SSoP Podcast Episode 79 — Michigan: We're All Just Yoopers and Trolls Livin' in the Mitten State

This is a transcription of Michigan: We’re All Just Yoopers and Trolls Livin’ in the Mitten State

David: Hello. Welcome to Strong Sense of Place.

Melissa: In each episode, we focus on one destination and discuss what makes it different than any other place on Earth.

David: Then we recommend five books we love that took us there on the page.

Melissa: I’m Melissa Joulwan.

David: I’m David Humphreys.

David: We’re going around the world one great read at a time. Thanks for joining us.

[cheerful music]

David: Welcome to Strong Sense of Place. Today we get curious about Michigan. In Two Truths and a Lie: how a bowl of cereal turned two brothers into forty years of enemies. And the Upper Peninsula’s actual, real, on-the-ballot attempt to become America’s 51st state. Then we’ll talk about five books we love.

Melissa: I’m recommending a fantastic short story collection about a unique community in Dearborn.

David: I’ve got a book that says it’s a thriller. And it is. But they shelved it as a thriller because ‘devastating meditation on loving your abuser’ doesn’t fit on a sticker. … The marketing department may have missed the memo on this one. But first, Mel’s going to bring us up to speed with the Michigan 101.

Melissa: Let’s get oriented!

Melissa: Michigan is in the upper midwest in the Great Lakes region of the US. It’s made up of two distinct peninsulas connected by the 5-mile Mackinac Bridge. The two peninsulas are the Upper and…

David: The Lower!

Melissa: The Upper Peninsula has more rugged terrain with dense forests and snowy winters. The lifestyle is outdoorsy and influenced by Finnish and Swedish heritage. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, people from Scandinavia escaped crop failures and famine in their home countries by emigrating to Michigan for jobs in mining and logging. Nowadays, the residents of the Upper Peninsula are known as Yoopers.

Melissa: The Lower Peninsula is larger, flatter, and more urban. Its residents are jokingly called trolls because they live below the Mackinac Bridge. The Lower Peninsula is shaped like a mitten. If you hold up your left hand, in front of you, like you’re wearing a mitten, the capital of Lansing is kind of in the middle and Grand Rapids is below your pinkie. At the base of your thumb are Ann Arbor — home to the University of Michigan — and Detroit, also known as Motor City and Motown and The D.

Melissa: Although it’s in the midwest, Michigan feels like a state with a coast. You’re never more than 6 miles from some kind of water. It touches four of the five Great Lakes — Huron, Michigan, Erie, and Superior. And it has around 11,000 inland lakes. Related fun fact: It has more lighthouses than any other US State. Want to guess how many? 129. The next closest states have about half that: New York (69) and Maine (65). It would not be a bad way to spend a weekend, touring old lighthouses and eating local cherries.

Melissa: Because Michigan is the Cherry Capital of the US. The state produces 70% of the country’s tart cherries. Every July, the National Cherry Festival is held in Traverse City. You can eat cherry pie, drink cherry wine, put cherry bbq sauce on some ribs, and meet the National Cherry Queen.

Melissa: Native Americans lived in the land now known as Michigan for about 12,000 years. There are 12 federally recognized tribes, mostly belonging to the Anishinaabe, which means the ‘Original People.’ Then in 1618, the French showed up. They controlled the land for about 100 years until the French and Indian War. Native Americans and the French teamed up to fight the British but they lost… and a century later, Michigan became a US territory. In 1837, Michigan became the 16th state.

Melissa: Fast forward a few decades… At the end of the 19th century, Detroit was a B-list industrial city: food production, pharmaceuticals, cigars, and stoves. But it was positioned for greater success. The Great Lakes made it easy to ship heavy raw materials like iron, coal, and timber — and those resources also meant wealthy investors. There was an existing industry with skilled workers who knew how to build carriages and wagons.

Melissa: Automakers put it all together. In 1903, Henry Ford founded the Ford Motor Company, and he seems to get a lot of the credit for launching the Motor City. But I also want to shout-out the Olds Motor Vehicle Company, founded in 1897 and maker of the Oldsmobile, because the founder’s name was Ransom E. Olds, and that just needed to be said.

Melissa: By the end of the 20th century, Detroit was home to 125 car companies — and in the process, it became on of the most racially and ethnically diverse places in America. Scottish, English, Mexican, Lebanese, and Black workers came from all over to work in the factories, picking up new skills and livable wages.

Melissa: The thousands of Black Americans that moved from the South to Detroit brought music along with them. Blues, Gospel, Jazz. And the well-paid autoworkers had money to spend on a good night out with cocktails, records, and live shows.

Melissa: Berry Gordy, Jr. was right there, at the right time. He was born in Detroit, dropped out of high school to become a boxer, and then served in the Korean War. Back in the US in 1953, he got married and started writing songs. Jackie Wilson — the R&B singer known as Mr. Excitement — recorded a bunch of Gordy’s songs, including ‘Lonely Teardrops.’ And Etta James laid down a silky version ‘All I Could is Cry.’ Gordy also discovered The Miracles and Smokey Robinson. Imagine! Hearing Smokey’s voice for the first time in some small club.

