Frequently, Thoughts Take Wing

A few mornings back, a friend e-mailed me one of his poems-in-progress, one in which he, the writer, is “condemned to earth” while crows and even tiny sparrows have the power of flight. One does not argue with a poem. A poem is not an argument. Yet I couldn’t help thinking that I would not trade places with the highest-soaring of birds. It is they who are “condemned,” in my eyes, year-round, to a constant and often uncertain search for food. But do they feel condemned? Jealous of other beings? Surely not. Surely they are incapable of such feeling, of comparing the lives they have with lives they cannot have, and in that incapacity must lie their true freedom.

Then came into my hands a most unusual little book, only 16cm tall and 12cm from spine to fore-edges. Its unusual nature is extended by the fact that it is two books in one: Hold it one way, and you have one title and author’s name; flip it over, and read words announcing a different title and author. Read from either cover, and midway you must stop, flip the book over, and read from the other cover back to the middle. The book is Checking In/Checking Out (New Orleans, NO Books, 2011), and the authors are Christopher Schaberg (Checking In) and Mark Yakich (Checking Out). The subject is human flight – airplanes, flying, airports – fear, security, danger, and the everyday work involved for support personnel, poetry, reading, ecology, and evolution.

Schaberg loves flying and will fly stand-by, via any circuitous route, anywhere in the world, it seems. Yakich approaches unavoidable air travel with clammy hands and imaginings that all his attempts at meditation cannot subdue. But there is so much more than elation and fear in these first-person essays. Yakich brings musings on poetry and books and reading to thoughts and memories of air travel, while Schaberg, equally unrestrained by gravity and location, suggests that airports have their own ecology and that air travel is part of evolution.

For instance, Schaberg recounts an anecdote about a gopher snake hitching a ride on a big 747:

It occurred to me that this sort of counted as an evolved form of migration: the snake had found a rather quick way to a new bioregion. And then it dawned on me that, strictly speaking, evolution encompasses everything that happens; there’s no getting outside it. Airports are a human phenotype, and other creatures interpenetrate these techno-cultural spaces, showing them to be actual ecosystems, through and through.

Yakich observes the importance reading on planes, for himself and for other travelers:

Like flying itself, reading connects me to others through space and time. Particularly on take-off, reading helps because it’s the one thing about the flight that feels in my control.

He also says that while he often sleeps with a book, he cannot imagine sleeping with an e-reader, because “once you’ve had one Kindle you’ve had them all.”

Checking In/Checking Out is, physically, one of the littlest books I have ever read. Its font is miniscule. And yet, in the course of its 100 small pages I took multiple wild flights, imaginary and speculative.

My own very infrequent flier history stands in marked contrast to the number of flights the authors have experienced. I am able to count mine on my fingers:

RT Joliet-Chicago

RT Traverse City-Chicago

RT Kalamazoo-New York

RT Chicago-Paris (3x, 1^st time by way of Iceland)

RT Paris-London (1)

RT Traverse City-Paris (via Detroit)

RT Traverse City-Aspen (via Chicago)

RT Traverse City-Phoenix

Because it’s the way my family always did things, the way I grew up, I buy newspapers, read books on paper, and write letters to mail at the post office, preferably with beautiful or at least interesting stamps. Because my father (civil engineer), grandfather (train engineer), and two great-uncles (one a train engineer, the other a conductor) worked for railroads, our family took trains wherever we went, from South Dakota to Illinois, to Ohio, and to Florida, at a time in American history when other vacationing families were driving the new, wide postwar highways and staying at Howard Johnson motels. 

I took my first train trip before the age of three, when my parents moved from South Dakota to Illinois. If there were still trains between Traverse City and Chicago, I would be taking them to visit my mother and sisters. The little demitasse cup and saucer you see here were given to me by the dining crew as a memento of that first trip. (What three-year-old girl isn’t precious?)

For me, the best part of flying -- which is otherwise, let’s face it, a lot of hassle and inconvenience, not to mention discomfort – is the view from the window, the view above the clouds, above mountains, fields, rivers and cities. But then, despite the charms of dining car, cone-shaped paper cups to fill at the drinking fountain, cunning little sleeping bunks, and miniature sinks, my favorite part of riding the train, too, was the always-changing view out the window. Yet earthbound, my imagination was unrestrained and subject to wild flights.

If you don’t believe me, ask my younger sisters, captive audience to my long-ago railroad story-telling.

