Easter egg hunt? Bring a shovel

For author Wade Rouse, Easter was not so much a time for dressing up as it was a day for getting down and dirty.

As the Saugatuck-based author notes in his latest book “It’s All Relative,” his father was an engineer with some unusual ideas about Easter egg hunts: Instead of being scattered around the lawn or tucked beneath the leaves of flowers in the garden, eggs at the Rouse house were buried in the ground.

“I think I was in middle school the first time I wrote about the buried eggs,” Rouse recalled during a phone interview from Chicago, midway through his promotional tour. “I think that was when I realized that that wasn’t normal, and that other kids were waking up on Easter morning with beautiful Easter baskets at the foot of their beds.”

“Relative,” which chronicles Rouse’s most memorable experiences related to most of the major holidays, was compiled in bits and pieces over many years. “I guess it was decades in the making,” he said. “I was always writing, always capturing the holidays, but I didn’t know what to do with it.

“Then I heard a story on National Public Radio one day about how people are obsessed with the holidays and how much they spend on holidays. Suddenly, it seemed like the time was right.”

It’s Rouse’s fourth memoir. In “American Boy,” he wrote about struggling with his sexual identity while he was growing up in the Ozarks. “Confessions of a Prep School Mommy Handler” detailed his turbulent tenure dealing with the often demanding parents, students and administrators at an upscale private school. “At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream” described his life-changing decision to forsake the comforts of metropolitan life for a rural home on the Michigan lakeshore. The transition was not easy for Rouse and his partner, Gary Edwards, but they have adjusted over the last three years: Their home, nestled in the woods outside of Saugatuck, is a showplace, complete with a burgeoning garden and a former carriage house that they remodeled into a pair of home offices. At Rouse’s desk, you’ll find a picture of the late humorist Erma Bombeck, who was first an idol of Rouse’s mother and later became a major source of inspiration for Rouse.

“She cranked out so many columns in her life,” he said. “When they were compiled into her books (such as “The Grass is Always Greener Over the Septic Tank” and “I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression”) the culminating effect of those stories about marriage and family were pretty amazing when they’re taken together. One at a time, they’re like little chunks of humor, but taken together … ”

Rouse sighed.

“When she was originally writing them, her family agreed they would never read them,” Rouse said. But he has talked with Bombeck’s children, who have since read her work. “They said, ‘When we went back and read her, we were blown away by how much she captured in those tiny moments.’”

Bombeck would love “It’s All Relative,” which mixes sometimes jaw-droppingly candid humor with moving observations about the difficulty of relationships, dealing with parental health crises, Edwards’ battle to stop drinking and being ridiculed for being “different” in grade school.  

“I can be brutal with my humor, but I try never to be mean just to be mean,” Rouse said. “I think the beauty of people is in their love, in their foibles. Everyone has faults — that’s what unites us, that were all whacked out of our minds.”

Some of his most cutting comments are reserved for the dreaded Christmas letters some well-meaning people send out, mass-mailed, resolutely upbeat yearly recaps that reflect what Rouse calls “our obsession with perfection.”

“I have a meltdown anymore when I see those things. They drive me out of my mind.

"Tell the truth for a change: My husband’s a jackass who forgot my birthday, the kids’ braces cost three times as much as we thought they would, little Jenny has scoliosis. Just be honest!”

Telling the truth can occasionally be tricky, even for Rouse. One case in point involves an overnight stay at Edwards’ childhood home. Rouse recalls Edwards getting aroused by the noise from the HVAC unit because of adolescent memories connected to that rumbling sound.

“I did a reading of that story in Milwaukee, and people gasped,” Rouse admitted. He called to Edwards, who was standing nearby: “You were kind of mortified, too, weren’t you, Gary?

“He turned red the first couple of times, but it gets one of the biggest reactions, so I have to stick with it — and it’s totally true.”

Rouse is hosting a weekend-long writing seminar in Saugatuck at the Twin Gables Inn May 12 through 15. Topics to be covered include “Facing Your Fear & Finding Your Voice,” crafting query letters, self-marketing and working with editors and literary agents.

His next project, scheduled for publication in September, is “I’m Not the Biggest Bitch in This Relationship,” a collection of essays he commissioned from various writers, including Rita Mae Brown, Caprice Crane, Annabelle Gurwitch, W. Bruce Cameron and Jeff Marx. The foreword was penned by Chelsea Handler’s dog, Chunk.

“They’re all hilarious stories,” said Rouse, a life-long admirer of all things canine. “I didn’t want any ‘Marley and Me’ soapiness going on.”