From the National Book Association:
http://www.nationalbook.org/index.html

From Publisher’s Weekly:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6702755.html?nid=3333

From the Kalamazoo Gazette:
http://www.mlive.com/entertainment/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2009/10/local_writers_bonnie_jo_campbe.html

From the Detroit Free Press
http://www.freep.com/article/20091014/FEATURES05/91014066/1322/Kalamazoo-author--little-WSU-Press-up-for-national-book-honor

From Chicago Reader
http://www.chicagoreader.com/TheBlog/archives/2009/10/15/bonnie-jo-campbell-national-book-award-finalist-in-fiction

For Sale From the Pole Barn

2009-08-20T20:28:00.000-07:00

As our 22nd wedding anniversary approaches (Aug. 21), the clutter increases, and we are trying to get rid of some things from the pole barn. For instance, the 120 gallons of fry grease we collected in order to make our own biodiesel; it seems unlikely now that we will make biodiesel, but surely somebody needs the grease. If you know that someone, please mention it. The grease is on our truck, which we cannot use to haul anything else until we get rid of 80 gallons of fry grease.

Does anyone want two whiskey barrels in great condition, with a little bit of whiskey in each.

And there is the little VW diesel rabbit truck with only a bit of rust. I don't want to sell it, but Chris says we should. The clincher is that Chris says he doesn't want to fix it any more. I'm not quite convinced, but if you think you have a buyer, send that person my way.

Chris absolutely wants to sell the old lawn tractor. He even put an ad on craigs list. Here it is:

Wheelhorse/Toro 212-5 Riding Mower- red like Satan! - $350 (Kalamazoo) 12 HP, 5 speed gear drive. Cuts up stuff good. Just the thing for dispersing that possum carcass on your lawn. Perfect for spraying gravel against the side of your meth-making neighbor's doublewide at 4 a.m. Kept inside under a chandelier when not being used to terrorize feral cats. Lights work for night-time zombie mowing. Can be used to drag lifeless objects deep, deep into the dark and silent woods. Never used on sanctified ground. Never abused by the clergy. May consider trades, but not for anything that needs to be fed. Blades could benefit from a good honing. Made of shiny, pitiless metal. Does not leak or squeal. Less trouble than a grass-eating goat, but not as delicious. Glistens wetly in the moonlight. Runs well. Slow to anger.

Bringing in the Hay

2009-07-28T20:14:00.000-07:00

Last summer our family hay field produced 230 bales of grass hay; this is an amount of hay that can be stacked on trucks and put away in the barn in one evening by whatever gang of people my brother George wrangles up. This year George produced numerous children and assorted (current and former) boyfriends of his daughters to help load the hay. There were six of us lugging bales and one kid driving, George's youngest, Matt. My Ford 350 with the stake bed holds 65 bales easily, and the other Ford pick up holds about 45 without showing stress.

However, we did not take into account what it meant that Susanna had fertilized the field this spring, for the first time in thirty-five years. Instead of 230 bales of hay, there were 500. We got the baling underway by about 7 p.m., and everybody was worn out by 11 p.m., and we were only half done.

So after 11 p.m., I came home and grilled Christopher a chicken and cheese sandwich (he gets home at 11:35 p.m.), but then could not sleep for worrying about the forecast, 30% chance of rain, turning to 50% chance later in the morning. At four o'clock I got up and looked at the weather radar and saw blue specks all over the place. At 4:30, I headed back out to the hayfield with some big tarps. At least I could get some of the hay under cover.

A few hours of dragging bales across the lower field into two long pyramidal stacks nearly killed me. By the time the sun rose, the twine had battered my hands through my work gloves; my arms ached, my neck and wrists were scratched. My legs were also scratched from the previous night, when wore long shorts rather than pants. I was so tired. And I had gotten maybe 140 bales under cover. There were still almost that many in the field.

The thing with hay is that, quality-wise, it is a delicate commodity. This hay got rained on the night it was cut, and so it was already very much compromised. It would never be beautiful and green and soft like the best grass hay. But if the finished bales got rained on, in addition, the hay would have been awful and it might have rotted in the barn, or worse, if it really was wet when we put it up, a fire hazard.

Anyway, I got finished tarping the hay, brought one small load into the barn, then came home and looked at the radar. Storm centers were rolling toward us across Benton Harbor, sixty miles to the west. So I grabbed my neighbor Jim Coe and his son, Evan, and paid them to come out and help me load two trucks up. We got those bales under cover, though not stacked in their permanent locations. The barn is cluttered and crowded.

After George got home from work, he cleared the last 22 bales from the field, and all the hay is under cover for now. Susanna is off in West Virginia at a music festival, but she can't really move hay any more anyhow.

There's still plenty more to do. We need to sell the 140 bales that are still in the field, under the tarps, or else stack it in another barn, but disaster was averted. Oh, I don't know where this is going, but I am just feeling overwhelmed by it, by the fertility of the field, by the work to be done in this life, heavy lifting and otherwise. Everything seems overwhelming these days. Though I do less than a lot of other people (say, those with young kids), I feel the strain of projects needing to be done. For years I have meant to repaint the bathroom. Six years ago, I tiled 2/3 of the hallway, and haven't gotten to the rest of it. The donkey pasture needs to be re-fenced. I've never trained my donkeys to do anything significant, though I've meant to. I've always thought I'd find a way to spend a few months walking around Michigan with one or both of my donkeys, just wander town to town, sleep on the ground. It's likely I'll never do it. I wanted to spend a year learning to breathe the right away. I've wanted to build an excellent tree fort. I thought I'd write a lot of books, dozens of them, and send them out into the world. The weight of all the things I'm not getting done is dragging on me.

I had invited Amy Newday, poet and former dairy farmer, to come help with the hay, but she couldn't. She wrote me afterward:

"I was actually feeling regretful last night that I had to get up & teach this morning so I couldn't volunteer to help you. I do miss haying--the intensity of it (we were always squeezing it in between milkings) and especially that moment when you finally get your tired body into bed afterwards and the exquisiteness of not having to move any part of you and the bed is just so deliciously soft."

She's right. It feels good to have tired muscles, and to have finished a job, to have gotten the hay out of the rain's way. Maybe that's the thing, and a good night's sleep will ready me for the next job.

The top photo is Chris's favorite photo of Susanna, with our big truck; lower photo is Rick Campbell's, featuring horse being trimmed by Drew Anderson. Children are Sheila & Tom Campbell, plus Danny Wickman.

