James C. Schaap

You’ll drive a long way to find a sandy beach on Minnesota's north shore. That humpy stuff roiling beneath your feet looks and feels like lava, which it is, surprising as that may seem with not a mountain anywhere close.…

Truth be told, there weren't all that many people around. I was a little disappointed in the size of the crowd--three or four dozen, most of them, like me, decidedly on the far side of their forties. A pandemic is raging…

A couple of weeks ago, out west on the Oregon Trail, I couldn't help being astounded by both the clockwork and the sheer number of Union Pacific long-haulers passing, one after another after another, on their way east, each heavy…

"It was a test," he told me, after pulling me aside. "It's a story I thought you'd like, a story I wanted to tell you." We were in the den, a couple rooms away from the jabbering coming the family…

Found it. I just hadn’t read the small print. I had turned right off the gravel road and headed to the scruffy Cather Township cemetery where a number of Cathers are buried. Not Willa--that I knew. But I was hoping…

https://youtu.be/17l2wM33ysE It was, I'd like to believe, at least something like this rendition--big choir, lots of folks on stage. I was a boy--kindergarten, first grade or second--and it seems to me that the woman who ran the whole pageant that…

He was a colleague, my boss, my editor and, for a long, long time, our neighbor and good, good friend. From just across the street, we watched him grow up as a father with all those kids—six of them—some of…

The land out back is vacant, all flood plain.  Nobody will build behind us, so we’ve got an acre of grass, native flowers, and Russian thistles, who get my daily attention. It’s wide open, the horizon yawning out for miles.…