Though many writers’ first books of fiction are thinly veiled autobiographies, Whitmore Lake-based journalist John Counts drew inspiration for Bear County, Michigan from what he’d heard while sitting in courtrooms, working as a crime reporter.
“It’s just the material that you’re using,” Counts says. “Like, if you were a sculptor, you’d be using clay. These are just the things that I had at my disposal.”
Yes, real incidents — like a man setting his off-the-grid cabin in the woods on fire to signal for help in a snowstorm (“The Hermit”); various people breaking into locked-up vacation homes (“Big Frank”); and a man accidentally blowing up his stone house (“Lady of Comfort”) — planted seeds for stories that appear in Bear County.
But the characters, the details, and the northern Michigan county itself are all products of Counts’s imagination. Having grown up in Bay City and Livonia, Counts spent a good deal of his youth hunting, camping, hiking, and fishing Up North, and after studying literature and creative writing at Wayne State University (for his bachelor’s degree) and Columbia College Chicago (for his master’s), he worked as a crime reporter in Manistee and Ann Arbor. Currently, he’s an investigations editor at MLive.
“My dad had been a trench-coated police reporter in the 1970s,” Counts says. “Which I thought was so cool. So it was definitely something I wanted to pursue when I got mixed up in journalism. … The crime beat is where you get to bear witness to the broad range of human experience, from drama to comedy.”
And in the spirit of old-school journalism, Counts is clear-eyed and honest about — but never condescending to — his characters, who are often working dead-end jobs and living in desperate economic and emotional circumstances.
“There’s a balance in any human being,” Counts says. “It helped covering the crime beat for so long in the news world, where you actually meet some of the people face-to-face who are getting into trouble or are part of these big events. … They have a whole other side of them that people don’t want to think about.”
Why? Because it’s easier to make snap judgments based on what might be a person’s worst act. But Counts sees fiction as a crucial means of building empathy.
“The only way we can really have any sort of community is to understand other people and where they’re coming from, instead of focusing all our energies on our divisions or what makes us different,” Counts says.
Though Bear County debuted this year, Counts has been honing his craft for a long time. He estimates one story is approximately 20 years old.
The father of two maintains his creative habit by carving out time each morning to write “even for 10 minutes,” he says, “just so it’s in my brain-space.” That kind of discipline seems to have paid off. Though short-story collections are often a hard sell in the publishing world, Bear County has achieved good sales numbers, critical praise (including comparisons to Jim Harrison and Ernest Hemingway!), and lots of press since its release.
“It comes down to place, right?” Counts says. “I think that’s what’s resonated with people. And that’s good, because that was my intention: to write about a place I know very well and that I love very dearly.”
This story originally appeared in the October 2025 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
|
|
|
|
|
|
