Empire to honor Michigan Author Award winner Anne-Marie Oomen
From staff reports
Empire writer Anne-Marie Oomen has received the 2024 Michigan Author Award, an award given by the State Library of Michigan to a Michigan author for lifetime achievement. In celebration of this honor, the Empire Area Community Center (EACC) and Glen Lake Community Library Friends of the Library will hold a reception in honor of her award and to celebrate her books on Sunday, Sept. 8, from 4-7 pm at the Empire Town Hall.
Oomen is author of eight nonfiction books, editor of two anthologies, and co-author of two tales of fiction for young people. She has won numerous awards over the years. The Michigan Author Award is given through a nomination process from librarians and others, and David Diller of the Glen Lake Community Library was one of the nominators this year.
“I’m so grateful to the librarians I’ve worked with over the years, but our local library has become particularly special to me,” said Oomen.
Oomen’s memoirs and essays delve deeply into rural living and family relations. Her settings honor farm life as lived on the west shoreline of Lake Michigan, and especially her childhood home in Oceana County. However, she always hopes her narratives take on a universal quality so that anyone, from urban Detroit to the Arctic, can identify with and enjoy the growing up that matters.
“I love the idea that someone on the other side of the planet might share the plight of a girl who always feels like a misfit,” she said.
The search for identity and a place to “home” are themes that run through all her books, but perhaps most poignantly in her recent book, The Long Fields: Essays of Comfort and Home a collection that spans some three decades and brings together the short pieces she has written for the Glen Arbor Sun, Traverse Magazine, Michigan Council for the Humanities (and others) under one cover.
“For this book, I want readers to be able to read a short essay at breakfast and linger on it through the day—or read one before bed to lull toward dreamtime. There’s no need to read in order—it’s a tapas (sampler) kind of book.”
Even so, the book includes several final chapters about how she and her husband built their handmade home here in Leelanau County—just outside of Empire, and includes adventures of becoming a carpenter with a small “c.”
Her most successful book, As Long As I Know You: The Mom Book was a surprise winner of the AWP Sue William Silverman Award for Creative Nonfiction. The book also won a Michigan Notable Book Award and a Silver IPPY Award. This fall, a new fable, The Lake Huron Mermaid, will pair with her previous Michigan bestseller, The Lake Michigan Mermaid (co-written with poet Linda Nemec Foster), to continue the tales of a freshwater mermaid connecting with a troubled girl who loves a Great Lake.
Oomen’s books will be for sale at the Sept. 8 event and profits will go to the Friends of the Library and EAAC. Entertainment will be provided by the Beach Bards, and music by Lisa and Ingemar Johansen of Song of the Lakes. Light appetizers and beverages will be available and other beverages are BYOB.
