Stop-Action Moments

Sunny Juliet takes a play break.

I always say in the fall, when people ask, “How was your summer?” that it was a blur—and so it seems as it races by. There are, however, moments to stop and take a deep breath and look around in gratitude and appreciation, and I’ve had a lot of those already.

 

We had launch!

 

My dear friend Marilyn Zimmerman’s book launch was one such stop-action moment for me. All who could attend (and in the summer it is impossible to avoid every schedule conflict) were delighted to be together to celebrate the release of Marilyn’s novel. After the author described the setting and background of her story and read a passage from the book, questions and observations from the audience and further conversation while she signed copies kept our guest author too busy to have a piece of her own congratulatory cake until it was almost time to leave. Verdict: Success!

 

Author Karen Mulvahill was in the audience and had to leave early, but what a joy for me to hear from Marilyn and Karen the next day that they were avidly reading each other’s books! Northern Michigan writers I know are such generous souls, celebrating each other’s successes joyfully. That’s yet another lovely aspect of my wonderful world of books, and I am especially proud of the achievements of these two Northport writers.

 

Of course, Zimmerman and Mulvahill’s novels are available at Dog Ears Books. In Defense of Good Women is being marketed as a legal thriller, The Lost Woman as historical fiction, but I will tell you that both are much more than a single genre tag can capture. They have in common page-turning suspense; beyond that, however, Mulvahill’s novel lays bare the ways in which cruel authoritarianism divides a society, while Zimmerman’s explores hidden and complicated motivations and relationships.

 

In Defense of Good Women, by Marilyn Zimmerman. Paper, 302pp, $17.99

 

The Lost Woman, by Karen Mulvahill. Paper, 280pp, 18.95

 

 

We had a summer reunion!

 

Omigod, is it really 18 years since our first lunch? The number has fluctuated from year to year, depending on who-all is available when Dorene makes her annual pilgrimage to northern Michigan, but here is our original tiny core from all those years ago. Back then Marilyn Zimmerman and Trudy Carpenter were taking writing classes together and writing short stories, so when writer Dorene O’Brien came up from the Detroit area the four of us got together for lunch to talk about the writing life. And here we four are all those years later! 

Left to right: Marilyn Zimmerman, Trudy Carpenter, Dorene O'Brien, et moi

A prior year with Elizabeth Buzzelli, Barbara Stark-Nemon, and Sarah Shoemaker

I had company!

 

My sister and brother-in-law came to visit for three days and nights last week. Breakfasts and dinners on the porch, one restaurant excursion, much relaxing outdoors—and Sunny got a lot of attention from my dog-indulgent sister! Somehow I guess we were too intent on conversation and food and relaxation to take photographs of each other. Even on Sunday morning when Sunny triggered a temporary crisis mode by encountering a porcupine at close quarters, there was no pause for camera work. Those quills had to be pulled out right away! After her ordeal, Sunny retreated to the other end of the porch to recover in solitude, not sitting next to the table as usual while we humans had our breakfast. She had completely gotten over the shock to her dignity and independence by afternoon, however, and meanwhile her momma had squeezed in a nap following the departure of beloved company.

I found a photo! This one of Deboran and Bob is at Nittolo's in Lake Leelanau.

 

We all had sun and rain.

Soft, gentle rain from the sky always seems better for young growing things than cold water from a hose. My gardens have had some of both so far this season. Little seedlings are emerging in the vegetable beds, and flowering plants are flourishing in the borders and fields. 

My apple trees, I report sadly, look as if they are not going to bear at all this year. Just when I thought I was on top of my game! I got the pruning done, and I was ready with my homemade codling moth traps after last year’s maddening discovery of a worm hole at the blossom end and core rot inside almost every piece of fruit! So what could go wrong? How about a failure to blossom and set fruit? Very disappointing! It seems my trees have definitely slipped into a biennial fruiting pattern, and all I can do now is to be ready again next year and hope for a good harvest in 2026.

