AADL Productions Podcast: AA/Ypsi Reads Author Jerry Dennis

Sat, 03/06/2010 - 5:05pm

When: March 26, 2010

In this episode, 2010 Ann Arbor Ypsilanti Reads author Jerry Dennis stops by to talk about Reads title The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas. Apart from being an award-winning nature writer, Jerry is also a lifelong Michigander whose experience of the Great Lakes reaches back to boyhood fishing trips. In this interview we learn about his life as a writer and what he has learned about the lakes through his research and many conversations with the people who live along them. We also get to hear his feelings about what makes the lakes so important to Michigan and Michigan so important to the fight to keep the lakes healthy. You can also watch the video of Jerry's presentation at Washtenaw Community College in the AADL Video Collection.

Transcript

• [00:00:02.44] AMY: Hi this is Amy.
• [00:00:04.16] ANDREW: And this is Andrew and you're listening to the AADL Productions Podcast.
• [00:00:10.08] AMY: In this episode Andrew and Ira talk with Jerry Dennis, author of the 2010 Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads title, The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas. They talk about Jerry's career as a nature writer, what the Great Lakes mean to us as people and as Michiganders and what we all need to do to keep the Great Lakes healthy for ourselves and for the plants and animals that call that Lakes home.
• [00:00:38.47] IRA: Tell us a little bit about where you grew up and where you live now and what your writing regimen is. So there's three questions.
• [00:00:46.32] JERRY DENNIS: Three questions. Well, I grew up in Northern Michigan. Very close to where I live now, within 15 miles in fact. I grew up on 2 Inland Lakes. Silver Lake and Long Lake in Grand Traverse County. They were the dream of my father's life. My father and mother both were from Northern Michigan. My mother's family several generations in Leelanu County. My father's father was a cherry farmer and maple syrup producer in Leelanu County. Well, my parents had both moved to Southern Michigan to work when they were out of high school. My father went into the Army as well. They met down there and my father became a police officer in Flint. And that's where I was born and lived there for five years. But my dad's dream was always to come back to Northern Michigan and get a place on the water. And I was the beneficiary of them. My brother and I, at age five-- I was five, he was three-- we moved to Silver Lake and stayed there for three years and then to Long Lake and I spent the rest of my childhood and up until I left for college living on this beautiful house and beautiful shore of an Inland Lake. And spent a lot of summers on Lake Michigan where my mother's family lived and so both of those bodies of water were very formative in my upbringing. And in fact, later became the title of my first collection of essays, A Place in the Water. I write as an occupation. My full-time occupation. It's my job. Has been for 25 years and I've evolved into a pretty tight work schedule of getting up at 7:30 or 8:00 in the morning and walking-- I commute to work. It's about a hundred feet from the back door of the house to my little writing shack which is in the loft of a stone building that was originally used for farm equipment on our former orchard where we live. The orchard is now one acre and six cherry trees. And I work an eight hour day. I spend my mornings isolated from the world with the blinds closed and no phone or internet. And I compose in the mornings, take a break at lunch, walk the dog, get the mail. And then in the afternoon, so I plug into the world and I'm in touch with editors and agents and answering mail and doing all the other incidental things that need to be done. Waiting, killing time often until the next morning when my real life begins again.
• [00:03:14.26] IRA: I wanted to ask you what was your purpose in writing this particular book? I know you've written several books before this and they cover things like canoeing and fly fishing and covers lots of topics that have to do with water.
• [00:03:28.60] ANDREW: What would possess you to even try to write a book about the Great Lakes is what he's asking.
• [00:03:33.87] IRA: Right, why would you want to tackle that?
• [00:03:36.28] JERRY DENNIS: Well in a sense, every book like the canoeing guide, Canoeing Michigan Rivers, my first book we went into that thinking we could do it in six months and it took two solid years. And you know, it just takes up more time then you think. You want to bite off more than you can chew, of. course. And the Great Lakes, what a huge sprawling subject. Because in the books before I had followed sort of a trajectory. I started writing about something I knew I could handle. The canoeing guide. I knew I could describe these places and because we canoed every mile that we wrote about I could write about them. My partner in that book, Craig Date, did the maps and photographs. But we did all the research together. I knew I could handle that. Well, the next book I took on a bigger subject. So what about writing essays about growing up outdoors in Michigan and then adventures elsewhere in the world as well, but the idea then was to tell stories. And again, is something I could handle. I knew I could do that. I knew I could do it in a way that would put a reader in the places I was writing about. Well by the time, seven books later I get to the Living Great Lakes I'm no longer satisfied to write about just recreation. I wanted to write about this place that is unique in the world that has a fascinating little known history that most people in America don't understand and they don't understand how central this place is to American history and Canadian history. And that it's in danger. It's imperiled. How do I get this place to come alive for readers in a way that might motivate them to learn more about it and care maybe enough about it to do something about protecting them? So I my stretched my arms as wide as I could and grabbed as much of it as I could and tried to bring it to life. But you're absolutely right, what possessed me? There were a lot of days when I thought, I am out of my mind. What was I thinking? How can you possibly tell this story in one book? It would take at minimum five volumes, right? One for each lake. But many more volumes in truth to do it justice.
