Sky Full of Burdens

Left behind by the hyper-acceleration of a new century are the lives encountered in Sky Full of Burdens. In one way or another facing extinction or obsolescence, the men and women in these stories could be described as vestigial: the proprietor of a failing grocery in a town literally about to be erased from the map; a man isolated by a physical handicap who stakes much of his identity to an engineering quirk on a local highway. Exile from their comfort zones brings them into direct contact with irrevocable mistakes, deferred realizations, and unexpected connections with the humanity and fallibility of others. The interplay of painful losses and discovered compensations is echoed in the alternately bleak and beautiful landscape of northern Michigan.