Author: Mark Peacock

Tonight’s WPCA-FM broadcast of my short stories featured “Sinner Ella”, a “mangled” fairy tale found in the ebook Yes, More Break Time Stories! and in the paperback book, The Second Gathering of The Break Time Stories. Ella, of course, is modeled faintly on the classic Cinderella, but this girl is dissatisfied with the mega-church she attends and goes exploring to find something different. What she finds and what she does when she finds another church is bound to offend some church people, but the story has a happy ending despite a nasty step-mother, bratty step-sisters, her AWOL father, the mandatory fairy godmother, and, of course, a prince charming. As a retired church pastor, I’ll take the heat.

Speaking of heat, today we’ve had ice that has made our place a skating rink, at least the parts I’ve cleared of snow. Trudging through snow to the back of my property to haul some wood closer to the house for the wood stove was much safer than sliding on the patio blocks and slipping on the paths to fill Marina’s bird feeders.

I spent a bit of today on the phone trying to find a way to get my books and Marina’s “Gretel and Andy” book in the Twin Cities airport’s book stores. Short stories are ideal for travelers that may have to sit around while waiting to board their flight and for reading while in flight. My stories all are written so that a reader can read a complete story on his/her lunch break and still get back to work on time.”Sinner Ella”, for example, clocked in tonight at 15 minutes, including time for plenty of laughs. Self-publishing does have its drawbacks and one of them is the challenge of getting my books into the hands of people who can make money by selling them. While I’m on this subject, I should explain that I wrote most all my stories when I was in my early to mid-seventies and my experience as a freelancer for 40 plus years was that I could send out a query to an editor and  might receive a response months afterward. Also, short stories are difficult to market, with the only thing tougher being poetry. And so I was running out of time; I didn’t have months to wait for an acceptance or rejection and until I had some exposure–people laughing at “Sinner Ella” when I read it in public, for example–I really didn’t know if my stories were any good. The response to my tales has been quite good, “Six Short Stories” garnered nice reviews, and people are buying both the ebooks and print books so I am confident about their quality and I think they deserve a much wider audience.

This week has a few “free” days, which is OK with me because driving on ice makes for tense trips. Besides, it’s tax time soon and I need to assemble the necessary numbers for our CPA. The sale of our Luck rental is supposed to close later this month and I’m hoping that the cleaning I need to do will be minimal and that there will be no unforeseen repairs.

I also should mention the passing of our friend, LaMoine MacLaughlin. LaMoine was kind enough to give praise for my stories and I’ve been able to include his kind words on each of my books. LaMoine also shared the stage with me to read his poetry twice as a fundraiser for St.Croix Festival Theater. He and his wife, Mary Ellen, who passed away just a couple of months ago, created and ran the Northern Lakes Center for the Arts in Amery, Wisconsin. It was a performance center, a music school, and featured what was likely the only chamber orchestra in the USA in a town of fewer than 3,000 people. People could share all sorts of artistic endeavors, including writing, acting, dance, music recitals, painting, fabric arts and other things that don’t come to mind as I write this. La Moine was an unusual, creative person–he took first prize some years ago in the short story competition for the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts and Letters. Marina and I were blessed to have LaMoine and Mary Ellen as friends and we will miss them.

Tonight’s story broadcast on WPCA-FM was Shall We Dance?, an inside look into a flamenco dance company performing in Los Angeles. Yes, there is a real Wilshire Ebell Theater in L.A. and yes, flamenco dance troupes have performed there, and yes, the theater is a very fine venue for dance of all kinds. The story characters? My inventions. El Duende? that deep, dark sadness in the gypsy soul? It’s real, exposed by flamenco guitarists for many decades. You can find Shall We Dance? in the ebook, Yes, More Break Time Stories and in the paperback, The Second Gathering of The Break Time Stories. It’s a story that has drawn a number of comments, such as “How do you know so much about this stuff? To which I reply, lots of exposure and some doing Spanish dance myself. Ole!

