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Kippis! A Literary Journal Table of Contents W elcome from the Editors Beth L. Virtanen & G.K. Wuori i About the Cover Art C. Ryan Pierce iii Kippis! Contest Winners First Place Kelly Nelson 1 First Trip as a Widow

Blood Loss Coming Back

Second Place Gary V. Anderson 3 Ruoantähteet Third Place Marlene Mattila Stoehr 4 The Bells of Karstula Regular Submissions A Poem Elaine Moe 7 Learning the Language Nonfiction JoEllyn Belka 9 What We Talked About (Photos by JoEllyn Belka) Two Poems Fran Wiideman 14 Lucky Chicks Nonfiction Helena Halme 16 Leopard Print Isn’t for Me Two Poems Michael King 18 Winter Heilongjiang Train Late Mourning

Excerpts from A Kalevala for Eva Susanna Brougham 19 The Meeting The Singer Fiction Helena Halme 22 The Sofa Two Poems Jane Piirto 25 Trio At the Park Cemetery One Poem Kaarina Brooks 27 Northern Lights Fiction Terri Martin 28 My Name’s Not Martha Nonfiction Lauri Anderson 34 First You’re There and Then You’re Not Nonfiction Eero Sorila 39 Translator, Sirpa Kaukinen

The Fate of a Beret in Florida Our Sponsors

Helena Halme, The Englishman 41

Arlene Sundquist Empie 42

Journal of Finnish Studies 42

Ernest Korpela and Liola Korpela for Finn 42

Diane Dettmann 43

Ontonagon County Rural Electrification Association 43

Finlandia University 44

Finlandia Foundation National 44 A Bit about the Finnish North American Literature Association 45

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Welcome from the Editors

This issue represents an important

milestone for Kippis! and for our parent organization, the Finnish North American Literature Association, which has worked from its inception to share work that is uniquely Finnish and/or multicultural and which provides insight into a diverse view of our world community. We offer this issue both in print as a commemorative FinnFest 2013 edition and online as the enduring representation of our ongoing literary aspirations.

In that spirit, it is our pleasure to introduce the winners of this fifth annual Kippis! contest in our sixth volume of the journal. Taking first place is Kelly Nelson for her two poems, “First Trip as a Widow” and “Blood Loss.” Gary V. Anderson takes second place for his poem, “Ruoantähteet,” and Marlene Mattila Stoehr takes third place with her short story, “The Bells of Karstula.” Each of these provides an insight unique to a particular experience, one that speaks to our core human identity.

It is also our pleasure to be able to reproduce in print for this issue the cover work by noted American artist C. Ryan Pierce. His work is available at http://www.cryanpierceartworks.com/. Pierce specializes in work celebrating figure studies and also the natural world. He has generously shared his work Wolves for this issue, Volume 6 No.1, a wildlife study inspired by the Alaskan outdoors. The printing of the work on our cover is facilitated by Brandon Hirvi who works as a

Project Manager for Abhe and Svboda, in Honolulu, Hawaii, and is a partner in the company of Superior Consulting and Inspection Services of Kerrville, Texas.

The year 2013 marks our tenth year in the project that became the Finnish North American Literature Association. Although I formally began the organization two years later when I applied for and received a grant from the Finlandia Foundation National which allowed me to work more diligently on collecting research for the bibliographic record on the FinNALA website, that work eventually gave birth to this project that is FinNALA with its publications, Kippis! and The FinNALA Newsletter, and our literary contest and presence at Finnish-themed events, such as FinnFest and FinnGrandFest. In the process of our growth, I started with an idea and a team of one, but soon we became a group that wished to share their interest in and love of Finnish and Finnish-North American literary works. Soon, we grew to include two overlapping publications teams as Terri Martin now heads up the FinNALA Newsletter from Upper Michigan, and G.K. Wuori works with me on Kippis!, from Illinois and Arkansas, respectively, with both editorial groups supported by Sirpa Kaukinen who brings her Finnish language expertise to bear on all our publications in addition to turning her keen editorial eye to ensuring the overall quality of all our literary projects.

We have also added our presence to FaceBook and to the internet by migrating

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from print-only versions of Kippis! and an emailed pdf version of the Newsletter to fully online versions which fostered broader dissemination and access across the globe. Regular submissions come to us from the Middle East, the Far East, Europe and North America because of our broadened presence, and our network of Finnophiles is no longer limited to a European or North-American Finnish experience and begins to reflect the global nature of our tastes and experiences.

As we have grown and broadened our reach, we have come to include a global perspective on Finnishness and Finnish-hyphenated identity that is fluid and flexible,

representative of our ability to reflect on experiences that begin to question what it means to be local or of a particular space, especially as our literary and personal spaces become increasingly virtual and, therefore, increasingly fluid. We like to see the experience of China cheek by jowl with the experience of Saudi Arabia or Thailand, juxtaposed with the experience of Canada, Finland, and the United States through the eyes of the person who did not originate from any of those places, for we are now global in our view as we seek to straddle the distances and differences that divide and/or connect us.

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Cover Art for Kippis! Volume 6, Number 1

The cover art, “Wolves” is provided by noted American artist C. Ryan Pierce. The color original in Acrylic/Oil Pastel on canvas is 28” by 22” and is available along with other C. Ryan Pierce original works and high-quality prints at cryanpierceartworks.com.

Artist’s Statement: The intention of my artwork is for it to be pleasing to look at from a distance and to entice the viewer to take a closer look to see how it was made or to guess the materials used. How it’s made, that's the whole point. It’s the process we as artists should be enjoying. When viewers enjoy the result, it’s a bonus. My process has evolved into a dance: I get into a zone, and it's just like I'm dancing with the materials. I feel like my subtle vibrating scribbles continue to dance on the canvas for the viewers.

Artist’s Bio: I studied Fine Art at Eastern Michigan University and Henry Ford Community College, and I earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Northern Michigan University (1998). My first concentration was drawing, and my passion was figure studies. Forcing myself to paint, but still incorporating my drawing techniques, and falling in love with the nature around me has brought me to the dance I create today.

Kippis! A Literary Journal, Volume 6, No. 1, Summer 2013 1

First Place

Three Poems by Kelly Nelson First Trip as a Widow The name tequila, our guide tells us, can only be given to drinks made from

hearts of blue agave grown in this one region, hearts like giant pineapples that weigh more than a newborn foal, hearts from this place only. Like Champagne, someone says. Like me, I think, known by the name a man gave me when we hadn’t been anywhere besides our hometown. Here, the word for without is sin—I am sin a lover, sin a translator, sin a place to take my name from. I’ve become unmoored, every moment feeling that I don’t belong and yet all the crosses point in the same four directions, angels cast the same trembling shadows. --

Blood Loss There will be no commotion in this house. If Arvid again drinks away the butter money, I will say nothing. We have all lost many things—no amount of noise will bring them back. Papa, only forty two when he died and me just seventeen. The deep woods I deserted. My second born son. The man I came here to marry. The curer will be here soon. We will go together into the sauna where she will make small cuts in my thickening ankles and my blood will darken this unforgiving ground in a place I cannot call home. --

2 Kippis! A Literary Journal, Volume 6, No. 1, Summer 2013

Coming Back

What I saw was the cashier walking away with my bag of yellow-red plums. Follow her? Stay? Walk out of this Helsinki market empty handed and hungry? On the boat over from Stockholm my mother’s first language crackled through the speakers. The captain did not say milk or mother, father or butter, he did not

say I love you—the only Finnish words my mother taught me. Our people were not city people. They felled trees in forests east of Oulu, shoved the trunks

into icy rivers. What would they know of these city streets? What did I know of finding my way my first afternoon in Helsinki? The cashier, blonde like the daughter I imagined I’d have, returns the plums weighed, the bag labeled. She rings in the price. “Sorry,” I say with a weak smile. She replies in precise English: “Tourists do not know.” I am a tourist in my grandmother’s land not knowing the name of a single lake, the tracks a brown bear makes, how to say hello and goodbye. --

Kelly Nelson is fourth generation Finnish and Norwegian American. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Paddlefish, Tar River, Mixed Fruit, Eclectica, Found Poetry Review and Finnish American Reporter, among others. Last summer she was a Visiting Artist at the Regional Cultural Center in New York Mills, Minnesota where her mother and grandfather were born and raised. This summer she is presenting a poetry workshop at FinnFest in Hancock, Michigan. She lives in Tempe, Arizona, teaches Interdisciplinary Studies at Arizona State University and serves on her city’s Municipal Arts Commission.


Second Place

One Poem by Gary V. Anderson Ruoantähteet Finnish for leftovers, scraps If I were to write another poem, I would talk about substitutes - golf courses for savannahs, sport for war, stem cells to repair broken hearts. I would paint over tough times, but not that rough-water trip to Rocky

Point, with Grandpa, salvaging lumber, chasing seagulls. The least you need to know as I age - don’t talk about me in past tense, don’t bring up the solace of winter

solstice, or the idea that testes and ovaries shrink with lower temperatures and are digested in birds as they migrate. That kind of talk makes me twitchy.

I’m looking forward to the risotto trinity, where I follow my mink trail, where all bad things are imagined away, where I remember a Sunday morning, look down the hill, see my old man next to the outhouse - after a direct hit from our well-aimed alder block - Sears catalog in one hand, Daily Astorian in the other, logger pants at his ankles, screaming like Charles Bukowski. I have rituals to prepare for what comes next: get ready for the real work, think longer, say less, pour a dram of single malt, meditate. --

Gary V. Anderson was raised along the Columbia River. He has been moderator for spoken word events at Finnish American Folk Festivals in Naselle, Washington and Finn Fest USA in Astoria, Oregon.

