Commentary by Julie McDonald / For The Chronicle
An adjunct professor who received a six-figure advance for his memoir about life in the Marines will host the Lewis County chapter of the American Association of University Women’s (AAUW) Authors’ Night on Friday, Sept. 6, at Centralia College’s TransAlta Commons.
Matthew Young, a Connecticut native who grew up in Indiana and teaches English at Centralia College, will ask questions of Garth Stein, bestselling author of “The Art of Dancing in the Rain,” and Libbie Grant, aka Olivia Hawker, author of “One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow.”
“I knew from the age of eight that I would one day be a writer,” Grant said. “I always wrote stories for fun, but I didn’t take it seriously and didn’t try to finish my first novel until I was in my late twenties. It took me two years to write my first book.”
She got an agent, but the novel never sold to a publisher. Rather than give up, she broke up with the agent and published the book herself. She also wrote and published other novels with great success. Then Lake Union Publishing approached her about acquiring her books.
“It was Lake Union’s decision to use the pseudonym Olivia Hawker,” Grant said. “I also publish work under my real name.”
The biggest challenge in her journey to becoming a publisher was finding time to write alongside her day job. Today, she is a full-time writer.
“The most rewarding thing is the opportunity to exchange ideas with many others,” she said.
Stein, who describes himself as a storyteller, studied film in graduate school and wrote grant proposals before publishing his first novel. His third book, The Art of Racing in the Rain, written from the perspective of a golden retriever, spent nearly 160 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Like his human protagonist, Stein raced cars, so he knew his novel’s setting well. A 2019 film based on the novel starred Milo Ventimiglia as Denny and Kevin Costner as the voice of the dog Enzo.
Young, who was adopted as a toddler, graduated from Homestead High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 2004 and then enrolled in college, but he preferred hanging out with friends and drinking to sitting in classrooms. He dropped out of an Indiana university a week before classes started and spent his mother’s money on a tattoo.
“She wasn’t happy,” he said, pointing out that his parents separated when he was 13 and his older brother was 21.
For six months, Young lived with his aunt and her husband, a Marine veteran he admired, but after driving his car into a fire hydrant, uninjured but in shock, he realized he needed a change.
At 18, he strolled into an Army recruiting center and joined the Marine Corps, the only unit that worked on Sundays. After scoring well on the entrance exams, the Marines offered him a choice of assignments. He chose the infantry, looking forward to fighting overseas.
“I think there was a lot of self-destructive behavior,” Young said. “I wanted to cause destruction and I wanted to be hurt.”
In April 2005, he went to basic training camp at Camp Pendleton in San Diego and chose marksmanship as his specialty.
He was assigned to the Fifth Marine Regiment and was deployed to Iraq three times during his four-year service. Military vehicles were bombed with improvised explosive devices. Bombs exploded. Friends died. He returned to the United States with mixed feelings.
“I think it radicalized me and made me opposed to military service and war,” Young said. “I’m pretty strongly opposed to it.”
At home, people called him a hero.
“A lot of it ultimately struck me as just empty lip service that people were paying us,” he said. “They didn’t have to think too deeply about what the United States was doing.”
Civilians don’t understand the carnage of war, he said, and don’t want to know. He’s not ashamed of his service, but he doesn’t want recognition either. He did his job, just like teachers do theirs every day.
“I can be proud of my service, but I can also be critical,” he said, particularly of the senseless waste of human life in war. “I don’t necessarily believe they died for anything.”
After leaving the military, he returned to Indiana and worked one summer at Lowe’s, loading trucks and stocking shelves. He resumed old habits of drinking and driving and received a DUI citation.
“I was kind of lost,” he said. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”
His brother posted bail for him. During his probation, he lived with his brother and attended meetings and classes on alcohol.
A former friend and neighbor—now his wife—had moved west for graduate studies in marine resource management at Oregon State University and invited him to stay with her. He enrolled at OSU not knowing what he wanted to study, choosing fish and wildlife science, but with the encouragement of a professor, he quickly switched to English. His fiancée graduated in 2011, and he graduated two years later. They married in 2013 and moved back to the Midwest. He enrolled in graduate school at Miami University in Ohio, where he earned a Master of Arts in creative writing. He taught undergraduates and wrote his senior thesis about his experiences in the Navy. His wife, who had worked as a docent at the Yaquina Head Lighthouse on the Oregon coast and enjoyed teaching schoolchildren and creating science curricula, enrolled in Miami University’s graduate program in education.
