Reading through the pandemic: new books by Leelanau authors
From staff reports
We’re home. We’re quarantining ourselves. We’re practicing social distancing. Some restaurants and bars are closed. We’re avoiding crowds. What better way to spend these pandemic days than to read books newly published by Leelanau authors? Here’s a roundup of local books, or books by local authors, in 2020:
Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women in Food and Farming
Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women in Food and Farming looks at the female culinary pioneers who have put northern Michigan on the map for food, drink, and farming. Emita Brady Hill interviews women who share their own stories of becoming the cooks, bakers, chefs, and farmers that they are today—each even sharing a delicious recipe or two. These stories are as important to tracing the gastronomic landscape in America as they are to honoring the history, agriculture, and community of Michigan. They include Leelanau County residents and business owners Nancy Krcek Allen, Jody Dotson Hayden, Rose Hollander, Anne Hoyt, Angela Macke, Martha Ryan, Mimi Wheeler, and Carol Worsley.
Divided into six sections, Northern Harvest celebrates very different women who converged in an important region of Michigan and helped transform it into the flourishing culinary Eden it is today. Hill speaks with orchardists and farmers about planting their own fruit trees and making the decision to transition their farms over to organic. She hears from growers who have been challenged by the northern climate and have made exclusive use of fair trade products in their business. Readers are introduced to the first-ever cheesemaker in the Leelanau area and a pastry chef who is doing it all from scratch. Readers also get a sneak peek into the origins of Traverse City institutions such as Folgarelli’s Market and Wine Shop and Trattoria Stella. Hill catches up with local cookbook authors and nationally known food writers. She interviews the founder of two historic homesteads that introduce visitors to a way of living many of us only know from history books.
Words like Thunder: New and Used Anishinaabe Prayers
Award-winning Ojibwe author and Maple City resident Lois Beardslee has published a new book with Wayne State University Press. The collection of poetry is titled Words like Thunder: New and Used Anishinaabe Prayers. Much of the book centers around Native people of the Great Lakes but has a universal relevance to modern indigenous people worldwide. A poem from Words like Thunder, titled “Fiction Versus Nonfiction” was featured in The New York Times Sunday Magazine on April 9. Beardslee’s poem “is very appropriate for these times of disinformation and false narratives,” writes Naomi Shihab Nye, who selected the poems for the Times. One line is especially powerful, “So librarians dutifully tuck ‘history books’ into the realm of nonfiction, as they have been dutifully taught.”
When Truth Mattered: The Kent State Shootings 50 Years Later
When Truth Mattered, by journalist and Northport resident Robert Giles, is a gripping, authoritative account of a young editor and his staff painstakingly pursuing the truth of the Kent State shootings on May 4, 1970—a tragedy that has haunted the nation for 50 years and significantly changed the debate about the Vietnam War.
The editor, Giles, takes you inside the turmoil and drama of the Akron Beacon Journal newsroom on that fateful day, and on campus at Kent State University, a Midwestern college under siege. The heart-pounding story captures the flash of National Guard rifles, the bloody aftermath of four students killed and nine wounded, and the stress of reporters hurrying to sort fact from fiction for a horrified world wanting to know “what” and “why.” The Beacon Journal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage created a truthful narrative that has stood unchallenged and unchanged for five decades. It also provides an urgent lesson for today: What is the role of truth in media? Can you trust the news that you’re hearing and seeing? If not, how do you equip yourself? When Truth Mattered shows how journalism was done right … and how those standards must still be applied today.
The Less Than Spectacular Times of Henry Milch
Three-time Lambda Award-winner, Marshall Thornton released The Less Than Spectacular Times of Henry Milch on April 28 at Bay Books in Suttons Bay. The book is the first in a new series called the Wyandot County Mysteries. Set in a mythical county in norther lower Michigan (hint: it’s actually Leelanau), the series begins in the spring of 2003. Things have not been going well for Henry Milch. After a Saturday night clubbing in his beloved West Hollywood, he took one pill too many and ended up banished to live on a farm with his ultra-conservative grandmother. It was that or rehab. While working a part-time job for the local land conservancy he stumbles across a dead body in the snow—as if things couldn’t get worse. But then things take a turn for the better, there’s a reward for information leading the man’s killer. All Henry has to do is find the murderer, claim the reward and he can go back to his real life in L.A.