Melissa: With Smokey’s encouragement, Gordy founded a music label to make records that celebrated the local sound, the Motown sound. It was soul music that blended pop and R&B into a whole new thing. Think of an artist whose song makes it impossible to not dance, and it’s probably Motown: Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross & The Supremes, The Temptations, Gladys Knight & The Pips, The Jackson 5, Lionel Richie & The Commodores. Martha Reeves and the Vandellas literally sang about dancing in the streets. And, it’s worth noting, Motown was a black-owned business AND employed a multi-racial staff throughout the ’60s, a time when most of America was deeply divided along race lines. You can visit the Motown Museum in Detroit to explore the sound and its history.

Melissa: Now, let’s get into some other things you can do in Michigan. Do you want to start with outdoors or indoors first?

David: Outside!

Melissa: On the Lower Peninsula, you can visit Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. It’s a gorgeous national park with vast, steep sand dunes that slope dramatically down into the sparkling blue water of Lake Michigan. As you might imagine, there’s all manner of hiking, biking, kayaking, and skiing.

Melissa: But I need to tell you about hunting for Petoskey Stones. They’re stones made from fossilized prehistoric coral, and they’re found almost exclusively in Michigan. They look like ordinary gray limestone when they’re dry. But when they’re wet, a magical pattern appears. It looks like a honeycomb with starbursts in each cell. When you hold one, you’re literally holding history. Those rocks started forming about 350 million years ago. And it took a lot of effort to get one into your hand. Before the earth could even conceive of a song like ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ or the thrill of riding in a T-bird convertible, the area that would become Michigan was covered by a shallow saltwater sea where coral grew. Over millions of years, the coral died and its organic matter was replaced with minerals, turning it into rock. Then recently, where recently is about 2 million years ago, glaciers scraped the earth and spread the fossils across the Lower Peninsula so you can take a walk in Petoskey State Park, pick up a nice rock, put it in your pocket, and take it home.

Melissa: In the Upper Peninsula, you can admire Root Beer Falls, paddle along a water trail, dive into history at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, tour an iron or copper mine, and visit a mining ghost town. There will be links for all of that in the show notes.

Melissa: But, the one thing that really snagged my attention, is a boat ride on the freshwater spring called Kitch-iti-KIPi. And it’s not just because of the name. The water is emerald green and crystal clear, like looking through a magical gem stone. There’s a wooden raft with a glass bottom on a rope pulley system, so you can glide over the water and look down at what’s happening below. The water rushing in from the spring makes the silt swirl. And the water is so clear, it’s almost like looking down into the sky, everything is topsy-turvy, and it seems like the trout are floating in the air. The spring is inside Palms Book State Park, so it’s free to visit, and I just think that is amazing and awesome. This jewel box experience, just there, waiting for you.

Melissa: Inside… We’ll start with something bookish: The University of Michigan Law Library. It’s the Gothic library and reading room of your dark academia dreams. The walls are partially covered in carved oak panelling, leading up to arched stained-glass windows and a soaring vaulted ceiling. Rows of long study tables are lit by wrought-iron chandeliers that came straight from Dracula’s castle. It’s open to the public and has a strictly enforced no-talking policy. There’s also a coffee shop inside. So you can take a book, grab a cuppa, and read your tattered copy of ‘The Secret History’ in silence.

Melissa: If you have unfulfilled political ambitions, you need to go to Hell. The town of Hell. It’s a short drive from Ann Arbor and Detroit, and for $100 USD, you can be mayor for the day. [DAVE: Mayor of Hell!] You receive a certificate, a badge, and a 1-square inch piece of land. In 2017, Elijah Daniel became mayor for the day and banned straight people for a few hours. In 2022, the mayoral title was awarded to a black cat named Jinx with crazy yellow eyes and little feet that point in opposite directions. Both temporary mayors were impeached at the end of their 1-day terms.

Melissa: Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Detroit-style Pizza. It’s the midwestern cousin to East-coast Sicilian pizza. Which means it’s cut into thick square slabs, not floppy triangles. Detroit Pizza is truly rooted in the Motor City. It’s baked in blue steel pans that were originally used as automotive drip trays in factories. And it turns pizza upside down. The crust is topped with cheese first, then a few wide stripes of a thick, garlicky tomato sauce. The whole shebang gets caramelized and golden during the bake. The crust is almost fried on the bottom — and the cheese is Wisconsin brick cheese, not mozzarella. [DAVE - what is that?] I had to look it up! It’s not stretchy like mozzarella. Instead, it’s creamy and gooey. So that melts and gets brown around the edges. One fan described it as the perfect balance of airy dough, crispy bottom, and caramelized edges.

Melissa: Music that makes you want to dance, an epic library, outdoor activities to work up an appetite, cherry pie and Detroit pizza — when are we going? That’s the Michigan 101.

