Travis Mulhauser's Blog

*this is one of my favorite promotional essays for the book--written for The Quivering Pen

On the day of my high school graduation I sat on the curb outside my mom’s house, chain-smoking cigarettes and waiting for the school to call and tell me if I could walk that night and get my diploma. I can’t remember what class, specifically, was in question, but I was facing the horrifying prospect of summer school until my mom finally walked out onto the front porch late that afternoon.

“That was them,” she said. “You graduated.”

As you may have guessed, I wasn’t a particularly good high school student. I don’t know what my GPA was or what I scored on the ACT. I do remember riding the end of a mild mushroom trip while I took Michigan’s preferred college entrance exam, which may or may not have helped my score—but either way, I wasn’t being recruited for my academics—or anything else. I didn’t care because I didn’t want to go to college.

I moved out of my parent’s house and into an apartment—it was all of three blocks away—and got a job. I worked as a camp counselor in the summer, then worked retail, then quit retail, ran out of money, and had to move home by Christmas. My mom said fine, as long as I took at least two classes at the community college. The community college had to take anybody that applied, literally, and because she taught there I would receive my books and tuition for free.

Thus, I became a Fighting Ferret of North Central Michigan College. Over the course of four years at NCMC I would earn my two-year degree—I was working too, lest you judge too harshly—and, more importantly, I would discover that I wanted to be a writer. That discovery came, in no small part, because of James McCullough.

James was a fantastic writing teacher, which we’ll get to, but we should probably start with his psychology course, and how terribly I bombed it. I showed up late, or not at all, and was disengaged when I was there. I received a D for my final grade and when we met to discuss my performance in the exit exam I sighed, lamenting the fact that I had not lived up to my potential.

“Yeah, you did,” he said.

“I got a D,” I said.

“That’s because you’re a D student,” he said. “If you could have gotten a C, you would have.”

“No,” I said. “You know what I mean. I could have tried harder.”

“No, you couldn’t have.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Obviously, I could have.”

“Look,” he said. “If you were capable of putting in more effort, you would have.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “I totally slacked off.”

“I don’t even know what that means,” he said.

“It means I didn’t try my hardest.”

“I believe that you think that’s true,” he said. “But you put everything you had into this class, trust me.”

In my own personal mythology, that exit conference is my Dagobah. It’s some real bubbling swamp, Luke and Yoda shit. I would wager James doesn’t remember that particular talk, certainly not in such detail, but I’ll never forget how flattened I was when I realized that he was absolutely right. We are what we do, and there is no bigger, more damaging lie than potential. Talk about the white whale.

I still remember my first day in his English 101 course, largely because it was my first day of college. I sat in the back along a window that faced the parking lot and completed my first assignment on a piece of notebook paper. I handed it in to James and when he handed it back the next class with a nice comment or two I got the feeling that he genuinely liked what I wrote. As the semester wore on, I started to realize that I genuinely liked to write.


I went on to take all of James’s writing courses, and when I cashed those out I badgered him into giving me an independent study. It was extra work for him, but he did it, and it changed my life forever. Over the course of that semester I decided I wanted to be a fiction writer, a decision I announced to James with great fanfare and blustery pride—think blaring trumpets and banners unfurling—and he did the right thing and told me to slow my roll.

James always made me want to write more, and better—the only real measure of a writing teacher’s value—but this was not achieved through effusive praise, or an excess of kind notes in the margins. James was sharp and he was honest and sometimes his critiques stung a little bit. Like the story that came back with a single line scrawled across the top. I don’t know what the hell this is, it said.

He was right, of course. It was a terrible story and I knew better than to argue on its behalf.

James never blew smoke when it came to the prospects of a professional writing life. From the outset he told me that it was next to impossible to earn your living writing fiction, and that it certainly wouldn’t happen any time soon—that I would have to work other jobs, have other careers, and spend most of my free time slaving away at stories that there was no guarantee anybody would ever read, yet alone pay me for.

“Which isn’t to mention if you want to get married,” he would say. “Or have kids, for Christ’s sake.”

