January 6, 2018
Inspired by her love for Door County, where she spent summers with her grandparents, and utilizing her background as an adjunct professor on the history of sex, fashion and culture, M.L. Collins was able to write a satirical novel all about “synthesizing life experiences”.
Out the Door! is a story about “a little of everything: geology, sex, politics, the government, prairie voles, cheese curds, casinos, aphrodisiacs sturgeon, trilobites, Hat Island, a bit of mystery – and much more!”
As this year’s CWA Book of The Year Award winner for Indie Fiction, CWA chatted with Collins about the inspiration behind Out the Door, her love for Door County – which is the main location in the novel, as well as how living in Chicago helped her become the writer that she is today.
How does Chicago influence your writing life?
Chicago is where I came of age as a writer after having graduated as an English Major from Northwestern. Writing for the Reader was the best possible experience in that I was free to cover the sorts of topics that interested me. As an early feminist, I wrote a profile on a Chicago lawyer who had come up with a monetary sum to prove the “worth of a wife” in divorce cases. And then with this relatively useless degree in English, my favorite piece was a profile on Reinhold Aman, the publisher of Maledicta — a journal that dealt with how different societies engaged in verbal aggression. That profile ran as a Reader cover story with the heading “He Loves it When You Talk Dirty”. That article ended up being reprinted in a bunch of other independent newspapers around the country.
Tell us about the events that led to you writing Out the Door! What has been the most interesting?
I think writing a novel is all about synthesizing life experience so setting a satirical novel in a small Midwestern town seemed like an ideal way to launch all my demons. Most interesting was how easily and quickly the characters materialized.
How long was the writing process for Out the Door? What kind of research did you have to do? What was the most challenging part?
I hate to confess this but I worked on this on and off for about a decade. That was mostly due to the usual interruptions and distractions that makeup life — job changes, relationship changes — so there were a lot of starts and stops to the story. I’d work furiously for three months, then leave the ms. for 6 months, then pick it up again and create another plot-line and character and it began to read like one big unwieldy mess. The last year was mostly figuring out what to slash and burn — or save for book 2!
Tell us more about Door County. What inspired you to use that location as a setting in Out the Door?
I’ve had a profound love for this quirky beautiful place ever since I was very small so my very earliest imprinting is of the quixotic landscape — a peninsula surrounded by water and edged with limestone encrusted cliffs. It’s also one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems in the Midwest. As I explained in my introduction to the book, Door County is a rich and varied dish of gun advocates, tree huggers, rednecks, socialists, meatheads, lesbian separatist chicken farmers, tourists, fundamentalists, vegan Buddhist bicyclists and some very nice people.
Give a general overview of your work. What are your main concerns, ideas?
I’m extremely interested in history. As an adjunct professor, I taught about the history of clothing, about the cultural landscape of the body, about the material culture of sex. My PhD is in the obscure field of Erotology which studies how cultures manifest and express sexuality through art, literature and so on. So, all those interests feed my love of history and all of it finds its way into my writing.
Tell us about the inspiration behind the title of the book. How did you come up with that title?
The actual working title for the longest time was "The Party’s Just Begun” which — seriously — is a line on a tombstone next to my mother’s in the local cemetery here in Fish Creek. By the time I finally finished editing (cutting and slashing) I realized the title didn’t really mesh with the story. I sort of panicked because I couldn’t think of anything else that worked. I woke up in the middle of the night and said, OMG, I have to get this damn thing... out the door. I think the next morning I realized those words worked as a title at more than one level.
In one sentence, what is Out the Door about? Tell me what interests you most about this book — or tell me other things, besides books, that might constellate around it.
As I described it on my website, Out the Door! is a story about a little of everything: geology, sex, politics, the environment, prairie voles, cheese curds, casinos, aphrodisiacs, sturgeon, trilobites, gulls, and whatever else I could manage to throw into the pot.
M.L. Collins has been in love with Door County ever since spending summers in Juddville with her grandparents who moved there in the 1930s after retiring from the circus. M.L. has worked as a free-lance writer and lectured extensively on the history of sex, fashion and culture at various institutions in Chicago including the School of the Art Institute, the University of Chicago Graham School and most recently, Columbia College. She divides her time between the big city of Chicago and Door County, Wisconsin where she recently fell for a sailor named Smee.
