Going Places

Choosing a book is like choosing a road.

Going Places In Fiction

 

Mutual understanding in the world being nearly always, as now, at low ebb, it is comforting to remember that it is through art that one country can nearly always speak reliably to another, if the other can hear at all.

- Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction” 

 

I want to pause here after this sentence, written by Eudora Welty in an essay called “Place in Fiction,” because I want to call your attention to the first thirteen words: “Mutual understanding in the world being nearly always, as now, at low ebb….” This essay of Welty’s, which I encountered in a collection entitled The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews, was originally published in 1957. The 1950s are generally portrayed as a time of calm prosperity in America, and yet Eudora Welty, a writer from Mississippi, would have had a front row seat from which to observe battles over school desegregation, 

yet another reminder that there is no short, simple answer to the question of what the Fifties were “like,” those years (as was true of the Sixties and any other era in the life of our country) having been different for different people in different parts of the country with different skin color or economic status. How much “mutual understanding” was there between the races, between regions of the United States in the 1950s? 

But let us return to Welty’s discussion of place in fiction: 

 

Mutual understanding in the world being nearly always, as now, at low ebb, it is comforting to remember that it is through art that one country can nearly always speak reliably to another, if the other can hear at all. Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, indeed, but truth.

 

Fiction, Welty writes in the middle of the following paragraph, “is properly at work on the here and now.” Even a historical novel must transport us to “the past made here and now,” and that is because for us to enter the world of the novel “we have to be there.” And so it is that “fiction is all bound up in the local.” 

 

A few of my friends become impatient with descriptive passages in fiction. They want action and accept dialogue only insofar as it advances plot. Not me. For me, whether in a short story or a memoir, classic novel or murder mystery, I take pleasure in the time an author takes to draw me into the locale of the story. Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country begins with a lyrical passage:

 

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carrisbrooke, and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys in Africa. About you there is grass and bracken and you may hear the forlorn crying of the titihoya, one of the birds of the veld. Below you is the valley of the Umzimkulu, on its journey from the Drakensberg to the sea….

- Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country

 

Immediately we are in a specific place. Then, downhill from the grassy hills, he takes us to a different specific place.

 

The path is dropping into the red land of Ndotsheni. It is a wasted land, a land of old men and women and children, but it is home. The maize hardly grows to the height of a man, but it is home.

 

--It is dry here, umfundisi. We cry for rain.

 

--I have heard it, my friend.

 

--Our mealies are nearly finished umfundisi. It is known to Tixo alone what we shall eat.

 

The path grows more level, it goes by the little stream that runs by the church. Kumalo stops to listen to it, but there is nothing to hear.

 

The stream, dry for a month, does not run, and the women must walk to the river every day for water.

 

Kumalo is the individual through whose eyes we see his home, and when he makes the long journey to Johannesburg to search for his son and his sister, we hear the noise of the city through his ears and feel his confusion and fear. It is Kumalo’s truth, at home with his wife and in his meetings with other individuals in Johannesburg, that the novel allows us to see. 

It can take you somewhere you've never been before.

...For Book Reviews

 

Big news in the book world is the demise of The Washington Post’s “Book World” section, with its small number of fulltime reviewers and an ever-changing cast of guest reviewers. Was it reviewer Ron Charles who commented on NPR that there are now fewer fulltime book reviewers in the U.S. than the number of people who have walked on the moon? Whether fact or hyperbole, you get the point. As the number of newspapers shrinks, fewer and fewer of the surviving papers give any space at all to newly released books. Bestselling, big-name authors have the money of their publishing houses behind them because sales of their books keep the publishers alive, but what of small publishers, new authors, books that don’t fit neatly into a genre or niche with a loud and loyal fan base?

My customers and I trade recommendations.

Where do you learn about new books? I read reviews in the New York Review of Books (an article there persuaded me to read, at last, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove) and local publications, listen to reviews and interviews on NPR, read my daily “Shelf Awareness” newsletter, and make notes of books and authors recommended to me by my friends and bookshop customers and authors (overlapping categories). 

