September 17: One of Those Mornings, Lists, "Carol" Dip Monday

It has been one of those mornings.  I overslept a little bit, and I have been running my butt off ever since, trying to make-up for the lost time.  I will probably feel rushed for the rest of the day.  That's what happens when my day starts off like this.  I have a lot of stuff to accomplish.

One of the first things I did when I was finally able to sit down was make a list.  I know, I know.  Lists are nothing new for me.  This list, however, was requested by a friend of mine who is putting together an anthology of Upper Peninsula writers/poets for a university press.  He wanted me to come up with a list of the three best U.P. poems.  Well, I came up with a list, but it's the three best U.P.-based short stories.  I think it's a really good list.  Let me share it with you:

1.  "Indian Camp" by Ernest Hemingway from the collection In Our Time.  The quintessential U.P. story for me.  A young Nick Adams visits a Native American camp with his physician father to deliver a baby.  His father has to perform a C-section without anesthetic.  After the operation is complete, Nick's father discovers that the woman's husband has committed suicide in his bunk.

2.  "Road Kill" by John Vandezande from the collection Night Driving.  This story deals with an experience almost everyone who lives in the U. P. has had--encountering a deer that's been hit by a car.  The three characters in the story deal with questions of mortality and death.

3.  "Winter Mines" by Sharon Dilworth from the Iowa Short Fiction Prize-winning collection The Long White.  This story is about a laid-off miner who sinks into depression.

Those are the three stories that capture important elements of what it means to live and survive in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  When I look at that list, I realize those tales are pretty dark and depressing.  All of them.  But they are increbile pieces of writing.

Now that I have that out of the way, I can move on to other tasks, like doing a Carol dip for this Monday.  And I have just the question to ask:

Will I ever end up at the top of a writer's list for poetry?  (Say, the top three greatest poets to have ever lived?)

And the answer from the great Charles Dickens is:

But if you had judged from the numbers of people on their way to friendly gatherings, you might have thought that no one was at home to give them welcome when they got there, instead of every house expecting company, and piling up its fires half-chimney high.  Blessing on it, how the Ghost exulted!

There you have it.  Numbers of people and friendly gatherings and blessings, all to celebrate me on the top of a list of great poets.

Saint Marty can't ask for much better than that.

A poet in search of a list