Twice-Baked Pie

2009-07-05T18:28:00.000-07:00

This weekend a bunch of us got together on the island in the St. Joseph River to celebrate the 100th year of Frank Herlihy, but we didn't end up talking much about FWH (or "Herlihy, you old stink," as Bob Ardrey called him in a letter I brought along, but did not read.) Instead the formal portion of the event was made up of Sam Lipson, Mimi Lipson, and Sonia Lipson (respectively) leading praise of (Uncle) Terry Herlihy, Susanna, and Joanna Herlihy. Those three children of FWH seemed to be just fine with this.

We then attended 12 minutes of fireworks in St. Joseph, and were dumbfounded by the hour-long traffic jam getting out of town. We found that the police had closed off one lane of highway 63, for apparently no reason. Perhaps they needed the overtime. Afterward we spent many hours talking around a campfire. Twenty of us stayed the night in the two river cottages.

We celebrated Kellee's birthday on Sunday, with a twice-baked pie. Or perhaps we'll call it a pie casserole. Here's the recipe. One person accidentally baked a sour cherry pie without sugar. So we took that pie, tipped it upside down in a pan and broke it up until the (delicious homemade butter-based) crust was broken into bite sized pieces. Added some sugar, some sour cherry juice, and some very soft cream cheese and swirled it around a bit. Then we baked the mess until it was good and hot, until some crustiness formed on the crust-bits that were on the top. We cooled it, and then we striped it generously with an icing made of cream cheese, butter, half and half and confectioners sugar. It was a hit all around, especially with vanilla ice cream.

As I write this, many Lipsons & assorted others are traveling across the eastern U.S. on an Amtrak train that will go from Chicago (where Sonia, Felix & Lucy board the train) to South Bend, Indiana (where Mimi, Sam, Luc, Joanna and Ava get on), to Albany (where Mimi and Luc get off), and switching to Boston, final destination. Imagine it, a train full of Lipsons!

The above photo features Ben, Susanna and Terry; the picture below is Kellee & self with twice-baked pie.

Farm Auction

2009-06-14T18:27:00.000-07:00

Thousands and thousands of items. Nine by fourteen foot fiberglass pre-formed greenhouse, cider press, brush hog to pull behind the Ford 8N tractor are all things we could use. The auctioneer at the back was selling tap extractors, trouble lights, a meat scale, machine gauges, mostly to men in baseball caps and flannel shirts. Piles of C-clamps, rooms full of well oiled machines that weigh tons, little wooden boxes of drill bits and taps, box of army gloves, cigar boxes full of screws. The auctioneer said, “Tube bender and tube cutter, who will give me five?” He said, “The knives and the traps together. Who will give me three?” He holds up some rusty old leg traps. Yow. Two compasses, who will give him two? He asked. He held up some sort of metal bits in metal boxes, and says, “Call ‘em what you want when you get ‘em home, when they belong to you.” I asked a guy in a Nascar cap, what was that tool you just bought for three dollars that looks like the capital letter F with a few extra horizontals? He said it was a “tool for breaking flat chains on elevators.” Another man wore a cap that said “Global warming is Bull Crap,” and he bought some odd lengths of tow chain. Over in the tent, the other auctioneer asked for bids for “anything in the box under the table.” An Amish man bought all the pickle crocks and twenty-seven five-gallon glass bottles. The auctioneer was pushing a thousand fishing lures. “Shakespeare Mouse, and another one that wants to be a Shakespeare mouse,” he said. The “tiger” variety of the Shakespeare Mouse went for eight dollars; everything else went for less. All the while, one black-haired woman was standing there knitting a Christmas baby blanket in red and green and white, watching the auctioneer intently, maybe waiting for the cider press to come up. I waited a long time to go use the Porta-potty, and then when I finally went in, it wasn't so bad, except that the door didn't shut and the toilet lid kept closing on my back. Forty eight fishing poles, piles of timing gears, ball peen hammers, metal files, a book "The Machinist’s Practical Book." Box of snap rings. “Ain’t no friends at an auction,” the auctioneer said. Chris bid to sixty dollars on the cider press; the Amish man wanted us to sell him the brass sausage stuffing attachment inside, but we figured we’d better keep our options open; maybe one day we will want to stuff sausage skins with our cider press. The greenhouse went for $290, too rich for our blood, seeing how hard it was going to be to get the thing home. A woman set up a tent and sold brats and chips and soda pop. The man in charge was a grandson of the owner of the stuff; the grandmother was still alive, he said, but she didn't want to come. The atmosphere was not festive, exactly, but it was not so dreary either. The grandson was about forty years old and chatty. He told us stories. He said, "Lord, we just want to get rid of this stuff."

Would You Take Fashion Advice from These Folks?

2009-05-28T19:30:00.000-07:00

I know what to wear at the dojo: my gi with black belt and no shoes. In the garden and barnyard I wear jeans, T-shirt and cheap canvas tennies or workboots. I have difficulty dressing for any other environment. Teaching is a great challenge, because I have to try not to wear the same outfit every class. I'm trying to get some shoes or sandals to wear for teaching in June; I thought I'd found a pair: black, rubbery, comfy. I put them on after kobudo class and Kristina (who has just returned from France) said, "no." Josh, who has a special room in his house just for his shoes said, "are they comfortable?" Eric says, "They can't decide what kind of shoes they want to be. Sporty or elegant or summery. But I like them," he said. I will return the shoes to Meijers and try to formulate a new plan.

At the bar after working out, I pitched around the table for general fashion advice. Kristina advises wearing "anything leopard print." She was wearing a knee-length tight-bodice sleeveless leopard-print dress, leopard-print earrings and barrettes, and a pair of medium-heel, pointy-toed leopard-print pumps. Her sister Tori Grace said, "Filipinas are shoe whores." (The sisters have that in common with Imelda Marcos.) Jamie Blake suggested, "Short people should wear pointy-toed shoes." Tori Grace suggests that bandanas are always a good fashion accessory, but you need to research gang signs before you get too creative. Most days, Tori says she wears a long tank top, a short tank top and two belts. Eric, who is talking about buying knee-high converse tennis shoes, says, "T-shirts and jeans work for every occasion. For formal wear, add a denim jacket." Phil, who is holding hands with Kristina says, "Black. Everything goes with black, especially black." Shihan Wayne Kroll says he just tries to remember to put on his pants.