But more important is the news that Mark Yakich will be at Dog Ears Books on Friday, June 28, from 2-4 p.m. Writer of fiction and poetry, as well as nonfiction, he's coming to us straight from New Orleans, so plan to be on hand for fascinating conversation and riveting poetry. More about this in the weeks ahead.

Every Good Book Can Be "Harvested" Over and Over

I am an inveterate re-reader. This is, in some ways, a handicap for a bookseller and would be a real problem for me if I sold only new books, because, as people sometimes ask, “How can you keep up?” and the answer is that I can’t. A quick search for book reviews here since the first of the year will show that I do not ignore new books; on the other hand, reaching for old ones keeps me from being familiar with all the current best-sellers. For instance, I have yet to read The Kite Runner, let alone the author’s latest book, a single glaring example that should serve to illustrate my point without a long, embarrassing-myself list.

So there’s my “Books Read” list, and there’s Ellen Airgood’s South of Superior again, read for the third or fourth time. There’s a Barbara Ehrenreich title read twice already this year (and the year less than half gone). There are titles by Ernest J. Gaines that came out years ago – these not re-read but discovered by me for the first time and only because I do not read only new books. Already I yearn to re-read Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Q Road and Once Upon a River and the indescribably vivid short stories of Katey Schultz in Flashes of War.

Valerie Trueblood has a new book coming out very soon, her third. I have it back-ordered but meanwhile, while waiting impatiently, I began re-reading her first book, Seven Loves (2006), a nonlinear novel. The novel tells the life of the main character episodically rather than chronologically, and what strikes me on this re-reading, since I already know the “end” of May’s story, is the poetic economy of the writing: nothing is missing, and nothing is extraneous. I am in awe of flawless writing that proceeds so quietly and modestly.

Many fiction readers seldom if ever read poetry. There must be devotees of poetry who miss a lot of new short story collections, too (Trueblood’s upcoming publication is a collection of short stories), and a lot of people who love novels don’t give short stories a chance. But is there a reader alive, I ask myself, any lover of writing excellence, who could resist Seven Loves? It’s hard for me to dog-ear books any more, and I’ve kept my copy of Seven Loves pristine for all the years I’ve had it, but the other night, well into the book (p. 130), I finally gave in to temptation.

“That was all right. That was as it must be. Eventually the past went from being cards laid face down to cards not held at all.”

“The gait, all her own, with which Jackie now advanced, awkward yet delicate, like a loaded camel led on a bridle.”

“When Nick died, her way back was as slow as the arrow that never arrived because the distance it was traveling could still be cut in half.”

“Twenty years had taught her to sense the approach of a given scene by its aura, and to stop the drift toward certain occasions of the past. Almost always, if they stirred in their fog she turned back.”

Only a small sample --. The thoughts and impressions of one mind, at different times of life, a rather ordinary life – but oh, how extraordinary the life of that mind’s expressions! May was a teacher for years and after her stroke is thinking back to papers her students wrote. One perennial favorite topic, she recalls while looking through an old encyclopedia, was bees.

She studied the head-on enlargement of the worker bee’s face, the giant badge eyes, blind-looking, innocent. Poor hunched compelled undesiring female. No student had written about that, the sadness of the facial configuration of the bee.

The phrase takes my breath away: “the sadness of the facial configuration of the bee.”

As author and bookseller, Trueblood and I have been in off-and-on e-mail communication since her first book appeared. I seem to remember asking her if she wrote poetry, certain that the answer would be yes, and receiving a negative reply. Well, in this novel we have May’s entire life, not merely one hushed, distilled moment, set in the middle of a page with wide margins around it -- and yet I read many poems in May’s responses to life.

How many poems are born and die unwritten and unacknowledged in a single mind? Trueblood’s gift to readers of this novel is the preservation of unique moments in her fictional central character’s life.

There was also Marry or Burn between then and now, and you can follow the link to my review of that book. You see why I am impatient for the new one? 

Yes, of course I read new books, too: Every book, if ever to be re-read, must first be read for the first time.

In Which the Bookseller’s Mind Hops Around Like a Flea

Every time I look at it, Facebook asks what’s on my mind (or, more intrusively, how I’m feeling, but I figure that’s none of Fb’s business), and I imply the question myself in the heading material of this blog, but seldom can the answer be phrased in a pithy, cocktail-party one-liner. Even at the bookstore, focused on business, I find my thoughts going in several different directions, seemingly at once.

