By Christine Maul Rice

A few summers ago, in the before times, I met Dawn Newton at the Interlochen Writers Retreat. That fall, she would publish Winded: A Memoir in Four Stages (Apprentice House Press, 2019), a book that explored the complexities of her own vulnerability in the face of stage IV lung cancer, embracing the unknown, and the value of a life. In The Remnants of Summer, out this week from Apprentice House Press, Dawn revisits those themes through the lens of 11-year-old Iris, a girl struggling to navigate life after her younger brother drowns on her watch.

Dawn received her undergraduate degree from Michigan State University and eventually went on to study writing at Johns Hopkins University. For over 30 years, she taught composition and creative writing as a non-tenured academic and supplemented her income with jobs as a lumber yard cashier, a library assistant, a Kelly Girl, a Manpower worker, a stock broker, a policy advisor, a grant writer, a tutor, a teacher, and an academic advisor.

In the following interview, Dawn and I discuss her tendency to indulge the darkness, growing up in 1970s mid-Michigan, memoir versus fiction, The Whoopee Bowl and parents who smoked Tareytons, and the awesome resilience of family.

You write, 

 “When you were a kid in Michigan, the best place to spend your summer was in the middle of the lake.”

Coming from a middle-class Michigan family without a boat or a place on a lake, getting out on the water was magical. But this desire to conquer the water leads to a tragic and defining moment in your main character’s life.

How did Iris’s family’s inability to deal with the situation hit the page? As I read Remnants of Summer, I felt like the 1960s and 1970s were marked by this inability to deal with national and personal trauma, to sweep it out of sight.

First, I think that some families, especially at that time and in my socioeconomic circles, had this vein of stoicism into which they tapped when bad things happened. I tend to associate it with the Midwest, but I remember studying it in Thomas Hardy’s work, and he certainly didn’t grow up in the Midwest. When some people or families experience a horrendous event, they focus on getting past the thing – moving on. There is a suggestion that we shouldn’t dwell on bad things. As I get older, I think my nature is to dive into those dark issues and expose them or even indulge them. I want to dwell on or at least talk about things. And in fact, my family of origin was, in many ways, open about things, or at least I thought so at the time. Yet I definitely kept secrets, so what does that mean?

I’ve learned that I’m even more intuitive than I ever knew in terms of not being able to name or identify things until long after “a moment” has passed. I think Iris is similar in that way. At an intuitive level, Iris feels she should be punished because she was clearly in charge of Scott in the summers once her mother went back to work at the library. In her eyes, she screwed up, and she wants people to just say it, but I don’t think she realizes she wants that at first. Yet the mother feels guilt, too; her returning to work (ostensibly to make money for a better home) could also be the cause of Scott’s death. She wasn’t around either. The father would have preferred that the mother stay home and not take the job. That’s the way my dad was, and he just couldn’t understand that my mother, who was this extreme extrovert, who’d been a civilian secretary stationed with the Air Force in Germany in her early twenties and had led this independent life at a young age after the death of her mother, might want something more than being a homemaker, skilled as she was at the task.

In the novel, if the mother were to step forward and accuse Iris, the family would begin to unravel. I wanted to capture both class and women’s rights issues here. In the working-class environment of my childhood, if the family wants to get ahead, both partners needed to work. But the males weren’t always accepting of that idea or of the idea that women might not be comfortable serving primarily in a homemaking role. Iris’s mother knows that in the wake of Scott’s death, she can’t give voice to any of this. She doesn’t want to blame her daughter but also doesn’t want the family to implode, which she thinks could happen if too many issues are talked about aloud. It’s the classic sweep-it-under-the-rug mentality, to re-use your housekeeping metaphor.

I also wanted to make communication or lack of communication a theme in the novel. The sixties were a period in which openness and sexuality were emphasized, and certainly, those messages permeated society throughout the country in many ways. Yet there still wasn’t a lot of discussion of babies being the product of unprotected sex, not to mention STDs. Mothers didn’t often give those lessons about condoms or birth control methods or even what sex might feel like. Young women could easily fall into a situation in which they became “unwed mothers,” that horribly judgmental label of the day. And even though heroin and other drugs were quite common, you didn’t hear much discussion of those dangers from parents either.

How did the process of writing a novel differ from writing memoir?

I should probably qualify for readers that I wrote a version of the novel first, so I moved to the genre of memoir only after I’d been reading, writing, and teaching fiction for about thirty years. I began the memoir when I was diagnosed with lung cancer.

