With Holiday, Real Summer Begins

Declaring independence!

In Northport, Beautiful 4th of July Weekend

Most years past in Northport, we've seen an influx of tourists and summer residents for Memorial Day weekend, followed by quiet weeks through June until the 4^th of July, but this time around summer seemed to kick off early, with more visitors in June than I ever remember before. Apparently word has gotten out that June is a heavenly month Up North. And this yea's 4th of July weekend could not have been lovelier. Weather was warm enough for the beach, not hot enough to be uncomfortable, with refreshing morning and evening breezes.

Kathleen Stocking signs book for Ty Wessell

My first bookstore event of the summer season was a signing of The Long Arc of the Universe, by Kathleen Stocking, on Sunday, July 3. Once again, I neglected to have my picture taken with my guest author! When will I learn to make this a routine part of every author event? Well, the good news – and not just for my memory book – is that Stocking will return for a second event in August. We will set up chairs in David Grath’s gallery next door, and the author will give a talk, with an opportunity for audience questions -- and I guarantee a lively, stimulating evening! More on this subject later....

Wildflowers on porch table

At home

There is never enough time for sitting at home on the front porch, but I enjoy every morning and evening minute of it that I have. Over the holiday weekend I re-read Letters from the Leelanau, by Kathleen Stocking, and Drummond Girls, by Mardi Link, then read Kelly Fordon’s short story collection, Garden for the Blind. Not only is Kelly my next guest author (Thursday, July 14, 1-3 p.m.), but she has been getting well-deserved rave reviews for this book. I look forward to meeting her and hosting her event, and I hope all my local writer friends will be able to make it to her reading. I'll have more to say about her stories, too, as we get closer to her visit. 

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Classics

Back in Northport

One day, during the usually midafternoon lull in the bookstore, I got to musing about phrases people use. For instance, people who come in out of curiosity, not necessarily because of an interest in books, usually insist that they don’t need assistance or information because they are “just browsing.”

Okay, I learned from my mother at an early age about telling salespeople, “Thanks, I’m just looking.” But looking, as I see it, is not browsing.

You can look with hands in pockets. You can look while in continuous motion, without ever coming to a halt. You can look pretty quickly -- and be out the door again in a flash! As I have heard tourists say to friends on the sidewalk, more than once, “It’s just books in there.” (Yep, pretty much just books, which explains why I call it a bookstore and why its name is Dog Ears Books.)

Browsing is something different.

Bookstore browsing is done with hands as well as eyes. It involves touching books, taking books from the shelves, opening book covers, sometimes reading a few pages, maybe even finding a nearby chair to investigate more closely a volume that has captured the eye and hands. A taste here, a taste there, the chewing-over of a thought or idea. Because unless you are already familiar with the book that catches your eye – and know that you want it – the title on the spine won’t tell you all that much. It’s what’s inside that counts, and the insides of books are a lot more than merchandise to be judged at a glance.

Now I know that I am not, single-handedly, going to change Americans’ use of the English language. “I’m just browsing” means, to most of the people who use the phrase in my bookstore, “I’m just taking a look around. I probably won’t buy anything. Don’t bug me!” I get it. Not that I bug anyone in my bookstore. There is no high-pressure sales force at work here. I offer once, so no one will feel ignored, and that’s that.

Browsers don’t have to explain themselves to me because their behavior tells the story. Like philosophers in the halls of academe, speculating on the dreams of dogs instead of obsessing about fringe benefits and retirement packages, browsers are my people. We understand each other. Looking is not enough for us. Rather, we look to lose ourselves in books.

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Random bovine

I’d just drafted the paragraphs above about browsing (originally with introductory material about horses and cattle browsing and grazing, just because I love horses and cows, but it was kind of a reach) when a mother and daughter walked in the door, and the mother exclaimed, “I’ve never been in a real bookstore before! I feel like I’m in a movie!” She had, as it turned out, been in large chain bookstores, but not in any quirky little independent place like mine, and her delight delighted me.

And they browsed! The daughter bought an art book! As they were leaving, I told them they had taken a new turn in their lives, and the daughter replied, “Yes, now we’ll never not go into a bookstore!” Music to my ears!

Bookstore bulletin board

A Pause as Time Rushes By

I hope everyone’s summer is off to a good start, and I hope it doesn’t race by too, too fast, though I already know that it will. Summer is like that. But we love it!

Tuberose begonias

Flowers, Books, Insects, and Curiosity

June slid into July, as it always does, and the march of mad summer blooms continues. Again on Thursday morning I was greeted by flowers on the bookstore doorstep.

