Author Mark Munger (Cloquet River Press)

Rene' and Mark Munger at FOT 2011

I’ve done the Festival of Trees (FOT), an event sponsored by the Junior League of Duluth, ever since I became a published author. My first novel, The Legacy was published by Savage Press of Superior, WI in October of 2000. That November, I sat in the Savage Press booth during the FOT and sold books alongside the owner of the press, Mike Savage. I did so well that, the next year, I had my own booth space. Over the ten years CRP has been a presence at the craft show, it has done well. I’ve sold hundreds of books to folks (mostly women). This year’s event, sad to say, was not very productive.

Now, I’ll readily admit, that part of the problem is that I haven’t had a new book released since Mr. Environment: The Willard Munger Story came out in March of 2009. So It’s been over two years since a new “Munger” product has been released. And book buyers, whether they are purchasing for themselves or others, want a new book, something unique and never-before-seen, to either read themselves or give as a gift. I get that. But, with stock of four book titles on hand (out of eight), one might assume that there would be something for everyone interested in buying a book even without a new title. But it’s more than that, dear readers. It’s also, as someone during a debate once said, “It’s the economy, stupid.” To be fair to the estrogen-driven female shoppers at this year’s FOT, I’d say my poor sales this year are a combination of not having “new” on hand to entice shoppers and the hard economic times we find ourselves in. I can remedy the first problem by releasing a new book (though, right now, I can’t afford to print it). But, like President Obama and Congress, I am clueless as to how to turn our dismal economy around.

Rene's Benches FOT 2011 CRP Booth

Thinking  about this weekend (two days of not many sales), maybe there’s more to this story than just product fatigue and global economic malaise. I come to this conclusion because, as the title to this piece says, I spent much of the weekend in my booth with Steve Jobs. No, I didn’t become delusional as I sat alone, waiting for customers, asking the perennial question I always ask: “Did John Grishom start this way?” (Actually, he did. A Time to Kill, his first effort, was self-published and languished in boxes in his basement until The Firm went ballistic.) I was reading, as I always do during down time at festivals, and my book of choice was the new biography of Apple icon and founder, Steve Jobs. I’ll save the review of the book for another blog but, suffice it to say, with all Jobs’s peculiarities, there’s one thing that has impressed me about the man’s story so far: He was always concerned with the aesthetics and the utility of his products. Keeping them beautiful and simple, while retaining functionality, was and is the hallmark of Apple’s product line. Reading the book got me to thinking (always dangerous, as my wife will attest): What if Cloquet River Press adopted the same business philosophy? What if, instead of perennially hitting my head against the wall, trying to break into a mainstream publisher through force of will, churning out manuscripts, sending out queries to agents and small presses, I simply took a step back, gathered my breath, and changed how Cloquet River Press does business? Interesting. What if, instead of trying to do things that big publishers are very, very good at (though their profit margins suck these days due to the onset of e-readers), like getting books into bookstores for strangers to read, I concentrate on my loyal fans, as small a base as that may be, and simply give them the best product I can produce? What if, when the next Munger book is released, it is done not with an eye towards pushing Mark Munger to a new level, but is released on a limited print basis (with e-book versions on all the major platforms) so that, in the end, I am not running hither and tither trying to sell books in the rain beneath my beloved EZ-Up? Craft shows were once the mainstay of what I did to sell books. Over the past three years, that avenue to sales has, even with a new book on the table (Mr Environment) dried up. Maybe the message that is being sent is: “Munger, it’s time to re-think, to re-vision what it is you’re trying to do.”

Over the next year, I will ponder more and travel less in an attempt to figure out what model makes the most sense for CRP. I’m tired of swinging for the fence only to hit pop flies: Better to wait for the right pitch and take a single. Steve Jobs likely wouldn’t be happy with that analogy: He’d urge me to swing for the fence. But in this changing world of print media, with a down economy and all the uncertainty of what tomorrow will bring, maybe taking a deep breath and actually thinking about where I want to be with my writing and my stories is the right thing to do.

Peace.

Mark

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place: and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead: Short days ago,
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved: and now we lie
In Flanders fields!

