UpInMichigan.org, a resource for Michigan Literature

An Interview with Steve Amick

David LeGault conducted this interview with Michigan writer Steve Amick at the Ann Arbor Book Festival in May 2007. There, they discussed regional writing, the importance of vocation in fiction, and a collective hatred of jet skis.

Steve Amick's first novel, The Lake, The River & The Other Lake, was a 2006 Michigan Notable Book and a Washington Post Best Book of the Year. His work has appeared in McSweeney's, Playboy, Story, The Southern Review, The New England Review, The New York Times, several anthologies, and on NPR. He was born in Ann Arbor in 1964 and divides his time between his hometown and a family cottage on a famously clear lake along the northern edge of the Lower Peninsula. (On one track of his CD of original songs, There's Always Pie..., he plays a sack of Petoskey stones.) For more information, go to [his website].

UpInMichigan.org: First of all, after reading The Lake, the River, and the Other Lake I felt a strong connection to growing up in northern Michigan. Did you have any existing connections to that region before writing the novel?

Steve Amick: It means a lot to me that people do connect to it. Some people connected with it so much that they took offense to it. They thought that I was writing about them specifically or an area, places that I don't even know. However, I do have connections to the area. I have to be vague because of my family, but we always spent our summers up there at a cottage in the general Traverse City area. It's a property my family owned since the 30's and they were actually the first "outsider" family, the summer people. We've since sold off a lot of that property, but it's very isolated compared to a lot of the giant ass houses.

UIM: Part of UpinMichigan's goal is to explore the idea of writing in Michigan. How do you feel the aesthetic of the region has affected you as a writer?

Steve Amick: Yeah, that's interesting. Two years promoting a book that's so much about that area and no one's exactly phrased the question that way… At the family cottage, There was no phone, no TV. The area affected me as a writer because we were allowed plenty of time to read as kids because we'd be up there for months. We'd be reading alone, anywhere on a large piece of property that included woods, a beach, fields of bracken. We'd be reading and writing alone, reading in a rowboat and floating off. And reading was a communal thing with my family, especially when we were young being read stories by my mother—Freddy the Pig stories, Hardy Boys, whatever—so that whole thing of reading, which is a really large component of being a writer. And there's a pace up there too. Or, there was used to be: pre jet ski. There's a pace that allows for conversations and allows for relationships with a couple siblings or whatever. You're kind of forced to interact with people who are there and that's all fodder, important tools for writing.

UIM: Do you find that reading is as important to you now, or does producing your own work take precedence?

SA: The reading habit falls off a little bit as a writer because you try to avoid certain things that are too close to something you're working on or a voice that conflicts. You don't want to start sounding like a certain writer or anything like that. Also, as a writer you seem to just get involved, you're just very busy. But having a background as a reader is very important for growing up to be a good writer; you start to hear language and rhythms. Summers at the cottage gave me a chance to be a great reader. It also gave me a feeling of freedom, and a feeling of certain empowerment because we were allowed to literally roam wild, and that roaming really duplicates what you do as a writer. It really opened me up to it.

In a panel I was on we discussed where ideas came from and the first thing I talked about was as adults we're not really allowed—unless we're writers—socially to be Walter Mitty and just let our imagination run wild unless we're reading or watching a movie. Then it's perfectly normal to say "wow that was scary." Really? Something imaginary that someone made up is frightening to you? That doesn't seem like an adult thing to do unless you're reading a book, watching a movie, or you're a writer. But to sit there and let your imagination run wild as an adult is sort of not allowed, but being able to physically roam the woods, roam the beaches, and be open to the small details of the world up there—the wild strawberries, the Indian paint brush, little things we could recognize as details—really helped me begin to develop myself as a writer.

UIM: Whenever a writer focuses in so clearly on an area, it seems like the subject that always arises is the concern of the book being "regional writing." Do you worry about being typecast or limiting your audience?

SA: Well, that's the amazing thing. When I wrote the book, I thought I wrote a regional publication, something that would be published by a small press. The fact that it was published by Pantheon (Random House) changed the perception of it and the way that it was reviewed. In fact, the only kind of knocking, slightly critical newspaper review I got was from a local newspaper. To them, it seemed like if I was going to write about up north, I had given myself an assignment like "if you're going to write about this specific area you should write about this, this, and this." I wasn't writing about that specific city, and that's not an assignment I gave myself: to duplicate northern Michigan. So nationally it got a universal read. Before the book came out the book's representatives had a meeting and I started hearing that they wanted to take Michigan off the little map I drew because then they could sell this in Vermont, they could sell this in Northern California, anyplace with a strong seasonal based economy. That was amazing and wonderful to me that the novel—though set in a very specific region—seemed to transcend the area. So tourism was the saving grace of that book. If I wrote another book about being up north, it might be considered a regional book, but The Lake, The River, and the Other Lake seemed to have some universal appeal that may have come from the great attention the book received from reviews and Pantheon. It seems like the response would have been different if a smaller press had published it. It's all packaging.