As always, I appreciate WPCA-FM’s sharing of my stories on the first Tuesday evening of each month at 7 p.m. It’s a rare privilege for a writer and I am grateful to Bob and LuAnn for putting my stories on the air. You can find all four of my paperbacks at Kenneth Larson in downtown Luck, WI and also at the Polk County Information Center in St.Croix Falls. Pure and Simple in Amery, WI and the St.Croix Health Clinics carry my Some Mangled Fairy Tales paperbacks. All of these books make great and inexpensive Christmas presents.

We have snow and lots of it after an unusually long Fall of unusually warm weather. Some days the high temperatures broke high temperature records. But now we are sliding into one of those December deep cold spells and I have had the wood stove warming almost all day. Fortunately, I have plenty of wood way out back. I use a plastic sled to slide the logs to the house. It’s exercise I need and I enjoy it, much to the dismay of my wife. There’s supposed to be more snow tonight, which means I’ll have to dust off the car before I join a former colleague for coffee and catching up. Kristin, a strong Christian family friend, will breeze in tomorrow morning, too.

I have a small wedding to perform this coming Monday for an older couple. The groom, whom I’ve known for 17 years, swore all those years that he’d never marry or consider romance again. However, he’s met his match. I’ll try not to giggle throughout the coming ceremony.

For Thanksgiving, Marina and I made a couple of pumpkin pies and roasted a small turkey. Daughter Britta and her husband, Mark, brought the rest of the meal. We enjoyed a pleasant and relaxed afternoon. And I hope the same for you.

Last night’s WPCA-FM broadcast of my stories featured Holding The Fort,  a tale found in The Second Gathering Of The Break Time Stories and as an ebook in Four More Break Time Stories. The setting: Fort Thomas, Arizona. The characters: the narrator and Oral, both of whom were Vietnam era Army drill instructors, and Oral’s young wife, Janet. The issues: small town racial attitudes between Whites and the Native Americans living on the reservation adjacent to Oral’s ranch. I’ve had one person who heard me read this story in public ask me to do a follow-up on what happened to Oral and Janet, so some people do track with this story’s characters. I take that as a good sign.

That brings up something for me as an author and that is, for me at least, while I may think a story is good, it takes other people saying so to validate my opinion. Until I had some public appreciation for my stories, I hesitated to put them in front of critics. For example, The St.Paul Pioneer Press’ Mary Ann Grossmann has seen only my latest book, the Six Short Stories volume, because I didn’t have the courage to send her the two Break Time Stories volumes, which also had printing problems in their first editions. I’ve had enough experience now to be confident about what I’ve done. In any event, the stories are out there, for better or worse, and my hope is that people will enjoy them.

No snow yet. It has been unseasonably warm with little moisture lately. Fire danger warnings are out. Cabin people that come here for the weekend don’t know about the restrictions and that makes things dangerous. They love to have an atmospheric campfire going and all it would take is a spark. I remember what it was like to evacuate the Laurel Canyon fire back in about 1958-1959. I was a kid, rattled by the desperate honking of the cars lined up behind my vapor locking car as we lurched down the hills to the Sunset Strip. It was no fun. Behind my home now lie acres of woods with dry leaves and just to the north of me lives an elderly couple with mobility issues that would have problems if they had to quickly evacuate their home. There is a possibility for rain this coming Saturday.

Daylight Savings Time ended last weekend and this is the first year that the change has affected me negatively. This year I find the change physically hard. Perhaps that’s just part of getting older.

This Sunday I’m taking the service at Wolf Creek United Methodist Church. They broadcast services on You Tube, so my mess-ups are out there for people of the world to see whenever they like.

Sunday afternoon I spoke a few words about the late Mary Ellen MacGlaughlin, co-director off Amery’s Northern Lakes Center for the Arts. To me, she had so many facets to her life that she was like a finely cut diamond. Which facet does one start with?

Mary Ellen loved teaching piano to kids and when LaMoine, her husband, fed up with battling bureaucracies in his job with a community development agency, saw how his wife could set her own schedule and that she was having a satisfying, enjoyable time, figured that could be a better life. The result: the Northern Lakes Center for the Arts, a teaching and performance space housed in a former church building that had become an auto parts store. I did a piece for the St.Paul Pioneer Press that appeared in January, 2014. In that piece, the focus was on the Center’s more than three decades in the black–an unusual record for an arts organization of any size. I didn’t give Mary Ellen enough credit. The two of them had a plan but it took both of them to work that plan.

