Pilgrimage to Stone Circle

On Saturday, August 8, 2026, I journeyed to the northwest edge of the mitten, between Torch Lake and Lake Michigan. The town: Kewadin. The venue: Stone Circle.

My friend Joe Troyer had been talking about Stone Circle since I met him waiting in line at a James McMurtry concert in Detroit last year. He’s known the stewards of Stone Circle–Terry and Wendi Wooten–for decades. He’s been a regular visitor and performer at Stone Circle, the longest continuous poetry venue in the United States, and possibly the world. This according to the award winning documentary The Stone Circle, directed by Patrick Pfister. I wanted to experience Stone Circle for myself, so Joe kindly drove me there.

Stone Circle is an outdoor venue consisting of 88 concentric boulders Terry Wooten hauled from the woods adjacent to his home, property that has been in his wife Wendi’s family for generations. It took years to collect the boulders. Centered in the circle, a huge fire pit.

When I first saw the circle empty and waiting, I immediately got a “San Juan Ridge” vibe. I thought of Gary Snyder, founder of that community, and I felt him, how happy he would be to see this place. Snyder was a big inspiration to Terry Wooten’s creation  of Stone Circle. He appreciates Snyder’s “primitive vision of the poet. Not a misfit, but the glue of the community.”

This year marks the 43rd year of the performance venue, which requires only that work presented must be memorized. No reading allowed. Back in its heyday, poets and musicians would routinely come from New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, the audience and performers numbering in the low hundreds.  COVID closed Stone Circle for a year, and since then crowds have been smaller. On August 8, about a dozen of us gathered for weekly Saturday night summer ritual.

As always, Terry Wooten began the evening with a variety of poems, some original, some collected from other writers. One in particular, a prose poem about an elder getting a bee stuck up his nose, came from The Elder Project. Wooten has worked with Michigan schools for decades, the Elder Project a powerful product of that work, paired elders with young poets. The elder shared the stories;  the youth made poems about those stories. Watching Wooten take on the mantel of the performer was a marvel to observe. A quiet, humble man, he crossed an invisible threshold in front of the crackling fire, suddenly a master of spoken word and oral history.

 

Next up was Joe Troyer, who’d prepared a set of five songs written by Texas songwriters James McMurtry, Townes Van Zandt, and Nanci Griffith.

Here’s the trailer for the film The Stone Circle. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95QOewqWo6c)

During the evening, someone mentioned Terry’s poem “Got In an Argument Over Harmony”.  I looked it up in his anthology The Stone Circle Poems, a Michigan Notable Book published in 2015. Here’s the first stanza (WordPress won’t let me due justice to the deliberate spacing of the lines):

After playing cards with a deck of Tarot

the young witch

gave me a magic-wooden toad

to keep my company

on my journey.

This silent night

all I know about astrology

is an instinct

feeling out

towards so much sparkling space,

so this is the path I take.

Is there such thing

as a mistake,

or are there just choices?

My life has become a fork in the road.

 

Those of you who know me know how deeply this resonated with me when I looked it up. The Stone Circle Poems is a brilliant collection, available for purchase on Saturday nights at the venue and by writing Terry’s wife and agent, Wendi Wooten, who can be reached through their website.   (https://www.terry-wooten.com/stone-circle.html)

I will vividly remember my pilgrimage to Stone Circle the rest of my days. I hope to return when my book is finished and share some Utah Phillips poetry by heart. He would hold Wooten and the place in high esteem:  Oral history, long memory,  community–so much of what he held most dear.

Thanks Joe! What a gift you gave me.