Entries by editor

Glen Lake Library hosts poet Ellen Stone

The Glen Lake Library in Empire will host poet Ellen Stone on Thursday, May 29, at 7 pm. Stone will read from her newest collection “Everybody Wants to Keep the Moon Inside Them.” A resident of Ann Arbor, Stone has had work featured in the Michigan Quarterly Review, About Place, Midwest Review and Third Coast. She’ll be joined by special guests, fellow poets Teresa Scollon, Fleda Brown, Anne-Marie Oomen and Mae Stier. For more information, visit the library online at GlenLakeLibrary.net.

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Stepping on toes. Tariffs, boycott of U.S. goods, threaten Farmer Foot Drums existence

Pete Farmer doesn’t project the air of someone who might lose his business—what he calls his “identity.” The founder of Farmer Foot Drums, who builds craftsman instruments from a pole barn at his and wife Kate’s property near Cedar, boasts a light, playful energy. He carries the buoyancy of a young athlete, even though the entrepreneur and musician turned 50 earlier this year. But Farmer was clear: the Trump administration’s tariffs on Chinese and Taiwanese goods—and the boycott of products made in the United States resulting from Trump’s policies and threats—might cost him his business.

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Glen Lake Library hosts Asparagus poetry contest

The Glen Lake Library will host its annual Ode to Asparagus poetry reading on Saturday, June 7, at 2 pm. The reading will be part of the day’s Empire Asparagus Festival lineup. Click here for information about how to submit or attend.

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Northern Michigan national parks prepare for summer visitors amid staffing, morale concerns

With a new tourism season upon northern Michigan, uncertainty remains about how national parks will handle millions of visitors amid lingering staffing questions because of back-and-forth federal workforce policies. Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore has approximately two-thirds of the seasonal staff it typically needs to welcome more than 1.5 million visitors over the next three busy months. “They’re still trying to get anybody else to accept a job, but it looks like there won’t be many more coming,” said former Sleeping Bear deputy superintendent Tom Ulrich. He added that the true impacts aren’t being felt yet because the park isn’t yet getting 400,000 visitors per month as they do in peak-season.

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Descendents of Black pioneers return to Leelanau for film screening

“The Search for Anna and Levi: A Lost History of Black Homesteaders in Leelanau County” will show at Leland School on May 31—not at the hamstrung Sleeping Bear Dunes headquarters, as originally scheduled. The Bay Theatre in Suttons Bay initially screened the film in February. Northern Michigan has begun to feel like a second home for Philadelphia resident Carmen Hopson. Ever since she received a life-changing Facebook message in September 2022 from Kevin Brooks, an amateur genealogist based in Grand Rapids, who shared photos to show that their ancestors—hers Black, his White—were neighboring farm owners and pioneering homesteaders more than 100 years ago along Little Glen Lake. “It feels like we’re coming home. This is a place where we will be welcomed home,” said Hopson. The National Lakeshore decided that it could no longer host the screening following the Trump administration’s March 27 executive order, titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” that cast this nation’s collective reexamination of historical racism as a “distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”

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In Memory, a wall of lights in Empire

This winter, in far away Guatemala City’s Central Parque, hundreds of people stood in silent awe as the street lighting went dark and thousands of votives lit the park in honor of the Guatemalan Day of Affection. Inspired by this beautiful moment, Empire township residents Anne-Marie Oomen and Mimi Wheeler thought to adapt the experience here in Michigan for an Evening of Memory during Memorial weekend. On Saturday night, May 24, at 8:30 pm (just before dark) people are invited to write a memorial message to a veteran, loved one, or friend who has passed, and to light a votive in their honor which will then be placed on the Empire Beach Wall at the lighthouse end of the beach.

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Northport photo exhibit opens May 23 at Village Arts Building

The Northport Arts Association is proud to present the 2025 Northport Photo Exhibit, launching Memorial Day weekend with a public Opening Reception on Friday, May 23 from 5–8 pm at the Village Arts Building. This popular annual exhibit, now in its eighth year, continues to grow in both artistic reach and visual diversity. The Opening Reception is free and open to the public, featuring complimentary appetizers and a cash bar. The exhibit will run from May 24 through June 8, with gallery hours Tuesday through Sunday, 12–4 pm.

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Glen Lake Library welcomes author Bonnie Jo Campbell

The Glen Lake Community Library in Empire will celebrate and host Michigan Notable Book Award winner and national best-selling author Bonnie Jo Campbell on Saturday, May 24 from 2-3 pm. Campbell will read from, discuss, and sign copies of her highly acclaimed 2024 novel, The Waters. Fellow Notable Author and Empire resident Anne-Marie Oomen will lead the discussion. Books sales are courtesy of Glen Arbor’s Cottage Book Shop.

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Marking Anishinaabe trails

The Leelanau County and Grand Traverse communities, led by members of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, gathered on May 15 at Clinch Park in Traverse City to celebrate the Anishinaabe Cultural Marker Project. Seven markers celebrating spots along “Old Indian Trails” have already been installed in Suttons Bay near the library, in Leland near the museum, at Northport’s Peterson Park, at Omena beach park, at Hannah Park and Clinch Park in Traverse City, and at the Brown Bridge canoe launch in Grand Traverse County. Two more, in Northport’s marina park and West End Beach in Traverse City, will soon receive their installations, bringing the total to nine.

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Glen Arbor Cemetery holds sixth annual Memorial Ceremony

This year’s Memorial Day weekend ceremony at the Glen Arbor Cemetery will begin at 10 am on Friday, May 23, and will feature a eulogy of veteran Ruell Welch, one of the four Civil War veterans buried at the cemetery. Poetry by Anne-Marie Oomen will be read, taps will be played by Norm Wheeler, and the Glen Lake School eighth graders will claim the names of those buried at the cemetery whom they each have studied.

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