To Keep the South Manitou Light Interview

Background: To Keep the South Manitou Light is a work of historical fiction set in 1871 on South Manitou Island in Lake Michigan and was published in 2005 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI.

I was interviewed several years ago by Cymbre Foster of the Leelanau Enterprise about my book To Keep the South Manitou Light.  Here I include some excerpts from the interview.
 
What connection do you have to Michigan’s Leelanau County?
My husband’s family has owned a cottage on Long Lake near Interlochen since the 1950s. For the thirty years of our marriage we’ve spent part of every summer there, always looking forward to trips to Leelanau County. We swim at Otter Creek, climb the Sleeping Bear dunes, visit the shops in Leland, Northport, and Sutton’s Bay, and just enjoy the spectacular, unspoiled beauty of the county. It’s the first place we take our visitors and it’s always one of the highlights of their Michigan vacation.

What was your inspiration for the book?
“The characters in this story are fictional, and the life of South Manitou Island has been changed in several instances for the sake of the story, but the lighthouse is real. Several years ago, my family and I camped on South Manitou. On a sunny day in August we followed a National Park ranger up the winding steps of the South Manitou Island Lighthouse and out onto the lower balcony that circles the top of the lighthouse. The view from up so high was at the same time breathtakingly beautiful and very scary.

Stories often begin with a writer asking the question, "What if?" And so this story began with What if it were November, a stormy, sleety night in November in the 19th Century, with ice building up in layers on the windows of the lighthouse? What if I were only twelve years old, and afraid to be up at the top of the lighthouse even on a sunny summer day? What if something had happened to the lightkeeper and I was the only one who could climb the ladder to the upper balcony and scrape off the ice so the light could shine through to warn the ships? I asked these and many other questions, until Jessie Lafferty, her mother, Omie, and the other characters in my story came to life.

To read the second part of the interview, click here.