Ellen Airgood didn’t always live in the Upper Peninsula, but she very quickly called it home. She already loved the land and the lakes especially the big lake and she soon learned to love its people. She has written “South of Superior” a novel based in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and she is making an appearance 3 p.m., Saturday October 22 at the Okemos Schuler to discuss her debut novel.
Like every good waitress, Ellen Airgood can recite the daily specials at the West Bay Diner in Grand Marais with no hesitation. On the day I talked with her they were a cheese and veggie omelet, and fresh whitefish sandwich with an ear of corn.
Airgood, who has been working at this quintessential diner in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula for more than 20 years, is also an accomplished writer who published her first novel this year. “South of Superior” is about a big-city girl who leaves it all behind to move to what the publicity hounds at her publisher call “a remote coastal village in Michigan’s isolated U.P.” (Yoopers would find that description a real knee-slapper.)
The novel is filled with love, cold shoulders, the clumsiness of fitting in, fierce independent characters, an unusual mystery, a town that helps its own and, of course, a love story — several of them, in fact. In addition to the protagonist Madeline, there’s a grumpy but fair old lady who is sometimes as cold as Lake Superior itself: often unforgiving, but always mysterious. In fact, the big lake is a major character in this novel.
In some ways “South of Superior” is not unlike Airgood’s own story. Some 20 years ago she moved from Chicago, where she was working for an environmental agency, to Grand Marais, where within six months she married the local diner owner and became full-time baker and waitress, often working 80-hour weeks, but all the time listening and observing.
As we talked, Airgood was just coming off her shift at the West Bay Diner and wanted to make sure that I knew this was not her first book.
“I have been writing seriously for a good 18 years,” she said. “This is the first book I published — not wrote.”
The novelist said she had completed several manuscripts for young adult novels before “South of Superior” was published.
Now with the success of “Superior,” she has a young adult novel due out next summer. The setting: New York City, but once again it features a protagonist who is way out of her comfort zone. This time it’s a small-town girl who moves to the big city.
“People have been asking me about where’s the sequel to ‘Superior,’” she said. “I tell them it’s not pressing.”
Ellen Airgood
A lot of readers might find Airgood’s characters in “Superior” quirky, but she’s quick to point out that to her everybody’s quirky. And she’s not just referring to those she knows in the U.P. “We are all crazy.”
She said that the residents of both Grand Marais and its fictional counterpart are not always warm and fuzzy. In fact, they might not like you at all, but they will help you.
Airgood makes that case in the book when the fictional community of McAllister rallies behind a young mother and daughter who they could otherwise care less about after the mother is seriously injured in an automobile accident.
Airgood said when she set out to write “Superior” that she “wanted something my own community would enjoy.”
The Grand Marais community has responded, often discussing the book as they drop into the diner, where the book is sold alongside homemade pie.
“They have embraced my book,” Airgood said.
She says she was relatively untaught when it came to writing, having gotten her degree in science at the University of Michigan. “My tool kit was pretty sparse, and I didn’t have the confidence.”
She said it was probably most comfortable for her to write what only can be called lush descriptive scenes of the area.
Get your Stormy Kromer on
“It was easiest and the most fun. I always loved to be outdoors and the sense of place is very important to me.”
She said she has been surprised by the positive reaction to the book: “Frankly, a lot doesn’t happen. It’s deceptively simple.”
She gets asked all the time if the characters in the book are modeled after anyone.
“The characters to me are themselves,” she said. “They aren’t components, they are just themselves.”
She said out-of-town visitors to the diner want to know where some of the scenes in the book are set and want to visit the old hotel, a major feature in the book. They’re out of luck.
“I have to tell them it’s fictional. I just wanted something for Madeline to do.”
As a first-time published author, she said she was most shocked about how an author is packaged for sale, a process she called “a strange feeling. The author photo — I never wear makeup.”
Pre-publicity has compared Airgood’s “Superior” setting to the quirky 1990s TV show “Northern Exposure.” Sort of, but the author might just be on the cusp of becoming the Fannie Flagg of the Yoop-eh.
Fudgies (and yes, you can you buy fudge in Grand Marais) better get their Stormy Kromers on when they visit what one of my lifelong Yooper friends calls “The Upper Peculiar.”