I look over the new arrivals at our local library. Also, as a dealer in used and rare books, as well as a reader of the old, I often follow up clues, learning of an author or a title in something I’m reading and then searching out the writers or work mentioned, which is what led me to Mary Webb’s Precious Bane. 

 

 

...In Books and Memory

 

Armchair travel! How I love it! Four decades or so ago, I was obsessed with the Arctic and sought out everything I could find about that part of the globe, particularly books written by women, such as Arctic Mood, by Eva Alvey Richards; Woman in the Polar Night, by Christiane Ritter; and Spring on an Arctic Island, by Katharine Scherman. There is a wealth of armchair travel available in fiction, too, and I have loved visiting on pages of books lands I will never see in person. Thanks to reading, I have also “owned” horses!

I thought of them fondly as mine.

My memory travels are made possible by daydreams, old journals, photo albums, even by digital images stored on my phone. Looking this morning at images from three years ago in Arizona, I thought for the first time that, odd as it may sound at first, Arizona gave me something of what I longed for in my Arctic dreams—a challenging environment. The Arctic would have given me the challenge of cold and treelessness. Cochise County challenged me with relentless sun, with dry, thin air (thinner with every hundred feet of altitude), primitive roads beneath my tires, and loose, unstable gravel and rock underfoot. There were times when my endurance was tested.

Solo destination was more challenging than photo portrays.

While my yearning for the Arctic has evaporated with age, I am sometimes “homesick” for the Chiricahua and Dragoon Mountains, and reliving hikes with friends and dogs is a pleasure I feed by (besides my own writing and photographs) reading books set in the area, such as stories of Cochise and the Chiricahua Apaches, as well as J.A. Jance’s Sheriff Joanna Brady series. 

 

“Were you homesick for Michigan when you were in Arizona?” a friend asked. “No,” I said, “I didn’t have to be, because I knew I would be back.” Every winter in Arizona, on the other hand, was a gift I knew might not be repeated, and indeed my last winter in the ghost town was 2022-23, but I remain grateful to have had my time there and for the friends I made.

 

 

...At Home in Michigan!

 

“We live in a beautiful place,” the Artist used to say often, and since he’s been gone I’ve made that remark frequently to Sunny Juliet, as my dog rides shotgun with me in Leelanau County.

With dog on Michigan back road -- heaven!

Michigan’s two green peninsulas, their lakes, rivers, creeks, fields and hills, sandy beaches and rocky shores—my family fell in love with Michigan when we came camping in a heavy old canvas umbrella tent, back when I was 12 years old, and it has been my great good fortune to call Michigan home for decades since. 

What do you look for in a companion? Common values, interests, background? Sharing a love for Michigan, both the familiar places and those not yet explored, is essential to me. Then, please, let him be a woodsman. Well, okay then!

I’ve just been living my life.

Someone to walk with...

Except for a letter or two, I haven’t been writing. More astonishingly, I’ve hardly been reading. 

 

Still having coffee every morning, getting outdoors with my dog, going to my bookshop four days a week (Wednesday through Saturday) for four hours a day, then back home and outside with the dog again before supper, but it’s been different for the past week because, in addition to Sunny Juliet, I have had a constant human companion. I have slept better and have awakened happy, despite  continuing corruption and chaos abroad in the land. 

 

Oh, my country! Cry, the beloved country! 

 

I need to read Alan Paton’s novel again, set in the era of racial tension that directly preceded the 1948 election of the National Party government. The party's appeal to white fear and white supremacy, as well as strong anti-British sentiment (subsequent to the Boer War) and promises to improve the economy for farmers and (white) laborers, put them in power and inaugurated apartheid in South Africa. Their rule lasted for 46 years, with apartheid the law of the land. 

Paton’s book, because a novel, focuses on individuals affected by conditions in their country rather than the more abstract march of history, and I have been thinking of how easy it can be to ignore issues not part of our immediate daily lives, events that do not touch us personally. Almost every life is touched by tragedy sooner or later. But it is the specific nature of the tragedy touching any particular person that usually dictates the cause or causes that that person finds urgent, while other people’s tragedies and other people’s causes never feel as desperately compelling.