The Sisters of the Lake (due out this July)
Award-winning author Linda Hughes has a dozen books in publication, including her historic trilogy set in Michigan: Secrets of the Summer, Secrets of the Island, and Secrets of the Asylum. She has spent most of her adult life living in Georgia. So she’s a Yankee and a Southerner. Learn more about Hughes on her website.
Notable books from 2018-2019
The Life of the Sleeping Bear: Views and Stories from Pierce Stocking Drive
The Life of the Sleeping Bear, published late last year by the Friends of Sleeping Bear Dunes, celebrates the world-famous Sleeping Bear Dunes area—its land and people—from prehistoric to modern times. Blending art, history, and science, the book contains vivid pictures, fascinating facts, and helpful graphics and maps to provide a rich and colorful tour of this precious and well-loved area. To celebrate the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshores’ 50th birthday in 2020, this compilation of photographs and information is shared for the first time, in one 152-page, full-color book.
“You’ve covered miles and miles and hundreds of years in one excellent book,” writes Cherry Republic president Bob Sutherland.
“It’s a gem of a book sure to answer all of the questions about the area, as well as delight anyone interested in this magical place,” says Sue Boucher, owner of the Cottage Book Shop.
From the Place of the Gathering Light, by Kathleen Stocking
“If you haven’t read Kathleen Stocking, you don’t know Leelanau,” wrote P.J. Grath, owner of Dog Ears Books in Northport. So it is a great gift she gives us with her book, Gathering Light—another collection of essays focused on the Leelanau but informed by almost 30 additional years of observing nature, participating in community, reading voraciously, traveling bravely, and endlessly pondering life on earth—from our little Up North paradise as it evolved through time to our place in the universe. Kathleen Stocking’s essays, while personal, are about much more than her own life, rich and overflowingly full as that life always has and continues to be. Essays in the new book are divided into seasonal sections, and over and over we are reminded that our brief time is but the thinnest of glazes atop the rich layer cake (she uses the image in one section) of geologic time.
A Port Oneida Collection, by historian Tom Van Zoeren
Those who are interested in the Port Oneida historic district of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore might be interested to know that a new book about the place is now available. Tom Van Zoeren’s A Port Oneida Collection: Images, Oral History, Maps presents the story of each of the farms of Port Oneida, based mainly, as the title suggests, on oral history interviews conducted with residents of the community, and on photographs collected from them. It is illustrated with a detailed map of each farm. A Port Oneida Collection is available at the Cottage Bookshop and at VZOralHistory.org.
Elemental: A Collection of Michigan Creative Nonfiction
Elemental: A Collection of Michigan Creative Nonfiction comes to us from 23 of Michigan’s most well-known essayists. A celebration of the elements, this collection is both the storm and the shelter. In her introduction, editor Anne-Marie Oomen recalls the “ritual dousing” of her storytelling group’s bonfire: “wind, earth, fire, water—all of it simultaneous in that one gesture. . . . In that moment we are bound together with these elements and with this place, the circle around the fire on the shores of a Great Lake closes, complete.” The essays approach Michigan at the atomic level. This is a place where weather patterns and ecology matter. Farmers, miners, shippers, and loggers have built (or lost) their livelihood on Michigan’s nature—what could and could not be made out of our elements. From freshwater lakes that have shaped the ground beneath our feet to the industrial ebb and flow of iron ore and wind power—ours is a state of survival and transformation. In the first section of the book, “Earth,” Jerry Dennis remembers working construction in northern Michigan. “Water” includes a piece from Jessica Mesman, who writes of the appearance of snow in different iterations throughout her life. The section “Wind” houses essays about the ungraspable nature of death from Toi Dericotte and Keith Taylor. “Fire” includes a piece by Mardi Jo Link, who recollects the unfortunate series of circumstances surrounding one of her family members.
Bookstores throughout Leelanau County
These books are available at area bookstores: the Cottage Bookshop in Glen Arbor (231-334-4223), Bay Books in Suttons Bay (231-944-6809), Leelanau Books in Leland (231-649-6798), and Dog Ears Books in Northport (231-386-1033).
This story was sponsored by Mel & Fell