Clearly, the bookstore needs a new sign.

Old sign announced bookstore presence

Currently, it's hard to see we're here

See what I mean? That OPEN flag is mine, but does it say bookstore? No. Despite the letters spelling out BOOKS on our door (thanks again to Bill Coohon), the big word LAW right above the door dwarfs our presence. LAW, of course, goes with the word OFFICE, the latter word being above the law office door just next to ours – sigh! -- because ours, you see, is a new door that wasn’t there when the LAW OFFICE sign went up. What can I say? We’re working on it, we’re working on it! Meanwhile, please search us out, because WE ARE HERE!!! WITH BOOKS!!! 

We need more room for gardening, farming, plant, and food books.

Small section of new book offerings

The first new books that Dog Ears ever carried were nature field guides. I’ve always loved them and never had enough used ones to satisfy me or my customers, who often wanted something specific and/or new. I’ve always loved old books on gardening and farming, too, and have been happy to have customers for them. Now with the recent resurgence of interest in homesteading (reminding me of the 1970s), there are also some great new agrarian and urban-agriculture books. So along with reprints of classics, such as William Cobbett’s The American Gardener; Masanobu Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution; and Louis Bromfield’s Malabar Farm, I’m stocking recent titles by Gene Logsdon and Sharon Astyk; books on raising chickens and keeping bees; Attracting Native Pollinators; The Encyclopedia of Country Living, by Carla Emery; The New Organic Grower, by Eliot Coleman; Ron Parker’s The Sheep Book; Florian Werner’s Cow: A Bovine Biography; and more -- and it isn’t enough to fulfill what I see as one of the missions of Dog Ears Books.

Sometimes I give in to an odd temptation.

There is one new book on the shelf that no one besides me will probably want to read, and though I don’t have time to read it, I may be its purchaser come Labor Day. No, I’m not going to say which one it is.

Ordering the latest Khaled Hosseini book, on the other hand, And the Mountains Echoed, was probably a better move. It’s already a bestseller, nationally and regionally. And I have Mardi Link's new memoir back-ordered, so that will be in soon. 

Why does the queen have two birthdays?

A friend gave me a lovely 2013 calendar, and on the June page I see “Queen’s Birthday (New Zealand)” on June 3 and “Queen’s Birthday (Australia)” on June 10. Isn’t it the same queen? If so (and I can’t imagine otherwise), why is her birthday celebrated one day in New Zealand and a full week later in Australia? Every time I look at the June calendar, the queen’s birthdays fill me with confusion.

And by the way, happy birthday, Big Steve! You and the Queen – in New Zealand, at least – share this special day, so I wish you the very best and suggest you consider wearing a crown.

Also on the calendar –

Poet Mary Ann Samyn will be here June 14, Poet-novelist Mark Yakich on June 28 (time TBA), and St. John’s Eve, June 23, I notice, is on a Sunday this year and is a full moon night. Considering having the Yakich event early in the afternoon rather than right at dinner hour (before Music in the Park). Any thoughts from Out There???

The best book, dog, nature, philosophy, etc. blog in the whole, ever-lovin’ world!!!

Just kidding. Couldn't resist. Thought of using the underlined for a boastful post heading and then having the text say nothing but “Just kidding.” Probably not the best idea I’ve ever had. That, please note, I did resist.

As for the rest –

That (see above) isn’t all that’s on my mind, by a long shot, and you probably wouldn’t want to hear it all, anyway, but if you miss my cranky side, hop on over to one of my other blogs -- or just wait for the next post on Books in Northport, because you never know what direction my thoughts will take -- because I don’t know ahead of time, either. It's spring, after all, on the cusp of summer. Whose mind isn't a little all over the place these days?

Robin stays focused. Me, not so much.

The Peaceful Timelessness of a Rainy Day

For me, time always seems to stand still on a rainy day. It’s an illusion, I know, but on a long, grey, misty day, with spells of gentle rain, drops streaking and running down the windows and spray from passing vehicles splashing up onto the sidewalks and pedestrians hunched under umbrellas or hoods or newspapers over their heads, the flow of continually alternating sunshine and dark is interrupted. Imagine a measure of rest in a score of music, and over the rest mark a fermata. That’s how it feels. Suspended pause. A time to move slowly from task to task rather than rushing or being rushed. 

