Litzenburger, Liesel

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Litzenburger, Liesel

Career
Sidelights
Selected Writings
Sources

Author

B orn c. 1967, in Petoskey, MI; married Hank.

Education: Earned B.A. from the University of Michigan; Western Michigan University, M.F.A., 1993.

Addresses: Home—Grand Rapids, MI. Office—c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

Career

E ditor of trivia book series; creative-writing instructor at various colleges, including Saginaw Valley State University, University of Michigan, In-terlochen Arts Academy, St. Mary’s College, and New College (Sarasota, FL); assistant professor of creative writing, Central Michigan University, 2001—; published first novel, Now You Love Me, 2001; book reviewer for the Chicago Tribune, Detroit Free Press, and other publications.

Sidelights

L iesel Litzenburger’s debut novel was barely noticed in the mainstream press, but Now You Love Me did manage to land her a deal with Random House. Her second book, The Widower, earned generally positive reviews upon its release in 2006 and even prompted a re-issue of her first title. “Everything that’s happened has been a pleasant surprise,” the college writing professor said in an interview with Marta Salij for the Detroit Free Press.

Born in Petoskey, Michigan, Litzenburger is a sixth-generation Michiganian and grew up in the nearby summer resort community of Harbor Springs—a town largely deserted in the winter months save for its old-timer families, hers among them. She was an avid reader as a child, and well aware of a famous literary connection in her family: Twentieth century American writer Ernest Hemingway spent childhood summers near Harbor Springs, and Litzenburger’s grandmother was a close friend of Hemingway’s sister, who still lived in the original Walloon Lake summer home belonging to the Hemingway family. Litzenburger’s own family’s legacy included an appreciation for a narrative thread, as she wrote in a biography that appeared on her official Web page: She noted that she hailed from “a long line of storytellers; I’m just the first one to get the sentences down on the page.”

Litzenburger’s family briefly decamped from northern Michigan to Fort Worth, Texas, but later returned to the Walloon Lake area. In the early 1980s, when she was in high school, she visited Brazil as an exchange student—an experience eerily fore-shadowed in the first piece of fiction she ever wrote back when she was eight or nine years old. The story, as she recalled on her Web site, “involves a kidnapping and espionage plot in Brazil. Ironically, when I ended up in Brazil years later, I found myself living in a town that looked a lot like the one I had invented in that childhood novel. I think the line between writing and life can sometimes be pleasantly blurred.”

At the University of Michigan, Litzenburger studied English, and after earning her undergraduate degree went to work as an editor for a trivia-book series. She returned to school for a graduate degree in writing at Western Michigan University, which she earned in 1993, and then held a variety of college teaching jobs while churning out short stories for literary journals and book reviews for the Chicago Tribune and Detroit Free Press, among other publications. By 2001 she had landed a job at Central Michigan University as an assistant professor of creative writing, and stints in writers’ workshops at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo helped her bring her first novel, Now You Love Me, to completion. The 2001 debut was published by Carnegie-Mellon University Press and sold a respectable number of copies, despite a lack of marketing budget common to such small academic publishing houses. The title was, however, discovered by a well-known editor at Random House named Shaye Areheart, who signed Litzenburger and helped bring her next work, The Widower, to fruition in 2006.

This time, Litzenburger’s book benefited from a modest publicity campaign that resulted in good reviews from several sources, including the New York Times. Critics liked her tale of a lonely orchard owner in northern Michigan who is nursed back to health by his longtime employee after the death of his wife. The story takes place in a rural Upper Peninsula community where nearly everyone knows one another—and one another’s family secrets— and centers on Swan Robey, age 37, despondent after an auto accident on an icy road has killed his wife and resulted in injuries that confine him to bed. His apple-harvesting associate is Grace Black-water, who has been secretly in love with him for some time. The plot moves forward with the return of her uncle, Joseph Geewa, to town after two decades in prison for a crime in which the weapon remains undiscovered. That mystery, along with the discovery of an abandoned infant in Robey’s orchard, propels the story toward its conclusion and unites this trio of lonely characters.

A few reviewers felt that Litzenburger had wrapped up The Widower a bit too tidily, such as New York Times Book Review critic Julia Scheeres, but commended her style. “Although Litzenburger’s plot may be troublesome, her prose often soars,” Scheeres asserted. “When a character steps into the frigid winter night, her lungs ‘feel like they’ve been swabbed out with rubbing alcohol.’ A woman met in a bar smells of ‘dried pine needles and gasoline, like something about to catch fire.’ A blackbird swoops past a window ‘like a thrown shoe.’” It was a sentiment echoed, first in Booklist by Carol Hag-gas, who wrote that “despite a surfeit of too neat coincidences, Litzenburger’s elegiac debut novel abounds with searching lyricism,” and then in Publishers Weekly, whose reviewer granted that though the novel “leans heavily on implausible encounters, Litzenburger’s prose lends luster and mystery to an otherwise conventional story.” A writer for the newspaper of Litzenburger’s new hometown, Mary Ann Sabo in the Grand Rapids Press, called the book “a beautiful meditation on fate and love.” Sabo commended “one particularly lovely chapter” in which Litzenburger “shifts the narration duties from Swan to Grace to Ray and then back, as effortlessly as a relay team hands its baton from one runner to the next. She takes tremendous care with words and ideas, layering them effortlessly to create these beautiful, wounded souls.”

Thanks to the success of The Widower, Litzenburger’s first novel was reissued several months later. This time, Now You Love Me scored several prominent reviews, including a recommendation from Entertainment Weekly. The plot centered on nine-year-old Annie, who finds herself on an odd journey with her unbalanced mother and little brother in a car stolen out of their neighbor’s driveway. Using a single narrative perspective—that of a preternaturally wise Annie—“lends both innocence and distance to the drama,” declared Entertainment Weekly writer Jennifer Armstrong. It also allowed Litzenburger to present Paige, Annie’s unconventional mother, in a more appealing way. “She’s lovable,” Litzenburger explained to Salij in the interview for the Detroit Free Press about the novel. “Sure, she’s never going to win Mother of the Year, but she’s a free spirit, and I think a lot of women want to be her.”