​Browsing at an independent bookstore, having the author sign your copy at a launch, tearing the gift wrap off a new book at the holidays, settling into your favorite chair with a fresh hardcover in your hands. It doesn’t get much better than this.

That’s assuming the book is available. If it’s out of stock, late to ship, or up in price, it may be because the publisher can’t get enough paper. Two reasons for the current paper shortage are side effects of environmental progress, Forbes reported in June.

First, recycling has gotten easier and more pervasive. We can throw all recyclables in one bin and include most any kind of paper. The resulting fibers are dirtier, harder to turn into book- or magazine-quality paper. Second, commercial packaging has shifted away from plastic in favor of paper and cardboard. Mills that retool to meet this demand no longer make as much paper suitable for books.

Next time I relish a physical book, I’ll try not to take its pages for granted.

“Catholic” and “Irish” are so linked in public imagination that the University of Notre Dame, founded by French Catholics, calls its teams “the fighting Irish.” Would it surprise you to learn Protestants outnumber Catholics among Americans with ancestors from Ireland?

Though I heard little about Dominion Day (now Canada Day) during childhood summers in Canada, my grandmother’s friend Mrs. Moise made sure I knew July 12 was Orangemen’s Day. It celebrates a long-ago Protestant battle victory over Catholics. For a few years in grade school I thought it fun to wear orange on Saint Patrick’s Day. Then I learned Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland were killing each other. Not funny.

North America received over a quarter million Irish immigrants in the 1700s, largely Presbyterian with Scottish ancestry. The merchants and tradesmen who formed the Irish Society of Boston organized world’s first recorded Saint Patrick’s Day parade in 1737. Instead of settling in cities, though, most moved to the frontier to farm. Their descendants multiplied to populate much of the South and the Appalachians.

History is written not only by the winners and the literate, but by those with an agenda. When potato famine in the 1840s drove well over a million destitute, starving Catholic Irish to an unwelcoming America, the previous arrivals rebranded themselves “Scots-Irish” to evade prejudice. Back in Ireland by the 1900s, the mostly Catholic independence movement laid claim to marks of traditional Irish culture: Saint Patrick, shamrocks, the color green.

Deciding “orange” Irish weren’t “true” Irish served agendas both green and orange. It’s a short step from there to assuming Americans’ ancestors from Ireland were all potato famine Catholics, even if it isn’t true.

Most books that strongly influenced my childhood were predictable classics: Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s fictionalized memoirs, the exploits of Sherlock Holmes and Robin Hood, The Little Prince. Others turned out to be personal passions, like Mistress Masham’s Repose by T. H. White. Perhaps the most obscure, though I didn’t know it at the time, was George Herbert Locke’s When Canada Was New France (1920).

“Almost four hundred years ago, when bluff King Hal ruled over Merry England and Francis over Sunny France, there were strange stories told in the ports of the west of England and the north of France of lands away to the Westward,” it began. What child could resist? Especially a child with Canadian roots, who spent summers in Canada with Canadian aunts, uncles, and cousins. A child excited by tales of adventure, all the more when the tales were true.

Locke wrote in honor of then-recent Canadian soldiers who sailed to Old France to preserve their ancestral motherlands in the Great War. To an adult reader today, his account is a quaint period piece, justifiably long out of print. To one child reader long ago, the intrepid explorers he wrote about—Cartier, Champlain, Joliet, Marquette, LaSalle—opened the door to a lifelong fascination with true stories of long ago.

The old practice of paying magazine writers by the word rewarded verbosity. Short-short narrative calls on different skills to make every word count. Constraints can spur creativity, we found in Gale Walden’s Write-by-the-Lake workshop on flash memoir and flash fiction last week. You might have fun with one of these:

• Forty-two word story. You can submit your 42-word story with its 42-character title for inclusion in an anthology inspired by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Detailed guidelines here.
• Six-word memoir. To write your life story in six words invites you to pare it down to the essence. What’s yours? Cool video here.
• Tweet-length tale. This form is especially popular for horror. Whether Twitter’s increase in limit from 140 to 280 characters affected story quality is up for debate.

For my first stab at flash fiction six years ago, click on “Her Next Bed” on the Writing page of this website.

Not all women marry in white, of course. My mother wore deep orange-rust velvet for her September wedding long ago. Nor has white always been traditional for European and American bridal gowns. That started after 1840, when Queen Victoria’s white wedding gown set a new fashion among the wealthy.

White was a color of conspicuous consumption because it was so hard to clean. (Nothing to do with purity or innocence.) Until well into the twentieth century, even the elites expected to wear their gowns again for other occasions. Most brides simply wore their best dress, which might or might not be new. The single-use white wedding gown did not become widespread until after World War II.

Traditions are customs, beliefs, or practices passed down through generations. In wedding fashion as in more important spheres, they’re not to be confused with eternal truth or the way things were always done.

