Clam Lake Papers a Winter in the North Woods

Reminiscent of Thoreau's Walden or Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, this journal bears its own unmistakable stamp of authenticity and originality. The road to meaning is blazed with countless guideposts, if only we are alive to them. The fox whose looping trail circles from the woods to the cabin and back again. The hibernating bear discovered by the steam raised by its body heat under a mound of snow. Even the strangely intrusive television, its flickering image blurred by a different kind of snow. All these contribute in these pages to a new and developing understanding of what it is to be human on our spinning, beleaguered planet. Picks up the crystal of life, turns it curiously and carefully to the light, inspects it from many angles, and sets it gently down again in a slightly different spot from where it was found. As quiet as the winter woods themselves, this book yet spikes like the first crocus of spring with a green and sudden hope.