Time to stop and look at raindrops on a new begonia. To breathe in the scent of lilacs. To notice and appreciate part of a spiderweb on a fading plum blossom and the short, fragrant life of wild choke cherry blooms.

It was a quiet day at the bookstore on the rainy Tuesday following the holiday weekend. I moved some furniture, hung a picture, put together a book order, drafted a press release. Sold a few books and visited with a few friends. Finished the new Elizabeth Buzzelli mystery -- on the edge of my seat to the last page!

Fun new sign

Sarah was her usual patient self all day. She hasn’t voiced an opinion about our new open sign, the red paw in the window, but then, she’s a quiet dog. Rarely barks and never whines. She’s always up for adventure when it beckons and company when it’s available, but she’s fine with quiet hours and days, too.

Through the rain-hazy front window on Tuesday afternoon

Two Reasons Why I’ve Fallen Behind in My Reading

Replacing what the moles ate

Lettuce seedlings

Reason #1: It’s spring, and that means planting and mowing and watering new plants and conditioning straw bales for the garden planting and mowing and mowing and mowing.

A couple of the garden bales by clothesline

Lawn mowed by abandoned garden site

MORE grass! Keeps down mosquitoes and reduces fire hazard--that's why.

Guest-picked posies

Reason #2: We’ve had a lot of company. Company means cleaning and cooking and visiting and visiting and visiting and showing friends and family the local sights. -- Unfortunately, I have limited photographic evidence to offer for this reason, because of three recent visits in as many weeks, my camera was available only for the second one.

Finally warm enough for front porch dining

Hanging around the table after dinner -- a favorite pasttime

Now all the company is gone, lawn mowed for the third time, and I’m engrossed in and halfway through Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli’s new book, Dead Little Dolly. Counting on bookstore helper Bruce to write a review of Bob Underhill’s latest murder mystery, Suttons Bay. We grabbed at those new titles eagerly, as will bookstore customers.

As for changes at the bookstore, they are almost complete. David and I put up a bulletin board by the front door the other day, so there will be no more need to fill the windows with posters, obscuring the view. (Bulletin board is cool! I love it!) Just a bit more furniture moving, and I’ll no longer be calling the place a work-in-progress. Maybe today? A rainy Tuesday after a sunny holiday weekend seems made to order....

Waukazoo Street Is Ready For You

The rain has stopped, the air is crisp and clear, the sun is bright, and despite the fact that we haven't got new signage yet on the old Hall & Kellogg garage building at 106 Waukazoo Street, things indoors are in pretty good order, just in time for (I can hardly believe it's already here!) the Memorial Day weekend.

Yes, we're open!

Red Mullein invites you --

Dog Ears Books invites you --

David Grath invites you --

When you see the OPEN signs (David Grath's gallery is pretty much open whenever the bookstore is open), come in and feast your eyes. 

Clare Gengarelly models one of her beautiful Japanese haori jackets. Each one is different, and all are gorgeous.

Clare also has jewelry and soft, bright weaving.

Her paintings are bright and cheerful, too.

David Grath's paintings glow with inner light.

The small gallery feels spacious and peaceful.

It's an oasis of calm and beauty.

You already know what's in my space: Dog Ears has notecards and puzzles, refrigerator magnets and laminated scenic bookmarks, but the basis of a bookstore is always books. 

New entrance --

New arrangement at front of shop --

Same dog who has not yet learned to read -- but she's very patient with readers.

Deirdre is a fabulous baker.

Coffee and treats are nearby, right across Waukazoo Street, in the "Big Store," although I've heard that Brew North may be changing its name any day now, along with offering more substantial fare. Erik and Deirdre and Dominic are also planning a music festival throughout the village to take place over 4th of July week.

On such a beautiful day, with Bruce is working for me at Dog Ears, I took the opportunity to stroll around the corner to Sally Coohon's shop, Dolls and More, on Nagonaba Street. Sally's place is always bright and colorful, Here she is explaining a new display to me. 

On the counter are sample craft items Sally made...

...displayed with the books that give instructions on how to do the crafts.

All this is only the tip of the iceberg Northport activity this season. Workers are busy at the old Stubb's restaurant on Waukazoo, which will open under a new name and new management probably by the 4th of July, and there's work going on also at the T-intersection of Waukazoo and Nagonaba where we are soon to have a brew pub, if I've got the story straight, and another new gallery and another new shop will be opening soon on Nagonaba Street, too, not to mention the golf course and bowling alley projects. 

