Yupper Class

The Way North, edited by Ron Riekki, is a unique collection of stories and poems from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The works complement each other well, at times making the reader feel like part of the rural landscape the writers evoke. The best of them are set in the Peninsula but deal with more universal themes.

One of the funniest stories and my favorite in the collection is Jonathan Johnson’s “Notes from the End of My Occupational Life.” The narrator, a young man named David Shephard, tells of his misadventures working at Domino’s pizza and then as a union worker on a ship. He is not particularly good at either job, and faces a violent criminal in the pizza joint before calling his work life quits and retiring to “a state of repose and was done working forever.” Nice work if you can get it. The details of his soul-crushing jobs and the folks he interacts with, including David’s disappointed parents made this story stand out.

Another memorable tale is Sharon Dilworth’s “The Possibility of Wolves,” a story of a disintegrating marriage. Here the subject of work again takes on a prominent role. Yannick, the husband, is a clownish figure, causing a rift with his wife through his argumentative nature and general idiocy. That he is actually a professional clown who can find no work is an amusing plot device that Dilworth uses for nice comic effect in an otherwise sad story. We learn that Yannick takes six years to complete a communications degree, then decides to go to clown college for another two, which makes one wonder what his wife, Rorie, ever saw in him. Dilworth’s dialogue is well done and the meltdowns between wife and clown are entirely believable. And Rorie’s compassion for her loser of a husband is impressive.

“To Myself at Five Years Old,” is a short, gripping poem by Raymond Luczak that the author says was inspired by seeing an old photo of himself with his deaf classmates. Its details are heartbreaking: “You are the boy whose parents shed tears / When they first dropped you off at Calverley Avenue, / A small house filled with nasty little secrets.” The catalogue of sadness continues, though the boy is a survivor. But the poem is not self-pitying and ends on an upbeat note that speaks to the author’s resiliency.

Many of the works here also deal with the rural isolation of the Upper Peninsula. This works better in some pieces than others, but it does give one a sense of what it might be like to live in this remote area. There is tension between the locals and tourists who come for the summer months in some of these stories, as in Ellen Airgood’s ‘The Wanderer.’ There is the beauty of the deep woods, and of the lakes in almost every piece.

Joseph Daniel Haske’s “Tahquamenon” is one such fine piece about the natural beauty of the region. He writes of “pallid froth / mingling in russet streams / under the stilted cedar.” It’s a ruminative poem, full of life, and evokes the wonder of being alone on this river and its falls.

One also gets a sense of the remoteness of some of the people who live here. In Jennifer Howard’s “All Imperfect Things,” a brief piece about a child with a potential heart problem, we see characters display a laconic pragmatism. It seems as if what is left unsaid might be more important than what is. “Everyone has a heart murmur, if you know how to listen,” she writes.

But the collection keeps a reader guessing. Just as you think you might have a good idea of what the Upper Peninsula might be, another author will turn your impressions topsy-turvy. Ron Johnson’s “The Hitchhiker” starts as a histrionic breakup between a voluble couple that seem like they could be from Manhattan for all the shouting and accusations the partners throw...