• [00:05:48.27] ANDREW: I love the structure of the book. The sort of three-pronged structure of the geological history and the human history and your own personal narrative. I love that way of writing and I was just wondering if it's difficult to find that balance between all of those things when you're writing?
• [00:06:08.15] JERRY DENNIS: That's a very good question because it is difficult. And I think it takes experience. I don't think I could have written this book 10 years earlier than I did. I don't think I had the judgment because that's what it really comes down to. You sense the weight of what you're doing. You sense when it's enough information. Enough science for instance or enough environmental bad news, enough doomsday stuff. A reader only wants so much of it. And I use myself as the judge because I know where my tolerances are too. I'll take some of it and I want some of it, but then please some relief. I want then some human stories. I want some movement. I want some color and beauty and laughter. So it's just a matter of a writers internal editor and judgment in saying, where is the right now. And you get to where you can feel when it's right.
• [00:07:04.82] ANDREW: Does part of it reflect your own understanding of the topic? So if you were to sit down and read a book about LaSalle. After a little while you start to think, oh yeah, I remember when I was in the St. Claire River and so part of it is also that's the way you think about these things? You think about them in terms of the history and the geography and your own personal stories?
• [00:07:27.50] JERRY DENNIS: You can't help but think of them that way once you've achieved a certain level of understanding yourself. And that was the real challenge of this book. Is there was no way I could write about it until I had been to those places. The old adage that I took to heart very seriously when I was a magazine writer was you need a pound of knowledge to write an ounce of information. And I took that very seriously in this book, so that I didn't write about anything that I didn't have personal experience with. But the great thing about that I discovered accidentally really was because I had that background knowledge, but it was also personal experience that then allowed me to use personal experience when necessary to loosen up the story and to give a little more life and color and reality to a topic, whatever it was, history, science, environment.
• [00:08:24.10] IRA: In getting that experiencing and becoming familiar with what you were writing about, you said that you explored many, many parts of the state and became familiar whether it was just the shoreline or working your way inward on rivers. When I grew up I learned about Michigan as basically the peninsula, the land surrounded by these lakes that you could go swimming in, boating in, fishing in, what have you-- recreation. The lake served us because we lived inland. We didn't live year-round on the lakes. And so what I'm getting from you and what I really think is great about what you're doing is you're giving that context as the watershed becomes one. The land and the water are equal partners and are equal personalities. That seems to be a part of what you're doing and I think it's great because just focusing on the land doesn't give the lake enough importance.
• [00:09:30.08] JERRY DENNIS: That's a good point and it's absolutely true. And if we create that artificial separation it becomes too easy to forget about the consequences of what we do on the land to the water and vice versa. So I wouldn't say it's a doctrine for me, but it's important to me because I recognize how important that is in our lives and how true it is to our experience on earth.
• [00:09:57.46] ANDREW: Last night at the event everyone who stood up to ask a question prefaced their question with one of their own Great Lakes stories about when they were on the Great Lakes and I realized that as I was reading this book it was bringing up all of my various memories. The first time that I had someone who said, as I grew up near Lake Ontario and they said, but you can see the other side. I remember the first time that happened and I was wondering why you think it is that everybody has a Great Lakes story? Do the Great Lakes just capture something in us that anything happens to us on the Great Lakes becomes a story because they are so big in our minds?
