Category: Research

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The Literary Pyramid Scheme: On Book #2

Those of you who follow this blog know about what I call the Literary Pyramid Scheme. Nonetheless, in case there are some newbie readers, here’s a quick recap:

Some time ago, I posted a call for volunteers to step forward to help me with a literary experiment. I described a letter I received that invited me to become a member of an informal book club. It went on to outline a kind of literary pyramid scheme, whereby I would send out one book and six letters. In return, I could expect to receive a maximum of 36 previously read books selected by strangers from their very own shelves.

The idea behind this project is to write an essay about the books I get in the mail from strangers. The first book to land in my mailbox was Gods and Generals, and it prompted some musings on the traces of former lives and journeys that we find in second-hand texts.

Book #2 arrived last week: Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. And even though it arrived quite a few days ago now, I haven’t written about it yet for the simple reason that I’ve been too busy reading it.

I’m a die-hard New Yorker reader, so Gladwell (a regular contributor) is very much on my reading map. Still, I’m not sure why, but I’ve never read any of his books. Recently, though, I have been especially tempted by Outliers, where he argues that geniuses become who they are and accomplish what they do in no small part because of the sheer number of hours they spend doing whatever they do: hockey, cello, writing, painting, you name it. I think the magic number of hours was 10,000. Now, for someone who spends every day in front of some manuscript or other, logging hour after hour, this is oddly comforting news.

Blink, by contrast, is about the genius of intuition. It’s about micro-cognition, and how we all carry split-second wisdom deep inside our most unconscious thought processes. I’m not done reading yet, but so far, the most fascinating and terrifying chapter for me (married eight years, and counting) has been his account of how the outcome of marriages can be predicted with shocking accuracy by analyzing very short snippets of conversations between couples. I’m sure you know this study (the key emotion is contempt). If you don’t, it’s worth reading about.

This book made its way to my home near Montreal from a stranger in West Virginia. What a lovely gift. It’s furthered my thinking on creative nonfiction (Gladwell’s version of it, though quite different from mine, is very good indeed). It’s satisfied a curiosity about a writer I’d wanted to get to know better, and made me want to read more. Outliers will be next on my list of his books for sure.

Here’s hoping for more packages from strangers!

[Photo: angelferd]

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Take Two: What is Creative Nonfiction?

A while back, in response to a question posed by a friend, I posted a few thoughts on what constituted creative nonfiction. Since then, I’ve been trying to think a bit more systematically about the genre, and to unpack my own writing process.

In that first entry, I cited Lee Gutkind, the editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction. Here too, I will turn to him, and a really lucid essay in which he breaks the genre down into components he calls the “5 R’s.”

Gutkind’s schema is pretty snappy and it makes sense to me. According to his model, the building blocks of CNF (I really like this abbreviation, and have started using it) consist of:

1) Real life

2) Research

3) Reading (not only research materials, he says, but masters of the genre and masters in general)

4) Reflection

5) (W)Riting

Gutkind’s is a pretty good description of how I work, though I might add one more R: “Rencontre,” by which a mean a somewhat mystical sounding meeting of past and present.

My work, for what it’s worth, tends to grow out of triangles. At the first of my three points, I have a fragment of the past; on the second there’s me in my here and now. The triangle’s third point is the the sense-making process between past and present, between my content and my perspective. The third point, in other words, is the point of the whole endeavour.

I always begin with a story (often a life) I want to tell, usually using an artifact like letters or diaries. Like, Gutkind, there’s always a real-life aspect to the research: I seem to get a better handle of how to make sense of worlds past by moving through the present. So, even though it’s not the same thing to go through Siberia by train in 2010 as it was in 1941, the trip nevertheless stimulates the imagination and raises questions.

Next, come research, analysis, and finally learning.

The best CNF doesn’t simply tell a story, but takes the reader on a transformative journey. And the easiest way to accomplish this as a writer is actually to learn something.

So, what are the components of my mode of CNF?

1) Story (This is my content, the first thing that tells me that there’s an original story to tell: a collection of letters or an untold life.)

2) Journey (I’ve not yet written anything half-decent without recounting a journey of discovery. Travel and observation are essential to my process. This is where detail and narrative drive come from for me.)