Meet My Brother George

2009-05-17T18:40:00.000-07:00

I recall from my youth a cartoon in which Bugs Bunny was was playing the piano, and he turns to face the "camera" and says, "I wish my brother George were here." Christopher says this is a reference to Liberace, who had a brother George, and who wished that brother was there. To me it had seemed profound, because I, in fact, had a little brother George, six years younger than me. I used to make him pancakes in the shapes of rabbits, snakes, and other animals. Recently George, nicknamed Geo, needed me to write a biography for him to put on the Geek Group website (http://www.thegeekgroup.org/). It was fun; this (below) is what I came up with, though George didn't want to mention his middle name, which is Timothy. The rumor is that Timothy Leary came to Kalamazoo and gave my dad acid, and hence the middle name. Pasted in is an old photo of Geo.

George (T.) Campbell

George Campbell was born in 1968, and grew up on a small farm in Comstock, Michigan, where he learned to fix machines, find lost objects, load trucks with hay or anything, herd critters back into their pens and generally work hard. At a young age he was able to look at a machine or a system and figure out how it worked. He is resourceful and quite famous among his family and friends for being able to fix anything with baling wire and duct tape.

George is the person to call if there is water spurting from burst pipes in the ceiling or if a furnace seems to have exploded, or if your horses and donkeys have gotten loose and are running through the neighborhood. George can set posts and fence a pasture with the best of them. He is always generous with his time and talents, though his wife wishes he would spend more time fixing up things around the house, maybe remodeling the bathroom. In a difficult situation, George never loses his cool; he looks at every situation calmly and with a sense of humor.

On George’s sixth birthday, he received his first tool, a small adjustable crescent wrench, and he has been collecting tools ever since, retrieving them from the weeds sometimes when his brother got mad and threw them. When George was twelve he rebuilt the power take off clutch on the family’s farm tractor. When he was sixteen, George got tired of listening to his siblings fight and so lived in his van for a while. Later, he lived with his friend Ed in a house with three snakes (two pythons and a boa constrictor) that roamed around loose and preferred George’s waterbed to any other sleeping spot.

George worked for eighteen years for Comstock Public Schools, until the school system recently privatized their custodial and maintenance staff. He had worked his way up from general cleaning to building and grounds maintenance. He currently is employed as “the outside guy” at Loy Norrix High School in Kalamazoo, taking care of the sports fields and lawns. His previous jobs included roofing, brick tending and greenhouse work.

George’s background is mechanical rather than scientific, and his knowledge base is practical rather than theoretical. He passed he G.E.D. with scores than put him in the top 3% of high school graduates. George is also known as a person who can get along well with all sorts of different people and can make good use of the skills of others to get work done.

George regularly operates a forklift, a Case 731 diesel tractor with Rotovator, and a Ford 8-N with a Wagner Loader. He and his wife Darcy have three wild children (Krystal, Kayla, and Matthew) and one grandchild, Julianna. When he has spare time, he fishes for blue gills at Three Lakes, and he plays World of Warcraft.

Pin the Tail on This

2009-04-24T10:56:00.000-07:00

Christopher had the two useless 275-gallon oil tanks in the back yard, and so he got out his torch and cut a nearly life sized donkey form out of one of them, so that we can play pin the tail on the donkey at Bell's Brewery during the book release party party, May 24. (Of course blindfolded people with stick pins was out of the question, so we will use tails connected to magnets.) Also, I just got this bright idea of taking the giant ball of string to the brewery, in order to give it away to someone as a prize. I'm going to call it "Kalamazoo's Biggest Ball of String," and see if anybody can prove me wrong. I love the giant ball of string, that my nice Kellee got from her friend Matt, and I love it when the cat sits on top of it, but Chris is tired of the hundred pound eyesore. Kellee thinks we should keep it. But she doesn't think I should keep the dried marshmallow that I have been saving. "You can't save everything," she said. But this marshmallow is special: when I visited the Geek Group Headquarters out on North Burdick Street, the leader, Chris "Duck" Boden put this marshmallow on top of the seven-foot-high Tesla coil and shot purple lightning through it. Then he stuck it to a pop can that he exploded with a giant pulse of electricity. It's a marshmallow with stories to tell. She confesses she once saved heart-shaped sugar-coated gum drops for a long time for sentimental reasons. She said she tried spraying some kind of clear coating on them, but it didn't work. I don't want to save everything, not really. I mean, I'm willing to give up my great great aunt Marie's silver coffee percolator set with tray, sugar bowl and creamer, so long as it went to someone with some sentimentality. But we're definitely keeping the porcelain rabbit head lamp with the glowing red eyes that Chris just made. We hung it up on the porch, and now when we're drinking out there, we can call our establishment "The White Rabbit." Cheers!

Furnace Adventures

2009-04-12T19:35:00.000-07:00

A couple of years ago, our oil burner died. Most people, faced with this situation would have paid the gas company to lay another hundred twenty feet of gas line and switch to gas, but we decided to stick with fuel oil. Our furnace man convinced us to buy a Thermopride furnace (he said it was the only kind he would install), made right down in Indiana, life-time warranty on the fire box. All in all, we got us a solid piece of American machinery. And it even looks good, a porcelain enamel surface in a mauve color.

http://www.thermopride.com/

So when we saw an exact copy of our $2000 furnace at the Re-Store second hand building supply store for $100, we couldn't resist buying it, so Chris could heat his pole barn, to more comfortably work on my car. Some guys at the Re-Store helped us load it in the truck, but Chris unloaded it all by himself. Here is a picture of him doing it with the use of his Ford 8N.

Well, it turned out that was the easy part, getting the furnace. Now he needed an oil tank. His friend Jonas, who lives downtown, has been wanting to get an old 275-gallon tank out of his basement for years, and so Chris spent a good part of a day extracting this steel tank from Jonas's basement, again, by himself (though I helped load it on the truck.) He got this all the way home before realizing the bottom of the tank was covered with pinhole leaks.

So now my brother George gave Chris another 275-gallon tank, the better of the two he had lying in his side yard. We got it on the truck and home before Chris discovered pin hole leaks around the intake valve. Shoot. Does anybody have a mint condition oil tank (without leaks) to donate? I'll help put it on the truck.