His poems have been published in Kippis!, a Literary Journal of the Finnish North American Literature Association, FinNALA Newsletter and Curio Poetry, New York. He has been featured in performances in Deep River and Naselle, Washington and on Lyle Haataja’s Scandinavian Hour radio show in Astoria, Oregon as part of the Finnish-American Festival. He has published two books, My Finnish Soul and Bunchgrass and Buttercups.


Third Place

A Short Story by Marlene Mattila Stoehr

The Bells of Karstula

Grieving in silence among strangers, my sorrow mirrored the gloom of the approaching evening. I was scarcely aware of the passing landscape as the bus traveled through the wooded countryside that bleak October afternoon of 1953. Five months earlier I had arrived by ship in the bustling, flower-filled harbor market of Helsinki, Finland, lugging a suitcase and a bulging leather shoulder bag that cradled a Finnish/English dictionary, a camera with film and flashbulbs for my entire stay, my passport and immunization record. One of four exchange program delegates, I would share the lives of four farm families that summer and fall. I received personal travel time at the end of the home stays, and on a happier day chose to visit my immigrant-grandmother’s hometown, to stay for two nights at the home of Eino Palovesi, a member of the Finnish Parliament who lived nearby. By October the sun, so bright in June, was a colorless orb low in the sky, foreshadowing the dark Nordic winter. The joyous day on which I had arrived contrasted sharply with the dreary, dismal days nearing my departure. Home seemed near; my leave of Finland was underway, yet home seemed unbearably distant. A week ago I had received a troubling message from my sister. My grandmother,

who lived with my parents, was in failing health. The doctor caring for her told the family, “You must write to Marlene and tell her that Grandma will not be here when she gets home.” Tragically, I then received a telegram bearing these words: Johnny Killed. Car accident. Finish your trip. Dad. Johnny was my oldest brother. Unexpectedly losing a brother only nine years older than I caused grief such as I had never imagined. Grandma’s death would be more in keeping with the natural order of things. I did not know that as my sister’s letter reached me a letter I had written home arrived in Minnesota. My sister read it, then went into my grandmother’s bedroom and said quietly, “Marlene is going to visit Karstula.” Grandma, too weak to speak, must have understood that news, for she turned in her bed and, alone with her thoughts, stared silently at the wall. My troubled reflections were interrupted when the bus driver announced a brief coffee stop at Karstula. With scarcely another person around the café that served as the bus station, I walked across the parking lot and up the sloping street toward the ocher, orthodox-style church. Its separate bell tower, silhouetted in fading light of the shortened autumn days, dominated the highest point in town.


As I drew near, a melodic sound met me, the pealing of church bells. I knew, from a magazine article, that the bells of this church were prized for their superb quality. I glanced at my watch. Close to the hour, I assumed it was the usual time for the bells to ring. I could not know the significance of the event then, but I knew I would remember this beautiful tone and carry that memory home. I turned from the church, walked back to board the bus, and mentally prepared for a draining evening ahead. A short distance from town I was dropped at my host’s home. The next afternoon Mr. Palovesi took me to visit the church; another man, perhaps the custodian, perhaps not, met us there. As we entered, I ran my hand lightly over the ornate brass hardware on the inner door. Reading my thoughts, the men volunteered that it was indeed the same handle my grandmother would have touched. Certain things had not changed, I realized. We entered the sanctuary and I moved about the church, seeking solace in the painting of Jesus in the fishing boat calming the waters, admiring the gilded circular canopy over the elevated pedestal pulpit, noting the sheen of the red velvet cushions around the semi-circular altar. I heard the men, neither of whom spoke English, conversing about the repairs taking place. Extensive restoration was underway, as the building was a century old that year. Our guide remarked that it was regrettable that the bells were not working so that I could hear them.

Puzzled, I blurted in Finnish, Mutta minä kuulin kellot!” “But I heard the bells!” Not understanding, he repeated that it was regrettable that the bells were not working. Again I insisted I had heard them the previous afternoon. My host, still believing I misunderstood, was about to explain again, when the guide asked what time I had heard the bells. Visibly moved, he related haltingly that the afternoon before he had sensed an urgency to try one last time to make a repair. He had gone to the church, climbed the ladder inside the tower, and rung the bells by hand just as I started toward the church. In the stunned silence that followed, each of us recognized an extraordinary happening. That evening a gathering in my honor was arranged at the church. There the story was told; how the bells, silent for years, rang during those few minutes a granddaughter from America walked toward her grandmother’s church. It is said that Finnish people do not show emotion readily, but that night many wept openly, hugging me and saying, “You are like a relative.” “It is as though your grandmother has come back.” I arrived home in November with this remarkable story to tell my grandmother who, from the day of my letter’s arrival, astounded her doctor and her family, and gained strength to live another six years. I gave an account of my exchange experiences to more than 200 audiences in schools and clubs throughout Minnesota under the auspices of the University of Minnesota, but never the story of the bells of Karstula. I told that story only in my

6 Kippis! A Literary Journal, Volume 6, No. 1, Summer 2013 parents’ home. On many weekend visits my father asked me to show my slides. The narrative of my church visit was what he wanted to hear again and again. One evening in the darkened dining room, I glanced at my grandmother. Sixty years later I yet see the tears

glistening in her eyes in the beam cast by my slide projector as we re-lived the miracle that brought the past into the present, the far and near together, the day the broken bells of Karstula rang. --

Traditions such as the sauna often appear in the writings of Marlene Mattila Stoehr, steeped from childhood in Finnish-American culture. Her grandparents emigrated first to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, then to Minnesota, in the late 1880s. Her career includes elementary teaching and service with the Agricultural Extension Service, University of Minnesota. Retired in Shoreview, Minn., she has been published in The Talking Stick, Volumes 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22; Otter Tail Review, Volume Three; County Lines, a League of Minnesota Poets publication; and in the 2012 on-line journal of Kippis!


A Poem

by Elaine Moe Learning the Language

Fitchburg, Massachusetts, 1924, the hands of French, Italian, Polish, Lithuanian, Finn, at work in mills making paper for newspapers printed in a language these men don’t read. English is handed to me by the ice man, neighborhood kids, landlady, schoolteacher. A gift always being unwrapped. Funny that my Finnish father can’t seem to open it. I bring home jump-rope rhymes, marbles, books. Isӓ brings home mill wages. Ӓiti brings home mending she will do for the money, hand-me-downs she will make fit my brothers and me. I notice that my English means Ӓiti’s longing arms hold me less but her gaze holds me more. My gaze holds recess keepaway: a German girl’s brown winter hat snatched by Finnish hand, tossed to mittened Polish hand, back and forth to its eventual fall in slush, returned to the first grader who wails to the teacher that Aino did it. Teacher,

beacon of American English replies, “Well, if you know who did it, then why don’t you tell me?” “Aino did it.” Teacher does not find this funny. Funny to me, now that I know the language-- not a word of English just two years ago.

In time I learn a new withholding: the mill’s pension doesn’t cover TB or sanatoriums. I drive the parents, bring groceries, medicine, translate what the doctor says, read disappointment in eyes that look away, watch hope tossed like a hat. Isӓ passes, Ӓiti sells the house. On my lined face is written wonder, worry, what has been kept away. I think of my cousin Aune, her visiting from Finland never coming true, the gift of her triumphant, halting English in our sporadic phone conversations, “Ilena, so good to hear you. It was so long time.” “Yes,” I say, “I know.” --

Aino, Aune—Finnish: female names Ӓiti—Finnish: mother Isӓ —Finnish: father

8 Kippis! A Literary Journal, Volume 6, No. 1, Summer 2013 Elaine is a granddaughter of four Finnish immigrants. She is a lifelong resident of Massachusetts, an academic advisor at UMass Amherst by day, and otherwise a member of the Finnish Center at Saima Park, a gardener, craftsperson and occasional poet. Her favorite contemporary poets (also coincidentally of the Bay State) include Mary Oliver, Martín Espada and John Hodgen.


What We Talked About

by JoEllyn Belka

Adjusting his cap higher on his head in a gesture of, How do you do, much in the same manner we give ourselves a good brushing with our hands to our clothing when surprise company shows up, Carl Borne smiled a welcoming smile and asked if I would like to set a spell with him underneath the pine tree.

I agreed; but for only fifteen minutes.

He carried out an old wooden rung-back kitchen chair painted just a few times and had me sit.

We talked about the historical heat wave we were amidst; how it had affected the trees, the corn, wildlife, people, even the future. But also, how the heat had finally broken, providing a beautiful afternoon’s reprieve.

We talked about his farm, how he purchased and moved in to the Hyer farm when he was twenty one, along with his mother. His father died when he was one year old. How he has lived on this farm all his seventy years since. Living on a quiet dead end road.

I asked if he remembered any goings-on with the road, which pretty much could be a taken as a long driveway. He asked if I noticed the “bumps” on his driveway. I laughed saying, “Yes, yes I did.” I almost bottomed out my van on the way in. Back around 1973 he added three rather large bumps, now covered with a layer of low growing weeds, after a strange group of hoodlums, probably

drunk or high on drugs, maybe both, stopped by and were giving him trouble. As luck would have it, my Uncle Edwin stopped by to see when he wanted his hay cut. My uncle was an intimidating man built much like John Wayne, able to kick anyone halfway across the room with the toe-side of his size fourteen boot if they were being out of line. My uncle’s presence was enough to send the group away without incident. The bumps were then built as a warning for the possible stranger looking for trouble.

We swapped stories about Hilda Talley. We agreed she was a lady who would have probably done just fine living as a mountain woman. Carl said he stopped by her place once and watched her kill a trapped rabbit with the snap of the neck. I told him how Hilda would periodically walk a mile down the road to my grandma’s house. Hilda, brash and brazen, would ask Grandma to make an apple pie for her. Always the lady, Grandma never said no to anyone. Later, Grandma asked her how the pie was. Hilda’s response was always the same, “Oh, it was okay.”