3) Questioning (Once I’ve got my content and have completed a journey of discovery, the important questions start to arise. I begin to figure out what the point of the story I’m trying to tell will be, and why not only I, but a reader, should care. Gutkind calls this stage Reflection.)

4) Research (Once I have a series of questions, I head to the library in search of answers. I read anyone and everyone who might be able to help. Much of this never actually makes it into the bibliography, but that’s OK.)

5) Learning (In some ways this is the hardest part, but it’s the piece that will make a CNF book worth a reader’s time. In order for the reader to learn, the author has to transform him- or herself in some way. For this reason, writing CNF requires humility. You can’t assume you know everything. If you do, there’s nowhere to go and nothing to learn.)

I continue to write at every stage in the process. Some parts of it are easier than others — journeys tend to write themselves, but incorporating research seamlessly can be like pulling teeth. I call that stage “writing through the pain.”

Weirdly, the final stage of learning often happens of its own accord. If you travel, watch, read, write and think for long enough, you’re bound to learn something. The trick is to listen carefully enough to hear what it is, and to write it down before it escapes.

So, if learning is the hardest part, how is it that it happens of its own accord?

Because you can’t cheat, fake or rush it. You have to do the work and put in the time for learning to come about. But when the point of the whole damn thing suddenly (that is, after months or years of work) reveals itself to you, and your manuscript seems to tell you how to finish it, writing becomes its own reward.

And then, for a moment, it may even seem easy.

How does your process work? Do the 5 R’s describe what you do?

[Photo: troycochrane]

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On the Dying Tradition of Letter-writing

I’ve been working with letters as literary artifacts for just over a decade now. As a graduate student, my attraction to letters was instant. The very first time I sat down with stack of yellowing missives, I was hooked, and never looked back.

I work with letters because I like the intimacy they afford. Piecing a story together through an unexamined correspondence is a way to tap into untold stories and to break new ground. Reading letters also gives me a glimpse into the ways in which people meld writing and life and make sense of their time on earth. And I’m interested in the ways the big and small combine in letters — how, for example, a letter can give a ground-level view of historical events.

But as we increasingly eschew handwritten letters on paper for electronic correspondence, the materials I use for my research are becoming a bit of dinosaur. I myself have boxes of love letters written on lined notebook paper from when I was a teenager, but mine may be the last generation to be able to say this.

And as I embark on the writing of my third book — my second to use letters as a primary resource — I realize that it’s time to start reflecting not only on what letters say, but on what they are.

I’ve never really cared all that much about physical objects in my work. Whether I read a second-hand copy, a library copy, or a first edition of Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, as long as all the pages are intact, it’s all the same to me. It’s why I could never be an art historian, because the value of objects that interest me has little to do with money, or physical uniqueness.

But now I see that it is no longer enough simply to consider the content of the letters I work with. Because letters are on their way out as a cultural practice, I will inevitably have to start reflecting more seriously on their physical form, the way they travel from sender to recipient, and how the process of letter-writing differs from or in some ways resembles the way we communicate today.

National Public Radio has kick-started this thinking process for me. It’s currently doing a series on the United States Postal System, which is apparently in deep crisis. As part of its Postal series, NPR has curated an on-line exhibit of interesting pieces of mail, called “Mailed Memories: Your Cherished Letters.”

The exhibit includes images of an annual cake-package sent by post, a posthumous birthday card, and a postcard sent to a kid by Allen Ginsburg that was originally addressed to John and Yoko. The last piece in the exhibit is my contribution: a 1947 postcard sent from Siberia to the US by my grandmother. Its tagline: “Finally, a letter from mom.”

It is indeed a cherished piece of mail, and I’m honoured to have it used as part of the piece. You can see the exhibit here.

I rarely write letters anymore myself, and wonder if others do. Share your letter-writing and -receiving stories with me through in the comments section. I’m interested to know about your writing life.

[Photo: Sea Dream Studio]

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Postcard from Siberia

Pictured above is one of my most cherished possessions. It’s a 1947 postcard sent from my grandmother in Siberia, addressed to her husband and children. It was sent to a town in Massachusetts where we had relatives, though at the time my grandfather and his kids (my father among them) were living in the UK. My grandmother wrote their church’s address from memory, I think, and sent it off as a kind of Hail Mary attempt to reach her loved ones.