Ours is only a small village, and we're still waiting for frost-free nights, but here comes the sun! 

We are unfolding eagerly in the light

Writing of Home – and One Southern Black Man’s Home Ground

Writing for me is discovery. If I knew everything when I began a novel, I’m afraid it would be boring to write. I do not know everything that’s going to happen in the book. I don’t want to know everything. I want to discover, as you, the reader, want to discover, what it’s all about. Those little unknown things that happen on the train between San Francisco and New York keep me writing and you, the reader, turning the pages. Oprah Winfrey asked what I try to reach for in my writing. And I said something to this effect: I try to create characters with character to help develop my own character and maybe the character of the reader who might read me.
 - Ernest J. Gaines, “Writing A Lesson Before Dying,” in Mozart and Leadbelly: Stories and Essays

There is always time for reading in a bookseller’s life -- or in a writer’s life or, definitely and by definition, in a reader’s life. In fact, most gardeners I know are readers, too. So yes, even in the midst of downsizing and moving, de-acquisitioning and remodeling and painting and planning and planting and gearing up for what we call “The Season,” I carve out little pieces of reading time here and there.

Home – what it means, what we mean by the word -- is much on my mind these days. Recurring throughout my life has also been the question of how much any writer can know about his or her characters before writing their stories. The two questions would not necessarily be related in every mind, but because I have been thinking about home and reading Gaines – and because home and writing are both central to my life -- they do occur together in my thoughts.

Again and again Gaines emphasizes that much of his writing career has focused on trying to reconstruct the porch conversations of the old black people in his part of Louisiana. Writing of himself in the third person in “A Very Big Order: Reconstructing Identity,” he recalls the day he left home to go away to school.

[He] realized that to find the tree from which the leaf had been broken was to go back to those who sat out on the porch the day he left. What were they talking about that day while he was inside packing? What did they talk about the day before, the year before, the years and years and years before?

Louisiana (but not New Orleans) is the place Gaines knows best, the place he grew up, but to carve out a literary place for that rural Louisiana required thinking about it, reflecting on it, researching its past, and writing, writing, writing. Because that is what he wanted to do: to write about “the people at home,” the people who had not yet been given a place in the American literature he read in college, to create that literary place for them, to give them life on paper, to introduce them to the world.

I wanted to smell that Louisiana earth, feel that Louisiana sun, sit under the shade of one of those Louisiana oaks, search for pecans in that Louisiana grass in one of those Louisiana yards next to one of those Louisiana bayous, not far from a Louisiana river. I wanted to see on paper those Louisiana black children walking to school on cold days while yellow Louisiana buses passed them by. I wanted to see on paper those black parents going to work before the sun came up and coming back home to look after their children after the sun went down. I wanted to see on paper the true reason why those black fathers left home – not because they were trifling or shiftless, but because they were tired of putting up with certain conditions. I wanted to see on paper the small country churches (schools during the week), and I wanted to hear those simple religious songs, those simple prayers – that true devotion.

Gaines, Southern and black, is unmistakably American, his stories rooted, like those of Wendell Berry’s Kentucky farmers, in a very specific American landscape whose people readers from elsewhere in the country and in different situations would not know but for his work. The place and people existed and are in some true way the source of the stories, but they had to be -- brought forth? That cannot be the right way to say it.

A famous sculptor spoke of subtracting from the stone everything that was not his subject, the subject being “always already” there (“toujours déjà,” comme disent les français), but can stories pre-exist their writing? And does the sculpture, really? It sounds good, but is it true? I for one don’t believe it.

A different sculptor would, I’m sure, have found a different subject in the stone. Another writer would have found his own very different characters in this “same” terroir. It cannot be the limits of geographical region and actual and historical inhabitants alone that determine stories of any particular place, because there is also the unique voice of the particular author who wrote the stories, and that voice did not simply pour out when tapped, like a vein of oil or an underground spring of water, but had to be developed over time, through work, through the continued and dedicated practice of writing. The writer had to show up for work, sit down to work, and keep at his work. He had to write and edit and rewrite and discard and start all over again. And he had to be open to discovery, to letting characters emerge in their own truth. The characters of Gaines’s work are true to those people he knew when he was young, to people he has known all his life, but no character is simply translated from life to the page. His characters are new beings in the world.