Sometimes I’d stagger out of his office feeling like I’d just been on an episode of “Scared Straight”—but for writers. You think you really want this, kid? Well, here’s what it’s going to look like!

He read my portfolio from our independent study closely and with far more attention and care than the work merited. When we met to discuss it—it was countless pages of computer-paper, hole-punched and clipped in a blue folder—he told me that a good portion of it was bullshit.

“Which is to be expected,” he said. “They’re early drafts. But I will say that in almost everything you write there’s at least one sentence that makes me stop. That jumps out because it’s your own, and because it says something.”

I lived on that compliment for a long time. I still go back to it.

My last semester at NCMC I sent him a story I’d been working on. There were no more classes of his that I could take and I was about to graduate and move on to Central Michigan University—and more incredible writing teachers. He read the story and then called me on the phone.

I was living in the upstairs flat of a townhouse apartment and it was sometime in the spring. There was snow piled along the curb and it was a bright morning and I was in the living room looking out on the street when James told me that I had written a very good story.

“I mean, it’s like an actual story,” he said. “Its something you would read in a magazine, or a journal. I gave it to Richard Hruska, he agrees.”

Richard Hruska was another English teacher at the college. I’d never had him for a teacher, had never even spoken to him, which granted his opinion significant weight.

“Really?” I said.

I ended up entering the story in a contest, won the small cash prize, got my picture in the newspaper, and when I published my first book a few years later, a heavily revised version of that same story wound up as part of the collection.

But that’s not the important part. The important part is the jubilation I felt after I hung up the phone. The racing heart and the euphoria. The truth is, I yelled “fuck yes” and pounded my chest. I threw a pillow across the room, then spiked it violently to the floor—Gronkowski style. I called out my haters by name. I made a series of inappropriate gestures. I did my touchdown dance—one that would demand to be flagged for its excessive and unsportsmanlike nature.

It’s the same dance I do every time something big happens. Like when I got my fantastic agent, Susan Ramer, or landed Sweetgirl with Megan Lynch and Ecco/Harper Collins—a literal dream come true.

I celebrate those victories, every one of them. These days, the kids join in, too—we all run around screaming and beating our chests and I try not to swear too much. But I always do. I go on and on until my wife, my significantly better half, yells my name. Shouts, “Honey, the kids!”

I’ll slow down then, but still have a fist pump or two left in me. The thing is, James told me exactly how hard those moments would be to come by. Lucky for me, I believed every word he said.

Travis Mulhauser

*People have responded well to this one on the website, so let's start here!

After I wrote Sweetgirl I was fortunate to have some people read it and be interested enough to ask a few follow-up questions—the most common being how much of​ the story is autobiographical. The answer to that is simple: none. Sweetgirl is fiction and by definition made-up, but readers, a generally smart and persistent bunch, were curious about any seeds of truth sprinkled at the root of the invention. Like where, for instance, did the character Percy James come from?

The first part of my answer is that we grew up together in northern Michigan. She was the quiet girl who sat beside me in class, the one that drove a pickup and knew how to fish. She was pretty, but more comfortable in a hoodie and jeans then she ever would be in a dress. She was smart and she was tough and she knew how to throw a punch if it came to it. She had problems at home, but she didn’t complain or even realize that something as pointless as complaining was allowed.

She wasn’t just the girl that sat beside me in class, though. Percy is also a composite of my earliest girlfriends. She was the one I danced with during “Stairway to Heaven”—the last song of every late eighties Petoskey Middle School dance—and I can still remember the way she dropped her head to my shoulder when Robert Plant came to the part about the bustle in the hedgerow. In high school we went to the same field parties and one summer night we talked a little longer than usual. We stood by the bonfire drinking beer and watching smoke drift above the clearing—which was supposed to be a fairway until the developers pulled out and left nothing but a big slash through the jack pines. That was the night I fell in love with Percy, and for a little while she might have even loved me back.

I grew up with Percy, but there were parts of her I didn’t know at all. My parents had a difficult marriage and divorce, but they were well-to-do and educated. They had connections in the community, my dad was a well-known probate judge, and I always had the resources Percy lacked. I’m conscious of that space between us and the parts of her experience that I couldn’t understand directly were filled in, I think, by the archetypal family stories I was raised on.