We talked about the sun cast flowers: moss rose, coreopsis, the old-fashioned hollyhock, also chocolate mint and hyssop: a sweet unfamiliar scent of yesterday, dating back to the Bible.

We talked about lightning rods and balls affixed to the rooftop of his house, how the currents of electricity naturally

10 Kippis! A Literary Journal, Volume 6, No. 1, Summer 2013 run atop and under the ground, and how, when lightning would hit a structure during a storm, it would then hit the lightning rod, following the easiest path to ground and, thus, saving the house or building.

We talked about this day back in history: July 21st 1969. I asked if he knew what made today so special. Other than

being Saturday, he hadn’t a clue. Enlightening him, I said it was the day Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked on the moon forty-three years ago, and also that it was the day, forty-three years ago, that I was born. That, then, was the reason for my visit. It was my birthday and I wanted to share a piece of homemade blueberry cake.

We talked about his blue Ford

tractor and the toolshed where he kept his truck. I noticed how everything hung neatly in its own place. Rakes, shovels, wrenches, sledge hammers, all oiled and honed. You name it he had it, knowing each tool’s space. I suppose, not having a wife to ask where he last laid the hammer, he knew he had to be organized and had to keep track of his things.

We talked about the signs on his screen door which read, “Blo horn loud,” “Hard a hearing,” “Bee rit bak,” “Step maybe slipery,” “Mad dog inside.” His last dog died several years ago. He didn’t know why I would want to take a picture of him standing in back of his screen door. But he let me do it anyway.

We talked about how he found relief from the heat; spending time down


in his basement of natural stone walls with dirt floor. Later in the day, he would come up and actually sit outside in the shade. In the matter of self-preservation, Carl Borne knows what works.

We talked about the saucer of water sitting in the drive. How he left it for a pigeon that occasionally showed up, an oddly-colored black-purple iridescence. He believed it to be some sort of homing pigeon. I asked if it had a white head. He looked astonished, and said, “Yes.” Ironically I had a pigeon stop by my house to roost on a window ledge the week before. I noticed its unnatural white head. Carl’s pigeon – “our” pigeon – eventually showed up that day. We threw corn to it and called out to it. The bird seemed quite happy with himself as he strutted around proudly, coming stunningly close to our feet. Carl said the pigeon never got that close. He thought it was because the bird knew I was a lady and all.

He said nobody really visited him much. I saw him as lonely and felt sad about it.

I looked at his blue jeans, how his knees were neatly patched, methodically folded under, and evenly whip-stitched with thick white thread. He told me it was how his mother showed him to mend. His shirt collar, too, was darned with a differing but similar cotton fabric. All these years he has been a provider of everything to himself, even more so after his mother died.

We talked about Valentine, Francis and Pat Senger. When I was young, Pat would walk down to my family’s milkhouse in her flip-flops, straw brim hat

(left over from a plant) and Hawaiian style dress to use the farm telephone. They didn’t have one. She would get on, sometimes talking for hours. To give her fair warning she was on long enough, we would repeatedly pick up the phone and hang it up several times in a row.

I told him about the flood of 1993 and how friends, while the rain was pouring down, went to help the Sengers. Valentine was the brother of Francis, living in an old trailer behind Pat and Francis’ house. Neither dwelling had indoor plumbing. Vally was a drunkard and bachelor himself, who many times had soiled pants, and smelled of piss, alcohol and bad pipe tobacco when you visited. He was still a good man. Friends tied a piece of rope to his belt loop and fixed it to a pulley system to fish him out of his trailer, which was half full of water by the time they got to him. After the water receded, the trailer was later found a quarter mile away.

We found Pat and Francis sitting in their house. We told them they needed to leave. Not moving real fast, but with our insistence, they finally relented. But before Pat left, she did a turnabout, retreating, saying she forgot something. I went with her, only to see two things lying on the table in front of her: the Holy Bible and a pack of unfiltered cigarettes. Knowing her to be a devout Catholic, I thought for sure she was going back for the Bible to pray. Instead, she grabbed the cigarettes.

We talked about his family of sandhills I could make out in the hayfield far off, slowly moving, staying cool under the oak. Every so oft, a bellow could be

12 Kippis! A Literary Journal, Volume 6, No. 1, Summer 2013 heard from mama or papa as they called out to their young.

We talked about the two garden windmills. I said I was partial to the one that had a few blades missing. The blades, which were still viable, had been replaced

with wooden barnboard slats. It gave character. He pulled the windmills from the local dump, salvaging someone else’s garbage. The windmills, had lost their usefulness in someone else’s eyes, but Carl found value in them, even beauty.

We sat under that pine tree as the wind made music on his wind chimes. They’d been repaired many times with replacement parts: brass bells, spoons,

corrugated tin. They were a spinning family of whirligigs hanging within the branches.


We talked about the trap he was rigging when I came up the drive. It was to catch raccoons. I asked what he did with the coons after catching them. He took them for a ride a few miles away and released them. Doesn’t own a gun.

We talked tomatoes. He asked how the heirloom Italian tomato plants he gave me earlier this spring were faring. We both love tomatoes.

We talked about kid’s moral compasses nowadays; how a thirty year old neighbor kid from just down the road came in to Carl’s house while he was away and stole his checkbook. He wrote checks out of state. The bank called Carl and asked if he had taken any trips recently to Oklahoma and Tennessee.

We talked about the whippoorwill, the mourning dove, the killdeer. How the whippoorwill comes out calling at the edge of night, a call which gives them their appropriate name, and how it seemed the whippoorwill’s population was dwindling. We talked about how the mourning dove builds its nest out of sticks

and straw on bare ground, laying two eggs and hatching chicks with a face only a mother can love. How the killdeer builds its nest on preferably sandy ground, lays four spotted brown eggs and, once hatched, the babes are ready to go – little puffballs on toothpick legs.

We talked about how he never crossed any Wisconsin border. Never been anywhere but here. Never felt a need. I thought of what he missed; but to him, nothing.

I snapped pictures of him, of his place frozen in time from a bygone era. Carl is the real deal. Simple. Nothing fancy. Honest. A true gentle man. His face shined from a light within his soul. People and places like Carl and his farm, I knew, I might not witness again. Before long, both he and his place, too, will disappear without a whisper.

My fifteen minute stay was much longer than that, yet not nearly long enough. --

JoEllyn Belka considers herself, a self-taught writer though she believes much of her drive, inspiration and love of writing comes from the encouragement and gentle nudge from several close acquaintances and her maternal grandmother. She writes about her surroundings and the many things bringing her joy: artistry in the many forms of it, cooking, animals, and gardening. JoEllyn has been previously published in Kippis. And until JoEllyn gets her major break and recognition in writing, JoEllyn will continue beauticianing in her one station country beauty salon she established at she and her husband Mike’s residence in the Baraboo bluffs of Wisconsin.


Two Poems

by Fran Wiideman Lucky Lucky, taken from his dead mother’s den, in early spring a puppy to make you happy when you were just a kid. One fall day, your brother Benny, was working on a chainsaw when Lucky came tugging on Benny’s

sleeve to play, Benny, impatient to get the winter’s wood made, shoved Lucky away, and in that instant, Lucky showed us

all the wolf he really was--- we saw the danger in his narrowed yellow eyes. That winter, when all the wood was in, and snow was deep, a neighbor, more merciful than we, put a single bullet in Lucky’s head. And you cried--- Yet, Lucky still stands today, stuffed, enshrined, a bit scruffy, in your lakeshore camp. And every year, or two or three, you leave your city life, for a weekend

at the camp to talk, to toast your memories when Lucky was alive, and to cry for the life you see revealed in Lucky’s yellow marble eyes. Chicks One spring day, A batch of chicks arrived 25 of them, one day old. We put them in the brooder under light to keep them warm little balls of yellow fluff cheeping away. Then one night, through some crack in that old chicken shed a weasel found its way. In the morning, all alone, one ball of yellow fluff crouched against the brooder wall, silent in the light. --


Fran Wiideman, grew up in a small Finnish community in Upper Michigan. Her education includes AA, Suomi College, BS and MA, Northern Michigan University, and MA in TESL/Linguistics, Oklahoma State University where she served as managing editor of the Midland Review. She recently retired from Director of the ESL Program at Michigan Tech University. Her publications include, “Visiting Toivo,” a short story, in Above the Bridge Magazine and three poems in Kippis!.


Leopard Print Just Isn’t For Me

by Helena Halme

Kaarina, my grandmother, was the first fashionista I knew. She wasn't actually my grandmother, but my mother's aunt. Kaarina adopted my mother when she was seven years old, after her parents died in the aftermath of the war in 1946.

Both of my parents worked when my sister and I were little, and we were looked after by my step-grandmother. She was a formidable lady. She had two passions: food and fashion. She was born at the beginning of the twentieth century and never stopped talking about the food and clothing shortages during the war in Finland.

“There was no butter, no pretty fabrics, no new shoes. In the twenties I had a pair of beautiful light brown leather boots, with laces. They looked so pretty under my skirt,” she sighed, slightly lifting one leg up.

My sister and I listened, our eyes wide trying to imagine our large-framed grandmother with ankles the size of tree-trunks, and one swollen arm, looking young and pretty.

Of course we didn't realize how tragic her life had been. Born to a poor family, she fell pregnant young, and had the boy adopted. (This I found out many, many years after she had died). Then she met a kind man, a farmer’s son, who asked her to marry him. She said yes, but his family said no. The young lovers eloped and spent a year in Paris, where my step-grandfather studied painting. Instead of a

farmer, he wanted to be an artist. Picasso was his hero. But his father, a wealthy landowner, gave him a choice, “Follow in my footsteps or be dead to me”.

My step-grandfather was as stubborn as his father and he was disinherited. He continued painting, but to survive he became a steel worker at the Tampella factory in Tampere.

My grandparents were never blessed with children together, but in due course my grandfather had saved enough money to buy a small flat in Tampere. That was a lot for someone like my grandmother in those days.

