I'm writing steadily, working on several projects at once, hoping there will be more news to share closer to spring.  If you're swinging by to place a direct order for signed books or CDs, please note that there will be a stretch from January 1 to the end of February when we won't be shipping.  The shipping department is doing some journeying.

A day is a day, I'm happy every time I get a new one, so I'm not a big holiday celebrator, but in the spirit of this the final day of 2005, I say again how grateful I am for the notes, the emails, the kind words in passing, the faces at readings, and above all, the people who take time from the day to rest a book on one knee.  This kind of statement always winds up sounding over-earnest and goofy, but I'm happy and thankful for this little life in ways that make me mumble and stumble.

So thank you.  Thank you.  In 2006, I resolve to fix my screen door.  And paint the dang house.

Listening to James McMurtry again, in particular Childish Things.  Literate and dusty I guess is how you would describe it.  Also some Oleta Adams.  She will lift you up.  This time of year, it is good to hear her sing "Get Here."  And I like her version of "Don't Let the Sun Go Down On Me."  Mainly I am just typing, typing, taking a stretch from another year on the road to catch up on writing that is owed to various friends and editors, not that the two are mutually exclusive.  I am winding up the year the way I always do, feeling a little overwhelmed and a lot grateful.

Oh.  If you sent me an email any time after mid-May, I'm pecking away.  Shnikies.

• John Shimon and Julie Lindemann shot the covers and author photo for Population 485 and Off Main Street (which includes an essay on their vintage camera-toting ways).  Last year they did a funky book about aluminum Christmas trees and it became a cult favorite.  It being the season and all, here's a page with some sample photos, and here's information about the new edition.
  
• Last winter I went mushing (dogs, not peas) with Arleigh and Odin Jorgenson.  The January/February issue of Backpacker magazine (available now, that's the way magazines work) includes an essay about the trip, along with fun photos by Layne Kennedy.
  
• Ever wonder what it looks like when a guy records an audiobook?  Like a goofball sitting at a table, that's what it looks like.  Still don't believe me?  Pictures here.  Not very good pictures, because I don't know how to post them right.

There's your phrase for the week: leaky bags of warm fish.

So.  A major hazmat situation.  There are two upsides.  Number one being, it was a smallish cube freezer.  Number two being, deer season opens in two days.  The replenishing and refreezing can commence.  For now, after a number of scrubbings, the freezer is sitting unplugged and contains nothing but a pan of vinegar.

Speaking of deer season.  I know some are confounded by the practice.  I hope to write about the whys and the wherefores some in my next book.  But there is a fellow just up the road from me who has created an essential body of vernacular work on the tradition and history of deer hunting.  Although I don't recall that he and I have ever met (I could be wrong, it's been a busy stretch), I've been on his side ever since the time years ago when I saw him set up with his card table of books in a local mall.  I was on the way to my own card table at the time, and I believe we understand each other.  I see he has a new title out, and just as a neighborly thing, if you're interested, I can tell you he is currently taking visitors at http://www.mertcowley.com/.  Anyone who takes their author photo in blaze orange is OK by me.

Also, it's been a hectic second half of the year.  I believe I have answered all my emails up to about May.  So if you're having a hard time raising me, I apologize.  Picture me bent over the keyboard.  Wait, that didn't come out right.  Typing, anyway.

Oh, and some folks who have been good to me (to say nothing of instructive) over the years, Creative Nonfiction and Brevity, have combined to release a special issue of Creative Nonfiction magazine featuring short nonfiction pieces including a version of the "boat people" scene from Population 485.

- Pictures from a poetry slam in a place called the Schlachthof (Slaughterhouse).  I opened with a reading and played two songs on a beat-up hand-painted acoustic guitar handed to me backstage by a roadie named Uwe.  The headliner the week previous was Motorhead.

- In her blog entry for 10/26/2005, Wisconsin poet Paula Sergi mentions the reading she and I did in Wiesbaden.  Two small-town Wisconsin nurses turned writers.  This reading was at the Schalterhalle Hessisches Ministerium fur Wissenschaft und Kunst.  Yes it was.  It was fun to hang out with Paula and talk words, words, and cheese curds.

- A picture and short note about a reading I did at the Frankfurt City Library.  The t-shirt is held up on behalf of these good people.  Prefer German?  Click here.

- And finally, an interview I did with a newspaper in Frankfurt.  I have no idea what I said. 

And whether you are a city or a country mouse, the museum's current Farm Life exhibit is tremendous.  It's been a pleasure to be a small part of this project.

