Interviewed by Cal Freeman
I first became aware of John Counts as an editor and writer back in 2017 when he and his partner, the writer Meredith Counts, accepted a poem of mine for Great Lakes Review. As it turned out though, I knew of him as a musician in the punk band Suburban Delinquents long before then. John’s always been an artistic presence in Michigan and a bit of a legend. I know I was present for at least a few Delinquents shows in the west suburbs of Detroit back in the 90’s. Even back then, in the noise of palm-muted electric guitars and gridlocked, somatic 4/4 drumbeats, Counts’s lyrics could evoke place and scene like few others operating in that genre, hinting at a deep reading life. In the ensuing years I’d see his work pop up in publications like Midwestern Gothic and Hypertext and consider how important the type of realist fiction he writes is to the Michigan canon. There’s something about Counts’s refusal to sensationalize the sensational, his commitment to sober, third person narration of devastating events, his Dostoevskian consideration of bad choices interpellated by bad situations that elevates his short stories to the realm of myth. Reading Bear County, Michigan has been a productive, rewarding struggle for me. There’s nothing easy about these stories, and they don’t sugarcoat the material.
What led you to imagine the fictional place of Bear County, Michigan?
I grew up reading William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, who filled their places with wild characters and events. It made me want to create a place and fill it with wild characters and events, too. I spent a lot of time in northern Michigan as a kid camping, fly-fishing, hiking, hunting. There is a mythic quality there I didn’t feel in the suburbs of my youth – or Detroit where I went to college or Chicago where I went to grad school. The real poetry was always in the north woods. It’s the most suitable place to practice the style of mythical realism I prefer.
The idea of building a fictional community always appealed to me. It’s an attempt to understand how we’re all connected to one another in this place we call America. And places like Bear County are where the American myth of individualism collide with an inherent need for community. We usually think in terms of nations, states, cities and towns, but the county as a geographic designation is of great importance to those of us in the journalistic trade, which I’ve practiced for twenty years. In rural areas, the county line is both a police jurisdiction and coverage area for small daily papers like the one where I worked in Manistee County when I first started hatching these tales.
The first story I wrote set exclusively in Bear County was “Bonecutters,” about a hopeless family in hopeless circumstance that still, somehow, has a glimmer of hope. That story helped define the moral and aesthetic tone of Bear County.
I remember you telling the audience at your book release at Literati that your father was also a journalist who would take you up to Grand Marais where you got to hang out with your dad and the legendary Michigan writer Jim Harrison. Can you talk a bit about how those experiences shaped you as a writer?
Harrison loomed large in my life from a very early age. When I was about ten or eleven, Dad took my brother and I on a fly-fishing trip to the Fox River near Seney in the U.P. (the actual setting for Hemingway’s Big Two-Hearted River).We were at the IGA in town when Dad started talking to this suspicious looking man in the meat section. Dad was a journalist and could talk to anyone. Harrison took a shine to Dad and invited him up to Grand Marais to go bird hunting in the fall. When we got out of the IGA, Dad told me the disheveled man was a great writer. I didn’t believe him, so I started reading Harrison’s books – mostly the fiction. His work set the tone for what I thought fiction should be. I later read other writers that challenged that notion, but that’s where it started. We began going to Grand Marais bird hunting every fall starting in the early 1990s and spent a lot of time with Jim and other writers like Phil Caputo. Jim and Dad are gone now, of course, but my brother and I still head up every October to chase grouse and woodcock.
Harrison’s literary advice wavered depending on how much he had to drink. I recall when I was young – seventeen or eighteen – I went to the bar to hang out while everyone was hunting. I was sitting alone reading Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums when Harrison came in, sober in the daytime, and pulled the book from my hands, looked at the cover, then told me a story about how he met Kerouac at a New York City bar in the 1950s. Kerouac was so drunk he couldn’t speak, according to Jim. If you get that drunk, you can’t do the work, was the message. Ten years later, when I informed Harrison I was getting an MFA, he roared, “Why the hell would you do that?” But he later listened attentively when I told him about the program and the things I was working on. Another time, he told me if I really wanted to be a writer, I should go seduce a beautiful Mennonite woman he had seen earlier that day. Sometimes we just played pool. Mostly the talk at the bar was about fishing, hunting or traveling. The last time I saw him at the Dunes Saloon, I would have been in my early thirties, he grabbed me at the bar and quoted to me from a Louis Simpson poem, “Be true, be true, to your own strange kind.” These all felt like brushes with brilliance.