UIM: I understand that you're primarily a short story writer. Since this is your first novel, I'm interested in how you made the transition to the longer form. Was that a difficult transition for you?

SA: You know, it's always misleading when people ask "what your next novel is" or "how many novels do you have." I've written a lot of novels, I just haven't written any that I could sell (laughs). I wasn't sure that I had a handle on the form as strongly as I did with short stories. Short story structure seems to come to me. However, this particular novel isn't a collection of stories. It's not meant to be read as individual stories as some novels nowadays are, but I did build it that way. I knew that I wanted it to be a community novel, a multiple story novel, but I wrote each section individually. I wrote each perspective as a novella, knowing that they'd interconnect and that they had points of intersection. The characters would appear in multiple stories, but I wrote each individually so that I knew that I had the entire arc for each individual storyline and then went back and put them together. However, I always planned on having it be this novel, never a collection of short stories with these specific themes or interactions. It was my way of taking these longer and longer stories I had been writing and crossing over multiple long arcs. It made it easier to write because I never write chronologically, and since I wasn't writing in a linear way I could hop from one story to another. Doing this, I wrote the first 200 pages in the first ten days.

UIM: Wow.

SA: Yeah. Up at the cottage I wrote 20 pages a day. It was a crazy assignment; I don't recommend it. I lost my voice, I was coughing, some nights I wouldn't be able to sleep and I'd have to go out and jump in the lake. It was just crazy. But I had 200 pages and the one way I was able to do that was to do it was I'd hop from one story to another I'd write about Roger Drinkwater for a while, and then I'd get a little stuck so I'd move on to Von. I could go from one storyline to the other.

UIM: It is a pretty good way at getting around that problem.

SA: Yeah, it was a way that I could work with some of the assets that I felt were strong at that time and I wouldn't scare myself with this hurdle: "can I write a novel that can get published?" I think it worked. I think this book works as a novel.

UIM: I saw on your website that they're developing a screenplay based on The Lake, The River, and the Other Lake. Was that something you had intended for the novel? I know that the book has a musical tie-in on your website, so I was wondering if the cross-medium element was something you had intended to happen.

SA: Yeah, well actually the screenplay's dead in the water right now, which is too bad. They just opened up some of the constrictions that have kept filmmaking from really happening in Michigan and I think that it's a gold mine. I'm never fooled when they shoot a movie somewhere else. Hopefully one day the movie will happen, but basically it's done.

Was the screenplay something that I intended? I don't know. Everyone from day one reading the manuscript was saying, "I can see this." And I don't know, when things work for me they tend to be very visual. I do other things, like art; I did the illustration on the cover of the hardcover version and that was sort of an accident. The editor wanted a map to get a sense of where things were and I sort of drew too much detail and then the art director saw it on her desk and said "what is this?" and it ended up on the cover of the hardcover, but the music was partly because of a walk on character who's an Ann Arbor legend, Dick Siegel, and he plays a lot and I've become friendly with him. I grew up with his music, and now he's sort of a nationally known folk singer and he has a song about the sumac being on fire so I put him as a cameo coming into the party at the millionaire's house. And from his perspective, he would not acknowledge who the people at the party were—Dick was just some folkie from Ann Arbor—and because of that there's no real quote of the song or any real way to acknowledge Dick. Later, he asked, "can you just stick my song in somewhere at the end?" and I thought that we could have this little juke box on the website since they were already making it for the map and all of my friends who are all great Michigan musicians (including myself in there—not as great, but you know, fun and wacky) and to me, it made a nice little feeling to go with the book. People told me it feels like the book to them and that was nice, a fun way to reinterpret the book. If the movie ever did get made, it would be nice to see a couple of my friends on the soundtrack. [laughs.

UIM: After seeing a couple reviews for the book, I saw people identifying this as a humor novel. Some of it does read almost as satire of the area, or at least satire of tourism. Is this a label you're comfortable with?

