Category: Nonfiction
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2018 Hal Prize Judges Announced
The Peninsula Pulse newspaper is pleased to announce the judges of the 2018 Hal Prize poetry, prose and photography contest. They are: award-winning Wisconsin photographer Carl Corey, Minneapolis poet Leslie Adrienne Miller, Minnesota novelist Peter Geye, and nonfiction writer José Rodríguez. Conducted annually since 1998, the mission of the Peninsula Pulse’s Hal Prize is to […]
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Weather forecasters like NOAA include advice of how to dress for a cold winter’s day. Never mind for Northerners alerting the hazard at a measly zero degrees seems a touch wimpy. Once zero wasn’t cold enough to be considered hazardous, and that with six volt batteries and a hand crank. This warning demonstrates the remarkable […]
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Door County Reads Author on Writing, Refugee Experience
This year’s Door County Reads book selection is The Latehomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir, by Kao Kalia Yang. The book is the memoir of a Hmong family displaced by war, a childhood in the Ban Vinai refugee camp, and her family’s experiences making a life in America. The author will give a keynote address at […]
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Isherwood: Soviet Man Gains Eternal Life
We knew this was gonna happen, it’s the logical sequence of where all this is going. Those letters A.I., where artificial intelligence is going. Verge.com recently reported on the death and resurrection of a Russian named Roman Mazurenko, born in Belarus, 1981. Only child of Sergei and Victoria with a tendency to red hair, a […]
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Announcing the 2018 Hal Prize Contest
The Peninsula Pulse newspaper proudly presents the 2018 Hal Prize. Conducted annually since 1998, the mission of the Peninsula Pulse’s Hal Prize is to encourage and appreciate artistic expression through various literary forms and photography. The contest has showcased works from individuals of all ages and backgrounds – novice writers and photographers to professionals. The […]
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Justin Isherwood: The Tree In the Barn
My father was a curious man, perhaps strange, perhaps odd, the streak of oddness as routinely happens to dairymen. A lifetime of what ungodly early mornings will do to you, as will the abiding love of cows. My dad loved his cows. Our father went into a Zen state at evening milking, as could less […]
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Isherwood: Listening to Late Night Radio
Maybe it’s just lonely farmers that listen to late night radio. To suggest a political affiliation here, an affinity for the dark, the moods of the night, those solitary thoughts, we who gather around the muffled glow of radios in the nether hours. My childhood was uniquely radio, to reference baseball. As a sport, baseball […]
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Seven Fall Book Releases to Watch For
Fall and early winter is an exciting season for booksellers and readers alike, as this is the traditional time for publishers to release titles by big authors and about timely topics. So, while it may be time to pull your book from your beach bag, don’t feel blue – you can curl up next to […]
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Review: ‘My Baking Bloopers’ by Charlene Berg
Charlene Berg is a familiar figure in the Gills Rock area. On summer mornings her sleepy customers gather at the Gills Rock Coffee Shop to sample Charlene’s cherry turnovers, cinnamon rolls, and fresh-baked quiche. A businesswoman of considerable ability, Charlene is also the author of a recently published autobiography, My Baking Bloopers & Other Amusing […]
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On Sept. 15, 2017 a fellow Earthling will die, actually it’s an execution. To quickly add, for a good cause; this fellow Earthling’s name is Cassini. If some of us believe machines don’t die, they just stop working, some others of us think machines too can have a soul. Perhaps it is only farmboys that […]
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Write On’s Jerod Santek and His Leap of Faith
“In the summer of 2013 I took what many might consider a huge leap of faith,” Jerod Santek said. “And left my job as program director at one of the oldest writing organizations in the country to head this new center. It is the best thing I’ve ever done.” After 19 years working with writers […]
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Blackberry summers are rare, blackberries are shy, same as bachelor farmers are shy. Blackberries are shy because God and its creation are selfish. Easy blackberries spoil people – they begin to think blackberries grow on trees. The Bible was mistaken. The apple isn’t the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. Wasn’t the apple […]
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Announcing the 2017 Hal Prize Poetry, Photography & Prose Winners
Each fall, the Peninsula Pulse invites people of all ages, backgrounds and artistic abilities to submit stories, photographs and poems for a chance to be published in our annual Hal Prize literary and photography issue. The Hal Prize is held in the spirit of the late Hal Grutzmacher, a professor and Door County bookstore owner, […]
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Local Author Koski Releases Book on Experiences with Loss
Door County author John Koski has released a new book, Autumn Leaves. Autumn Leaves is a wide-ranging collection of remembrances culled from the author’s life experiences. Readers learn about a mysterious volume of short stories by French author Guy de Maupassant, an elderly nursing home resident who needs help remembering her past, an overworked boiler […]
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Most kids at some point in their transition to adult-form domestication go through a dinosaur stage. There is some appealing element about dinosaurs, big, noisy, different, that connects with kids. Dinosaurs perhaps signify a kind of defiance, and where they, despite being children, know more about something than their parents. Dinosaurs represent a distinctive intellectual […]
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Review: ‘Meet Me Halfway: Milwaukee Stories’
“The children of Milwaukee are the reason I wrote this book,” Jennifer Morales explained. “Their struggles, discoveries and resilience in this difficult place compelled me to try to pin some of Milwaukee’s voices down, to listen and maybe sound out something about how this city came to be the way it is.” Morales’ collection of […]
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Tom and I were friends, the original fault for this was Vietnam. We were both elderly at the time of that war, the advanced age of 23 and 25, respectively. Both of us medics in the service of our much-mistaken Uncle Sam. Tom was in patient care, I a housekeeping medic, also sanitation, surgical cleanup, […]
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when daisies pied and violets blue and lady’s-smocks all silver-white and a cuckoo buds of yellow hue do paint the meadows with delight. Wm Shakespeare It is of spring poets comingle. All on the relent of winter, as northerners understand. When trills the redwing and heralds the sandhill, all is poetry. All the flowers, […]
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Asparagus stories are of emergent things, to perhaps add newness to this list, and hope, and joy, and daring. Once was when that tribe of farmers used to utter private catechisms on asparagus. Asparagus as the spring tonic if not an omen. Crops and margins and chances of drought predicted by asparagus. Farmers did this […]
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Celebrating the Cream City and Literature: Milwaukee’s ‘Cream City Review’
In the early 1970s, a literature enthusiast named Mary Zane Allen approached the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee Student Union with one goal in mind: to create a literary journal and reading series for the university’s creative writing department. Her interest stemmed from her involvement in the early years of the University of Wisconsin – […]