• [00:10:37.12] JERRY DENNIS: They touch us and when something touches us our natural human response is just to turn it into a story. Everywhere I've gone, those questions last night, some of them were new. I had never heard some of them, but there was always that same preface. Everywhere I've gone, probably 150 times I've spoken to groups around the Great Lakes since this book came out and it always comes up. And I think there's a really important clue to the way people feel about the lakes in that. I was invited to speak to the Great Lakes Legislative Caucus two years ago in Chicago and here's, you know, 50 lawmakers from all 8 states who are there to learn about the Great Lakes and to try to develop their positions on Great Lakes legislation and they wanted my perspective, which I was honored to give. And the very first thing I told them was that very thing. I gave them some anecdotes about people I had met of every type. People that we're all over the spectrum politically, racially, economically. And I said, they always begin their comments with a story about their experience on the lakes and they take it personally. I said, you guys are going to really make an error if you don't keep that in mind. People are passionate about this lakes and it's a part of their lives. It's in their blood, literally and it's in their souls and they will get really upset if their lakes are tampered with. I think they knew it already though. I don't think they'd have been there at that Caucus if they weren't concerned and interested.
• [00:12:18.93] ANDREW: So I have a question for you and I'm going to preface it with a story about myself and the Great Lakes. I actually grew up on a town on the Erie Canal and I'm 15 miles from Lake Ontario and I'm 15 miles from two of the Finger Lakes. And in my life we always identified ourselves in my region very closely with the Erie Canal and with the Finger Lakes and Lake Ontario was just sort of where the land ended. We didn't really think a lot about Lake Ontario and it wasn't until I went away to college and started meeting people from Pennsylvania who had no experience with the Great Lakes that I realized what Lake Ontario really was and I started thinking about it and going back and visiting it with different eyes. And I was wondering if there was a point in your life when, did you always know that the Great Lakes were something important to you or did you reach a point in life and say, this is something really meaningful to me? This is something really important that I didn't realize was important before?
• [00:13:12.14] JERRY DENNIS: It's an interesting observation about Lake Ontario. I noticed that. I was there. I spent several weeks on the shores of Lake Ontario last summer and exploring the area and trying to understand the way those communities interact with the lake because they tend to have their backs to the lake. They tend to be oriented inland. And I saw many people. I talked to many people who had that same attitude. That that's just where the land ended. I had the opposite perspective, I can remember vividly as a very young boy at five years old that Lake Michigan was where the world began. And I think it was because my father had a telescope in our front window looking out over Lake Michigan. We only lived one summer in Empire, Michigan near the Sleeping Bear Dunes the summer I was five before we moved to Silver Lake. But there was a brass telescope in the front window and I would stand at that and watch ships on the horizon. My dad would tell me, that ship's going to China. That ship's going to Australia. And that excited me to no end because even then I sensed that we were way deep in the continent, far away from the rest of the world and I was so curious about the world and that became my connection. So when I walked the beach, beach combing as a kid, and if I found a fisherman's float from a net I wouldn't think oh, that must be from a Japanese fishing net on the other side of the world because I thought this connection was a easy flow. So no, I had a very different experience. It was always the entry to the greater world to my mind and that stirred my imagination.
• [00:14:56.32] ANDREW: I also found when I moved to Michigan that my idea of lakes is very different because my idea of lakes growing up was Lake Ontario and the Finger Lakes, which are all large. And so, when I come here and I'm driving around and I see some of these little things that they call lakes I say, that's not a lake. It seems to do some injustice to use the same word for something where you can see all of the edge of it at once and compare that to something the size of Seneca Lake or the size of Lake Superior. It seems ridiculous that we've only got one word for it.
• [00:15:29.96] JERRY DENNIS: It's true. It's the same with rivers. You go out west and lots of creeks are bigger than our biggest rivers here in Michigan. So very, very regional applications of those terms I think. Or in New England they call a lot of what we would call lakes they call ponds and they're pretty good sized lakes by our perspective.
• [00:15:52.13] IRA: I don't know if it would be fair to ask you to maybe give us a sentence. A personality description of the five lakes. Where I mean, you gave one or two chapters to each one in the book. But just off the top of your head, would you maybe give it a try?
• [00:16:17.85] JERRY DENNIS: I've been trying to do that coincidentally. Making it part of the documentary project that we're doing and we're saying, can we characterize then each lake in a sentence or a few and it's difficult. The one thing that I always come back to is I wrote somewhere, I'm not even sure if it was in this book that the lakes were like five willful sisters, each one very different, but yet very alike as sisters always are. And Lake Superiors is the oldest and the orneriest, but also the most beautiful one. The heartbreakingly beautiful one. And Lake Michigan is the sort of tempestuous, but also responsible one. And Lake Huron is not as responsible and she's a little colder. She's got more rocks around the shore. And maybe a little more analytical and independent. Goes her own way. And Lake Erie is just a younger one who's unpredictable. And you never quite know where she's headed. Lake Ontario is the quiet younger one who everyone's sort of curious about it because she's so mysterious.