 

Thus it is that the large group of people who care deeply about something, whether mental illness or abused children or cancer research or autism treatment or whatever (and a majority of people in any country, I feel sure, care about at least one issue and usually more than one) can accuse one another, because their cares and concerns are different, of not caring. 

 

For instance, ICE raids continue in Minneapolis and elsewhere, abducting first and asking questions later, with families and whole communities living in emotionally crippling anxiety day after day. Although we haven’t heard as much about it in the past week, because ICE hasn’t murdered anyone in the streets in the past week, a family member in the Twin Cities tells me nothing is better there and that the daily stress and anxiety continue, along with volunteer operations to help the terrified. 

 

But if no one in your family or group of friends has dark skin or was born in another country or is of a “nonconforming” gender or practices a faith tradition outside of Christianity, perhaps you don't consider the current administration dangerous. And so it is with every heartbreaking issue. As for immigration raids far, far from the border, even when American citizens are picked up and held without being charged, perhaps it's still easy to look away and say that, well, of course a few mistakes will be made, but ICE troopers, after all, are “just doing their job.” It shouldn’t be easy to look away and dismiss concerns, I keep thinking. If you’re at all concerned about legal vs. illegal (as ICE supporters insist they are), then you ought to care, I fervently believe, for little aspects of American law such as probable cause and due process. But maybe some people haven’t followed those events too closely, because other issues that do touch their own personal lives take all their attention. Or because they don't want to know?

 

Can people be persuaded to care? How? 

My life has been more peaceful during the last two weeks, not because various horrible conflict situations in our country have been resolved or even improved but because I have stopped trying to make people care who have not yet seen the horror. I have not given up all hope that their eyes will eventually be opened—if only when they are personally touched, at last, by some aspect of it—but I have given up the hope that any information and opinions I might share will make a difference to them. When their eyes are opened, they will see, and not before, and when they see, good people will care.

There are always, of course, a minority of people (I feel certain they are the minority of human beings on earth) who care only for themselves and whose “care” for themselves is so fixed on money and what it can buy that they are willing to sell their very souls to see their worldly wealth increase, and unfortunately, those presently in power in Washington seem to belong to that don’t-care-for-others group, their greed and aggressive natures giving them outsized visibility on the national and world scene. —Perhaps you say not all in that highly visible cabal are motivated by money? Some are afraid! Ah, but what do they fear? Losing their jobs? Doesn’t that come down to sacrificing integrity in order to hold onto wealth and position?

 

Read my friend Dawn’s pithy summary of the Gordie Howe Bridge brouhaha, written before the news came out that it isn’t about “Canada” or “respect” or “fairness” at all but—surprise!—the old billionaire club protecting one another’s interests, and to hell with American (and Canadian) workers! Grift and corruption, old political allies. 

 

Another current issue, one bound to affect generations of Americans yet unborn (think about it, you who advocate tirelessly for the “unborn,” with nary a thought for living children and their families), is the threat to the “endangerment finding.” (Update: More than a threat.) The name alone may not tell you much, but the endangerment finding has to do with environmental pollution and public harm. In 2007 SCOTUS recognized the responsibility of the EPA to limit greenhouse gases, citing public harm. Now in February 2026, the current administrator of the EPA, Lee Zeldin, a 46-year-old Republican from New York State and father of two, appointed in January of 2025 by then-incoming president DJT, is poised to stop protecting the American public. Pollute, baby, pollute! Your investment portfolio will love it!

 

(But of course! In department after department of the federal government, the current administration’s strategy has been to find someone not to direct valuable operations but to gut said department of its budget, expertise, and the ability to fulfill its mission, with the overall goal of eliminating government services and turning them all over to the highest bidder, i.e., to those who can guarantee squeezing the last dollar out of the American public for private profit.)

 

Threats to free elections? Don't even get me started. Anyone who isn't concerned is just not paying attention.

