I saw this photo and story during my morning reading last week, and thought, “I know that stretch of road.” I write about it and the surrounding area in the second prose section of A Northern Spring. The flat we rented is just through this intersection, to the right—across the street from The Sunflower. This is the road I walked early every morning, before anybody else was up, to get coffee and pastries for the crew from a nearby Caffe Nero. I write about how it felt like I’d become a regular at both the Nero and The Sunflower, where we got on especially well with the guy running the pizza oven (a wood burner in the beer garden), who gave us recommendations for the next leg of our trip—to the Antrim Coast, Bushmills, and Derry—and made us bespoke pizzas with what ingredients were available (the brand-new and encroaching pandemic was already affecting supply chains).

I remember this stretch well: just behind a person holding a camera to take this shot, somebody had spray-painted, quite largely, the initials KAT, which I figured were the initials of somebody’s name. I started to see that this KAT character got around and was tagging up lots of places. Then one of our guides in Belfast, Damien, schooled us on sectarian graffiti. That KAT means “Kill All Taigs” and that “Taigs” is a derogatory term Protestants use for Catholics gave my morning walks a different tone.

On the street by the Nero is a makeshift and fading memorial, like the roadside memorials we see here where people have died in wrecks, commemorating two (maybe it was three) men killed there longish ago—during the Troubles—by an IRA bomb. A couple days later on a walking tour in Derry our guide Gleann would note that we were standing near where Lyra McKee had been murdered less than a year ago by a New IRA gunman in a flash of sectarian violence.

The public art in the North can be way-to-one-side moving or way-to-the-other-side menacing. A walk down this stretch of road would have a new and better tone and flavor with this mural there. The peace in the North is imperfect as hell, but it’s a grand imperfection. Here’s to it lasting, and spreading.

PHOTO: Screenshot from the Belfast Telegraph announcing a memorial mural for Lyra McKee.

Since brunch this past Sunday, I’ve been wondering, “Is this at all how Alexis De Tocqueville felt? Or, less famously, Dervla Murphy? Did they both think like I’m thinking—what will they think?”

Tocqueville wrote in Democracy In America for, at least in part, a French audience, and for sure (I’m reading it now) for a not-American audience. Murphy wrote (among many things she wrote) A Place Apart about Northern Ireland for audiences not in the North.

In A Northern Spring, a good three-quarters of the prose and a healthy dose of the poetry is me writing about the North of Ireland for an American audience. And at brunch this past Sunday I did a frightening thing: I got two advance copies of A Northern Spring into the hands of a couple of acquaintances from the North—Réamonn and Fergal—back in Minneapolis for more cultural exchange (I first met them about this time last year, culturally exchanging).

I didn’t read Murphy’s book till this spring—well after my book was finished—but what I do is akin to what she did. If she invented this genre, I’m following suit. Did she wonder about what those in the North would think? Did Tocqueville wonder about what we would think? I know I do—very much so. I want them (Réamonn, Fergal, the rest) to find my take candid, honest, useful, and as duly generous as I found them to be. And that I may inadvertently not be what I hope I’ve been? Tom Petty was right: “the waiting [to hear what they think] is the hardest part.”

SIDEBAR: Tocqueville was a student at The Fabert School in Metz, France, from 1817-1823, from the ages of 12-18. My great, great grandfather Matthew Lewis was born in Metz in 1825. The population at the time was about 42,000. I wonder if the young Tocqueville ever happened upon the infant Lewis?

PHOTOS: Clockwise from upper left: Bobby Sands mural on the side of Sinn Fein office headquarters, Belfast; Europa Hotel, Belfast, known as "the most bombed hotel in the world" for the 36 bomb attacks there during the Troubles; a Troubles mural in the Bogside, Derry, site of the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre;  another Bogside mural depicting the fourteen killed by British Parachute Regiment soldiers on Bloody Sunday; painting of poet Seamus Heaney in Bittles Bar, Belfast; Troubles mural in Bittles; Derry Girls mural, Derry; Dennis's Wee Shop from Derry Girls, Bogside, Derry; "YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE DERRY" sign, Bogside.