The main thing I learned from being around Harrison was how to read. He read voraciously and could quote poets and writers from all over the world. Good writers need to be good readers first. His idea of literature was expansive, never limiting. Everything is possible in writing. It’s the most liberating of human endeavors. It’s all about being true to your own strange kind, your own strange story.
Social class seems to inform so many of the stories in Bear County. I think of characters like Frank Dombreau and Debbie Somsel from the first two stories of the book as working class, but we might consider characters like Todd Bonecutter post-working class, and then there are characters like Lillie Korpella and Duane Bobbins, who have more professional backgrounds, which is all to say that although class differences among your characters exist, their existential plights, including their proclivities and habits, transcend their class backgrounds. Are you trying to say anything about work, class, and material wealth through these stories?
My sympathies are generally with the Big Franks, Debbie Somsels and Bonecutters of America, regardless of the various ways they mess up.
As a boy in Bay City, my brother and I would sneak into the backyards of the lumber baron mansions on Center Avenue. Even as a kid, I could feel the faded grandeur and opulence in my stomach. We behold the beauty of fine things even as the question forms in our gut – at what cost? We moved downstate when I was ten and I spent my formative years in humble, middle-class circumstance in working class Wayne County, south-central Livonia to be exact. Most kids in my high school were not college-bound. The moms stayed home; dads worked for one of the auto companies and the boys in my generation assumed they would follow suit. If the parents were professionals, they were teachers or engineers. Dad had a unique job as a journalist, which put him in a professional class, but I had a vague sense the union dads who worked on the line made more money than us. Now that I’m a journalist too, I’m pretty sure I was right.
I came of age in the ‘90s and gravitated towards the punk rockers – the anti-authority types. I suppose I had great antipathy toward the rich, material things, status and wealth. I still question the raw ugliness of capitalism. There is a sense in America that being rich is a virtue, which we know is not true. As a writer, I feel it’s my role to raise a mirror to the way America does things and how that affects our souls. And you end up with Bear County, where there’s a sense the best economic times have come and gone. Where everyone feels a bit used and discarded.
I don’t think you can build great wealth without losing something. In Bear County, the Powers family clear-cut the woods, but they also clear-cut their souls. Humanity is capable of great and awful things. To build our huge, wealthy nation, we had to exploit natural resources, decimate an entire population of people and enslave another. And that is the soul of America – mighty, rich, magical, inventive, yet also debased, filled with sin, guilt and regret. It’s all connected, you can’t have one without the other.
And yet we all share more than we think. In post-industrial, late capitalism Bear County, both ruling class and exploited class are wandering around in a daze, hooked on pills, trying to make sense of their existence like Jessie Powers in Rich Girl Blues and Jimmy Blizzard in Compensation.
There’s a bleak beauty in the landscape you evoke here. You refuse to present Michigan as an idyllic place, despite its geographical beauty. I’m thinking of the fatalism of stories like “The Women of Brotherhood” and “The Final Voyage,” where the impulse toward suicide, what Camus considered the only serious philosophical question, is explored unflinchingly. What does your fiction owe to concepts like determinism and free will? What would you like non-Michigan readers to learn from these stories about the state you’re from?
In many ways, I’m still just a moody English major wandering around abandoned buildings in Detroit and the woods of the U.P. pondering the fate of mankind. I’m kind of kidding and kind of not. I was a big fan of Camus and all the French Existentialists as a teen. I was also a huge fan of malt liquor and drugs. I probably spent more time in my drunken twenties and thirties pondering Camus’ question than was healthy. But I also paid attention to that line in Harrison’s Letters to Yesenin: “My year-old daughter’s red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting stop.” Having children (two daughters) helped me to stop too. Being sober for eight years has also greatly altered my worldview for the better.
I was never much of a philosopher. I think philosophers seek answers. Fiction writers live in the muddle of reality and myth. Excitement precedes answers, haha. I think fiction repels answers and solutions by necessity. Fiction tells human stories filled with moments of stress, conflict and complication punctuated by moments of resolution and Joycean epiphanies, only followed by more stress and conflicts, then more resolutions, and so on. A story doesn’t seek to find answers. It chronicles those cycles of life. It thrives in the contradictions because that is life. Big, gorgeous life with all its stuff. And that’s what fiction is. All the stuffing. Where we find transcendence and meaning in our relationships with one another. Or the natural world. Michigan is most beautiful in its empty spaces, whether it’s an abandoned skyscraper in Detroit or the backwoods of the U.P. That’s what the rest of the world should know about our state.
I was interested in “Rich Girl Blues” for the way it blends the settings of Chicago and Northern Michigan. Can you talk a bit about the inspiration for and process of writing that particular story?
