Meet the Master of the Northern Michigan Beach Read

Wade Rouse — aka Viola Shipman

By Emily Tyra | July 3, 2021

How’s this for a pure northern Michigan experience: Pick a sugar-sand spot on one of the area’s big water beaches and settle in with a summer read that’s actually set on our shores of Glen Arbor. Viola Shipman — pen name of bestselling writer Wade Rouse — has a new novel following the lives of four women who met at a fictional summer camp in Glen Arbor in the ’80s. "The Clover Girls," part of a multi-book deal with HarperCollins/Graydon House, came out May 18, but it’s just one in a line of novels Rouse has set in northern Michigan’s beach towns.

Rouse, who pens his heartfelt fiction under his grandmother’s name, didn’t begin as an author until age 40, but he quickly found acclaim. He is the noted humorist of four memoirs, including “It’s All Relative,” a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Awards in Humor (Tina Fey and Betty White beat him out!). 

His books have sold over a million copies worldwide, have been selected as Must-Reads by NBC’s Today show, and featured in USA Today, The Washington Post, and on Chelsea Lately. But as far flung as his fandom is now (he’s especially beloved in Germany), Rouse — who lives in Saugatuck —never strays from his setting of Michigan resort towns.

“I work to make the coast of Michigan a living, breathing character all its own in all of my novels,” he explains. “The resort town is central to the storyline and often as big of a character as my protagonists.” Here’s more from Rouse on why that’s resonating, even with readers who have never laid eyes on the Mitten:

Northern Express: “The Summer Cottage” follows a woman in the wake of her divorce, converting her parents’ aging lakeside Saugatuck home into a B&B. “The Recipe Box” follows a New York chef who returns to her family’s multi-generational orchard in Suttons Bay. Is it true one of your readers asked if these places could really be so quaint and beautiful?
Rouse: Yes, a funny email prompted me to reply to her … with photo evidence. She asked, is the water in Michigan really that blue, are the towns really that cute? She, of course, wants to plan a vacation here now. People in Michigan love that the novels are set in our coastal towns, but now I see those hooks — and how the beauty here resonates in people’s souls — reaching all over America. I want to do for the Up North/Great Lakes area of the country I love and call home what some of my favorite authors — Elin Hilderbrand, Nancy Thayer and Dot Frank — have done for Nantucket and Lowcountry South Carolina.

Express: Any specific spots in Glen Arbor that will stand out in “The Clover Girls”?
Rouse: I kind of made up where the summer camp is; it’s nestled up there by the dunes. Michigan readers especially will connect the dots. But there are some very specific snippets: restaurants people will notice, there is a scene at the end of the book in Leland, and the Sleeping Bear Dunes, Cherry Republic as well as Cottage Book Shop — one of the quaintest indie bookstores in the world, housed in a historic log cabin.

Express: Is that your favorite Leelanau book store?
Rouse: Seriously, I love all of them! Michigan is blessed when it comes to having some of the nation’s best independent bookstores, from Saturn Booksellers in Gaylord to McLean & Eakin in Petoskey. In Leelanau … Bay Books, Cottage Books, Leelanau Books … I go to all of them.

Express: We are calling this a beach read, but to be fair, “The Clover Girls” themes run a little deeper …
Rouse: “The Clover Girls” centers on forgiveness, not only of others but also ourselves, and about how our friends guide us and help us rediscover who we were and who we still can be. A lot of love stories have been written, but I wanted to write a love story about friendship.

Express: And setting it at a summer camp in Glen Arbor helps deliver that tale?
Rouse: It’s about four very different girls who become best friends at summer camp in the 1980s until life and adulthood — as it too often does — makes them lose touch. I don’t know if you have gone to camp. I did. Camp brings back such visceral memories, where I was horrified to go in the beginning, but then finding people like myself, who supported me and understood me. If there is anything we learned in this last year, it’s how much we need connection. There are those who know more about us than anyone else and keeping those friendships is vitally important.

Express: In addition to Leelanau nostalgia, readers will get a nice blast of ’80s too?
Rouse: Absolutely. Wham!, feathered hair, friendship pins, Drakkar Noir, high-waisted jeans, which sadly are back! I love the ’80s and, it’s hilarious, I work with many young people at the publishing house, and they were talking about mix tapes, so I shared some music, and they are into it!

Express: Writer’s Digest called you “The No. 2 Writer, Dead or Alive, We’d Like to Have Drinks With,” sandwiched between Ernest Hemingway and Hunter Thompson …
Rouse: I am not 100 percent sure it’s a compliment?! [laughs] It’s fascinating to watch the new Ken Burns documentary about Hemingway on PBS. I love and hate him — he almost became a stereotype of himself at the end — but he earned his bravado. I laugh to think how he’d do today, interfacing with humans on book tours.

Express: Tell us more about your pen name?
Rouse: I chose my grandmother’s name, Viola Shipman, as a pen name for my fiction as a thank you to her. She — along with all of my grandparents — were working poor, but they made incredible sacrifices. My mom was the first to go to college and that really changed my family’s life. I want characters like my grandmother front and center in my books — good, kind, hardworking women, doing their best but whose voices are often overlooked.

Express: And your next novel? Where will it be set?
Rouse: “The Secret of Snow” comes out on October 26. A meteorologist in Palm Springs has an on-air breakdown and is replaced by a former friend of hers. She returns home to Traverse City in the middle of winter, where she lost a sister when she was young. It shows the quirk of some other little Leelanau towns. It’s very funny and very sad. I love it. People ask what’s your favorite of your books, and it’s usually the one you just wrote.

To learn more about Wade Rouse and his novels — and keep track of his upcoming appearances — check out www.violashipman.com.

***Author photo courtesy of Kim Schneider