Read that long quoted passage again, the one in which the name “Louisiana” sounds over and over like a bell. Can you feel the sun? Can you smell the earth and the grass and see the children? That is the setting, very different from my northern Michigan home. Next, to enter the lives of Gaines’s specific characters, you must read his stories and novels.

Every successful writer of fiction creates a new world for us. If we give ourselves a chance and let ourselves trust a writer, we can slip out of our own lives for a while and into a place other people call home, and in this way, we can broaden our own sense of being at home on this earth.

Feeling or not feeling at home. Wanting a home, finding a home, losing a home. Homelessness, alienation. Being at home in one's skin and in one's language. The feeling for home is universal, but every instance of it can only be specific.

Guest Book Review: SPARROW MIGRATIONS

SPARROW MIGRATIONS, by Cari Noga

Paperback, $14.95

Reviewed by Marilyn Zimmerman

When Canada geese take out both engines of a passenger plane -- not just one, as is usually the case -- the lives of three families impacted by the emergency landing on the Hudson River in January, 2009, change in ways they could never have imagined.  Cari Noga’s first novel, Sparrow Migrations, puts the reader on three intersecting life paths: on one of the rescue ferries with an autistic adolescent and his loving but often frustrated parents; on the wing of the plane where icy water creeps up the ankles of an infertile woman (infertility her biggest ongoing life challenge) while her husband stands next to her texting the lab where he works; and back on the ferry with a minister’s wife and her female lover, who have no idea the television cameras have captured their image and will broadcast it to the world. 

The story follows these three families beginning on that dramatic day. For the autistic boy, the bird strike becomes a connection with his father and a window out of which he can view the world; the infertile wife learns that her sister has a rare genetic disease and must then make her own decision about genetic testing and in vitro fertilization; while the minister’s wife must wrestle with her own truth and what its exposure does to her family.  As these diverse characters struggle with deceit, infidelity, and issues of communication, their lives change, and they come ever closer to encountering one another again, this time in quite a different setting,. The common feature in the second intersection is, once again, birds.

The author’s bio tells us that Cari Noga is the mother of an autistic son, and her experience with the subtleties of that condition resonate clearly in this well-written story.  Images of Robby with the hood of his Detroit Lions sweatshirt pulled tight around his face, his noise-muffling headphones underneath, his annoyance with his well-meaning parents, his obsession with numbers (of the geese in the river, their flight speed, the outside temperature, and later, counting birds for the local Audubon chapter), and his need to be in control of his environment, stayed with me long after I had finished the novel.  Noga’s insights about this boy’s mind and his view of the world ring true and leave the reader with a sense of what it must be like to live with this kind of autism.  She gives the reader a poignant gift with the character of Robby Palmer. 

Noga’s other characters in Sparrow Migrations learn lessons about difficult and unsought choices parents must face.  Besides the obvious challenges of raising an autistic child, the idea of giving birth to a child who could carry a disabling genetic condition, as well as the balance between living one’s own most authentic life or giving it up for a child -- or something in between -- are all explored with insight and realism. 

Like sparrows, ordinary birds we might easily fail to notice but each one, we are told in Scripture, important to God, the seemingly ordinary parents in Noga’s graceful book learn to cope with the changes life brings their way, and, through their struggles and insights, each character becomes significant to the reader.

Marilyn Zimmerman is a former elementary school teacher, a retired attorney, a lover of books, and a writer.  She lives on a farm outside Northport with her husband and their very spoiled cat named Marmalade.

*  *  *  *  *

Bookseller's Postscript: Cari Noga, whose Road Biking Michigan was published in 2005, this time around has self-published Sparrow Migrations, her first novel, but she has also done something I’ve never seen done before: In addition to the novel, she has also self-published an excerpt from it as a stand-alone book, this shorter story titled Plover Pilgrimage. Glenn Wolf did the cover illustration. Slightly over 40 pages, Plover Pilgrimage contains the story of the visit Robby and his parents make to Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore in plover nesting season. Sparrow Migrations is $14.95 in paperback, Plover Pilgrimage only $4.95. It’s interesting to me how many people decide to buy both, even knowing that the smaller book is an excerpt of the complete novel. They buy the complete novel for themselves and the shorter story to send to friends. Thus Plover Pilgrimage will introduce new readers to Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore and to the fiction of Cari Noga at the same time. Clever author! - pj