Gatemouth was diagnosed with lung cancer a year or so ago.   He chose to forego treatment and played on past 80.  Hurricane Katrina blew away everything he owned, including the porch he shared with that gator, but he got out alive.  Then last Saturday, he died.

A few of the details are here.  Never mind death, what a life.

On a more day-to-day note, Here & Now (with my new video essay) will be on at 8 p.m. this Friday, not 7 p.m. as usual.  This is a one-time thing due to Hurricane Katrina coverage. (LATE WORD: essay will be held until a later date so they can deal with the real world, and I say, you betcha.)

Thanks again, folks.  The good people are out there.

Wisconsin Public Television will be running a new video essay we filmed in a graveyard.  It'll be running this Friday on Here & Now.   This is the one that got bumped last week.

I've mentioned Eric Taylor in my writing now and then.   Smart music, beautiful music, he's doing a rare little tour, go here and click "Tour Schedule" for Midwestern dates.

And finally, New Orleans.  Others are speaking in far greater detail and with far greater eloquence than I possess.  So I'll keep it specific.  I have a friend who fled the wind and water.  One of the lucky ones, he got out OK.  But last I heard, he has no idea what - if any - of his home and possessions remain.  It so happens he is a multi-award winning fiction writer, journalist, and one of the nation's leading authority on jazz.  If you know of any university, lyceum, chautauqua group, etc., with budget for a speaker, or someone to lead a weekend fiction workshop, please let me know ( mike@sneezingcow.com ) and I'll pass the info his way.

Also - our little fire department is celebrating its 100th anniversary.  Information here.

...as a Wisconsin farmer's son, [Michael Perry] has spent stretches of his life engaged with manure. Nonetheless, he appreciates the American fantastic -- of which manure surfing is surely one manifestation -- and pays tribute to it in the best of these pieces. He introduces us to the neighbor who built his own airplane and writes rhapsodically on such roadside colossuses as the 9,000-pound prairie chicken that lures -- it is hoped -- people to Rothsay, Minn., and the 50-foot Jolly Green Giant who presides over Blue Earth, Minn. He is also a great and eloquent fan of the water tower and the 18-wheeler. As Dickens delighted in miniatures, so he delights in big stuff -- though not the Brobdingnagian houses that now plague the land. But the biggest object in these pieces is the smallest and certainly the most gruesome: a kidney stone. It is his kidney stone, in fact, whose agonizing journey to the outside world (to reveal itself to be the size of a chokecherry pit) he recounts most wonderfully. ''Where I used to tolerate tales of childbirth with a sort of deferential politeness," he writes, ''I now find myself nodding in solidarity."

So thank you to my book editor.  And to the magazine editor who first assigned the piece.  And perhaps most especially, thank you to my longsuffering (he has no choice, the piece cannot be retracted) urologist, who presided over the birth.

I told part of the kidney stone story on Public Radio International a few weeks ago when I was a guest on Michael Feldman's Whad'Ya Know?  You can listen to an archived version the show here.   (Scroll down -- it's the May 21 show.)

Also updated the speaking engagements page.  For mid-July: a few new radio interviews, a signing, and some Long Beds music events.

Other than that, the garden has yielded some delicious peas.  My annual squirrel problem has abated, replaced with footloose cats who leave well-formed presents buried between the cilantro and the summer savory.  I have taken to making wild-eyed charges from around the corner of the garage while hissing like a puma.  The effect is startling and impermanent.

Also, if you're in range of Milwaukee's WUWM, Mike's interview with Jane Hampden airs this Friday (5/27) at 10 a.m. and 10 p.m.  The show is called, coincidentally enough, "At 10."

Backstage at Whad'Ya Know? we were talking about John Hildebrand's new book, A Northern Front: New and Selected Essays.  John's writing is powerful and I owe him a great debt for all the time he has taken to help me with mine.

- Newspaper story describing the contest and machine (includes complete listing of the 24 steps required to light the flashlight).

- Another newspaper story describing the contest and machine.

- Blog describing the victory (umm, you might need your Norwegian/English dictionary...this blog is written by Espen Grindhaug, a foreign exchange student and member of the team) (the team also included exchange student Max Mukhtarov of Azerbaijan).

Congratulations, team.  Innovation and ingenuity, right here in Nobbern.

http://www.chippewa.com/articles/2005/04/21/news/news1.txt

Off to Lansing.