• [00:17:37.80] IRA: Wow that's pretty.
• [00:17:38.47] JERRY DENNIS: Maybe that's the best I could do.
• [00:17:40.62] IRA: That's great. Which one has the record of causing the most shipwrecks?
• [00:17:45.51] JERRY DENNIS: I don't know the answer to that. You know, Lake Superior's the one that's capable of the most horrific shipwrecks of course with the cold water and all the rocks and the shortage of harbors of refuge. But I would guess that Lake Erie is because it's the shallowest and so of course, the storms and the wind. It's oriented east/west so the predominant winds are going to howl down it. There are not a lot of places to take refuge along its north and south shores and it has the most traffic. So I would guess if you tallied them up you'd find Lake Erie was.
• [00:18:26.68] IRA: One thing that came up, you mentioned the blackbirders. The people who built fires on Long Point in places that would cause ships to be wrecked for plunder. And as you were telling the story of, was it Dave Stone?
• [00:18:41.58] JERRY DENNIS: Yes.
• [00:18:44.23] IRA: Did you come up with many other instances like that, of people that were committing crimes on the lakes and what type of thing did you find?
• [00:18:54.08] JERRY DENNIS: There are a lot of stories of piracy and there are other places where there was the blackbirding of that sort. So I didn't gather a lot of those stories because I recognized right away that there could be a whole book. It's not a book I would probably write, but there are some wonderful historians of Great Lakes legends and lore that could do entire books just on those subjects. I think it kind of touches on the part of the story that people outside of our region don't understand. That these lakes are as big as seas. They are inland seas and that we have some of the same stories that they have in the oceans of privacy and mutinies and ghost ships. You know, I hear a lot of stores about ghost ships. So there's a lot there and I had to make the decision to hold back and not put too much of that in this book because it wouldn't do it justice.
• [00:19:49.91] IRA: Along those lines, you know, I've read Moby Dick and it's one of the great American novels. It's not just about the whale, it's about lots of other things that were going on in America at that time that Melville was talking about. And I was just wondering, you know, everyone mentions that the Great Lakes are kind of like seas, but there's no real novel that I know of, maybe you can tell us about some that try to capture that view of America or any view of America that has epic proportions on the Great Lakes like Melville did on the ocean. I was just wondering, you ever thought about why that is?
• [00:20:30.80] JERRY DENNIS: I have and I've poked around in the literature from the 19th century onward and there were periods in the 1800s and in the 1900s up until probably the 30s, maybe till 1940 when there was sort of a semi-popular little genre of novels set on the Great Lakes. Mostly historical novels and mostly pretty poorly done. They were for the popular press. They were pulp novels. I was surprised. I didn't read a lot of them. Maybe six and every one of them I was interested to note had moments of just brilliant description of the lakes. You know, just great writing and then they would fall back into the melodramas of these wooden characters falling in love and breaking up and then marrying and having children. But there have been a lot of attempts. I've often wondered why a modern novelists doesn't take on the subject.
• [00:21:32.18] ANDREW: You ever thought about it yourself? You ever thought about dipping your toe into fiction?
• [00:21:35.56] JERRY DENNIS: Well, I do write fiction. I write short-stories and I started writing fiction and always assumed I would be a novelist. Still love the fictional form and still dabble in it, but I think after 25 years of making my living at it if I haven't written a novel I might not be a novelist. So I don't know. It appeals to me because it would be a different way to tell a story and I think it could be great fun and interesting, but so far it hasn't.
• [00:22:08.80] ANDREW: I just moved to Michigan about four years ago. I've lived in various Great Lake states all my life and it wasn't until I moved to Michigan that I found the kind of Great Lakes pride that I have encountered in a large number of people. And I live inland. I live in Ann Arbor. I live nowhere near the Great Lakes, but I've met so many people who are so proud of the Great Lakes in Michigan and we identify so strongly with it probably because that gives us our shape. It gives us everything that we are. But do you feel like that gives Michiganders a greater responsibility towards the lakes as well?