The Center had several instruction spaces, as well as the central performance space that housed a chamber orchestra nicely but was intimate enough so that a big name like Gordon Bok declared that it was his favorite venue in the nation. The chamber orchestra was likely the only chamber orchestra in the country in a town of fewer than 3,000 people. Mary Ellen played cello in the orchestra, but the prelude to her cello playing was her selling tickets at the door box office–she knew most people that came through the door because she had been pounding the pavement soliciting donations to help support the Center–and handling the stage lighting. Later, Mary Ellen sold the ads for the Center’s newspaper. She and LaMoine would play a Mozart piece for four hands that Mozart and his sister had played, pulling it off as a demonstration of how Mary Ellen’s teaching could pay off. The orchestra included players of all ages, from kids to senior citizens.

The Center used its wall space to display work by quilters and visual artists. Writers could meet to share their works and read them to audiences, who also received a printed publication, “Soundings”,  that included their writing. Christmas concerts included audience participation singing and the Lou Jappe installed pipe organ, as well as seasonal readings. Shakespeare would have enjoyed seeing some of his works performed in the Center’s space, as well as plays by Moliere.

After mentioning so many facets of Mary Ellen’s contributions, not to mention her three successful daughters, several of LaMoine’s published love poems spelled out how he felt about his many-faceted wife.

Many facets. Step back and one finds a beautiful jewel. Because of who Mary Ellen was and how she was, and because some facet, and perhaps many, touched the lives of so many people, many of who gathered last Sunday, we can thank her and thank God for her time among us. Because of who she was and how she was, our little worlds have been better.

 

For several years now Bowman Leather in Amery, Wisconsin has been carrying all my books and Marina’s Gretel and Andy, God’s Gift; The Lives of Two Seeing Eye Dogs. Now, due to health reasons, Greg and Catherine are closing the shop and selling their building. They plan a complete store sale the end of October that will include any of our books left on their shelves. This may be an opportunity for you to acquire our books, perhaps at a discount. (That’s just a guess of mine, so don’t hold them to it.)

Tonight’s WPCA-FM story broadcast was The Eye Of The Beholder, a tale of three artists, Edna, a silver artist, Leslie, a painter, and Jasper Howe, an artist good enough to teach how to paint water and snow but whose big sales at outdoor art shows are “found object” pieces: little objects glued onto slick black canvases. Leslie and Edna, whose booths are adjacent to each other, can’t figure out the appeal of Howe’s odd canvases, especially to wealthy people. The solution is up to Leslie’s small town policeman husband, Josh. Again, I appreciate WPCA’s monthly broadcast of my stories, which they’ve done for several years now.

Tonight boasts our first possible freeze, with temperatures down around the usual lows appropriate for this time of year after weeks of above average and near-record high temperatures. Per usual, the leaves of my many trees have taken the word “Fall” literally, and I have raked and shredded the yard three times so far. There are many leaves yet to fall. The pontoon and dock removed is scheduled for nine days away. With the exception of last year, our usual removal activity has been done with snow/sleet falling and hand-numbing temperatures. We’ll see how this year goes. Tim Eck shares my dock now. He and his brother and I put in the dock in the Spring but it’s best if I help the professionals do the removal job. Once the dock is out, Lance will pilot my boat to the north landing and take care of it for the Winter.

For almost two months my rider mower was on the fritz. It just stopped enroute to mowing the beach. I managed to tow it back uphill, which was fun when there was no one to steer the thing as I hauled it behind the car. Neighbor Paul Hubacher helped me find out there was a spark and we replaced the fuel pump when the machine still would not start. Paul cleaned out the carburetor but when we primed the carburetor, it would run for several seconds and then quit.The advice of several backyard mechanics was to replace the carburetor, which I did. Same result from priming. I gave up and got the trailer from Jeff’s Small Engine in Milltown and winched the tractor onto the trailer. The result? A solenoid that didn’t work, even on the new carburetor. “I just bypassed it,” said the mechanic. I didn’t have the brains at the time to ask what the solenoid did if it could simply be bypassed. Anyhow, I have the tractor back and it is running very well and tons of leaves are being shredded to help improve the lousy soil in my yard.

