“Travel brochures, postcards, and license plates from decades past touted Michigan as ‘The Water Winter Wonderland!’ And in Adam Schuitema’s stories, it is just that: a wonderland where men and boys collide with sand and snow, flora and fauna; where nature is not only somewhere to explore, but a place to hide. In his Michigan, deer frolic through urban areas, old men pilfer sand dunes, and the woods are the best place to hide your Playboys. From childhood to adulthood, these guys struggle to do the right thing—searching the woods, gazing out at the lake, sifting the ashen sands—for a clue as to how to become the men they need to be. Schuitema’s Freshwater Boys is the literary equivalent of an early spring leap into the still icy waters of the bay: shocking, refreshing, cleansing. The best way to rouse a spirit drowsy from an endless, arduous winter.” —Michael Zadoorian, The Leisure Seeker and The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit
Freshwater Boys is a collection of eleven short stories set in and around the Great Lakes of Michigan. The opening narratives feature adolescent or pre-adolescent boys struggling with their conceptions of manhood. They are sizing themselves up against masculine ideals, and filled with doubt and confusion regarding their own paths.
In “New Era, Michigan,” Darryl Pickle tries to make sense of an old hermit whose life seems to have left no mark. The three boys in “Sand Thieves” struggle to coexist with their Great-Uncle Lucien, whom they seem to despise, though he’s the only male role model in their lives. And Zach Vanderlaan in “Restraint,” who—after the death of his father—lives alone with his mother in a university’s married housing complex.
But the later stories depict grown men who find that these same struggles never go away. Even now, they feel like they are failing to reach some masculine ideal. The narrator in “Camouflage Fall” feels out of place among the hunters and fathers as they search for a missing child. Evan Rumishek in “The Lake Effect” fights through a blizzard to prove his worth to his own wife. And in the title story, David DeHaan grieves not only his drowned son but also his own failure as a father.
The landscapes and lakescapes serve as recurring characters in the book. The boys and men wander forests—sometimes finding tranquility, sometimes finding tragedy. They climb and descend dunes. And often, they encounter the Big Lake: Lake Michigan. The idea of a Third Coast figures prominently in the book, the lake and its horizon serving as a kind of world’s end, where things come to life or pass away.
The earliest story in the collection is “The Lake Effect.” The short-shorts in the book followed soon after. But it wasn’t until I entered graduate school and wrote “Sand Thieves” that I discovered the type of story I truly wanted to write, and thus, the type of collection I wanted to write. That story combined the two things I became most interested in as a fiction writer: the freshwater surroundings of my native Michigan, and the behaviors of adolescent and pre-adolescent boys. The title Freshwater Boys obviously reflects these two themes.
Though the narratives themselves—the conflicts—are all fictionalized, most of the settings are true to life. Three of the stories take place in the town of New Era, and there’s mention of a little private lake called Lake Tahoe, both of which are real. I spent most summer weekends at my grandparents’ cottage on this lake, and it remains in our family. One autumn in graduate school I spent a lot of time up there alone, and within a couple of months wrote both “New Era, Michigan” and “Camouflage Fall.”
Other lakeshore settings, including Beaver Island (“After the Recessions”), Saugatuck (“Freshwater Boys”), and South Haven (“Restraint: A Confession”) are places that I love and that I took a great deal of time trying to figure out how to capture these lush landscapes in the black and white of the printed page.
We Michiganders have a tremendous amount of pride when it comes to the Great Lakes, and often resent the term “lakes,” as it seems to diminish their scale. When speaking with someone unfamiliar with them, we always want to draw comparisons to oceans and seas, and take seriously this idea of “a third coast.” I certainly tried to convey this in these stories. I love how the Melville quote, which I use as an epigraph, reinforces this.
The book took about five years to write, though it was a year or two before I realized the individual stories were shaping up into something cohesive. It’s always been important to me to write a collection where the stories play off each other, and where—as strong as they might read individually—they gain strength from the stories that surround them.
“A wonderful, poignant collection of stories about men struggling to understand manhood.”
“ . . . the stories contain numerous moments of memorable, tension-filled sensual descriptions . . .”
Adam Schuitema is the author of the short-story collection Freshwater Boys. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous magazines, including Glimmer Train, North American Review, Indiana Review, TriQuarterly, Black Warrior Review, and Crazyhorse. Adam earned his MFA and Ph.D. from Western Michigan University. He is an assistant professor of English at Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he lives with his wife and daughter.
Western Michigan University - MFA
Western Michigan - Ph.D.