Surviving 4th Grade

2009-03-29T20:07:00.000-07:00

My mother's been cleaning her desk, and when I stopped over there today to feed the donkeys, she handed me my fourth grade "progress report." My most impressive attribute was my perfect attendance. The areas in which I was evaluated included "work habits" "social development" "health and safety." Apparently I listened attentively, followed directions and worked without disturbing others, but my social development was lacking. Especially low were my "self confidence" and "takes care of personal belongings." The academic areas were also evaluated. My strongest area was mathematics, and my weakest was handwriting. Also I was weak in music and physical education. My language skills were adequate, but I had low marks in "writes creatively" and "exhibits interest in creative writing." My 4th grade teacher, Mrs. G, had also been my second grade teacher. The greatest burden in being in Mrs. G's class was that she picked her nose and then ate it. This habit of hers saddened me so profoundly I could not look her in the eye. Some of her written comments on this report seem cryptic. For example, she wrote, "Bonnie does seem to be trying to be more original in her writing. Bonnie has made many adjustments this year and I feel has come to appreciate them. She is accepting new situations with more enthusiasm." I can't help but feel touched, however, that she finished with, "I'll certainly miss having her around."

Big Boy

2009-03-15T20:16:00.000-07:00

Christopher and I were out exercising the big Ford truck, testing the brakes, and we noticed that the neighborhood ostrich was running around in its pen, so we figured now was a good time to get some photos of the big fellow. The weather was warm today, giving the illusion that winter was over, and seeing the ostrich made us glad that one of the original six birds had lasted its fourteenth winter in Michigan. Ostriches are native to South Africa. We knocked on the door of the house at the corner of Market and Sprinkle, and Hannah, who is about eighty years old shushed her two dogs (mixed breed cocker spaniel and mini daschunds)and invited us to walk through her house and into the back yard to get up close and personal to Big Boy. He's seven feet tall, eight when he stretches up, and very ostrichy. Last time I'd stopped and visited the ostriches a few years ago, she'd seemed fed up with them, was complaining that her son hadn't taken them to his place as he had promised to do. She'd still had a couple females then, and she used to sell the eggs for ten dollars a piece if she could get them out of the pen without being attacked. Each of the eggs contained as much as twenty four chicken eggs, she said. When I ask her about the progress of her injury, she pulls up her pant leg and shows me the big gash of a scar. She'd been trying to administer worm medicine to the ostrich Renegade (R.I.P.) and he'd kicked her with his big front claw, and the tear went to the shin bone. Hannah's husband died last year, and when I expressed my sympathies, she reached through the chain link and scratched Big Boy's neck. She can't let him bite her any more, because her skin has grown too delicate that his beak tears her. It costs her about a hundred dollars a month to feed Big Boy. But that's okay, she says. She seems to appreciate the bird's companionship. Her dogs have soft teeth, she explains, she has to brush them weekly. She's wearing a sweater the color of a purple crocus, and after we leave, she lounges in a lawn chair near the Ostrich pen, with her two dogs at her side. The sun shines on her.

Outbuildings

2009-02-26T20:17:00.000-08:00

Today I slid open the barn door at Susanna's farm in order to feed the donkeys, and a red fox jumped up from the straw, looked me in the eye, and then turned his snout toward the other door and ran out into the pasture, out into the rain. I felt bad that I'd disturbed the creature. I guess rain is better than snow overall, seeing we've had way too much snow already.

On the way home, I saw both of Steve Barrett's old work trucks parked in front of his shop in Comstock. (A few years ago Steve built Susanna's big pole barn, the one with the fox in it.) He bought the best building in Comstock, a big old lumber warehouse, didn't pay much for it either, so I heard. Anyway, I needed Steve and Mike to come look at the garage I accidentally purchased at the tax sale. It's swaybacked like an ancient over-used mare. Well, the bad news is that the winter's heavy snows have taken their toll, and it's leaking pretty bad, not to mention listing and rotting in spots. "You need a whole new roof, my dear," Steve said. Ideally I would get a building permit, tear it down to its cinder blocks, put up all new trusses, sheathing, shingles.

Of course I am who I am, so I begged him to consider the lesser repair, the hobbling together, the propping up, the patching. He poked his measuring tape into the soft bluish wood of the ceiling, said he'd think about the options and talk to me soon. He said it would be a real good idea to get some ten foot two-by-fours to prop under the wettest of the noodling rafters. I really thought I could get six of them in my Honda station wagon, and I did, only I shouldn't have tried to close the hatchback. The resulting crack in my windshield was bearable only because I returned home to learn my new collection, American Salvage, has been given a starred review in Booklist.

My AWP

2009-02-15T20:29:00.000-08:00

Holy Crap. Last time I went to the AWP conference for creative writers, it was in Kansas City in the year 2000 and there were, like, maybe 2000 people. This year in Chicago there were 8000. I didn't see hundreds of people who I knew were there. Highlights included Dorothy Allison's very dirty story that might have been entitled "Frog Fucking," a real performance piece. After that, nobody else would have been able to concentrate on literature, and so it was appropriate that out came Mucca Pazza (Italian for "Crazy Cow"), a 40-piece circus punk marching band that was the most exciting performance I've ever heard and seen. Did I mention that all this took place in a giant ballroom, complete with big glass chandeliers and all the old decor, seating four thousand. The band did klezmer and mariachi and at one point a guy with a megaphone on his head played gypsy violin. Another highlight was the room reserved by Susan Ramsey on the 17th floor, with big full view of the lake and part of Millennium Park and Grant Park. Another high point was my getting to hear Robert Owen Butler use the phrase "white-hot center." And then there was Art Spiegelman speaking for 70 minutes on the history of Comix. But about those 8000 writers. Wow. That's a lot of aspiring writers, quadrupled in nine years. At this rate, we'll have 32,000 writers in year 2018. We won't be able to meet in a hotel; we'll have to take over an entire town. I worry that we're creating a big Ponzi scheme, all teaching more people to write, promising they'll be able to find work or publishing opportunities the way Madoff promised monetary returns. On the other hand, maybe all these writers will create so much incredible writing that Americans will burst out reading. Americans will turn off their TVs and Ipods and pick up their chapbooks and novels and read.

Planet of the Blind

2009-01-29T11:07:00.000-08:00

Take any man, add a dog, and you’ve got a better man. If you need any more proof of this, go read Steve Kuusisto’s memoir Planet of the Blind. It is beautiful, funny, heart wrenching, and also gut wrenching. If you meet this self-possessed and accomplished Kuusisto person, who teaches at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, you will not believe he was ever as insecure and self-hating as he seems throughout the first three quarters of his memoir. Kuusisto had the weird fortune to be brought into the world by middle class parents who stubbornly refused to accept that their kid was blind; following their example, he himself chose to deny his blindness for decades and so wandered around inside a dim kaleidoscope, pretending the light shards added up a visible world. When he finally took a cane in hand, he realized he needed a dog.

Read this book. Kuusisto writes with plain honesty and dark sweetness, and if you are not blind, then he knows a lot that you don’t know. And the book has a happy ending. You can’t beat that.