This coming Sunday I take the service at Wolf Creek United Methodist Church. Shawn Gudmanson is our musician that day and it’s a privilege to have him with us. He has been honored greatly lately, both locally and internationally and as Wisconsin’s Teacher of the Year. Shawn is a longtime choral music teacher at St.Croix Falls High School. You can catch Wolf Creek’s services on You Tube. Call up “Wolf Creek United Methodist Church services”.

We’ve been able to take the boat out several times these past few weeks and the Fall changing of the tree colors around the lakeshore has offered its usual beauty. It’s too bad that change does not last longer. Fall is my favorite season anyway.

Finally, my reading at the Frederic Public Library went well, although the turnout was small. The weather was nice so people found things to do that they couldn’t do outside because of the near-constant rain. The Inter County Leader’s Sarah Beth Rodomsky wrote a nice review of the reading and I appreciate that very much. Praise from a fellow writer means a lot.

Lost Wax was the story broadcast tonight by WPCA-FM. Per usual, I am very grateful that WPCA-FM broadcasts my story readings each month on the first Tuesday at 7 p.m. You’ll find Lost Wax in Six Short Stories, my fourth paperback and online as an ebook. Jeffrey Saltin is a painter-turned sculptor who’s inspired (and even propelled) by a talented and perceptive wife. When I’ve read it in public it has produced tears in my listeners. For that matter, I wept while I was writing it and reading it aloud sometimes has been a challenge. I may read Lost Wax this coming Saturday at the Frederic Public Library (10 a.m.) Which of the 27 stories I have in print I’ll read will depend on who has heard which story read before, so I’ll need to do a brief survey as we get started. I’m grateful to Librarian Heather Marek for the opportunity to come to the Frederic Library. My reading will be balanced by what one listener called a story that prompted “belly laughs”, which means a tale that can only come from Some Mangled Fairy Tales, a book containing six of those.

I’ll also begin our session with a surprise: I’ll read two brief selections from Marina’s Gretel and Andy, God’s Gift: The Lives of Two Seeing Eye Dogs. Her book has been receiving nice reviews on Amazon and in-person, with people buying several copies to share with friends. The life of a Seeing Eye Dog is told in the dogs’ voices, which Marina has captured extraordinarily well.

Lately, I’ve spent time splitting huge logs for the wood stove, a gift from neighbor Mike Huppert. Life interferes, so I’m behind on firewood production. We’ve had so much rain this season that the grass has been growing like crazy and because my rider mower has been under repair I’ve been mowing deep grass with my old walk-behind. Mowing that way takes me about four times as long. That has meant that I’ve mowed our property in sections over several days of the week and I’ve done no mowing down at our beach for so long that willow trees are sprouting in a big section of the grass. Marina and I did take the pontoon boat out for awhile last week. Over Labor Day we went down and just sat on the boat while all the end-of -season activity went on around us. Funny, how things go so quiet after Labor Day. People close down their cabins for the season and put boats in storage. Yet, there is plenty of boating left, especially when the leaves turn on the shore surrounding you and can be admired from the lake. We lost a couple of weeks on the lake when the boat engine was in the Bernizer shop for repairs.

The lake is different than the rivers. Bone Lake is a larger lake for this area, almost 1,800 acres, five miles long and about two miles wide at the widest. For me, the greatest difference is that on the river I always felt that if I really wanted to and could afford it, I could just keep going. Once I fancifully plotted a trip down the Mississippi and out through the islands, then through the Panama Canal and up the Pacific Coast to San Diego. The Dilly would have needed bladder tanks for fuel and was probably too small for such a journey, so it was sheer fancy and imagination. But the temptation to just keep going was there. We did log 1,300 plus miles to St.Louis, Missouri and back the first year we owned Dilly. We left Hudson, Wisconsin with a six month old baby, two children, two dogs and a turtle and had a grand time. That trip’s log became the backbone of my first national magazine article in Boating.

