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On An Inland Sea: Writing the Great Lakes
"As a man who long convinced himself that he lived on the edge of the world, here's my wish for Embrace the awe. Allow yourself to feel alone. Then remember you are not." The thirty-three writers in this collection grapple with the vastness of the lakes—and the vastness of experience living alongside them. Gabriel Bump explores how his relationship with Lake Michigan changed after losing a friend. For another writer, the water provided the freedom to explore a romance that would have been too complicated on land. Come dive for shipwrecks, harvest manoomin, and visit the disappearing ice caves. Witness the chickadees, smelt, and cattails, but also zebra mussels, factory runoff, and algae. Each writer's relationship with the lakes is personal and unique, but that relationship to the water is also one shared by so many of us.
- GenresEssays
192 pages, Paperback
Published March 10, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
July 3, 2026
“There is an intimacy to living with the Great Lakes. It's a type of love to step into their waters and have your breath taken away, both by their temperature and grandeur. To feel the lake even when you can't see it, to know by its silent pull that east (or west, north, or south) leads you home. To feel as if you're standing on the edge of the world.”
To me, the Great Lakes region has always felt like a microcosm of America itself. Once a frontier, its cities built beautiful and shining, left for vacant once the money was bled out and resources were exhausted. The Great Lakes have seen America’s identity solidify, welcoming immigrants into a joyous collapse of cultures — building the architecture and cultural landscape to provide warmth for the cold, dark, winters we weather year after year. The Great Lakes were formed alongside America in geologic time, have seen the exploitation of their clear, cold, waters and dense forests. If the lakes could speak they’d sing the lives of all they’ve sustained, combined carrying 21% of all the world’s surface water by area, replenished by countless rivers and snowmelt. They’d also tell about the death they give us, how they gently erode our land, decompose bodies and soften the edges of our human settlements. The lakes have always and will continue to defy political boundaries and act as a reflection of the best and worst of our respective lives.
I loved this book as a whole and as a concept, maybe in the way I always knew I would because I feel so deeply connected to the region I’m proud to call my home. It’s uncanny how there’s an echo of familiarity and solidarity whenever I visit another Great Lakes or Rust Belt city— the underdog pride, the scrappy familiarity, the constancy of water and weather. I read this bundle of human stories, poems, and reports; once again I became overwhelmed with the precise joy of understanding a landscape completely.
Like any essay collection, there are strong parts and weaker parts. Some of the pieces definitely felt a bit unresolved, trite, and amateurish, but at the same time I feel like it’s not worth it to be overly critical of personal narrative essays— most still touch on fascinating topics regarding space, identity, relationships, environmentalism, and meaning. It’s important to note that these pieces are not meant to be the Paris Review or the New Yorker: they’re dispatches from working artists in the Rust Belt, real people with connection to place— and sometimes that’s worth more than an esteemed literary conciousness or the latest Iowa WW MFA slop!
I’d really like to read more books from Belt Publishing, the independent press that put out this book and many other treasures of hyperlocal pride like this one. I’d encourage any of my Goodreads friends to check out Belt Pub and their magazine and see what might pique your interest… I highly admire the work they do both as an independent publishing imprint and community for writers and artists from an often very overlooked geographical region of North America.
other foundational great lakes region ephemera:
- Gordon Lightfoot, “The Wreck Of Edmund Fitzgerald”
- @rustbeltroadtrip on twitter/x/IG
- “Don’t Give Up The Ship”
- minor league hockey
- navigating by the direction of the lake
To me, the Great Lakes region has always felt like a microcosm of America itself. Once a frontier, its cities built beautiful and shining, left for vacant once the money was bled out and resources were exhausted. The Great Lakes have seen America’s identity solidify, welcoming immigrants into a joyous collapse of cultures — building the architecture and cultural landscape to provide warmth for the cold, dark, winters we weather year after year. The Great Lakes were formed alongside America in geologic time, have seen the exploitation of their clear, cold, waters and dense forests. If the lakes could speak they’d sing the lives of all they’ve sustained, combined carrying 21% of all the world’s surface water by area, replenished by countless rivers and snowmelt. They’d also tell about the death they give us, how they gently erode our land, decompose bodies and soften the edges of our human settlements. The lakes have always and will continue to defy political boundaries and act as a reflection of the best and worst of our respective lives.