In the beginning, working on memoir felt quite different from writing fiction, primarily because of the need to capture fact, as well as the element of dialogue. I was trained as a fiction writer, and while I’d written lots of essays, most of them were more academic in nature.

Yet when I sat down to write the memoir after my cancer diagnosis, beginning with morning journal entries in the semester I took off work while my cancer drug was tackling my tumors, I was petrified as I moved beyond the journal entries. With fiction, it is so freeing to be able to create your characters however you choose, even though it’s often comforting to borrow character traits from someone you know. But I was very worried about the memoir dialogue. I knew all the debate about James McBride’s book The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother and how he was challenged about the veracity of some of the details. Because I am at my core still this little girl who always wants to do the right thing, I didn’t want to make any mistakes with the dialogue. I had, of course, read several memoirs, but I didn’t consider it my main genre. And as a person who once had a strong memory, I was still astounded when I read that bestseller The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. I wondered how she remembered all those moments from her adolescence with the exact dialogue, not realizing until years later that she was likely capturing the essence of whatever event, not necessarily the actual words spoken.

I started reading even more memoir, and then had the good fortune of doing a fabulous workshop with Michigan writer Anne-Marie Oomen at Interlochen and some sessions at local conferences. I learned that many memoirists create their own code for how they want to treat remembered conversations in their lives. I ended up adopting the common practice of distilling the spirit of spoken exchange between characters, as opposed to verbatim speech. I still tend to include less dialogue in memoir than in fiction, but I am more comfortable creating scenes than I used to be.

Of course, it’s not just the words from a particular scene or event that one needs to capture in memoir – the actual events and when those events take place is also essential to one’s authority as a writer and for accountability to any reader who might be involved in those events. There is a certain amount of fact-checking that you feel compelled to do when you write memoir.

Fact checking is involved in novels, also, especially for historic novels, but for me, more is at stake when I’m writing memoir than when I’m writing fiction. When I returned to the revision of my novel after the memoir came out, I was overjoyed to be back in the no-holds-barred world of creating dialogue and doing a less-intense form of fact-checking.

Finally, I read a few books when I was writing the memoir – Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story and Sven Birkerts’ The Art of Time in Memoir. Both helped me to realize that in memoir, writers need to figure out what was happening in a moment from the past to write about its significance in the story they’re telling. But in fiction, I don’t always have the characters’ emotions and actions figured out in advance. That makes the latter seem so much more freeing to me, at least in the first draft.

Anne-Marie Oomen’s class must have been fantastic. I love her writing.

Missing people—Iris’s brother, children abducted by a serial killer, emotionally absent parents, POWs—populate your novel. Can you talk about your decision to set your novel in 1974 and how the confluence of events impacted the narrative? 

Well, thanks for that insight. I wasn’t thinking about how many missing people there were, at least at a conscious level. As I mentioned earlier, I began this novel in the late eighties, not long after graduate school, after I’d completed a short story collection and my agent had suggested I get cracking on the novel I’d started writing not long after that, so we could get a two-book deal. I knew at the time that I wanted to capture my Michigan childhood in the 1970s. There were so many ways in which that childhood felt magical for me, though we didn’t have a lot of money, yet I also knew that my adolescence had made me aware of a lot of darkness in our small town. I remember after graduate school teaching at a gifted and talented camp, which I did for several summers. I had adolescent writers. The first summer this one student was happy-go-lucky. When I returned the following summer and saw him within the first few days of the camp’s beginning, in a random walk from one building to another, he broke out in tears for reasons I didn’t understand and said something about how much more everything mattered this summer than in the previous summer.

I was stunned at how he could sum up his emotions so succinctly, and I realized I was observing this seismic shift so many of us experience in adolescence – the coming of age. It made me think that my character Iris needed to replicate my own growing awareness the summer of 1974 when I was fourteen. As a bookish kid, I had been focused on many intense emotional things, but fourteen really was the trigger for full-blown angst. When I thought about the events I wanted to include in the novel, I considered things that I’d experienced – a growing awareness of bits and pieces of darkness all around me. In the 1960s and 1970s, there were societal seismic shifts that mirrored the seismic shifts of adolescence, and I wanted to capture, if only tangentially, some of the ways those trends played out in families.

In the beginning, I had the kitchen sink down on my list of things to explore. I thought about how important my MIA had been for that time. My mom subscribed to Redbook and Good Housekeeping, and in the pages of women’s magazines, I read about the Kent State shooting shortly after it happened. Then I ordered POW-MIA stuff. The Vietnam War was a concept for me, especially since I didn’t have older brothers involved in the draft. But the years between 1973 and 1975 were the years I started to pay attention, and it was hard for me to understand what it meant that the war was “over,” because in so many ways, it just wasn’t.

