If you’re anywhere near St Croix Falls, WI, this weekend, or Taylors Falls, MN, stop on by because today is the start of the annual Wannigan Days celebration. There will be races, craft sales, lots of food and beer, a cake walk, music on the overlook, and two parades – one in St Croix Falls at 6pm Saturday night, followed by a second in Taylors Falls at 7pm. The fireworks are scheduled to start at 10pm Saturday night in St Croix Falls. And this is only a taste of all the fun that awaits visitors to our beautiful river town this weekend at our 59^th River Spirit Celebration. (Check out http://www.wannigandays.com.)

But, what is a wannigan, you may ask. It’s a Native American word meaning “house that walks on water”. And that’s what it is, a shanty built on a raft. It dates back to the lumber era. The wannigan followed the men (called river drivers, river hogs, river pigs, catty men, river rats, river jacks) as they rode the cut logs downriver to the mills after the spring thaw. The wannigan carried supplies, equipment, and maybe most important of all to these hard working men, the cook and the food. This was their floating kitchen and kept them fed and strong for the long, grueling, and very dangerous trip ahead. And before you picture lovely picnic lunches on shore when the men got a much-deserved mid-day rest, they ate while they worked. (As so many of us do today, except sitting at a desk.) They used what was called a river pig nose bag, a tin lunch bucket generally strapped to their back, so they could eat while continuing to direct their logs to the saw mills downriver.

Many men lost their lives on those spring log drives. It was easy to lose your footing and slip beneath the surface, where they would be quickly covered over by tons of fast moving logs, and either drown or be crushed…or both. Have you ever been to a log-rolling competition? Or perhaps watched one on television? Imagine doing that while moving from one log to another down a river moving fast from spring snow melt. The ones who fell off weren’t in for a dunking and some good-hearted ribbing from their friends. It’s why the job paid so well and many men were willing to do it.

The cry “log jam” brought townspeople running to view the spectacle; but, chances were great that some of the men would die before it was over. Our stretch of the St Croix River was particularly prone to log jams as the rush of logs from the wide river to the north suddenly reached our narrowed passage where the water cuts through high cliffs of traprock. The result was a complete stop, causing logs to be thrust up and over each other so violently that men could be thrown to their death. The logs would be packed solid up to 70 feet deep in places, pushing the bottom of the jam to the river bottom, and as much as 30 or 40 feet above. These jams extended for miles and could hold up a lumber delivery for months as the river drivers worked to unravel the puzzle and free them one by one. The most spectacular jams happened here in 1865, 1877, 1883, and 1886. The last one was the largest of all and involved an estimated 150 million feet of lumber. On April 8, 1865, the Taylors Falls Reporter announced “river blocked by 20,000,000 ft of lumber” – “log excitement prevailed”. *

So, if you can, come and join us as we celebrate our proud lumber history at Wannigan Days this weekend. We’re supposed to have perfect weather; and I promise you’ll never experience a more beautiful part of our State. At least, that’s my opinion. Come and visit, form your own opinion. You won’t be sorry.

*  Log jam information from “St Croix Tales and Trails” by Rosemarie Vezina Braatz.

Summer is here. Gone are the long, dark, cold nights of winter; gone are the temperamental fits of spring where one day you feel the warm sun on your face and the next it’s snowing…again. We’ve watched all the usual harbingers that one after the other promised us the seasons were changing. We saw the first robins and heard the return of the song birds at dawn. Little spring peeper frogs heralded in chorus the coming of spring. The family of goslings is back in residence by the pond down the road. May begins with our yard filled with violets and ends with the forest floor covered in a blanket of white trilliums. And, at the end of the day I hear the click, click, click of the June bugs hitting the windows, attracted by the light.

I wrote the following as a tribute to the fat bugs that seem to want nothing more than to join me. It originally appeared in the Summer 2013 issue of Creative Wisconsin, a publication of the Wisconsin Writers Association.

