Michigan has its unique qualities, and author John Counts infuses them into his short stories in Bear County, Michigan.

Counts takes a page from William Faulkner’s writing by centering each story within a fictional county. Set in northern Michigan, the characters hunt, work blue-collar jobs, get hooked on drugs, coexist with the wildlife, spend time on the water, and go to a nudist resort on the lake.

Counts, who is based in Whitmore Lake and a journalist and editor for MLive, will read from his new collection at Literati Bookstore on Friday, February 28, at 6:30 pm.

The short stories in Bear County, Michigan study how life deals the characters tough hands and how they react. In the story “The Hermit,” Karl loses the love of his life:

Karl was broken and went into the woods and screamed at the treetops. He decided he would never be foolish enough to risk such humiliation. In two years, he saved enough from painting houses with his father to buy his own plot of land out at the edge of the national forest. He built his own cabin and learned how to be self-sufficient. Years passed. He meditated on his solitude. He never went in for his dad’s religion, but decided the silence of the woods was holy. He was inside Time itself in a way a life filled with mindless distractions would never allow. To become Time meant becoming the wind in the leaves, the rush of the river, the beat of his heart, each intake of breath.

It was an amicable situation: Karle didn’t bother the world and the world didn’t bother Karl.

This passage also demonstrates how this story collection meditates on the natural world and its influence on characters.

Each story brings individuals who are nevertheless making the most of their lot. Various forms of employment and pastimes occupy many of them. They work in jobs relatable and common in Michigan. For example, “While Debbie found the EZ Mart soul-sucking, it was one of the few full-time gigs in Brotherhood and therefore sought after by people like Krystal, who currently worked fifty hours per week at the Burger King in Bear River, a half hour away.” Yet the conundrums they find themselves confound them. Bear County Sherriff Duane Bobbins “had no reason to believe the situation would get violent or explore into the fiasco it did” in “The Standoff.” They evoke empathy but perhaps not a desire to trade places with them.

The state’s water and precipitation flow throughout the stories’ plots and even mirror life. After the standoff, Sheriff Bobbins reflects that “he thought of his life as water. Life came at you like rushing water and slipped away like rushing water.” The characters have to come to terms with the fluidity of their lives.

Counts and I talked about his new story collection, his relationship to writing as a journalist and musician, and his characters’ interest in connection with other people via email prior to his event at Literati.

Q: What drew you to writing short stories while also having a career in journalism? How does your background as a reporter and editor inform your stories?
A: I’ve always thought of myself as a writer who became a journalist. When I was 15, I dreamed of becoming a rebel poet like Arthur Rimbaud. I was in a punk rock band and didn’t care about the future. I studied English and creative writing in college and graduate school. And when the future came, I needed to earn a living. I loved stories and language in any form—songs, poems, movies, novels. But I also wanted to make a difference. So I went into journalism, a crucial truth-seeking service in our society. Journalism exposed me to a wealth of extraordinary people and events over the years, great material for fiction. I’ve interviewed billionaires and drug dealers. Murderers and priests. I feel it gives the creative worlds I explore depth and breadth.

Q: How does the process for writing short stories compare with your news writing and editing?
A: Much slower. Like Don DeLillo says, writing fiction is more like sculpting. The rough draft is just the clay. It might take years to shape the images, conversations, and story movements into what you’re trying to say. And even then, it might not feel finished. Another French poet, Paul Valery, said something I always think of: “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Journalism is really a different animal. In fiction we call it “prose,” in journalism it’s “copy.” It’s fast. It’s wild and thrilling. It’s typing the story in the courtroom or at the crime scene as everything is unraveling right before you, then getting the copy to your editor. The story shapes itself and you’re bearing witness, being the stenographer, bringing the story to the town square as fast as possible.

Q: I do not know how to describe this other than saying that your short stories feel like Michigan. They invoke the spirit, people, and places in the state, even though the setting is not an actual county in the state and the characters are fictional. Did you set out to write stories closely connected to Michigan? How did you go about imbuing your collection with characteristics of this state? What qualities do you think make these stories with their places and characters uniquely tied to Michigan?
A: Michigan is emblematic of a certain American narrative—boom, bust, and regeneration, boom, bust, and regeneration. Our character is shaped by that history, our economic situation, our beautiful woods and lakes, and our weather, just like the California sun shapes attitudes there. Right now, in the depths of a very cold winter, I can’t help but dream of opening day for the Tigers and opening day for trout season.

I see my creative work as “covering” Michigan in much the same way as my journalistic life. Maybe I’ll set a story someplace else someday, but I know Michigan. It’s small towns. Beautiful backcountry. Bleak cities. Rich people. Poor people. Everything.  There is every kind of scenario imaginable here that gets at the core of the human condition—joy, sadness, greed, pain, love, hate, violence. I sifted through police reports and sat in court for years and saw just about everything humanity has to offer—both awful and redemptive. I think working creatively in a contained universe helps keep things artistically manageable. I get dizzy when I think of how big the world is, all the billions of people living their own stories. So I put everything I know into Bear County. They are people I know and love, even the scoundrels. And Michigan breeds a very specific kind of hero/heroine and scoundrel.

