Ellen Airgood: In Her Own Words

Summer 2011: Ellen Airgood will be the first featured author of the season at Dog Ears Books in Northport. She will be here Friday, June 17, from 4 to 6 p.m., to answer questions about her writing life and her recently released novel, South of Superior, and to read from and sign her book for customers. Here in advance is some of her background from the author herself.

I grew up on a small farm, the youngest of four children. My father was a blacksmith and a schoolteacher. For the last nineteen years I’ve been a waitress in Grand Marais, Michigan. I was twenty-five when I came to this tiny Lake Superior town, on a camping trip with my sister, and fell in love with the man who made my cheese sandwich and chocolate malt at the local diner. We met, exchanged assessing, almost challenging gazes, and six months later we got married. I told my sister we would, on the way back to our campsite that first day. “You’re crazy,” she said worriedly. But pretty soon she grinned, shook her head, started getting into the spirit of it. “Well,” she said, “this is going to be interesting.” And it has been.

I’ve never been sorry. My husband Rick and I run a diner together, a job that is always consuming, often punishing, and hugely fulfilling. Most of what I know about maturity and compassion, not to mention story, I’ve learned from waiting tables. We work eighty to a hundred hours a week together almost year round, and one way or another we’ve faced the constant barrage of setbacks and frustrations and equipment failures that restaurant work is, the high stress and long hours. There is so much satisfaction in it, though: the goodness of hard work, the joy of feeding people a meal they love, the delight of long friendships, the pride in a job well done. All kinds of people come here from all kinds of places, and we get to meet them, to hear their stories, and pretty often we get to make them happy for the time that they are here.

This is the route I took to becoming a writer. I didn’t get an MFA or study writing in school. I could have learned about life anywhere, but fate brought me here, to the end of the earth and a tiny town that time forgot. My customers have given me good practice as a storyteller, too. It’s a matter of survival. If I can entertain people, draw them over to my side, they won’t murder me when I’m the only waitress on the floor and the cook is swamped and the wait is long and we’re out of silverware and I didn’t know the fish was gone when I took their order.

Fate brought me, your bookseller-blogger, to a little town on Lake Michigan, not at the end of the earth but nearly at the end of the road. The joys of bookselling, like that of running a restaurant, involve the making and maintaining of friendships. There is also introducing people to books and introducing book people to one another. Books are another kind of nourishment, and it is my pleasure to bring our good friend from the U.P. to Northport and to be able to offer for your delight her debut novel.