“Ladies of the Lights” Presentation by Michigan Maritime Expert Dianna Stampfler Showcases Female Keepers of Michigan’s Historic Beacons
“Ladies of the Lights” Presentation Showcases Female Keepers of Michigan’s Historic Beacons
Michigan lighthouse historian and author Dianna Stampfler has announced a series of presentations of her popular “Ladies of the Lights” in honor of Women’s History Month. This program, which includes readings from newspapers and autobiographies, as well as countless historic photos, sheds light on the dedicated women who served at lights around the state dating back as early as the 1830s.
These were women before their time, taking on the romantic yet dangerous and physically demanding job of tending to the lighthouses that protected the Great Lakes shoreline. Given this was also a government job, their involvement was even more unique. In all, nearly 50 women have been identified who excelled in this profession over the years.
One of the most notable was Elizabeth (Whitney) VanRiper Williams who took over the St. James Harbor Light on Beaver Island after her husband, Clement, died while attempting to rescue the crew of a ship sinking in the harbor. She later became the first keeper of the Little Traverse Lighthouse in Harbor Springs, retiring after a combined 44 years of service.
There is also Julia (Tobey) Braun Way who outlived two husband keepers at the Saginaw River Rear Range Lighthouse in Bay City, and some say who still haunts the place today. Anastasia Truckey served as the interim keeper at the Marquette Harbor Lighthouse in the 1860s while her husband, Nelson, was off serving in the Civil War. Mary Terry served 18 years before she died in a fire at the Sand Point Lighthouse in Escanaba in 1886 – her death still shrouded in mystery 137 years later.
Stampfler has been researching Great Lakes lighthouses for more than 25 years and is the author of Michigan’s Haunted Lighthouses (2019) and Death and Lighthouses on the Great Lakes (2022) both from The History Press. She has penned countless articles and been interviewed extensively about the lighthouses and their keepers. She is also the president of Promote Michigan.
As part of a weekend-long Walloon Lake Writer’s Retreat Weekend at Hotel Walloon, the public is invited to a FREE event – A Lakeside Chat with Author John Patrick Hemingway – on Friday, April 14 at the Talcott Event Venue in downtown Walloon Lake. Doors will open at 7pm with a cash bar featuring a Pilar’s Rum Hemingway Daiquiri (see recipe below), along with select wine and beer; the discussion will begin at 7:30pm and a book signing will follow.
Throughout the weekend, the Canadian/American writer and journalist will lead writers in a series of workshops, readings and other creative exercises meant to inspire personal storytelling. Last year’s inaugural Writer’s Retreat was led by Ernest’s great granddaughter (and John’s niece), Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, author of Ernest’s Way.
In addition to his memoir, John Hemingway has published a number of short stories in magazines and literary reviews such at The Saturday Evening Post and Provincetown Arts and has also written for many fishing and hunting magazines such as Showboats International and Ducks Unlimited. His first novel, Bacchanalia: A Pamplona Story(2019), takes place in Spain during the Fiesta de San Fermín, a nine-day event that was made famous in the1920s by the publication of his grandfather’s work The Sun Also Rises.
Ernest Hemingway was just three months old when he made his first trip from his hometown of Oak Park, IL to Walloon Lake where his parents – Clarence and Grace (Hall) – had purchased property along the North Shore. Ernest spent time every summer until 1921 at the family’s beloved Windemere cottage there, the simple cottage still owned by descendants today. The woods and waters in and around Walloon Lake shaped Hemingway’s life in many ways and it was a place he always held dear to his heart. It was here that his 1972 posthumously published book, The Nick Adams Stories, is primarily set.
To inquire about availability for the “Walloon Lake Writer’s Retreat ” please contact Hotel Walloon at 231-535-5000.
Now one of the most popular retirement area for Americans and Canadians, the Lake Chapala Region, nestled in a valley almost a mile high in Mexico’s Volcanic Axis, has long been a draw for ex-pats and vacationers, lured by its almost perfect climate and beauty.
In his book If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s historic buildings and their former occupants about Mexico‘s earliest international tourist destination (also available in Spanish), award-winning author Tony Burton shares his knowledge and interest in a region where he has spent more than two decades. Burton, a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society who was born and educated in the United Kingdom, first visited Mexico in 1977. That visit was obviously a big success as he returned and for almost 18 years lived and worked full-time in Mexico as a writer, educator and ecotourism specialist.
