Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula ed. by Ronald Riekki

Abstract

Reviewed by: Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula ed. by Ronald Riekki Amy D. Richards Ronald Riekki, ed., Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. East Lansing, Michigan State University Press, 2015. 282 pp. $24.95. It is fitting that I am writing this review here, in the Peter White Public Library in Marquette, the unofficial capital city of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I grew up here, but education led me away and has only managed to return me to the shores of Lake Superior during academic breaks. Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is a collection of previously published poems, short stories, and excerpts from novels written by women about this particularly northern place. The writers, their lives spanning over three centuries, include women who are native to the land because their nineteenth century Finnish, Italian, Cornish, or German ancestors migrated to mining settlements here, and women of Ojibwa ancestry who are native to the land still longer. The writers include women who make sacred annual pilgrimages to the homes of grandparents, the places their own mothers or fathers left for a more prosperous lower peninsula. The writers include women transplanted here by the universities or simply because they are seduced such as Elinor Benedict who announces “white birches and blue waters have taken me.” All of these women have found something here, [End Page 101] and the result is an evocative, humorous, despairing, sobering, and renewing collection of literature. The selections in this book are eclectic, not simply because they include several genres including two pieces of juvenile fiction one of which is historical fiction set in revolutionary America, but primarily because the works were first published between 1839 and 2013 with the majority written in this century and the end of the last. There are a few selections from the middle of the twentieth century and a 1904 excerpt from Carroll Watson Rankin’s Dandelion Cottage, a childhood favorite of mine. The work reaches back into the beginning of the nineteenth century with the inclusion of the poetry of BAME-WA-WA-GE-ZHIK-AQUAY (1800–1842), also known as Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, one of the first Native American writers. Because of the early writings, the work provides an anthology of women’s voices, but I am left wondering if there are other middle to late nineteenth century voices that might have been included. What I think this book does best is illustrate the paradoxical push and pull of the Upper Peninsula (UP). The pull is the attraction to the natural for spiritual and physical healing, and the refreshing experience to be in a distinctive place not homogenized like much of America. But, with the magnetic pull north comes the polar push from one’s native land and its alcohol and methamphetamine abuse, spousal abuse, family lies and secrets, poverty, cold, isolation, and unemployment or under-employment. In the foreword, Alison Swan, award winning poet and environmentalist, writes that between June and September “everything from mosquitoes to white pines has to complete the year’s growth and reproduction.” In these stories, the authors show what it means to survive in the UP, but stories of thriving and flourishing are few, and this rings true to life. Nature provides succor in these writings. The trees, the lakes (especially Lake Superior), the rivers, the ethereal Northern Lights all minister to the primarily female narrators. Poet Stellanova Osborn writes, “When I carry/The woes of the world/Into the woods/Branches reach out/And brush them gently off.” Water offers absolution and restoration as in several of the poems where bodies of water are evocative of female bodies. The power of water heals the women from sexual abuse. Most of the authors imagine Lake Superior as “she,” and she is very powerful and empowering. One of my favorite lines of the collection is from contemporary poet Catie Rosemurgy’s [End Page 102] “Lake Superior Confesses to the Shore of Keweenaw Bay” when the lake says of the balsam fir and the northern white pine that, “They think they are all the needles/ever lost in haystacks.” Lake Superior goes on to confess that, “I...