This month on Michigan Writers on the Air, Aaron Stander will be having a conversation with clinical psychologist Jennifer Sowle about her historical novel set at the Traverse City State Hospital, Admissions.
Finding Truth in Fiction
GRAND TRAVERSE INSIDER Published: Tuesday, December 14, 2010
By KATIE BEDARD-GOYTOWSKI Contributing Writer
Local author, Dr. Jennifer Sowle, relaxes in her Midtown office off Lake Street, near the Boardman River. Sowle’s first published work of fiction, “Admissions,” has become a local bestseller. Photo by Katie Bedard-Goytowski
‘Admissions’ offers story of redemption and healing
It’s her first novel, and it’s already a bestseller.
Dr. Jennifer Sowle burst onto the local writing scene this summer with her first work of published fiction, “Admissions,” a fast-paced, emotional journey of grief, loss, friendship, acceptance and growth.
“Admissions” begins in 1968 when Luanne Kilpi is admitted to the Traverse City State Hospital for reportedly attempting suicide after her young son dies. The ensuing pages follow Luanne over the next year as she works to overcome grief and adversity, following the protagonist and her new friends as they bond together to face their demons of loss, addiction and a variety of other mental issues.
While the novel is a work of fiction, there are bits of truth in it as well, according to Sowle.
“The novel stems (partly) from my fascination with the old State Hospital,” Sowle said.
Her research at the State Archives in Lansing, where copies of the hospital’s old newsletter, “The Observer” are held, gave Sowle factual events from which to build her story. In addition, her experiences as a psychologist helped her to build the characters that surround Luanne.
“They are real in the sense that they come from my clinical and life experiences … they are composites of clients I have seen over the years,” she said.
“As a psychologist, I have the privilege of being invited into people's lives in a very deep and meaningful way. My characters are undoubtedly a compilation of clients I have worked with in the last 20-plus years. I do believe my work has given me insight into how people react and cope.”
Dr. Sowle’s own life is present in the novel as well.
“They say one's first novel is autobiographical to some extent, and I'm no exception,” she said. “I've experienced loss early in my life, so the novel has, in some ways, been a catharsis for me. I understand what Luanne (my main character) is going through even though I don't know firsthand what it's like to be in a mental hospital.”
Ideal setting
The State Hospital was a perfect location to explore the experiences of loss and grief for Sowle.
“I'm a lifelong fiction reader, starting with Nancy Drew when I was a kid,” Sowle said. “I've always been drawn to mysterious and scary stories, both books and movies. The State Hospital is quite a contradiction – its beautiful architecture and luxurious grounds could have been a grand castle in Europe somewhere, but behind the meshed windows, stories of heartache and human misery played out.
“People are both intrigued and frightened by mental hospitals and mental illness in general.”
Plus, “psychiatry and psychology have a rather checkered history,” she said. “As a psychologist, I want to understand where we came from in terms of treatment of the mentally ill.”
There’s a deeper meaning behind the book, too.
“The novel really isn't about mental illness; it's about overcoming adversity, it's a story of redemption and healing,” Sowle said. “It's an old theme, but one that never loses its steam because we are all interested in how people get through life's challenges and tragedies.”
Dr. Sowle has written multiple professional articles as a psychologist and two other non-fiction books for children and parents on the subjects of sex and sexual abuse. Her next novel is currently in the works.
“I am currently working on a novel that opens in 1990 with an attempted suicide,” she said. “The story leads us back to the 1960s when the lead character is a child growing up in a small town and her best friend goes missing.”
In the meantime, “Admissions” has been on the UpNorth bestseller list several times since its release this past summer, and resides on that list now.
Sowle will be attending two local book signings in the area, both at Cuppa Joe’s in Building 50 at the old State Hospital on Saturday, Dec. 11 from 6-9 p.m. and at Horizon Books on Saturday, Dec. 18 from 4-6 p.m. For details, visit www.jenniferjsowle.com.
"Mary in the Morning" 106.7 FM
Interview 7/26/2010 10 MINUTES
3 segments (click in order)
| |
"Points North" IPR Interlochen Public Radio
Book Review and Reading by author. Click on admissions-review.mp3 just below "Listen" button.
Admissions: Novel probes a mental hospital’s past
Admissions by Jennifer Sowle
Arbutus Press, 19.95
By Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli
There is something about the Old Traverse City State Hospital —
“mental hospital” it was called back when it functioned as a home for
the mentally ill, or home to the dysfunctional, or home to people
warehoused to make life more convenient for their relatives, more
convenient for abusive husbands, even business partners wanting a too
inquisitive partner quieted. Certainly more convenient for society.
In Jennifer Sowle’s new novel, “Admissions”, (Arbutus Press, $19.95),
the old state hospital becomes the place where Luanne Kilpi, a sad
woman who has lost a child, is taken after a suicide attempt. It is
the place of monumental cruelty and callousness and then kindness and
healing. Building 50, very different today, rises like a kind of
ghost, to haunt the imaginations of all of us who have ever walked the
hospital grounds and wondered as we shivered: Could it have been me
trapped behind those walls?
Sowle, a practicing clinical psychologist in Traverse City, when asked
about her interest in the hospital as the setting for her novel, said,
“Ever since I was a teenager and vacationed in TC, I’ve been
fascinated with the State Hospital. Perhaps because I’ve always been
interested in what makes people tick and conversely, how they come
unwound.”
