An interview with novelist Sharon Dilworth about her new campus Novel of Upper Peninsula Intrigue, To Be Marquette.
By Jennifer Bannan
Molly, the protagonist of Sharon Dilworth’s new novel To Be Marquette, is enthralled right off with Professor Robinson’s band of followers, “the Crusoes.” Between bonfires and sit-ins to protest the communications lines being installed for nuclear submarines, these students at Northern Michigan University seem to have life figured out. And frequently Molly finds herself an outsider, sure that ominous powers are at work.
Grounded in place like so much of Sharon Dilworth’s fiction, Northern Michigan’s beauty and foreboding compete with the dramas unfolding around Molly, with an urgency of nature that makes this looking-back novel a novel for today. Pittsburgh author Jen Bannan interviewed Sharon Dilworth for Belt.
JB: This novel differs from other campus novels in that this is no Ivy League-type of school. The Crusoes that become fascinating to Molly are more working class, more rust belt than those who make up the campus novels we might be used to. Pregnancies or money problems might end or at least interrupt a college career. What else makes this a different population?
SD: The Crusoes are Molly’s classmates in her Ecology class. Their professor is Dr. Robinson and they give themselves this name, even though, as Molly says, it doesn’t quite make sense. They are students at Northern Michigan University – where I went as an undergraduate. It’s a state school, and there were a number of non-traditional students. It was a working campus. Most of us had jobs either on or off campus. Students went a semester, then took one off to earn money. I worked as a waitress and my boss was in my English class – so not the typical college.
JB: Molly is beset with a persistent fear of missing out. She’s sure that something is going on that’s exciting, right out of her view. It’s a theme in some of your other work too. Is it a particularly rust belt theme, this idea that the world has moved on to other things? That what remains is a sense of loss or wanting?
SD: I think that’s the emotion that people relate to the most when they read the novel. They remember being at college and really feeling out of place. It’s a strange time especially the first semester. You don’t have your high school friends and not being sure about what to do, where to go, and there was this sense that everyone else is having a good time and you’re in your dorm room waiting for an invitation to something. You just feel left out – even though I’m not sure there’s proof that anyone else is doing anything better. There’s just this sense of wanting to fit in but not sure what it is that you’re fitting into. Not knowing – seems to be the dominant sensation when you first get to college. It’s more a universal theme, but it may echo more loudly in the rust belt, where massive shifts have happened or are happening because of economic or power shifts not readily seen by the everyday people.
JB: The young people of the novel missed the protests of the Vietnam War, and so they’re focused on the ELF protests, and yet their own college experience is competing with the draw of activism. This combination of elements adds to the yearning sensation. Was activism part of your early adulthood?
SD: Project ELF was a government funded program created during the Cold War that would allow the military to communicate with submarines anywhere in the world using extremely low frequency radio waves. They planned to embed them in the bedrock of the Upper Peninsula. When I went to college Project ELF was divisive. Some people thought it would bring jobs to the region – at the time unemployment in the Upper Peninsula was high – others were dead sure it was going to hurt the environment. I did join in some protests against the project. I also remember we advocated for a bottle bill – Michigan passed one of the first ones. People could return the bottles for reuse at ten cents each – so that really cleaned up the sides of the highways. It felt like we were making an impact. I hope we did.
JB: Molly is often reminded of being female, and often the only woman. Lake Superior, the logging history, the submarines, all have the stamp of a man’s world. Dr. Robinson tells a story “for Molly” in class of an Ojibwa woman who outlived her husband during a winter they were stranded on an island. Dr. Robinson says the story is about a woman’s strength, but it seems more about outsider status. Were you inspired by other writers who look at women’s experience in these extreme macho settings?
SD: Angelique Mott and her husband were sent to Isle Royale by one of the copper companies. They gave them some supplies and asked them to search for copper. They left them there over the winter months. They had no food and weren’t able to trap anything to eat. She survived – her husband did not. I always found her strength fascinating. It’s not a story many know.
I grew up on Hemingway stories – I love them but they do focus on men and their struggles. As a writer, I do tend to write about women. I’m continually trying to show them in different situations, different relationships, highlighting their own struggles.
JB: You recently did a reading at the Peter White Public Library in Marquette. What was it like to return to the setting that inspired the book?
SD: It was wonderful to be back in Marquette. So much has changed but so much hasn’t changed. The lake, the trees, the wonderful sense of the town. The University has so many new buildings but I went to my old dormitory, which was exactly the same.
I read at the Library where I used to study sometimes. I lived at that end of town and liked being there. I also stayed at the Landmark Inn where I used to waitress. The hotel had the same vibes as back in the day. I saw friends who went to school with me and who stayed there. It’s a beautiful place. It definitely defines my literary heart.
JB: You’re a Michigan-born and educated writer, you studied with Charles Baxter, you teach at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh: you are decidedly a Rust Belt writer. What would you say is most inspiring about these rust belt settings, something they have in common, even though each city, each town is very different from the other?
SD: I grew up in Detroit, where car manufacturing once reigned supreme. Like steel in Pittsburgh, there is a sense of something lost. I would say the same is true for the towns in the Upper Peninsula. The closing of the iron ore mines, and the loss of the forestry industry defines what was there. These industries, now gone, continue to haunt these places.
JB: What happened to ELF, those strange communication lines for submarines that are such an important backdrop to the novel?
SD: The project sort of fizzled out. I think they did build some but not the miles and miles that were planned. Then the Cold War ended and that seemed to be the end of Project ELF. It was always supposed to be top secret so maybe I’m wrong.
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Sharon Dilworth has published three collections of short stories, The Long White, Women Drinking Benedictine, and Two Sides, Three Rivers as well as two novels, Year of the Ginkgo and My Riviera. Dilworth has received an Iowa Award in Short Fiction, a Pushcart Prize in Fiction, and a Hopwood Award as well as grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
Jennifer Bannan’s credits include a collection of short stories, Inventing Victor, as well as stories in anthologies and literary journals like the Kenyon Review online, ACM, Passages North, and Chicago Quarterly Review. Her collection of short stories, Tamiami Trail, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press, in Fall 2025.
