Author Michael Delp keeps Michigan in focus in 'As If We Were Prey'

Plenty of us purchase locally made goods to demonstrate our commitment to the state.

But the buy-Michigan mindset isn't just limited to open-air farm markets and Sanders ice cream. We can't forget the arts.

If you're browsing the book shelves for a collection of short stories so engaging you forget they are words on a page, fortunately you have no farther to look than our collective own backyard.

Such is the offering of "As if We Were Prey" by Michael Delp (Wayne State University Press, $15.95). Delp's stories are set mostly in small towns in northern Michigan and feature rural boys and men facing their demons and trying to make sense of their own lives.

The book is the latest publication from Wayne State University Press' Made in Michigan Writers Series, a selection of poetry, creative nonfiction, short fiction and essays by Michigan writers. The series is devoted to showcasing Michigan's talent.

Delp, who has taught creative writing at the Interlochen Center for the Arts for the last 26 years, also happens to be one of the series' editors, along with Detroit poet M.L. Liebler.

"You'll find great writers anywhere you go," Delp concedes. "But Michigan is really unique. In one day's drive you can be amid the heavily industrialized southern end of the state and then be at the Upper Peninsula where you can actually stand on the oldest rocks on the earth. There is a tension between those two extremes, and it is a great breeding ground for writers. I'm very proud to be able to be able to celebrate a lot of our writers with the series."

Of course, it doesn't hurt when it's your work the publisher is interested in. Not that Delp is exactly relishing the fame. Reached at his home on Green Lake outside of Traverse City, Delp is not accustomed to any bright-lights, big-city attention. In fact, he flat out eschews it. "I'm not an urban person," he says. "I don't like going anywhere near cities. I've been in Detroit a couple times, but that's just because of the ... (Wayne State University Press)."

In understated prose that remarkably says more in one sentence than many writers do in a paragraph, Delp takes us inside the head and hearts of his male characters, all of whom share a certain melancholy, both eerie and familiar, all in a style reminiscent of another up-north renowned author, Jim Harrison.

They include a kid taking revenge on a neighborhood bully; a father sharing his childhood stories of defeat with his young daughter, inspiring her to settle a score; two men who catch a giant bass and keep it in the bathtub all winter to fatten it to prize-winning size; and a pretty frightening Vietnam vet haunted by his past.

Delp, 61, grew up in Greenville, a farm town of about 8,000 people near Grand Rapids, and spent his childhood either swimming in or fishing in Lake Michigan. Some of his stories echo the Michigan he knew as a kid in the '50s.

Besides writing and teaching, Delp's passion is fishing and hunting.

In addition to the house on Green Lake, he has a fishing cabin on the Boardman River.

"I can walk out of my classroom and in 15 minutes be out on three major rivers in Michigan catching salmon and steelhead. So this is where I was really meant to be."

Delp says he lured his wife, Claudia, away from Farmington more than 30 years ago and credits her (she just sold her business) with being able to live comfortably since he could not have made it solely on a writer/teacher's income. "She's semi-retired. Mostly, she has her hands full looking out for me."

They have one daughter, Jaime, 27, who is getting her Master's of Fine Arts degree in poetry at the University of Michigan.

Even after 40 years of teaching (he taught for 15 years at Grayling High School before Interlochen), Delp says he still enjoys it. "I'm teaching work that I really love and the kids are really responsive."

The writing, too, is a labor of love. "Much of it is really subconscious for me because I don't plan a story. I don't plot a story. It just kind of happens. You create a character, you give him this kind of situation, and you just kind of follow him around on the page."

But more than anything else, if life were only one perfect day after another, he'd hang a sign on the door that would -- no surprise -- read: "Gone fishing."

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