That's nice.  I remember that night in Kalamazoo.  It was dang cold.  I sat in the back room and went over my notes.  Bookstore back rooms are wonderful places, all stickered and stuck with notes and author quotes and cartoons related to literature and posters from book tours long gone, and of course, piles and piles of books.  Before a reading, it is this perfect little quiet place to gather your thoughts and drink enough water so that your bladder will prompt you to wrap up the yapping before the audience members develop numb hinder disorder.

I'll be in Madison Wisconsin this Wednesday and Thursday to take part in Madison Area Technical College's "Reading Together" program.   There will be several events open to the public.  More information on the speaking engagements page, and also here.

Me, I'll be off on the other side of the state in the middle of Lake Michigan, doing a reading at the Red Cup Coffee House on Washington Island.  The reading is at 7:30 p.m.  The coffee house is beside the Post Office.  If you can't find it, ask.   If the person you ask doesn't know where it is, they are either lying or not from there.  If you're planning to drive, bring a paddle.

Howdy folks.  If you’re looking for all the “Latest News” posts from 2004 and previous, you’ll find them here.

  Well, jeepers.  Here we go, 2005.  This is probably a good time to say thanks one more time for all the kind words that have come my way as a result of the book Population 485.  Since the book came out in October 2002, I have received scores of letters, several thousand emails, and countless other kindnesses, many while I was far away from home.  That little book has allowed me to meet all manner of people in all manner of places – from Midwestern libraries to Mississippi taverns, from Manhattan bookstores to a Los Angeles soiree where I ate cheese balls alongside Mary Martin and Heidi Fleiss, which is a spectrum of sorts.

  It's been fun to sign books in Blytheville , Arkansas , or Kalamazoo , Michigan , or Bellingham , Washington , and have someone say, "Your town is just like our town."  I think that says something wonderful and hopeful about humans, no matter our shape, color or location.  The irony is, I wrote a book about my love for a certain place, and as a result, I've been on the road pretty much nonstop ever since, and have fallen way out of the running in the informal “most calls per year” contest down at the fire department.  But every time I pull off the four-lane at my favorite exit in the whole wide world and point the car up Main Street , that water tower still looks like a long-lost friend.  I get in the house, find my pager, switch the button to “on”, and I am home.

Because of the book, people ask me if I'll live in New Auburn forever.  Nobody can answer a question like that, and I have an incurable travel jones.  When you get to that horizon, wrote singer/songwriter Steve Earle, there’s always someplace else to be.  But for now, I’m still living on Main Street, and to paraphrase a passage from Population 485, I can say without reservation that wherever I am or wherever I end up, New Auburn is the place I will always call home, no matter where I stand at the time I invoke the name.

***

One more note of thanks.  To all the Fire/EMS people I have met and continue to meet as a result of Population 485, you have added a dimension to my writing experience that I never anticipated.  It is a privilege to be considered one of your number.  I do a lot of public speaking, and I have yet to leave an engagement wishing I hadn’t taken it.  But Fire/EMS crowds are extra fun because I get to do jokes about S.A.M.P.L.E. and overzealous extrication techniques.  I am often asked if I will write another book about firefighting or emergency medical services, and for now, the answer is a respectful no.  I did my best to convey what “we” do and see out there, no matter the size of our service or level of our training and experience, and I hope I got it mostly right, but I am just one of thousands, and everyone who has ever run lights and sirens has their own book’s worth of stories.  Somewhere someone is writing their version, and we will read it one day.  But in the meantime, I think of you-all out there, hanging out for five minutes after the call, or having a smoke-and-joke after the monthly meeting, or standing around the rigs yapping between training exercises, and I grin, because I know, those stories, they’re getting told.

***

In other news, HarperCollins will be releasing a collection of my essays and magazine pieces in April.  The collection is titled Off Main Street : Barnstormers, Prophets & Gatemouth’s Gator.   At the same time, HarperAudio will be releasing an audiobook combining portions of Population 485 with several selections from Off Main Street .  We’ll post more details as things get closer and you can sign up with their author tracker if you like.  Book tour and speaking dates will be posted on the Speaking Engagements page when they are confirmed.

***

In the meantime, I’m currently under deadline for several magazine pieces and finishing my next book, which is tentatively due out in early 2006.  Because of all these deadlines, and because some of the magazine pieces require that I travel on assignment (nothing all that exotic, although on one occasion I will be required to smuggle myself across the Minnesota border), I am having to back off on the number of speaking engagements I accept.  What might look like open days on the speaking calendar are actually days in which I am typing through the dark hours, all hollow-eyed and amped up on Zebra Cakes and double Americanos.  To say nothing of the fact that my screen door still isn’t fixed.