Then disaster struck. My step-grandmother got breast cancer. This was during the Winter War in 1939-40, the first war which Finland fought against the Russians. The hospital was short of surgeons, medicines and equipment. They managed to remove my step-grandmother's breast and save her life. But after the operation her arm filled with fluid, which the doctors didn't know what to do with. They told her she was lucky to be alive. To have to live with a vastly enlarged left arm and a missing left breast, was a small price to pay, they said.

When my grandmother's brother died after his wife - my real grandmother - had succumbed to a brain tumor, she adopted my mother. She dressed her in pretty clothes and fed her well. But she didn't know how to love. I guess she'd just had too much tragedy in her life, or she


just couldn't spare the time with all the cooking that needed to be done.

I remember sitting in her kitchen in Tampere helping Kaarina make rye bread, biscuits, Tiger cakes, Karelian stews, meatballs, jams or kissels, while my grandfather painted at his easel. She talked incessantly while he painted and said nothing.

Sometimes he'd turn around and wink at me with his pale blue eyes when my grandmother nagged him about something or other. Usually something he hadn't done, like take the rubbish out, or something he had done too much of, like pick too many lingonberries from the woods.

Though my step-grandmother liked to cook, she didn't want to be made to cook. She wanted to have the choice of what to cook and when. If my grandfather picked too much of anything, like berries, or wild mushrooms during his many wanderings in the forest, she complained. If he didn't bring anything home at all, she complained.

When I was younger I blamed my step-grandmother for the fact that my dear grandfather spent more and more time in the forest, instead of painting, and for the

fact that he eventually lost his mind. Of course I now know he had Alzheimers, but in those days the illness was still called lunacy, or the Kekkonen disease.

As I said, my step-grandmother was a true fashion addict. Not put off by her rather large frame, or the tragedy of her permanently swollen arm and poorly fitting false breast, she had several going-out outfits made for her by a seamstress. And she made up for all the war years of not having butter to cook with or pretty fabrics to make clothes from, with an outfit made to measure for my wedding. Her whole get-up was in leopard print, made from one roll of the same fabric. Underneath her leopard print hat, and the leopard print coat, was a tightly fitting leopard print shift dress. She told me she wanted to have shoes made out of the same fabric, but couldn't find anyone who could do it.

So, you see, it's impossible for me to wear anything made out of leopard print that would even come close to the effect of my grandmother's outfit at my wedding.

I've tried it many a time, but it just doesn't feel right. --

Helena Halme grew up in Tampere, central Finland. After studying Political Science at the Swedish School of Economics in Helsinki, she moved to Britain in 1985 and spent the first ten years as a naval wife and working as a journalist at the BBC. In 2004 Helena took a MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, and has since written three full length novels, The Englishman, Coffee and Vodka and The Red King of Helsinki, all of which are set in Finland and published on Kindle. Helena now lives in London with her English husband, daughter and a Border Terrier.


Two Poems

by Michael King Winter Heilongjiang Train Bound in layered winter gear, loaded with New Year’s gifts, the anxious throng jams turnstiles to burst into corridors, bounce luggage down stairways, swarm across platforms, and pack the train’s vestibules, where standees like me pile up like crushed butt filters. The concrete pillars of Harbin creep away. Inside this pleated foyer, cigarette smoke wrinkles ice on windows, distorts brown bricks of trackside slums as speed builds. Chain puffers chatter; some save my name on their cells. Between the cargo squeezed in the haze, vendors wedge carts heaped with snacks. Toward reunion we ride through the fog of sub-zero temps outside. Trees in straight rows abide in cryogenic stupors. At remote stations, rigid sentries mind empty yards. Austere villages bare no distinct paths. Wiping over frozen sands of excavated hills, squalls cast snows into mountainside mineshafts,

colossal maws below which monstrous earthmovers rust. Along with ceaseless rumbles that sporadic bangs complement, rhythmic jostles backed by cushioned jolts quiet, though drafts chill the huddled, while desolation remains, and destinations close on dreams. -- Late Mourning Cardboard and paper foil, a fully furnished house and stacks of gold and silver bars and nuggets

burn for Song Yong Hua, whose mound of earth

resides in shade cast by a single row of trees that parts two fields on a slope in the far southeast of Heilongjiang. Green crops fill furrows in low mountains all

around. Quick, the late morning’s breezes flap a cape of

flames between the mourners and interred, who died five

days before her youngest child’s return. Miranda’s one year in America has proved too long. Our hopes for Gram to hold our baby fly with cinders flung away to airy states by summer solstice winds. --

Michael King began writing poetry as an undergraduate at The University of Maine Honors College. His work has been influenced by his readings of—among others—classics, 16th and 17th Century British poets, transcendentalists, and nature writers. A New Englander who lives and teaches in China, Michael generally pursues lyric and narrative expression. With a concern for the world evoked by his experiences, he recently sought and obtained from The University of Edinburgh acceptance to postgraduate study, online, of Global Challenges.


Excerpts from, A Kalevala For Eva

by Susanna Brougham The Meeting “Hurry, dear, put on your best clothes.” The mother’s words surprised the girl, but she loved that dress, its hue of thistle, the stitched vines. She slipped it on, marveled when her mother hung juniper on the door. Why now? She heard jingling, then a carriage appeared—and a famous

man. With a sharp smile, the mother said, “Daughter, step up now and curtsy. This is the man you’ll soon marry.” But the girl could not move, nor speak. The man approached her anyway. He threw a small bag down before her. “Here are coins for a fine gown. You shall soon have all you want— tin pots and spoons, an oaken bed, a painted cradle for the babies, everything a girl could ask for.” His eyes shone, glad, determined, triumphant even, thought the girl. “Speak up, daughter! Show respect.” Her parents beamed with expectation. And that was when the young girl ran— crossing the yard and then the meadow, into the forest, the calm, the deep. She called, “Aspens, will you help me?” They rustled fiercely to hush her steps. The girl hopped rocks and twisty roots, heard her family following. The man, in good humor, was commenting,

“I’ve heard tales of these shy girls. You must chase them for three days before they stop playing this game.” The girl cried, “Stone, will you help me?” A boulder stretched its granite hood. She slipped within the cool chamber just as the searchers blundered past. As she caught her breath and rested, a nearby patch of moss asked her, “Who offers a softer bed than me?” The tall pines whispered, “Stay with us. We will keep you safe.” The girl smiled, thanked the forest, but she knew it could not be. Off in the distance, the marrying man was calling to her. Then the wind spoke: “I see you often at the lake. Perhaps it knows a way to help you now.” The girl hurried there, to the curtains of rock that dropped clean into blue. Ledge to sky, echoes careened: the man promising house and money, parents coaxing, anxious not to lose such things. The girl realized that the fright she felt was a warning. A voice within asked, “What will you give yourself to? You must give the self.” The waves were lifting in sunlit gestures. She knew there was but one answer. The girl, of age, with relief, chose her element. --

20 Kippis! A Literary Journal, Volume 6, No. 1, Summer 2013 The Singer A reverie—then a splintering crash, a sneering young man. “Move to the side, you geezer! Your sleigh’s in my way.” The old man had been dreaming fine stew, thick blankets. Horse and sleigh sped along on their own, until this. “Grizzle-hair, you take up the whole road! My horse is raring, yours is a nag. I’m in a rush—let me pass!” “You ram my sleigh and insult me, boy? Step down, let’s see how well you fight.” In a low clearing, by the reeds’ crusty glimmer, they faced off. Now a rabbit’s whiskers alerted, a hawthorn leaned in, and, to see better, the sun melted a cloud, for the fame of the singer reached high. As the youth approached, the man breathed deep, his old voice crackled, words welled from the spring he kept youthful and clear in his heart—song never yet imagined or voiced. He never feared what poured from his soul. The youth felt his feet freezing, for snow was sucking them down. When he realized, he cried, “Old man, I am sinking!” “What’s it to me?” the elder replied. Beneath the snow lichens parted, the rooty earth pulled the boy deeper. “Old man, free me from this spell! I’ll give you my horse!” The old man crossed his arms. “I’ve plenty of horses.” “Old man, I’m sinking waist-deep! I’ll give you my boat if you let me go!” The old man waited, testing the boy. “Old man, I’m dying! Here’s one last offer, the very best: berry from brambles, brook from rock, my young sister!” The man paused. His mind raced through the prizes he’d won—land, silver, livestock, honor—despite this


he lacked charm for women. Not one had warmed to him. Without hesitation he freed the youth. “Go home now, boy. Put everything in order, for soon I’ll come to claim my prize.” The youth rushed home, fell down weeping. He called to his mother, confessed it all. “How shall I ever tell my sister? I’ve promised her to an old snow-beard.” His mother mused, then said, “Think nothing of it, child. We’ll use this trouble.” “I’ve often heard of that man’s wealth.” The sister did not hear them speaking. She rarely lingered in the house. She stood outside by the frozen shore, gazing as winter fog curled and billowed, softening rock, caressing the ice, erasing treetops, helping the young girl dream and dream. --

Susanna Brougham’s poetry has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Smartish Pace, The Seneca Review, The Southern Humanities Review, Salamander, Yemassee, The Potomac Review, Off the Coast, and other journals. She is proud of her Finnish heritage—all her grandparents were born in Finland, and she grew up in the Finn town of West Paris, Maine. The poems that appear here are part of a five-poem sequence called A Kalevala for Eva, in memory of her great-grandmother, Eva Kemppainen Mikkonen. Susanna works as an editor.


The Sofa

by Helena Halme

“You can start, it was your idea,” Mamma said. She was sitting in a comfy chair next to the hall.

Papa looked at her in disgust. The year was 1972. I was twelve and Anja fourteen. This was two weeks after Papa hit Mamma across the face so hard that she’d been black and blue for days. Since then there’d been fewer fights.