And this book will probably make you realize you need a dog. Not a seeing eye dog, necessarily, but maybe a staying sober dog, a dog who will growl when you are about to drink too much. A story-telling dog who will bark when you start to tell the same story again to the same group of people, or a stomach-eating dog who will prevent shameful acts of overindulgence. We all need the brain-thinking dog, the heart-loving dog, the start-dancing dog. You will admire the adventuring Steve Kuusisto in this book, as he falls in love and falls into wet cement (literally), as he travels to Helsinki and encounters the most surreal carnival of humans you’ve ever seen, um, I mean, encountered. Until you get hold of the book, read his blog ( http://www.planet-of-the-blind.com/ ) to hear his rants about disability politics and poetry. If you go to his entry for January 27, 2009, you can link to a You-tube video of “Kuusisto Does the Kennedy Nixon Debate.” Kuusisto-as-Nixon makes his points using poetry by Wallace Stevens, while Kuusisto-as-Kennedy channels William Carlos Williams.

In Seaside, Oregon, Steve Kuusisto and I were both teaching at a residency for Pacific University's MFA creative writing program, and at dinner one evening, he told an anecdote about Babe Ruth eating at his grandparents’ apartment in New York (the Babe wouldn’t eat the asparagus they’d gone to great lengths to acquire out of season—can you guess why?) In the bar one night, Steve sang out Doris Lessing poems in the voice of Bob Dylan. Our table was kind of crowded, and his dog, Kira, was lying partly under my chair. I had made a point of respecting Kira’s working-dog status, but at the critical moment, when the wild swirl of humans was getting to be too much, the good man let me pet his dog.

Jack Driscoll is an Angel

2009-01-20T20:01:00.000-08:00

Jack Driscoll lives in northern Michigan and teaches fiction writing to graduate students at the Pacific University low residency MFA program in Oregon, and when the folks there were looking for another fiction writer, he put my name forward, and Lordy, Lordy, I got hired, and I just spent ten days in Seaside, Oregon on the seaside, teaching and listening and meeting writers and students. I had been starting to worry that I was too goofy and exuberant and peculiar to ever find a place I could teach and belong without moving away from home, and Jack has generously helped me find a place. I pause here to go outside in the cold Michigan air and cry out my gratitude. At the ten-day residency, I was looking forward to spending time with Jack Driscoll; he's a quiet and mysterious fellow, always kind. He was one of the readers of my new book, American Salvage, suggesting to Wayne State University Press that they publish it, and also he offered me some good suggestions for editing. Jack is also an angel because when his latest book was published, How Like an Angel he came to my class at Kalamazoo College for nothing more than traveling expenses, which was all that I could get the school to pay him. On the third day of the residency in Oregon, something terrible happened. Fiction writer Pete Fromm had a heart attack, one of those bad ones. Jack accompanied Pete to the hospital and stayed with him for more than a day until Pete's wife could get there to take over care. (Pete's going to be okay, they said.) I shared the teaching of a workshop with Jack, so that we alternated teaching days and the students told me how much they loved him, and they told me that he shared with them his CD of eighteen versions of Danny Boy. On the last night of the reading series at Pacific, we read together, and it was an honor, but I can't say I know him any better for spending time with him, except that I am more convinced he is a wondrous spirit. In this world of writing, we need to construct writing families. My writing mama has always been Jaimy Gordon, my first writing teacher, but I've never had a papa. I'd be too shy to ask Jack to fill that role, but next time I see him, I'll try to get him to agree to becoming some sort of uncle, weird or otherwise.

When the Ee-rye-ee's a Rising and the Gin is Getting Low

2009-01-04T20:04:00.001-08:00

My mom sings that lyric whenever we get flood warnings for the St. Joseph River. It's from a song written by Bobby Darrin and Walter Raim in 1962, the year I was born. The chorus is:

Ooh ... the ER-I-EE was risin'
And the gin was gettin’ low
And I scarcely think
We'll get a little drink
til we get to Buffalo
'til we get to Buffalo.

Well, just last week the river was real high and frozen and then the ice melted all of a sudden and a lot of loose ice came piling down the river fast and hard, so hard it knocked down the tree to which my uncle Terry's float was attached with a cable and so the float went loose. On the float were chained two aluminum boats. We knew the float was gone, and we figured it had just traveled down the road and got stuck on somebody's dock, but then I got a call from the coast guard. And they send me this note, because one of the aluminum boats was last registered in Darling Christopher's name.

Dear Mrs. Magson

Your vessels and dock are located on the Morrison Channel in Saint Joseph just abeam Ann Street at the very first set of private docks on the left hand side as depicted on the attached chart.

Good luck with the recovery efforts, and please call if you have any questions or concerns.

JD Ryan
Auxiliary Flotilla Commander
Communications Watchstander

First of all, what a delight to know there is an Auxiliary Flotilla Commander and a Communications Watchstander, and so much the better that he will help me with recovery efforts and use words like "abeam." (You might also note that I was communicating in the guise of the innocuous "Mrs. Magson," a persona I have found valuable as people called "Mrs." seem harmless to men in the public sphere.) The surprise was that the float traveled a lot farther than just down the road. It traveled about five miles, almost all the way to Lake Michigan.

My brother George drove to St. Joseph with his friend Todd, whose house was full of in-laws, and they found the float, unloaded the boats, returned them to the island, but couldn't figure out how to get the float back up without a powerful boat or a crane and a big truck. George sent me this google map to show me the path the float traveled. Have current, will flow!