SA: Actually, I had the opposite reaction: gosh I hope people find some of this funny. I had an eleventh hour panic with my editor about the novel. I was worried that after writing very clearly humorous short stories, my novel wasn't funny and my editor said, "What are you talking about?" And, maybe it's a different kind of humor than my short stories—not as sharp or pointed and satirical—but there are definitely funny moments. I think the humor comes from things that I'm not as much in control of: dialogue that naturally flows from characters I've invented—it's naturally what they say and it surprises me too. They're not trying to be funny; they're just being the way they are. Von the farmer is the kind of character who says accidentally funny things and I don't see it as me trying to be funny there, but I just think that's how it comes out.

It's how people I know talk. I used to live in New York and people there would say, "Hey Buddy I got a problem with you," Here, you'd kind of get around it, and that struggle is funny. It's skewed from the straight path. After all these years of sort of trying to be a humorist, almost and I feel like I have really funny stuff, other novels where the whole idea is funny and they're kind of, you know high concept, and this seemed like a more grown up approach.

UIM: Interesting. Since we have the fudgies and locals, the migrant workers, there's a lot of this insider/outsider business going on and I'm wondering if that was something that occurred naturally, or if you were trying to play it up in the novel? It seemed like the driving conflicts throughout the book were all coming from people who were opposites.

SA: I didn't intend for that to happen. I found that the narrative voice isn't nearly as judgmental at all as I am about that type of stuff. That's when I felt I was doing my job: I was making characters that I empathized with, people I wouldn't agree with at all in real life. I'm thinking of the Lasco land dispute, there's a guy who builds a big stupid house, but he's in the right. Those sort of gray areas started to occur, so to me it was less about the insider/outsider stuff and more about the fact that place sharply defines character, that people are really defined by where they are. If you live in this town, but you live on this lake, you live on the Indian side of the lake, it becomes that kind of thing. I don't know if you noticed, but characters have different names depending on who's telling the story. Kim is Kimmy depending on who she's talking to.

UIM: And Mark is "Kid" when he's with Walt and Keith.

SA: Yeah, and people have different names for the river depending on what time they're from, too. And that's sort of the idea of the title too—The Lake, The River, and the Other Lake—because which one's the other lake? It has to do with side of the tracks and perspective. Geography, especially up there, really defines who you are. Geography identifying identity is a bigger picture than insider/outsider, but it is an element.

Is the guy whose family bought property in the 30's who comes up for three months out of the year more of a local than the person who has lived there year round for two years?

UIM: It's really an interesting idea I see coming through in the novel and I enjoyed that. Getting away from the book and more into you as a writer, were there any particular teachers, writers, or experiences that you feel shaped you early on? Outside of the childhood reading that we talked about earlier, did you have any mentors?

SA: I had a junior high school teacher who took me aside when I thought I had to re-do an assignment because I was being a smart ass and told me that I should be a writer. Her name was Jan Newman and she's a great--was a great--institution in Ann Arbor. You know, it was one of those Tiger and the Lady stories and you have to finish it and I was like twelve and I wrote that they open the door and the Avon Lady was there. It was a hokey concept, but I was twelve! And he ordered some tiger shampoo and some bath beads and she would come back in two weeks.

So her, and a man named Stan Bidlack who was huge in the Ann Arbor school system. He was an English teacher that was encouraged me in high school and submitted stuff to this Scholastic writing contest and said, "Let's send it in to the humor division there will be less people" and I won it, and that was great. And then in grad school, Richard Bausch, and he was a great friend and mentor.

UIM: Where did you go to grad school?

SA: George Mason University. Which is a basketball school now to people's minds, but he was really great and Joe David Bellamy. They were very encouraging and they taught me little things about the real mechanical aspect of writing, "when you're writing in the 3rd person blah blah blah," but mostly they teach you to get up every morning and do it, to believe yourself and to read your own work. You know, in the act of revision.

UIM: I'm trying to find these connecting themes with Michigan authors for a research project, and I'm especially interested in the idea of work in literature. With Mark's job forcing interaction with people he never would interact with, the same with Kim and the computer tutoring for the priest, I noticed that work almost always led to trouble. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the summer job, or the mysticism of tourist based economy.