Remember the spring of 2020? The COVID spring? Well, in A Northern Spring I've captured a version of it in roughly 35,000 words: some prose, some poetry—so a hybrid capturing, a kind of memoir.

This version of that spring we'll never forget begins in Derry, in the North of Ireland, where, among other things, I was doing research on the Troubles for a study-abroad class I've created that uses the Troubles as a lens through which to better see and respond in art to the violences, fractures, and divisions in the US. While I was there, the then US president announced a vague travel ban for "everybody in Europe."

In four sections I call preludes spaced throughout the book, I write about being abroad and not being sure we'd be able to make it home as a pandemic was gripping the world, then not being sure we wanted to return to where the pandemic seemed a whole lot worse. The writing in these four sections is packaged in the form of text messages to an unnamed P from an unnamed MM that receive no replies—so text messages into a kind of void, based on the IRL fact that I didn't have an international travel plan for my phone so wasn't receiving any messages while abroad (they all came in at once when I landed back home). In between these preludes are poems about life at the start of the COVID pandemic, often in conversations with writing from pandemics of the past, or the one we got handed,  or just texts that in light of the new realities of a pandemic seemed to gain significance.

I am one of those for whom the pandemic was a productive period. I wrote the book in real time, completing it in the spring of 2020. The book's ending, a section called "Minneapolis: The Last Week of May 2020," found me. There I write about the murder of George Floyd in South Minneapolis, where I live, and all the all that began to transpire locally in the wake of that.

There is a kind of coming full circle where the local becomes global when a mural in Belfast and a vigil in Derry—the last two places I'd experienced "normal" life before the COVID lockdown—honor/commemorate/bring attention to the murder of Floyd by members of the MPD.

So, evacuation, lockdown, uprising: these 35,000 or so words, with a real and true narrative arc, are my capturing of a confluence of events and circumstances over roughly two and a half months that are both peculiar to me and not peculiar to me at all, but shared by many (is it too much to say "all of us"?).

I've dedicated the book to Minneapolis, a city I fell in love with and decided I wanted to live in roughly 30 years ago on a school trip to see a Shakespeare play at the old Guthrie Theater, a city I eventually made my way to—and my life in—about twenty years ago. I still love it here but the love, as you'd expect, is a lot more complex than when it began.

PHOTOS: Clockwise from upper left: The lovely Sunflower Pub, across the street from our rental during our first say in Belfast; the street on which we would eventually locate—after passing it several times and missing it—the sought-after Duke of York; a snug in The Crown Liquor Saloon, which may or may not be the one featured in Anthony Bourdain's trip to Belfast for season 3, episode1 of No Reservations; The Garrick Bar, our first stop in country after dropping our bags at the rental flat, featuring me hungry and waiting for food (the libations arrived first); the view of Belfast from a window in our rental. All photos taken before the declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic, and so are the last depictions of a prior and now forever gone normalcy.

The small town bar and grill is a genre I know well. I may even be something of a connoisseur. So: Rosie Peters and company are running one of the best of the best in Brookside Bar & Grill. I was fortunate to be on the bill at Rosie’s inaugural reading event last night with Brian Baumgart, Scott E. Vetsch, and Lynette Reini-Grandell. Venus DeMars followed with a short musical set.