My grandfather, my mother’s father, was a Polish immigrant with the rough equivalent of a fifth grade education. He and his family survived two years in Siberia as POWs of Joseph Stalin—a fact that all our “tribulations” were directly or implicitly compared to as children. I remember complaining of a headache as a teenager, only to have my mom remind me that prisoners in Siberia were sometimes executed if they’d grown too sick to work.

My grandfather was a teenager when he was prodded from bed by the sharp edge of a Russian bayonet. His home and everything the family owned was taken without explanation or apology and all his stories about the war and his imprisonment—the ones he was willing to tell—dealt with depravation and the harsh logistics of survival. And I think those stories are very much a part of Sweetgirl. I think a good bit of Percy’s resilience and fight, the way she deals with what she doesn’t have, what’s been taken from her, can be traced all the way back to the Kolodziejs of the Tarnopol Province in Poland.

But Percy is also her mother’s daughter. Carletta is from Charleston and calls Percy her “rebel daughter” because she “talks southern.” Percy claims she doesn’t have an accent, that she doesn’t “sound like anything,” but the truth is she’s got some Johnston County in her too.

I taught English for eight years at Johnston County Community College in Smithfield, North Carolina and I believe I got to know the people there about as well as I could for a commuter from Durham. I read my students’ papers, which were often personal in nature, met with them in my office, and bummed their cigarettes in the campus’s ever-diminishing designated smoking areas. (And this in the land of big tobacco.)

Because my wife is a lawyer I was often consulted for free legal advice. I played some pickup basketball with students between classes, listened to their band’s demos, and reacted with the appropriate horror when they told me about their family’s deportation, their year in the state penitentiary, or the time they were shot while delivering pizzas.

Once I had a teenage mother, we’ll call her Tabitha, who came to her scheduled conference while in labor. She had already checked into the hospital, but when they told her to take a short walk around the grounds she decided to come to our meeting instead.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m only at five centimeters.”

“I am worried,” I said. “I am very worried.”

“That’s your right,” she said. “But I busted my ass all semester for this A and I’m not going to lose it over an absence.”

“You are very clearly present,” I said. “And you have more than earned your A.”

“So that’s it?” she said.

“You’re giving birth,” I said. “In my book that calls for an abbreviated meeting.”

“Let me see that A,” she said.

I tilted my computer screen toward her, entered an A for the conference and highlighted it with my cursor. She smiled and hoisted herself up from the chair.

“Good enough,” she said.

“Thank God,” I said. “Can I help you to the car? Or get one of the nursing students? I think they’ve got some wheelchairs down there.”

“Naw,” she said. “I don’t need a wheelchair. I just need to get my ass to the hospital. I need to hurry up and have this baby.”

She thanked me and walked off, and looking back I think that’s exactly how Percy would have handled the same situation. Percy, like Tabitha, would stop at nothing to get her A, but there’s more to Percy’s Johnston County connection than that incident. There’s also the essays.

I read and commented on thousands of papers, some of which dealt with things like physical and sexual abuse, poverty, racism, violence, and drug addiction. There are scenes from those essays I will never forget for their horror and severity, and while Percy’s experience is entirely her own, while nothing in the novel comes directly from my students, the way they sought to order and make meaning of their experience was hugely influential on Percy’s character. I remain amazed at how my student’s writing so often sought to understand and bring light to devastating circumstances—how goddamn tough and hopeful those kids could be. I always told my students they reminded me of home and I think those two separate but similar places come together in Percy, particularly in her hard-earned optimism.

In the end, I guess Percy comes from several different places all at once. She’s from places you can pinpoint on a map, exact locations with latitudes and longitudes, places you could call in an air strike for if you wanted—but she’s also from other, murkier areas in the far-flung swamps of the subconscious. Like all of us, she isn’t any one thing. Complexities and gray areas are what make characters real and that’s why it’s always easier to lie and say that we made them up.