David: Are you ready for Two Truths and a Lie? I’m going to say three statements, Mel doesn’t know which one is the lie. Statement 1: The research station for one of the most famous studies in wildlife science is a dead man’s cabin, in the most isolated patch of wilderness Michigan’s got. Statement 2: In 1975, the Upper Peninsula came within 30 votes of being the 51st state. And statement 3: The invention of corn flakes started a family feud that lasted nearly 40 years.

David: Let’s take them one at a time…

David: The research station for one of the most famous studies in wildlife science is a dead man’s cabin, in the most isolated patch of wilderness Michigan’s got. Since 1958, biologists have tracked a deadly game happening on a single island in Lake Superior. That’s sixty-eight years running — the world’s longest continuous study of a wild predator-prey system. Moose vs. wolves.

David: The island is Isle Royale [Isle Roy-AL], 210 square miles of wilderness that legally belongs to Michigan, though it sits closer to Canada. A whole population of moose swam over first. Then, in the 1940s, a pack of wolves walked over a frozen ice bridge from Ontario to find dinner waiting. In 1958 a biologist named Durward Allen realized that he had a near-unique setup: one predator, one prey, sealed onto the same island with no way out for either one. So he started counting them. And somebody’s been counting them ever since.

David: For decades, the research base has been a dead man’s cabin. A commercial fisherman named Jack Bangsund died there in his sleep in 1959, after an evening of celebrating his birthday with his friends, according to a sign on the cabin. The Park Service started using the place in 1960. It’s still in use today.

David: For a long time, the data told a simple story: the wolves and the moose rising and falling together, roughly a decade apart, like clockwork. Biology textbooks cited Isle Royale as proof that wolves kept the ecosystem in balance. Then the study kept running, and the balance turned out to be an illusion. In 1980, the wolf population hit 50 — the highest density of wolves ever recorded in the wild, anywhere ever. Two years later, it crashed to 14. From this, we learned that humans like to pretend they know what’s going on.

David: By the 2010s, the wolves were losing for real. No new blood had reached the island in years, and only two closely related wolves were left. So the Park Service reset the game. They relocated nineteen wolves to the island.

David: This year, the wolves are winning. There are 37 wolves on Isle Royale, the most since the 1970s. The moose are not: down 75 percent since 2019.

David: If you’d like, you can go see it happen. Ferries and seaplanes will get you there, there’s a lodge with a small restaurant and grocery, and, of course, camping. … If you want to get your hands dirty, there’s a volunteer program called ‘Moosewatch.’ You’ll spend a week in the summer backpacking the island looking for moose bones. We’ll have details in show notes. … Go, team moose.

David: Second statement: In 1975, the Upper Peninsula came within 30 votes of being the 51st state. No. I made that up. They’ve thought about it — more than once, actually — but it was never that close.

David: Here’s what actually happened. It’s better than the fake version, because the real ending is so much more Michigan.

David: The Upper Peninsula — the U.P., home of ‘Yoopers,’ as the locals call themselves — almost didn’t end up part of Michigan at all. In 1836, Congress handed it over as a consolation prize, after Michigan lost a border fight with Ohio over the city of Toledo. Michiganders were not moved by the gesture. The first vote to accept the deal failed, 28 to 21 — a state literally voting to turn down free land. It took a second, hastily called meeting that December, cold enough and unpopular enough that it’s still known as the ‘Frostbitten Convention,’ before delegates said yeah, alright, 78 to 10. So Michigan didn’t really want the U.P. either. The feeling’s been occasionally mutual ever since.

David: That resentment turned into a plan in 1858. A convention in the town of Ontonagon proposed combining the U.P. with chunks of northern Wisconsin and Minnesota into a brand-new state called ‘Superior.’ That didn’t go anywhere. Neither did the next attempt. In 1962, a group called the Upper Peninsula Independence Association tried the direct approach: get enough signatures to force a statewide ballot referendum. They fell tens of thousands of signatures short.

David: Which brings us to 1975, and the closest this idea ever actually came to a real vote. A state representative named Dominic Jacobetti — U.P. born and raised — turned ‘Superior’ into a genuine, if half-serious, political moment. He requested an official legal opinion on how secession would work. He gave speeches. He printed T-shirts.

David: By the fall of that year, Marquette and Iron Mountain put it to an actual, on-the-ballot vote: should the Upper Peninsula secede and become the 51st state?

David: The people said no. Resoundingly no — about 71 percent in Marquette, 68 percent in Iron Mountain. Once you do the math, it’s not hard to understand why: the U.P. is enormous, over 16,000 square miles, bigger than nine U.S. states, Massachusetts included — but it holds only about 300,000 people — which is about half the population of Boston, for instance. Even the U.P.’s own congressman argued publicly, at the time, that seceding would leave 300,000 people holding the bill for an entire state’s worth of roads, schools, and snowplows. The dream of Superior disappeared.

David: So: Michigan’s Upper Peninsula never came within 30 votes of anything. But the idea has never fully died — Marquette County’s board flirted with bringing it up again as recently as 2012, and you can still buy ‘State of Superior’ merchandise today. If you’re interested, it’ll be in the show notes.