 

Pretty tree, no fruit

We have plans --

 

Sunny Juliet and I will be having more company soon, and we will getting back to our agility work with Coach Mike next week if the weather permits. 

 

On June 24, Dog Ears Books will host another poetry reading, this time with Jennifer Clark from Kalamazoo. She will be our featured guest for the third time with her third collection of poetry, Intercede: Saints for Concerning Occasions, which is not, she says, your grandmother’s book of saints.

So if you can’t relate to sanitized, stained glass perfection, come and meet Jennifer Clark’s cast of helpers—cranky, insecure, doubting, and hilarious—saints maybe “for the rest of us”? Because we who don’t fully have our spiritual acts together certainly need guides who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty by interceding in our screwy, complicated lives!

 

That reading will be Tuesday, June 24, beginning at 4 p.m.

Poet Jennifer Clark

 

And then, the ongoing—what to call it?

 

I cannot see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil like those three little monkeys. Sorry! I cannot pretend that all is well in our society and our world these days. 

 

We have in the White House a president who “promised” he would be a dictator on “Day One,” seeming to imply that his dictatorship would only “need” to last a single day—and excuse me for all the scare quotes, but this is scary stuff, and whoever thought that any dictator would step down after 24 hours? This one sure hasn’t. And the most frightening part of it all is that his supporters, military and laypeople, continue to cheer his overturning of the Constitution and the rule of law that Americans have always considered guarantees of our country’s bedrock freedoms. 

 

Why all the arrests and deportations? It isn't about protecting us from crime. Undocumented workers doing their jobs, paying taxes, and taking care of their families are no threat to the rest of us. 

Think about it. 

He promised to bring down consumer prices “on Day One” and was unable to do so. Prices have not come down. He promised to end wars in Gaza and Ukraine “on Day One” and was unable to do so. The wars go on, as do the deaths. But deportations? That’s one area he’s been able to get some results, so by God he’s going to keep deporting! 

 

And never mind that he’s not singling out criminals but terrorizing and tearing apart families who have lived in and contributed to their communities for years! He’s a “tough guy,” right? Don’t you see it? Having gotten rid of many people in authority who took seriously their oaths of office, he is now able to command troops and appoint program "czars" to terrorize and also, often, try to quell protests against his bullying tactics. 

 

The man himself is a pitiful figure. He and his minions steal from the poor and give to the wealthiest, while they dismantle protections for civil rights, health, and our natural environment because it is much faster to destroy than to build. Destroyers make themselves feel big and powerful by tearing down or blasting apart, and that’s the name of the game.

 

This weak, whining blamer-in-chief would be less than nothing if there weren’t still many Americans who either look past his rhetoric of hate and blame and buy his pie-in-the-sky lies or actually feel their own impoverished spirits fueled by hate and blame. You hurt? Must be someone else's fault. Find a scapegoat to punish.

 

For a long time I wanted to believe that the people I know who support him must have, somehow, good intentions in their hearts, that they simply were not aware of what he was actually saying and doing. They couldn’t know what he really was and be okay with him, I told myself. They were good people, right? I wanted to believe they must be living in information silos, hearing only partisan propaganda and seeing only happy, smiling photos of him. 

 

But such total ignorance of reality is impossible, and I have to face reality. He has his own social media platform and spews his blame and hatred there daily, so his supporters cannot be ignorant of what he is. I have to face the fact that they themselves, apparently, have no loyalty to the U.S. Constitution or to the rule of law. I have to face the fact that “liberty and justice for all” is to them a meaningless phrase. “Justice” to them means “We win!” and everyone else loses. 

 

What does what's happening mean to you? To put party above country, loyalty above principle, might above right? Is this the United States of America your parents and grandparents fought to preserve? Is it the one you want to leave to your children and grandchildren?

