Just A Peck 0056 // Oregon, Hadestown, Fishing

Just A Peck

Welcome to the latest issue of Just A Peck. I’m glad you’re here!

JOURNAL

We left the Oregon Shakespeare Festival on Sunday morning and took an extra day on the way back to Portland so we could stop by a redwood grove and then drive up the Oregon coast. The redwoods were astonishing, like always. The grove felt ancient and sacred, like a majestic cathedral.

Justin and Jody at the base of an enormous redwood
Sunlight filtering down through a grove of redwoods

Jody had done a ton of research and preparation, and had found a bunch of highly recommended stops along the coast that were not super touristy, but also not so inaccessible as to make them tricky to get to during my recovery. Every one she had planned was a stunner. We walked along beaches, waded into the ocean, climbed through sea caves, saw anemones in a tide pool, and eventually watched the sun dip toward the horizon before turning inland. A perfect ending to a wonderful trip.

Justin looking at the Oregon coast

Sea stacks scattered across the surf along the Oregon coast
Justin and Jody's shadows stretched across the wet sand
Jody pointing out the green anemones clustered in a tide pool
Dark sea stacks silhouetted against the incoming tide
Justin and Jody on a wide Oregon beach
Two figures at the water's edge as the sun drops toward the horizon

On Friday we saw Zeitgeist’s production of Jen Silverman’s Witch. (This is also the APT shoulder-season show this year, so we’ll be seeing it again in a few months.) Such a great script and some outstanding performances.

The program for Witch by Jen Silverman held up in front of the Zeitgeist set

On Saturday, Jody joined some of her siblings for a fishing expedition on Lake Superior to celebrate her brother’s birthday. They brough the fish back to Spooner for a fish fry and spent the day in each other’s company. Pretty special.

Jody and her siblings gathered on the deck of the charter boat on Lake Superior
Jody holding up the fish she landed

WHAT I WATCHED THIS WEEK

Hadestown: The Musical (2026) poster
Hadestown: The Musical (2026). We saw this live stage capture with friends, a couple of whom we've seen live productions of Hadestown with. Some of the impact of experiencing the show in the theater is lost (you won't be as blown back in your seat when the stage splits apart at the end of "Wait For Me," for example), but seeing the original cast up close revealed quite a few things that I'd never noticed before, despite having seen the show multiple times.

WHAT I READ THIS WEEK

Finished:

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. This one has been recommended to me many times, and I'm so glad to have finally gotten to it. What a marvel. A Pulitzer Prize-winning epistolary novel where the entire book is one single (long) letter from a dying Congregationalist minister to his young son. Quiet and filled with grace. Hard but hopeful. Mournful and joyful. I read a Kirkus review after finishing it that called it "A novel as big as a nation, as quiet as thought, and moving as prayer. Matchless and towering." That seems about right. I'll be returning to this one.
Gichigami Hearts by Linda LeGarde Grover, held up in front of Lake Superior
Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong, by Linda LeGarde Grover. I read Gichigami Hearts for our book group this month. A collection of creative nonfiction pieces — essays, stories, and poems — about the author's family history, Ojibwe culture, and Duluth and the North Shore. "The story has its own truth." "It is because of you that I walk."

In Progress:

BOOKS I PURCHASED

MEMORIES

Ten Years Ago:

We were all spending the day at Furst Farms for Jody’s family reunion.

The extended family gathered for a group photo at Furst Farms for Jody's family reunion

WHAT I'M EXCITED ABOUT

Hadestown: Teen Edition opens at the Playhouse this week! Get your tickets here.

Hadestown: Teen Edition at the Duluth Playhouse

A new Dirt Magnet album! Fill your ears with the bass fuzz and drums of Duluth’s best garage punk band on Making Up Time.

Making Up Time, the new album from Dirt Magnet

MY FAVORITE QUOTE OF THE WEEK

"In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable — which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us."

— Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

That’s it for this week. Stay safe, friends. Thanks for reading!

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