How many waiters can recite an Emily Dickinson poem to you while serving you haggis? Paul Baumbusch at the Little Traverse Inn can. Originally from Washington, D.C., Paul graduated from the creative writing program at Interlochen Arts Academy in 2004, then attended Northwestern University and graduated in 2008. His teacher at Interlochen was Michigan’s local “Notable Writer” Anne-Marie Oomen, from Empire.
The Cottage Book Shop and the Glen Lake Community Library will host local author Anne-Marie Oomen on Wednesday, Aug. 1, at 7 p.m. Oomen will present her latest book The Lake Michigan Mermaid, a beautiful “tale in poems” co-authored by Linda Nemec Foster.
Who knew?! No one imagined that an idea hatched on bar stools at Art’s Tavern (the source of many brilliant ideas) by Bob Sutherland and me over 30 years ago would live so long.
For Empire resident Anne-Marie Oomen, Lake Michigan and all of our state’s water are part of her soul. The legend of the great Sleeping Bear is also embedded in her, as are legends of mermaids and mermen kept by indigenous peoples, particularly those along Lake Superior.
Josephine Zara left acting as a young adult in New York and never looked back … until she moved to Glen Arbor nine years ago. When she was 12 in Detroit, her grandmother had hired the head of the speech and theater department at Wayne State University to give her speech lessons.
The January 21, 2017, Women’s March on Washington, D.C. attracted more than half a million demonstrators to the banks of the Potomac. Writer Anne-Marie Oomen of Empire, and other Leelanau women shared their experiences from that day.
Nature abhors a vacuum. The same can be said for creative writers without an outlet for publishing their work. And that, dear reader, is one way of explaining how The Dunes Review, a local literary journal, came to be.
I walk into the library and smell it: paper, pages, ink, sometimes leather and glue—the scent of books, the old and new stories. When I open a book, a word odor wafts up with a love tale, war epic, a medieval ballad of loss, or the aroma of an essay on food so good you want to eat it. That’s the first love of a library, that scent. My love of literature started with libraries, with that scent, the spirit of story.
I am grossed out. On the video, a creature reminiscent of horror flicks, B-movies, an almost pornographic monster, except it’s not a monster, except it’s real and it is a monster. Sortof. The winged thing trembles on a flesh-like surface. The film reveals in full detail the tail-end of the monster’s abdomen, where a serrated ovipositor descends, and a double row of “teeth” pierces the surface. Slowly, with mesmerizing tenacity, she saws into the thin-skinned softness, dipping ever deeper into the flesh. Then, and this is where I feel sick, out of that same organ she forces a single small white egg, deposits it firmly into the hole. The ovipositor closes, lifts like a machine, revealing a tiny filament still extending from the hole—the breathing tube of the egg. The egg’s breathing tube!?! The creature turns; huge red eyes stare straight into the camera, and after all that, the darn thing starts the process all over. Hundreds of times. I am not kidding.
By Jacob Wheeler Sun editor The Glen Arbor Sun reached out to several local writers who knew famed author Jim Harrison, who passed away on Saturday at age 78. Harrison lived for 35 years near Lake Leelanau before he moved to Livingston, Montana, and wintered in Arizona. Harrison’s best-selling novellas, novels and poetry about the […]