Anja and I had been called into the large living room in Stockholm. This new apartment was spacious compared to the tiny two-bedroom flat we’d left behind in Finland that summer.

Anja and I were sitting on our new plush sofa, which had been bought new two months before. When it was delivered, after weeks of waiting for the biggest purchase Papa and Mamma ever made, it dwarfed the living room. Two matching chairs, massive in their golden velour glory, were placed opposite the sofa. Then two silent men from the furniture company carried in the coffee table. Papa put his hand on Mamma’s waist. Underneath all the wrapping was smoked glass with golden legs and knobs on top.

Looking at Anja and me in turn, Papa had said, “This furniture is very expensive and you two will have to be very careful. See the glass table? It’s delicate, so hands off.”

Neither of us spoke, so he continued, “Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes, Papa,” I replied and Anja nodded.

Next, the two men in brown overalls brought in a long parcel between them and started untying the string holding the roll together. Papa had his arms around Mamma. They were both silent, Mamma hardly breathing when the rug was unrolled and laid out between the new suite.

“It’s beautiful” she’d sighed and turned to kiss Papa on the lips.

I looked away and examined the swirly pattern on the carpet. It was the same gold colour as the velveteen sofa and chairs, with a bright blue and darker bronze pattern on it. I was trying to make out what it was, but could only see a large crown, or a round vase in the middle. I turned my head from side to side until I felt dizzy. Then I saw Anja’s shoes on the rug.

“What are you doing?” Papa had shouted.

Anja stepped off the carpet, “So it’s rug that no-one is allowed to stand on. It’ll go nicely with the sofa that no-one can sit on and the table that can’t be touched.”

“Anja, please be nice,” Mamma pleaded with her. She’d moved away from Papa’s hold and was walking towards Anja on the other side of the rug.

“For goodness sake,” Papa said. Mamma looked back at him and

saw she’d stepped right on top of the blue pattern of the rug wearing her outdoor shoes. Anja had started laughing.


Now, sitting on the velveteen sofa, with my feet touching the brightly colored carpet, I knew a divorce was going to be announced. Or at least that’s what Anja had told me. She was next to me, leaning back against the high back of the sofa. I looked over to the balcony where I’d seen her smoking. Since last weekend she did it every day after school when Mamma was out at her language classes. When Papa came home I thought he must smell the tobacco, but Anja told me she didn’t care what Papa said or did. “He’s bastard, why should I listen to him?”

“Right. What we’ve decided to do is,” Papa began.

He shot a hateful look at Mamma. She’d been crying.

Then he continued, “Mamma and I are going to be divorced.”

“What a surprise,” Anja said. “Thank you Anja, that may have

decided it for you.” “Decided what?” Anja said. How I admired, and feared, her

courage. Papa could explode any minute and hit her across the face, and then me, and then Mamma, again.

“Mamma and I…” “Not me, this is not my idea,”

Mamma interrupted. Papa didn’t look at her, but said,

“We want you to decide who you are going to live with.”

Silence. Mamma and Papa were looking at

Anja. She was sitting twiddling her fingers and admiring her new red and white platform boots. You could see the stripy heels underneath her flared jeans. Papa had forbidden Anja to wear clothes like

that. He said her jeans were too long and had dirty hems.

“You look like a bloody clown and a beggar,” he’d told her.

That had started another row. Papa didn’t think Mamma should have bought Anja the clothes.

It was nearly dinnertime on a Saturday afternoon in November. The sun was out but weak and only managed to create a few thin strips of light through the Venetian blinds, between the ceiling and rails of the balcony. Specs of dust were dancing in the rays. I wondered if Papa was going to complain about the state of the house or whether now they were divorcing, he’d not bother anymore.

“Well?” he said, looking challengingly at Anja. “You’re the eldest. You go first.”

“I’ll live with Mamma,” Anja said quietly.

Now Papa turned to me, smiling, “And Eeva – are you going to live with Papa?”

I was trying to remember when he’d stopped calling me ‘Papa’s Girl’. I didn’t dare to look at Papa now. I couldn’t speak. I looked sideways at Anja. She still had her eyes down on her boots. Mamma was in one of the comfy chairs. She held a piece of toilet paper, worn to shreds, fiddling with the pieces. She lifted her eyes and they met mine. She nodded to me, and I whispered, “Mamma.”

There was another silence, then the sound of Papa sucking in his breath. The whole of his body moved. First his large chest lifted and then collapsed.

“Well, you’ve done it now,” he said. “Don’t come running to me when she

24 Kippis! A Literary Journal, Volume 6, No. 1, Summer 2013 can’t look after you and you’re on the streets with no money to your name. And you needn’t think you can stay here – this flat is paid for with my bloody hard work – she’ll have to find a hellhole for you somewhere else.”

He got up and left. I heard him sit heavily on the bed in our parent’s room. Anja straightened her back on the sofa and looked up to Mamma. Mamma shook her

head, silencing her. I just wanted to cry but there were no tears. Mamma went to the kitchen. I followed Anja down the corridor to her bedroom, the furthest room away from where Papa was. I didn’t dare to look in as we passed the open door. But from the corners of my eyes I could see his feet at the end of the bed. --

Helena Halme grew up in Tampere, central Finland. After studying Political Science at the Swedish School of Economics in Helsinki, she moved to Britain in 1985 and spent the first ten years as a naval wife and working as a journalist at the BBC. In 2004 Helena took a MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, and has since written three full length novels, The Englishman, Coffee and Vodka and The Red King of Helsinki, all of which are set in Finland and published on Kindle. Helena now lives in London with her English husband, daughter and a Border Terrier.


Two Poems

By Jane Piirto “Let’s strike hand to hand / fingers into finger-gaps / that we may sing some good things” Prologue, Kalevela. Trio Ah! Our trio of voices resonates, the opening unison. All sit up and focus. We blend, pretty in our summer dresses. (draw me nearer to the place) Our vibratos vibrating, the pianist’s eyes follow us. We look at each other sideways and smile. A blessing descends. They cluster around us afterwards, shake our hands, pass holy peace to us— our offertory, the alchemy of harmony. (to the precious bleeding side) For a moment we are ear-drumming vessels, vehicles of soundlight caught in time, a short journey to the end of the measure, modulation in faith from G to A flat, the inevitable rush to breathe and tune, in great hope we will not crack. (draw me nearer, nearer blessed Lord) Then, time passes into space. Do you think we were lightning rods then? containers of truth for the timed race? ships on deep water when fair wind blows? flashed mirror for deserted lost souls? signal of summer in a winter of snows? Three women barefoot on a carpet of coals. --

26 Kippis! A Literary Journal, Volume 6, No. 1, Summer 2013 They chased, they hounded The Demon’s elk from its lair. Runo 14, Kalevala At the Park Cemetery At the Park Cemetery a yearling, 700 pounds sent away by her mother back in the nearby dark woods wanders among the gravestones on Memorial Day. She laps in the lily pond where white swans used to glide, where snapping turtles sun, stands safe on a small island. Admirers with cameras edge closer, ever closer. The DNR can’t trap her. She is too big for their slings. The newspaper editor warns to keep our distance because she is scared and kicks.

The crowd ignores these warnings. A fat woman in gray shirt, old Polaroid slung on straps, steps up military-crisp, the very edge of the pond, to take her instant memory. The moose’s pendant ears twitch. Then, like a knobby filly, all gangly legs, shoulder hump, she flees to the wooded parts. How she waded, thigh deep, then leaped to the other bank; how she ran, gliding, loping, like Garbo, fleeing her celebrity. --

Jane Piirto is a native of Ishpeming, resident of Ohio, the author of 14 books and 6 chapbooks, literary and scholarly. Literary books are The Three-Week Trance Diet (novel); A Location in the Upper Peninsula (poems, stories, essays); The Arrest (novel); Labyrinth (Novella), Saunas (poetry) and Luovuus (in Finnish with Kari Uusikyla). She is Trustees’ Distinguished Professor at Ashland University in Ohio and received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Northern Michigan University. Recently she has published poems in The Way North, an anthology of U.P. writers published by Wayne State University Press.


Northern Lights

Longlac, Ontario, 1953

by Kaarina Brooks

Walking home in nippy northern night, skates thump against our shoulders.

Our breath—a frozen cloud—hangs in the air. Heads back, we stare up at the moonless sky,

parka hoods thrown off for better viewing. Seven stars of Great Bear pierce the blackness.

Then—“Look! Oh, look!”

Growing, dancing, two pale green shafts of light rise from the west!

Wildly undulating beacons flare up past the zenith.. and die.

“Look!” Suddenly the sky’s ablaze with burning pillars: flaming columns flowing, swaying, in exalted revelry,

while cool and quiet stars still shine behind them.

“Spirits of the dead, dance before the Manitou,” whispers Sylvia, my Ojibwa friend.

In that little northern town, we'd never dreamed of great cathedrals with majestic organ pipes.

But those grand stanchions, gloriously star-bejeweled,

swaying high above, awed us to silent reverence

Kaarina Brooks, a retired elementary teacher, immigrated from Finland with her parents and sister in 1951. Since childhood, writing and art have played a big part in her life. Her short stories, articles and poetry have appeared in magazines, e-zines, literary journals and anthologies, and she has written and/or translated books for Thomson/Duval, Scholastic Canada, Aspasia Books, Write Words Inc. and Wild Rose Press. Her translation of The Kaleva—Tales of Magic and Adventure (published by Simply Read Books) won the Aesop Award for 2009 from the American Folklore Society. She sells her books and watercolours at shows and festivals around Ontario.


My Name’s Not Martha

by Terri Martin

Dora ate a simple Lenten supper of tomato soup and saltine crackers. It was a time, if not of deprivation, then at least of self-control. Never one to engage in indulgence and gluttony, Dora hardly felt deprived as she consumed her meal. After she finished, she carried her bowl from the small dinette table to the sink in her efficiency kitchen. She washed and dried the bowl, spoon, and saucepan in which she had heated the soup, and put everything in its place in the cupboards.

