My Novel is Coming Out!

March Street Press is going to publish my novel, Into the Desperate Country.


Into the Desperate Country . . . imagine if someone read Walden and then tried to live the life Thoreau prescribes. This is exactly what Stanly Carter does (minus the actual reading of Walden). Having gone back to nature to live deliberately in his cabin near Gaylord, MI, Stan feels the very alluring pull of society calling him back to the easy path. Find love. Find a job. Have kids. Own a house. And then die -- having, perhaps, never lived.
It's the siren call of conformity and status quo. It's the call Stan must fight. And, in some way, it's the fight we all have as we make our way.

Signed copies of the novel can be ordered by sending a check for $18.00 (includes shipping) to:

Jeff Vande Zande
P.O. Box 2042
Bay City, MI 48707

Copies will ship as soon as I get them in June.

A Great Email to Receive

Dear Professor Vande Zande, Ted Kooser would like to publish your poem, "Clean," in his national newspaper column, American Life in Poetry. The column is carried in more than 200 newspapers, with a readership nearing eleven million. Suppported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the column is made available to newspapers free of charge on its website, www.americanlifeinpoetry.org.


Wow! That was a blast to receive.

Another Quote

Here's another quote I made up about the status of the short story in America:


The short story is like the red-winged blackbird and the novel is like the duck-billed platypus. The short story doesn't take on too much and its beauty is in the juxtaposition of one fantastic detail with an otherwise ordinary setting. The novel simply takes on too much, the juxtapositions become convoluted and lost, and in the end it's not fantastic, but ridiculous, awkward and hard to believe. And, yet, ask anyone which animal they'd rather see.