I loved this book as a whole and as a concept, maybe in the way I always knew I would because I feel so deeply connected to the region I’m proud to call my home. It’s uncanny how there’s an echo of familiarity and solidarity whenever I visit another Great Lakes or Rust Belt city— the underdog pride, the scrappy familiarity, the constancy of water and weather. I read this bundle of human stories, poems, and reports; once again I became overwhelmed with the precise joy of understanding a landscape completely.
Like any essay collection, there are strong parts and weaker parts. Some of the pieces definitely felt a bit unresolved, trite, and amateurish, but at the same time I feel like it’s not worth it to be overly critical of personal narrative essays— most still touch on fascinating topics regarding space, identity, relationships, environmentalism, and meaning. It’s important to note that these pieces are not meant to be the Paris Review or the New Yorker: they’re dispatches from working artists in the Rust Belt, real people with connection to place— and sometimes that’s worth more than an esteemed literary conciousness or the latest Iowa WW MFA slop!
I’d really like to read more books from Belt Publishing, the independent press that put out this book and many other treasures of hyperlocal pride like this one. I’d encourage any of my Goodreads friends to check out Belt Pub and their magazine and see what might pique your interest… I highly admire the work they do both as an independent publishing imprint and community for writers and artists from an often very overlooked geographical region of North America.
other foundational great lakes region ephemera:
- Gordon Lightfoot, “The Wreck Of Edmund Fitzgerald”
- @rustbeltroadtrip on twitter/x/IG
- “Don’t Give Up The Ship”
- minor league hockey
- navigating by the direction of the lake
March 21, 2026
This absorbing anthology of essays and poems lovingly illustrates the symbiotic relationship, for better or worse, we have with the Great Lakes. I laughed and cried and resolved never to take living near a big beautiful body of water for granted ever again.
This quote from one of the essays best sums up the whole book: “The lakes are wild and mysterious; they are vast and interconnected; they are powerful and capable of incredible change. And so are we.”
This quote from one of the essays best sums up the whole book: “The lakes are wild and mysterious; they are vast and interconnected; they are powerful and capable of incredible change. And so are we.”
April 16, 2026
Anyone who has an affinity for the Great Lakes (or even just one of them) will find the pieces in this collection resonant, engaging, and each doing their part in an attempt to describe or explain the ephemeral notion of Great Lakes Culture. At times charming and nostalgic, at others thought-provoking or challenging, each essay in this book is accessible and enjoyable and contributes to a diverse but cohesive whole.
May 4, 2026
I love essay collections by multiple authors because of the variety of forms, topics and perspectives each piece can take. I especially enjoyed that this collection also included poetry. "Ballast" by Jessica Leigh Hester is one of my favorite essays, a well-developed parallel between the lake and the body. But they were all enjoyable and made me understand the Great Lakes better.
May 7, 2026
Being and currently living from the Great Lakes region, this was an auto read for me. I consider this compilation to be a bit of a gem. The subject matter is deep and thought provoking, sometimes raw, and it correlates to the author's perceptions and interactions with the Great Lakes. This was such a unique compilation, and all of the authors were extremely talented in their writings.
April 14, 2026
Anyone who has ever puked after swallowing a little Lake Erie beach water, shoveled three feet of lake-effect snow, or had a set of Wizard of Oz (Ozzie Newsome) PJs, will appreciate the beauty of these stories. Intimate and comforting.
June 14, 2026
Simply put it is just a collection of writings about the great lakes. Many of them hit on climate change. If you like it here, give it a flip through.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews