So it goes...

It was a weekend of high culture around here. It started on Friday night when we attended a Guest House volunteer recognition at the Pfister Hotel in downtown Milwaukee. Donna was being recognized along with her friend Jill, and an attorney who has donated his services for the Guest House. For those who don't know, Donna and Jill are part of a large Facebook group that coordinate monthly meals for the guys at the shelter. They organize donations, cook the food and serve it every month. It is a lot of work and coordination and they are very good at it; good enough to be recognized for their efforts. I couldn't be prouder of both of them. Their hearts are huge and talents many. If you've ever been to the Pfister you know its magnificence. It is a classic old Milwaukee hotel on the order of the Palmer house in Chicago. Crystal chandeliers, plush carpeting, ornate marble, beautiful artwork and details, details, details. If you don't feel rich when you're there, then...

April is National Poetry Month. I'm featuring local Southeastern Wisconsin poets on my blog in an attempt to give them exposure and just because it's kind of fun. I remember my first real exposure to poetry from a critiquing or analytical perspective as clear as if it was yesterday. I was in 8th grade literature class and we were all asked to pick a poem and give a critique of it. On that day, one friend chose Elton John's song, Funeral for a Friend / Love Lies Bleeding which we played on the monoaural phonograph and was then critiqued. It was as edgy as we got in a Catholic grade school in the 70's; as close to Room 222  or the Dead Poet's Society  as you can get, I think. I forget the poem I chose, some willowy poem about ocean waves and a cave cut into the rocks or some such thing. I do remember reading it and thinking "What the heck?". It was only after re-reading it a second, third and fourth time that I really started to understand the deeper me...

It occurred to me that for all the mention of my writing and my book, I've never disclosed much about what Dirty Shirt: A Boundary Waters Memoir  is about, or how it came to be. I know I've addressed the process and lamented about my struggles with it, but I've never really prepared an elevator talk outlining what the book is about. Part of me just assumed that from the title, people could figure it out for themselves. Another part of me thought that I should keep it secret, or to myself, so that the book would be somehow more engaging or self-revealing to people when they read it. Neither of these are good assumptions to make from a marketing standpoint. People don't get interested by "mystique". So, I'll try and talk a little about the book without giving it all away. The book actually was never intended to be a book at all, I'll start with that. In 2005, I enrolled in a class called Writing from Your Life. It was a class offered through the City...

I went looking for a book today and ended up finding it in our upstairs bookcase. The photo above is but one shelf of the two shelf bookcase - which came from the house I grew up in in St. Paul, Minnesota. Now before you judge us on having such a small book collection, let me explain. If you know my wife and I, we are voracious readers - she more than me, but I do alright. We have a stack of books by our nightstand constantly.  (Ironically enough, as I write this at 8:30 on a Saturday night, she is up in bed...reading. What else to do on a February night?) Right now, I have three books up there, From the Top , by Michael Perry, The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Marten Troost and the Hawks of Sorga , by Summer Hanford . These three books are resting on top of a Sun Magazine , a Verse Wisconsin Poetry Magazine and a Bible. Sex Lives is finished, From the Top is in progress, Hawks is pending and Bible is ongoing forever. Finished, in the works, on deck. I've read, I'm r...

I've been actively writing since about the fourth grade. Of course, it has been an on again/off again affair over my lifetime, but if I had to pin down when I first realized my love for writing, it would have to be in fourth grade. It was then that I wrote some stories that were not even required for class. I did them just because I enjoyed creating them. Each of the stories were written on 1/2 sheets of paper which were then cut in 2 and put together like a short book. I still have the stories, Mom saved them over the years, and there are some common themes to them, namely disaster, some sort of resolution to the disaster and a moral to the story. I remember a nun teacher of mine asked if she could put one or more of the stories in a special box for the class and I really wasn't keen on the idea. (Author's rights at a young age, I guess.) She got the drift and backed off, but it was really kind of cool to be acknowledged for something I just thought was fun. Through high...