I didn't grow up loving Michigan. I grew up here, in a town I couldn't wait to leave—and I left. College, then the world. I lived abroad. I built a life somewhere else, then watched it come apart.

When my marriage ended, my son and I came back. Not because I wanted to. Because I needed somewhere to land.

And then I took him to Pictured Rocks.

I wasn't prepared for it. The color of the water. The way the cliffs just drop into the lake like they've been there since before anything that mattered to me existed—because they have. Something cracked open that day. I fell in love with Michigan for the first time, as an adult, with my son by my side, in a place I'd somehow never seen growing up a few hours south on the shores of Lake Huron. It sure didn't look like this place.

We continued exploring. Trails, shorelines, small towns, shipwrecks, sand dunes, forests. We went back even after we moved away again. Michigan kept calling. It still does.

That's what built PULSE of the Great Lakes. Not nostalgia—I don't have that kind of relationship with this place. Something harder-won than that. A chosen love. The kind that knows exactly what it's fighting for.

More Than a Magazine

PULSE is independent journalism rooted in the Great Lakes Basin—a region that holds 21% of the world's surface fresh water and the identity of tens of millions of people. We cover adventure, arts, culture, history, music, lifestyle, and politics, because none of those things are actually separate from each other here.

But PULSE is also the heart of something larger. The Love Where You Live Foundation is our nonprofit arm, doing the hard work on the ground across the Basin. That means supporting volunteer firefighters, veterans, and marginalized communities through the Bring the Love Initiative. It means standing with Indigenous boarding school survivors through truth-telling and community-led healing. It means fighting corporate extraction and private equity firms that are buying up and destroying manufactured-home communities through Keep Our Homes. And it means protecting the Great Lakes Basin itself—the drinking source for over 40 million people—through the Great Lakes Basin Initiative.

Three active podcasts—PULSE on Politics, love where you live!, and Rights of the Lakes—dig into power, healing, democracy, and the growing fight to give these Lakes the legal right to defend themselves.

We built all of it for one reason. Because this place, and the people in it, deserve more than flyover coverage. They deserve something real, something rooted, and something that fights like it means it..

Why We Need Your Support

We don't sell your data. We don't cater to sponsors. And we sure as hell can't be bought.

Everything we publish is powered by people who give a damn. If our work moves you, informs you, or just reminds you that you're not alone in caring about this place—please consider supporting us. You can find the link to Fund the Fight below.