David: Last one: The invention of corn flakes started a family feud that lasted nearly 40 years. That’s true. This story starts at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in about 1894. At the time, it was a premier wellness destination. People went there to heal and learn how be healthier. And it was huge. At its largest, the Sanitarium had 30 buildings on 30 acres, with 800 full-time employees, and more than two dozen doctors.

David: At the top of this organization sat John Harvey Kellogg, director. And running right beside him, his little brother Will. John was the doctor, lecturer, writer, authority. Will seemingly did everything else - bookkeeper, business manager, ghostwriter - John’s hardworking silent partner.

David: And John was a lot. He ran a health resort that pulled in the era’s biggest names — Henry Ford, Amelia Earhart, George Bernard Shaw. He was Goop, 1900 edition. If you can imagine a man with a very impressive white goatee trying to bring ‘more agency, depth, and joy to life.’ That was him. He treated people with a regimen that had some ideas that we might agree with — exercise, sleep, stress reduction, and cutting down on cigarettes and booze. But he also had some ideas that we probably don’t agree with. He had enema machines capable of pumping fifteen quarts of water a minute. He was a big fan of vibrating chairs and belts for fat removal. John also believed that sex sapped what he called ‘vital energy.’ He believed this so thoroughly that it’s said he never consummated his 41-year marriage — all while he and his wife Ella raised 42 children. Most of those were foster, at least seven of them adopted.

David: Will was almost the opposite of John: quiet, disciplined, bookish. He was so thoroughly overshadowed by his brother for so long that almost nobody in Battle Creek thought of him as his own person. After he made his own fortune, his eccentricity came out in two ways: horses and philanthropy. He became a serious breeder of championship Arabian horses. He opened a California ranch and hung out with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Gary Cooper, and Valentino. – Will eventually gave almost his entire fortune away. He built the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. That started in 1930 with $66 million from Will. It is, to this day, one of the largest philanthropic foundations in the world. The foundation has a portfolio of almost 9 billion dollars which they mostly use to help children.

David: But the corn flakes.

David: By the late 1800s, the Kelloggs had already produced a wheat flake cereal. It probably looked and tasted something like Wheaties or Total. That had been a success, but it was a bit medicinal. Will wanted something that would appeal to a wider market. So in 1898, he started a long, patient experiment trying to swap the wheat out for corn. He got there, eventually. He’d steam the kernels, slice off the oily hull, grind what was left, then toast the whole thing. Crispy, golden flakes with a little bit of flavor, and a touch of sweetness. It took him seven years, but he had fixed John’s recipe. And that’s the way John saw it, too — not his brother’s invention, but an extension of his work. As far as John’s concerned, there’s no corn flake without the wheat flake to improve on.

David: And the conflict didn’t end there. John wanted to ship the corn flakes plain — because to him ‘healthy’ and ‘tasty’ can’t coexist. Will wanted to add sugar, because he’d met people.

David: Will won that argument the only way he could — by leaving. In 1906 he split and started his own company, and he sweetened the recipe. He turned it into one of the best-selling foods in American history. Which left one enormous problem: both companies wanted to put the name ‘Kellogg’ on the box. There is a whole separate story about the Kellogg v. Kellogg case. But we’ll shorten the story a bit by saying that the brothers ended up suing each other over their own last name. By the time the lawyers were done, John and Will were, for all practical purposes, bitter strangers who shared a surname and a hometown.

David: They stayed that way for nearly forty years. Then in September of 1941, John — eighty-nine years old, half-blind, and clearly aware he was running out of time — sat down and dictated a long, emotional letter to Will. He apologized for decades of conflict. He told him, flat out, that he’d been the better businessman all along. Will never wrote back — and John died two years later, in 1943, convinced his brother had frozen him out one last time.

David: Except that’s not what happened. The letter had never been mailed — John’s secretary had quietly decided a man of his stature shouldn’t be sending something so undignified, so passionate, and just… filed it. It sat forgotten in a cabinet for six and a half years, until someone found it in 1948 and delivered it to Will. He was blind by then, too — so a nurse had to read him his dead brother’s apology out loud.

David: If you are curious about the Kellogg story, there’s a book. ‘The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek’ by Howard Markel. It was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist for Nonfiction in 2017. That is Two Truths and a Lie.

Melissa: My first recommendation is ‘Make Nice’ by Ryan Effgen. This is an easy-breezy family dramedy with a simple plot: The Pickford family is gathering at a fancy hotel to fulfill their recently-deceased mother’s wish that they all spend time together. But as it often goes with families, it’s not that simple.

Melissa: Before I get into the story, I need to tell you about the setting. It’s Mackinac Island, the island in Lake Huron between Michigan’s two peninsulas. The perimeter of the island is only 8 miles (12 km) so you could walk the whole thing in about half a day — the whole day if you stop for a picnic and a swim.

Melissa: Based on the photos and tourist brochures, it’s either the tackiest or most charming place in Michigan. Listeners, if you’ve been there, please let us know!

Melissa: Back in the day, it was home to indigenous peoples. Its name is from the Odawa word meaning Great Turtle. Then in the 17th century, the French and British showed up. The island became the center of the Great Lakes’ fur trade, the British built forts, two battles were fought there during the War of 1812. Then in the late 19th century, the Gilded Age barons decided it would be a really nice place for a vacation. They were right!