He met his wife, Gwen Chan Burton who was a teacher of the deaf and then director at the Lakeside School for the Deaf in Jocotepec, one of the three main towns lining the shores of Lake Chapala. Though they now reside on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, the Burtons continue to revisit Mexico regularly and he is currently editor-in-chief of MexConnect, Mexico’s top English-language online magazine.
The other two towns, each with its own distinctive vibe, are Ajijic and Chapala, native villages resettled by the Spanish Conquistadors in the 1500s. “This book looks at how Chapala, a small nondescript fishing village in Jalisco, suddenly shot to international prominence at the end of the nineteenth century as one of North America’s earliest tourist resorts,” writes Burton. “Within twenty years, Chapala, tucked up against the hills embracing the northern shore of Mexico’s largest natural lake, was attracting the cream of Mexican and foreign society. Thus began Lake Chapala’s astonishing transformation into the vibrant international community it is now, so beloved of authors, artists and retirees.”
The book, organized as a walking tour, covers not only existing buildings but also pinpoints the spots where significant early buildings no longer stand but their histories still weave a story of the town. It’s only a partial guide, explains Burton, noting that an inventory prepared by the National Institute of Anthropology and History identified more than eighty such buildings in Chapala including many not easily visible from the road but hidden behind high walls and better viewed from the lake.
Among the famous people who lived in Chapala at some point in their careers was author D.H. Lawrence, probably best remembered for his risqué (at the time) novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
In 1923, Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, rented Casa de las Cuentas (House of Rosary Beads), a house that dates back to the 1800s. At the time, a one-story abode with a half-moon entrance and heavy wooden gates, it was located at 307 Calle Zaragoza, a street formerly known as Calle de la Pesquería (“Fishing street”) so named as it was where the local fishermen repaired their nets and hung them out to dry. It was while living on Calle Zaragoza that Lawrence wrote the first draft of The Plumed Serpent, published in 1926. The novel is described as “the story of a European woman’s self-annihilating plunge into the intrigues, passions, and pagan rituals of Mexico.”
Over the decades, after the Lawrences moved out, subsequent changes were made to Casa de las Cuentas including the addition of a swimming pool in the mid-1950s when artist Roy MacNicol and his wife, Mary, owned the home.
While Lawrence’s writings were considered by some as scandalous, MacNicol’s life had its scandals as well. Burton describes him as “colorful” in that he was married multiple times and was involved in many escapades as well as lawsuits.
It wasn’t the work of a dilettante as reviews of her book such as this one on Amazon shows.
“Flower Cookery is recipes, but far more than recipes,” writes one reviewer. “The book is organized by the popular name of the flower in question. Each section is introduced with quotations from literature, philosophy, and poetry that feature the blossom. This is followed by the recipes, interwoven with mythology, stories, and aphorisms about the flower, the plant from which it grows, its symbolism, and the culture or society in which humans discovered the value of the plant or blossom. The recipes include original favorites as well as recipes collected from historical sources and contemporary sources around the world. Here is just the tiniest sampling of the riches in the book.”
Burton shares her Christmas Cheer recipe from when she lived at Casa de las Cuentas.
Christmas Cheer
10-12 squash blossoms with stems removed
2 eggs, beaten
2 to 3 tablespoons water
Flour, enough to thicken mixture about one tablespoon
Salt and pepper
1 cup neutral oil such as grapeseed, canola, or safflower
Wash and dry squash blossoms on paper towels, making sure to remove all the water. Mix remaining ingredients except oil to make a smooth batter. Place oil in a large, heavy skillet to 350-375°F. Dip blossoms in batter and fry in oil until golden brown. Drain on paper towels. Serve hot.
As for the house, it was renovated again in the early 1980s and is now Quinta Quetzalcoatl, a lovely boutique hotel.
The above maps, both copyrighted, show Chapala 1915 [lower map] and 1951 [upper map].
In all, he’s planning on adding several more to what he currently calls the Lake Chapala Quartet, these focusing on the writers and artists associated with the area. I asked him to describe the region so readers who have never been there can get an idea of what it is like, but it turns out the Burton is NOT a traveler who meticulously plots every moment of a trip before he arrives. Instead, he tells me that part of the fun when traveling is to not know in advance what places are like and instead to see and experience them for yourself.