• [00:22:45.84] JERRY DENNIS: Absolutely. We are the only state that's surrounded by the Great Lakes. We're the only one that borders on as many as we do. On four of them. We are at the center, geographically of the Great Lakes region. We are the Great Lakes state. I think we have the responsibility. I think we should take the leadership role and make decisions that are going affect everybody. And help lead the process of making those decisions. You know, the other states have an equal voice and they should, but we are in a position to take the leadership role and take responsibility.
• [00:23:22.33] IRA: Do you think our state government gets that? And there are people there that are-- I know there's organizations around the state, but is our state government get it and are they moving in the right direction?
• [00:23:39.32] JERRY DENNIS: I'm afraid I don't know if they get it. But I'm afraid they often act as if they don't. And it's frustrating. And I know I'm not the only one frustrated by that. I'm old enough to remember the William Milliken administration when William Milliken was governor in the 60s. And he took that role very seriously at a time when the Great Lakes were in a great deal of trouble. And he'd convened the governor's of all the Great Lakes for the first time and he said, let's form a compact. Let's get together and make a difference for the future. And it was an uphill battle, but he was a persistent and strong and clear-headed man who thought in big terms and then long distances at a time. We haven't seen that nearly to that degree since that and boy, it's certainly time.
• [00:24:33.36] IRA: He fell apart. I read the book on how he helped push to establish the dunes Sleeping Bear--
• [00:24:39.53] JERRY DENNIS: Sleeping Bear, yes.
• [00:24:42.13] IRA: Did that end up on the Milliken administration?
• [00:24:44.60] JERRY DENNIS: Yes and I remember it very well. I have family members who were displaced by the park. Our family was divided by that. As many were in those days. But one of the interesting things is that even my aunts and uncles who lost their homes. You know, didn't lose them, they had to sell them at market value, but these were homes that they had planned to live the rest of their lives in and they were bitter. But now all these years later they say it was the right thing. It was the right thing because they can see what would have happened if there wasn't a park. You know, the dunes wouldn't exist as they are now. Again, it takes a lot of courage I think for a lawmaker to make a decision that is for the long term benefit. But that's the right decision almost every time.
• [00:25:39.35] IRA: Right. What kinds of things are being done to educate children? You've probably been around the state, learned a lot about some really good programs to get kids excited about the lakes, could you tell us about any of them? Either in the Traverse City area or anywhere else?
• [00:25:55.58] JERRY DENNIS: One that is incredibly affective is the Inlands Sea Association up in Suttons Bay on Northern Lake Michigan. They take groups of school children, schools from all over the region, all over the Great Lakes Region out on a tall ship, a schooner and they introduce them to freshwater ecology. They take water samples, they show them with microscopes the micro fauna of the lakes and catch fish and muscles and study the bird life and introduce these kids to what's really going on in these lakes and how dynamic they are. And it's an intensive program, but the kids really respond to it. They really go crazy. And I hope I have the number right, but just recently they passed the 80,000 mark of students they've put through this program. And that's the program I mentioned in the talk last night that lead one young woman that I met in Wisconsin to come up to me after a reading and say that she had been in that program and it convinced her to pursue a career in biology and she was studying [? Lunes ?] for her master's thesis on [? Eire Royal. ?] Because of the work, she was a city kid, she grew up in Detroit, she said she probably never would have thought of studying the natural world as a career without that experience. There's another great one going on on Lake Erie at the Black Swan Bird Observatory Education Program that is bringing inner city kids to Lake Erie and the shoreline and in this amazing wetlands that at one time stretched for 150 miles along the southern shore of Lake Erie. It has been cut up into pieces, but it still has a few intact tracks. Again, getting kids who have never been out to it. There's another good one in Milwaukee. Again, for inner city kids that's making a big difference.
• [00:27:55.80] ANDREW: You start the book talking about trying to understand the Great Lakes and how after so much time you never felt like you understand them and I was wondering, do you feel like you understand them better or whether you feel like maybe trying to understand the lakes is enough in itself and you can never really understand them? It's almost like falling in love with someone and trying to understand everything they think and feel. You never really will, but it's that act of trying to understand them that is important?
• [00:28:27.21] JERRY DENNIS: Yeah, I think it's all we can do. I think if you stop trying that means that you think you know enough. You're content with what you know and that's what breeds reptiles of the mind. As Blake said. If you don't keep trying you're lost, but it's hopeless. It is hopeless. We'll never completely know, we'll never know just as we'll never completely know another human being as close as you get to them. To me it's one of the mysteries of life and one of the reasons that I am a writer because writing is the only way I've ever found to enter a subject as deeply as I can. As it feels like I'm capable of and live it at a level of super high intensity until something new and surprising happens in the creative process. So I'm afraid it's a recurring theme in my work and probably always will be a part of it.
