Jenny Robertson brings the painter’s eye and the poet’s ear to these two beautifully crafted stories. Against the backdrop of northern Michigan’s landscapes and seasons — harsh and brutal winters, lush and languid summers — her carefully wrought characters struggle with love, loss, and redemption. These stories are honest, powerful, and evoke a tender wisdom. —Aaron Stander
Robertson’s stories are rich in place, weaving sadness, acceptance and awakening with snow and sand, winter moonlight and June sunshine. In Hard Winter, First Thaw she demonstrates her talent for exploring difficult human situations with unaffected sensitiviy and simple grace. —Marcy Branski
Jenny Robertson is a painter, poet, and fiction writer currently at work on her second novel. A northern Minnesota native with a B.A. in natural history from Carleton College, Jenny is interested in the ways people interact with each other and with the natural world. Her paintings have been included in several juried shows, and have been featured at Gallery 31 and Center Gallery. Jenny’s poetry has appeared in the Dunes Review, High Fibre, and Carleton College’s literary magazine IT. Jenny lives with her husband, young daughter, and several furry beasts near the Platte River in Benzie County.
Among the many striking rewards of Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s Forking the Swift is being led into the startling realization that everything is a wilderness. She leaves us alone and lost with no guide except the poem. When we stumble out from her work, we wonder how we survived and we learn that survival means changing into something new. Notice how she makes form evoke and embody what the language explores. This is artistry that matters and means. These poems put the lie to one ever again saying, “Seen that. Done that.” Steinorth brings us back to the enigmatic wonder of it ALL.
— Jack Ridl, author of Broken Symmetry and Losing Season
In a world where language may be as homogenized as milk or as pretentious as Jello colors, Jen Sperry Steinorth’s poems offer the essential-ness that a long look at a clear night sky will give you. She is as attentive to sound as a jazz trumpeter is, “Those Triassic Calamites out a coal mine in Tasmania…,” letting the mutes and sibilants move in and out of a poem like fireflies, but she’s also as grounded and authentic as a good drummer: climbing oil rigs, going for smokes, and yes, what about that black dress? Her poems range wide in refreshing content and format, strung with phone calls from the electrician and wrestling bears. They are permeated with quiet wit about human and wild nature—think of “Thirteen Ways to Kill Starlings.” Without sentiment or cliché, Jen brings us what we love in poetry, the song of shaped sounds rivering through shaped meaning—“suck the marrow/the morrow.” Michigan Writers is proud to introduce this dynamic work not just to lovers of poetry, but to all of us who long for a clear eye to show us the what shines in the dark.
— Anne-Marie Oomen, author of the poetry collection, Un-Coded Woman, An American Map: Essays, and other books
Jennifer Sperry Steinorth’s lives in northern, lower Michigan where she is a builder and designer of small, green homes. Her poems have appeared or are forth coming in Pleiades, Tar River, The Southeast Review Online, A River and Sound Review, Cheek Teeth Blog, Scintilla, Dunes Review and elsewhere. She is a frequent contributor to Foreword Reviews.
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Set against a backdrop of poverty, Kisses for Laura takes us to a time in America’s history when the future seemed to promise little. Seen through the eyes of a child, however, small details loom large, and almost anything is possible. This is a story of hope, written with clarity and empathy for a girl who is wryly self-aware of her own foibles. In true Dickensian spirit, it might be called an update on A Christmas Carol. —Judith Kitchen, author of The House on Eccles Road
Joan Schmeichel and her husband Neill live in Kewadin, Michigan, where they moved permanently upon retirement. Before retirement Joan was a development officer at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Joan has written numerous stories over the years, mainly for her own pleasure. The Depression years left a deep impression on me, Joan acknowledges. Although Kisses for Laura takes place several years before my time, she adds, the circumstances were much the same. In addition to Kisses for Laura, Joan has been published by D.C. Heath & Company in My Best Bear Hug, a children's reader.
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Rich, lyrical prose, at once dream-like in its imaginings and firmly rooted in the powerful landscape that is Northern Michigan, Sarah Baughman’s essays create a verdant tapestry woven from fibers both outside and inside her pregnant body. They invite you in, and even when you have finished reading them, you don’t want to leave. — Marcy Branski
Sarah Baughman holds a B.A. in English and German from Grinnell College and an M.A. in Education from the University of Michigan, both of which she has put to use as an English teacher and freelance writer in Michigan and overseas. She lives with her husband, baby son, and dog in Petoskey, where she seeks to explore in writing the ways that nature informs and echoes the human experience.
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As most of us know, the world we live in keeps making surrealism feel more and more like a depiction of the way things actually are. This is everywhere evident in Denise R. Baker’s fine Eat the Apple, a book that keeps finding language for its convictions, which are fierce, but not without humor. Throughout, there’s a visceral edginess, and over-the-topness, that succeeds in rendering what feels like the condition of a particular life, and, by extension, the world that surrounds it. Strong poems here, the real stuff. —Stephen Dunn
Denise's poetry has appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Dunes Review, Whisper in the Woods and Branches. She has served as Managing Editor of Dunes Review, Assistant Editor of Whisper in the Woods, Managing Editor of Monitor and Editor of Labyrinth. Denise owned the freelance business SmartypantsWrite.com. Her environmental, outdoors and health writing has appeared in countless magazines, ghostwritten books and web sites. Denise serves as Advancement Director for the Watershed Center Grand Traverse Bay. She eats copious amounts of fine dark chocolate and talks to sunflowers.
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John Mauk’s stories are filled with magic, violence, and wisdom. Among the blessed and the cursed, the drunks and the perverts, you will meet a girl who can fly, a belligerent priest, and the son of a witch. There’s something organic and essential, even inevitable, about these oddly-shaped stories; it’s as though they might have written themselves. The community opinion always matters here, as do the small-town values of hospitality and tolerance. In the words of one of Mauk’s narrators, “Everyday life churns out a rich perfume… The breath of every person, plant, and animal marries together, works its way upward.” —Bonnie Jo Campbell
If Lewis Nordan and Flannery O’Connor had a baby, he would be John Mauk. Early on in Mauk’s story “The Insult Comic,” the narrator proclaims, “You can’t surf on corn.” I’m here to tell you that John Mauk can surf on corn. Each unfathomable story will lead you to believe, to believe despite your logic telling you, No. Can’t be. Can’t happen. Mauk gives us a world you will find only here, only here until you set the book aside and go for a walk. Then you will begin to feel his world surrounding you. You will wonder if maybe, just maybe, what you have read has been there all along, just down the street, in aisle three at the market, or up there in that house at the top of the hill. In “The Blessed,” the narrator’s mother says that when a leaf releases its scent into the air, the whole world changes. When you read these joyfully unnerving stories that will happen for you—their scent will change your whole world—and you will be grateful. —Jack Ridl
John Mauk teaches writing and rhetoric at Northwestern Michigan College. He lives in Traverse City with his wife.
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