We’re not talking cute animal videos or funniest home videos here. We’re talking a four-to-seven-minute movie complete with story line, dialogue, and action. In the 48 Hour Film Project, each team in cities around the world rushes to create a movie over a weekend. Like running a marathon, it’s structured as competition but the great achievement is to finish.

All a team is allowed to do before the Friday evening kickoff is register, scout locations, and assemble cast, crew, and equipment. At the kickoff, teams draw lots for genre and learn the required elements: a specified character, prop, and line of dialogue. Then begins the fun of plotting, script writing, costuming, shooting, editing, and submission. The films submitted Sunday evening will screen before a live audience in a local theater.

Like National Novel Writing Month, the 48 Hour Film Project can teach perfectionists the concept of “good enough.” Unlike the novel-writing challenge, the film-making challenge requires collaboration—and, I suspect, the willingness of creative people to cede individual control. Forty-eight hours is too short to thrash out all your decisions till everyone gets their way.

When I commuted to work in downtown Chicago, I sometimes crossed outdoors between moving cars on the elevated train, not to reach a different car but to practice facing a fear.

“Do one thing every day that scares you.”* Something not dangerous or foolhardy, but dysfunctionally intimidating. For some it’s public speaking, complex paperwork, or raising a touchy issue with a friend. The “Fear” I burned in a New Year’s Eve bonfire involved unfamiliar machines and bus systems. The more I use them, the less they scare me.

Two caveats. First, advice to leave your comfort zone suggests a false dichotomy between discomfort and being stuck in a rut. There are far-from-boring ways to be “in the zone”: creating, writing, learning, running on the beach. No need to break the flow just because it doesn’t scare you.

Second, desensitization isn’t the only way to ease fear. In the body, a case of nerves looks much the same as excitement. Even for those of us not adrenalin junkies, it may be easier to reframe unhappy jitters as happy ones than to calm ourselves down. A wiser adage might be, “Do one thing every day that excites you.”

​*Mary Schmich, Chicago Tribune, June 1997. Read here for quote history and misattributions.

Poppies shooting up in my garden are almost—not quite—in time for Memorial Day. Since its origins in the American Civil War, this holiday to honor those who died in military service has combined flowers with the sung, spoken, or written word.

John Brown’s body. At the war’s end in April 1865, former slaves in South Carolina exhumed Union soldiers from a prison camp mass grave for reburial. Then in May, ten thousand former slaves paraded at the camp, including members of black Union regiments. Children holding bouquets sang the abolitionist battle hymn, “John Brown’s Body.”

General John Logan’s proclamation. Decorating soldiers’ graves with flowers was common during and after the Civil War. In 1868, Logan called on Union veterans everywhere to strew blossoms on their fallen comrades’ graves on May 30. By 1890, Decoration Day was an official holiday in every Northern state, with similar observances on other dates across the South.

War after war. “In Flanders fields the poppies blow // Between the crosses, row on row.” After World War I, Decoration Day was extended to military personnel killed in all wars, observed on May 30 nationwide. During yet another bloody war, in 1967, it became a federal holiday under the name “Memorial Day.”

​          Noise : Sound : Music :: Weeds : Plants : Garden

Cement mixers growl and trucks beep endlessly as they lay a new driveway next door. If music is organized sound, noise is the sound of chaos. The human brain learns the difference early on. What counts as music varies by culture and once imprinted, rarely changes beyond early adulthood. Sorry, friends, heavy metal is still noise to my ears.

A recent public radio segment featured composers who record and organize sound from the environment, both natural and human-made. Like a wildflower garden or a collage or yard sculpture made from other people’s trash, their artistry depends not on good or bad material but the eye or ear they bring to it. Writers say it’s all grist for the mill.

​How many of life’s irritants might feel less irksome if I searched them for elements to compose into artistry? For a moment, when I shift to a different mindset, the machines and voices next door become more interesting than painful. Perhaps with practice I’ll be able to make this shift for longer at a stretch. To bring a different ear and, if not create music, at least ease the noise.

Saturday, like this time every year, I drove from Madison east along Interstate 94 to Milwaukee and its beautiful Wisconsin Club, venue for the Council for Wisconsin Writers annual awards banquet. What joy to bask in a roomful of people passionate about writers and to hear readings by some of the best.

Road trips east on I-94 mark the turning of my seasons. In a couple of months, spring green along the highway replaced by verdant summer, we’ll drive on past Milwaukee to the Wisconsin/Illinois state line to revel in historical fantasy at the Bristol Renaissance Faire.

Every fall or early winter, past woodlands brilliant or bare depending on each year’s polio meeting calendar, I-94 takes me on into greater Chicago and the Rotary International headquarters in Evanston. Though a far cry from the escapist fantasy of summer, the current history of global polio eradication holds as much drama and suspense as any fiction.

As winter settles in, I hunker down to writing and look forward to the return of robins, trillium, and the next CWW awards banquet. What annual rituals mark the turning of your seasons?