Take up our quarrel with the foe
To you, from failing hands, we throw
The torch: be yours to hold it high
If ye break faith with us who die,
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields

(Composed at the battlefront on May 3, 1915  during the second battle of Ypres, Belgium by Lt. Col. John McCrae, British Expeditionary Force)

Graves of the Lost

The guns fell silent 93 years ago today. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, the fifth year of the devastation and destruction that defined the so-called Great War, the fighting stopped, men and boys at arms stood down, and WWI was over. Though political intrigue and fighting would continue in places like Finland, Estonia, Russia, and the Middle East as world leaders tried to redraw and redefine the global map, with the Armistice, the war was declared “over” and American soldiers, sailors, and Marines (who, in the last year of the war had been deployed to shore up the French, British, Italian, Canadian and other allied forces against the Germans and Austrians) began to dream of returning home.

Home.

I sit this Armistice Day (renamed “Veteran’s Day” to honor all of the men and women who have fallen defending America across time) in the comfort of my little writing studio along the banks of the Cloquet River in northeastern Minnesota, never having fired a shot at another human being; never having clawed my way through mud on my belly in the face of combat; never having experienced the utter terror and degradation of war on a personal level. Oh, I served ever-so-briefly. My career as an Army Reservist was undistinguished and of short duration. It did not involve watching my friends and my enemies die. It involved typing at a unit typewriter (you remember typewriters, I’m sure) at a cozy desk in a warm office in Fort Snelling. But, despite my innocence, my naivete with respect to the horrors of combat, I think I understand. But of course, as interview after interview with the vanishing heroes of another war (members of, as Tom Brokaw proclaimed, “The Greatest Generation”) have revealed I know nothing about war. So I will not pretend, as I sit contentedly in my bathrobe sipping hot coffee and listening to classical music as I type this piece, to understand what our young men and women in uniform posted in Iraq and Afghanistan are experiencing. I cannot relate to their reality any more than I can relate to the experiences of Frank Buckles and the other young men who stood the trenches on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month so many years ago.

Frank Buckles, last WWI Veteran

And now, they are all gone. Buckles was the last: The last American veteran of WWI. He died this year. He died, in some ways, unhappy: He had lobbied, to the end of his days, for a memorial to be erected to honor those who fought and died (improvident as the war might have been) as Americans under arms in the Great War. Perhaps it is too distant a time, too far a journey back, for the public to care enough (or at all) about their service. But Buckles cared: He knew the terror, the blood, the horrors of trench warfare and its impact on those who survived and how, for nearly five years, political forces on both sides of the conflict moved young men around strategically, like pieces manuevered by chess masters, with little regard for their dignity or their lives. They called it the Great War: Those who served and saw would tell you that there was nothing magnificent or heroic about it at all, that in the end, twenty million human beings (more than six million of that number were civilians) died because of a madman’s political insult. And though, in some ways, WWI was the end, for empires and old alliances, it was also the beginning: Science and technology impacted the way men would kill each other in that, for the very first time, masses of humanity could be dispatched from a distance by the use of modern weaponry. Despite the distance of time, on this eleventh day, of the eleventh month, of the eleventh year of a new century, how much, dear readers, has really changed? How much have we humans really learned?

Today, take a moment away from your coffee cups, from your cozy enclaves, from the safety and security of your existence here at home and say a prayer, or recite a poem, or simply remain silent in honor of those boys who stood (and still stand) the trenches, and for the women who minister to the wounded, guard our positions, and transport our troops. Whether you believe we need to be in Iraq and Afghanistan isn’t the issue. When you remember the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month remember this as well: We asked and they said “yes”.

American men and women who serve in uniform should be honored (for doing what the rest of us cannot or will not do) regardless of our personal politics.

Peace.

Mark

The Judge lugging back a rooster pheasant somewhere north of Ashley.

When you’re nearly 84 and your doctor tells you, “Sorry, Harry, but you’re not going to be able to go” a few days before a scheduled hunting trip with your son, two of your grandsons, and your lifelong buddy, well, that doesn’t light up your day. That’s what happened to my old man about a week ago. He and I went down to the Eleanor Mondale Memorial Service in the Twin Cities so he could pay his last respects to the daughter of one of his oldest fishing pals, former Vice President Fritz Mondale. Somewhere along the way, grandpa caught a nasty bug that turned into pneumonia serious enough that it landed him in St. Luke’s Hospital for a week and ended his hopes of joining me, my sons Chris and Matt, and Bruce out in Ashley, ND for our annual pheasant hunt. It was a bummer but, when your doctor, a guy who’s saved your life a few times, tells you, “No”, you have to listen.