Christmas Eve Roll Call

2008-12-25T17:04:00.000-08:00

Winter storm warning, winter weather advisory, freezing rain, heavy snow. That's been the story for the last week or so. Susanna's (my mom's) long driveway was treacherous. I got stuck in the driveway the previous day, but had to hope for the best. I picked up Denise Martin in Parchment and brought her (with oxygen), backing up partway down the drive. Three hours later when I drove Denise home, I was stuck, but with help from Matt Schwartz and David Magson (and when I managed to put the car into drive... oops!) Sheila and Matt Schwartz made it just fine in the minivan. George and Matt Campbell came in the four-wheel-drive truck, so they were fine. Darcy and Kayla and Krystal Campbell got in and out. Gina Betcher did fine as well, in her car, parking pretty far from the house, carrying two good bottles of wine. Tom Campbell didn't do as well; he got his rear-wheel-drive truck stuck in slush-covered ice partway up the drive; he fought to get free and when he finally did, he was so annoyed he turned around and drove himself and Kennedy back home again, so we didn't have their company. If Tom had made it, then we wouldn't have overcooked the beef so it wasn't pink. Susanna was quite sad about that. Mike Messer ventured down from his home in the workshop to have a glass of wine. After dinner and the gift exchange Loring ended up giving Kellee Campbell a guitar lesson, and she paid dutiful attention. Kellee wanted to be free to drink too much wine, so her papa Mike agreed to stay sober so he could drive her home (he left his little truck at Kellee's house rather than even attempt the driveway). Julianna was the only little kid, and we kept her occupied with foods containing no eggs or nuts (oh, those allergies). Paul, fiance of Krystal showed up after 8:00 when he got out of work; he was so cold from working outside at Meijer's gas station that he couldn't even eat. Darling Christopher was not with us; until eleven-twenty that evening he was saturating moist toilettes with acne medication and putting them in foil packets. The cold and harsh weather has emboldened the deer, so they're coming close to the house to eat the birdseed and yew bushes. I tell those deer they're going to be venison if they're not careful. They do look healthy.

One Wild Day

2008-12-20T06:38:00.000-08:00

My pal Susan Ramsey, erstwhile bookseller, is a connoisseur of book covers, and she has long maintained that in order to sell, a book should have a face on the color or the color red. She is speaking from experience of trying to distract humans as they travel from the front door of the independent bookstore to the table in the middle where the Harry Potter books are

Here’s the new paperback cover of the new German version of Q Road, translated as “Ein Wilder Tag,” One Wild Day. I nearly wept for joy when I saw it. Though I can’t read a word in it (beyond my name and the names in the acknowledgments page), I’ve dragged my own copy of the new book around town and made everybody look at it. I just never dreamed I’d have a book on whose cover a beautiful little boy is stroking his, um, ...chicken. It’s super fun to be published in German, and I can only imagine how brilliant my translator is; she only asked me about ten questions during the translation process, including “what is finch seed”? After this lovely book, whatever else gets published now with my name on the cover is gravy. Of course I immediately wrote to the German Editor at Droemer-Knaur, Caroline Graehl, suggesting they should buy the German rights to American Salvage. One must always be marketing oneself, and it doesn’t necessarily take away from the joy.

This picture is the cover of the hardcover German edition, 2004.

Susanna Despises, Endures Hospital

2008-12-02T18:06:00.000-08:00

“This feels like a wake,” Susanna said, looking around the room at us through one eye. The other eye was angry red and swelled shut . This was last Monday, three days before Thanksgiving. Susanna, my mother, was smoking her last cigarette and sipping her last vodka drink before turning herself in. The mournful onlookers included Loring Janes, Chris Magson, the singing contractor Steve Barrett,and his sidekick Mike, and myself. Steve and Mike had spent the day in the barnyard, working on rebuilding the old chicken barn. Nobody was dead or dying, but Susanna was getting ready to go into the hospital for an indeterminate stay. Susanna hates the hospital more than anything, and yet her eye was swollen like a fleshy red golf ball, and she knew they were going to keep her for a while.

They did tests and took blood, and the eye guy determined it was an eye socket infection. Apparently they couldn’t tell what sort of infection it was, because she’d been taking the antibiotic Keflax for four days and it might have masked the bacteria. They kept her, kicking and screaming (or at least wandering the halls and complaining bitterly), giving her dose after dose of antibiotics vancomycin (the treatment for MRSA staph infection). Susuanna missed Thanksgiving, which was held at my house. My brother George took a cell phone picture of her eye at its worst, but she’d probably kill me if I posted it here. The photo I've posted is from this summer.

Susanna kept quoting a statistic suggesting that most people die in the hospital of something they didn’t have when they came in. When, during Susanna’s stay, her roommate was diagnosed with a MRSA staph infection, Susanna said, “See, precisely why I shouldn’t be in here.” She packed up her cloth bag of books and dragged it down the hall to her new room. She wore jeans and a sweat shirt—there was no reason to put on a gown when her whole reason for this “incarceration” was to get three doses of intravenous antibiotics a day. She calls it a waste of tax payer money, making medicare pay for a bed for her, when a creative medical system could have found a way to administer the antibiotics on an outpatient basis.

Her attending physician, a tiny Hospitalist, might have liked to keep her longer, but let her go on Sunday, and so Susanna rushed home and put her feet up on her desk. Except for the ruined digestion from the drugs, she’s pretty much back to normal. Except that she can still only see out of one eye.

Culture Wars

2008-11-16T18:17:00.001-08:00

I was invited to visit Albion College, along with John Rybicki, to do a Q & A and a reading. Susan Ramsey came along to knit a sock and keep us company. The Q & A was interesting; the two classes attending were an advanced poetry workshop (taught by Julie Stotz-Ghosh) who'd read John Rybicki's book of poems, We Bed Down Into Water and a basic writing class (taught by Nels Christensen) whose members had read a few of my stories. Folks asked John Rybicki how he wrote a poem and he talked about running across the roofs of garages as a twelve year old and being filled with electricity; he spoke about his body becoming a shaft of light. And I said, well, sometimes you can't stop rolling a thing around in your head and so you write about it. The coolest thing is that Nels Christensen knows Carolyn Chute and loves her the way I love her, as a writer and a philosopher and a warm person (with a new book just out, The School on Heart's Content Road). The recent NYT Book Review had an article that made a great deal out of Carolyn Chute's being the head of the 2nd Maine Militia, which is a whole story in and of itself. So Nels and I were talking about guns, and he said that he thought more liberals should have guns, because otherwise the other side would have all the guns. Lately I've been thinking that maybe the main difference between the sides in the culture war is that some folks are most concerned about the first amendment, while others are most concerned about the second. We believe in all the amendments, but we prioritize them differently. And that's not really such a big difference as it's made out to be. And there are some people like Carolyn Chute who work hard to protect both amendments. (There is probably a sizeable list of gun-loving writers if anyone wanted to collect it, including Hunter S. Thompson and Pinckney Benedict, for sure.) My darling Christopher says, paraphasing Robert Heinlein, that we citizens should always cast our votes in such a way that we choose more freedom over less, whether it's to allow guns or gay marriages. So Albion was a great trip all around, finishing up with a nice dinner at a bar, and Susan Ramsey was of great assistance in conversation as she remembered everything I could not remember. While we're on the topic of guns, here's a picture of my pal Shawn Wagner and me after we were shooting clay pigeons at the Wagners.