June Bugs
By Jane Yunker

June bugs hurl fat bodies
against my bedroom windows
attracted by the light of my reading lamp
shells click and thump against glass
wings buzz desperation.

Do they want to read over my shoulder
or are they just afraid of the dark?

For some, Memorial Day means a long weekend off work or school. It’s the beginning of summer and is celebrated with picnics, BBQ’s, and weekends at the cabin and/or the lake. While this is all well and good, let’s not forget the real purpose of Memorial Day.

It is a day to remember all those who died defending our freedoms.

Perhaps your town has a parade or a ceremony at the local cemetery to honor those in the community who died in service to their country. Perhaps your parents or grandparents forced you to go as a child and you hated it because it was boring and you just didn’t understand why they felt it was so important. Life was good and you probably didn’t personally know anyone who died in battle. But now we are at war, undeclared but a war nonetheless. A war with no foreseeable end and every day families are touched by the knowledge that someone they know isn’t coming home.

Remember them, the fallen and the fighting. Honor them.

Thank them with your presence, your thoughts, your prayers.

This weekend is WisRWA’s annual conference in Green Bay and I’m scheduled to pitch “Mary Bishop” to two different agents on Saturday morning. Am I nervous? Absolutely! Will I walk in there smiling, shake her hand, and act like this is the most natural thing in the world for me to do? I’ll try. I’ve done this once before with Entangled editor Candace Havens and hopefully these two ladies will be as nice and understanding as Candace was. I suspect they will be, based on their online pictures. Yes, I did some research in preparation for meeting them. That’s an important first step, after reserving my ten-minute time slots. I no longer have that scary picture in my head of a Meryl Streep-type character; you know, like the fashion magazine editor she played in “The Devil Wears Prada”. <involuntary shiver>

I’ve also written several different length pitches to study. First, the elevator pitch. That’s a one-liner summoning up the entire book that, yes, I could pitch in the time it takes for an elevator ride…should I ever find myself riding in an elevator with an editor or agent at a conference and she/he says, “So, tell me about your book.”

“Mary Bishop”: A war that divided a nation, a woman fighting for her life, and the two men who promised to love her forever.

“The Healing Heart” (should they ask what I’m working on now): A pandemic that almost takes her life opens Alice’s eyes to new opportunities and her heart to the possibility of a new love.

Are you intrigued? Good! (I’m assuming you answered with a resounding yes.) I hope they are, too. Intrigued enough to ask all sorts of questions that lead to a request for a partial or full manuscript.

I’ve also written a short sentence and question pitch, and a short descriptive paragraph for each. Think what you’d read on the back cover to entice you to buy the book.

Going to conferences, getting the chance to meet other writers, both successful and newbies, as well as the chance to talk with editors and agents, really fires up my desire to write. And, it’s nice to be around other people who understand when I say I hear voices in my head without shying away and suggesting I see a doctor and consider medication.

Hopefully I’ll return on Sunday with at least one, maybe even two, requests to read more.

This is going to be a short post this week. I’m going on vacation, leaving after work on Wednesday and returning late on Sunday, and I have much to get done before I leave because I’ll only be back four days before I have to leave for a conference. Some people might suggest if it’s going to be this busy and stressful to get ready to go on vacation, perhaps it’s not a good time for me to go on a vacation, even a short one. Part of me would agree; a very small part of me. You see, vacations are important, even short ones, and besides, if you’re waiting for the perfect time to go on a vacation you will never get to go. Vacations allow us to clear our minds of all the clutter that builds during our everyday lives. Vacations allow us to forget, even if only temporarily, all the things others need from us and concentrate on what we need from ourselves. People who take regular vacations are happier and healthier.

In this rush-around-always-be-doing-two-things-at-once world we live in there will always be something else you should be doing. But you know what? It will probably still be there when you get back and you can do it then, and if it’s not still there and someone else has done it for you, even better. I do have a few things that need to be done before I leave, deadline things, and I’ll do those. Then it’s off to Vegas where my sister and I will sit in the sun with our over-priced fruity drinks during the day, and roam the casinos with our over-priced fruity drinks at night. And in between we will no doubt do a little shopping. You find the best shoes in Vegas! By the time you read this I should be on my way to being well-rested…and hopefully a little richer. That’s the plan.