The Munger boys aren’t the best shots. We aren’t the smartest or the hardest working hunters. But, over the past five years that we’ve joined my old man out on the Dakota prairie, we’ve always managed to find a few rooster pheasants, the odd sharptail grouse or two and even hit them on occasion. We’ve watched innumerable sunrises and sunsets over soybeans, corn, and sunflowers. We’ve tromped through ditches and hedgerows and swales until our boots were caked in mud and our wool socks were soaked. We’ve tried to sneak up on ever-elusive and diminutive Hungarian partridge, blue-gray birds not much larger than pigeons that favor open fields devoid of crops. We’ve watched wave after wave of sandhill cranes circle high above us, geese soar in gigantic ballet-style formations, and flocks of fast flying mallards and teal race with the wind to the next prairie pothole. This year didn’t prove to be any different even without Dad: Our aim hadn’t improved and, despite a sense of bitter-sweetness to the trip without grandpa, we had a whale of a good time.

Matt, my eldest son, was our chef. He and his wife Lisa (newly expecting my first grandchild: I call her Emily but I doubt that’s gonna stick) did all the grocery shopping for us. Chris was assigned the job of cleaning any birds we managed to shoot. I was the dishwasher. And Bruce? Absent his perennial hunting partner, Bruce continued on in his role as philosopher and guide, pouring over the public lands maps depicting places near Ashley available to hunt. After a day of seeing virtually no birds, we used Bruce’s expertise to find other spots to hunt: We found success, even in a year of poor rooster production (the result of two bad winters and a very wet spring), at least, success in the Munger sense of the word. We shot enough roosters to keep Chris plucking every night when we returned bone tired to the little frame house we rented in the center of town. We ate well, had a couple of cold Leinnies, swapped stories, hit the rack early, and, in the morning, got up to go at it again.

Chris brought his pal’s Springer spaniel, Windsor, along for the hunt. Matt brought his beloved Lexie, a spoiled, but well-mannered bronze colored Labrador retriever. Hunting over dogs in a stiff autumnal breeze beneath the open skies of the North Dakota was a pleasure. There’s nothing like watching a good dog like Windsor lock up tight on a rooster sitting in a patch of sedge grass no bigger than a loaf of bread. The human eye can’t see the bird: But you learn to trust the dog’s nose. Windsor was unrelenting, a bundle of nervous energy, bounding over high grass, cattails, and weeds on the trail of birds. Lexie was methodical but equally effective: In one day, she found, locked on, and retrieved all three roosters we hit. Not that Windsor wasn’t working: Lexie just happened to be the dog of the moment.

Of course, with modern technology, Grandpa Harry kept in touch, calling us every night for a post-hunt update. You could sense the lament, the longing in his voice when he’d call. Though he loves his friend and care-taker Pauline dearly and enjoys her company immensely, he’d waited all summer for our annual trip. Not to be with us was, in a word, heartbreaking. Being that we’re guys, that word was never spoken: You just knew that was the case from the tone of the old man’s voice.

Our last day, we came upon a small covey of Hungarian partridge. We don’t see a lot of Huns where we hunt, though every couple years, we run into them. Usually, the birds are far off, out in the middle of sown crop, nibbling left over soybeans or corn, far out of range. I think we’ve had one or two shots at Huns over the years but never hit one. They are, to use my son Chris’s analogy, my Holy Grail. So when I saw Huns pecking away on remnant beans half a football field away, I wanted them bad. But the birds saw us long before we could get in range. And so, we tromped the edge of a big mown field alongside a huge lake, hoping to coax a rooster out of cover. A mile later, all we had for our effort was the sight of one skittish hen pheasant (off limits to hunters) flying low over weeds.

“I’ll bet those damn Huns are back by Bruce, eating again,” I said aloud, though my two sons were trudging over the wasteland left by the bean harvester too far from me to hear. “And Bruce is likely snoozing in his car.”

Damn if I wasn’t right. Neither of my sons saw them but I did: My little beauties were, as predicted, clucking and picking and eating to their hearts’ content just fifty yards away from Bruce’s Toyota Highlander. Bruce, never one to waste energy, was sitting behind the steering wheel, reading a map, totally oblivious to the Holy Grail just outside his car.

“Huns,” I whispered loudly, gesturing emphatically towards the blue-gray specks ahead of us.