Melissa: There are beaches all around. During summer days, the temperature is warm, not hot. At night, it’s chilly enough for a sweater and a bonfire. The shop keepers on the island decided back in the 1800s that fudge was going to be their thing, and there are now 8 fudge shops — that’s two for every square mile of island real estate. They collectively make 10,000 pounds (4500 kg) of fudge every day during the summer.

Melissa: And most importantly, there are no cars on the island. It can be reached by boat, ferry, small planes, and, in the winter, by snowmobile. But once you’re there, you’re walking, cycling, skating, or riding in a horse-drawn carriage.

Melissa: Now, back to the book. Make Nice.

Melissa: In the world of the book, the Pickford family had spent childhood summers at a small cottage on the island. Since then, their mom has died. Dad has become a curmudgeon, either through grief, natural inclination, or both. And the now 30-something siblings have been a little beaten up by life. The eldest sister Viv just learned her husband is gay. Their brother Corey is a charmer with very shady employment, and Peter, the baby of the family, is the United States’ foremost expert on mollusks, with a particular interest in snails. They’re all emotionally stunted and bumbling their way through their lives — which is one of the best tropes: ‘let’s gather all these mildly troubled people together and see what happens.’

Melissa: Their childhood vacation home right on the lake has been sold and redesigned into a sort of McMansion, so the family is staying at The Grand Hotel. This is a real Gilded Age palace hotel on the island. It opened in 1887 and looks like a white wedding cake sitting on top of a hill overlooking a vast emerald-green lawn and the endless vista of water and sky. It has a 600-foot long wrap-around porch that was known as Flirtation Walk because would-be paramours could meet and stroll together in a respectable fashion. The plot of this book makes good use of the porch in a pivotal scene.

Melissa: This novel has everything you could want in a dysfunctional family story: unspoken resentments, meaningful revelations, fleeting romantic moments, cringey conversations. The feelings are all earned and feel authentic, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously. There’s plenty of silliness and warmth to sand the edges off the family conflicts. For me, read-alikes would be the family-focused rom-coms by Elinor Lipman — like ‘The Inn at Lake Devine’ — or the movie ‘Little Miss Sunshine.’

Melissa: This book has a very strong sense of place and characters I was rooting for, especially when they made bone-headed decisions. Bad choices made by well-intentioned fictional friends are so endearing! That’s ‘Make Nice’ by Ryan Effgen.

Melissa: I couldn’t find a way to elegantly work this in, but there’s one more thing I want to say about The Grand Hotel. In 1947, the film ‘This Time for Keeps’ starring Esther Williams was filmed on the island. The pool at the Grand is still named the Esther Williams pool — and in 1987, she returned to the Grand Hotel as a guest of honor to cut the ribbon at a rededication of the pool. Obviously, I’m going to put lots of photos and video of this in the show notes.

David: My first book is ‘The Marsh King’s Daughter,’ by Karen Dionne. This book starts with a woman delivering homemade jam to a grocery store in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The jars have gingham circles tied over the lids with butcher’s string, color-coded by flavor: red for raspberry, purple for elderberry, green for cattail-blueberry, which I did not know is a thing, and it’s apparently very good. She leaves her toddler buckled in the truck with the windows down while she hauls boxes. On the drive home, a news bulletin cuts in: an escaped prisoner, armed and dangerous, last seen near the Seney [See-knee] National Wildlife Refuge. Two guards are dead. She already knows his name. Because he’s her father.

David: The marketing copy on this book undersells it. This book looks like a thriller. And there is a thriller running through this book. But that’s not really what it’s about. What it’s about is a woman named Helena, who was born in captivity to a mother who was abducted. Helena was raised for the first twelve years of her life to believe that the cabin in the marsh — no electricity, no running water, no calendar, just her captive mother, her dangerous father, and the seasons — was just life. Helena loves her father. The book keeps circling back to it. It never once lets you off the hook for just how uncomfortable and devastating that is.

David: The chapters alternate. In the present, Helena is married to a gentle nature photographer named Stephen. He does not know who she really is. Together, they’re raising two little girls, selling jam at the farmers market under a name she assumed after her escape. In flashback — headed, ominously, ‘The Cabin’ — we get Helena’s childhood: learning to track, to skin a beaver, to clean a deer. Learning to shoot at six. Getting her first knife at five, an eight-inch Bowie, presented to her from her father like a knighting ceremony. There’s a scene involving a hammer, her thumb, and a lesson about carelessness that I’m not going to describe any further than that — but it’s worse than it sounds. It sits two pages from a scene of the same man wrapping her in a blanket at midnight to keep her from being scared of a sound in the yard. Dionne refuses to let that dissonance end. He’s a monster, and he’s her father, and she loves him in a broken way.

David: And then — the escape happens, the state police are on her porch. Her husband finds out who he married. That’s roughly where I’ll stop, because what Helena decides to do next — instead of running, instead of staying safely with her family — is the rest of the book.