I can’t wait!!

Jennifer Probst talks about the difference between envy and jealousy in her new writer’s guide, “Write Naked”. If you read the definitions they don’t seem to be that different, but they actually are when you think about it. When I consider my friends who have published I’m envious of their success, I wish I had the same success, but I don’t wish I had it instead of any one of them. Now, if I were jealous of them I would want just that, to take their success away from them. I would believe I deserved it and not them. In reality, I don’t begrudge a single one of them what they have earned because I know how hard they each had to work to get to where they are today. So I continue to work just as hard in the hopes of one day earning that success for myself.

It’s one reason I read books like “Write Naked”. I’m mining them for that golden nugget that’s going to get me over the hump from “we really like it, but…” to “we really like it and we want it”; that tip that will make all the difference.

The idea of writing naked is not about actually taking your clothes off to write; although that is certainly an individual decision. It’s about letting go of all your worries about what others will think. It’s about not getting hung up on the details when writing a first draft. First drafts are supposed to be bad. Well, maybe not bad, but rough. Don’t agonize over that perfect word to describe his eyes, or the way his lips felt when he kissed her the first time. Instead, just get it down on paper. The rest is called revision and that comes later. You have to build your frame before you can put up the walls and the roof, before you decide the perfect shade of paint for each room.

It’s what we used to call free writing. You put your butt in the chair and your pen or pencil to the paper and you start writing. Will you have to delete a lot of it later? Probably. Will you have to add a lot? Definitely. But that’s a worry for a different day.

So, that’s where I’m at with “The Healing Heart”; butt in chair and pencil to paper.

Free-range parenting. What an odd phrase! It makes me think of free-range chickens, and in a sense, it isn’t much different. The idea is to let your children be free to roam the neighborhood on their own. You know, walk to school, ride their bike to a friend’s house or go to the park or the corner 7-11 without their parent(s) tagging along. Sound familiar?

This concept is not a new one…although an entire generation of young parents seems to think it is and enters into great debate over whether or not it’s wise to allow children such freedom. What if something happened? What if they fell off their bike and mom wasn’t there to pick them up? What if they use their entire allowance to buy the largest Slurpee and end up with a tummy ache? I’ve talked to mothers who are convinced if a child is left alone, even in their own yard, something awful is going to happen to them. These children never learn how to be independent. They never have a chance to make a mistake, live with that mistake, and fix that mistake all on their own. Now, I’m not talking about whether or not it’s a good idea to allow a child to cross a busy street alone, only a parent knows when they’re ready for that. And I realize there are some neighborhoods where children are not safe on their own. By staying close, those parents are doing right by their children.

When I was growing up back in the Stone Age our mothers pushed us out the back door on a beautiful summer morning with a reminder when to be home for lunch. Then, after we were done eating, she pushed us back out in the afternoon. We rode our bikes to visit a friend, go to the library or the public swimming pool. Sometimes we just rode around town or even out into the country to the next town, because it sounded like a fun thing to do. We even played outside at night! Remember Kick The Can and all those other games best played in the dark? Forget summer reruns on the television, and we didn’t have cable or computers back then, but we had so much fun we hated to come in when called and the memories are still fresh all these years later.

Yes, we did have to tell mom where we planned on going, who we would be with, but she understood that might change and we just had to check-in with her first. We didn’t have cell phones, but we did know that our mothers talked to each other and any misdeeds would most definitely be reported. . .usually before we got home.

A child needs to learn how to get along in their environment. I grew up in a small town more years ago than I care to admit, but even a child growing up in a city today can learn those lessons in a safe manner. Allowing children to grow through age-appropriate levels of freedom is how we get them to a successful and independent adulthood. After all, isn’t that the goal? Isn’t the end game to have our children grow up, move out, and live off their own salaries and not our retirement fund?