Bruce had come in to work for me on Wednesday, for the first time since last fall. Hallelujah! A day off for the bookstore owner! Naturally, I had a bookstore errand to run, an excuse for a morning drive down to Glen Lake, where I picked up the new book from Leelanau Press, Leelanau Trek: One Shoreline, Two Visions, a book about which I cannot say enough good things. That was exciting! We even made a brief dip into Traverse City.

I finished my reading of Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, a much livelier and funnier book than I had expected it to be. Our reading circle has decided to meet in August but without an assigned book to read and discuss. Instead each of us will bring something we want to share with the others. I’ll be sharing Samuel Butler.

A bookseller from Powell’s, out in Portland, Oregon, wrote a piece for the Huffington Post, and to every paragraph I wanted to shout, “Yes!” Here’s the link, if you’d like to read “Love and Bookstores” for yourself, because if I start quoting I won’t be able to stop.

And then, as always, there has been the serendipitous picking up of the odd volume and finding treasure:

There are for each one of us, according to his turn of mind, certain books that open up horizons hitherto undreamed of and mark an epoch in our mental life. They fling wide the gates of a new world wherein our intellectual powers are henceforth to be employed; they are the spark which lights the fuel on a hearth doomed, without its aid, to remain indefinitely bleak and cold. And it is often chance that places in our hands those books which mark the beginning of a new era in the evolution of our ideas. The most casual circumstances, a few lines that happen somehow to come before our eyes decide our future and plant us in the appointed groove.

-      Jean Henri Fabre, The Hunting Wasps

Who but Fabre, “the Homer of the insects,” would begin a book about wasps with a paragraph on the serendipity of book discovery? It was, admittedly, his way of introducing a monograph he had happened upon that set his mind in a new direction concerning the habits of wasps, but still – a curious mind, open to the discovery of whatever was nearby, guided Fabre’s learning about insects as surely as it brought the right books to his hands and mind. About my only disappointment in the trip David and I made together to France years ago was that Fabre’s house, now a museum, was closed for renovations the month we were there. Anyone wishing to visit the grounds, however, may do so by viewing the film “Microcosmos.” I recommend it highly.

Don’t forget that this Sunday Kathleen Stocking will be at Dog Ears Books from noon to 1 p.m., signing her latest book, The Long Arc of the Universe. I’m continually surprised to find there are people who have not yet read her first and second books, Letters from the Leelanau and Lake Country. In the car this morning, on the way to Northport, I thought of what I needed to tell those of whom this is true: “If you haven’t read Kathleen Stocking, you don’t know Leelanau County.”  So get started now!

Report from the Tweet Front

Awaiting the big news --

Today’s report is from Saturday, June 25, the first-ever Dog Ears Book tweet fest. Will there be another? I suppose it could happen, but it would be hard to top yesterday’s for thrills.

Logging on....

Treats!

The tweeting occasion took place far from Northport, down in Orlando, Florida, at the national convention of the American Library Association. ForeWord Reviews was there to announce their 2016 Indiefab awards, and Even in Darkness, the novel by Barbara Stark-Nemon of Ann Arbor and Northport, was a nominee in a couple of categories. ForeWord would be tweeting from Orlando, Barbara would receive the tweets and Facebook announcements, and so she proposed re-tweeting results from her favorite bookstore, as a few other nominees around the country were also doing. Being Barbara, she not only brought laptop, iPad, and iPhone but also what my fellow blogger Gerry Sell calls “excellent treats.” My technological role was limited to sharing a Facebook post Barbara tagged me in. I could handle that.

Thrills!

We didn’t have a big crowd, but the moment Barbara logged on and saw her award – right away, no waiting! – she read it aloud, and she, Clare, and I screamed in delight. You should have been here. I’m sorry you missed it. Barbara won the Gold (first prize) in literary fiction, and Bronze (third) in historical fiction! Over the top excitement! 

Sharing the excitement

Our giddy delirium lasted quite a while, and several browsers who wandered in caught the fever and bought copies of Even in Darkness to take home. Then when the decks cleared, Barbara and I went down to Northport Brewing to relax and chat at an outdoor table with a couple of cold pints. That was a first for me, too. Finally!

Relaxing, enjoying....

Tweeting? From Dog Ears???

Still making news!

Can you imagine tweets coming from Dog Ears? If it’s ever happened before, the activity was surreptitious, and I was not involved. I won't be the one doing the actual tweeting this time, either, but it will occur in my bookstore, with my blessing.

The instigator is -- and tweeter will be -- Barbara Stark-Nemon, author of Even in Darkness. And the reason is that Barbara’s book is up for a 2016 INDIEFAB book award from ForeWord Reviews, and ForeWord will be tweeting live (and posting on Facebook) on Saturday from the American Library Association’s national convention in Orlando. Make sense now?

