WRITE MICHIGAN 2013 ANTHOLOGY TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword by Wade Rouse . 1 Judges’ Choice Adult Winners Untitled by Rhonda Wilson, Grandville . 7 Brother Wolf: A Tale of Beginnings by Matthew Rohr, Zeeland . 13 Remember by Katherine VanZwoll, Lansing . 19 Judges’ Choice Youth Winners Walk in the Light by Emma Seif, Shelbyville . 27 The Thief and the Painter by Ashley Cabala, Pinconning . 35 Women in Burkas by Leah Viotti-Ziegler, East Grand Rapids . 43 Readers’ Choice Adult Winners Archived by Andrew Rogers, Grandville . 49 The Job You Want by Daniel Schoonmaker, Grand Rapids . 57 The Herald of Free Enterprise by Phillip Sterling, Ada . 63 Readers’ Choice Youth Winners Chasing Cars by Sarah McLellan, Rockford . 69 Hotel Lusoldo by Daniel Alexander, Bellevue . 73 Notes in Blue Sharpie by Madeline MacLean, Holland . 79 About Write Michigan . 85 About the judges . 86 Acknowledgments . 87 FOREWORD The Delta Dawn Debacle Wade Rouse Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you have on? Could it be a faded rose from days gone by? As a young boy, I made the horrific mistake of singing “Delta Dawn” – while holding a faded rose, no less – in my rural, middle school talent contest . (To make that plight current for younger readers, just insert any Taylor Swift song for “Delta Dawn” and then imagine a chubby, little boy singing it to a gym filled with a collection of country folk that made the fellas from Deliverance look like the Jonas Brothers). I wasn’t just heckled, I was boo’ed offstage . I sprinted off the rickety plywood runway and directly toward the open arms of my waiting mother . She didn’t get a hug, however . She got berated . “How could you let me humiliate myself like that?” I screamed . My mother, the nurse – still wearing her hospital scrubs – said simply yet firmly, as if she were assisting a doctor in surgery, “You were only being true to yourself, and no one should ever stand in the way of such honesty and fearlessness . Only that can lead to true happiness ”. She then presented me with two gifts: a little, leather writing journal and a copy of American humorist Erma Bombeck’s book, At Wit’s End . “You will need both – humor and writing – to make sense of this world,” she had already written – in her looping cursive – on the inside cover . “I love you ”. She then took me to get a twist cone to numb my pain even more . Yes, my mother, it seemed, had not only known my performance would be a debacle but she had also come prepared for the disaster . But she wasn’t a soothsayer, as I initially believed . She was simply a great mother . That evening changed my life, no matter how much the memory stung, because I realized that my mom didn’t stand in the way of my dreams . She encouraged them, knowing – as a nurse does – that healing often comes with a little pain, while knowing – as a mother does – that discovering yourself often comes with fits of failure . After my Delta Dawn debacle, my refuge became our tiny local library, with its mossy front steps, where my grandmother volunteered on occasions . That library 1 2 Write Michigan 2013 Anthology was a magical place, a fantasyland that smelled of old books, the Avon perfume of the librarians and inspiration (if you can tag a smell to that) . The library and its books transported me to worlds I never knew existed . That was the place where I ended up falling in love with writing and writers . It’s where I discovered great humorists like Erma, Dorothy Parker and Oscar Wilde . It is the place where I began to write my own stories . Ironically, I wrote mostly about my mother, a hospital and Hospice nurse with a penchant for telling long-winded, long-winding stories in an Ozarks voice as thick as maple syrup while wearing blood-stained scrubs . I referred to my mother in my writing as “Digit,” because she became known in our rural community as being the go-to gal whenever a local goofball cut off a finger with a chainsaw or a toe with a lawnmower . She would race, day or night, to our giant, red rotary phone – the kind presidents used in old movies to launch a nuclear bomb – and say very calmly, “Can you locate your digit? OK, good!” before running out of our home, often in a nightgown carrying an Igloo cooler filled with ice, to retrieve some idiot’s finger . Of course, she discovered my writing while cleaning my room but was never angry with me . “I shouldn’t have expected anything less,” she sighed one morning while reading one of my stories about her . And then