The Oakland County Child Killings happened closer to my graduation from high school, but for me, they were so connected to my life as a babysitter – watching over kids and making sure they were safe. And the Nixon inclusion occurred because my parents held various political views over the course of their lives – my mother’s liberal and democratic, my father’s often similar but occasionally completely inscrutable. But Nixon was the President about whom my dad first expressed extreme disgust, so that was significant. And when I did my final revision of the novel during the Trump era, it seemed essential to include the Nixon Impeachment, especially since the dates fit my timeline.

I cut a great deal from the book – more crime, suicide, sadness; one critic said the narrative felt like the trials of Job or something Faulknerian, and he didn’t think that was my goal. Yet when I’d returned to writing the novel after a bit of a hiatus, after my parents had died unrelated deaths about thirty-six days apart in 1993, I knew then that one of the darkest personal aspects of the novel would involve interrogating the emotions related to grief, emotions which I’d struggled mightily with after my parents died. 

You fictionalized a town based on your family’s place near Williams Lake in mid-Michigan. Why not set the novel in the actual place?

This is a good question, because I know at various points in the writing of the novel, I had differing perspectives. Originally, I was going use the actual names of towns, roads, and landmarks. But since I was writing fiction, I suppose I worried about protecting the innocent, or conveying a conception of the town that other people did not share. Somewhere along the way, I made everything fictional, creating names for lakes and roads and towns, and that seemed too convoluted and complicated. Your book Swarm Theory helped me make a final decision. You create a fictional town, and yet when I read your book, I knew that it included real places, places I’d put in my own novel, like the Whoopee Bowl. And there is so much discussion now of hybrid work, so I thought, “Okay – I’m going to be hybrid.” What I wanted to be true was the name of the lake – Williams Lake – and the road with the same name that winds through town.

You set a scene at the Whoopee Bowl. It must have been quite close to where you grew up, yes? Why did that place make such an impression on mid-Michiganders? Have you been there lately? Is it still there?

I think The Whoopee Bowl did leave quite a mark on Mid-Michiganders. I have a couple of different thoughts on why it might have been so compelling. First, it had a junk store or flea market quality, with the suggestion that in addition to getting a bargain, a person might also have an incredible selection available. It was the equivalent of the current generation’s dollar store – you can now find a dollar store (or several) in most towns. But the Whoopee Bowl was mammoth! And I think the word “bargain” is key. The owners, Dale and Marguerite Wilder, were raised in the time of the Great Depression, and from what I understand, after serving in WWII, Dale came back with a plan to purchase a large swath of land on Dixie Highway near Clarkston. Together the Wilders created a surplus business to sustain them. I know my own parents lived through those years. Having access to materials of all sorts at bargain prices was highly desirable and appealing to children of the Great Depression. In our family, we never talked about going to antique stores – those were expensive. We talked about bargains. Doohickeys and thingamajigs with more than one purpose.

I didn’t know that history but I recall everything smelling musty…as if the roof had been leaking for 50 years.

I also think about the existence of the automotive industry and all its workers in our area. The 1970s was the heyday of the auto industry in Michigan. My father’s original occupation was as a tool and die maker for General Motors – actually, the Pontiac Motor Division of General Motors. My dad was a natural tinkerer – he could make anything with his hands. In fact, when I saw the movie, Runaway Bride, especially the part where the Julia Roberts character strikes out to define herself, there is a scene in which she begins making lamps out of recycled material. That part always reminded me of my father. I have a lamp that he made of such materials. Tool and die makers were like inventors, and they were always repurposing items, transforming them into other useful things.

Thus, if you link the word “bargain” to this idea of creativity – reusing or repurposing things, as many men and women of that period were trained to do, it’s easy to see the appeal of a place like The Whoopee Bowl, especially for offspring of the Great Depression.

With respect to the question about whether the place still exists, my research indicates that there were calls for the main building to be demolished as unsafe, and there were some back and forth appeals around 2005.  I believe the ownership changed hands, and by 2009, parcels of the property on Dixie Highway were being sold, at least according to a blog entry I read.

The schism between Iris and her older sister Liz broke my heart. How did the relationship develop on the page?

