Last night we spent battling the undisputed queen of the bramblebrush. Our efforts yielded many quarts of blackberries which we ran through the Victorio seeder/strainer. (Man we love that hand crank appliance!) When the cranking was done we had...Read More Here...

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This afternoon I played the Baraga County Fair from noon to 2:00 in the Performance Hall. There were only a couple folks there for the first hour but the music was piped out onto the fairgrounds. In time, many people found their way into the hall and sat down for a listen. I played solo and brought a truckload of instruments. It was a fun gig. People even applauded the accordion.


For those readers residing outside the continental U.S. a corn dog is...Read More Here...

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Okay. I freely admit my initial plan for handling editor rejections involved beer, detonators, explosives, chocolate cake, and ice cream. Thankfully, I have moved beyond that. (Though the ice cream still waits patiently in the freezer.) Here is the new plan: ...Read More Here...

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As it was a hot night we sat out on some steps until the start time. Then we trouped into a black box kitted out with tiered orange seats. A strong odour came from a thick layer of straw that covered the acting area.

It was an odd, an air-freshener smell that reminded me of a bathroom spray called 'Summer Meadows' . It turned out to be a metaphor for sexual morality in seventeenth century Naples. That and the costumes were the best thing about the production . The straw was scattered across the foyer by the time we left. I hope they were less heavy-handed with the air-freshener on the press night.


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Oh my! It’s been a busy couple of days. We drove up to Lac LaBelle and stayed at camp a couple days. Paying homage to the “Make hay while the sun shines” adage we were busy sunup to sundown. We picked berries. Then we picked more berries. In the end we ended up with seven more jars of Thimbleberry jam and a couple large freezer bags of wild blueberries. In the evenings we fished for Smallmouth Bass until ...Read More Here...

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Last week I went to see London Road at the National Theatre. It's a verbatim play: in other words, its script contains nothing but things real people actually said over two years from the first of the Ipswich Murders, to the conviction of the murderer. And as we discussed it, I remembered the part of the Writing for Radio course I've just done, where we explored the use you could make of pre-existing spoken-word material - news broadcasts, for example, or other kinds of sound clip, right back to the days when you tuned your wireless from the Local or the National, and waited to hear those black-tie-ed voices at Alexandra Palace saying, "This is London calling," out into the ether.

The words come from interviews by the playwright, from neighbourhood watch meetings, to the local TV news; they're complete with ums, errs and hesitations, clichés and banalities, not to mention occasional comment about the deaths of prostitutes from residents sick of living in a red light district, which sets the metropolitan audience wincing. But what was so fascinating about London Road, and raises it above other kinds of verbatim docu-drama such as plays which re-enacts transcripts of trials, was that those flat little phrases become the basis for a music drama.

Begonias, petunias, um, impatiens and things, says a character as they water a plant, or, Everyone is very very nervous and very uncertain of everything, basically, while waiting for a bus after a shopping trip: the actors catche exactly the inflexion and cadence of 21st century Suffolk (in previous productions the dramatist Alecky Blythe has actually fed the lines to the actors, via ear-pieces, to get just the right verbatim intonation). The character says it again, as people do, while going on with life, and then again, and we begin to hear the music within the pitch and rhythm of ordinary speech. Then that music is picked up by the band, and by one actor after another, and more of both so that the single line becomes a properly-woven piece of music, where the way phrases curl round and return, are re-shaped and inverted, stretched and compressed, passed from singer to singer, and plaited to a final cadence. Indeed, I'd be tempted swear that one number was a formally correct fugue: it reminded me of the "Fugue for Tinhorns" at the beginning of Guys and Dolls.

Of course, in whether it's drama or novels, in the one-remove-from-factual-reality that is fiction, within the contract of writer and reader that we'll both forget that none of this really happened, you can still use the forms of pre-existing speech to make elements which aren't narrative or dialogue, but instead seem to have been taken from the real world.

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This morning I spent with my journal writing poetry. It felt like it was working but I will give it a look later in the week and see if I'm still just as excited about it then. The day outdoors began at noon. I took the big boat out on Lake Superior for a bit more shakedown time. I set three rods and put her on autopilot to troll for salmon while I cleaned the boat. I suppose that I could have cleaned and organized her right at the dock but where would be the fun in that? ;) I was rewarded for my efforts when...Read More Here...

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Online writing forums commonly contain critique requests with words to the effect that “this is an early draft.”...

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Thursday we picked thimbleberries until our hands were a delicious crimson. (I also picked wild blueberries in the morning.) The thimbleberry is native to the Copper Country and only a few other places in the world. (The Pacific Northwest and the Arrowhead region of Minnesota.) They are delicious and one of the few berries that contain enough pectin to thicken to jelly naturally without any additions. The recipe for Thimbleberry Jam is...Read More Here...

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Hey gang. I’ll be rocking with Bruce and Noble Rundman at the Franklin Square Inn seventh floor in Houghton on Friday. Fun starts at 8:00 and continues until they lock us out. The spirit of Warren Zevon will be present in addition to the spirits and fine food available at the restaurant and bar. For my part I’ll be singing harmonies and playing mando, fiddle, guitar, and at least one surprise instrument. Noble will be working the percussion and keeping things a smidge under WARP speed. Bruce will rock the lead vox and ...Read More Here...

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