Dora surveyed her small, immaculate apartment, and found everything as she had left it when she went to work that morning at the law office, where she was employed as a legal assistant. After picking a few yellowing leaves off her philodendron plant, Dora went into the bedroom to change her clothes. She draped her gray wool slacks neatly over a hanger, careful not to disturb the crease, and hung them in the tidy closet. The blouse went in the hamper in the bathroom that adjoined her bedroom. She pulled on her elastic-waist corduroy pants and a sweatshirt.

These were the garments that she wore every Thursday evening when she performed her various tasks at her church. The janitorial service cleaned the church on Thursday morning and Dora re-cleaned it on Thursday evening. Slipshod and lazy would best describe the cleaning people. They gave the illusion of cleanliness. She had spoken to the pastor about the issue,

and he had patted her on the shoulder, “Oh, Dora, you are my Martha. What would we do without you?” Dora’s Thursday evening sojourns were not official. Her endless work and dedication was surely favorable in the eyes of God, and that was all that mattered. To try to please others was futile. Although she was highly efficient in her job at the law firm, it was Dora’s devotion to God—her need for perfection in His eyes—that drove her daily life. She must not disappoint.

Disappoint. One day you are an

angel, the next a disappointment. Her father had given a whole sermon on it that Sunday as Dora, barely seventeen and pregnant, squirmed in the pew. He was looking at Dora, his eyes cold and empty. The whole Jehovah’s Witness congregation knew; they were not allowed to speak to Dora or acknowledge her existence for one year. The shunning was unbearable. She would have preferred a stoning.

Dora did not take her car most Thursday nights. She preferred a vigorous walk, even in the cold of a northern Michigan winter. There was an advantage to leaving her car home when she made her unsolicited visits to the church: she did not wish to explain her presence to nosy people who might recognize her car.

Dora slung the strap of her cleaning supply tote bag over her shoulder,


shrugged into her coat and, after checking twice to make sure the front door was locked, stepped outdoors. Feeling the burn of the sharp wind was not entirely unpleasant; it affirmed her existence. Snow stung Dora’s exposed face as she walked up the hill toward the church. A strand of graying hair pulled loose from the tight chignon and whipped across her face. Impatiently, she shoved the errant strand back into place. She fondled the church key that she carried in her coat pocket. That night, Dora intended to tackle the pastor’s office for which she had recently found a key perched on the ledge above the door.

The first time she had entered his office she was dismayed that a spiritual leader could exist in such a state of disorder. It was obvious that the cleaning people had never set foot there. When Dora first found the key and tentatively slid into the office, she nearly swooned. Unruly piles of periodicals and junk mail rose from every available surface. The wastebasket overflowed with rejected sermon drafts, several of which she had read and determined to indeed be substandard. The Bible, lectionary, and countless other bound materials—including a scandalous book of poetry—lay open with printed sides down. After inspecting the spines for damage, Dora had placed the books on shelves—except the poetry book, which went out with the trash. A fine oil painting of Jesus hung askew and several other works of art sat on the floor, waiting to be hung. The entire office was a sea of litter, dust, errant paperclips, outdated Post-it-Notes, and

filthy coffee cups—the most offensive being one from an insurance agency with the phrase: Jesus Saves Souls! We save you $. Dora found this to be in poor taste if not downright blasphemous. She had put it in the garbage along with the other trash.

It seemed to Dora that others could not see the un-holiness of clutter and disarray. The other women of the church ignored her devotion to make things orderly. They did not understand her special calling.

They excluded her from many things. Oh, no, Dora, they would say, we have all the help we need for this funeral luncheon. Or, we’re so sorry you didn’t hear about the change of location for the mission meeting. Dora knew that they were jealous. She was not the first soldier of Christ to suffer rejection and punishment. And she knew how to endure rejection. Her father had banished her while her Mother keened and prayed, but never touched her unclean daughter, never embraced the terrified girl. It had been the counselor at the Methodist-run home for unwed mothers and wayward teens that had held Dora’s hand for eighteen hours, until, with a final, excruciating push, the baby came.

Dora entered through the side door and stamped the snow from her boots. Once in the sanctuary, she turned on the lights and laid her coat on the back of a pew. From her bag she extracted a bouquet of silk flowers. She placed the arrangement on the altar, then stood back to scrutinize them. She frowned a moment and made a barely perceivable adjustment to the altar, making certain everything was

30 Kippis! A Literary Journal, Volume 6, No. 1, Summer 2013 symmetrical. There were brass candlesticks on either side of the altar. She always made sure that the wicks were properly trimmed and the wax did not built up in the brass caps. Positioned between the candlesticks was a stunning brass cross that bore the letters IHS; its gleaming patina testimony to God’s glory. Dora bought the polish herself. Removing the tarnish was a constant chore as the true nature of the metal battled for dominance. Her father’s long, accusing finger had pointed toward his daughter: Jezebel! The young woman who’d held such promise was now soiled, tarnished, unclean— no polish able to remove her sin.

Because it was Lent, the congregation took communion every Sunday. Dora’s highest honor was to help with Communion. Not only did she bake the bread and fill the chalice with non-alcoholic wine, but often helped with the ritual itself. She had the recitation memorized, though she always pretended to read it from the hymnal.

After the congregation had received their bread and wine, she and the pastor shared an intimate moment when they performed communion for one another. Dora would provide bread and wine for the pastor, tearing off a portion of bread for him, positioning the cup to dip it into. Then it was her turn to receive. They would gaze intently into one another’s eyes.

“Martha,” he would say, then smile and shake his head and whisper, “Dora, you know you are my Martha.”

This declaration was intended to be high praise, for in the Bible, it was Martha

of Bethany who tended to the comfort and needs of the controversial rabbi, Jesus, when he sought the hospitality of the house of Martha, Mary and their brother, Lazarus.

After Communion, Dora wrapped up the leftover bread and dumped the wine, which contained bread-crumb flotsam. She carefully cleaned and polished the brass chalice and bread plate and put them in the special cupboard until the next week, when the ritual would be repeated. The leftover bread would be broken into bits and scattered under the church bird feeder, which she filled regularly. She had placed a Plexiglas cone over it to discourage the red squirrels.

Dora shut off the lights to the sanctuary and slipped down the hall to the pastor’s office. Through perseverance, she had achieved some sense of order and cleanliness in the pastor’s office over the past several weeks. The next step was to move some furniture.

She had been mentally rearranging things for several weeks. She had even made a crude sketch of the plans, which she carried in her pocket. In spite of her bad back, Dora was able to move the heavy oak guest chairs away from the desk to a better place against the wall. In order to make space along the wall, she had to drag the credenza across the office to the front of the desk. After rubbing out various unsightly beverages rings and marks from the credenza, she placed some religious artifacts on the unit, adjusting the arrangement several times until satisfied.

She straightened the picture of Jesus. His eyes followed her, it seemed,


watching as she made a final adjustment to the statue of Mary and the Christ child that sat on a shelf of the credenza. Backing out, Dora turned off the light and locked the door. She could feel the eyes. It made no difference if it was dark or if you hid in your room, the omnipresent eyes watched, calculated, judged.

Carrying her tote bag and coat, Dora took the back stairway into the basement where Sunday school was held. That past Sunday she had noticed that the teacher for the youngest children had not seen to proper clean up. Juice spills and crumbs from snacks littered the tables. The young ones were careless with their crayons and markers, and the tables would have been ruined if Dora did not use her special bleach and vinegar solution to make everything spotless.

As Dora vigorously scrubbed a bright pink doodle into oblivion, she heard thumping and scraping overhead. She froze, spray bottle and cloth poised. Muffled noises. Muted laughter. More thumping. Dora crept to the top of the front stairway and listened. She believed that the noise was coming from the pastor’s office. She moved silently down the short hall toward a weak slat of light escaping from a crack in the office door. She inched closer, willing herself to silence. The noises were louder, grunting, rhythmic, desperate.

“Push harder,” begged a female voice. “That’s it, almost there—oh, don’t stop now! I’m so close. Okay, perfect!”

Then all was silent but for the heavy breathing.

Dora felt her groin tingle and her face flush. The boy had made Dora cry out with just such pain and pleasure in the back of his mother’s station wagon. It had been so long ago. He had made many promises during the moment of passion. He would love her. He would marry her. If only she would prove that she loved him. But he had called out the name of another girl—that of Dora’s best friend. Dora and the boy had only made love the one time, but it was enough.

Then came the terrible shunning, the unfocused eyes of her father, the seclusion of her mother. In her sixth month, Dora was sent to the home for unwed mothers and wayward teens where she was housed with other pregnant girls. A doctor with rheumy eyes and calloused hands administered pre-natal care. As Dora signed the adoption papers, the social worker assured her that the child would be better off. Dora’s erstwhile best friend and the boy got married, she had heard.

“I’m getting too old for this!” She heard them laugh, catching

their breath. Dora moved closer to the door,

where she could see through the crack into the office. The pastor and his wife were sprawled, fully clothed, on a couch that Dora had never seen before. The chairs that she had carefully put against the wall had been shoved aside, and the credenza was cockeyed.

“Dearest,” said the wife to the pastor, “why didn’t you have the movers put this sofa in your office?”


“Because,” he answered, “they said the door was locked so they had to leave it in the nursery. What do you think? It’s in pretty good shape.”

“Tacky,” she said. “Who donated this thing?”

“Anonymous, that way we can’t send it back.”

“Well, I think some people might find it inappropriate for a minister to have a sofa bed in his office,” giggled the wife. “Although. . . now I can send you here when you start snoring.”

“Oh boy!” he said. “I wonder what Martha will think when she breaks into my office to clean.”

“Who’s Martha—oh, Dora.” She frowned. “The poor thing.”