Midday Thursday, Northport

So I come back to Alan Paton’s novel, which begins with a contrast between green, grassy land and overgrazed bare earth, a contrast of human wealth and poverty mirrored by the land itself, and I think of aquifers in North America depleted by CAFOs, wells polluted by mining and other industry, water made undrinkable and air made unbreathable by industrial and automotive effluents and emissions. I think also of the deepened and still deepening divisions in this country of ours, the widening gap between the haves and have-nots, racial divides that I had hoped were healing back when President Obama was elected, splits political, dogmatic, religious, and also (because the issues have to do with our most dearly held values) deeply personal, such that it seems the legacy of the current administration will, for the remainder of my life, be a tragically divided national landscape. 

 

“Cry, the beloved country,” wrote Alan Paton of South Africa in 1948, a country he loved deeply and gave generously of himself to try to heal.

 

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, not stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, not give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much.

 

-      - Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country (1948)

- 

Will the legacy of our time on earth be a Divided, Poisoned, Polluted and Hate-Filled States of America? Will those of us who have loved our country “too deeply” have our hearts broken over and over before we die? And if that happens, if we do not live to see our country turn back from fascism and oligarchy, will a future generation yet be able to regain the betrayed ideals our parents lived by and some died for? Will American children not yet born have another chance to find healing and to make of this country a shining city on a hill? Or will America go the way of so many former empires, a story of the dead past for history books written and read in a few surviving free nations? 

My father, WWII

Good News, Good Deeds, Neighbors

 

Saturday morning glory!

Happy News: Sunshine and Standing Up

Last Thursday was very cold, but it was also sunny. Friday, sunny morning, cloudy afternoon with heavy snow. Saturday, cold and sunny again. Two and a half sunny days in a three-day streak is something to write home about in January, but I am already home, so I’m writing it to all of you who are elsewhere to let you know what you’re missing in your winter perches in Arizona, New Mexico, Mexico, south Florida, etc. Now on Sunday, the first day of the year's shortest month, sunshine again! Sunshine on pristine, glistening, sparkling snow!

 

Sunny day, Sunny!

Do you envy those of us back here in northern Michigan? A friend sent me a link to a video about a 4-year-old girl who received a gift pony and whose parents allowed her to show the pony her bedroom. My friend asked me, “Are you jealous?” and I answered, “Yes!” But right now I wouldn’t be anywhere else these days than northern Michigan, because my little personal life here is very happy, outside of my anguish over attacks on democracy and the rule of law all over our country, and even there, more and more Americans are standing up and taking brave public positions, so that is reason to be encouraged. Or, as a friend would have it, enCOURAGEd.

 

Homemade sign. NOT a "paid protester"!

(Graphic design is obviously not my forte. There are more snow and protest images and thoughts, however, in my previous post.)

Happy Book News

In my work as a bookseller (one aspect of my little personal life), I was thrilled to hear on Saturday from Robert Carlos Fuentes, author of The Vacation: A Teenage Migrant Farmworker’s Experience Picking Cherries in Michigan, that his book has won a Michigan Notable Book Award for 2026. Carlos wanted to thank me again for nominating his book, but I told him all I had to do was to call the committee’s attention to it (which was my honor and privilege), and his book did all the rest. I’ll let you know when the author (from Lansing), whose story takes place in Lake Leelanau, will next be in Northport. Author Tim Mulherin, who spoke at Dog Ears Books in late 2025, also received an award for his book, This Magnetic North. “My” authors! Bravo!

So there was all that sunshine--my final count for the month of January was four and one-half days--and there was the wonderful Michigan Notable Book news.

 

Then, Serendipity: From Other Books

 

Surrounded by books, both at work and at home, it’s easy for me to open covers and turn pages at random and find just the words I need. In a volume called Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, by Audre Lorde, in an interview with poet Adrienne Rich, Lorde says, “You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for.” I find that wonderful! It’s when you are afraid that you need courage. It’s when life challenges your strength that you need to be strong, and you become strong. 

 

At home, from my favorite philosopher, I found these words:

 

Between the closed soul and the open soul there is the soul in process of opening. Between the immobility of a man seated and the motion of the same man running there is the act of getting up, the attitude he assumes when he rises.