“In my mind, it’s like it was a really golden time of our lives,” Young said, even though it turned out to be a stressful and austere time living off TA grants and five-figure student loans.
They moved back to the Northwest, where his wife taught biology at Centralia High School and Young received fellowships at Words After War in Vermont and the Carey Institute for Global Good in upstate New York.
At the Carey Institute, Young made contacts with the country’s best writers, who helped him find an agent. He received many rejections before Chris Clemans, now at Janklow & Nesbit in New York, took him on as a client and sold the memoir to Bloomsbury Publishing. His 256-page book, Eat the Apple: A Memoir, was published in 2018 amid a media frenzy.
“We were renting on the west side of Olympia and it was more than we could afford,” Young said. “We were close to not being able to afford the rent anymore. Then the money for the book came along. It was a nice down payment on our house.”
After his daughter was born, Young struggled to write another nonfiction book, but penned an essay about leaving the hospital with a newborn and little parenting instruction. “I feel like there’s more control in adopting a dog than there is in adopting a child,” he said. “It left us pretty panicked.”
He suffered from writer’s block again and began writing the fictional story of a Marine struggling with the aftermath of a combat deployment and managing to balance his role as a parent with “the knowledge that one is capable of terrible things.”
Young enrolled in graduate school at Pacific Lutheran University and earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing in 2021. His thesis became his 299-page debut novel, “End of Active Service,” which he sold for a five-figure advance and was published by Bloomsbury in June.
“I think I’m very lucky,” Young said. “I think a lot of it can be talent, but I think a lot of it is luck.”
He and his wife are in the midst of the long and arduous process of adopting a sibling for their 6-year-old son. At 28, he met his biological parents and three full siblings in Massachusetts, perhaps the stuff of another memoir someday.
At Centralia College, he feels no pressure to publish, but rather to simply teach what he enjoys. He wants his students to become critical thinkers.
Young is excited to host the evening of authors. “I’m excited to be on this panel,” he said. “I think it’s going to be great.”
What advice would he give to aspiring writers?
“I think people really worry when they’re writing – who’s going to read this and what are they going to say?” Young noted. “Say what you need to say. Do as much as you can to shut down the inner critic.”
AAUW’s “Evening with Authors” supports program against domestic violence
For years, the Lewis County chapter of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) sponsored Lunafest, short films by and about women, to raise money for Hope Alliance. Since 2017, the chapter has donated $22,820 to Hope Alliance, formerly Human Response Network, and another $3,765 to the chapter’s scholarship fund, Women Supporting Women Scholarships, said Donna Loucks, treasurer.
“Then the Luna Company decided to stop producing Lunafest films, so we had no films left to show!” she said.
The AAUW has decided to host an evening with authors on Friday, September 6th at the TransAlta Commons to raise funds.
“When we learned that Lunafest was no longer happening, we started looking for ideas on how to replace it as a fundraiser for Hope Alliance,” said Jo Martens, Evening with Authors coordinator. “Sharon Lyons came up with the idea for a book festival loosely based on the very large book festival that takes place in Tucson every year.”
In collaboration with the Southwest Washington Writers Conference, AAUW was able to bring together two outstanding writers—Garth Stein and Libbie Grant, whose pen name is Olivia Hawker—for an interactive panel moderated by Matthew Young, an English professor at Centralia College.
Tickets are $20 for adults and $15 for students. In addition to the panel, the evening will feature book signings by local authors, as well as appetizers, drinks and raffle baskets. Local businesses donated food and drinks, and Book ‘N’ Brush is hosting book signings by Stein, Grant, Young and local authors.
Doors open at 6pm, presentation starts at 7pm
“I am always impressed by the amount of time and energy, even their own money, our AAUW members donate behind the scenes, quietly, often without recognition, to make these events possible,” Martens said. “All proceeds from ticket sales and the basket raffle go to Hope Alliance. If the community responds well, we hope this will become an annual event.”
For tickets, contact Martens at 360-561-2831 or email [email protected].
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Julie McDonald, a private historian in Toledo, can be reached at [email protected].
