Wannaskan Almanac

  THIRD MOVEMENT REMEMBERING   SONG SEVENTEEN BURNING GROUND   III   I keep moving retracing steps I decide the City will be next I intend to confront it – I will not wait             to find that old terrain and know its sound Back to the city – back to gray walls journeying outward, inward – burning ground   I continue with courage heading there and time being a relative thing dances and laughs in shifts and shimmers             as I open to hear the City’s old sound First, a river flowing inside a littered border that I hardly saw when I ran anxious  to join the gray-skulled order   Now there is time and I will proceed             and proceeding I will begin and beginning I will know the river’s voice that sings to me          ...

The Palmville Globe Volume 2 Number 33 Man Finds Missing Closure Joe McDonnell. 79 and residing in Palmville Twp, Minnesota, recently found a twist tie to replace the original one. "Every year before we exit the fair, we buy a super large bag of kettle corn," McDonnell tells the press. "The kettle corn is very hot so the attendant leaves the top open and gives us a long, red and white twist tie. We eat some kettle corn so we can get the twist tie on, but this time our twist tie could not to be found when we needed it. We did not want to walk all the way back to the kettle corn stand so I startled scanning the ground for a twist tie. Before we reached the exit we found an exact replica of the lost twist tie, though it appeared to have been stepped on."  In a later communication, McDonnell says that once they were home, they found the original twist in a purse. "In the hubbub of the fair, things often go missing only to turn up later." he says.  Man Avoids Z...

Hello and welcome to our first chilly fall Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is September 12th. Yesterday marked the 25th commemoration of 9/11. When I was a kid, I marveled at people's ability to remember where they were the day JFK was assassinated. I wondered how an event could be so impactful that the who, what, when, and where of the moment would be forever cemented in one's brain. Well, now I know.  On September 11, 2001, I was living in Brno, Czech Republic. I had just gotten home from a day of teaching English at the Berlitz school. I was feeling pretty good and in high spirits when our home phone rang. (Cellphones were just starting to be a thing then.) "Kim, I'm so sorry, but there's been an attack in America. Planes were flown into the towers in New York City," my friend Susann told me in German. I felt disoriented. Susann rarely called the home phone. We always spoke German, even though my fluency was quite mediocre. And this kind of vo...

       I used to give a book fifty pages to convince me I should finish it. Now I decide after the first sentence. I recently started a book whose introduction started off- "This book is unreadable". The book is  Finnegans Wake  by James Joyce. I had read and understood Joyce's previous book, the notoriously difficult  Ulysses . I had read  Ulysses  twice previously without understanding much of it. I had been an English major and felt I needed to be able to say I had at least read it.      I was able to master  Ulysses  on the third try with the help of two fellow  Wannaskan Almanac  writers, Catherine Stenzel and Kim Hruba. For a year and a half through Covid we read a chapter a month and met monthly via Zoom to discuss and argue over the chapters. The book takes place on a single June day in Dublin in 1904, and follows the interconnected activities of three Dubliners as they go about the city. ...

Hayes Lake State Park Saturday September 10th, 1983  Excerpt From "Hot Coffee & Cold Beer: a Journal."      I mentioned last week’s ( Sept 3rd ) camping trip to Mark, another friend of mine at the toy factory. He’s an amateur photographer; having a Canon 35mm camera and some great lenses. At the mention of seeing the otters, he became interested in getting some pictures of them and asked if I’d be  willing to show him where they might be this weekend. And of course, I was, as friends were far and in between for me about that time. Having learned we had similar interests, I thought I should make the attempt.     Over the course of the week we discussed various ideas of what to bring and where we would camp at Hayes the night of the ninth and look for the otters early in the morning on the tenth. I’d provide the food, the canoe, and camper. Mark would buy the beer and camping fee. Good enough. As it turned out, even though I took the grocery lis...