David: What makes this book a strong-sense-of-place pick, though, is how well Dionne draws the Upper Peninsula — not as scenery, but as the backbone of the whole story. The Tahquamenon [ ta-QUA-me-non] River basin. The Seney Stretch, twenty-five straight, flat, mind-numbing miles of M-28. Sault Ste. Marie, which locals just call ‘the Soo.’ Deer camp as a two-week regional holiday. The specific, seasonal knowledge of where the blackberries grow biggest, which wind a buck will bed down against, how cold has to get before the snow squeaks under your boots. Dionne isn’t writing ‘the wilderness’ in the abstract. She’s writing this particular 130 square miles, in enough detail that it feels like you colud field-dress a doe by the end of it.

David: In the 1970s, Karen Dionne and her husband lived in a canvas tent in the UP. At the time, they had an infant. For three years, she lived without a telephone or running water. It’s not hard to imagine that this is where the veracity of this book came from. She wrote about the experience on her site. We’ll put a link. She has since moved back to suburbs of Detroit. ‘The Marsh King’s Daughter’ was her breakout novel. It was an international success that became a movie a couple of years ago.

David: This isn’t really a book about a manhunt. It’s a book about what it costs to love someone who taught you everything you know and then very nearly ruined you doing it. It’ll make you rethink the word ‘complicated.’ If you’re going to read it, start it on a night you don’t have anywhere to be. It’s ‘The Marsh King’s Daughter,’ by Karen Dionne.

Melissa: My second recommendation is ‘Dearborn’ by Ghassan Zeineddine. This is a collection of stories set in the Arab American community in Dearborn, Michigan. One of our Patrons Emily K recommend this book to me, and I’m so glad she did. Thank you, Emily!

Melissa: Dearborn is a Detroit suburb. In 2023, it because the first Arab-majority city in the US. About 55% of the city’s residents are of Middle Eastern or North African ancestry. In the neighborhoods, a Palestinian falafel shop sits across the street from an Iraqi restaurant and an Lebanese-owned hair salon. You can get a coffee brewed with cardamom seeds. The Walgreen’s sign has Arabic alongside the English.

Melissa: Just a few weeks ago, Abdul El-Sayed became the Democratic nominee for the US Senate in Michigan. If you’re not familiar, he was born in Dearborn to Egyptian parents, has an MD from Columbia University, and worked as an epidemiologist. It felt like the universe was conspiring to tell me to read ‘Dearborn.’

Melissa: The ten stories are lightly connected. In one of them, two friends routinely eat together in a burger joint — later, that same restaurant is casually mentioned by another character in a different story. There are other quiet touchpoints like that. They create the sense that you are IN the neighborhood.

Melissa: Each story has a singular vibe, and the author Ghassan Zeineddine uses precise details. He KNOWS these people, and knows how to make them feel real. He also uses the entire emotional palette.

Melissa: Some of the characters are heartbreaking: an ambitious DJ who single-mindedly chases success. A desperately lonely woman who goes to tragic lengths for companionship. Innocent people run afoul of ICE. Petty crooks cook up ridiculous schemes that work… for a while. In a fable called ‘Money Chickens,’ a father teaches his son how to hide ill-gotten cash inside frozen chickens. It reminded me of the tall tales I’ve heard about my extended Lebanese family.

Melissa: One of my favorites is called ‘Marseille.’ It’s narrated by Madame Ayda, a 100-year-old chain-smoker who survived the Titanic sinking. Sitting in her living room during a snowstorm, she tells a journalist about her childhood in Lebanon, her husband, and her eventual arrival in New York in 1912. It’s a melancholy love story, a travelogue, and an immigrant tale, all deftly concentrated into 17 pages. It’s complete as-is, but I would love that one expanded to a 600-page novel so I can spend more time with her.

Melissa: The other story I loved is a comedy called ‘Speedoman.’ Every Saturday, five married couples go to the Ford Community Center. The wives gather in their burkinis in a corner of the swimming pool while their husbands soak in the Jacuzzi. Gossip is the order of the day. One weekend, a stranger they dub Speedoman disrupts their routine with hilarious results.

Melissa: They notice him, first, becasuse he’s wearing a pink robe, and he’s carrying a book. He’s tall with broad shoulders and more tan than anyone should be in winter. When he drops his robe, he reveals his bathing suit: a sky-blue Speedo with an image of a Lebanese cedar tree on his butt.

Melissa: The husbands are in a tizzy. They think he looks like a porn star, although they’ve never actually see porn. How dare he strut like that! They worry he’s going to get too close to their wives.

Melissa: For their part, the ladies are enthralled. The way he glides through the water, the cedar tree, and most tantalizing: the book on his chair. What, they wonder, is he reading?

Melissa: Everyone’s fascination with Speedoman continues for weeks. Eventually the ladies learn he’s reading poems by an 8th-century Persian princess. They decide immediately to make that their next book club title. As they read a love poem together, the wives imagine Speedoman as the speaker in the poem. They are intoxicated.