Our “live” show will begin at 4 p.m. on Saturday. This is the first such event hosted by Dog Ears Books. Call it a historic occasion. And if you want to be part of the excitement, come join us!

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Unrelated to Saturday's planned event (except insofar as this other item is also related to books), this morning I finished reading The Woman in Black: A Ghost Story, by Susan Hill, a former library copy that turned up in some random box a few days ago. Opening to the first page, I was immediately taken by the illustrations and probably began to read the book for the sake of the pictures. John Lawrence, the illustrator, was not a name I recognized, and there was no further information about him on the dust jacket. The publisher, however, was David R. Godine of Boston, one of my all-time favorites. That explained a lot. Trust David R. Godine to come up with the perfect illustrator for a story! From now on, I'll be looking for John Lawrence's name, as well as Godine's. The book really was charming. And yes, there was a dog in the story.

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Finally, today is St. John's Eve, and the St. Johnswort has started blooming, but my golden yellow wildflower closing today's post is coreopsis. Aren't they simply glorious?

I Fall Down a Rabbit Hole

My title is a phrase used by friend, fellow blogger, and intrepid historical researcher Gerry Sell, over in Antrim County. It’s what Gerry says about the way she’ll start out looking for a certain piece of information and much later find she has pursued a long series of connecting facts that led far from her original question. Curiouser and curiouser, we book people and our unplanned quests! It isn’t distraction. It’s serendipity.

And so it was with me on a quiet afternoon in my bookshop when most vacationers were out enjoying sun, wind, and water. The hunt began innocently enough in the familiar and leisurely task of rearranging books on shelves, and then I couldn’t help sitting down with one large format, staple-bound item, Currents of the Boardman, since it was compiled by the Boardman River Historical Committee under the chairmanship of Martin Melkild, whom I was privileged to know for several years prior before he died. 

Falling, falling, falling into the past – I am lost in the days of one-room schools and boarding houses, train fares of two-and-a-half cents a mile, an old Swede who kept chickens and bought a bull “yust ta pet.” Then in Chapter VIII, “Those Good Old Fishing Days,” by Gordon Charles, in an account of the Traverse City Fly Club, appears an entry quoted from “The Shack Diary” by shack guests Harold Oswald Titus (1999-1967) and Beth Vladimir Titus. Charles notes that Titus “was one of Michigan’s earliest conservation writers,” and I jump up to pull a couple old novels from my Michigan shelves.

Yes, indeed! There he is! Bruce of the Circle A (1918), a Western, is set in Arizona, but the story of a later novel, Spindrift (1925), takes place in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, when a young sailing captain finds himself charged with murder. Carl Garrison is innocent but goes to prison, escaping after three years – and that’s about all I can tell today, because I left him, still on the run, to write this post. Oh, one other thing – at the end of Chapter VI of Spindrift, the protagonist in flight has taken responsibility for an injured dog. Lynne Rae Perkins, in her latest book, Frank and Lucky Get Schooled, observes that “every picture can be better with a dog in it,” and what’s true for pictures is certainly true for stories....

I suppose it isn’t surprising that Harold Titus would write the Western, as well as books set in Michigan. After all, he was of the same generation as James B. Hendryx (1880-1963), another Michigan novelist and outdoorsman, who wrote Westerns as well as what I call “Northerns.” Westerns were to that time in American popular literature what spy novels are today. But to my mind, there's nothing like an Up North story.

The village of Fairport strings along the shore of the Garden Peninsula just before that land reaches its extremity in Point Detour, on one side of which rolls Lake Michigan and on the other Green Bay. There are perhaps a score of houses under the balsams, scattered along half a mile of shore line, and in front of the cedars which fringe the beach itself rest the weather-beaten net houses and docks of the fishing rigs. 

 Under those cedars on fair summer evenings the village gathers.... 

 - Harold Titus, Spindrift

Exciting Week in So Many Ways

With so many different avenues of excitement, it’s hard to know where to start, but a picture of Sarah is a good introduction to almost any story, so there she is, above, soaking up attention from her aunt and grandma, i.e., my sister Deborah and mother Nora, who came to visit from Illinois Sunday through Friday. Sarah gets two-three times as many walks when Aunt Deborah, a dog person without a dog of her own at this time of life, is on the scene.

We had many quiet, peaceful suppers on the front porch and also a few breakfasts out and one restaurant dinner. My mother’s Thursday dinner was the fanciest, while fanciest breakfast on Friday was Deborah’s.