My sons understood. The dogs, though they were working into the wind, hadn’t picked up the scent of the covey. Windsor was by my side though he kept trying to stray. I held him in close by command so as not to spook the Huns. All three of us walked slowly, our shotguns at the ready, making ourselves as small as possible in a completely naked field that rolled to the south for better than a mile. I kept my eyes glued on the birds. The Hun closest to me became skittish, opening and closing its wings as if making ready to fly.

Now or never.

I eased the bead of my 12 gauge over-under on the nearest bird, clicked off the safety, and raised the barrel.

Boom.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

The Huns flew away unscathed.

“My fault,” I said apologetically as I joined my sons. “I shot too soon.”

“Damn straight, Pops,” Chris said. “What were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t,” I admitted.

There was little reason to continue the discussion. I’d messed up. Not the first time, won’t be the last. But through all the noise and commotion, Bruce hadn’t moved: His eyes were riveted on the map in his hands. He had no idea the Holy Grail had been just outside his windshield.

Later that evening, I had the chance for redemption. We were driving back to the house on a dirt road near dusk when a big rooster pheasant rose from the ditch and settled in a patch of saw grass next to standing corn.

“That’s your bird, Dad,” Chris said. “He didn’t make the corn.”

I exited Matt’s truck, let Windsor out of his kennel and a flock of pheasants ran across the road behind the Nissan headed for open country.

“More birds. You take Lexie after them. I’ll take Windsor after the rooster.”

We split up. Windsor bounded over thick ditch grass and worked the edge of the corn. The dead stalks swayed and cracked in a slow wind. The sun was setting above the horizon in the west, its gold and orange glow casting magic over the land. Windsor stopped dead, his wet nose pushed into cattails. A cackle split the cooling air. A rooster pheasant rose from thick cover next to an open pond. It’s wings glinted in the dying sun. Then another bird, a hen, rose to my left. Another rooster cackled and burst into the declining sky to my right. I kept my eye on the first bird, the bird that we’d been tracking.

Boom.

The rooster tumbled and hit water. Windsor dove into the rushes. A few minutes later, he reappeared with the colorful bird in his mouth.

As I type this story on my iMac in my writing room overlooking the Cloquet River, far removed from pheasant country and the hunt, day is again breaking. Down river, I hear the bark of shotguns. Geese fly above the house, followed by flights of local mallards smart enough at this stage of the season to get the hell out of dodge. The sun is rising in the east and a clear blue sky is replacing night’s veil. I am hopeful, as I end this story, that there’s at least one more good hunt in my old man. Next year, Jack, my fourteen year old son, will come with us to Ashley. It would be great if he could hunt with his grandpa.

Peace.

Mark

The Misguided Munger Pheasant…

There are no ring-necked pheasants in northeastern Minnesota. Never were. It’s too cold, too filled with predators, too dangerous a place for a bird so colorful. And yet, there he is, strutting around our front yard like an undersized peacock. The bird is an aberration, an anomaly, that can only be explained this way: He’s here to welcome Representative Willard Munger to Fredenberg Township.

Willard, my long-departed uncle, was a great man. I didn’t coin that phrase: His friend and associate Ann Glumac did. Her comment, taken from an article she wrote at the time of Willard’s passing in 1999 (and included in the biography I wrote about my uncle) goes like this:

In the 20 years that I knew Willard, I loved him for his humanity, his humor, his high pitched laugh, his stories, and his dedication to family and friends. I also envied him for his steadfastness in fighting for principles in a world where black and white almost always blend to gray. I’ve been privileged to meet or work with many leaders and public figures, but Willard Munger is the only great man I have ever known.

(Mr. Environment: The Willard Munger Story by Mark Munger (c) 2009)

So how can a man who’s been playing gin rummy with the saints for over ten years be coming home, to the Munger farm in rural northeastern Minnesota, you ask? And why would a pheasant show up out of the blue to greet him? The answer is simple: providence.

You see, back when I decided to write the story of my uncle’s remarkable life as Minnesota’s quintessential conservationist, taking up the keyboard only when no one else seemed interested in doing so, I was encouraged by folks who, time after time after time at art and craft shows, or bookstores, or libraries where I was hawking my fiction, would come up and urge me to write about my uncle. Many of these folks were environmental types or former Liberal politicians. Some were just good people who loved Willard. I resisted the call to write his biography for five years after his passing: I felt ill-equipped, as his nephew and young ward, to write his story. I wanted someone else to do it, to chronicle Willard’s seventy-plus years in Liberal politics because I felt too close to the subject matter to do it justice. But then, as time passed and nothing was written about Willard and his beginnings as a Farmer-Laborite, or the battles he fought as a legislator on behalf of education and the environment, I began to research and write about my uncle. The result, Mr. Environment: The Willard Munger Story was published in 2009 to some fanfare and celebration. But the book has been, in a word, a tough sell despite all the urging and prompting I received to take it on as a project. It hasn’t sold like I expected and, two and a half years later, I have a mountain of unsold copies of the book waiting for buyers.