Amazingly, it made its way out of Stalinist Russia and into the hands of distant cousins in the US. From there, the card found its addressees: my father, my two aunts and grandfather. It was the only moment of communication my grandmother had with her children between 1941 and 1955, when regular correspondence between Siberia and the West became possible.

The back of the postcard reads:

1947.II.16

My Dear Children Birutėlė, Janutė, Algutis and Antanukas [the latter, her husband, is addressed as one of her children, because she had told Soviet authorities her husband was dead],

It made me indescribably happy to learn that you were alive and well. I’m healthy, I work on a farm. In my thoughts and in my heart I am always with you.

The priest, my uncle, is still alive and lives in Liepalingis [Lithuania], as before.

Write to me, all. I await your letters.

Your mother,
Ona Šukienė.

After weeks of working my way through my travel notes from Siberia, I’m now back to my archives: reading my grandmother’s letters, and travelling in my mind across languages, time, space.

My grandmother wrote letters to her children from Siberia from 1955 to 1958, then from Soviet Lithuania from 1958 to 1965, when she joined her family in Canada. The above card marks the first step in their long process of return to one another. For me, now, it marks the beginning of my next stage of writing.

While working through my Siberian travel notebook over the past few weeks, I wrote a great deal in a very short span of time. It was going so well that I didn’t dare stop, question, or even re-read too much. In fact, I was working so fast that I  became uneasy, and started bracing myself for the other shoe to drop.

Well, crisis averted. With the complex tasks of weaving past with present and of melding my life with that of another back in my sights again, the familiar feeling of wading through mud has returned. Writing hurts again and the book resists.

All is well with the world in this regard.

Onward. (Squish.)

[Photo: J. Šukys, Ona Šukienė’s Siberian postcard from 1947, private collection]

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Technological breakthrough! Pregnant Pause essay now up

A few weeks ago, my new essay on mothering, writing, research and on “my” librarian (the subject of my forthcoming book) appeared in Feminist Formations. I’ve finally figured out how to upload PDF files onto the site. So, here’s the essay for anyone who wants to read it. You can also find it under Publications on the right margin.

The essay is called “Pregnant Pause: On Ona Šimaitė, Research, Writing, and Motherhood.” I share it with the journal’s permission.

As the day goes on, I’ll use my new-found skills to link to more publications.

[Photo: loungerie]

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On the pleasure, pain and panic of working with archival materials

I’ve been working with archival materials for more than a decade now.

While writing my dissertation, I sat in archives comparing drafts of novels, tracking authors’ corrections and studying the process of composition and revision. More recently, I’ve been working on diaries and letters, telling the story of a life on the basis of private papers. Archival work can be slow and painful: you have to read some twenty or fifty letters before you find one that grips you, speaks to you, or tells you something new.

Piecing together a narrative from a million seemingly inconsequential details is the hardest literary thing I’ve done yet. You can’t know what will be important, so you have to copy everything, read everything, and take copious notes. The result is a lot of paper, loads of post-its, a stack of storage boxes as tall as me, and a chaotic office. Only after thousands of hours of reading and reflection will a thread start to emerge.

Waiting for the thread takes faith and patience.

Still, there’s little that thrills an archival researcher more than making a connection  or accidentally finding a key piece of evidence: these moments of pleasure that make the pain worthwhile.

So here’s where I’m at: after years of work, of mastering my subject’s writings, and having finally completed my manuscript, it dawns on me that I don’t own this material. While writing my book, I had put the issue out of mind, but now that I’ve finished, it’s time to face facts.

And the fact is that it’s not mine to publish. Not yet.

The issue is copyright.

In order to cite from unpublished archival materials, international copyright law requires permission of the author’s next-of-kin. In the absence of an heir, you must  prove that you have made a good-faith effort to find one.

To be fair, I have a long-standing and good relationship with the nephew of my main biographical subject who controls the copyright of ninety per cent of the material that is important to my book. But permission for the other ten per cent now needs to be secured. I waited to finish the manuscript before starting the permissions process, because only now do I know what’s important to my story

For the past two days, I’ve been writing emails and making cold calls to Eastern Europe in my good-faith effort to locate the heirs of the authors of additional archival documents I cite.

