Exhibit Celebrating Hometown Writer

Kalamazoo Valley Museum features me--crazy, eh?

Well, I had a couple of days at home, visiting local-ish bookstores in Grand Rapids and St. Joseph (What great crowds—I need to post some photos of full houses!) and then a sold out 450-seat auditorium for the event with Haroula Rose talking about the Once Upon a River film. So thank you everybody! (By the way, you can see the film on Amazon Prime and other platforms.)

Christopher and I had heard a rumor that the exhibit “Hometown Writer” was up at the Kalamazoo Valley Museum, curated by the hardworking Alecia Cross. I guess I figured it was more than a rumor when Alecia asked me to bring every artifact I could dig up documenting my 61 years to share with her, so she could make an exhibit of them. Chris and I carried boxes of things to offer to her, including lots of books, my own and those that inspire me.

The initial idea for the exhibit was put forward by Audrey Seilheimer, who suggested it to the museum in 2021. She was sure it was a great idea, even though I thought it was just too crazy of an idea. It’s great to know people with crazy-wonderful ideas!

Most of what writers do is just about pen and paper and computer files, and so what a fun challenge to try to create an exhibit of items. She wanted things from my childhood, so I found horse show ribbons and photos—I can’t believe I found them. She wanted awards, so I found those in some other boxes in the attic. She wanted news articles and reviews, including those from my former life as a bicycle tour leader. She ended up using mostly local stuff, to build on the hometown writer theme: I’m from here, and I’m still here, and this is what people and newspapers here said about me.

I wrote a few paragraphs about what it meant to me to be a writer from this place, Kalamazoo County, and Alecia found other quotes online. The museum then sent over Kalamazoo Valley’s amazing marketing project manager Earlene McMichael-Rutherford and a film crew, including Monica Harmsen from Lawrence Productions, and Monica is so charismatic that I forgot the name of the two lovely men who were with her (a father and son.) They bossed me around and made a 12-minute video of me at the River Shack that you can see playing in the exhibit.

What an honor and, yes, still a surprise, to wander in the museum and see my life spread out like that, across several glass boxes and featured on walls! This is about as famous as I ever need to be!

The feeling I’ve had lately when my work is out in the world is that, in some way, it is not mine, or not mine alone. I’ve written elsewhere that I woke up one night in terror that I’d plagiarized my book, The Waters, which clearly is not the case, but the reality is that it doesn’t feel like mine, The Waters and everything else I’ve done feels to me like community work, as though I’m just a part of something much larger. It doesn’t belong to me alone.

(And yet, I do hope I get some royalties from the book when it sells!)

So posted here are a few pictures from the exhibit. I want to suggest to Alecia a couple additional things, including a mature poem or two (there’s a poem in there that I wrote at age 15, which is quite precocious!), and a very short short story. And also a computer. The truth is that I write on a laptop computer, not with a pen in a notebook as pictured on the desk in the exhibit.

I ran into Sharlet Alagia, who works in the museum, and she said that she loves the exhibit because it makes her want to climb inside the glass box and get cozy and write. And I’m with her there. I’m on the book tour, and I spend most of my “free” time answering emails, making travel plans, and organizing my life, figuring out what to do next. (Part of my book tour scheme is to visit friends I haven’t seen for a while, and so these connections are joyful work!) But in truth, what I want to do right now is write! I want to write write write! I’ve got some big plans, but for a writer, plans aren’t much—it’s the writing that counts.

But as my agent Bill said, “You spent a decade writing this book, you owe it to yourself to spend a couple of months promoting it.” And so I will! See you out there. Here is a link to where I’m going next!

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