she laughed, as I inhaled a bowl of Quisp cereal . “You’re channeling Erma Bombeck… writing about family . We all better be ready…” They never were, of course, but that didn’t stop me . For decades, I wrote essays about my family . From our eccentric holiday celebrations (my father buried our Easter eggs to make it more of a “challenge”) to the summers spent with my beloved grandparents at a log cabin alongside an Ozarks creek, to the tragic death of my brother, I wrote about my life, with humor, because it was the only way I could make sense of an often insane world in which I didn’t seem to fit or understand . Oftentimes, I couldn’t sleep until I got the words in my head down on paper . After I finished college and graduate school and began my career as a journalist and PR executive, I became disillusioned with my chosen path . I yearned to write books and rediscovered many of my stories and found that they shimmered with love, honesty and humor . Moreover, they showed an American family as it loved and lost, fought and made up, struggled and triumphed, laughed and cried . These stories, accumulated over time, were quite powerful . I also rediscovered that laughing at oneself – finding humor in the simple struggle of everyday life – was a great gift and largely the reason I had survived . Moreover, I realized what a gift it was to be able to unleash a hidden talent and have it nurtured and appreciated by those around you . When I began to write my first memoir, America’s Boy, something not-so-funny happened, however . I began to recreate my family stories as fiction . I had never been worried, as a The Delta Dawn Debacle by Wade Rouse 3 kid, about what my family thought, but as an adult, I became paralyzed with fear . About everything . Would my family be angry I was sharing our secrets? Would anyone think I was funny? Was I good enough to get published? Who can really make a career as an author? Who writes as an adult? Just give up your dream. As a result of that fear, I wrote drivel . Or didn’t write at all . And then I went home . Literally . “Why aren’t you writing?” my mother asked at the end of one of our regular Sunday evening phone calls . “Where’s that fearlessness and honesty?” I drove from the city back to my family cabin in the Ozarks a few weeks later, stuck my feet in the ice-cold, crystal-clear creek, and began to write, my mother watching from the deck . Those words – written in longhand – became the first chapter in my first memoir . Those words went unchanged from creek to Penguin Books, from literary agent to editor, from proof pages to finished hardcover . “No one should ever stand in the way of such honesty and fearlessness . Only that can lead to true happiness ”. I remembered those words as I ate ribs with my parents after writing all day by the creek . I inscribed those words on the inside front cover of America’s Boy that I presented to my mother just a year or so later . I also ended up learning another great lesson as a result: Fear is the great destroyer of a writer’s dreams and, even more importantly, of a writer’s voice . Once a writer lets fear take hold, something awful transpires from head to hand: Words change, ideas morph, dreams disappear . Once any of us lets fear take hold, we find ourselves doing things for the wrong reasons, living someone else’s life, putting our dreams on hold forever . That is why Write Michigan – and this book – is so valuable: It is concrete (OK, paper and electronic) evidence that fear didn’t win . You believed in your dreams and talent; you sat down and wrote; you finished; you created a story that will now live forever . Writing is magical, but the journey often isn’t: The process of writing can be maddening, dumbfounding, hair-tugging, exasperating . It requires a person to sit down, alone, crowd out the world and create one of his own, a single word at a time . Writing is hard work . I compare writing – actually finishing a short story, an essay, a book – to exercise: It takes commitment, diligence, perseverance . In the beginning, you don’t notice much progress . But, like training for a marathon, or losing weight, the result is cumulative . After a week, a month, a year, you can finally see how far you’ve come . 4 Write Michigan 2013 Anthology In the beginning, writing requires great faith, because you start with nothing but a driving belief that there is something there, something bigger than you, some- thing that just might change not only your life but also the lives of others .