The Book, Art, and Spiritual Center of Hillsdale has a small display of local authors’ books, which include a work on the story behind Tarzan, poetry from the heart, and a novel based on old friends.
The three-book display sits on top of the counter of Richard Wunsch’s store. In the collection are books from Hillsdale, Osseo, and Montgomery, Michigan writers.
“I think they’re all pretty good books. Local writers have always been a matter of interest to me and to others. I think they deserve to be highlighted,” Wunsch said. “There’s a lot of local talent in the area of writing. It’s just another way of serving the community.”
The featured books include Hillsdale resident Charles “Chopper” Ferguson’s first book of the “Roach Stone” series, “A Look Back to the Present,” and Osseo resident Bobbi Lee Byrd’s collection of poems called “Giving Voice to Loss: A Journey to Healing.” The third writer is Montgomery resident Michael Hatt, who wrote the book “Tarzan Slept Here: Edgar Rice Burroughs and the Coldwater Connection.”
Ferguson’s fictional novel details a community in the imaginary town of Ransom on the Mountain, North Carolina. Inspired by events in his own life and the people he has met throughout the United States and Mexico, Ferguson creates a place aimed to educate and help troubled children.
Grady Matthews “Roach” Stone is chosen by a man named Murray Williams, based on Ferguson’s real-life mentor Bill Murray, to develop a community for students who need a second chance. The town includes every job any child would want to do from working on a dairy farm to running a television show or writing for a newspaper, which are all jobs Ferguson himself has had.
“Nothing is easy there,” Ferguson said. “It’s the best private school in the country, but this classroom is 52 square miles. The kids leave and go onto much better things.”
The story tells of Stone’s process in developing the community and his willingness to do everything to protect it.
Inspired by his childhood upbringing by his mom, the first single foster mother in Michigan, according to Ferguson, he carried on her legacy by exploring avenues of how to help children. While living in Tennessee, he reached out to troubled young adults, providing them housing and work until they found their own jobs.
“I’ve worked with a lot of kids and done pretty well with them, but I always knew there’s so much more that could be done with them,” Ferguson said. “I’m so disappointed in protective services. I think our education system is really messed up. There’s a solution. My total belief is we need a total of six or eight places like this one.”
While the BASCH sells his book, Ferguson said he is looking to expand his audience through commercials, and soon, he will sell an e-book and audio version.
Ferguson said readers and critics have complimented him on how real Ransom on the Mountain seems. Some have even expressed their wish to live in the fictional town.
Cimmeron Summey, a volunteer at BASCH, said, although he has fully read only about five books in the past 10 years, he read Ferguson’s book in one night.
“If that place was real, I would pack up and leave. It gives you a hope in this world that there’s something like that. It makes you feel like you want to be a part of this,” Summey said. “It’s like when you go away for a while and then come home, it’s that feeling. I’m home.”
This close relationship and connection with the reader hat Byrd does in her book of poetry .
She published “Giving Voice to Loss” after several patients with whom she worked as a volunteer with Hospice convinced her she should share them with a greater audience. Most of the poetry is inspired by the grief and loss she has experienced in her own life.
“I have found they resonate with people I have been working with,” Byrd said.
Byrd said she hopes her words surrounding emotions she felt while her grandmothers had Alzheimer’s disease and after her husband of 30 years died eight years ago will provide comfort to others.
“I hope that they can see it’s a real journey: getting through grief and getting to recovery,” Byrd said. “There’s never really a point where you’re not aware of the loss. You learn to live with the pain. It’s not something that happens overnight, but it takes a while. It is possible to recover.”
The participants of a group with which she works at the Hillsdale County Medical Care Facility expressed their appreciation of the poetry to her.
Much of her work is spiritual, according to Byrd, and at times, she feels they are divinely influenced.
“Every day, I try to be an instrument of peace,” Byrd said. “I don’t always know when it’s coming. Once in awhile, I wake up, and they just come to me. I don’t ever touch those because I know it didn’t come from me.”
As for her own healing, Byrd, who has written poetry since she was 11 years old, uses it for therapeutic means.
“In the process of working through my grief, poetry was a helpful tool for me to express my feelings and to get my head and my heart around it,” Byrd said.
Hatt’s “Tarzan Slept Here” tells the story of the 20 years Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, vacationed in Coldwater, Michigan.
As Hatt discovered, the parents of Burroughs’ wife owned a farmhouse in the community. Her sister’s husband also owned the J.B. Branch & Co. department store, which is now North Woods Coffee Co. Burroughs additionally frequented Morrison Lake located near Coldwater.
“He wrote one of his stories while staying in the farmhouse,” Hatt said. “I also discovered that in 1916, while he was camping on the northwest shore of Morrison Lake, he wrote one of his Tarzan stories while sitting in his camping tent looking at the serene setting of Morrison Lake.”
Hatt grew up collecting and reading Burroughs’ fictional adventures, and when a Coldwater Post Office coworker informed him Burroughs had stayed in town while living, Hatt became intrigued.
Learning this in the ’90s, Hatt kept the information in mind until he met a writer who published a book on Burroughs. The man encouraged Hatt to pursue the idea.
Compiling all he could find in research, notes, and interviews, Hatt gathered enough information to write a book exclusively on Burroughs’ time in Coldwater.
According to Hatt, other biographers have not included much on his experience in Michigan.
“They just jumped over it like it didn’t even exist. They had forgotten part of his life,” Hatt said. “He spent a considerable time here. It was his secret hideaway from Chicago. He liked Coldwater. Let’s remember it.”
Hatt is now preparing to publish a book in early 2016 on his time in the Coast Guard during the ’60s near the Arctic Circle called “Ice Breaking Aboard the West Wind.”
For Hatt, the most rewarding part of his current book is being able to share with his community a portion of the town’s history.
“It’s my favorite subject to talk about. I try to enthuse people about it,” Hatt said. “Everybody in the world, if you say ‘Tarzan,’ they know who you’re talking about. How many authors have that kind of notoriety?”
BASCH’s showcase may provide recognition for the works of these authors.
“People forget in their communities that these people exist,” Summey said, “that they have people in their own areas that do these things.”
