An associate professor who earned a six-figure advance for his memoir about life in the Marines will moderate the Lewis County chapter of the American Association of University Women’s (AAUW) Evening with Authors 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 pose questions to Garth Stein, bestselling author of The Art of Dancing in the Rain, and Libbie Grant, also known as Olivia Hawker, author of One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow.
“I knew from the time I was 8 years old that I would be a writer someday,” Grant said. “I always wrote stories for fun, but I didn’t get serious about it and try to finish my first novel until my late twenties. It took me two years to write my first book.”
She obtained an agent, but the novel never sold to a publisher. Rather than give up, she parted ways with the agent and published the book herself. She wrote and published other novels, too, with great success. Then Lake Union Publishing approached her about acquiring her books.
“It was Lake Union’s decision to use the Olivia Hawker pen name,” Grant said. “I also publish work under my real name.”
Finding time to write while working day jobs proved the most challenging aspect of her publishing journey. Today, she writes full time.
“The most rewarding part is having the opportunity to share ideas with many other minds,” she said.
Stein, who has described 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 a golden retriever’s point of view, spent nearly 160 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Like his human protagonist, Stein also raced cars, so he knew his novel’s setting well. A 2019 movie based on the novel starred Milo Ventimiglia as Denny and Kevin Costner as the voice of Enzo the dog.
Young, who was adopted as an infant, graduated from Homestead High School in Fort Wayne, Ind., in 2004 and enrolled in college but preferred hanging out and drinking with friends to sitting in classrooms. A week before classes started, he dropped out of an Indiana university and spent his mom’s refund on a tattoo.
“She was not pleased,” he said, noting that his parents split up when he was 13, his older brother 21.
For six months, Young lived with his aunt and her husband, a Navy veteran he admired, but after crashing his car into a fire hydrant, unharmed but shocked, he realized he needed a change.
At 18, he sauntered into an Armed Forces Recruiting Center and joined the Marine Corps, the only branch with people working on a Sunday. After he scored high on entrance exams, the Marines offered him a choice of assignments. He picked the infantry and looked 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 also be hurt.”
He left for boot camp at Camp Pendleton in San Diego in April 2005 and selected rifleman as his specialty.
Assigned to the Fifth Marines, he had three deployments to Iraq during his four-year enlistment. Improvised explosive devices blew up military vehicles. Bombs exploded. Friends died. He returned to the United States with ambivalent feelings.
“I think it radicalized me against military service and against the war,” Young said. “I am pretty staunchly against it.”
At home, people called him a hero.
“A lot of it just kind of ended up feeling to me like empty lip service that people were giving us,” he said. “They didn’t have to think too deeply about what the U.S. 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 accolades either. He did his job, just as teachers do theirs every day.
“I get to be proud of my service, but I also get to be critical,” he said, especially of war’s senseless waste of lives. “I don’t necessarily think they died for much of anything.”
After leaving the military, he returned to Indiana and worked for a summer at Lowe’s, loading trucks and stocking shelves. He picked up old habits of drinking and driving and received a DUI.
“I was kind of lost,” he said. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”
His brother bailed him out. While on probation, he lived with his brother and attended meetings and alcohol classes.
A former friend and neighbor — now his wife — had moved west for graduate school in marine resource management at Oregon State University and invited him to visit. He enrolled in classes at OSU with no idea what he wanted to study and opted for fish and wildlife sciences but, upon encouragement from a professor, quickly switched to English. His fiancée graduated in 2011, and he finished 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 undergraduate students and wrote about his Marine experiences for his thesis. His wife, who had served as a docent at Yaquina Head Lighthouse on the Oregon Coast and enjoyed teaching schoolchildren and creating science curriculum, enrolled in Miami University’s graduate program for education.
“In my head, it’s like it’s a real golden period of our lives,” Young said, even though it proved a stressful and frugal time living on TA stipends with five-figure student loans.
They moved back to the Northwest, where his wife taught biology at Centralia High School, and Young received fellowships with Words After War in Vermont and the Carey Institute for Global Good in Upstate New York.
At the Carey Institute, Young connected with top writers in the nation who walked him through the process of finding an agent. He received a lot of rejections before Chris Clemans, now with Janklow & Nesbit in New York, accepted him 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 blitz.
“We were living in a rental on the west side of Olympia, and it was more than we could afford,” Young said. “We were about to not be able to afford rent. Then the money for that book came in. It was a nice down payment for our house.”
After the birth of his daughter, 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 oversight for adopting a dog than there is for taking a kid,” he said. “That was kind of panicky for us.”
He hit another writer’s block and began developing a fictional account of a Marine struggling with the aftermath of combat, reconciling being a parent with “knowing you have the capacity to do horrible 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. Bloomsbury released it in June.
“I feel 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. At 28, he met his biological parents and three full siblings in Massachusetts, perhaps fodder for another memoir someday.
At Centralia College, he feels no pressure to publish but simply to teach, which he enjoys. He wants his students to become critical thinkers.
Young looks forward to moderating the Evening with Authors. “I’m excited to do this panel,” he said. “I think it’ll be great.”
What advice would he give to aspiring writers?
“I think people get really worried as they’re writing — who’s going to read this and what are they going to say about it?” Young noted. “Say what you need to say. Do as much as you can to shut off the inner critic.”
AAUW’s Evening with Authors supports domestic violence program
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 the Human Response Network, and another $3,765 to the branch’s scholarship endowment fund, Women Supporting Women Scholarships, said Donna Loucks, treasurer.
“Then the Luna Company decided to stop doing the Lunafest films, so we had no films to show!” she said.
The AAUW decided to host an Evening with Authors at the TransAlta Commons on Friday, Sept. 6, as a fundraiser.
“Once we learned that Lunafest was not going to happen again, we cast around for ideas to replace it as a fundraiser for Hope Alliance,” said Jo Martens, the Evening with Authors coordinator. “Sharon Lyons came up with the idea for a book fest, loosely based on the very large book fest that takes place in Tucson every year.”
Working with the Southwest Washington Writers Conference, the AAUW brought in two stellar authors — Garth Stein and Libbie Grant, whose pen name is Olivia Hawker — for an interactive panel moderated by Matthew Young, English instructor at Centralia College.
Tickets cost $20 for adults and $15 students. In addition to the panel, the evening features book signings by local authors as well as hors d’oeuvres, beverages, and raffle baskets. Local businesses donated food and beverages, and Book ’N’ Brush is organizing book signings by Stein, Grant, Young, and local authors.
Doors open at 6 p.m. with the presentation beginning at 7 p.m.
“I am constantly impressed with how much time and energy, even their own money, our AAUW members donate behind the scenes, quietly, often without recognition, to make these events happen,” Martens said. “All proceeds from ticket sales as well as the basket raffle will go to Hope Alliance. If the community responds well to this, we’re hoping it will be an annual event.”
For tickets, contact Martens at 360-561-2831 or by email at jj83martens@gmail.com.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