 

Well, for now we go on with our lives. Those of us who write, write; those who join public protest demonstrations, demonstrate; those who lie awake night after night try to get enough sleep to face another day. We go to work, we care for our families and homes, and we treasure our friends—because life is essentially a beautiful gift, and it would be wrong not to be grateful and to appreciate what we still have. 

When my husband died, I learned that grief and gratitude are not mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the most meaningful experiences of our lives. And so I continue to be deeply grateful for all this country of mine has given me, even as I grieve these nightmare times and hope that we can still come out the other side into the sunshine of lawful liberty again. 

 

Hope. Community. Justice for our neighbors as well as for ourselves. Because there is no true justice that is not justice for all.

 

“We're all travelers in this world. From the sweet grass to the packing house. Birth 'til death. We travel between the eternities.” 

 

That was the simple funeral speech actor Robert Duvall gave in “Broken Trail,” and I think of it often. We are here on earth for such a short time. We have such a short time in which to be worthy of our lives!

Lives were given for our freedom.

Road Trip!

 

Reason for trip: art show at Kalamazoo College

Since the return from Arizona in the spring of 2023, completing my first cross-country round-trip without the Artist, I have been pretty much a homebody here in northern Michigan. Except for a day trip to Cadillac last fall and Reed City this spring, and a quick dart as far south as Interlochen once or twice, I’ve mostly stayed put. Asked the other day if I’d ventured south of Leelanau County over the winter, I thought for a minute and then replied that I’d been to Grand Traverse County a few times. Going as far south as Kalamazoo is a whole ’nother story! It means, usually, going through Grand Rapids and the rest of the way from there on expressway, and that’s what I did on Tuesday. 

 

Sunny was with me, confused and anxious about our departure from routine, but once we reached our destination my son dog-sat in the car with her while I attended grandson Jack Willits’s show of paintings (the ultimate destination) at Kalamazoo College, his senior project, which earned him graduation with honors. Meanwhile, Ian managed to log into his home computer from his phone, thus to work on his writing while tending to the dog girl, who found her favorite hidey-hole under the steering wheel while I was gone. (That settled her down enough that she didn’t feel compelled to bark at every passer-by.) Jack was pleased that I had made the trip, and his work—a full room of paintings done during the past year, his senior project—was beautiful: a wide range of subject matter, from landscapes to figures, in his own very distinctive style. His grandpa would have been so proud and happy! Family, friends, and lots of young people were there, of course. Neither Jack’s mom nor I managed to get good photographs of all the family together, or even all of them separately, but everyone was impressed by the work and happy to be there to celebrate it.

Artist and his model

After a drive back down to Portage and a bite to eat with my son, the dog girl and I repaired to our motel for the night, and after a little dog walk, I had half an hour’s conversation by phone with a dear friend before ending the social part of my day. Then, saving the last pages of the novel James for morning, I watched an episode of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s “Finding Your Roots” (television is such an occasional, rare part of my life!) before letting sleep claim me.

 

With so much to do in my home and yard and business, return trip came the very next morning, but I had a couple of other objectives along the way: first, to avoid Grand Rapids; second, to stop in Newaygo at a bookstore I’d spotted (new store with used books) on the way south. That being the case, my route on Wednesday took me west from Kalamazoo and then north through Van Buren, Allegan, Ottawa, and Muskegon counties. Unlike the drive south, there was no one expecting me and nowhere I had to be at a particular time, so if my drive north took an hour or two longer, no problem. 

 

At River Stop Café (a favorite stop for the Artist and me on many trips), I bought a sandwich to go (my choice was the “M-37,” but there are no wrong decisions at this café) and then managed to find eight volumes to buy at Flying Bear Books (I would have found more if Sunny hadn’t been waiting for me in the car) before seeking out a park where Sunny and I could have a relaxed picnic before the last leg of our travels.

Since every road trip for me is a trip down Memory Lane, it’s easy for melancholy to get its foot in the car door as associations with the past accumulate. The Artist and I had many, many road trips over the years, and the best of my life were with him. No one was more fun! This time, a few little country roads I’d never been on before helped, as did a new bookstore to visit and not having much of an agenda for the return trip other than, eventually, reaching home. All told, the trip was worthwhile and successful, an important mission accomplished.

