Writing and photography from the Great Lakes region
This essay was an honorable mention in the 2017 Narrative Map College Student Writing Contest. Kelley hoisted the door open and a ding promptly followed. We peered around the empty shop, the vacancy of other people was unimportant because we …
This essay was an honorable mention in the 2017 Narrative Map College Student Writing Contest. Setting courses for sailboats taught the boy about scars: the lake was a gouge in the earth, the sailboats left fluid white gashes in the …
This essay was an honorable mention in the 2017 Narrative Map College Student Writing Contest. The exterior looked how I felt: dirty red brick, tired neon signs, a dead tree, and a lot of ashtrays. Every time I went, the …
This is the third place winner in the 2017 Narrative Map College Student Writing Contest. As a teenager, I cringed at the idea of staying in Battle Creek. I looked down on the people who grew up in Battle Creek, …
This is the second place winner in the 2017 Narrative Map College Student Writing Contest. June 12: I’m getting in the car and driving north soon. The road feels like home in a different sort of way than my parent’s …
This is the first place winner in the 2017 Narrative Map College Student Writing Contest. I settle down on the beach near the Old Mackinaw Point Lighthouse and take my camera out of its protective case. The sun has just …
Q&A with Milwaukee author Todd Lazarski (pictured above at a Dunkirk social club) as he romanticizes and sometimes denigrates: Chris Paul; sarcasm’s hidden kindness; self-destruction as research; necessary meanness in food writing; and thoughts of his father, dead at 39 …
This essay is part of the Great Lakes Review’s Narrative Map project. I’ve been tracking the Niagara Escarpment, a geologic formation that arcs from Wisconsin through upper Michigan and Ontario past Niagara Falls into western New York. In the Upper Peninsula, …
This essay, published in the 2015 issue of the Great Lakes Review, was an honorable mention in The Best American Essays series, edited by Jonathan Franzen. We reprint it here with permission from the author. Someone once said that if …