Handgun Owners for Barack Obama

2008-11-06T07:17:00.000-08:00

The day that Obama became our president elect, the On Target gun store called Christopher to tell him his .357 was back; he'd bought it a few weeks ago but the first time he cleaned it, he had discovered a machining flaw on the rifling inside the barrel, so they sent it back to Smith & Wesson. People around here were all cheery about Obama, but at the gun store folks were apparently grumbling. Christopher saw two twenty-year-olds leaving the store with a new purchase; one said to the other, "I guess we can go shoot some illegal immigrants now." Inside the store, a man said to the clerk, "I guess I'd better buy a gun before January 20." The guy behind the counter told the guy he didn't think there was any immediate cause for concern to gun buyers. There are lots of bumper stickers at the gun store, classics such as

THEY CAN HAVE MY GUN WHEN THEY PRY IT FROM MY COLD DEAD FINGERS.

and TED KENNEDY'S CAR HAS KILLED MORE PEOPLE THAN MY GUN

and THE WEST WASN'T WON WITH A REGISTERED GUN

There was AMERICA'S PRECIOUS METALS: GOLD, SILVER, LEAD

Christopher's favorite was a newish one, that was supposed to be a dig at the democratic congress.

WHEN THE DEMOCRATS GOT INTO CONGRESS, GAS WAS 2.20 A GALLON

On the way home, after Democrats swept the elections, Christopher noticed that gas was selling for $2.14.

Screen Porch Blog

2008-10-16T19:40:00.000-07:00

I just posted a blog at the screen porch literary blog, where I put all the stuff related to my literary adventures, especially my forthcoming story collection. However, I forgot to mention that I read as part of the Paper Dolls poetry reading at the library, and that I read at a Baptist church as part of Banned Books Weeks. Oh, and I'm taking a poetry class from Con Hillberry, and we are reading John Rybicki's poems right now from his new book We Bed Down Into Water; also I met with my Dawgs Poetry group and found out Elizabeth Kerlikowske just had her PhD Thesis (a creative thesis) accepted for publication by Wayne State University Press. And everybody around me is reading interesting books. And one of my students, Jordan, just told the whole class that he loved literature and lived for reading and writing. Life is so darned full, it's hard to get it all wrote down.
http://screenporchlit.blogspot.com/

Congratulations Josh, Kyle, Shihan Wayne

2008-10-05T07:13:00.000-07:00

Josh Yoder and Kyle Watts got their black belts in Koburyu Karate. Takashi Kinjo Kaicho of Okinawa, head of our style, presided over the test in Lincoln, Nebraska in September. On the right in the photo is our Shihan Wayne Kroll, who just received his Roku-dan, sixth degree black belt, in both Karate and Kobudo (weapons arts). Josh and Kyle did us all proud and looked strong, fast and tough in their public test. I wish our Sensei Janel were pictured here, but she was unable to go to Lincoln to see the tests this year.

I am very proud to say that I have managed to work my way up to a Ni-dan, a second degree black belt in Kobudo, and that makes me feel very humble, as though I have a lot to live up to. Martial arts does that to you; as you grow faster and tougher and stronger, you are better able to study those who are even faster, tougher, and stronger than you, and so you know how much work you have left to do. (The above is not my usual writing style, you will notice, but is more like truisms or platitudes. Martial arts changes a person, even a writing style.)

Normally, I am the kind of person who might be kicked out of a martial arts class—though I am hard working, I also argue with the teacher and question accepted wisdom, and I’m not as respectful of authority as most martial artists. I’m fortunate that our art is more tolerant than most. I’d like to write about martial arts, to use a dojo for a setting for a piece of work, to use martial artists as characters, but I haven’t figured out how to do it. All good writing is subversive (that’s my theory anyhow), and if I do write about martial arts, I may end up in trouble with my people there. It’s strange that I spend so much time in a place in which I do not see unfolding the kinds of stories I can write. Not yet anyhow.

But you don’t need to worry about that. You should just come down and meet Josh and Kyle and Shihan Wayne and join us for a class, see if our art is for you. Our Karate and Kobudo classes meet Monday and Wednesday nights at Southside Dojo (http://www.southsidedojo.com) in Portage, Michigan, and all interested parties are welcome to step onto the floor and check out our style. We have kids classes too. There are other arts at Southside Dojo, including Judo, Aikido (a softer style than Steven Segal practices), Jujitsu, mixed martial arts, Muay Thai and others. The membership in our dojo is inexpensive ($25 a month, with no contracts required) and if you join us, you can try out all the arts. (This isn’t a platitude; this is a commerial!)

Kalamazoo Flood 2008

2008-09-21T19:46:00.000-07:00

Hurricane Ike reached Michigan. We got thirteen inches of rain in a couple of days, and we flooded. The water kept pouring down. Our nieghborhood lies low along the Kalamazoo River, and as it rose, parks and streets and houses went under. One of these photos is the park in Comstock, with the ball field 3 feet under water; beside the ball field is the Comstock fire house, all wet. This two-story house was for sale a few years ago for $5,000, and Chris and I thought we should have bought it for that, but now maybe we see it's a good thing we didn't have the dough. The woods scene is our road with water coming across it. The water is receding now, a week later, but still roads are closed off. A big wet time. We feel lucky to have dry floors.

Elderberries Unite,Ferment!

2008-09-10T10:03:00.000-07:00

I collected a big grocery bag of elderberry clusters and spent a lot of hours separating stems from fruits, and now I've mixed up the ingredients according to my recipe, and I'm keeping the mess at 65-75 degrees (though outside temperature went down to forty degrees last night) and I can smell the yeast doing its work. Here's the recipe I'm using, though I've tripled the amounts:

1.4 lb Elderberries
1 gallon of boiling water
3 lb granulated sugar
Yeast packet
8 oz chopped raisins
Juice of 1 lemon
Juice of 1 orange
1 teaspoon yeast nutrient
1 teaspoon yeast enzyme with vitamin B

I got this recipe off the web last year, and I sort of used it but not exactly. This year I figured I'd follow it exactly. The only thing that worries me, however, is that I just found a recipe on the web that is exactly the same as this recipe except calling for 4 lbs of elderberries rather than 1.4 lbs. It makes me wonder what I'll come out with. I wonder if it's too late to go find another 8 lbs of elderberries.

The New Wood Shed

2008-08-28T17:29:00.000-07:00

We've been spending a lot of time around the wood shed that Christopher is building. It's an 8'x12' pole structure he's erected on the house side of the garage. First Chris augered five four foot deep holes into our slag landfill and sank treated 4"x4" poles. Then he pulled nails out of some 1"x12" cedar boards (ouch, splinters!) our neighbor Gilbert gave us and created a roof. On Friday, our buddy Jim Coe will put tar paper and shingles on it (we have five bundles of of leftover shingles that have been sitting under a plastic table cloth for two years). We're not sure how much wall to put up, since we want air
to move around the firewood.

