Culture | Jan. 2024
O’ER THE PEN
By Bill McLean
ILLUSTRATION BY BARRY BLITT
We asked Lake Bluff author/speaker/possibility thinker Kathryn Haydon—who grew up in Wilmette and Wheaton and majored in Spanish and Latin American Literature at Northwestern University—to look back at 2023 with one eye and look ahead to 2024 with the other. We then let her focus, with both eyes, on things in the present. Haydon’s latest book, Unsalted Blue Sunrise: Poems of Lake Michigan (Prairie Cloud Press), was released last June.
UNFORGETTABLE MOMENTS IN 2023? Sharing my finished collection with audiences, after a year of walking to Lake Michigan to write poems. I am grateful for the ripple effect of inspiration this book continues to generate in readers.
CAN’T WAIT TO DO WHAT IN 2024? Prairies have long fascinated me. I look forward to leading “Wintering on the Prairie,” a series of four nature immersion writing workshops, with Lake Forest Open Lands (lfola.org/wintering-prairie).
THE WORD THAT BEST DESCRIBES
LAKE MICHIGAN? Sublime.
YOU GET TO EAT LUNCH WITH ONE OF YOUR FAVORITE AUTHORS, THE POET WHOSE WORK MOVED YOU THE MOST, AND ANYONE FROM LAKE BLUFF. NAME YOUR TABLE MATES. Ann Patchett, the writer who runs her own bookshop in Nashville; Jane Hirshfield (The Asking, 2023), a contemporary favorite poet; and Joyce Foster, whose nature quote easel is one of the delightful features of Lake Bluff.
THE BEST WAY TO FIND
ONE’S INNER CREATIVITY? First, identify all of your positive qualities such as originality, perceptivity, and humor. Then, strive to deliberately
exercise these in your daily life.
THE LAST TIME YOUR TEENAGE SON, AERIAL PHOTOGRAPHER CJ, AWED YOU? He has such a keen eye. Last spring, he captured Lake Michigan in the soft, early light of the morning. The photo hangs in my home and it takes my breath away each time I look at it.
