Notes from the shoreline.

When the early French voyageurs first looked out over Lake Erie, they did not call it a lake. They called it une mer intérieure — an inland sea. The horizon vanished into water; the weather changed without warning; the shore felt like a coastline more than a bank.

We took that name because publishing, at its best, is a long voyage. Books carry weight across distances we cannot see. Readers, like sailors, trust them in the dark.

From the shoreline of Lake Erie to the ridges of Appalachia, we are gathering voices for that voyage. We hope you will sail with us.

Brent Whetstone has spent decades at bedsides — in trauma bays, in nursing homes, in the quiet hours when a family must decide what to do with a beloved body. His new book, Anatomy of a Yes, gathers what he has learned.

We spoke with him about the small word that holds the largest meaning, and what it asks of all of us.

There is a month on the Great Lakes when the water turns the color of slate and the wind cuts through every coat you own. November is when the lakes remember the ships they have taken.

It is also, somehow, the most hopeful month — the one that asks you to keep a candle in the window.

In a small church up a gravel road, twenty people stood in a square and sang in four parts. There was no choir director. There was no audience.

There was only the sound — and the way each voice held up the others. That, it turns out, is also how books get made.