 

-      Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion

 

 

What We’re All Doing Here

In Minneapolis, citizens observe and video-record action in the streets; hold vigils and demonstrations; organize to shop for and delivery groceries to people afraid to leave their homes. Here in little Northport, far from the fray, we oldsters take turns standing outdoors with signs. We send checks. We use our platforms (this blog is one of mine; my bookstore is another) to share facts and support. A kindly bookshop customer brought me a piece of delicious homemade cake on Thursday, and I ran library errands for someone else. A cherry farmer keeps my driveway plowed, and I delivered a book order to a customer not feeling well enough to venture out. 

Friends and neighbors. And everyone in need is a neighbor, whether next door or a thousand miles away. Help however you can.

 

Again!

 

Sunday, 1/25/26: Another sunny January day!

We had another sunny day on Sunday. Sunshine again, for the third time this month!

Thursday--sunshine again!

On Thursday’s sunshine (sunny day #4), I locked up my shop just before noon, leaving a sign on the door telling anyone who might wander by that they could find me down on the corner to the south, where I stood with a group I call “the stalwarts.” They were a much larger group back in the summer, before the thermometer took a dive and the larger segment of Northport’s population took off for Arizona, Florida, and other points south, but nine or ten or eleven of them still get out there on Thursdays for half an hour or so, standing where they are most visible to drivers coming down the hill and turning left onto Waukazoo Street, and I decided it was time for me to join them.

 

I was sure I had posterboard somewhere, either at home or in the storage area behind my shop, but it stubbornly refused to reveal itself, so my sign was black felt marker on the raggedy top of a cardboard file box—not as big as it might have been and nowhere near as “professional” in appearance, but I justified the look by assuring myself that no one could mistake me for a “paid demonstrator.” 

 

(Does anyone really believe that there are paid demonstrators against ICE in American villages and towns and even large cities, Minneapolis or any other? I know the people who turn out for these events! They are my friends, my family, my neighbors! But I guess the same people who think it’s okay for right-wingers to carry assault weapons to demonstrations  and even kill people (do your own online search if you don't remember the names) but wrong for an ICE nurse from a VA hospital to carry, holstered not drawn, a gun he had a legal permit to carry—those people will clearly swallow any blatant lie or absurd argument in the world, as long as it comes from the “leaders” they follow blindly.)

 

Winter. Snow. COLD! Although even a sunny day without wind is darn cold when the temperatures are in the single digits, there are important reasons for not huddling indoors full-time, e.g., meaningful gathering of people aiming to protect democracy, e.g., getting a dog out for regular exercise.

Very COLD week!

Is a "warm-up" coming?

Thought-Stopping

A friend of mine who had trouble with anxiety was taught a method of overcoming it called “thought stopping.” When an anxiety-provoking thought or image comes into your mind, you say aloud, “Stop!” and then visualize something calm and beautiful, replacing a negative with a positive image. Some people have good results; however, the method is of very limited or no value for others, particularly anyone with OCD. By attempting to block the thought rather than dealing with it, the thought itself develops resistance to your resistance, studies have shown. Despite occasional temporary relief, you may be strengthening the fear you are trying to avoid by stuffing it into a closet. (See alternatives here.)

The other day another friend sent me a link for another kind of thought stopping, the kind that seeks not to conquer chronic fears but to avoid critical thinking, i.e., to avoid questioning whatever orthodoxy someone has accepted, to silence one's own doubt. The man who posts on Instagram under the name “epistemiccrisis” (great name!) says he was “born into” the MAGA culture and learned ways to avoid questioning the ideology by reaching for handy mind control techniques. Thought stopping, as epistemiccrisis explains it in this ideological world, holds questions and doubt at bay with phrases that short-circuit critical thinking and keep believers comfortable. One such phrase is “Fake news!” The phrases are used as shields to block a person's own intrusive thoughts but can also be used to block information from other sources that could lead to doubt.

One phrase that epistemiccrisis doesn't mention (please excuse me for not spelling it out completely) is “Tr__p Derangement Syndrome,” commonly shortened to TDS. Confronted with any unpleasant fact about the current president, his followers block thoughtful doubts with the catch-phrase, “TDS!” (That is supposed to imply that the person criticizing the president or simply bringing up an unpleasant fact about him is completely unhinged on the subject of the president, not that the president himself is unhinged or deranged, which would make much more sense.) A true-believing follower might follow up the thought-stopping accusation by asking the person who has criticized or brought up the unpleasant fact, “Are you off your meds?” 