THE OBSERVER
While doing research for the book Sowle found “there is surprisingly
little research of the type I’m interested in… Thank god the
librarians here hooked me up with the State Archives in Lansing where
I had access to old copies of the Observer, the hospital newspaper.”
When she first came to Traverse City, Sowle said, “I did some
consulting with mental health and several of my patients had been in
the state hospital. They told me first-hand stories. The rest were
second or third hand stories… Luckily this is fiction. I’m allowed to
use my imagination.”
In the novel, Luanne Kilpi is delivered to the hospital by her husband
who is dealing with his own grief and doesn’t know how to help his
wife through her deep and continuous sorrow. A weak man, the hospital
seemed his salvation. He would leave Luanne and she would be cured of
feelings of guilt and pain. It was a favor he was doing her, wasn’t
it? His own misery and self-pity led him to sideline Luanne from his
life. He leaves her in the state hospital for over a year. Leaves her
to carry the weight of their dead child alone. Life goes on for him
while Luanne is trapped in that horrible moment when their little boy
died.
BLACK HOLE
Moving from hall to hall—depending on her healing, Luanne is at first
confined to a dark hole where the insubordinate are placed. Weeks of
cold cement and darkness. Eventually she lands in Hall 5 of Building
50 where she meets five other women confined with her. All the women
have varying reasons for being in a mental hospital. Most of the
reasons have little to do with mental illness and more with life
experience. It seems that being brutalized was reason enough to lock
up a woman, being rejected, being anorexic. Heidi, Isabel, Beth,
Autumn and Estee. They become Luanne’s friends. The friendships make
life behind hospital walls livable, make the days pass, fill days with
caring and storytelling, with the kind of physical and mental
protection only friends provide.
The story of these five women isn’t, ultimately, a dark one. Of course
someone has to die, her death figuring large in the lives of these
confined women.
“I just keep thinking about her,” Autumn says after the anorexic woman
dies. “Trying to imagine what happened.”
Luanne can’t control her lips. They quiver. “You know,” she says,
“something passes between people who suffer together. It forms a
bond, like a sister.”
Of course someone has to regress. Of course someone has to heal and
someone has to learn lessons taught only through the classroom of life
at its hardest.
HUMAN EXPERIENCE
“I don’t really see “Admissions” as a book about mental illness,”
Sowle says. “As strange as that may sound. I see it as a novel about
the human experience. The core story is based on my own losses early
in my life and, in that sense, it is a bit of a catharsis.”
Sowle has mined the fear we all feel when looking up at the abandoned
buildings of an institution. I don’t know what that fear is. I know
mine goes back to a visit I made with a friend, to the Northville
State Hospital. We were 16, my friend and I. Her grandmother was
confined to Northville because she was old, because no one wanted the
burden of her in their homes, because she was sick. We found her in a
bed left out in a crowded hallway. The woman cried when her
granddaughter woke her with a touch to the cheek. On the way out a
mad woman lunged at a heavy screen over a window and screamed at us.
That’s what I remember when walking the grounds of the state hospital
in Traverse City. I remember sadness, and I remember fear.
I always thought the fear we felt near prisons or mental hospitals was
a fear of losing everything, of being locked away, fear of the horrors
we make up and the horrors we learn of. But now, after reading
“Admissions”, I think the fear comes from emotions out of control,
exposing something we all carry with us.
OTHER BOOKS
For me, any background other than the one Sowle chose would have
lessened my interest in the story. It is almost a relief to have
those visions of brick walls—building after building; the memory of
heavily screened windows; of empty, stark porches softened just a
little bit by a very human story of women who save themselves and each
other as they share the worst a society can heap on them.
Because the hospital is now being carefully restored by the Minervini
Group who are bringing the buildings new life and wiping away much of
the horror, it is important to gather the history of the place while
we can. There are videos on YouTube—some cheesy, some poignant.
There are wonderful books of photographs such as Heidi Johnson’s
“Angels in the Architecture” and Geoffrey Vail Brown’s “Beauty in
Ruin -- The Asylum Nudes.” “Beauty in Therapy: Memories of the
Traverse City State Hospital” by Kristen M. Hains captures the
memories of a man who worked at the hospital for many years, while
“Traverse City State Hospital” by Chris Miller tells the story of the
old buildings.
|
Admissions Review
by David Marshall
for Cottage Books, Glen Arbor, MI
Jennifer Sowle’s Admissions (Arbutus Press. $19.95) is,
quite simply, a good read: good characters, good plot, good
story-telling. It’s also more: set in the dreary, depressing
(sometimes horrifying) world of Traverse City State Hospital,
Sowle opens us to a dark side of “health care” in the previous
generation, a side we would prefer to believe didn’t exist.
Alas, it did. The main character, Luanne, admitted (hence the title)
by her husband, is dropped into the dehumanizing hospital,
abandoned, grief-stricken and (in all likelihood) a little crazy.
But so is the world in which she finds herself. Our interest is
heightened by the local setting and local history, which Sowle
weaves through the book in delightfully artistic ways. But her
story stands as a psalm to the resilient hopefulness of the
human spirit. |
|
|
|