Home--and at work--before dark

Reminder: June 10, 5-7 p.m., is the launch for Marilyn Zimmerman’s novel, In Defense of Good Women. This is not an event for young children, but everyone else is cordially invited. Marilyn and I are very excited and hope you will join us! 

Happy author, my friend Marilyn Zimmerman

Guest Book Review: IN DEFENSE OF GOOD WOMEN

 

When Pamela Grath invited me to review a novel by a local Michigan author, I knew the book would be good. But, as it turns out, In Defense of Good Women, by Marilyn Zimmerman, is remarkably good. In fact, once I started reading this compelling, suspenseful story, I couldn’t put it down. 

 

In Defense of Good Women is a legal thriller that tackles the controversial topic of neonaticide, the killing of an infant within its first twenty-four hours. This fascinating book features strong, complex female characters and an evocative portrait of a coastal town in southeastern Michigan.

 

The lead character, Victoria Stephens, is a smart, accomplished criminal attorney with a twenty-year career. In the small town of Port Huron, she projects a perfect image of success with her Chanel sunglasses, designer shoes, and new Mercedes. At the insistence of a chief circuit judge she has known for years, Victoria reluctantly takes on a seemingly impossible case. 

 

The client, seventeen-year-old Callie Thomas, has been charged with murdering her newborn infant. The baby was drowned in the St. Clair River, hours after being born. Callie insists she is innocent. She does not remember giving birth or even being pregnant, though the DNA evidence is indisputable. Adding to the uproar, Callie is the daughter of a locally prominent Evangelical minister, known for his strident pro-life opinions.

 

As Victoria constructs a defense, she consults a psychologist with expertise on neonaticide syndrome, a kind of dissociation that occurs in women, particularly teenagers, who have been traumatized by their pregnancy. Closely related to temporary insanity, the syndrome is a controversial diagnosis that is not exactly abortion and not exactly infanticide. The woman wants to get rid of the baby after it’s born, and then she’ll block it from her mind, as if the baby never existed. The hypothesis would explain a lot about Callie’s behavior and frame of mind, though the expert admits that the defense may not work in U.S. courts.

 

The story has several unexpected twists that I won’t spoil. But I will say that Zimmerman is brave and even-handed in confronting tough issues related to pregnancy, motherhood, and the expectations that weigh on women facing difficult decisions. She also does a fantastic job of developing her lead characters. Callie is traumatized and reticent, but she’s also sensitive and artistic. And Victoria, even with her Jimmy Choo shoes and diamond wristwatch, is a complicated woman who carries wounds of her own. By its conclusion, the novel resolves the mystery of what happened to the baby and to Callie. But there is a deliberate raggedness to the ending that is startling and thought-provoking.

 

The book effectively captures the ambience of small-town Michigan. The media turmoil, the rumors and judgments, and the intertwining lives are all recognizable and believable. Especially captivating are the descriptions of the cozy cottage Victoria inherited from her father. Constructed by bootleggers during Prohibition on the St. Clair River, the home conjures memories of her parents and has become her sanctuary. 

 

Like most great books, In Defense of Good Women works on several levels. With its crisp pacing, compelling characters, and suspenseful plot, the book would make fabulous beach reading. On a deeper level, it would also be a wonderful choice for a book club seeking meaningful discussion around women’s reproductive health and the right to choose.

 

Thank you, Pamela, for sharing this book—and for all you do to inspire community and introspection in beautiful Northport. And thank you, Marilyn Zimmerman, for writing such an intelligent, entertaining, and timely book. I hope you’re already at work on your next manuscript!

Postscript from your usual blogger: First, thanks to Kristen Rabe for being an excellent guest reviewer! Second, we will be hosting a launch in June for Marilyn’s book—details to be announced when plans are firm.