Way before last weekend began, I came to the bookstore one morning to find a bouquet of enormous peonies on my doorstep. Now it’s Friday, a week later, and the are still gorgeous. What a treat! At home, I have only one peony bud beginning to open, so the magnificent Japanese-appearing blooms were (and still are) very exciting. They also have a beautiful natural perfume.

It’s been an exciting week for selling Kathleen Stocking’s newest book, The Long Arc of the Universe: Travels Beyond the Pale, and Jim DuFresne’s The Trails of M-22, my two current bestsellers. Then on Thursday came delivery of the latest Lynne Rae Perkins, Frank and Lucky Get Schooled. “Is it like Christmas?” the UPS man asked when he brought in the boxes. Every day in a bookstore is like Christmas!

Then toward the end of Thursday afternoon, Kathleen Stocking herself made a surprise visit, and I had a chance to introduce my mother and sister to her before she and I got into a deep shop talk conversation. Unfortunately, thanks to the shop talk, I didn’t think of taking my relatives’ picture with the author until after she had left! Kicked myself for missing that opportunity.

July is going to be a busy, busy month, with four authors on the bookstore calendar. See the list in the right-hand column for dates and times. Latest addition to the lineup is Kelly Fordon, whose “novel-in-letters,” Garden for the Blind, was chosen as a 2016 Michigan Notable Book, was a finalist for the Midwest Book Award, the IPPY Award, Foreword Reviews' INDIEFAB Award and the Eric Hoffer Award. In addition it received an honorable mention at the New York Book Festival. My northern Michigan writer friends will definitely not want to miss Kelly’s book or her appearance in Northport -- or any other of my special visiting authors and their wonderful books.

Constant companion -- she would read if she could!

Book Review: THE LONG ARC OF THE UNIVERSE

Quiet moment, Lake Leelanau Narrows

The hard thing about living anywhere, I decide, and traveling in general, is that one can never live long enough or see enough of the world to fully understand the long arc of the universe and make any sense of it. Little bits are all we get, and it’s never enough to see the big picture. 

 - Kathleen Stocking, The Long Arc of the Universe: Travels Beyond the Pale (2016)

Kathleen Stocking’s written arc soared high in 1990, with the publication of her first book of essays, Letters from the Leelanau. That book, published by the University of Michigan Press, was reviewed in the New York Times under a headline reading, “Notes From a More Real World.” Interesting, no?

Is Leelanau County more real than New York City? Was it then?

What reviewer Peter Leschak actually had in mind was the way Stocking gave her readers so much more than just stories of the “vivid lives of ... rural folk.” He was saluting the way the author connected the lives in her essays (in portraits he called “touching,” “authentic,” and “sometimes quirky”) to the rest of the world, to history and to human and cultural evolution. He called her a “seer.” Poet Jim Harrison said then, of Stocking’s writing on the Leelanau peninsula and its inhabitants, “I don’t think anyone does it better.”

Three years later the University of Michigan Press published Stocking’s Lake Country (1994), new essays that took readers from the U.P. in the north of the state to Ann Arbor in the southeast corner (where the author attended her daughter’s graduation, having skipped her own in the Sixties). Here is a sentence I love from the preface to Lake Country:

Michigan is a state where it seems one can travel almost indefinitely and never come to the end of the journey.

Stocking also wrote in that preface that she needed in her second book to get beyond the Leelanau peninsula, “to understand herself in relation to something larger....”  A series of travels throughout Michigan gave her that larger context.

Village corner

The Long Arc of the Universe: Travels Beyond the Pale (2016), Stocking’s third collection of essays, completing her nonfiction trilogy, again combines memoir with travel, history, and social commentary. Again the author starts out from the small northern village of Lake Leelanau to explore a world she has realized is no longer separate from her sheltered country life, and between travels she comes back again and again to her familiar home territory. 

As I continued to come and go from my village of Lake Leelanau, to and from villages overseas, the whole world was becoming an Internet-connected village. Computers changed everything. It happened so fast and spread so far, it was hard to take in.

But why did she go at all, and why so far this time? What possessed her? What inspired a woman her age (you should excuse me: she and I are of the same era) to venture away from the beautiful, peaceful place she calls home, or, as she puts it in her introduction “to leave Paradise and visit Hell”?

Paradise -- at least in summer!

In response to the question in conversation, Stocking says she thinks we all have a natural curiosity about the larger world. “When I worked summers at the Totem Shoppe in Glen Arbor when I was a kid, if I heard a foreign accent, I always wanted to know where that person was from and what it was like in their country.” Fair enough. Maybe all of us have the curiosity. But Kathleen has, in addition, the guts to take her curiosity to countries most of the rest of us don’t want to visit even as tourists (I’m speaking for myself here), and she has the strength to rise to challenge after challenge, a probing mind never content with easy answers, and relentless honesty in describing whatever she finds. Horrors as well as delights. Beauty, kindness, in strange and unexpected places -- but also, at times, the stuff of nightmares.