• [00:29:31.45] ANDREW: That actually leads into another question I wanted to ask you which is, how your experience of nature, how the way you as a person experience nature differs now from before you were a writer or even differs for you as a parent from before you were a parent?
• [00:29:47.26] JERRY DENNIS: It does differ. There's a danger I've discovered of writing intensely about any subject because you reach a point where you don't want to not just not write about it anymore, but you don't want to participate anymore. And it happened with me to some degree with fishing. Years ago, when I was first starting out as a writer I met a fellow writer who was older than I was and he told me that he made his living writing about canoeing and camping and sea kayaking. He lived in Seattle and we were fishing together. We were fishing in Montana and we were having a great time. He was the best fisherman I'd ever met at that time and I was just amazed at his skill. And I said, well, you don't write about fishing? He goes, no, I love it too much. If I write about it it'll kill the love. And I didn't believe him. And yet I found some of that to be true. There was a time in my life when there was nothing I would rather do than fish. It's fallen down the list now. I don't think that'll happen with my love for the natural world, but I think that's because my definition of the natural world keeps expanding. It infiltrates city life now. It's part of everything and my subject, I don't even think of myself as a nature writer anymore. My subject is the world and everything that it contains. So I hope I'm immune from becoming weary of my subject because if I am I'm lost.
• [00:31:24.64] IRA: In this book, The Living Great Lakes you use photographs, but in many of your earlier books you use illustrations by Glenn Wolff, could you tell us a little bit about Glenn and how you two worked together on those books?
• [00:31:40.41] JERRY DENNIS: With pleasure. Glenn is one of my closest friends and is an amazing artist. One of the few people I've known for whom art is so integral to his being that he doesn't even recognize that he's being artistic all the time. We started working together, our first book was published in 1992, It's Raining Frogs and Fishes. A book about natural wonders of the sky. We had gone to high school together, but we didn't know each other. We were a year apart. I mean, I knew who he was because he was a star and he was the star of the art department and was well known in school. But I was a year younger so he never noticed me. But we became very close friends working on that book. We worked so well together and our styles complimented each other so well that we elevated that book far above what it could've been if we'd done it separately. And it was so fun and so satisfying that we've quickly worked together on five more books and after that four more after that. A total of five books. And then for this book, The Living Great Lakes, we couldn't find a way-- he was as dissatisfied as I was because he couldn't find a way to illustrate it as effectively as those photos could do because it had a different purpose and a different feel. He did the end maps you may have noticed. That show the routes of the places we covered. So we decided on that book that we probably were fine just using the photographs. But we are working together on new projects and I'm delighted to be working with him again because he inspires me constantly.
• [00:33:24.43] IRA: That's great. What are some of the new projects?
• [00:33:27.34] JERRY DENNIS: Well, I just finished a new book that's Meditation on Winter and it's set on the Great Lakes. That book began with one chapter that Glenn illustrated with etchings, which was a new form for him. He usually works with ink or paint on canvas or found object. He's doing a lot more of his fine art is on old doors and counter tops and things and they're stunning. But he was curious to work with etchings because it could be used in a letter press program. And we took this chapter of the book called, Winter Walks and we teamed up with another friend of ours, Chad Pastotnik who has Deep Wood Press in Mancelona. And he's a brilliant letter press printer and an artist in his own right. And we did this limited edition book on the old style 1910 letter press that it was just a magical experience of hand sewn books and just beautiful. We just had a blast. We had so much fun that we said, OK, we'll make this a chapter in a larger book and Glenn will illustrate it. And then we have other ideas down the road, so I hope to be working with him from many, many more books.
• [00:34:48.34] IRA: [? Hiyo ?] has a very strong presence in the book, what has been your relationships since the book has come out. And after this experience with him and the rest of the crew?