And although it’s going well, the realization that I’d written a book that I might not be able to publish kept me up all last night.

This is the panic of archival work.

May the heirs be kind and generous.

Fingers crossed.

[Photo uploaded by anvosa]

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Siberia! Siberia!

Julija by the ridge where the village of Brovka once stood. 2010.

I’m home.

Two cousins and I spent fourteen days travelling from Lithuania to Siberia’s Tomsk region, in search of the neighbouring villages of Brovka and Bialystok where my grandmother lived in forced exile and worked on a collective farm for seventeen years (for a time she lived in one village, then in the other).

We found both villages (Bialystok still very much alive; Brovka now defunct), plus so much more along the way.

Siberia surprised me at every turn. It was both gentler and at times more desperate than I’d imagined. The journey was worth every minute and every kopeck.

In Tomsk we marvelled at stilettoed women strolling through the city with their babies, and were awed by the beauty of Tomsk’s Catholic Church perched up on the city’s one hill. The nearby Sisters of Charity welcomed us warmly and glowed with joy, all the while telling harrowing drunk tank tales. Six nuns minister to the city’s alcoholics.

We had many local companions and guides without whom the journey from Tomsk north to Bialystok would have been impossible: there was Vasily, the museum director, born and raised in the village; Svetlana, our guardian angel, daughter of a Lithuanian exile, and generally the coolest Siberian you’ll ever meet; 79-year-old Anton who took us into his house and fed us from his kitchen garden; Dusya, Anna and Nina, who shared their memories of our grandmother; and Maria who showed us hospitality with a potato and egg fry that we ate straight out of the skillet plonked down in the centre of the table, Siberian-style.

All this, plus my impressions of Moscow suffocated by wildfire smoke, our deportation from Belarus and resulting mad-dash through Copenhagen’s airport in a race to catch up to our train, and of the still Siberian landscape under the blue shutters and fences of Russian villages, will unpack and reformulate itself into a book over the next year or so.

I’ll share what I can as I work.

To all those who helped along the way: Spasibo bolshoe. Ačiū.

This is only the beginning.

[Photo: M. Angel Herrero]

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Travelling light

As I pack my bag for Siberia, I realize how long it’s been since I travelled light.

The last time was ten years ago when I went to India and Nepal. My friend Anna and I went for three weeks, each carrying a modest bag containing a sheet, mosquito net and a few articles of clothing.

People around us balked at the idea of our going so far for such a short time. But I had a sense then that if I didn’t seize that opportunity, it would be a long time before it returned.

I was right.

The freedom, money, time and fearlessness of that Indian summer have never combined in the same magical way again. Since then, I’ve travelled a lot, but have felt very heavy indeed, dragging books, cats, an entire household behind me en route to another postdoc or teaching position.

I used to be an expertly light traveller, having started when I was only a teenager. I’d work some weekend or summer job for just long enough to buy plane and train tickets, plus scrape together a bit of pocket money, then take off with a friend.

“That’s what you’re bringing?” my dad asked the night before one such trip.

I was seventeen and heading off for nine weeks with a small pack borrowed from my cousin for the train trip through Europe that everyone was doing back then.

“Why, do you think it’s too big?”

“No,” he answered, laughing. “Just the opposite. I’m wondering how you’ll survive.”

I came back happy, healthy and strong. And having learned a ton.

Travelling light isn’t just about stuff. To do so, you have to believe that world will take care of you, that it will lend you things you need but didn’t bring, and that it will teach you how to be in the place that you are.

This trip, I’m going to try to recapture some lightness.

My plane takes off Thursday.

[Photo: Rachel Giese]

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University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature threatened with closure

Theory Of Literature by eriwst

I arrived home from a week of camp with my three-year-old to learn that the University of Toronto is threatening to close the Centre for Comparative Literature, where I earned my PhD.

If you are engaged in writing and reading, if you value creative thought, innovative teaching and scholarship, and believe in cross-cultural dialogue, please write to the university in support of the Centre. The relevant email and postal addresses appear below.

