Random Posts

A View from Montreal Pier: The R/V Blue Heron

Not long after I disembarked from the research vessel Blue Heron in June, it was announced that a new form of life had been discovered inside the propeller shaft. A life form, hidden inside the extreme environment of the engine, cold and dark — it feels like how the Venom movies started. It feels maybe a little Lovecraftian, maybe, this shapeless life form, in the black goo.

My colleagues laugh at me for thinking in such melodramatic terms. But really, ever since that ride, I just keep learning how cripplingly limited my understanding of Lake Superior, and of our relationship to it, really was. I’m still trying to wrap my brain around it.

Finding the Blue Heron

The Blue Heron is docked in Superior on Montreal Pier, a research facility maintained by the University of Wisconsin-Superior. The site itself is a weird mishmash of history. The Montreal Pier, Quebec Pier and Allouez Bay are all a reminder of the deep affect French Jesuits and fur traders had on the Superior region.

By the early twentieth century, these piers were incredible sites of commerce. Superior was in competition with the Minneapolis area as the center of wheat and grain production, and several major companies built grain elevators and mills on the piers — Lake Superior Mills, Anchor, Listman, Cargill, and Belt Line. Most of these structures were destroyed in fires.

Ripped in Toronto in 2000

[Editor’s note: For this week’s essay we’ve once again pulled out a relic from the archive of Slim Goodbuzz, who served as Duluth’s “booze connoisseur” from 1999 to 2009. Twenty-five years ago the Sultan of Sot hit the road for a visit to Toronto, Canada, and composed this article for the July 12, 2000 edition of the Ripsaw newspaper.]

“Nobody helps you with your cup
No one could ever fill it up.”
—The Sadies

Prelude: Detroit Metro

It was 11:15 a.m. and I was sitting in one of the many cafes at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport, waiting for my connecting flight to Toronto. Everybody else drank coffee and ate pastries. My flight had been delayed two hours. I needed whiskey.

The Price is Right was on the TV above the espresso machine. Bob Barker put his arm around a gaunt middle-aged woman while they watched a cardboard mountain climber ascend a cardboard mountain, singing:

Laaa dee doody
Laaa dee doody
Laaa dee doody dooooo …

PDD Shop Talk: The Usual Spiel

(Enter the amount of your choice.)

Keeping Duluth’s Duluthiest website running with new content every day has been an ongoing financial challenge for 22 years, but Perfect Duluth Day is still here, still free to read and still kicking out the daily goods. Advertising revenue keeps the operation going, but donations help us do more and do it better.

That’s why we occasionally toss up a post like this one to remind everyone that donations are a big help.

One more contribution to the literary history of Duluth

My students were busy over the past two years. Tales of Migration is the second of their book projects, a collection of migration tales that include submissions from the students, from Duluth, and from around the world.

I am looking for themes for the spring 2026 project. I am oscillating between calling for an anthology, like this, or for calling for chapbooks and short essays and comics that could be published by my students, chapbook style.

North Country Cadence in the literary history of the Duluth

For some reason, the Duluth Public Library decided to deaccession some of its reference Minnesota collection.

Duluth in the novel ‘The Horn’

John Clellon Holmes’ 1953 beat jazz novel The Horn contains a couple references to Duluth. In the 1988 edition by Thunder’s Mouth Press, the first mention occurs on page 131. I cite it below with a couple paragraphs for context, which make it clear “Duluth” is used synonymously with “some out-of-the-way city on the road.”

Selective Focus: Reverie with Kathryne Ford

Utilizing a variety of different mediums, including mirrors, projection, paint and a mold made for her actual teeth, Kathryne Ford curated “Reverie,” an installation exploring “thoughts and visions that rattle through my mind at 2 a.m.” The exhibit, containing images and objects nostalgic to childhood, are intended to make the audience feel both “lost and found,” said Ford, as “surreal moments are in a real medium.” To learn more about the Reverie art installation, open at Prøve Art Gallery through June 21, check out the interview with Ford below.

Rag Mag: More Duluth Literary History Hunting

This post, also looking for resources and connections for my fall 2025 course in Minnesota Writers, has two asks.

‘Cottage Core’ tea at the Loch

I recently attended an afternoon tea at the Loch. It was a joyful experience.

PDD Quiz: Father’s Day Edition

Celebrate Father’s Day with a dad-adjacent PDD quiz!

A PDD quiz reviewing headlines from June 2025 will be published on June 29. Please submit question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by June 24.

Discovering Colleen Baldrica’s ‘Tree Spirited Woman’

In “Minnesota Writers Spotlight on Colleen Baldrica,” Kaelyn Hvidsten writes about discovering Baldrica’s Tree Spirited Woman tucked away in a Canal Park art shop.

Writing Communities: The Writing Group at Sara’s Table

Calyx Books was a significant creative force in shaping poetic life in Duluth. These two pages, from a Calyx Press book discussed in the Duluth Budgeteer, are a kind of evidence of that impact, creating and manifesting literary community.

Minnesota Authors: Reading Like a Writer (Margaret D. Kennedy and Winnifred Elliott)

This Fall, I’m teaching Minnesota Authors: Reading Like a Writer (a subtitle I stole from my colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Superior). The goal of the class is to read like a writer, which is to say to be less interested in “what a text means” (that’s reading like a reader), but instead “how a text works” (that’s reading like a writer).

We also look at the mechanics of writing and publishing. The works of Michael Fedo are a gift in this. He has written extensively about being a writer.

The Buckthorn Crusader of Lakeview Park

The eastern stretches of Lakeview Park with an abundant mature buckthorn jungle.

After an hour or two of relentlessly battling buckthorn, you may sit to rest and close your eyes for a moment. If you do this, you’re likely to see pokey spear-like shapes in your closed-eye vision.

In my eight-year quest to de-buckthorn a particular unknown Duluth park, I have come to know this particular plant quite well. And in my obsessive need to destroy it, I believe it has come to know me. I even joined a city-organized and backed volunteer group dedicated to destroying every last seed and stem of non-native explosive-growth monster plants.

Selective Focus: Run, Smelt, Run! Parade 2025

Select Instagram images from Magic Smelt Puppet Troupe‘s annual smelt-themed second-line parade.