“That said,” he continues, “the various villages and towns on the shores of Lake Chapala are all quite different in character. The town of Chapala, specifically, is a pretty large and bustling town. It is growing quite rapidly and has added several small high end boutique hotels in recent years, as well as some fine dining options to complement the more traditional shoreline ‘fish’ restaurants. The many old–100 years plus–buildings in Chapala give the town a historic ‘air’ where it is relatively easy to conjure up images of what it was like decades ago. By comparison, Ajijic, now the center of the foreign community on Lake Chapala, has virtually no old buildings and more of a village and artsy feel to it, though it also has very high quality accommodations and more fine restaurants than you can count.”
Other structures still standing include the Villa Tlalocan, completed in 1896 and described by a contemporary journalist as “the largest, costliest and most complete in Chapala… a happy minglement of the Swiss chalet, the Southern verandahed house of a prosperous planter and withal having an Italian suggestion. It is tastefully planned and is set amid grounds cultivated and adorned with flowers so easily grown in this paradisiacal climate where Frost touches not with his withering finger…”
Also still part of the landscape is Villa Niza. One of many buildings designed by Guillermo de Alba, the house, according to Burton, was built in 1919 and looks more American than European in style. Located at Hidalgo 250, it takes advantage of its setting on Lake Chapala and has a mirador (look out) atop the central tower of the structure, which affords sweeping panoramic views over the gardens and lake. De Alba’s strong geometric design boasts only minimal exterior ornamentation.
Burton, who specializes in non-fiction about Mexico, related to geography, history, travel, economics, ecology and natural history, has written several fascinating books about the history of the Lake Chapala region.
In If Walls Could Talk, Burton invites you to walk with him through time as you explore the city.
Who is Dr. Kevin Schewe and why is he winning all these awards?
Shelf Life is lucky to have Guest Blogger Kathy Tretter, co-publisher and editor of the Ferdinand News and Spencer County Leader, two award winning newspapers in Southern Indiana, to answer that question. The following is from her column which ran in the Ferdinand News.
“If history was taught this way in school, everyone would be a scholar and educating ourselves not only about our accomplishments but the horrors of the past that should awaken and give insight to the path of a better future. A rare gem!” —David Holladay, MD, 5-Star
His wife Nikki, a radiation therapist, probably calls him Kevin, but his old friends know him as Bubble Butt!
Dr. Schewe discovered, rather late in life, that he possesses both a passion and a talent totally unrelated to the medical profession — and that talent is, quite literally, winning him accolades across the globe.
At last count he has been honored with over one-hundred international awards for his screenplay, Bad Love Tigers (he’s over 200 honors thus far) — not to mention raves for the four books he wrote on which the screenplay is based. Some of his awards include Best Original Story at the Cannes World Film Festival, Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy Screenplay at the Vegas Movie Awards, Best Screenplay at the London Classic Film Festival and Honorable Mention at the Los Angeles Movie Awards. Most recently he earned the Best Screenplay Award at the East Coast Movie Awards.
A partial list of his wins appears at the end of this article and the scope is quite simply astonishing.
According to his publicist, “In less than six months on the international screenplay circuit, Kevin Schewe’s Bad Love Tigers generated momentum on its whirlwind sweep of the globe, finding acclaim at film festivals spanning from Los Angeles to Hong Kong and dozens of locations in between.” That quote came at the end of June after the screenplay had amassed, by that point, 83 awards, and the list continued to grow from there.
So how did this all transpire? It’s not every day someone wholly ensconced in a profession as intense as medicine suddenly clicks on his brain’s right hemisphere (creative side) to become a novelist and screenwriter, although the left (logical) side is responsible for language and probably had something to do with both his careers.
Here’s what happened.
Dr. Schewe is a history buff and reads everything he can get his hands on concerning World War II. He came across a true military history story that happened on a late afternoon in November of 1944, as the war in the European Theater was starting to wane. A brand new B-17G Flying Fortress (four-engined heavy bomber with a 104 foot wing span), known as the Phantom Fortress, landed at a British air base in Belgium. These bombers were a proud symbol of American air strength during World War II and there were several iterations, the B-17G being the last.
As this colossus was coming toward the landing strip with no warning, the tower kept trying to radio the pilot, to no avail.
The landing had not been perfect. There was some damage to one engine when the bomber end-rolled in, touched down, spun around, dipped, and hit the runway, but it landed and came to a halt, the remaining three engines still turning.
Gunnery crews on the ground were scratching their heads trying to figure out what was going on. Was everyone inside dead? But then how did the bomber land? Was this a proverbial Trojan Horse, a trick of the Nazis?
Apparently British Lieutenant John Crisp drew the short straw and went out to the plane to investigate about half an hour later when no one disembarked. What he found was surreal. No one was in the cockpit or anywhere else in the bomber. Parachutes were lined up along the fuselage, while a leather flight jacket and candy bars littered the floor.
As could be expected, an investigation ensued. The man who was supposed to be piloting the B-17G (on only its third mission) was later located and said he and the crew had been en route to bomb the Leuna Synthetic Oil Refinery — Nazi Germany’s second largest synthetic oil plant and second biggest chemical operation — when an engine failed. The B-17 was losing altitude and destined to crash, so the crew abandoned the mission and bailed out in the clouds. But it didn’t crash — it landed on Allied soil and only one engine — the one damaged on landing — had failed.
Which, Dr. Kevin “Bubble Butt” Schewe realized made absolutely no sense. Why would the crew not have used parachutes and why would anyone depart without his jacket as the air outside would have been frigid? The only engine that failed was the one damaged during touchdown in Belgium.
Please note, B-17Gs were not drones, nor were they equipped to land themselves, so those facts alone would seemingly constitute a miracle. This is where the whole right brain/left brain scenario comes in — this true tale lit an imaginative spark in Dr. Schewe. His mind then took a slight right to his undergrad roots as a physics major. “When I read this story it was like I was struck by lightening,” he recalls. He sat down and began penning the first novel, developing the characters based on his childhood friends with a couple of fictional personages added for good measure.
What resulted is a superlative blending of fact and fiction, and it’s highly tempting to give everything away.
But here’s a taste.
Dr. Schewe grew up in St. Louis (his Dad served under General MacArthur in World War II) and his friends did indeed (and still do) call him Bubble Butt. Many of those friends appear in the books and script — their nicknames intact as well. The protagonist is Bubble Butt, but with a different surname. The action happens in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which everyone who has read even a little bit of history knows was the epicenter for the Manhattan Project leading to the development of the atomic bomb.
The fiction is fascinating and partially based in reality, such as the discovery of exotic matter (a focus of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity), also a necessary component of time travel (oops, getting close to spilling the beans).
The year is 1974 and Bubble Butt and friends accidentally come across a secret, cavernous vault known during WWII as the White Hole Project near the Oak Ridge complex. This dynamic group of young adventurers, known as the Bad Love Gang, use a time machine to travel back to the World War II era. So there, you got it out of me.
One feature of the first book,Bad Love Strikes, will surely provide the soundtrack for the movie (if it gets made and surely it will). On the first pages Dr. Schewe gives a list of songs to play while reading every chapter, from “Born To Be Wild” in chapter one to “Shambala” in chapter 20. Each chapter also begins with a quote such as “Put your hand on a hot stove for one minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.” — Albert Einstein. Or the one prior to the epilogue, “OK, I will admit that I am having some memory issues. I can do pretty good with the past, it’s the future I’m having trouble remembering …” — Larry W. Schewe, father of the author when his memory was beginning to fail.
According to his publicist, “Schewe’s Bad Love Tigers is a feel-good, action-adventure, sci-fi blend of Stand by Me meets Raiders of the Lost Arkor Back to the Future meets Goonies. The energetic and fun screenplay has strong appeal and great potential to attract an audience of all ages to the big screen. This incredible display of worldwide interest shows that Bad Love Tigers is already a global phenomenon, crossing cultures and borders and demonstrating its potential to be a feel-great-again, big-screen blockbuster.”
Which is why it has garnered so many awards.
So who exactly is Kevin Schewe, physician author and screenwriter, and where did he come from?
He moved to Jasper after the clinic at which he had worked in Colorado changed hands. He was extremely attracted to the radiology equipment at Memorial, noting some very generous donors made the Cancer Clinic at the Jasper-based hospital top of the line. The fact the move would allow for more time to write also appealed as Bubble Butt has plotted eight more books in the series. “I plan to be here for the next seven years [until retirement],” he notes. Then with a cheeky smile adds, “Unless Stephen Spielberg calls.”
The 72 National and International Awards won (so far) by Bad Love Tigers (a partial list out of more than 200)
· Best Screenplay, Eastern Europe International Movie Awards (Izmir, Turkey) · Best Original Story, Cannes World Film Festival (Cannes, France) · Best Feature Screenplay, HALO International Film Festival (St. Petersburg, Russia) · Best Feature Script and Best Action Screenplay, Top Film Awards Film Festival · Best Feature Screenplay, Golden Nugget International Film Festival (London, UK) · Best Screenplay, 52 Weeks Film Festival (Thousand Oaks, CA) ·Best Original Story, Cannes World Film Festival (Cannes, France) Vegas Movie Awards (Las Vegas, NV) · Best Screenplay, Indo-Global 2022 Film Festival (Mumbai, India) · Best Sci-Fi Screenplay, Masters of Cinema International Film Festival (Rome, Italy) · Best Sci-Fi Screenplay, Stardust Films and Screenplays Festival (New York, NY) · Best Feature Screenwriting, Red Moon Film Festival (New York, NY) · Outstanding Achievement, Swedish International Film Festival (Arkiva, Sweden) · Best Script Award for Best Sci-Fi Screenplay, London Film Festival (London, UK) · Best Screenplay, The Gladiator Film Festival (Istanbul, Turkey) · Best Screenplay, Inca Imperial International Film Festival (Lima, Peru) · Best Unproduced Script, Indiefare International Film Festival · Best Sci-Fi Script, Hong Kong World Film Festival (Hong Kong) · Honorable Mention, Los Angeles Movie Awards (Los Angeles, CA) · Best Feature Script, New York Neorealism Film Awards (Rome, Italy) · Best Screenplay, London Classic Film Festival (London, UK) · Best Sci-Fi Screenplay, Stardust Films and Screenplays Festival , Best Original Screenplay, and Best Poster, Golden Giraffe International Film Festival (Nice, France) · Best Sci-Fi Short Script, Red Dragon Creative Awards (Dallas, Texas) · Best Short Screenplay, Silver Mask Live Festival (Los Angeles, California) · Best Script Written During Pandemic, Redwood Shorts & Scripts (Sunnyvale, California) · Critic’s Choice Award for Best Feature Script/Screenplay, International Motion Picture Festival of India (Pondicherry, India) · Best Sci-Fi Script, Mykonos International Film Festival (Mykonos, Greece) · Best Sci-Fi Screenplay, Thinking Hat Fiction Challenge (Punjab, India) · Outstanding Achievement for Feature Script, Luis Bunuel Memorial Awards (Kolkata, India) · Best Feature Screenplay, South Film and Arts Academy Festival (Rancagua, Chile) · Best Sci-Fi Script, Gold Star Movie Awards (Newark, New Jersey) · Best Sci-Fi Screenplay Award, BRNO Film Festival (Brno, Czech Republic) · Best Feature Screenplay, Filmmaker Life Awards (Hollywood, CA) · Best Story Screenplay Award, The Madrid Art Film Festival (Madrid, Spain) · Best Feature Screenplay, White Unicorn International Film Festival (Hong Kong, India, Japan) · Feature Script Audience Choice Award, Black Swan International Film Festival (Kolkata, India) · Best Feature Script/Screenplay, Indo French International Film Festival (Pondicherry, India) · Best Script, New York Independent Cinema Awards (New York, NY) · Best Script in a Feature Film, World Indie Film Awards (Chongqing, China) · Best Script (Sci-Fi), Los Angeles Film & Script Festival (Los Angeles, CA) · Best Screenplay for Young Adults, Bridge Fest Film Festival (Vancouver, Canada) · Best Thriller Screenplay, Adbhooture Film Festival (West Bengal, India) · Feature Script Outstanding Achievement Award, Royal Society of Television and Motion Picture (Kolkata, India)
About Kathy Tretter
Kathy Tretter with Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb .
Active in her community, Kathy Tretter is President, Editor/Co-publisher at Dubois-Spencer Counties Publishing Co., Inc., is former Chair of the Spencer County Chamber of Commerce, past president of the Hoosier State Press Association and remains on their board. An award winning editor, Tretter was the winner of the 2014 Rotary Club of Jasper’s ATHENA International Leadership award. The ATHENA Award, an international honor, recognizes women who have demonstrated excellence in professional leadership, community service, and the mentorship of future women leaders and also have been active in community service and show professional excellence.
A gifted linguistic professor who is fascinated by such extinct languages as Old Norse and Old Danish, Val Chesterfield is so frightened of the world that she has immured herself at the university where she teaches and treats her overwhelming anxiety with pills and bottles of Amaretto and merlot.
Beyond that, she’s mourning the loss of her marriage and the death and possible suicide of Andy, her twin brother who died of exposure on Taaramiut Island off Greenland’s northwest coast.
And so, when an email from Wyatt Speeks who is overseeing the scientific lab on Taaramiut, pops up in her inbox, Val’s first thought is to hit delete. But despite her own initial forebodings, she opens it instead.
Wyatt is asking her to listen to the attached vocalizations of a girl they extracted from the ice and who has, amazingly and impossibly, thawed out alive. Playing the sounds over and over again, Chesterfield is intrigued. The girl is not speaking any of the Greenlandic dialects spoken in the frigid part of the world where Wyatt is located. Indeed, despite Val’s vast repertoire and knowledge, she cannot recognize the language at all.
Wyatt wants Val to fly out and study the girl’s language. But that entails she leave her office, her shelves of books, and her everyday routines. When Val visits her elderly father, a noted climate scientist who has always been disdainful of her, he dismisses that the girl could have been thawed out alive and that his daughter has the spunk to travel so far away.
“You’ve never been out of Massachusetts,” he tells Val. But he also wants her to go, to find out the truth about Andy’s death and delivers an ultimatum. If she doesn’t journey to Greenland, then he doesn’t want to ever see her again.
The winds blow over 50 miles an hour on Taaramiut across a landscape barren of anything but snow, glaciers, water pocked with ice floes, deep seemingly bottomless crevasses, and herds of caribou. No native people live this far north so where did the girl come from and how long was she encased in ice?
Totally isolated, the small community consists only of Wyatt and his assistant Jeanne, Val and a young couple who have won a coveted spot to dive in the frigid waters for specimens. And, of course, the girl who once was frozen and is now strangely alive.
But it’s not just the isolation, the young girl who speaks a strange language, and being where her brother died outside, alone in the bitter cold, that is unnerving. Wyatt seems to have other hidden agendas and Jeanne may be too good with knives—and she has so many. Even the couple become uneasy, urging Val to just play along until the plane arrives to take them home.
With the disappearance of her anti-anxiety medication, Val is unable to sleep and maybe unable to reliably process what is happening around her. She takes risky chances and she also has become maternally attached to the young girl as she learns the meaning of her words. What is part of Val’s uneven emotional state and what is real become less defined. She believes Wyatt’s stated quest–to learn how to prevent a cataclysmic climate change, one where sudden outbursts of frozen winds are freezing people to death almost instantaneously around the world–parallel Andy’s own dedicated studies.
But Val also senses a scary undercurrent and the more she learns, the more she wonders if Andy really committed suicide by wandering off into the cold or whether someone locked him outside. To add to her distress, the young girl is ill and is trying to tell Val in her own language what she needs to survive.
What can she do to save her? And what can she do to save herself?
Erica Ferencik is the award-winning author of the acclaimed thrillers The River at Night, Into the Jungle, and Girl in Ice, which The New York Times Book Review declared “hauntingly beautiful.” Find out more on her website EricaFerencik.com and follow her on Twitter @EricaFerencik.
Far from the marshland where her family grew up and that claimed her father’s life, Loni Mae Murrow has found a quiet niche where she creates intricate life-like drawings of birds for the Smithsonian. It’s a rare talent and a job that Murrow, who started drawing at an early age, loves. But there are undercurrents in her job and life starting with a new administrator talking of budget cuts and disdaining Murrow’s need to return home to deal with her aging mother. Making it all more complicated is that she also is confronted with her brother and his controlling, avaricious wife both of whom seem more intent on cashing in on what little money there is in their mother’s portfolio than in helping her. Murrow has just a short time to take care of family business and to sort out messy family entanglements. If she doesn’t return in time, she’ll no longer have a job.
But the pull of her mother’s needs, a compelling job offer from a good friend, veiled hints at mysteries unsolved along with her realization that her father’s death may be less straightforward than it seemed at the time jarringly jeopardize the peace and tranquility that Murrow has achieved. She finds herself deeper and deeper into the place of her youth and the marshes, both of which she thought—hopefully–she had left behind for good.
