Stocking writes about the people and places she knows so intimately

Civil War letters written by Cyril H. Tyler, Michigan 7th Infantry Regiment, Company I, 1861-1864.

One writer's quest to locate herself within the wet, wild, and diversely human cultural heritage that has shaped her

Explores ghosts and haunted places, local legends, cursed roads, crazy characters, and unusual roadside attractions found in Michigan.

Pays tribute to the women behind the local, sustainable, and quality foods of northwestern Michigan. Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women in Food and Farminglooks at the female culinary pioneers who have put northern Michigan on the map for food, drink, and farming. Emita Brady Hill interviews women who share their own stories of becoming the cooks, bakers, chefs, and farmers that they are today—each even sharing a delicious recipe or two. These stories are as important to tracing the gastronomic landscape in America as they are to honoring the history, agriculture, and community of Michigan. Divided into six sections, Northern Harvest celebrates very different women who converged in an important region of Michigan and helped transform it into the flourishing culinary Eden it is today. Hill speaks with orchardists and farmers about planting their own fruit trees and making the decision to transition their farms over to organic. She hears from growers who have been challenged by the northern climate and have made exclusive use of fair trade products in their business. Readers are introduced to the first-ever cheesemaker in the Leelanau area and a pastry chef who is doing it all from scratch. Readers also get a sneak peek into the origins of Traverse City institutions such as Folgarelli’s Market and Wine Shop and Trattoria Stella. Hill catches up with local cookbook authors and nationally known food writers. She interviews the founder of two historic homesteads that introduce visitors to a way of living many of us only know from history books. These oral histories allow each woman to tell her story as she chooses, in her own words, with her own emphasis, and her own discretion or indiscretions. Northern Harvest is a celebration of northern Michigan’s rich culinary tradition and the women who made it so. Hungry readers will swallow this book whole.

In volumes1-8: the final number consists of the Commencement annual.

Fans of nonfiction that reads as beautifully as fiction will love this collection.

Northern Michigan is a place, like all places, in change. Over the past half century, its landscape has been bulldozed, subdivided, and built upon. Climate change warms the water of the Great Lakes at an alarming rate—Lake Superior is now the fastest-warming large body of freshwater on the planet—creating increasingly frequent and severe storm events, altering aquatic and shoreline ecosystems, and contributing to further invasions by non-native plants and animals. And yet the essence of this region, known to many as simply “Up North,” has proved remarkably perennial. Millions of acres of state and national forests and other public lands remain intact. Small towns peppered across the rural countryside have changed little over the decades, pushing back the machinery of progress with the help of dedicated land conservancies, conservation organizations, and other advocacy groups. Up North in Michigan, the new collection from celebrated nature writer Jerry Dennis, captures its author’s lifelong journey to better know this place he calls home by exploring it in every season, in every kind of weather, on foot, on bicycle, in canoes and cars. The essays in this book are more than an homage to a particular region, its people, and its natural wonders. They are a reflection on the Up North that can only be experienced through your feet and fingertips, through your ears, mouth, and nose—the Up North that makes its way into your bones as surely as sand makes its way into wood grain.

In the Shadow of the Bear chronicles the author's return, after a forty-year absence, to the site of his childhood summer vacations at Little Glen Lake in northwestern Lower Michigan's Leelanau peninsula. The ancient Ojibwa legend that gave a name to the area's most striking geographical feature, the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes, offers a way of understanding his mother's powerful but sometimes restless force of love and ambition in the family, as well as his father's quieter, often self-sacrificing love. Chapters devoted to the return to Leelanau, to each of his parents, and to his father's family culminate in the narrative of his daughter's 2005 Leelanau wedding. Jim McGavran tells his story of self-discovery in prose that is alternatively frank and lyrical as he recaptures his bewildered yet enchanted boyhood self, filtered through his consciousness of longing and loss, lending the writing a particular poignancy.

A survey of the composing processes of seven working writers--columnist/ essayists Jim Fitzgerald and Kathleen Stocking, political columnists Tom Wicker and Richard Reeves, drama critic Walter Kerr, and film critics David Denby and Neal Gabler--Working at Writing offers rich and unique insights into how writing is actually done. The book has three interlocking elements: edited transcripts of interviews with the writers about their composing processes and the composition of specific works, copies of the works discussed in the transcripts, and a series of chapters that analyze the interviews and articles in the context of current research into composing. Through this unusual structure, Root investigates both the ways in which the working practices of the seven writers relate to one another and to current models of composing and the ways in which such a discussion will be of value to others, particularly to student writers and their teachers. By considering the comments of practicing writers and the examples of their compositions and by comparing the evidence of research findings with those examples of practical experience, Root gives student writers--and their teachers as well--the opportunity to better understand the paradigms that govern their own composing and to confirm, modify, abandon, or replace them. The final chapter discusses the implications of these professionals' experience for those who hope to become working writers. Stressing the importance of "assiduous stringsaving," immersion in context, regular composition, the rhetorical situation, and the writer's understanding of his or her own process, Root suggests both what separates the novice from the expert and how novices can apply the insights of this book as they work at their own writing.