In the summer of 1999 I moved away from the hometown I’d known and (kinda) loved to the woods of northern Michigan. I was trying to escape a bad relationship and thought proverbial “geographical cure” might be just what I needed. I didn’t know how long I would stay, only that the teacher I’d moved up there with would need to return in the neighborhood of late August.
My plan was to relax and take some time to write. I’d been imagining stories before I could read them, so the idea of a novel had been floating around in my cranium for quite some time. I’d been to the Virgin Islands as a teenager and, inspired by a slave rebellion that had taken place in 1733, written 400 pages of what could be described as a ‘hot mess.’ It was charming in its heaving bosom and hoop- skirted naiveté, but I soon realized the massive word count did not divide evenly into ‘novel of my dreams.’
My summer adventure up north changed all that. I met a slew of quirky people straight out of a Northern Exposure episode, had the obligatory summer romance and started working two jobs: one cleaning cabins at a fishing lodge, the other mixing drinks in a dive bar with a guy named Squirrel.
I started telling him a little bit about myself, including my desire to write. He must have filed it away in the corner of his brain because one day he asked me when I was gonna finish my “damn book?” When I told him I had no idea what to write about, he told me to “write about us.” I looked over at my regulars, men with names like Hoss, Worm and Sweaty, and thought “why the hell not?” I was worlds away from heaving bosoms and hoop skirts, but once committed, the story fit into my heart like a locket that clicks shut after the latch has been fixed.
I moved back home in the fall and began writing a straightforward account of my summer that somehow morphed into the novel that became ‘Evening in the Yellow Woods.’ A million revisions and one release date later and I’m still surprised that the girl who ran away for the summer found her true purpose in the small Northern Michigan town that embraced her. I can’t give Squirrel all the credit for giving me the kick in the butt I needed, but I’m pretty sure he’d be tickled pink to know I finally finished the “damn book.”