There’s a certain comfort to a rainy day. The soft glow of a lamp cutting gray light from outside and the tap-tap-tapping of the rain on the roof slows my heart rate while separating me from the concerns that exist only “out there”. It’s a day to cross-stitch, bright threads shaping flowers. It’s a day to read, write, even nap. It’s a day to bury myself under a warm comforter while drinking my coffee and watching an old movie; preferably something with Doris Day and Rock Hudson, or Debbie Reynolds and Gene Kelley. The kind of movies made back when Hollywood concentrated on lifting our spirits rather than igniting political protests. It’s not a day to worry about work, or world unrest. It’s a day to turn inward and recharge.

When we were children and couldn’t go out to play we would sprawl on the living room floor and play board games. It was one of the few times I can remember my brothers not minding having to include me. In fact, I think they enjoyed it, too. At least, that’s how I choose to remember it. I can’t speak for them.

Rainy days are cozy. They should be cherished, not scorned. True, I couldn’t golf today, but that’s nothing a couple episodes of Call The Midwife couldn’t cure. Today’s rain knocked free many of the little red bud casings and I know that means there will soon be bright green leaves filling the empty branches. Our yards, and the golf course, are turning a beautiful shade, as well. Soon the flowers will bloom in all their varied colors.

No, a rainy day shouldn’t be cursed, rather it should be praised and enjoyed for all it does for us today and all it promises to do for us tomorrow.

This morning we woke to a fresh blanket of snow; this after some very warm and promising spring weather. I golfed three times last week! Sadly, I won’t be golfing this week. I was reminded of a morning several years back when we had a late snow and a couple deer ventured into the backyard searching for the fresh green shoots they’d been eating on not long before. I took this picture and was inspired to write these few lines.

April Snow
by Jane Yunker

An unexpected spring snowfall
brings a curious breakfast guest,
a white-tailed yearling still wearing
his heavy dark winter coat,
hungry, cautious, slipping
step by hesitant step from the trees,
looking for green grass,
tender young hosta shoots
beckoning from our open yard,
a promise of nourishment
greater than the fear of discovery.

Last week I wrote about making your feedback to others matter. This week I’m talking about the opposite, how to take comments on your own work with grace. It’s not as easy as you think. In fact, it’s a lot more difficult to be open-minded when it comes to your own words under fire. I know, because I’m not always the best at it myself.

First, you have to learn how to listen and not talk. Unless you’re asked a question, you just listen. Do not defend. Remember, this is one person’s opinion and you can choose to either go with it, or ignore it later.

Second, take plenty of notes. You don’t want to be in a position later of trying to remember what someone said because now you suspect they might be right and you want to revisit the idea.

Third, smile. At least pretend to be interested. If you scowl, if you look angry or put out, that person might hold back for fear they’re hurting your feelings, or also get angry. You could miss out on something that could improve your work.

And, fourth, don’t discount any of the comments until you’ve given yourself plenty of time to consider them. Go home, set aside your manuscript with notes, and come back to it later when you’ve had a chance to cool off a little. On more than one occasion I’ve realized a comment that seemed ludicrous at the time really did make sense. I was convinced I was saying exactly what they claimed I was not saying, or I certainly wasn’t saying what they said I was saying, so the fault was with them and not me. But then, after a suitable length of time had passed and I reread that part, I realized what I thought I was saying was not what my reader was reading. It didn’t matter what I thought was there, it wasn’t coming across clearly to my reader and when you come down to it that’s what matters. That’s the goal. You know what you want your reader to experience and it’s your job as a writer to make sure that happens.

This works just as well outside creative writing. It could be a report for school or work. It could be your annual job performance review. My advice remains the same: ears open, lips closed and smile firmly in place. The only sounds should be of your critique partner speaking, and your pen or pencil madly scratching out notes…if it’s an appropriate note-taking occasion.

Like I said, they are only the opinions of one person. If, after you have given the matter much thought you still believe your version is better, then your version is better.