Tag: Jerry Dennis

Author Jerry Dennis Looks Back and Ahead as “The Living Great Lakes” Turns 20

Published on May 30th, 2024 by - Blog Posts

The Great Lakes are one of the world’s natural wonders, and Jerry Dennis is one of the literary wonders of the Great Lakes region. His books explore and celebrate many features of the Lakes, and none more so than his classic The Living Great Lakes, published in 2004. The combination of inland sea adventure, environmental chronicle and poetic, personal musing has made the book a perennial favorite of readers. The 20th anniversary edition, which includes a new introduction by the author, is now available. We asked Jerry to answer a few questions about the milestone.

What’s the significance of the 20th anniversary of the book? Why the new edition?

My publisher has been pleased with the book’s performance, reprinting it once or twice every year since 2003, and wanted to honor the 20-year mark. I’d been thinking about it too, especially as changes caused by the warming climate have become increasingly obvious. Also, when I wrote the book I was unaware of Enbridge’s Line 5 and its potential for catastrophe. As with many people, that and other petroleum pipelines didn’t come to my attention until the Talmadge Creek/Kalamazoo River spill in 2010. Plus so many readers have asked about the Malabar and her crew that I felt I owed them an update.

“I’m hopeful, however, because I’ve met so many dedicated and capable people who are working every day on important issues and am confident that the majority of the residents of the Great Lakes region want the lakes to remain healthy.”

Did the book reach audiences well beyond the Great Lakes region? What kind of feedback did you get from such readers?

One of the pleasant surprises for me was the many people from outside the Great Lakes region who have reached out to me. I’ve received emails and letters from New York to California and from several countries outside the U.S. and Canada, including Korea, where a translated edition is in progress. Many of the messages were remembrances of childhood visits to the lakes or nostalgia for years lived near them, but more than a few were from readers who had never seen the lakes and wanted to tell me how surprised they were to learn how interesting—and big—they are. The majority of correspondents from everywhere expressed concern for the lakes and determination to help protect them.

Are you more or less hopeful about the health of the Great Lakes than when you wrote the book? Why?

Am I hopeful about the future of the Great Lakes? I like the distinction Jane Elder made between hope and optimism. Twenty years ago I might have said I’m optimistic, but I’m older and more battle-scarred now (as you might have noticed) and shy away from the word. I’m hopeful, however, because I’ve met so many dedicated and capable people who are working every day on important issues and am confident that the majority of the residents of the Great Lakes region want the lakes to remain healthy. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are aware of that, as well, and at least lean toward supporting legislation that is good for the lakes. One of the pleasant surprises in my writing career was on Earth Day a few years ago when a paragraph of The Living Great Lakes was read aloud on the floor of the U.S. Senate by a Republican senator from Ohio. That made me hopeful.

In His Newest Book, Jerry Dennis Defines “Up North”

Published on October 25th, 2021 by - Blog Posts, News

Jerry Dennis (foreground), Glenn Wolff (background). Photo by Pamela Grath.

Jerry Dennis is a Michigan treasure. The 67-year-old Dennis, a native of Northern Michigan, is the author of more than 10 books, including the epic, The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Island Seas, and essays, poems, and short fiction that have appeared in more than 100 publications. He has received the Michigan Library Association’s 1999 Michigan Author Award, the Outstanding Alumnus of the Year Award from the University of Louisville’s School of Arts and Sciences, the Great Lakes Culture Award from Michigan State University, and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. His recently-released Up North in Michigan: A Portrait of Place in Four Seasons, illustrated by frequent collaborator artist Glenn Wolff, gets at the timeless feel of the North Country in an era of rapid global change.

FLOW: Much of your writing conveys a vivid sense of place. How does this book build on that in a new way?

Dennis: I’m always trying to find my way into a deeper understanding of this place, which requires fresh ways of writing about it. In some of my earlier work, I took a journalistic approach, interviewing experts, writing photo-like snapshots of places and people, compiling footnotes and endnotes. In the new book (and in The Windward Shore and in long sections of The Living Great Lakes), I gave myself permission to abandon formal journalism and not worry about gaps in the account. Instead of adhering to a schedule, I cultivated a sort of vigorous loafing. Whenever I found myself in a spot that seemed to require interviews with experts or a visit to a famous landmark or any other task that reeked of duty, I would turn and head off in another direction. Rather than organizing a strategy, I just trusted my gut.

FLOW: You say in the introduction that changes are all around in the north country, including land development and the climate change-induced rapid warming of Lake Superior, but it still feels like up north. Do you think that will still be true in 10, 20 or 50 years?

Dennis: I have to believe that this place will continue to “feel” like it does now and, presumably, like it has for several hundred years or more. I’ve read dozens of old journals and memoirs written about the region, and, in all of them, the feel of the place seems the same. [Henry Rowe] Schoolcraft’s journal of the 1820 Cass Expedition around the Great Lakes shores of Michigan is a good example. Two hundred years later, his descriptions of places like Sleeping Bear Dunes, the Straits of Mackinac, Pictured Rocks, the Keweenaw Peninsula, and others are easily recognizable. He mentions the ridges formed by the ancient lakeshores visible along the Lake Michigan shore above Good Harbor Bay and just north of Charlevoix. There are many houses on those shores now, but you can still see those exact ledges from the water, especially when the leaves are down. As I mention more than once in the book, we’re lucky that so much of our region is protected within national and state forests and parks and by the crucial purchases of the various land conservancies. We can’t know what it will be like in 50 years, of course, but we can hope that much of Northern Michigan and the U.P. will remain as they are now.  

We can hope that much of northern Michigan and the U.P. will remain as they are now. That’s one reason FLOW’s mission is so vitally important. If the waters we hold in common are lost to private interests or aging and ill-advised infrastructure like Enbridge’s Line 5 fail, northern Michigan as we know it could be lost.

FLOW: How far can we go in sharing this beautiful place? We’re hearing a lot of talk about climate refugees now; what are the implications of that for the land you write about?

Dennis: It’s a privilege to live here. And it comes with responsibilities—to honor it, to protect it for others to enjoy, and to never forget that most people are not as fortunate. We all know the story. Throughout history, it has been the people who are the most impoverished and disenfranchised who are forced to live in the ugliest, most polluted, and most dangerous places. Climate change could turn that tendency on its head and make the Great Lakes watershed not just a desirable place to live, but a safe and necessary one for people of every kind.

FLOW: How long has this book been in the making?

Dennis: I could argue that it goes back to age 17, when I started keeping notebooks in which I recorded observations, overheard conversations, random ideas, excerpts from my reading, and notes to myself about what and how to write. One subject that appears over and over in 50 years’ worth and thousands of pages of those notebooks is how to write about the sense of place in general, and about Michigan and the Great Lakes in particular. One passage, written in 1988, has been a guiding influence on every book I’ve written since:

Write the book you want to read. An honest book. A spacious book. A book that resonates like bells. That is as informative as waves breaking on gravel. That has beach stones and wind in it. Water stains, gull keen. Sand. Silence. A book that asks instead of answers. An open book. A ventilated book. A pristine flowing spring of a book.

A book that remembers on every page that everything is temporary. All else will follow from there.

FLOW: How does your collaboration with Glenn work? Are you like jazz musicians riffing off each other or is it something more conscious?

Dennis: We’re simpatico. Always on the same page. Our friendship has been one of the most creative and enjoyable of my life. Glenn’s an accomplished jazz musician, so I’m sure he would say we riff off each other.