Rich Girl Blues is the beginning of a novel I’m working on called Wild Acres that chronicles the rise and fall of the doomed Powers family. I was drawn to that juxtaposition between the big city street where they’re eating brunch and the last stand of virgin pine in Bear County. Just putting those two settings next to each other – minus all the other mechanics of plot, character, action – tellsa story. The family pillaged the land so future generations could sit around in big expensive cities having scandals and tawdry affairs. Jessie feels something is wrong even as she perpetuates the cycle. That is her redeeming quality. Whether or not she can stop that cycle is something I’m exploring more in the novel.
But let me go back to sneaking around the backyards of the lumber baron mansions in Bay City as a boy. It was the beginning of class awareness. And in many ways Bear County is how rough-and-tumble America plays out amid the beauty of northern Michigan. There is boom, there is bust, but there is always the beauty of the natural world. I imagine Nature just hangs out laughing while watching humans fumble about.
“The Standoff,” the novella-length final piece in the book, deals with indigenous peoples’ land rights and erasure, carceral surveillance, ecological consciousness, and class conflict. At what point did you know these would be the themes of the piece, and what typifies and necessitates a novella-length work in your mind?
I was very familiar with the novella form from being raised on Harrison’s work. But I can’t recall if The Standoff started out that way, or if it was a short story that went long, or if I was trying for a novel and it went short. Here’s my very unscientific and subjective take: A short story usually has a single narrative line; a novel might have three or four; a novella has room for two. But in the end, a story is as long as it needs to be. With all that said, there’s not much you can do with a novella publishing-wise. And it fit nicely at the end of this book.
My favorite Harrison creation has always been Brown Dog, the loveable backwoods scoundrel who appears in a series of novellas. There are a lot of native themes in them. I also like the work of Louise Erdrich, especially the novel Love Medicine. And at the time I started the novella, let’s say 2010 or so, I was covering a tribe for the newspaper in Manistee and immersed in its daily business. This was during the Obama years when the mood was different in America. The nation still felt stable. The atmosphere has changed but the concept of the novella is still relevant: What if a splinter group from the tribe tried to take its ancestral land back by force? It gets at the heart of America’s conflicted soul. I was thinking of the 1960s, a time when the Black Panthers and American Indian Movement were at the forefront of the national consciousness. This was all still in the air when I was coming of age in the Detroit area in the ‘90s. When I went to Wayne State, I worked at the school bookstore with a bunch of aging revolutionaries from the White Panther Party. I was also familiar with various radical ideas from being close to the Detroit punk scene. I always think of Winter Bear, the leader of the splinter group, as a punk rock hero. The ultimate rebel. I bet he would have enjoyed the Camus quandary. In the end, I wanted to tell a story about America’s original sins but framed in the very specific world of Bear County, where things are all a little exaggerated, a little more slapstick, a little more crime-fiction driven.
I needed a foil, a stand-in for people trying to make sense of these extremes. You get Sheriff Bobbins. He’s a little indecisive, struggling to do the right thing, which I think is where most Americans are at. His personal life is a mess. His town is a mess. And he can’t make any of it right. I liked the juxtaposition of him dealing with both a political conflict and a personal conflict. Betrayals are all connected in some cosmic way, whether it’s adultery or genocide.
The novella felt like the perfect ender to the book because it goes after big things. The stories leading up to it help build the world of Bear County and introduce the reader to some of the characters formed by the place. But The Standoff was intended to offer a climax in the battle for the soul of America. I’m still not sure who won. I’m not sure if anyone wins. Maybe that’s the point.
John Counts is a writer and journalist based in Whitmore Lake, Michigan. He’s published fiction in various places over the years, including the Chicago Reader, Joyland and Hypertext. His journalism has won numerous state and national awards. He’s currently the editor of the investigative reporting team at MLive.com. Bear County, Michigan is his first book.
Cal Freeman (he/him) is the author of the books Fight Songs (Eyewear 2017) and Poolside at the Dearborn Inn (R&R Press 2022). His writing has appeared in many journals including Atticus Review, Image, The Poetry Review, Verse Daily, Under a Warm Green Linden, North American Review, Panoply Magazine, Oxford American, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Advanced Leisure. He is a recipient of the Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes), winner of Passages North’s Neutrino Prize, and a finalist for the River Styx International Poetry Prize. Born and raised in Detroit, he teaches at Oakland University and serves as Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Detroit. His chapbook of poems, Yelping the Tegmine, has just been released, and his hybrid full-length collection, The Weather of Our Names, is due out this year from Cornerstone Press.