Melissa: This hairy, tan stranger attains levels of suave irressistability that are only possible when someone is the object of a crush from across the room. Both the husbands and wives are smitten. And the denouement of the story is very sweet and funny.

Melissa: Even though these stories are very specifically about Arab people, they’re also very American. If you set them in any other immigrant community in the US, the precise details would change, but you can also see the analogous threads between them and, say, the Mexican neighbors we had in Austin or my Italian relatives in Pennsylvania or a Jewish grandmother in New York. The bonds of family and the merging of old-world customs with the new to create something novel. That’s the heart of makes something uniquely American. That’s ‘Dearborn’ by Ghassan Zeineddine.

David: My second book is ‘Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story,’ by David Maraniss [MA-ran-iss]. It’s a biography of Detroit. And it does a close read on the city of about eighteen months, from the fall of 1962 into the spring of 1964. The author makes a compelling argument that, in that window, Detroit was peaking and collapsing at the same time.

David: Now, before we go too much farther — I want to ask: was there ever a more noir city than Detroit in 1963? I know Chicago’s right there. There’s LA and New York. You could go international — Shanghai, Hong Kong. But Detroit has got to be in the mix. In 1963 you’ve got the top of the US auto industry, run by Henry Ford II — locals called him ‘the Deuce.’ You’ve got the mob operating in plain sight. The police commissioner, a guy named George Edwards, kept a three-ring binder in his office labeled ‘MAFIA: Members, Relatives, Associates, Suspects.’ There’s a mob party bus, described as, ‘painted blue and silver, the colors of the football Lions.’ It ran with a well-stocked bar and bunk beds. The vice squad tailed it around town most nights. Jimmy Hoffa is still walking around, years before he isn’t. That same police commissioner secretly wrote a letter, addressed to Robert Kennedy — who was the Attorney General at the time: the envelope says, ‘only open this if I turn up dead.’ Meanwhile, Motown’s about to have its biggest year yet, on the strength of twelve-year-old Stevie Wonder’s live recording of ‘Fingertips.’ That’s about to hit number one. Martin Luther King gives an early run-through of ‘I Have a Dream’ here, two months before the one everybody remembers. Aretha Franklin is still singing in her father’s church. There’s a lot of stark light and dark shadow in Detroit in 1963.

David: The book opens with parallel action, and the first half is a symbol of exactly what Detroit thought it was. On November 9th, 1962, close to the Ford plant, there’s a building they called a ‘showroom’ — the Ford Rotunda. The word ‘showroom’ doesn’t really do it justice. The Ford Rotunda was an amusement park for cars. It was the size of a small stadium. It had displays called ‘The Hall of Science’ and ‘The City of Tomorrow.’ There was a track for test drives that was 3/4 of a mile long. That had reproductions of what Ford called ‘The Roads of the World.’ You could drive down a replica of the Apian Way or the Oregon Trail. For a stretch in the 50s the Rotunda was one of the top tourist draws in the country — Ford’s own PR people claimed it out-drew Yellowstone. That afternoon, workmen were up on the roof getting it ready for the holidays — a propane heater, some sealant vapor — and within the hour, the pride of the American auto industry was on fire.

David: The same afternoon, a few miles away, Commissioner Edwards sent over a hundred officers with fire axes into the Gotham Hotel. The Gotham, in Maraniss’s own words, was ‘the cultural and social epicenter of black Detroit.’ John White, a self-made businessman from Ohio, bought it in 1943, and for the next two decades it was where Black Detroit’s elite gathered, and where half of Black entertainment America stayed when they came through town — Ellington, Fitzgerald, Basie, Holiday. B.B. King got married there in room 609. Joe Louis, the Brown Bomber, one of the greatest fighters of all time — he grew up in Detroit and become one of its favorite sons. He was a breakfast regular. He’d go into the hotel’s Ebony Room, order five scrambled eggs with ketchup and a bone-in steak. And when Martin Luther King Jr. stayed there in 1959, the owner, John White, was moved enough to put a copy of King’s book in every guest room, right next to the Bible.

David: The Gotham was also — per the book — ‘long known to local cops and feds as the iron fortress of the numbers racket in Detroit.’ Edwards had been a little obsessed with it. The author says the raid, and the demolition that followed it, was the first step in wiping out Black neighborhoods in the name of ‘progress.’

David: That’s the shape of the whole book: five storylines — Motown, the auto industry, labor, civil rights, city hall — all kind of wrapped together and cut between.

David: David Maraniss is a Pulitzer Prize winner. He won in 1993 for his reporting on Bill Clinton, and was part of a Washington Post team that won again in 2008 — and he’s an associate editor at the paper today. He was born in Detroit. He said the spark for this book was watching a 2011 Chrysler Super Bowl ad, the ‘Imported from Detroit’ one with Eminem, and being surprised by how it choked him up.

David: It’s a book about eighteen months when Detroit had absolutely everything, and about watching a place build its own legend while it’s also losing its foundation. That’s ‘Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story,’ by David Maraniss.