• [00:35:03.49] JERRY DENNIS: We've stayed in touch. Now it's been a year since I've heard from him, but for five or six years after the book came out or after the end of this journey he called me regularly. And at very irregular hours. I got a call one night at 3:00 in the morning and I happened to be up because I often work at night and 3:00 in the morning the phone rings and I think, OK, either somebody died or it's [? Hiyo. ?] And it was [? Hiyo ?], calling from a ship in the middle of the Atlantic. They were hauling war supplies to the Persian Gulf and he had just gone off duty and he wanted to call me with an idea he had that we would take his sailboat-- he has a wonderful, beautiful 60 foot sailboat that is a one-person sailboat. He can sail it alone and he has sailed it across the Atlantic alone. It's just a terrific, very seaworthy boat. He said, we will sail it to the Faulkand Islands. And there are, on one of the islands, there are washed up on shore, two of the old ironclad frigates that were used for the tea trade around the Cape, Cape Horn in the 19th century. And he said, they're the last two in existence that haven't been restored. One is being used as a break wall and the other is just up on the beach. He said, so we'll go down there and we'll salvage them. We'll use the parts from the two to make one vessel that floats. Then we'll tow it back to Connecticut and set it up as a museum and get rich. And he thought we could finance it by my getting an assignment from National Geographic to write about it. Which isn't a bad idea. I mentioned to my wife the next day and she vetoed the idea very strongly. But I never know where he'll be. He called from the Gulf of Mexico not long ago working on a research vessel in the oil and gas industry and talked about how degraded the environment was in Louisiana and near the mouth of the Mississippi because of the petroleum industry and chemical industries, unfortunately. He's just a restless, restless soul. He's always on the go.
• [00:37:16.07] IRA: Yeah, wow.
• [00:37:17.59] ANDREW: You ever sit back and think about some of the amazing things that you've done? Like try to catalog them in yout head? Like just in this book, sailing on the Malabar and the Voyager canoe trip and those things are so wonderful, have you ever sat back and said, wow, what a great life being a writer has been to me?
• [00:37:35.67] JERRY DENNIS: I do. Every day I do. Even though I'm also you know, I'm restless to do more. There's so much I haven't done and so many writers have been much, much more ambitious and adventurous than I am. But you know, there's a lot of places I haven't been that I would love to go to and have experiences. My son Aaron, who's 30 years old has spent a lot more time in wild and crazy, beautiful, dangerous places than I have in Africa and India and Tibet, Nepal. He's the one that should be writing adventure books.
• [00:38:14.45] IRA: And we have a film from this book to look forward to?
• [00:38:18.88] JERRY DENNIS: We hope so. It's in development. But we're making really good progress. We've got an amazing team assembled. We've got filmmakers from Boston and Detroit and Ann Arbor. Academy Award-winning Sue Marx is on our team. And Linda [? Herrera ?] from Boston is a multi Emmy Award winner and a former producer for the Nova series, And our presenting partner is WTTW in Chicago. But this will be primarily a Michigan project. We're all very excited about headquartering it here in Michigan. The driving force is Tony [? Enfente, ?] who's from Brighton outside of Ann Arbor and we're determined to make this Michigan based and even folks in Chicago and Boston agree that this is the place to be. This is the Great Lakes state. We're making leaps and bounds strides right now. And we're hoping it'll be broadcast in the fall of 2011. ANDREW: I just wanted to ask one more question, which is for some reason, after I got done with your book I started thinking about the various natural wonders of the United States and I thought of the Grand Canyon specifically. I looked up the Grand Canyon and I may have gotten this wrong, but as far as I can tell, Lake Ontario alone is four times larger than the Grand Canyon, what do we need to do because everyone wants to go to the Grand Canyon, but you don't meet a lot of people in Arizona who are like I've got to get up and see those lakes. I've got to see those lakes, what do we need to do?
• [00:39:51.33] JERRY DENNIS: That's great. I'm going to borrow that observation. That's terrific. Well, you know, I think the problem is that the lakes are too big. I think if it was one Great Lake we would feel that way about it. But they're so big. They sprawl across such a huge chunk of the continent and there's so much variety in the landscapes around the lakes. Everything, it just seems to take forever to get from the agricultural part to the forests of the northern part and I just think it's too much to encompass in one glance. It's a challenge to artists. These filmmakers are excited about that challenge because they say, we can do it. We can start with satellite views of these lakes and then zoom in to them in a way that will make it possible to embrace the whole and get a sense of the grandeur of the lakes that is similar to the Grand Canyons, we would hope, but that's a great observation. Four of them, huh? Wow.
• [00:40:58.63] ANDREW: You can learn more about the 2010 Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads title, The Living Great Lakes and author Jerry Dennis at aareads.aadl.org.
• [00:41:08.11] AMY: You've been listening to the AADL Productions Podcast from the Ann Arbor District Library.