You will notice that this method of avoiding critical thinking also has the general effect of shutting down discussion by sideswiping anyone with a different perspective, sending the clear signal that no challenge to the received orthodoxy will be received by the blocked mind.

Recent Reading

Ah, but we still have books! Not only my own interests but semipopular demand has determined me to enlarge my offerings of classic philosophy writings. Notice also Mary Webb’s novel, Precious Bane, for which I am an evangelist. Escape to the quiet world of Shropshire, back when plows were drawn by livestock and the Saturday market was as good as a county fair. Don’t worry, though. There is plenty of conflict and drama in the story; it isn’t all sweetness and light. Simply one of the Western world’s great books, too long overlooked.

The story told in journalist Martin Sixsmith’s work of nonfiction pictured above was partially familiar to me from the film version, “Philomena,” starring Judy Dench and Steve Coogan. While the movie focused on the mother searching for the baby she was forced to give up for adoption, however, the book follows the life of the child from birth to death and also delves deeply into political struggles within Ireland (between Church and government), as well as in the United States, where the adopted Irish child grows to be a successful lawyer working for the RNC on (of all things!) redistricting, so book and film are complementary, and I recommend both. 

This Week Up North

 

Despite single-digit temperatures and subzero wind chills, Leelanau bodies of water are not yet covered with ice. Looking past the mountains of snow that hide most of the Northport Youth Sailing School buildings, you can see the blue water of Grand Traverse Bay. How long will that be the case? How soon will ice boating and ice fishing be possible on Lake Leelanau? Stay tuned. I’ll let you know.

Blue water in Grand Traverse Bay is still visible.

What good does it do to “speak out”?

I’ll cut right to the chase today and save the meandering for another day. On this cold Monday morning I typed “stand with Minnesota” into my Internet search bar and found a site with exactly that name, so here it is. Within the site you will find various other links, so do a little exploring and see where you want to put your two cents—or more, I hope.

 

I STAND WITH 

MINNESOTA.

 

I STAND FOR 

THE U.S. CONSTITUTION.

 

 

A group of stalwart Northporters gathers on the sidewalk every Thursday morning, and on Monday morning, casting about with that agonizing question, “What can I do?” I thought, I can do that. 

 

Former presidents Obama and Clinton have spoken out. (I’m still waiting to hear from President Bush.) They, of course, are famous people, former presidents, historic personages. What possible difference can it possibly make for one “tiny bookseller” (as I was once called) in a tiny Up North village to hold a sign and add her aged voice to the resistance? I was told by one political opponent that my “rants” don’t do any good and was asked how I can possibly expect anything I write or say to change the course of history.

 

Let me turn that question around: How do you expect to turn our national tragedy around by remaining silent? I shouldn’t say “you” there but “anyone.” How does anyone hope to do good by crossing to the other side of the street and looking away? “How many times can a man turn his head/and pretend that he just doesn’t see?”

Protests in the Sixties (1960s, that is) were not always peaceful, and they were not always effective, and there are plenty of Sixties sayings that aren’t worth printing on a t-shirt, but one I stand by today: 

IF YOU’RE NOT PART OF THE SOLUTION, YOU’RE PART OF THE PROBLEM. One voice is not one alone when voices join together in a chorus.

 

Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse murdered—shot in the back—by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday (they “scattered” after firing their guns), was the classic good Samaritan. On Nicollet Avenue to observe ICE and film activities to protect his community, he stopped to help a woman pushed to the ground by federal—I want to call them “storm troopers,” but let’s use the more neutral term—“agents.” He wanted to make sure she was all right. Because of that, after his legally permitted firearm was taken from him (he did not have it in his hand), and while he was lying on the ground (already “subdued” by multiple agents), he was executed in cold blood.

 

With whom do you stand? For what do you stand? If not now, when?

Postscript: I strongly recommend this video statement by Adam Kinzinger. Watch and listen to the end. Good arguments, strong background.