Melissa: My final recommendation is ‘Children of the Wolf’ by Abby Geni. I loved this book, and I’m still not sure what genre to put on it. It’s going to sound like a thriller. It’s not NOT a thriller. Maybe literary suspense?

Melissa: Here’s the setup: Ulf Thorvaldsson is obsessed with his Viking heritage. Important note: the name Ulf means wolf. He’s a direct descendent of Erik the Red, and he hews as closely to 9th century life as one can, living in the 2020s. He and his children — his son Finn and his daughter Liv — live off the grid on a compound in rural Iowa. They’re homeschooled with lessons that consist of the Norse sagas called Eddas, reciting the nine noble virtues, violent swordplay, and archery. All lessons are conducted in Swedish. They have almost no interaction with anyone else, and they celebrate Norse holidays, including making blood sacrifices in the woods.

Melissa: Periodically, their father disappears for a day or two. When he returns, he locks himself in the basement where the children are forbidden to go. Sometimes there’s blood.

Melissa: One day, the FBI busts through the perimeter fence and arrests their father. He’s sentenced to a handful of lifetimes in prison.

Melissa: Then the story jumps ahead 20 years. Liv and Finn have relocated to a small town in Michigan and live quiet lives together as beekeepers. Until violence re-emerges in and upsets their carefully constructed peace. See? Thriller.

Melissa: Except that this book is two distinct experiences. There’s the page-turn-y, WHAT?! Tell more more about this Viking stuff! And then there are complex characters and an ending that lingered with me for days after I finished reading.

Melissa: The story is narrated by Liv, and her voice pulled me in immediately. She’s an adult, re-examining her childhood over and over again. Her mulling over the past has the patina of memory alongside the scalpel-sharp understanding of an adult.

Melissa: Childhood Liv was quiet, obedient, eager for approval from her domineering, volatile father. All grown-up, she’s prickly, anxious, and suffers from debilitating insomnia. She’s almost pathologically protective of her older brother Finn.

Melissa: The brother that protected her as a child has grown up into a silent, self-contained man who prefers the company of animals to people. His constant companion is a wolfhound. He communes with their bees. He befriends an injured raven who brings him shiny gifts as thanks.

Melissa: That either of these two grew up to have a conscience is astounding. And their feelings about their abusive, dangerous, larger-than-life father are complex. Their father saw himself as a wolf-warrior, infused with Viking spirit, driven my primal instincts, unconcerned with human morality.

Melissa: Liv says, God, how I loved him. I know it may be difficult for you to understand. He taught me to braid my hair like his: the plaiting taut, intricate, and overlapping. He took me through the forest in the spring, teaching me which mushrooms were edible… He showed me how to care for our lingonberry bush, providing it with mulch, harvesting the fruit, and making jam of the second bloom. He taught me to snare animals and bring down game with a bow and arrow, since providing meat for the menfolk was a vital part of a Viking woman’s duties.

Melissa: The first half of the book is all about their childhood on their Iowa compound, and it’s riveting. The second half celebrates the kinder wilderness in Michigan, and introduces a new character into their lives. Penny. She’s unnervingly kind, a vegetarian who raises but doesn’t eat animals. She keeps pigs, chickens, and bees simply to have them in her life. She and Liv begin a romance. Very tender, sweet — and cautious. Liv is understandably vigilant and keeps her past a secret. As we’re rooting for her to let her guard down, we learn that Penny also has a secret. A locked door in her house. Too reminiscent of their father’s locked basement. Is Penny merely very private? Or is history repeating?

Melissa: The suspense in this book is relentless. That’s a compliment. The stakes just keep going up and up. But so does the emotional engagement. There are two other facets of the novel I want to mention.

Melissa: First, the Viking lore. If 8-year-old you went through a period when you feverishly reading about the Vikings, you’re going to love this book.

Melissa: Second, the bees. Liv shares captivating facts about the lives of bees. They are clearly a stabilizing influence in her life. But the author Abby Geni is hiding an authorly trick in plain sight, and the import of the bees is significant.

Melissa: This book delves into the best and worst of humanity, loyalty, love, and fate. I finished it in a four-hour sprint on a Sunday morning with tears prickling my eyes on and off. That’s the highest compliment I can give. If you’ve enjoyed Liz Moore’s books ‘Long Bright River’ and ‘The God of the Woods,’ definitely pick this one up. It’s ‘Children of the Wolf’ by Abby Geni.

David: Those are five books we love, set in Michigan. You know how the best part of traveling is swapping stories with the people you meet along the way? That’s exactly what happens over on our Patreon. After every episode, a bunch of curious readers and travelers—just like you—gather to share what we missed and tell a few stories of their own. It’s a little like sitting around the fireplace at the world’s coziest travel lodge… except you don’t have to pack a bag. You can join us for just $3 a month, and you’ll be helping keep the journey going. We’d love to have you along for the adventure. Visit our show notes at strongsenseofplace.com for links and details.

David: Mel, where are we going for our next episode?

Melissa: By request of our patrons, we’re heading to South Korea.

David: Thanks for listening, and we’ll talk to you soon.

[cheerful music]

Top image courtesy of Victor Crespo/Shutterstock.