In late 2004 I received a Journalism Fellowship from the German Marshall Fund. Due to work responsibilities, however, I couldn't leave until a couple years later. In autumn of 'o6 I traversed six European countries in search of local food, visiting farm markets, meeting farmers, looking at their cheese making, looking at their pigs, watching wine making in Switzerland, it was really wonderful. I went to a big 'slow food' expo in Turin, but what I really liked was meeting farmers and seeing the landscape. It is a sacred landscape, in the Old...

I met Dobra Bielinski in a history colloquium at UIC, and saw she was a person of many interests and talents. Later she opened a bakery, and became proprietress of my now favorite confectionery Delightful Pastries on W Lawrence Ave. We had lunch one day and as she told me about fresh Michigan cherries and fresh cream from some dairy in Indiana, I felt a need to write about it. And help her out with a little publicity if I could. A creative editor at the Chicago Reader came up with the title The Polish Patisserie. Before that I put a little...

One night I went to a party in an artist's apartment in Pilsen. It was a little basement apartment crowded with people and the guy's paintings. A belly dancer came from behind curtains.  Stepping onto a little carpet, she went into a slow, strange gyrating dance. I liked it so much I wrote an article about the dancer.

I received a journalism fellowship in '04 to traverse Europe's farm markets, but I couldn't break away til the fall of '06. I saw cows, goats and pigs in five countries and talked to farmers who leave their wild boars to eat acorns in the forest. I learned about chestnuts in Italy. I produced little journalism from it but wrote this little essay.

I visited this estate several times while working in Sâo Paulo during the autumn of 2004, which was spring in Brazil. It's a big coffee estate that Marcos Croce wants to return to the old organic ways and even improve them with new knowledge. I found the place and the people fascinating and wrote this story.

A 'first person' essay published in Illinois Issues, November, 2001. Alvin later told me he thought the story needn't seem so sad. The article is Island Grove Afternoon. My original text, more complete, follows below. It is the church standing alone in the countryside that first intrigues a visitor to the parish of Island Grove. St. Joseph’s is a shapely little building of red bricks whose narrow sides rise to a steep sloping roof of black shingles. Its tall tower, compact, protruding slightly from the front, holds a brown wood door within a...

In early spring 2007, Greg Lochow and I went out to make a couple short films in the Calumet area of southeast Chicago. One is about a missing link in a long regional bike path. The other tells of a 'lost lake' sealed off and hidden from the local community. In each we had to move through a complex geography, combining video with still shots to tell a story. We tried to draw out the key points of a complicated issue to convey a clear community goal. So we placed each story, each project, in the midst of its difficult setting, showing its...