Kathleen Stocking’s “Long Arc of the Universe”

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Writer Kathleen Stocking wants to change the world. The acclaimed author of Letters from the Leelanau and Lake Country has just published her third book of essays, The Long Arc of the Universe: Travels Beyond the Pale. In it, she takes readers along on her incredible journeys from her home in seemingly peaceful, picturesque northern Michigan to some of the world’s most unstable and terrifying places. Like a modern-day Scheherazade, she brings her skill with words, language and storytelling to protect herself, as well as teach an incredible range of students: from hardened criminals in maximum security prison to the offspring of Central American despots; from poor African-American children traumatized by gang warfare in their urban neighborhood to Third World children in Thailand and Romania.

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Empire Asparagus Festival 2015 poetry contest

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Here are the winners from the 2015 Empire Asparagus Festival poetry contest. They are Empire native Sarah Marossy in first place, Rachel Reed in second place, and Elizabeth Paxson in third place.

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Squirrel wars and a mouse story, too

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The squirrels arrived the first summer when the English walnut tree bore nuts. The tree was perhaps nine or 10 years old and until the summer of the squirrels there had been nothing to show of its true nature. The walnuts were formed as walnuts are, perfectly, with the insides of their halved shells, the nut meat, resembling intricate passageways of brain tissue.

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River in the Blood

Stand close by the banks of the Crystal River and try to convince me that it was not put down millennia ago by an alchemist, some ancient madman who melted down tons of goblets, and made them into something liquid and cold, and somehow managed to transform them into this lovely river. I prefer myth to science most of the time, and know full well the glacial forces which shaped Michigan and laid down the bed of the Crystal.

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Faithful Companion

I dreamed about him when I was working in the prisons of California. I felt him one night in the room as I was falling asleep and thought I could smell him. I missed him at a subliminal, subconscious level all the time but missed him consciously, in ways I’d never anticipated, on the days after work when I was tired and saw no hope for my students, most of whom were going to be behind bars for a long time and, if they got out, would have no families, no jobs, no future.

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My Summer Vacation, Part III: Making Meaning

Author Anne-Marie Oomen offers the third in three lessons about how to write about your summer vacation in Leelanau. Use sensory language to describe your best summer moments; use strong, action verbs to keep memories locked in place. Now she explores the “so what” factor.

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Unnatural Phenomenon: Children at the border

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When dolphins wash up on shore in significant numbers, we suspect there’s something wrong happening in the ocean. It’s just not what we expect. It’s not a natural phenomenon. We may not know what it is exactly, but we guess that, whatever’s happening, however unknown or unknowable to us, it’s got to be about more than dolphins simply taking a notion. Why don’t we have the same common sense intuition about the children at the U.S.-Mexican border?

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My Summer Vacation, Part II: Where the action is!

Action. The brain really likes action. In fact, the brain loves action, even when we are veging out on the beach, action runs in the drift of our minds. After all, we are part animal, and we still have that watchful animal awareness that what moves might be predator or prey, so it gets and keeps our attention. But how does this translate into that more sophisticated thinking we do when we write, even just one paragraph.

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My summer vacation: part I

What I did on my summer vacation: the age old cliché, the assignment for school children that both children and teachers dread, in part because it’s so often boring—both for reader and writer. Why is that? Or why is it that when we look at the hundreds of iPhone photos we took of the Sleeping Bear Dune Climb, we never get the rush of flying down the sand. What happened to that feeling of bubbling laughter when Uncle Jack fell through the inner tube into the Crystal River? We think, for example, we can keep the Leelanau County wine tasting alive with pictures alone, but even though pictures recall the image and some association, they don’t recall the narrative, the story of the moment. That’s the limitation of pictures, glorious as they are. So we need words too. We tell the story of the picture, sometimes ad nauseum, to our neighbors back home, but even that, over time, loses its power. That is, until the senses get involved.

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Transporting ourselves back in time

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Our default perspective is from our own place and time. This is natural. It cannot be otherwise. Yet it’s sometimes fun to engineer a shift in the way we see and experience things, and by so doing create more awareness. You can put on the 3-D glasses for another time period by trying out earlier modes of transportation. Some of these are a little hard to find but walking, our original mode of locomotion, is always available. Travel by canoe, ox-cart, stage coach, sleigh, schooner, steamer and train will take a little more effort in the way of arrangement-making, but all are still possible.

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