Hello and welcome to the last Saturday in May - and the start of summer vacation - here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is May 30th. This past week, we reflected on 2026 as our 20th anniversary living in Wannaskaland and 23 years since we returned to the U.S. Wannaska looks different than it did in 2006. The first thing I noticed is the absence of magpies. When we moved here, I remarked, "Magpies! Look at all the magpies!" This is especially memorable because magpies is one of a handful of bird species I can recall from my own sixth-grade science class with Mr. Hanson at Washington Middle School in Brainerd, MN. Mr. Hanson was diligent and patient in the pursuit of memorizing two things: our ornithological lexicon and timeless proverbs in the vein of "Good, better, best, never let it rest. Make your good be your better, and your better best." On the other hand, eagles seem abundant these days. Another memory I have is that of a warm spring. A very specific memory I ...
A bookseller once said that writing a book is hard, while publishing a book is even harder. But the hardest thing in the world is selling a book. I once knew some college students who were so good at selling books that they were able to pay for their education. For several years in the summer, Marion and Jerry Solom would host a college student from one of the former Soviet republics. These young people were recruited by a US encyclopedia publisher to scour northwestern Minnesota for sales. One time I asked a young man from Estonia what his technique was. "Grandparents," he said. He didn't call grandparents suckers, but he knew grandparents would do anything to help their grandkids succeed in school and that's what he told the grandparents his encyclopedia would do. A little over four million books are published in the US every year. Three and a half million of them are self-published, mostly through Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. Most self-published books ...