My older sister was a little bit worried about how she might inform the characterization of the Liz character. As it turned out, most of the tender scenes between the sisters in the novel were based on actual events, whereas most of the tense scenes were pure creations. For example, I was completely impressed with my sister’s work life, and she did have a job with a dairy store, so the scene about the sisters cleaning Liz’s work jacket in the bathroom sink was a bonding moment that I remembered.

The scenes between Liz and Iris containing tension were scenes in which one of them reacted naturally based on an emotion she was feeling. The marble scene near the beginning of the book occurs because Iris wants to visit Scott’s room to get the beach key and just look around, but Liz is extremely focused on the idea that this room is a shrine, and Iris shouldn’t go messing around in it. I tried to depict two different reactions to a situation to capture how family members might view the deceased person’s belongings differently. But as the novel goes on, I feel Iris is forced to play a poking-the-bear role. She becomes the advocate for communication, as I mentioned in connection with the first question. She wants the family to talk about the actual day of Scott’s death. For her, that’s the only way she can work through her guilt and grief. Yet they don’t want to do that, in part to protect her from their judgments but also because they know the events leading up to that day are a proverbial can of worms, and they are petrified at the idea of going there. From a writer’s perspective, the characters’ refusal to change course and confront that day makes some of the scenes feel repetitive because those characters keep walking to the brink and then backing off.

Sheldon, a Navy buddy of Iris’s father, is a delightful character. Out of all your characters, he might be the most damaged yet emotionally healthy. Did he appear suddenly or did you always know he would be part of the narrative?

Sheldon appeared in one of the middle drafts of the book, I think, when I was trying to make the book less intense, maudlin, gloomy – whatever word you use to describe a dark book. He was going to be the comic relief or the diversion. There actually was a painter in our neighborhood – an artist who did garage door murals, and he did loan my dad some books on painting and drawing techniques for beginners. But I based the character of Sheldon on a stockbroker and office manager that I worked for in the early 1980s. When I graduated with my creative writing degree, I moved back home with my mom. I had no income, tons of rejections from all the jobs I’d applied for, and student loans from my undergraduate education. I needed a job desperately. My neighbor worked at a stock brokerage firm and said I could get a temporary clerical job there. I was hired by a man named Sheldon, an older Jewish gentleman who became my mentor and protector. He was a self-made man who’d worked as a fruit seller for many years but had invested a lot in the stock market and decided to take all the tests to become a stockbroker.

He was funny, irreverent, and I think he probably viewed me as the daughter he never had. I lost track of him over the years, something that makes me sad, and when I was looking for a character to get Iris out of her grief straight-jacket, Sheldon came to mind as someone who’d helped me out when I was floundering in my life as a writer.

Yet another aspect of Sheldon’s character comes from an actual person my husband knew. To put himself through graduate school, my husband did a lot of manual labor jobs. During our first year of marriage, he worked with an older guy who was working primarily to pay off his dead wife’s medical bills. It was hard work – sheet metal in the hot Virginia sun, and my husband always felt bad for the guy. Ironically, my husband is in a bit of a similar situation now – he provides our family’s health insurance, particularly good health insurance, which pays for the bulk of my cancer treatment. That’s my little sideways pitch for America to consider a different system for health insurance that doesn’t rely on the employment connection.

Karl is a manipulative pedophile from a time when many parents didn’t warn kids about these kinds of predators and, because of her family’s struggles, Iris is left to negotiate Karl on her own. She senses that something is very wrong with Karl’s attention but doesn’t yet have the vocabulary to define what he is or what he’s doing. Had Liz been more accessible when Karl kissed Iris, she could have helped Iris and Rosemary sooner than later.

Kids can often sense predators—they might not be able to identify specifically why someone is creepy but they know something is off.

I grew up with two female siblings, one older and one younger. No boys. Although we had older male cousins and neighbors, most of them were respectful, so it took me a while to grasp the idea that some guys were sleazebags. I don’t remember our mom giving us any major warnings about watching out for them. She was a fairly positive person who tended to see the good in everyone. My parents were fairly open about sex as my sisters and I got older, yet we didn’t address the idea of pedophiles or just plain creepy guys.

By the time I got to high school, it had become noticeably clear to me that some males were not to be trusted, and I saw enough evidence to make me worry about young women I knew, though I never found a way to assert those worries aloud. Yet decades later, I wanted to make the assertion in this novel that dealing with sketchy men, especially for young women, was something we needed an education about, since there was no playbook for saying “no,” especially in the seventies, when people were advocating for free love. Nor was there practical guidance for how to handle the males who didn’t take “no” for an answer. When I had a daughter of my own who became a teenager, and more recently, when following the developments of the #MeToo Movement and how it helped women open up about their experiences, I knew the Karl character needed to be in the novel.