He took his wife’s hand. They kissed. She laid her head on his shoulder.

“I don’t snore,” he said. “Do too,” she said. “Don’t.” The pastor sat up and looked

around the room. “What happened in here?”

“What do you mean,” said his wife. “We just shoved this blessed hide-a-bed couch in here.”

“No, I mean, the chairs, the credenza, they had been moved before we got here.”

He frowned. “Now she’s moving furniture. The

cleaning—well that was fine, I mean, what harm is in cleaning? But soon she’ll switch the pews around.”

“Who?” “Dora,” he said.

“Oh, right,” said his wife. “Maybe we should have the lock changed again.”

“Maybe,” the pastor said, his eyes settling on the crack of the door.

“Well, I just feel sorry for her,” the wife said. “She’s got a crush on you, dear.”

Dora sucked in her breath and

backed away, mortified. How dare that woman pity her! How dare they accuse her of such thoughts! Her father has shouted those words: How dare you!

There had been a drape shielding her from the child that she never saw, never knew, never touched, never marveled at its purity and innocence.

Dora rushed silently through the church into the sanctuary. She slid into a nook next to the organ and sat on the floor, feeling the tears run down her cheeks into the corners of her mouth. She licked them, salty and bitter.

Eventually she heard noises of the pastor and his wife leaving. She sat for a few moments, bathed in near darkness. Above her was a stained glass window of Jesus, his face serene yet full of anguish. The beam of a streetlamp shone through the window, illuminating the altar.

Slowly Dora stood and went to the altar, banging her shin painfully on one corner. Tears stung her eyes as she rubbed the pain from her leg. She picked up the collection plates and dashed them to the floor with a clatter. She tore the silk flower arrangement from the altar, silk petals flying wildly. The brass cross and candlesticks twinkled from their recent polishing. These Dora left, for she knew


the tarnish and destruction would come on its own.

She went to the basement for her coat and bag and left the church, walking briskly—nearly running—toward home. She paused when she reached the bridge that spanned the Ravine River. Drawn to the edge, Dora peered over the guardrail. Far below, a vigorous ribbon of open water ran between the ice-lined banks. A full moon emerged from beneath a cloudbank, its beams undulating brightly on the open water. Dora shivered as the cold wind snaked down her neck into the depths of her soul. She listened to the river moving and watched the ripples sparkle in the moonlight. The plunge might be fatal. As far as she knew, nobody had tested it.

Dora stood there for a time, her thoughts blank.

She stepped closer to the guardrail, her knees touching the bottom bar. She hesitated a moment, hypnotized by the unrelenting movement of the river. She shivered again and thought about the water, how cold it must be. Dora felt her tote bag slip from her shoulder. Something was leaking, and a wide circular mark stained one side. She knew that in spite of repeated launderings, the bag would never again be truly clean. She watched the bag rise over the guardrail and plummet toward the river. In an instant, it succumbed to the black current, all its sin and secrets hidden below the surface. --

Terri Martin and her husband, Wayne, moved to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula over ten years ago and live on the Silver River near L’Anse. Terri finds inspiration for writing in the north woods and embraces the unembellished U.P. lifestyle. Her middle-grade children’s book, A Family Trait, was published in 1999. She has written humor for The Porcupine Press and several outdoor articles for various publications, including Backpacker Magazine and Michigan Out-of-Doors. Terri is the Editor-in-Chief for the FinNALA Newsletter. As an employee of Finlandia University, Terri often finds herself immersed in the Finnish-American culture of the Keweenaw Copper Country. She enjoys coordinating Finlandia’s Sibelius Academy Music Festival and a Finnish-themed Road Scholar (Elderhostel) program. Terri completed a master’s degree in English from Northern Michigan University in spring of 2011.


First You’re There and Then You’re Not by Lauri Anderson

The first time, death was a gun

pressed against my temple while I lay in a top bunk at two AM in an abandoned logging camp in northern Maine. The crazed and drunk World War II vet had been from Normandy Beach to the Brenner Pass in Austria, and he wasn’t about to “let no eighteen-year old” push him around, or so he kept repeating until someone from our Geodetic Survey crew tackled him from behind and pinned him to the floor while someone else kicked the gun across the floor. Then we got several hundred feet of rope and wrapped it around and around him, pinning him tightly from his neck to his ankles to a chair. Then we went back to bed and we and he slept until morning. After a pancake breakfast one of the surveyors ordered him, now sober and very quiet, into a military-surplus Jeep and drove him southward on dirt roads through the uninhabited forest for seventy-five miles to the nearest town, where he left him on the main street.

The second time, it was my Kanuri and Hausa students at Bornu Teachers’ College in Maiduguri in Nigeria. They had risen in the dark, left their dorm, and marched to the sabon gari with torches, gasoline, and machetes. They’d set fire to Ibo businesses and homes and when the occupants had run outside, they’d chopped them to death—men, women, children, babies. Then they’d hurried back to the

dorm just before dawn, had cleaned up, had breakfasted. Then they marched to my class, where I confronted them. “Why did you do this?” I angrily shouted. They calmly explained that the dead had been Ibo. For them, that was enough of a reason.

A few days later about a dozen of my students came to my house to kill my Ibo barber. They’d seen him ride onto the campus on his bike, the tools of his trade neatly packed into a wooden box resting on his rear fender. He was halfway through cutting my hair when he saw them in the distance, dropped the shears, abandoned his bike, and ran across a long open space toward the highway. My students gave chase. He reached the highway just ahead of them and just as a truckload of refugees was passing. The driver slowed and the refugees reached down from the bed, grabbed his arms, and pulled him up and over the truck’s rear gate. When my students returned and were walking past my house, I again confronted them but they told me to be quiet, that they liked me, that this hatred of the Ibo was not my business. They waved their machetes in my direction, told me I looked funny with half a haircut, and walked on.

The third time, it was a mob of leading citizens in the Ibo village where I lived after I married another Peace Corps Volunteer. They came to our home during


the day, while we were teaching, and told our cook that they would return the next day to kill his three-year-old son, Monday. Then they would kill his wife. After that they would kill him. At three AM the Scottish principal of St. Martin de Porres Catholic School for Girls and I piled Sule, his wife, and their little boy on the rear floor of the principal’s Volkswagen Beetle. Then we piled a few of their possessions on top of them and on the rear seat. Miss McKay and I drove through the night without lights to the Northern Region, where we left the family with relatives. Then we went to a priest’s house for breakfast and coffee. “If they’d stopped you at a roadblock, you’d all be dead,” said the priest, rather jovially. “I’d be praying over your bodies.”

The fourth time, it was an AK47 driven into my kidneys at a bridge crossing on the Niger in Biafra. The Ibo soldiers had mistaken me for a British national with a suitcase full of large-denomination pound notes. The Brit had escaped from their custody an hour earlier. The soldiers kept jabbing me in the ribs with their rifles as they marched me under the bridge to be interrogated by an officer who sat behind a rude card table inside a small cement maintenance building by the riverbank. Fortunately the officer was a fellow graduate student at Michigan State. He asked me how the Spartan football team had recently fared. Then he laughed and explained that the soldiers were just village boys. “They can’t tell the difference between British and American accents,” he said. “Plus all of you white people look the same.”

The fifth time, it was a boulder hurled by a drunk at my face as I lay on my back in a burn pit on Moen Island in Truk Lagoon. I had intervened to prevent a group of village drunks from kidnapping girls from the dormitory of the school where I was Dean of Students. I’d wrestled with one of the drunks and we’d fallen into the pit. The boulder struck the back of the head of a colleague, who had bent to help me at exactly the wrong moment. The boulder cracked his skull and rendered him instantly unconscious.

The sixth time, it was knives in the hands of students who were trying to kill each other just outside my apartment door on the upper runway of the boys’ dorm at Mizpah Mission in Truk. As I opened my door a knife swept within an inch of my face. I tackled the student, knocked him to the floor, and smashed his hand against a board. He lost the knife. Other students tackled the other boy and also disarmed him. I asked why they were fighting. The Trukese boy said it was because the other fighter was Palauan. The Palauan disagreed and said it was because the other was Trukese. Late that night Trukese men from the village came on campus to kill the Palauan but the boy hid in the pigpen and, in the morning, sailed for home.

The seventh time, it was a Juan Corona victim hitchhiking in Stockton, California. When I picked him up, death was on his red-stained hands and in his hair. When he’d awakened in the park that morning, the guys on both sides of him had had their throats slit. “Why did I survive?” he wondered. “I need to get out

36 Kippis! A Literary Journal, Volume 6, No. 1, Summer 2013 of here and never come back. I’m hitching to L A, where things are a lot saner.”

The eighth time, it was a Turkish soldier in an armored landing craft. He was part of the naval invasion of Cyprus, was in full battle gear with an American M-16 clutched tightly in his hands. On the skyline sat hundreds of warships. I was dogpaddling a hundred feet offshore from a line of hotels as his craft bore down on me. Many others formed a long line of invading boats. When he was within fifteen feet he cut his engine, waved his rifle in my direction, and in Turkish asked me how I was. I said I was fine. “Go to your hotel and stay there,” he said, smiling but pointing his rifle at my head.

The ninth time, it was a sixteen-year-old from Atlantic Mine, Michigan. He didn’t know how to drive on ice and snow and slid sideways across the road into my van. The impact cracked my skull, broke seven ribs, split my sternum, bruised my liver and kidneys, mangled my legs, injured my left hip, and knocked me out. Now I know what it’s like to be dead. First you’re there and then you’re not.

My wife tested death when she boarded a Turkish ship in Marseille and sailed for Istanbul. Enroute the Greek Navy kidnapped the ship and my wife and held them prisoner in Piraeus. She and the other passengers and the crew remained below decks and sealed the portholes and all other vents to prevent grenades from being tossed inside. Ship and passengers were released when Turkey prepared to invade Thrace. At their arrival in Istanbul, they were given a twenty-one-gun salute.

