New reads in Leelanau
By Sarah Bearup-Neal
Sun contributor
2015 has been a good year for local literature. New books about Leelanau, books by Leelanau County authors and at least one old favorite await eager readers in area bookshops. Here’s a sampling:
Leelanau Love — Color on Art Book
Charlotte Davis
While out on a hike on the Old Indian Trail in the Sleeping Bear National Lake¬shore, Charlotte Davis had the inspiration to produce a coloring book. The drawings began in February, while she kept close to the wood stove to stay warm and hunkered down to bring her dream to fruition. Fast forward to the present. Her Leelanau Love — Color on Art Book, published by Dancing Frog Press, now sits on the shelves of the Library of Congress. The non-traditional coloring book features more than 30 drawings, depicting iconic scenes from around Leelanau County, as well as close-up images of nature.
Davis’ journey to authorship began 16 months ago when she was suddenly laid off from her office job. “I took the opportunity to embrace a lifestyle of more freedom, yet work harder than I ever did at a traditional day job by pursuing an entrepreneurial dream,” said Davis. “Just one month prior to getting laid off I wrote this goal and put it on the board above my desk: ‘move toward a sustainable life of creativity and freedom’.” Davis started a business selling artistic notepads, greeting cards and other original art items. She used her own photography to draw from, and produce, the drawings for her book.
Leelanau Love is available at the following stores in Glen Arbor: the Cottage Book Shop, Cherry Republic, Lake Affect and Northwoods Hardware, as well as North Shore Outfitters in Northport. The book can also be found at the Glen Arbor Farmers Market on Tuesdays, the Northport Farmers Market on Fridays and the Suttons Bay Farmers Market on Saturdays, or directly from Davis by contacting her at DancingFrogPress.com.
Davis calls herself a child at heart, artist, photographer, publisher, mother, grandmother, avid hiker and faith-filled minimalist. “I have embraced artistic projects since child¬hood. My goal is always to connect with the recipient of each creative endeavor.”
She also credits her daughter Raquel Jackson, who works for the Glen Lake Chamber of Commerce, who she says was instrumental in helping her produce the book.
Murder in the Merlot
Aaron Stander
Published March 2015, Writers & Editors LLC
In this new book, author Aaron Stander returns to the fictional Cedar County, Michigan – the setting of his eighth installment in the Ray Elkins Thriller series he launched in 2009. Ray Elkins’ turf is a small Northern Michigan community in the midst of wine country. In this book, we find the laconic, thoughtful Elkins up to his eyeballs (again) in murder and mayhem, this time at the apex of wine tourism season: The body of a bold-face celebrity from the wine world turns up face down in a Cedar County vineyard. If that weren’t enough, Stander throws in a few Chinese 1 percenters with a keen taste for the grape, “legendary chateaus” from the Province of Burgundy and other global tidbits.
It’s no secret Stander, a Grand Traverse County resident, cast his writer’s eye over the border to Leelanau County, drawing on the Land of Delight for inspiration when he crafted Cedar County. The Leelanau continues to provide both the author and his sheriff with material. Stander said, ”There are things that I want to continue to explore and try to figure out. Ray Elkins has become my vehicle for doing this.”
Love, Sex and 4-H
A memoir by Anne-Marie Oomen
Published April 2015, Wayne State University Press
The newest book in the Empire author’s trilogy of intimate family stories. “I thought I was done mining my childhood,” Oomen said, “ but I kept thinking there must be something more — all these stories about 4-H and how it shaped me.”
Oomen grew up in the 1960s in a rural, Oceana County farm town. She is oldest of five children raised in a household headed by a farmer father and housewife mother. 4-H clubs were an intrinsic, familiar part of farm life, but Oomen’s mother – determined and focused – steered her daughter toward the club in the hope that 4-H values, its pledge of loyalty, service and better living, would keep Young Anne out of capital “T” Trouble. While Anne-Marie learned how to cut fabric and sew it into a dress, the Kennedy assassination occurred. While Anne-Marie was figuring out how the chemistry of making jams and jellies, the Cuban Missile Crisis was unfolding. Of more immediate threat to the protections Mrs. Oomen hoped 4-H involvement would confer on her daughter were a variety of first waiting to happen: kisses from boyfriends, love and heartbreak. Anne-Marie Oomen uses the tension of competing worlds — inner and outer, local and global — to craft a story in which a club where one learns to sew a dress is a metaphor for so much more.
Back Pages of Leelanau
A Decade of Weekly Images from Ken Scott
Published July 2015, Leelanau Enterprise
Why We Preserve
The Leelanau Conservancy Through the Lens of Ken Scott
Published July 2015, Leelanau Press
Suttons Bay photographer Ken Scott’s documentation of Leelanau County’s nooks and crannies, seen and unseen worlds, vistas, orchards, beaches and woodlands has earned him a huge following – and a regular place on the Section One back page of the weekly Leelanau Enterprise. A decade’s worth of those images have been selected and turned into Back Pages of Leelanau, a coffee table book. There are essays to put Scott and his work in context by Leelanau County residents Susan Agar, a retired Detroit Free Press columnist, and Alan Campbell, Enterprise co-publisher.
Why We Preserve is another commemorative project. “The (Leelanau) Conservancy was coming up on its 25th anniversary and asked me about going out to shoot all their properties so they could have something to show the membership,” Scott said. What followed was two years of shooting properties conserved and preserved by the Leelanau Conservancy. Scott is a four-seasons photographer whose images express his full-immersion approach to documenting Leelanau County. Scott images are bookended by words: seven essays by Leelanau-loving residents and a short description of the each of the 52 properties photographed explaining why it was preserved.
Frank and Lucky Get Schooled
Lynne Rae Perkins
June 2016, Greenwillow Books (an imprint of HarperCollins Childrens Books)
Newberry Medalist Lynne Rae Perkins looks to her own home and family for this upcoming picture book (aimed at children 4-8 years). Lucky is a shelter pup who enters the life of young Frank and “helps” him with his homework rather than eating it as the old saw goes. Perkins’s son is, indeed, named Frank, now a college student. And Lucky, a Lab mix rescued from an area shelter, lived with the Suttons Bay family until the ripe age of 14.5 years.
Perkins had been casting around for a new project after her last children’s novel, Nuts To You, a rip-snorting tale of three squirrels who go on an unexpected adventure, learn about friendship and the importance of community. It was published in 2014.” I had thought for a while about a book about the different subjects studied in school. Sometimes I thought of it as a book for preschoolers whose older siblings were going to school, so they could ‘go to school’ vicariously,” Perkins said in an email. “Maybe that will still happen someday. But one day the title just popped into my head, and then I filtered all of the ideas I had been mulling over through that title, and through Frank’s and Lucky’s relationship.”
Petoskey Stone Soup
Martha Mothershead
Illustrations by Janet Clarkson
Published in 2006, Whaleback Press
Reissued in 2015, Leelanau Press
A short Facebook post in April announced that the Leelanau Press had purchased Whaleback Press and was bringing back Petoskey Stone Soup. Written by Martha Mothershead, a former Leelanau resident now living in Virginia, the recipe for this early-reader picture book is the 1947 classic Stone Soup. Two children go on a walkabout in the Sleeping Bear Dunes and get lost. Their wanderings bring them to the ghost village of Glen Haven. Doors are locked, no one’s at home, and there’s two hungry kids in need of a meal. Through imagination, they find a way to nourish their bodies and, as a result, they learn about cooperation as they feed their bodies and souls.
Sun editor Jacob Wheeler contributed to this story.