Core Hollow

Core Hollow invites you through our lost portal, that place of heart’s connection and hard-hearted truth, the place we fiercely loved, the place that ultimately changed us forever. .

This book is really about impetuous love, you see, and its inevitable conclusion. Core Hollow invites you through our lost portal, that place of heart’s connection and hard-hearted truth, the place we fiercely loved, the place that ultimately changed us forever. And for every love there is a first time, right? Did I ever tell you about the first time? That was the night we drove straight up the hard, laddered gravel road, right to the top of the ridge in a rusted Ford pickup. And then what? There was nothing. No road, just a sighing eternity of grass, and no house, just the waiting woods, echoing the moony cry of owls, shadowing the secret shine of wolf gaze. Our vehicle was at maximum load with beat-up furniture, clothes and kids. Three kids rode in the truck bed, holding a cardboard box with a big yellow cat in it, dangling their feet over the missing tail gate. A black dog the size of The Hound of the Baskervilles sat on a dresser drawer, eyeballing two turkeys in a barrel. All of our assets were merged into one piece of property…this. The moon rolled its blind, white eye over us…. We were those wind-blown people in the pickup truck. We were not so different from you….except that in 1995 we went wild. We sold our former home, moved to a feral place and lived there, making our own shelter, finding a way to obtain water, growing and hunting our food, pulling our lives right out of the rock-ribbed, sharp-shinned ridge in Western Wisconsin we decided to call home. Directions? Put your finger on a Wisconsin map, choose that hard-hearted space between bleak, wind-scoured farmhouses and stony, unrelenting toil, and you have landed. Ed Gein lived around here, if that's any consolation. Why? Maybe we thought it would be different than it really was, like a story line from Little House on the Prairie. You know, all about a close family prevailing against formidable odds. And maybe, maybe by the time we’d seen the truth, we were tied, captured, bound by love for this bewitching place. But there’s always more to it, right?