Review by Mack Hassler
The Walloon Writers Review annual collection is inspired by Northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula. The Northern Shore of the UP from East to West is defined by the Big Lake with a small stretch of Lake Huron reaching toward Canada beyond the Bridge. On the South, the top of Lake Michigan loops over to Green Bay. Some magic small lakes dot the coast nearby, often when the clouds clear, with the Bridge in sight. I wrote about one of the latter in my review of Yooper Ale Trails (Crooked Lake for Professor Stott is South near Walloon Lake.) The folks UP North in this area nearly feel part of the UP. In its eighth edition now this collection carries the name of Walloon Lake.
Ernest Miller Hemingway, the world-famous writer is associated with this publication. Any reprint of his work, of course, would be out of reach financially for the editors But the editors for this current collection identify a theme with nice Hemingway resonance: the theme is “pushing the borders and continuing to fight – like holding a narrow redoubt as at Thermopylae or in the famous World War II film “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” The great Hemingway (absent the middle name which he used as a youthful troll getting over to Seney for his early stories) has my favorite image with real resonance for this “fight to the end in the whole heat of the fight. It is the image near the end of his famous war novel A Farewell to Arms (1929): his hero watches the ants jump into the campfire off the log they are on as they run along it to get away from the heat” — so like Dante in his first book of The Divine Comedy, so sad.

Ellen Lord
Some of the hard-working writers, whom the editors could afford to reprint in this new Walloon collection made the trip of the troll over the Bridge, past Seney, and over to the UPPAA May 2024 Conference in Marquette and read at the open mic session at the Crib on Friday evening. Two of my favorites that I had known about but whom I had never heard read were there. I was glad to hear Thomas Ford Conlan read. He captained a Coast Guard Cutter before he retired, and he has some good work in this collection But I need to end this review with a woman who is one of the fighters to the heated end. Ellen Lord is a fierce woman poet whose work I have seen in many places. She has back-to-back poems in the middle of this collection. A fierce one that characterizes the speaker as an energetic and colorful hooked salmon:
“Fish Tale: An Elegy”
How my body ached—
His lure finding
its way in silky shadow
to pierce my lip.
his filament taut and urgent
— and I rose
beyond the surging cascade
of thunderous waterfall—
a quiver
of salmon colored dazzle,
glorious in the mist. (p. 43)
Certainly there is some sexuality going on here. But what impresses me the most is that the very next Lord poem in the set is about dementia. Lord is a fighter and resists just as eloquently the dull death of the loss of mental acuity. These two poems represent well a fine collection that, I think, fights various lures in beautiful ways. Hemingway would be proud.
Walloon Writers Review, Eighth Edition, edited by Jennifer Huder, Founding Editor, and Glen Young (P.O. Box 936, Petoskey, MI 49770, 2023) 188 pages, pbk, n.p.