At 4:45 am, the first sounds I hear awakening are low murmuring chirps. When I open my eyes, the room is hazy gray with first light before sunrise. A breeze sighs through the open windows. I close my eyes, pat the dog, and snuggle deeper into the covers. [Red-winged blackbird.] A vehicle whines over the hill on the highway, tires thumping as the driver accidentally veers into the rumble strips. I open my eyes and look toward the west windows. Over the deep blue Black Hills, a wispy cirrus cloud turns pink, reflecting the coming sunrise. While I dress, I look out the west windows at the blackbi ..read more

Kneading, I could see my grandmother’s strong arms working the dough on the bread board by the wood stove. Bread dough, she’d say, is as independent as a 2-year-old. Both require hard work if they are to develop properly. I fold outside to inside and push with the heels of my hands, rotate the globe a quarter turn, crease and push, again and again while my brain replays a conversation with a young friend about Western problems: subdivisions, zoning, water. “But what can one person doooooo?” she wailed. Kneading, I consider that universal question. When the warm mass sticks to my fingers, I ..read more

In the yard at 5:43 on a dark morning, the sky is covered with clouds behind which a glorious sunrise has just vanished. Yet the evening primrose are blooming vivid yellow, like tall candles.   Ours is Oenothera biennis, Common evening primrose, a tall plant with large yellow blooms arranged most of the length of the stem. The “goblet-like” flowers in yellow, white or pink, each with four petals, are said to be lemon-scented, but they seem sweeter than that to me. I’m not sure where mine originated, but they have scattered naturally. Night-blooming plants are said to attract moths for po ..read more

How to Write While Avoiding Writing This essay appears in my book The Wheel of the Year: A Writer’s Workbook (2017). I posted this book excerpt on my blog in 2020, but am posting again with an update about the book at the end of this piece. Today’s the day, I promised myself this morning, just as I did yesterday and the day before. Yes, today’s the day I write an essay about Lammas for my business website Home Page. Lammas is often marked by rituals emphasizing endings, as well as with the collection and preservation of food. How could I connect this season with writing? Yesterday, while not ..read more

The Spring 2022 issue of South Dakota History (Vol. 52, No. 1), provides an illuminating article about a poet of our past who was completely unknown to me: Rebecca Fusfeld, a Sioux Falls resident who wrote poetry from the 1930s to the 1960s. Her work, says the article’s author, Anna Amundson, a history professor at Augustana University (Sioux Falls, SD), is one example of how Jewish people in South Dakota took part in a national movement to educate their Christian friends and neighbors about their religious beliefs and lives. Fusfeld (also spelled Fusfield) shared her perspectives on Judaism ..read more

Elise’s destiny was to hunt the prairie grasslands. Instead she helps Maggie Engler of the Black Hills Raptor Center teach people how important the lives of raptors — red-tailed hawks and other birds of prey — are to us. Raptors prey on birds, voles, rabbits, amphibians, fish, carrion and even grasshoppers. For humans, though, the best news is a raptor’s appetite for mice. Mice eat wheat, corn, oats, rye and other grains used in cereals, bread, pasta and beer. In one year, a pair of mice and their offspring can produce thousands of babies. Each pair of mice that lives a year eats 8 pounds of ..read more

Tory Bauer Mysteries by Kathleen Taylor In the long run, I don’t think the adult psyche is well served by being popular in high school. I suppose that sounds like sour grapes, since I was always on the outside looking in, but my belief in that basic truth comes from observation, not resentment. Most of us were born ordinary. . . That line was probably not the first time I whooped out loud at a truth in the writing of Kathleen Taylor, but it was one of the first I recorded in a list that is still growing. I found it on p. 137 of the third in the series The Hotel South Dakota, which may have ..read more

This essay was originally posted on my website for the Winter Solstice, December 21, 2012. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings. I believe that Wendell Berry’s poem “To Know the Dark,” which I did not discover until middle age, perfectly describes how I rid myself of my fear of darkness. And it symbolizes a way to tackle other fears. My mother, knowing I was terrified of the monsters under the bed, always left a night light in my ro ..read more

With Mystic Travelers: Images from the Edge, the reader receives not only a book but an invitation to join these two Mystic travelers on adventures to the edge of the world we know through Facebook and their website. When she married well-known South Dakota artist Jon Crane, Gail Crane was catapulted out of her previous existence and into an entirely different life. Geographically, socially, spiritually, Gail was transformed and began to trust and embrace the unknown. Gail writes in this book with a poetic vision, telling us of the history of that ongoing adventure; there is no end in sight ..read more

The honor of being named South Dakota’s first living Poet of Merit, by the South Dakota State Poetry Society, astonishes me because this state is full of poets, as well as of people who have not yet begun to write. Part of this job, I believe, is to encourage people to write their ideas, thoughts, observations, no matter what form they choose. Poetry is everywhere in the world; make it your pleasure to read it and record it. Homesteading in Dakota A few years ago, I received an email from a lecturer in the Humanities in Arizona who was teaching an American West literature and film class. The ..read more