I want to circle back to your earlier question about family dynamics and the tendency in that decade to avoid discussing personal trauma. My sisters recently finished this version of the novel, and we talked about how like Liz, my older sister was very generous about allowing us to spend time with her and her boyfriends. Both before and after Scott’s death, Liz brings boyfriends into the home for some of her dates. She’s a good role model for the non-covert way of being with the opposite sex. When significant others are integrated into a family, maybe that’s one way to weed out dangerous creeps. Normalize the relationship and keep it in the open.

As a parent, I’ve had to stretch beyond my intuitive and tacit understanding of things, especially with my own sons, and name boundaries and concepts in ways that my kids weren’t always comfortable with. I know I made some mistakes. Now, however, all three of my kids laugh at me and go along with my need to be explicit about emotions, relationship issues, and even physical details of sexuality.

Last question: You touched on this above but how has having your own family impacted your writing? Timewise? What’s important? Your process?

This question is so loaded for most moms who are also writers. When my kids were young, it was nearly impossible for me to write. I remember the first time I went away for an entire weekend – a conference at Western Michigan University near Mother’s Day. Michael Ondaatje was there, and I nearly wept, because who would have thought I’d be able to see Michael Ondaatje in person while raising children! Yet I’d gone into having children with my eyes wide open; I knew kids could be challenging, and their lives brought complexities beyond sleepless nights. Colic. ADHD. Intensity. Yet I’d identified from an early age that I would have children because of how much I love kids. (My husband had to agree before we got married not only to have children but also not to use corporal punishment methods – he wasn’t inclined toward the latter, but it’s a good example of how much I planned on mothering.) I talked about sperm donors even in college in the event I didn’t find a “suitable husband.” (I just had to throw that phrase in there!) So ultimately, the time I lost to parenting isn’t anything I have regrets about. I am more than happy, however, to show you the huge chip on my shoulder related to class and women’s rights.

As for process, I am big into freewriting and writing-to-learn, buzz word concepts I learned while pursuing a master’s in education, but also very germane to my processes. I write drafts for everything, from thank you notes and complicated questions for health care providers to Facebook posts. I never know what I want to say until I’ve said it, and I reread the draft a thousand times for hints. I know there are some writers who choose to outline their books. I wish I had those skills. I’m writing a story now for which I have two clear scenes, but I have no idea what’s at stake, what anyone wants, or who’s on first.

Before COVID-19, I worked a good deal at coffee shops because doing so helped me to stay in the chair and focus on the page. I like to write cursive and then enter completed scenes into the computer. As for getting feedback, since I have grown children now, all pretty articulate and thoughtful, I have them read material for me. I almost always have my husband read my stuff also; he’s good at telling me what he thinks I’m saying, and then I figure out if what I said is what I want or wanted to say.

I think that it is good to talk about the process and struggle so that parent-writers don’t beat themselves up about not writing every day or, even, months at a time.

Last comment: Like your mom, my dad smoked Tareytons.

Oh, the perils of smoking! My poor mother ended up having three teenaged daughters who pestered her about smoking in the car on the way to school concerts, because smoke could always curdle the freshly washed, freshly coiffed hair. My allergist pestered her for years about smoking in the house with a serious asthmatic (she always went outside if I was having an attack). My father smoked also, but he could easily put a cigarette down. I think the hardest thing my sisters and I faced was the aftermath of a serious car accident my mom had once on I-75, a major Michigan expressway. She was hospitalized for a bit out of town, with my aunt, her passenger that day, but the positive outcome was that having nicotine withdrawal occur while she was recuperating and somewhat out of it resulted in smoking cessation for months. But her life was hard, and she started up again, so when she had her serious heart attack and eventual death, all three of us were sad, knowing the smoking contributed.

I’m pleased that the industry is eliminating menthol from cigarettes. My husband, who smoked through college but gave up the habit in graduate school, says that he smoked menthols because the flavor made the smoke more palatable. He would have given up smoking much earlier without that menthol incentive.

At least your dad and my mom had the cigarette with the unusual name – why did they pick that brand, I wonder?

Thanks so very much, Chris, for the opportunity to interact and explore these thought-provoking topics! You do the literary world and writers like me a great service. We appreciate your support!

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Buy The Remnants of Summer from your favorite indie bookstore or find it HERE.

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