WannaskaWriter

Previously published in the Wannaskan Almanac on Thursday, May 6th, 2021 https://wannaskanalmanac.blogspot.com/2021/05/sometimes-redundancy-is-necessary.html     Chairman Joe sent me an email on April 30th, 2021 which contained this advice from Annie Dillard, an American writer best known for her meditative essays on the natural world. "One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and fi

EXTRA STOUT     1.) Jerry Solom: Particularly strong, sturdy, solid, substantial, robust, tough, strongly made, durable, hard-wearing; sometimes thick headed according to his wife.       2.) Guinness Extra Stout: A kind of strong, dark beer brewed with roasted malt or barley.       Almost everyone on the planet knew Jerry Solom was the guy who built his own boat and sailed to Norway and all that. There’s been dozens of stories about that feat for 26 years; I have many in my files here. Joe McDonnell wrote a remarkable epilogue about him in the almanac last week that went practically viral, so there’s no sense in me writing about it all again. http://wannaskanalmanac.blogspot.com/2019/07/jerry.html     But it had been six days since Jerry died and, as a very close friend whom I had known for 36 years I still hadn’t been able to wrap my mind around it. I’d been awaiting inspiration, some spark that would ignite emotion and set me down the path to write about him, but I couldn’t get there