A Reason for My Blog

My favorite book about writing is Stephen King’s On Writing. At one point in it, he describes good writing as the ability to kill your darlings. By this, he means one of the hardest parts of writing is deleting a good sentence, a well-organized paragraph, or an...

Chinese New Year*

In the years when we had kids around the house, the highlight of Chinese New Year was the handing out of red envelopes. Children went from adult to adult wishing them a prosperous and happy new year, and the adults rewarded the kids with an envelope of money. When...

Chinese Food, Indian Food

Last week’s blog was about driving to Madison to buy groceries for the Lunar New Year. I let myself get sidetracked about the holiday itself and didn’t write about the food we bought. We filled a grocery cart, so I won’t list every item, but there were fish balls,...

Preparing for the New Year*

Manyu and I sometimes drive two and a half hours to grocery shop. When we first moved to La Crosse in the early 1990s, we sometimes drove six. La Crosse’s Chinese/Taiwanese community is too small to support much of a Chinese market, so whenever we need to stock up on...

Out on the Ice

Fishermen on the ice do not necessarily mean the fish are biting. Last week, men were everywhere on the Upper Mississippi – in the backwaters, at river’s edge, even out on the hazardous main channel. I am not being political incorrect when I use the terms...
Steven Simpson