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Summer reads that celebrate Michigan with Wade Rouse aka Viola ShipmanFree Access

Literature



Author Wade Rouse makes Michigan a part of every one of his novels. Rouse Is an accomplished nonfiction and fiction writer who explores deeper life questions through humor and his relatable characters. (Courtesy photo)

Author Wade Rouse makes Michigan a part of every one of his novels. Rouse is an accomplished nonfiction and fiction writer who explores deeper life questions through humor and his relatable characters. (Courtesy photo)

Editor’s Note: Harbor Light Newspaper feature writer Emily Meier has had the opportunity to share insights and conversations from many literary talents in recent years. Recently she spoke with award-winning author Wade Rouse ( Viola Shipman). Their conversation is included here.

As a reminder, our interviews with upcoming Harbor Springs Festival of the Book presenters have already started to appear (check last week’s paper) and will continue to appear in upcoming weeks to give readers a preview of what’s to come.

In between those introductions, enjoy this bonus feature on another great writer.

For information on the Festival of the Book check out the Festival website, www.hsfotb.org, for more information. Registration is required to attend this year’s Festival.

Wade Rouse is an accomplished memoirist, humorist, and novel writer. His 2007 memoir, Confessions of a Prep School Mommy Handler, was my first introduction to his work, though not his first book. His humor hooked me from the start. I followed along on his misadventures as I read about his move to Michigan in the memoir, At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream: Misadventures in Search of the Simple Life.

“When I started writing these novels, I made the intentional decision to set them all in Michigan in different resort towns....I visit every town before writing about it. I spend time there, I talk to friends. I stay weekends, sometimes even weeks. I talk to locals. I become a journalist again and do a lot of exploring....I want to infuse every single page with a sense of place. Every novel I write is a love letter to Michigan.”

“When I started writing these novels, I made the intentional decision to set them all in Michigan in different resort towns….I visit every town before writing about it. I spend time there, I talk to friends. I stay weekends, sometimes even weeks. I talk to locals. I become a journalist again and do a lot of exploring….I want to infuse every single page with a sense of place. Every novel I write is a love letter to Michigan.”

Rouse knows how to tell on himself. And in his honesty and revelations on the page, there is great humor and heart. But after five books of nonfiction, he decided to turn his pen to fiction.

The leap from nonfiction to fiction is not an easy one in the world of publishing but Rouse has done so seamlessly. He has now penned seven books of fiction. His most recent novel, The Clover Girls was released this spring. A new novel and a holiday novella will both be released this October.

Rouse publishes his fiction under the pen name, Viola Shipman, a tribute to his grandmother. His books have become international bestsellers and have been translated into 21 different languages. His books have been selected multiple times as Must-Reads by NBC’s Today Show, featured in the Washington Post, USA Today, and chosen three times as Indie Next Picks by the nation’s independent booksellers.

His writing has appeared in a wide range of publications and media, including Coastal Living, Time, All Things Considered, People, Good Housekeeping, Salon, Forbes, The Washington Post, Writer’s Digest and Publisher’s Weekly.

Rouse earned a masters in journalism from Northwestern University and has worked as a journalist, a “Prep School Mommy Handler”, and a director of public relations. He divides his time between Saugatuck, Michigan, and Palm Springs, California.

During a two hour phone call, to which Rouse prefaced, “I’ll talk about anything. You can ask me anything”, he shared glimpses of the people and experiences that have made him the writer he is today.

Most authors are inspired by other authors and the books they read as children that left indelible impressions.

For Rouse, Erma Bombeck was an early inspiration.

“Erma Bombeck was always one of my favorites,” Rouse said, “I watched my grandmother read her newspaper column and laugh. So I started reading it. And it was the first time, even as a kid, where I thought, she’s writing about everyday life, about what’s happening to all of us. And it’s funny. For me, as a kid, being funny was how I made friends but it was also a self-defense mechanism–you make people laugh, they won’t hurt you. I grew up in the Ozarks in the 70s.I was a chunky kid who liked to read and write. I wore an ascot and tried to be fashion forward. That didn’t go over well in Wrangler country.”

While Bombeck taught Rouse about humor writing, J.D. Salinger offered a different way of looking at the idea of an outcast.

“I’m still obsessed with The Catcher in the Rye. It’s one of the few books I reread every couple of years,” Rouse said. “I love it because, as an adult, it speaks to me even more. Growing up it was teen angst. And now, reading it, I relate to the question it seems to ask– ‘why do we allow ourselves to have our uniqueness beaten out of us by the world?’ It seems like we all want to conform and yet, we each have these incredible gifts that we sometimes don’t get to channel. And it’s the saddest thing to me.”

Rouse saw this fiction translate to real life while working at a prep school.

“It’s interesting because working at that prep school, I’d see these kids,” Rouse said. “They want to fit in, to be liked. And they’re being told, ‘you’re going to be an attorney like your father or a doctor like your grandfather’. I worked there a long time and I saw these kids return as young adults. They were miserable human beings because they’d never found themselves, never found out who they truly were, never found their own voice. It was so sad.”

Rouse credits his mother for encouraging him to find his voice and put it on the page.

“My mother was a hospice nurse. She saw that I was miserable,” Rouse said. “She basically said ‘life is short, don’t end it with regret’. But she saw that regret first hand. There are a few people in life who really get life. She was one of them.”

Rouse started working on his first memoir while working a full-time job, waking up at four in the morning before work every day for three years. His mother got to see that hard work in book form, and her son was celebrated on the Today Show, just before she died which Rouse said was a dream come true. But his mother’s death was devastating to him and part of what led him to leave his nonfiction roots and find his voice in fiction.

