Author, activist and bioregionalist Stephanie Mills gave the following address as the keynote speaker at the 18th annual Freshwater Summit in Traverse City on Oct. 30, 2025. (Mills will appear with artist and community organizer Seth Bernard at the Grand Traverse Circuit from 6-8 pm on Jan. 14 for a program titled “Starting From and Staying With the Nature of Place.” The event is sponsored by the Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation and TitleTrack.)
The Glen Lake Library will host author and environmentalist Stephanie Mills on Wednesday, Oct. 22, from 6-8 pm. She’ll lead a participatory workshop to depict your knowledge of and raise questions about the nature of your home territory. Using Peter Berg’s classic workbook, Mills will facilitate graphic descriptions and revelations of our whereabouts. Space for the workshop is limited, so please contact the library to register in advance.
Earlier this year, a group of friends asked Leelanau County writer Stephanie Mills to speak at their regular winter gathering, whose theme was “Pleasure, Presence, and Play.” It was some wild genius on their part to redirect our focus from the cruel spectacle unfolding in the nation’s capital, and other portents of collapse, and to turn our attention to conviviality, wrote Mills. (It was also fairly playful to ask a depressive pessimist to address such a lively theme.) The following essay is derived from that talk.
There are many reasons women choose not to have children, and there are situations where it is not even a matter of choice but a physical impossibility. Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance asked in a 2021 interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, “How does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?” A group Vance targeted with this question is one he defines as “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.” Not long after, while speaking at a recent Trump rally, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Arkansas Governor and former White House Press Secretary for Donald Trump, claimed that her children are “a permanent reminder of what’s important,” following with a comment about Vice President Kamala Harris’ lack of anything to keep her humble. What Vance and Sanders are alluding to is their belief that women without biological children are inherently selfish and see no direct stake in the future of our nation. At a time when politicians are taking to the national stage to chastise women without biological children, Abby Chatfield spoke to 10 Leelanau women without kids of their own who collectively believe that we all have a stake in the future, regardless of whether or not we bear children. These locals show their dedication to Leelanau County’s future by investing in its youth, improving services for senior citizens, and fighting for the environment.
Leelanau County writer Stephanie Mills asks, “What does “watershed” mean to you?” A “watershed moment” can be a cusp, mark a divide. Earthly watersheds make for differences and natural diversity. Watersheds are basins that gather, channel, absorb and filter precipitation; they collect waters from their uplands. These flow downslope and congregate: seeps and rivulets connect with brooks, streams, rivers, lakes, and seas. Watersheds are life-places. They outline and embrace distinct realms. They collect fluid intelligence from animate terrains. Watershed maps strikingly resemble placentas. Their capillaries and tributaries, their veins and main stems, carry water and—every substance or organism— that can be dissolved, eroded, relocated, or washed from the land to replenish or contaminate the water bodies along the way to the world ocean.
In a world where florists purvey orchid corsages and online orchid vendors are legion, it’s enlightening to learn that glimpsing native wild orchids will only be on nature’s schedule. Late last year, to see some very carefully attended Showy Lady’s Slippers in full bloom, I broached the possibility of a visit to one of the Leelanau Conservancy’s northerly natural areas with Conservancy land steward Emily Douglas and volunteer Chuck Dickerson who, with his wife Janet, has been doing much to foster the orchid population there. Late this June, the “Showies” were flowering and we converged at the preserve, access to whose sensitive habitats is restricted.
Phil Thiel, recently departed, was in some ways mystifying. His life comprised several eras. He won fast friends in each. In his all too brief 65 years Phil was an altar boy, an Eagle Scout, a college dropout, a world traveler, a cooperatives advocate, a bioregional organizer, a hippie carpenter, an environmental activist, a writer, editor, and publisher, a champion of renewable energy, a caterer, a shopkeeper, a gonzo sports fan, a connoisseur of wine and liquor, a gourmand, and Cedar Michigan’s Mardi Gras King, circa 2014. This past March 8 he was felled by a cardiac event outside the Long Lake home his mother shared with him.
Three northern Michigan authors discuss the different ways Leelanau County, its homes and places figure into their fiction and nonfiction writing on June 23 at 2 pm at the Glen Arbor Arts Center.
How does a shortage of housing in Northwest Michigan take its toll on residents and businesses? That question is the focus of an hour-long panel discussion June 11, 10:30 am at the Glen Arbor Arts Center, 6031 S. Lake St., Glen Arbor. This program is open to the public without charge.
Julie Christian and I met on one of those blindingly clear and cold mid-March days with a bayonet wind coming off Lake Michigan. Christian is the newly appointed Chief of Natural Resources at the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.