A trip I’d like to take would involve going by boat from Hudson, Wisconsin to Duluth, Minnesota. You can drive it in around three hours. I pitched the idea to Franc Shor, the editor of the National Geographic at the time. His response: “There’s nothing there.”  I interpreted that as “Kid, take the trip and show us what you have.” In fact, there is plenty there, including major cities on the way like Chicago, Milwaukee, St.Louis and towns on the Ohio River, as well as Henry Ford’s copper mines and other historical places in more remote areas. I think it would have taken about three years to produce the contents of a decent book, with photography and descriptions. As I said earlier, life interferes. I didn’t have the three years to be apart from family and from earnings and after awhile I didn’t have the boat either. I was slow to understand that I couldn’t afford a 34 foot yacht, even an old one like Dilly IV. By now she’s probably in boat heaven–or wherever old boats go when they die.

Tonight’s WPCA-FM story broadcast was Shall We Dance? a tale of the insides of a  flamenco dance company. My flamenco dance friends tell me that this story “nailed it”, including the dance settings, the steps involved and the troupe dynamics. There are personality dynamics too and they are the story. The story is set in the Wilshire Ebell Theater in Los Angeles, a real place, one of the venerable performance spaces in the city. I was there often for a variety of artistic performances that included flamenco dance troupes and outstanding guitarists. Today, those events seem like another lifetime. Perhaps you can identify that feeling with long-ago events in your lifetime.  You will find Shall We Dance in The Second Gathering of The Break Time Stories paperback and as an ebook, Yes, More Break Time Stories.

I spent a bit of time today with Kenneth Larson, whose shop in downtown Luck carries all of my books. Larson is an excellent craftsman, especially when it comes to furniture. He’s also an experienced sailor with yachts in the Seattle area and up in the Apostle Islands. And his shop is a treasure trove of upscale items. I like the place and besides, he sells my books! Kenneth Larson, in downtown Luck, is a “destination” shop, a rarity in northern Wisconsin and especially in a small town like Luck. It’s worth a visit.

I will be reading two of my short stories at the Frederic, Wisconsin Public Library on Saturday, September 6, 2025 at 10 a.m. I appreciate Head Librarian Heather Marek for making this appearance possible.

Also, for people in and around the Luck, WI area where I live, my books are available in Luck’s Kenneth Larson shop (a place with great quality merchandise), Amery’s Bowman Collective, Pure & Simple on Highway 8 near the Highway 8/Amery roundabout, Polk County’s Information Center, and the pharmacy/gift shops of St.Croix Health. Your favorite bookstore can get my books for you and you can find them on Amazon.com and as e-books on Amazon. Marina’s Gretel and Andy, God’s Gift; The Lives of Two Seeing Eye Dogs also may be found on Amazon.

It was June, 2008 and the occasion of my first retirement. We 12 retirees at the Wisconsin Annual Conference were each given 3 minutes to address our audience of mostly new clergy. I was the only person to stick to our three minute limit. Here’s what I said:

“First, because the church gives you the privilege of holding in your hands the spiritual lives of a group of people, the church has a claim on you. If it says you must attend school or training, you must do that. If the Bishop says you must move, you must move. You have promised to do that when you came in and if you can’t keep your promises, then go do something else, something you can do. Sell toasters or something.

“Second, if you hear yourself say the words ‘My Ministry” more than once a year, take a good look in the mirror. This is not about you. It’s about GOD and THEM.

“Third, show up. Show up physically, psychologically, and emotionally. Someone told me years ago that ministry happens during the interruptions. When someone came into my office, they were there for a reason, even if they didn’t know the real reason themselves, so I got up from behind the desk–so my eyes would not stray to papers on the desk and signal to the visitor that the papers were more important than they were–and I came around to a chair opposite the visitor with a small table between us. I worked to be fully present. The paperwork will get done; that’s the nice thing about God’s economy.

“I wish all of you the best of God’s blessing in your coming years of ministry.”

All these years later, I still think those thoughts are valid. God blessed–and continues to bless–what I do in the name of God.