I've been to the Brookside before, which I thought was the case but then knew was the case once I pulled off the main road into Marine on St. Croix. My wife and I and a handful to a couple handfuls of friends used to camp every year a bit farther north, on the banks of the St. Croix. For years we camped on the Minnesota side and then switched to the Wisconsin side, where the group sites are in the remotest part of the campground (if you're going, these Wisconsin sites get my five-star rating). During the days, we'd drive around the area and hit up small-town bars and grills, the Brookside being one of many in the area, one of many we enjoyed. During a dry year on one of the those trips, when the river seemed low and slow—you could walk three-quarters of the way acroos starting from the Minnesota side on a sandbar with your head and shoulders above water—I and my brother decided we were good enough swimmers to get across the rest of it, where where the channel deepened. Long story short: It was a dumb idea. We almost drowned. Once we made it to the Wisconsin side, we just started walking toward the camps along whatever trails we could find. We hoped our camping party would get in a vehicle and come find us. Which they did. But we'd put in a lot of sore, barefoot mileage before they got to us.

I debuted my small town bar and grill reading set—light on the commentary, heavy on the shorter, punchier poems—which needs some tweaking. I read mostly from my reading copy of the book, the pages marked with colored tabs, the colors indicating sorts of poems I may or may not want to include, depending on how the audience is feeling. It can be hard to hear in bar readings with some people there just to eat or drink and not to listen to poetry. It can be hard to hear yourself and pay attention to what you're doing. All in all, it was typical in that regard, although a lot of people who seemed at the start to be there to drink and socialize it turns out were interested in the reading, but a little shy about it, this being the first time such a thing has occurred at Brookside.

Rosie is a great writer herself. She was a mentor for the Write Like Us program awhile back and visited my Into to Creative Writing class. She was on fire and the class loved her. It felt good to return the favor and to make the long drive that Rosie makes whenever she does events in the Twin Cities.

Rosie says the readings will be a monthly thing. Lots of live music on weekends, too. The Guinness and walleye fingers were perfect pub grub. Brookside in Marine on St. Croix: It’s worth a trip. It’s worth becoming a kind of regular. If you know Rosie at all, you know that the music and lit and Guinness come with lots of love, inclusivity, and generous and free helpings of hugs. See you there.

PHOTO: The inimitable Rosie Peters at the mic, launching the Brookside reading series.

If I were HOF lefty Bert Blyleven, I’d circle Geoff Herbach, Candace Black, Nick Healy, Kevin Langton, Edward Micus, Tina Gross, Michael Torres, Nate Leboutillier, Angie Mauch, fellow readers Jose Felipe Ozuna, Ailee Slater, star of the show the eminent Richard Robbins, and Poor Farm Studios hosts Brian Frink and Wilbur Neushwander-Frink. They are all pictured in one or another of the photos here from our reading last night, just outside of the city limits of Mankato, Minn., organized by Rick to launch his new (and amazing) book, The Oratory of Souls (Lynx House Press).

It was cold, as it still gets here in April. I wore goose down for the outdoor portions of the event. I read from A Northern Spring in the same, still warming up from being outside. The snow to come was a few hours from arriving. I met a lot of others pictured here whose names I don't recall, but thanks and thanks again to all who come out in the blustery weather to hear people read their poetry and prose. My reading went, finally, according to plan. Not only that, it felt organic—not like following a plan at all.

Brian built a wood-burning outdoor brick pizza oven in the yard of the Poor Farm Studios, and Rick supplied wine, beer, and soft drinks. Brian made me an anchovy, Kalamata, and carmelized onion pie. It’s said to be Picasso’s favorite. I have been to the Picasso museum in Paris. There isn’t a lot one wants to have in common with Pablo as presented there. But a taste in za? I’ll take that.

Rick had bios printed out and asked each of us to introduce the reader that followed us. I was the penultimate reader and was slated to introduce Rick, former teacher, former mentor, fellow struggling poet, forever friend. He said I didn't have to follow the script if I didn't want to. I didn't want to. I spoke contemporaneously. Praising Rick is an easy thing do.

IMAGES: Upper left: short video of April (no shit) in Minnesota. Upper right: Under the tent and around the the fire and in blankets as we enjoy Brian's pizzas and Rick's libations at the Poor Farm Studios. Lower right: a packed-to-the-gills reading space inside the Poor Farm Studios.