Yes, I know, it’s partially my own damn fault. I was (as I usually am) overally optimistic. I thought that folks living in Minnesota would be interested in learning about one of their own, about a guy born in a log cabin to poverty who grew up on the northern edge of in pheasant country (Friberg Township in Otter Tail County, northwestern Minnesota); lobbied FDR during the Great Depression; managed the campaigns of Liberal icons and Minnesota governors, Floyd B. Olson and Elmer Benson; built Liberty Ships during WW II after coming to Duluth; and served nearly 50 years in the Minnesota House of Representatives as the voice of the pheasants, deer, ducks, clean water and clean air. I was wrong: I printed way too many copies out of wide-eyed eagerness and love.

For the past two and a half years, cartons of the unsold biography have been stored in an unheated pole building owned by my friend Dave. Now, I have no problem paying the going rate for storage space and, up until yesterday, that’s exactly what I did. But last night, with the help of my sons Jack and Matt, the last carton of books was hoisted and carried into a vacant bedroom of our house on the banks of the Cloquet River. The books are stacked neatly, all 115 boxes of Mr. Environment (1,600 copies), in our basement, as I patiently sell them one by one to folks who care. I’ve got time. I’m not going anywhere. And neither, unless I get to work, are the books.

I’m convinced that the good Lord knew Willard was coming to stay at our house on the river. Why else would a regal bird, with no ties to the spruce, pine, and aspen forests of St. Louis County, be hanging around our place?

Peace.

Mark

The author hunkered down in his tent at Chester Bowl.

Auf Wiedersehen. Adieu. Näkemiin. Arrivederci. Goodbye. All these words fit the philosophical place where I find myself on this Sunday morning as I type this blog.

It’s drizzling outside. Soft, cold rain patters dying grass and slides over the steel siding of our farmhouse overlooking the Cloquet River. All night long, the residue of a tough week, a week spent in trial, a week spent moving 800 copies of Mr. Environment from a rented storage unit to a recently vacated bedroom in our home’s lower level (with another 800 copies awaiting similar transit), and a flurry of heavy lifting involving Rene’s concrete mosaic benches into the Pacifica for the Fall Festival in Duluth’s Chester Bowl, reminded me that this author stuff, at least the way I’ve been at it since I plunked my white EZ-Up tent down on the hard asphalt of ManyPenny Avenue at the Apple Festival in Bayfield ten Octobers ago, isn’t for the faint of heart or the weak of spine. Advil hasn’t dented the pain in my neck or the constant throbbing in my left heel, the result of too much weight, too much torque, too much lifting. After a fitful night spent on the couch trying to snare sleep, I yield: God (or common sense) has spoken.

Time to try a different approach.

Oh, yesterday at the Bowl was pleasant enough. I had some good conversations, heard familiar compliments about my writing, rekindled some friendships with readers, and chatted amiably enough with folks under a gray, autumnal sky. My sister and her family (including two of the cutest little girls in God’s creation) stopped by to say hello. Even the disaster of a little four year old trying to use one of Rene’s benches as a teeter-totter (which resulted in broken concrete and mosaic spilled over pavement) didn’t destroy the festive mood of the day. But I knew, before the day began, Chester Bowl would be the last outdoor art and craft festival. Not just for this year. Not just for this season. But forever. Last night’s fitful sleep only reinforced my decision.

I need to rethink how I market my work.

Oh, I’ll still do indoor arts and crafts shows, writers’ conferences, and try to get into bookstores, libraries, schools and the like for sales, lectures, readings, and signings. And I’ll still keep my fingers on the keyboard of my iMac churning out stories and blogs and Lord-knows-what-else. But the day of the EZ-Up is over. I met lots of fine folks, sold thousands of books, but there comes a time when all things, good, bad, or indifferent come to an end. I know that today, as I feel the bite of pain in my neck bending over the keyboard. Writing as a contact sport is beyond my reach and beyond my old body’s recuperative powers. I’ll need to find another path.

Peace.

Mark