How did she survive it all? By keeping her wits about her -- and with natural camouflage:

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending, but fortunately in this case, my looks are deceiving. I look like the most spaced-out, uncoordinated, naturally physically awkward, sheltered, poetry-loving, middle class, not-a-thought-in-my-head, straight-laced and inattentive person in the world. It's just the way I come across....

Of course, if you know Kathleen at all (or even as you will come to know her in this book, if it's your first introduction), you realize that she has more thoughts in her head at any given moment than some people have all day. That's what I mean by "camouflage."

My temptation when I am excited about a book is to quote at length, choosing passage after passage, but I'm not going to do that with this book. Readers deserve a chance to discover it for themselves. My job here is simply to assure you that it's more than worth the admission price, and I’m not going to cheat you out of the pleasure of discovering your own favorite lines and moments and episodes. But please do not cheat yourself, either! The Long Arc of the Universe is as deliberately structured as a good novel, structured to be read from beginning to end, and the effect of the whole would be lost by random sampling.

From Soledad Prison and the San Francisco jail to a private school for children of the wealthy elite in San Salvador to Peace Corps assignments in Thailand and Romania (those assignments bookends to an interval spent as a park ranger at Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore), The Long Arc of the Universe: Travels Beyond the Pale is a head-spinning, mind-bending series of journeys, and wherever she finds herself, whether in Empire, Michigan, or Istanbul, Kathleen Stocking’s keen mind, clear eye, and determined questioning, both of herself and her world, enlarge and enlighten the all-too-brief experience available to us in our short time on earth.

We are very fortunate to have this gifted seer among us, writing our world, near and distant.

Kathleen Stocking will sign her new book for bookstore customers at Dog Ears Books, 106 Waukazoo Street, on Sunday, July 3, from noon to 1 p.m. I will also be happy to hold prepaid orders for the author’s signature if you cannot attend on the day she will be here.

Narrows looking northwest

Ubiquitous

In June, the color green is ubiquitous. June is as green as January is white, with the difference that flowers, not just road signs, add bright color accents.

My last post featured one greenish-yellow “flower” and several white blossoms. Today, now that we’ve got the other colors out of the way, let’s look at another limited palette, yellow and green. The top photo today shows one of the showiest June wildflowers, the yellow flags clustered in and around the many small creeks of Leelanau County. Some of are creeks are so small you might miss them if not for white posts by the side of the road, one on each side, and a narrow, meandering northern Michigan jungle of cattails and red-twig dogwood. The wild iris flagging this stream, however, cannot help but attract a human eye.

Another yellow flower that thrives near creeks but also seems happy in cool fields is the happy little buttercup, one of my favorite June blooms. If you have a sharp eye, you might even see it on a shady roadside. The reflective cells on their petals make them shine like lacquer. 

What do you see when you drive or bike or walk along our county roads? Does the modest goat’s-beard flower catch your eye? Have you ever read of people eating salsify? Who knew goat's-beard and salsify were one and the same? I didn't.

How about quiet colonies of leafy spurge (sadly, another invasive alien)?

Or still quieter and more modest wild sedum at the edge of the road? Our old yard in Leland had huge patches of sedum that had outcompeted the grass, but I never minded. It was green and more interesting than grass. Undemanding, too. Loves poor soil. And we’ve got that here in northern Michigan.

Wildflowers of Wisconsin in the new book section at Dog Ears Books has been cruelly overlooked by customers, considering that the subtitle is and the Great Lakes Region. The only parts of this book not pertinent to Michigan are the distribution maps. And how many wildflower guides don’t have distribution maps at all? In every other way, Wildflowers of Wisconsin works quite well for Michigan. Of course, we have Michigan wildflowers guides, as well – I’m just pointing to one you might not otherwise have considered, a book easily overlooked, like those inconspicuous greenish-yellow roadside flowers.

Flower books, garden books – impossible not to love them! Practical, they are at the same time dream volumes.

The discerning eye will have noticed earlier in this post that my poppies and some of my iris are struggling for survival (quite successfully) in space now overgrown with grass. In my own defense, however, I must protest that I have gotten back on the job this year and have reclaimed half of my original backyard vegetable garden, so if only the rabbits will leave some greens for us, we’ll be all set. They don’t bother the rhubarb at all. Why is that? Can’t they see I have rhubarb to spare?