Q: Let’s talk about the order of the stories, too. The first story in Bear County, Michigan is “Big Frank” and the last one is the longest and called “The Standoff.” A writing instructor once told me to put your favorite pieces at the beginning and end of a collection. Is that true of the stories in Bear County, Michigan for you and why?
A: There is an art to ordering the stories. I’ve been in punk bands for 30 years and have independently released numerous albums, and I find ordering stories was a similar process as listing tracks. You want your single around song three or four, so that’s where you get “The Women of Brotherhood” and “The Skull House.” But the first song should always be a short banger—and there’s “Big Frank.” I love all the characters in this book, but I have a special place in my heart for Frank. He is both very real and a fairy tale, emblematic of the mythical realism I was aiming for. I would read about desperate dudes breaking into vacation houses all the time in the police reports. But his story became a fairy tale in which the bear goes to three different places rather than a Goldilocks. And like a real bear, he is both comedy and tragedy contained in a big body. I thought his vignette was a great way to open the book because it’s brief but introduces the reader to this world of Bear County. Quickly sets the stage.

And “The Standoff,” which is really a novella, was so much bigger than the other stories, so by sheer weights and balances, it needed to come at the end. The anchor. So while I never really think of the stories in terms of favorites—“I love all you kids the same!"—it just made sense. I ordered them this way many years ago and I don’t think Megan Stielstra, my editor at Northwestern University Press, and I discussed it much in the intensive editing process that leads up to publication. Everything just felt right.

Q: Everything does not feel right to the characters, though. In the story, “Lucy and the Bear,” Lucy faces disappointment. The narrator reflects, “It didn’t seem fair. The bear just wanted a donut.” Throughout your collection, characters rail against unfair situations in their own ways. Yet they also pursue situations that make them feel more alive, like how Lucy seeks out the bear. Do you think the characters are trying to escape their circumstances, trying to fulfill their own desires, or something else?
A: I think it’s important to have characters act, not just sit around thinking. And sometimes those actions have good results—ah, resolution—or bad results—oh no! conflict. Characters in stories are no different than what we’re doing out here in raw, real life—their predicaments are just more condensed and compressed within an artifice. Storytelling generally focuses on one desire and chronicles the struggle of the character trying to achieve it. There have obviously been literary movements over the years to subvert and upend that kind of traditional storytelling, but it’s something I’m drawn to. I definitely think Lucy is in a bad spot and using the bear as a way to deal with her abusive father and drunk mother. It’s her portal of escape, just like the bridge is a portal of escape in “The Woman of Brotherhood.” I think I even use that phrase “portal of escape. Just like looking for skulls is for Lillie. Booze for Big Frank. Pills for Jessie Powers and Jimmy Blizzard. The solitude of the woods for Karl. We all have our portals of escape—some are just more dire than others.

Q: There is also the inescapable: aging. Many characters in these stories face aging and find that life changes in ways that they do not expect or want. They also grapple with their relationships and loved ones evolving. In “The Nudists,” Shelly and her mother discuss their respective father and husband: “‘Your father has been taking advantage of me for years,’ she said. ‘You don’t understand how suffocating that man is.’ Shelly did. She understood how suffocating and needy all men were, even her husband, who wasn’t nearly as bad as her father.” In some ways, the characters’ relationships spur their actions. What is it about these relationships that provokes their actions? Do you think the characters see something in their close friends and family to which they are reacting?
A: This is a very insightful question. I think the people we love sometimes make us act—or not act, in the case of Grace in “The Final Voyage”—in unpredictable ways. The Captain is facing an unbearable future and is seeking his own portal of escape. He’s a bit of mystery to Grace, but she still loves him and accepts the change he is seeking—and lets him go gentle into that good night. In “The Nudists,” the whole action is spurred by Margery Bowman’s decision to go nude—and this causes chaos in all her relationships. I think it’s true in life, too. The people we love impact our lives with the most severity. Sometimes it’s painful, but when we come together, there is the opportunity for connection, which is what we’re looking for in art and life.

Q: Earlier, you mentioned being in a punk rock band and releasing albums. You released an album based on this book. How did you decide to make an album about it? How would you describe the style of this album?
A: I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was about 15, which coincided with me getting my first guitar and starting my punk bands in the mid-'90s. I’ve always seen the two disciplines in the same light. Songs are little stories, and fiction writing uses the musicality of language as its primary instrument. I’m usually simultaneously working on new songs as I’m writing new stories. These were the songs that were in my universe while I was writing the stories. Writing is a solitary, quiet thing. I need that trance-like state in my life. But I also have a desire to be loud—to sing and yell and scream. So music has always been a way to blow off steam. It’s given me great joy over the years. The music I’ve played with my band Suburban Delinquents started off as old school hardcore, Minor Threat-style punk rock. It’s evolved a little over the years. I’m still not much of a singer, but I can scream, mostly, in key. I’ve also always loved the old-timey folk and country singers like Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams. To me, punk music is just folk music in a different era. The Bear County songs are more in that older vein. There is a genre called “folk punk,” and that gets close at what these tunes are all about. The album is for fun. A celebration of the creative process.  

Q: How was composing the songs on the album similar or different to writing the stories in your collection?  
A: The songs just kind of come together. If I’m working too hard on them and it’s not fun anymore, I generally turn my attention to something else and come back to them when it’s fun again. It’s pretty spontaneous and free-form. The writing process takes a little more planning and structure. It’s more laborious—but not in a bad way. I’m happiest when I’m working inside a sentence or a paragraph—it’s my portal of escape.

Q: What has been on your stack to read lately?  
A: I’m always reading, like, 10 books at once! Right now, a few of them are: The Call of the Wild by Jack London; Just Kids by Patti Smith; Middlemarch by George Elliot; and The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw. When I do finally finish a book, I blog about it here: Slow Reader.

Q: What are you writing next?
A: I’m working on a novel that takes place behind the scenes at a newspaper in a mid-sized Midwestern city. Write what you know!

Martha Stuit is a former reporter and current librarian. 

John Counts will discuss "Bear County, Michigan" on Friday, February 28 at 6:30 pm at Literati Bookstore, 124 East Washington Street, Ann Arbor.