Literate Matters: Festival of the Book bringing big names to small venues
Allow me to brag just a bit. In a little over a week I’ll moderate a session at the Harbor Springs Festival of the Book, always a highlight of my literary year. In a panel consisting of poets Todd Davis and Linda Greggerson, as well as essayists Jerry Dennis and Chris Dombrowski, I’ll ask my writers to assess “The Fragility of Life and the Future of this Place.”
This might require unknowable conclusions, but we’ll nonetheless forge ahead, determined at least to discuss why this is a worthy question. And there are certainly plenty of reasons to convene this collection of authors to address the question.
Greggerson, professor of English at the University of Michigan and author of half a dozen collections of poetry as well as other works of criticism, comes to the festival riding the wave of accolades for her new collection “Canopy.”
In poems like “Deciduous” she digs into the soil of this place, personifying the seasons as each reveals the language necessary for the future of this place, as when “the cold months” declared “the scaffolding is/ clear now” so “the moon/ can measure its course by you.”
In “Sleeping Bear” she weaves her way from the legend of the Manitou Islands, born of a mother’s loss, to the way that there are still “So many children,” but “so little space in our rubble-strewn/ hearts” to see our way clear to solutions.
Dennis is maybe the best known locally of the group, with his many titles set in the region, ranging from short fiction to essays. His most recent collection is “Up North In Michigan,” which includes a series of essays that guide readers through the seasons as each unfolds in ways remarkable and mysterious.
Always an angler, Dennis understands the importance and the allure of our rivers. In “River Rush,” he drives back from the Upper Peninsula with a pal, “supposedly looking for places to hunt but mostly just enjoying the ride.” This turns to an ode to other autumn rituals, like “the last canoe trip of the year,” which has him saying “Michigan rivers are the loveliest and most interesting in the world.” He certainly knows the fragility of this place.
Chris Dombrowski is a Michigan native who long ago traded his Great Lakes address for a place in Missoula, Montana where he helps direct the creative writing program at the University of Montana. He also guides the occasional angler hoping for a hungry trout. In “The River You Touch,” he lays parenthood against the measure of angling, explaining how when he looked, he “saw with clarity” how his children, “progressing meander by meander, discovery by discovery–sustained me.”
Davis, originally from Indiana teaches environmental studies and creative writing at Penn State’s Altoona College, and is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently “Coffin Honey.” He too understands the fragility of this place, which is the natural world and her wonders.
“Hunting with Dogs” shows Davis’s work fully formed. Here, “The oldest dog has hunted with the man for nearly a decade,” which is possible because “Thirty-five thousand years ago, the first pup was snatched from a den-litter” to be domesticated. Davis, as he does regularly, places the wild next to the familiar to illustrate the power in between what we see and what we know.
Together, this cohort of writers will certainly offer some useful observations about the fragility of this place, but will also highlight the many ways the Harbor Springs Festival of the Book brings the best literary voices to our backyard.
Good reading.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Literate Matters: Festival to bring authors to Harbor Springs