Here is the text of the email bearing the distressing news:

Dear Alumni of the Centre for Comparative Literature,

As a fellow alumna of the Centre, I am writing to inform you of some very distressing news and to solicit your support.  The University of Toronto has recently and unexpectedly announced the “disestablishment” of the Centre for Comparative Literature as of 2011.  The Centre, founded in 1969 by Northrop Frye and the premier site for the study of Comparative Literature in Canada, will no longer be able to admit students to the PhD or MA degrees.  It will be reduced to a collaborative, non-degree-granting program in a future School for Languages and Literatures, a proposed new unit that will be formed by the fusion of all current language and literature departments except French and English.  For all intents and purposes, the Centre will cease to exist: all core faculty will lose their cross-appointments, no Comparative Literature courses will be offered, we will no longer have our offices, our space, our director and graduate coordinator, or our identity.  The proposed disappearance of the Centre will undoubtedly have an extremely negative impact on the future of the discipline in Canada and it reflects the general depreciation of the humanities and their essential contributions to knowledge and society.  I should add that the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto is presently flourishing, with a cohort of excellent, motivated students, an innovative curriculum, a prestigious annual international conference organized by our students, and a number of exciting initiatives, such as the journal Transverse www.chass.utoronto.ca/complit for details).  The decision to close the Centre thus has absolutely nothing to do with the current state of the unit and everything to do with budgetary concerns and an ignorance of the discipline.

This disastrous course must be averted for the sake of literary and interdisciplinary studies in Canada.  On behalf of all faculty and students in the Centre, I am writing to ask if you would be willing to send a letter to President David Naylor of the University of Toronto, registering your concern at these proposed events.

If you write, we would be grateful if you could discuss the importance and relevance of Comparative Literature in today’s globalized, multicultural world.  In its crossing of cultural, disciplinary, and linguistic borders, in its self-reflexive and critical modes of thinking about literature and culture, the research nurtured by the Centre’s faculty and students is crucial for a full engagement with the complexities of a multipolar, multinational world, and is a model for the practice of the humanities in other disciplines.

If you do send a letter, please send a hard copy as well as an e-mail.  The hard copy should go to:

President David Naylor
University of Toronto
Simcoe Hall, Room 206
27 King’s College Circle
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1A1

The e-mail message should go to:  president@utoronto.ca

Please copy the e-mail to the Provost Cheryl Misak (provost@utoronto.ca), the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Science, Meric Gertler (officeofthedean@artsci.utoronto.ca), and the Director of the Centre for Comparative Literature, Neil ten Kortenaar (neil.kortenaar@utoronto.ca).

I thank you kindly for your prompt attention to this request and for the time you will spend in composing your letter.  It is our sincere hope that if enough of us express our outrage at this decision, it will be reversed.

Yours sincerely,
Barbara Havercroft
Graduate Coordinator, Centre for Comparative Literature
(PhD 1989 from the Centre)

Below is one thoughtful letter that argues in favour of keeping the Centre open. If it helps you write your own letter, please feel free to mine it for content and ideas.

Dear President Naylor,

I have just received news from friends at the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where I was proud to be a graduate student and from which I received my PhD in 2001, that the University intends to “disestablish” Comparative Literature as a degree-granting program as of 2011. I am not a faculty member at the University of Toronto, so of course I have not seen the official documents, but if it is true that the university intends to take a series of actions that will in effect end the Centre’s existence, then this is a profoundly depressing development, and more than a little embarrassing to the university of which I have until recently been a very proud alumnus. I urge you to consider alternate options. The Centre is an important part of the history of the University of Toronto and of Canadian scholarship in the humanities; it is a rigorous and flourishing program; and its loss will mean a significant demotion of the University of Toronto in the eyes of the international community of humanities scholars.

The University of Toronto has had a long and important role to play in the humanities in Canada and internationally, but perhaps the single most important series of contributions were made by the literary theorist Northrop Frye. His impact across all of the humanities can hardly be underestimated, and the spirit in which he conducted his research – a ravenous curiosity, a powerful command of the central texts of the Western tradition, and a humane and often humorous style of presentation – has influenced nearly every scholar who has made a contribution to literary studies in the last 50 years. He was instrumental in founding the Centre for Comparative literature at the University of Toronto, and in an important way the Centre is synonymous with his legacy. I cannot imagine how doing away with such a central element in the University’s heritage will not be seen as a remarkable rejection of the legacy of one of its most brilliant scholars.