“I went through this incredible depression after losing my mother because she was my best friend,” Rouse said. “Things just weren’t funny to me anymore. And my dad, he didn’t do well. He declined very rapidly after my mother’s death and was diagnosed with early onset dementia.”

In the midst of mourning his mother and trying to move his father out of their family home, Rouse found inspiration in the attic.

“I found all of my mom and grandmother’s stuff packed away in the attic. Boxes filled with my grandmother’s charm bracelets, recipe boxes, quilts, scrap books, and the family bible. I just lost it,” Rouse said. “But that day, on top of the cardboard boxes, I started writing ideas about heirlooms and the family traditions we’re losing that connect the generations. I found their letters and thought about how we only text now. But texts go away. And the scrapbooks with all the pictures made me think about the 10 pictures I just took to send to friends with my phone, and how I’ll delete them later once my iCloud is full. Everything is disappearing. And I was thinking about why that was happening. And that was my start, how I started writing novels. I told my agent I want to use my grandmother’s name in order to pay tribute to her. And my agent fought for me, so my grandmother’s name stuck.”

Rouse’s characters are inspired by hardworking, down to earth, women like his mother and grandmother.

“The characters I write about are good, hardworking, kind women who are often overlooked in life and literature,” Rouse said. “I write normal characters, not ones that are out killing or sleeping with half of Europe. That’s just not my thing or what I write about in my fiction.”

For Rouse each book starts with a larger question that then inspires each character’s development and evolution.

“I’m much more of a by-the-seat-of-my-pants writer than a plotter,” Rouse explained. “I ask myself a big question, or questions, that I want to find answers to and that I think readers would find interesting to explore too.”

For his recent novel, The Clover Girls, the questions that led to the writing of the book revolved around the idea of childhood friends and childhood dreams.

“When you think of who you were as a kid, you had that best friend or two that you told all your secrets to. And you dreamed with them about being anything you wanted–a movie star, an astronaut, etc. And then you grow up and adulthood knocks that out of you. And I asked myself, why do we let all of that go? When does that happen? And why do we seem to lose touch with those we once loved? Those were my guiding questions,” Rouse explained.

The Clover Girls explores the relationship between four very different women who become best friends at summer camp in the 1980s. Adult responsibilities and betrayals have torn them apart. But a single tragedy brings them back to the camp where their friendship started as they once again explore the dreams they once held for themselves and each other. Rouse is not a writer who deals in melancholy and while the big questions are rooted in a serious note, the exploration of the answers through his characters is often filled with fun and quick one-liners.

But just because he writes by the seat of his pants, doesn’t mean his books come without a lot of hard work..

“I write every day,” Rouse said. “I try to take weekends off but that fails most of the time. I write in the mornings. I’ll start at 7:00 and write until about noon every day. Then I exercise. I’m a big runner, five to six miles a day. The more physically exhausted I get, the more mentally alert I become. I try not to edit as I write but I make notes. I’ll make notes like, ‘why does she do this?’ or ‘this is terrible’ and then I keep going. I push to just write through that first draft. Then the horror comes with the next three to four drafts.”

While Rouse is one of those rare writers who enjoys both the solitude of writing and the more social business of selling a book, he depends on quiet and a view to do the work and recharge.

“I need quiet and a view in order to write,” Rouse said. “It’s why I love Michigan and where we live. It’s so incredibly quiet and beautiful. I do the bulk of my work here. I feel very comfortable as soon as I am here. I love it. There’s nothing like it.”

Rouse is also a note taker and when he does venture out, he carries a small notebook with him.

I take copious notes before starting a book,” Rouse said. “I always joke that people in Saugatuck must think I’m a serial killer because I’m always pulling out my little notebook.”

Michigan is a very important place for Rouse and plays a role in all of his novels.

“That was a conscious choice,” Rouse explained. “I’ve always been a huge fan of authors like Elin Hilderbrand, Dorthea Benton Frank, Nancy Thayer, Mary Alice Monroe, people who write about a place like Nantucket or the lowcountry so beautifully. When I started writing these novels, I made the intentional decision to set them all in Michigan in different resort towns. And it was personal, too. I have an aunt who’s owned a cottage in Leland for 30 years. I’ve spent time there. But before I bought a house in Saugatuck, I vacationed there. I’m one of those people who got out of the car, walked around, and said, ‘I have to live here’. I used to think people like that were wackos. But it is one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen; it was almost a spiritual experience finding this place.”

Rouse and his partner Gary consider Saugatuck home in many ways, spending as much time there as they can. But he also enjoys the research trips to other Michigan towns as he gathers insight and inspiration for each new novel.

“I visit every town before writing about it,” Rouse said.”I spend time there, I talk to friends. I stay weekends, sometimes even weeks. I talk to locals. I become a journalist again and do a lot of exploring.”

Rouse likes the setting “to be as big as the characters” in each of his books.

“I want to infuse every single page with a sense of place,” he said. “Every novel I write is a love letter to Michigan.”

Whether he’s writing fiction or nonfiction, Rouse wants his readers to feel a sense of connection in the pages of his books.

“I want every book or novel to feel like you’re sitting around having a glass of wine with your friends telling stories. That’s what I want my books to feel like.”

For more information on upcoming events and book releases, visit: www.waderouse.com or www.violashipman.com

And join his weekly Facebook Live,Wine andWords withWade, to enjoy book talks withWade and other writers every Thursday.