Author Virginia Hartman convincing portrays the beauty of the marshes, creating an atmosphere of serene beauty but also one full of surprises and ultimately danger in The Marsh Queen (Simon & Schuster). She also conveys how easily Murrow falls into the patterns of her father who knew the waterways so well he could navigate the countless channels and inlets without a map. Hartman’s love of this landscape, full of unexpected wonders, is inherent in her writing.
Individual Portrait
“Early morning steam rises from the water,” Hartman writes about one of Murrow’s forays into the marshland. “I paddle to a different part of the swamp today, where the Cypress trees grow, as my dad used to say, ‘keepin’ their feet in the water.’ The canopy is high, like a cathedral, and I glide through the landscape of light and shadow. Ferns cascade from the trunks and pink lichen like measle spots and the Cypress knees stick up from beneath the surface like the hats of submerged gnomes.”
This enchantment of the waterways with all its many unexpected scenes of flora and fauna is something Murrow finds she shares with Adlai, the seemingly gruff proprietor of the canoe shop where she rents her canoe and paddles when she goes in search of such birds to draw as the purple gallinule. Her mother had married down so to speak when she chose Murrow’s father. It is a choice that Murrow ultimately must make as well—to leave a dream job of working at one of the most prestigious museums in the country and life in a bustling cosmopolitan city to return to the backwaters of home.
But first she must follow, however unwillingly, all the clues that keep presenting themselves regarding the past. It’s a matter of connecting the dots to find out what really did happen to here father all those years ago. And if she doesn’t accomplish that soon enough, then there’s more at risk for Murrow than just losing her job. It may mean losing her life.
Virginia Hartman has an MFA in creative writing from American University and is on the faculty at George Washington University. Her stories have been shortlisted for the New Letters Awards and the Dana Awards. The Marsh Queen is her first novel.
Virginia Hartman Events
At the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, Virginia teaches Advanced Fiction Workshop (six weeks). For more information, please contact the Writer’s Center at 301-654-8664, www.writer.org.
Michigan is home to more lighthouses than any other state and about 40 of those are rumored to be haunted by the spirits of former keepers, mariners and others with ties to these historic beacons.
Inside the pages of Michigan’s Haunted Lighthouses, long-time researcher, writer and promoter of all things Michigan, Dianna Stampfler, shares stories of those who dedicated their lives — and afterlives — to protecting the Great Lakes’ shoreline. Her second book, Death & Lighthouse on the Great Lakes, Stampfler delves into the historic true crime cold case files that have baffled lighthouse lovers for as many as two centuries.
Throughout the fall season, Stampfler will be speaking at libraries around the state, sharing her lively and upbeat presentation about these lights. Copies of her books will be available for purchase and signing at every program.
For the complete schedule of upcoming events (including other topics beyond lighthouses), visit the Promote Michigan Speaker’s Bureau online.
About Michigan’s Haunted Lighthouses
Michigan has more lighthouses than any other state, with more than 120 dotting its expansive Great Lakes shoreline. Many of these lighthouses lay claim to haunted happenings. Former keepers like the cigar-smoking Captain Townshend at Seul Choix Point and prankster John Herman at Waugoshance Shoal near Mackinaw City maintain their watch long after death ended their duties. At White River Light Station in Whitehall, Sarah Robinson still keeps a clean and tidy house, and a mysterious young girl at the Marquette Harbor Lighthouse seeks out other children and female companions. Countless spirits remain between Whitefish Point and Point Iroquois in an area well known for its many tragic shipwrecks.
About Death & Lighthouses on the Great Lakes
Losing one’s life while tending to a Great Lakes lighthouse — or any navigational beacon anywhere in the world for that matter — sadly wasn’t such an unusual occurrence. The likelihood of drowning while at sea or becoming injured while on the job ultimately leading to death were somewhat common back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Death by murder, suicide or other unnatural and tragic causes, while rare, are not unheard of. In fact, more than dozen lighthouse keepers around the Great Lakes met their maker at the hands of others – by fire, poisoning, bludgeoning and other unknown means. A handful of these keepers, either because of depression or sheer loneliness, took their own lives. A few we may never know the true story, as the deaths now 100 or more years ago, weren’t subjected to the forensic scrutiny that such crimes are given today.
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