Memoir: In Michigan, We Go Up North
This story describes the camping trips that saved me from my high school self. My path to deliverance started with an English class and a charismatic teacher, and then a canoe trip that attracted a group of vulnerable students seeking communion and meaning beyond what high school had to offer. A 1973 trip down Michigan’s Au Sable River led to a several-year odyssey of excursions, Michigan’s highways taking us far away to tents, cabins, rivers, lakes, the piney woods. Wherever Julia led, I followed her ever-quivering compass, loyal, blind, trusting it would read true.
Pine River, Fall 1973
Memoir: Can You Get There from Here? High Hopes for Higher Education
This 100,000-word completed manuscript describes my last two years at Kalamazoo College written in a contemporary voice and supplemented with journal entries from the 1970s. During junior year I studied abroad in Madrid, Spain. I returned to my mother’s breast cancer diagnosis, a troubled non-romance with a young man who turned out to be gay, school successes, career choices, and a senior-year grand finale involving a night in jail. Good thing grad school awaited.
Essays
My completed 76,000-word manuscript, Downriver from Detroit: A Collection of Essays, reflects major themes in my life:
Jobs, from convenience store clerk, to PhD, and back to store clerk
Observations on everyday occurrences from a 67-year-old feminist perspective
Downriver, the industrial suburbs south of Detroit where I grew up (→→ A barge traveling down the Detroit River, 1980s)
My elderly Dad and his dementia
Books, music, and film
Characters, human and not
The alternative existence I led in high school, camping with friends
College study abroad in Madrid and beyond
Life with two sons
Divorce after 24 years of …. what do you call that kind of marriage?
Published Pieces
Two essays were published in the Ann Arbor Observer: “Fungus Among Us” (March 2013) and “An Ann Arbor Goldilocks Tale” (entitled “Couch Surfer, December 2017).
“Fungus” describes my elderly dad’s hospitalization after his hip implant was infected with fungus from an injection of contaminated pain medication. The scandal, involving a compounding pharmacy, made national news…. “Goldilocks” tells a truly Ann Arbor story that happened on a University of Michigan home football game Saturday night. A drunk college student came through my family’s unlocked back door to spend the night on our living room couch. The Ann Arbor Observer renamed the piece “Couch Surfer,” of course.
“Summer of ’77: Bug Stalking” (entitled “A Summer of Bugs”) appeared in Kalamazoo College’s alumni magazine Lux Esto (Winter 2017) In “Bug Stalking,” I fervently gather insect specimens for a college entomology class collection. I am no field biologist, it turns out.
“Just Downriver from Detroit” was published April 19, 2019 in Belt Magazine. (April 2019) It describes an imaginary automobile tour, as I take my early-stage-dementia father on a tour of his life in Detroit’s south suburbs through images in a photo album. The area, known as Downriver, follows the banks of the Detroit River for thirty miles from Detroit to the north down to Lake Erie. From the late 1800s until the 1970s, coal-powered electrical plants, chemical factories, and steel mills filled its skies with billowing clouds of smoke and stinging sulfur. My place of origin.
“A Few PCBs” appears in Michigan State University Libraries Short Edition, May 2023. This piece starts with a hairdresser visit that brings to mind the place where I grew up. Downriver is part of me, no matter how far I go or how much I change. It has given me the gift of resilience.
A version of “Last Hurrah” appears in Gotham Writers online publication The Razor in October 2024. “Last Hurrah” describes the poignancy and delight I felt watching my son’s near-last jazz sax performance in high school—hoping to no end he’d keep his music forever. Like me.
“Give Me an Impressionable Girl and She is Mine for Life” was named as a semifinalist in Tulip Tree Publishing’s “Stories That Need to Be Told” contest (October 2024). “Impressionable” describes the unsettling parallels between my 1970s experience camping in Michigan’s wilderness with a charismatic teacher and a group of other high school students and the unhealthy student-teacher relationship in the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Trip to White Cloud, Michigan, 1975