We put some skids on the dirt floor, and we're piling wood on top of that. Before this year we always piled up our wood outside the door and put tarps over it. Then the tarps got snowed on and critters moved into the pile to spend the winter beneath the tarp. I'm so sick of that blue-tarp blue color I can't stand to look at it. Chris thinks we'll be able to fit four cords of wood in the new shed; we've already got about that much lying around on the ground. We use wood to heat the back part of our house. For the rest of the house, we just got $1300 worth of fuel oil put into our tanks. Ouch!

(See also the blog about my book... http://screenporchlit.blogspot.com/)

Squash Monsters

2008-08-15T20:19:00.000-07:00

What is up with these winter squash this year? I planted a lot of things in my garden: tomatoes (42 plants), eggplant (lavender, oriental, and miniature), beets, brussels sprouts, beans, parsley, carrots, kale, mustard greens, peppers (jalapeno, hot banana, sweet banana, green, etc.). I planted all that and more (peas, broccoli raab, lettuces), but all I can see is squash plants. The squash plants climb all over all my other plants. They climb up and accost the climbing beans. They weigh down my tomato plants and block the sun. One patch of three squash plants has sent vines out into the neighbor’s lawn, twenty-five feet. Depicted here are Carnival and Buttercup varieties, but I don’t even recognize some of the squash plants in my garden. I swear, I didn’t plant anything like the hard round yellows or the long ridged pale greens or the watermelon shaped ones or the beige pumpkin-shaped ones. When I tear off the squash branches, the green tomatoes look very impressive, so I have hopes that some will survive the onslaught. The worst news is that I’ve cooked three squashes from the garden, two buttercup and one carnival, and there was very little flavor in any of these. Hmmm. What is going on? A white kitten recently disappeared in the neighborhood. And I haven’t heard any frogs or crickets anywhere near the garden. Maybe these squash have strange and sinister plans for the future.

Buying Land Around Here

2008-08-07T19:41:00.000-07:00

I spend way too much time looking at maps like these, plat maps of my neighborhood. Looking at plat maps gives me the feeling I’m playing Monopoly, and in Monopoly, of course, I buy all the properties. This morning I went to a State of Michigan auction for tax foreclosed properties. I bid on two adjacent properties and acquired ownership of one. The property I got is a third of an acre, and it butts up against the Lustron property we own. It was once a horse pasture so it is nicely fenced; my niece Kellee, who lives in the Lustron, thought she might like to have goats and honey bees there.

Two complications of note: One person on the other side of the room bid against me at the auction, on both properties, and afterwards I tracked the gal down and took a closer look, and, turned out, it was my brother Tom’s first wife, Chrissy. Shoot, I said, we could have made a deal beforehand if we’d talked. She could have let my purchase of the first parcel go uncontested, saving me $1100 and I could have not contested the second one and saved her $750. Turns out Chrissy’s mother lives on the north side of the old horse pasture (the Lustron is on the south.)
Also, as a side note, Chrissy now races a school bus at Galesburg Speedway; she won her last race and became the first woman to ever win the school bus race there. Her yellow bus is parked on the property she just purchased, and on the side is painted, “Save your drama for your mama.”

The other complication is the garage. There is a garage on the property, a good sized one, that seems as though it should go with the house in front of it—I mean, the driveway leads to the garage, which we now own. When Chris told the house owner (Tim) that we’d bought the property that included the garage, he seemed angry, said he’d wanted to buy it. Probably he didn’t know about the auction. Seems like we ought to sell him the portion of land under the garage, but attached to the garage is the horse barn, which Kellee wants to use for goats. And neither Kellee nor Chris are feeling bad for the guy with no garage; they say it’s ours, we bought it. And yet, we’ve all got to live in the neighborhood.

Andy Mozina as Super Model

2008-07-29T19:20:00.000-07:00

My pal Carla Vissers coordinates the Hope College Visiting Writers series, and my pal Andy Mozina happens to be reading in that series, and Carla sent a missive on Friday saying Andy's photo was unacceptable. She demanded that Andy come to my house and have my darling Christopher take a better photo. So Chris was brought round (Carla can be very bossy and convincing), and Andy came to lunch. Andy is self-conscious about having his photo taken, so we tried to trick him into relaxing with a sandwich, a beer (Bell's Lager of the Lakes), a cat skull, a paper bag that we folded like a book, and finally some firearms, including a pellet gun, a .22 Marlin rifle and a twelve-gage shotgun. Finally, the shotgun seemed to work. As Andy wrote in an email later, "Holding the weapon, aiming it, for some reason, just for a second, I felt complete. Strange." Andy promises that next time he is photographed with a gun, it will be "in a more level-headed way, possibly illustrating safety tips." Also posted here is the photo of Andy that Carla posted to the Hope College VWS website (http://www.hope.edu/vws/). However, she cropped out the beer.

Dogs in My Life

2008-07-23T12:39:00.000-07:00

I don't currently have a dog, but I look forward to seeing all the dogs in my life. My cousin Mimi Lipson came to visit from upstate New York with her writer boyfriend, Luc Sante, and her dog Medusa. Medusa is black and takes two pills every day without argument, and she chases cats, so we had to close off the back part of the house to protect the yellow cat. Whenever I am jogging past my niece Kellee's house, I look for her out in the yard, and if I see her, I offer to take her dog Pi jogging, something she loves. Pi is an Australian Cattle dog, a very smart creature with a lot of energy. My neighbors Lynne and Mike M. are struggling with their dogs, two German Shepherds, Bear and Greta. Greta (pictured above) is a recently rescued dog, and she has to stay in a cage in the house or she and Bear fight. This is very stressful for Lynne and Mike. Our neighbors on the other side, the Ruizes, have two Jack Russell Terriers that bark and bark and bark and bark and bark. They were way down at the bottom of the list of my favorite dogs until yesterday when my Aunt Joanna came to visit with her lovely dog Cleo, sister of Medusa. I have always liked Cleo, despite her penchant for chasing cats, so I locked up the yellow cat and invited Cleo in. Then Cleo stood before the locked door leading to where the cat was and she peed on the carpet. Just stood there and peed, made a big stinking puddle. Bad dog.

(I'm posting book-related entries at http://screenporchlit.blogspot.com/)