In my boyhood people died in odd, violent ways. The grandfather who lived on the corner of our little dead-end street was mistaken for a deer and shot dead on opening day of hunting season as he leaned against an apple tree and waited for the sun to rise.

The woman across the street slashed her wrists in the bathtub while her daughter was at school. After school the daughter found a note from her mother tacked to the front door. The note told the child not to enter the house “under any circumstances.” She was to wait until her father came home. Naturally the girl went inside through an unlatched window and found her naked mother. The mother had smoked one last cigarette as she bled out and still held it between her fingers.

A high school classmate broke up with his girlfriend, drove too fast, missed a curve, and rolled his car down an embankment. At the end of the car’s first roll, he was thrown out the door. At the beginning of the second roll, he was crushed under the full weight of the car. Then the car hit a log, went airborne, and made a perfect upside-down landing on the boy’s chest. It balanced there until a passer-by saw the wreck, stopped, and rolled the car further down the embankment.

Ed shot a moose on the far side of Horseshoe Pond in November. He quartered the creature and dumped the quarters into his canoe. Then Ed set out to paddle across the pond to his camp. Halfway across, the canoe sank and Ed drowned. His heavy boots dragged him straight to the bottom.


Ron hitchhiked straight southward as the summer of his high school sophomore year began. He was arrested as a vagrant in South Carolina and spent vacation on a chain gang. Two years later he joined the Army and they sent him to Louisiana to learn to drive a truck. He’d driven a logging truck for his father since he was fifteen and he refused to participate as other trainees spent days in a huge, mostly empty base parking lot, learning to shift gears, to back up and to park. He went AWOL into the woods across the street from the main gate. He set up a campsite and periodically went on-base to the PX to get supplies. The MPs looked for him in bars and whorehouses. Eventually he returned to his barracks. When officers told him he still had to learn how to drive, he fled back into the woods. When he returned to his barracks for the second time, the Army sent him home with a discharge. He took a Black girlfriend with him. She was the first of her kind in Ron’s little town in northern Maine. It didn’t work out. After she left he committed suicide with carbon monoxide from the family’s logging truck.

Back then death was young and athletic and I was immortal. Now death dawdles. He has bad knees, a bad hip, and cataracts. It doesn’t matter. He has more than enough.

I woke up at three AM on New Year’s Day, 2013, shaking with grief. Someone dear to me had just died. Then I realized who it was. Exactly sixty years ago (1953) Hank Williams died of congenital heart disease on the back seat of his Cadillac. He had completed a New

Year’s Eve concert well after midnight and was on his way to another state to perform on New Year’s Day. At 2:30 AM he had stopped in West Virginia at the home of my friend Becky Bailey’s parents to get a little moonshine. He needed to sip some because he was agitated and couldn’t sleep. Fifteen minutes later he fell into a deep sleep and died at the age of 29. His driver heard the loud and terrifying silence when his breathing stopped. On a lighter note, J. D. Salinger was born nearly 100 years ago in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day. He would write one fine short novel and several fine short stories. Then he would spend more than half of his life as a recluse on a mountain top in Cornish, New Hampshire. I haven’t read him for decades but thought of visiting him on his mountain top in 1962. I was introduced to Salinger’s second wife in Vermont in 1968. But Hank’s mournful voice haunts me always. The haunting goes on and on. Tonight I sit in winter darkness in 1913 in Michigan’s Copper Country. Behind the howling wind distant voices echo out of shrouds of snow. I listen to terrifying shrieks. I hear the cries of long-dead children from one hundred years ago on Christmas Eve. Those children were born into a mining town. So was I. Many were Finnish. So am I. They were Yoopers. I’m an honorary one. My father was eight in 1913 and could have been among them but wasn’t. I grieve for those children and for all of the world’s other lost children. I’m only one man but I’ve seen way too much death, way too much violence. Why must profit and kind come

38 Kippis! A Literary Journal, Volume 6, No. 1, Summer 2013 first and unquestioning love follow as a distant second? I grieve for our world. I

grieve for my shattered ideals. We need to be forgiven. Now and for always. --

Lauri Anderson has taught English at Finlandia University for decades. He has authored nine books of literary fiction, all of them with Finnish characters. His books have been topics of dissertations and have been studied at universities. All are available on Amazon.


The Fate of a Beret in Florida.

by Eero Sorila Translated by Sirpa Kaukinen

I acquaint myself with the city

centre of Miami by walking on Tuesday, February 26th, 2013. Before midday the sun has already climbed to the middle of the open sky and the temperature to about thirty (Celsius). Fortunately I remembered to take along a beret which protects my head from the burning sun. Without a hat my “bald spot” would be as hot as the top of a stove on which an egg could be fried. Because “a shining cupola” is not designed for making food, growing hunger beckons me to look for a restaurant.

More than two million people live in the greater Miami area and about a half of these are Cuban. No wonder as I walk along, I hear more Spanish spoken than English. After passing a group of men on a sidewalk, I hear one of them say “el es de Espana” – “he is from Spain”. A black beret, a basker in Spanish, is an especially popular head cover for older men in Spain but not among the Cubans living in Florida. The basker has been a traditional head cover for hundreds of years for shepherds in the Basque area in Spain. Here I really stand out from the street scene with my basker. I don’t begin to correct the conclusion I’ve heard, so as a Finn, today I am a Spanish basker-headed tourist in Miami. I continue to search for a local food kind of restaurant while at the same time taking in the city centre atmosphere.

La Granja – A Ranch seems like a restaurant worth thinking about. A beret has the added advantage that a face can be pressed against a restaurant window without the visor or brim being in the way. After staring like a fool into the restaurant through the window I come to the conclusion that what I have seen is my kind of place. Travelling is great in that one can dress uniquely yet behave very naturally, like in Miami, where no one knows me. A wife could still, however, use the word foolishly instead of naturally. Someone wise has said that a woman is the only realist.

I sit at a restaurant table and order a chicken meal. Since the sun doesn’t burn my head inside I put the beret to rest on the chair beside me. After having taken it off in the air conditioned restaurant, it feels like an arctic wind is freezing the drops of perspiration on my bald spot. The beret made out of pure wool is like a pressure cooker which doesn’t allow the heat to escape, but it’s a better solution than a sun stroke. I am especially attached to the beret which I received as a gift from a 90-year old widow named Evelyn who lived in a village called Kerrobert on the Canadian prairies. The beret has travelled on my head through Mongolia, Easter Island, North Korea, the southern continent, Florida and many other destinations.


I leave the restaurant satisfied, with my stomach bulging like a sumo wrestler. I find the railway station and head for the Miami airport to take a homebound flight.

On my way to the airport I find that my beret is missing. Feverishly I check my pockets many times and search every corner of my backpack, but for nothing! The beret is likely continuing to rest on the La Granja restaurant chair, but I can no longer return there. It really annoys me to no end that the beret was forgotten. On another day when I was photographing church-going Lake Worth Finns, one woman took a photo of me. I believe that the beret and the homemade

camera “worm box” put her in a picture-taking mood. That was the last picture of my beret which had travelled with me through countries and lands. It gave me a protective feeling and a good spirit like meeting a trusted friend. I feel a great helplessness without the trusted head protector under the Miami sun and the cold elsewhere.

After looking through an old family album, I note that my father and his father understood, much before me, the usefulness of a beret. They both used berets. Also for me the beret has been the best headwear until it was forgotten.

That was the fate of a beret in Florida. --

Basker-headed photographer Eero Sorila has published a book about his travel adventures called: Around the World on a Shoestring. Available now in North America from link: hllp://amzn.to/13ESluh. Sirpa Kaukinen, our assistant editor, lives in Canada where she received her Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from York University. She writes and translates in English and Finnish languages. She is the winner of several short story writing competitions including a first place winner of the first issue of Kippis with a short story, “No Place for a Woman,” and a second place winner of a North American short story competition which stories were collected into a book, Lännen Kultaan Kurkottamassa (Searching for the Western Gold) and published by Werner Soderström OY in Finland. She worked for 23 years at the Toronto Hospital where her work centered on writing and producing small publications and public relations documents.


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A Bit about the Finnish North American Literature Association

The Finnish North American Literature Association (FinNALA) exists in virtual space at www.finnala.com. On our site, we provide the latest news and links to resources regarding authors, poets, writers and scholars of things ethnic, diasporic, literary and Finnish or Finnish-North American. There, we also share links to other sites of interest to Finnophiles.

On the website, we also share an annotated bibliography of literary, scholarly, and creative work written by ethnically Finnish authors whose work appears in English, either in translation or in original. That work is ongoing, and any ethnically Finnish author or an author writing about things Finnish or of interest to a Finnophiles can request that their work be included in the bibliography which is indexed by the Modern Language Association.

In an effort to promote the continuing creation of high quality diasporic and/or Finnish-themed literary work as well as to ensure that our members have a vehicle by which to experience that work, we publish Kippis! A Literary Journal once or twice a year, usually online on our website. Occasionally, we create a simultaneous print issue for a particular commemorative purpose, such as for sale at a national Finnish Cultural event.

We also publish the FinNALA Newsletter, which appears four times each year in an easy access online format and contains literary news pieces and short literary works of 500 or fewer words, either in prose or poetry, and items of particular interest to our readership. The Newsletter also serves as the communications arm of our organization. We announce latest books, articles in print, calls for papers or manuscripts, and other such news items of interest to our readers.

The FinNALA page on Facebook provides an instant venue to share what’s happening with our group. The page is private to members, but once membership is established by searching for FinNALA on Facebook and requesting membership, the group provides easy access to share information with and to contact other members of the FinNALA community. There, we also share announcements of immediate interest to members, particularly that which has a timeframe or deadline associated with it that is not amenable to presentation only in the Newsletter.

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