I chose the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto over a number of other very strong programs in the United States because in addition to its history, it hosted scholars of great international stature with whom I was very eager to work, and in the time that I have been active as a scholar this has continued to be true. My own supervisor, Brian Stock, was affiliated with the Centre until his retirement and has been an honorary member of the Collège de France and, now, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Also recently retired, Linda Hutcheon, distinguished University Professor and 2010 winner of the Canada Council for the Arts’ Molson Prize, has published a spectacular series of profound and influential studies, served as the president of the Modern Languages Association, and was also elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. These were the faculty members with whom I had the most contact when I was a graduate student there in the late 1990s: they were only part of a complement with wide international influence and a deep and important legacy. That the Centre should be “disestablished” so soon after their retirement sends a message about the value the University puts on their life’s work; a message they will not hesitate to share with their friends and colleagues internationally. The current faculty is no less strong, and I have seen the vibrancy of the Centre myself in recent years. Its students continue to distinguish themselves: in the last year alone, one received a prestigious Vanier Scholarship, and another one a Governor General’s Gold Medal for best dissertation.

None of the work of the scholars I just mentioned could have been done without the context for interdisciplinary exchange and the creative exploration of new ideas that the Centre has traditionally supplied. My own career has been profoundly shaped by the unique combination of intellectual rigor and creativity that the Centre inspired. With the Centre’s loss, this kind of research simply will not happen, and the University will be weaker for it.

It also means that the University of Toronto will lose a significant source of international visibility. Comparative Literature departments and centres continue to be major drivers of innovation in the humanities, and comparatists push the agendas of many humanities scholars, even those who do not hold comparative literature degrees. Indeed, a large proportion of the most influential studies in the last ten years have been produced by scholars affiliated with a department of Comparative Literature. Having such a department, and the path-breaking research that goes with it, is one of the signs that a University is serious: shutting one down tells the world that the University no longer considers itself so.

I write not only as an alumnus of your University and as a scholar who continues to have warm and productive relationships with many colleagues there, but also as a Torontonian with a deep emotional connection to  the UofT. At my current University’s convocation ceremonies, I wear the UofT hood proudly, and I often urge my undergraduates to count the UofT among their top choices for graduate school. The proposed “disestablishment” of the Centre for Comparative Literature, if it happens, will make all of that a little more difficult. Please reconsider.

You can read more about the Centre’s predicament in The Torontoist.

Click here for an UPDATE on the situation at U of T Comp Lit.

[Photo: eriwst]

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On the kindness of strangers

For the past week I’ve been sending badly written Russian emails to strangers all over Siberia. In them I explain that I will be arriving in Tomsk with my cousin in August by train, that we are looking for the village where our grandmother lived and worked for seventeen years, that I am a Canadian writer of English-language books, and that I would appreciate any help they could offer in locating Brovka.

Amazingly, some of these strangers respond.

This is not the first time I’ve imposed myself and my odd sense of what’s worth writing about on people I don’t know. I’ve arrived in small American towns asking strange questions about saints’ relics, place-names and local history and I’ve shown up in French villages inquiring after long-forgotten WWII prison camps.

Perhaps it’s because I’m obviously harmless and seem a bit naive. Or maybe it’s just because I’m genuinely interested in hearing stories about these out-of-the-way places. But strangers tend to be kind and generous to a writer looking for a story, and people from forgotten parts of the world want to share what they know.

So, over the last week I’ve struck up a friendship with a woman in Tomsk who is the president of the region’s Lithuanian friendship society. Her father was a Lithuanian exile who married a Volga German, also exiled to Siberia. Svetlana was born in town on the Mongolian border and moved to Tomsk to study at one of the city’s five universities.

She has already done a great deal of research on my behalf: making phone calls and passing on information to archivists (more kind strangers) who have taken it upon themselves to search for traces of my grandmother amongst old census documents. We write to each other in different languages: I, in Lithuanian, and she, in Russian. We manage to understand one another, and there is a warmth to our communication that I would never have predicted, though perhaps should have, bound as we are by the memory of exile.

For Svetlana, exile has become home. She lives in Siberia not because she must, but because it is where she was born, where she studied, and where she works.

I can’t wait to meet her. I suspect she’ll have a lot of stories to tell.

[Photo: Daniel Gasienica]

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