Wannaskan Almanac

  The Palmville Globe Volume 2 Number 18 Man Becomes A Two Phone Operator  Joe McDonnell, 79 and a resident of Palmville Twp, Minnesota, recently acquired a new smartphone  which proved problematical. "A friend recently acquired a new phone which she disliked," McDonnell tells reporters. "The phone was offered to me at a low price and the money I payed was donated to a dog shelter. My friend loved dogs. I had my phone number switched to the new phone and that worked fine, but I couldn't move my apps, pictures, etc. to the new phone until I deleted my friend's apps and pictures from her phone. To do that  I needed her phone ID which   could not be located. Paperwork was sent to the phone's maker and while I wait for the ID to be sent, I'm operating with two phones, one as a phone and the other as everything else." McDonnell says he feels like one of those business tycoons who were always portrayed talking into two phones at once. "Or like a secre...

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 ...

    My friend Joe McDonnell and I are local writers. In the early 1990s, I wrote a column in the Roseau Times-Region about Polaris titled, “Points North” and Joe wrote a column in the Roseau Times-Region about 50th wedding anniversaries. We both contributed stories and illustrations for the Roseau County Centennial Book and the Roseau County Heritage Books. I also contributed to the Roseau County book, 'Up Home ', its title derived from my mother’s expression for her childhood home in Palmville Township.     Joe and I interviewed people over the years and realized the tremendous wealth of human interest stories around us. All we had to do was be good emphatic listeners and accurately write their stories in their own voices. Consequently, in 1994, we started a publication we named THE RAVEN: Northwest Minnesota’s Original Art, History, & Humor Journal. The Roseau Times-Region did a story on us and launched us into the public’s eye. We were both working f...

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for May 27, 2026, the twenty-first Wednesday of the year, the tenth Wednesday of spring, the fourth Wednesday of May, and the one-hundred forty-seventh day of the year, with two-hundred eighteen days remaining. Wannaska Phenology Update for May 27, 2026 Wild Plums Prunus americana — bagesaanaatig in Anishinaabe — is now blooming across Wannaskaland. Flowers are ¾ to 1 inch across with 5 white, round to egg-shaped petals with a single slender style and a spray of perfectly white, slender yellow-tipped stamens in the center. The fruit is a purplish red drupe with a thin waxy bloom, about one inch in diameter with a single hard seed inside. If you're lucky enough to find wild plums later this season, several Wannaskan Almanac readers have cherry pitters you might be able to borrow. Several Wannaskan Almanac contributors and readers recently lamented the scarcity of ripe wild plums, which are bound to be popular with other non-...

  Aaaaaaaaahhhhh!

       THIRD MOVEMENT REMEMBERING   SONG FOURTEEN LIGHT DANCING   I              I search the desert for many days              alone, hungry, lost, and deeply afraid              but only one Raven appears here and there              -- no teacher, no coyotes, no wolves circling near              Just one noisy Raven persists overhead              I assume he is scouting to see when I’m dead                  Finally, my nose scents the sea              and I run to meet its w...