SA: In terms of tourist towns, it's really a double edged sword. These tourist towns, it's a significant component to the economy, but it's understandably an annoyance. And nobody likes to feel bound to other people. The summer job aspect to me personally is really interesting because I graduated high school in '82—in those Reagan years—and it was as bad, maybe worse than it is now, but we had the worst unemployment in the country. All of these companies were moving to Texas and you could not get a summer job, I mean it was difficult. I ended up doing some pre-school stuff because my family knew somebody, but I couldn't get a job at McDonald's if I wanted to. We're really labor oriented in this state, but the lack of jobs is almost as significant. But all this stuff that's happened in Michigan is because we're such a unique geographical state. There are strange geographical structures that you don't expect like the dune area and the iron range and we have such an environmentally diverse state that, to me, that's the commodity that we should be using in a less exploited way.

UIM: Do you see these issues having an effect on Michigan writing or writers?

SA: what I think makes Michigan unique, in terms of writers, is we're very unique in terms of the nature and stuff and that makes us kind of special and iconoclastic and different than Ohio where they had trees and just cut them all down and made farms. We're also isolated because we're a peninsula, we're two peninsulas. You have to go out of your way to go up north. You can't just cross over from the state line; we've got a moat. It creates this feeling of pride and this feeling of "if you're here, you have to want to be here." You could take a boat across the Great Lakes if you wanted to, but it's not like you can just step over a state line or cross the border. It makes it a very deliberate thing to be a Michigander.

The region and the idea of labor seem to help shape the characters. In the novel, The VonBushberger family is really defined by their orchard and it's really important to Von, their economy. There's Roger Drinkwater who has all these sources of income and he is one of the most mysterious and captivating people, versus someone like Kurt Lasco, who is just the septic guy. We kind of see him as one-dimensional, or stilted in some ways and it's not really fair, but the person who has the broader sources of vocation is more mysterious and more interesting, in a way. Also Noah, the billionaire, who is seen as a parasite because he's not really doing anything. He did something when he was nineteen that he's still making money off of.

UIM: I found that interesting that his story more or less mapped his economic decline. I'm probably trying too hard to tie it, but I saw reflections of our own economy and workforce in that.

SA: Yeah, what is Noah doing nowadays? We have a real strong work ethic in Michigan; we want you to be useful. Don't just sit up there in your big fancy house. We appreciate Roger Drinkwater because he gets up and does his swimming, he makes his beef jerky, he's a teacher, and he'll blow up your dock just to top off the day.

UIM: Yeah, I loved that.

SA: It's vicarious for me. [laughs]

UIM: Outside of the book, do you think that idea of industry or work affects you as a writer outside of the novel? Has it shaped you as a writer?

SA: Well it's become a bit of a problem. I have to say that I've been lucky enough to go to college and grad school, but not being able to have a lot of summer jobs as a young writer, I was a bit perplexed every time I sat down thinking "what does this person do?" I didn't want to be one of those writers who writes about writers. So that idea of vocation was always an issue as a young writer. If I thought of a good job, I'd write it down in my notebook. Anything good I could come up with because it's such a key component to character, it seems to be, it's probably unfair because people shouldn't be what they do, but that's how we think of it.

UIM: Since you don't want to be a writer who writes about writers, have you had any jobs that you've tried to shift over to writing, or do you try and avoid yourself?

SA: I'm embarrassed to say that I have done very little work in my life. Between grad school and college I had several things going at once: I was working at the YMCA with kids, I was working at a bagel factory (actually making the bagels), but that was the most long term grunt-type work I've done and I have tried to write about it. I've also done a lot of freelance advertising in the past ten years. That is writing, but it's also such a weird job: you fly in as a kind of gunslinger to bump up some pitch they're going to do. They put you up in this weird place and they suddenly give you this idea and they tell you for an hour about these widgets. Suddenly you become an expert, and that has helped me because after listening to "this is how we make these French fries" for an hour, you suddenly know everything about the French fry industry. I feel like the advertising jobs I took where I had to suddenly immerse myself in some job was great fodder for occupations. You know, it's a really cushy job where you're sitting on your ass, but the job gave an interesting look into all kinds of things.

UIM: Last question. I'm curious to know what books you've been reading lately. It's one of those stock questions that goes with your influences, but he thought it would be another interesting perspective into you as a writer.

SA: Okay, here's a few of the books I happened to read, for one reason or another, in the past couple months:

Between the Bridge and the River by Craig Ferguson

The Second Child by Deborah Garrison

The Wild Trees by Richard Preston

Telegraph Days by Larry McMurtry

True North by Jim Harrison

Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut

The Littlest Hitler by Ryan Boudinot

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David LeGault is an undergraduate student at Grand Valley State University. He's currently conducting research on the importance of labor in Michigan literature.

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