East Lansing author publishes short story collection 30 years in the making

By KURT ANTHONY KRUG

Dawn Newton said the title of her new short story collection, “Knuckle Boy,” is her “apology to the world for those times when I didn’t have the necessary skills to navigate a situation appropriately.”

“Someone’s feelings may have been hurt, and I felt bad about that. Inevitably, we all need to make judgements about the who and why of situations. Many times, such judgements are necessary, but the story hopefully captures that there may be a cost for a decision,” she said.

Since the book (Apprentice House Press, $18) is an anthology, Newton knew she risked making the title too broad. 

“Yet I did want the title of the story to be the title of the book. Even the brightest among us has been the knuckle boy, the one who didn’t know or realize the truth about a situation. That lack of recognition is something we write about again and again,” she said. 

The stories feature protagonists who grapple with wounded creatures — insects, animals and even humans. In the titular story, also Newton’s most recent story, a family’s vacation home attracts the persistent attention of a young man seeking a new place to visit.

“The themes are rather broad,” Newton confessed. “I wrote these stories over the course of 30-some years, so they’re the product of several different phases of my life.”

Born in Pontiac and raised in Waterford, Newton is the middle of three daughters. She lives in East Lansing with Tim Dalton, her husband of nearly 40 years. They have three children: Rachel, Connor and Nathaniel.

Newton is an alumna of Waterford Kettering High School, where she was one of six people to graduate at the top of her class, which is one of her proudest accomplishments. A first-generation college student, she earned a bachelor’s degree in English and creative writing at Michigan State University, which she attended on a partial scholarship, and a master’s degree in fiction writing from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which she attended on a teaching scholarship. 

At the latter, she studied under the late author John Barth, who was best known for his postmodern fiction.

“I was really young and, initially, quite intimidated by Barth — the extent of his knowledge and the breadth of his writing. He was so well read, and as I processed what he noticed about the way stories were constructed, I was beginning to absorb and understand the complexities of storytelling for the first time,” she said. “I used to worry that I didn’t learn enough from him, but over time I’ve realized that I did just fine. He led a very structured class — we critiqued two students’ stories each week, and he met with you ahead of time to provide feedback. I think I worried too much about pleasing him. He was already quite experimental, and I just wanted to write serious, realistic fiction, which was fine with him, even though he had moved on with experimental stuff.”

Newton also has a master’s degree in education from the University of Virginia, which she attended on a partial scholarship, and a certificate in medical insurance billing and coding from Lansing Community College. 

“My sisters and I read a lot of books when I was young. My older sister, Linda, and I traded elementary school library books each week. In the summers, I remember my mother driving my younger sister Lori and I to the branch library to check out books,” Newton recalled. “Before I started working, I entered a lot of fiction contests. Some of this feedback was painful — one of my works was called ‘a collection of platitudes’ — but I learned a lot.”

Prior to “Knuckle Boy,” Newton published two books: 2019’s “Winded: A Memoir in Four Stages” and 2021’s “The Remnants of Summer.” Besides being a teacher and an author, she has held numerous jobs throughout her career, including a lumber yard cashier, a library assistant, a stockbroker, a policy advisor, a grant writer, a tutor and an academic adviser. Her fiction, poetry and essays have been published in Gargoyle Magazine, The Baltimore Review, Clackamas Literary Review, The South Carolina Review and The Carolina Quarterly, among others. 

In late 2012, she was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. “Winded” explores her experiences being a parent with cancer. 

“Even in 2012, when I was first diagnosed at the age of 53, I was initially quite surprised because I had never been a smoker. But then I started reading about vague links between lung cancer and childhood asthma, as mine was quite severe when I was younger. I went to the hospital many times as a kid,” she said. “Writing ‘Winded’ helped me to understand the links between asthma and lung cancer better and probably helped me become even more compassionate with respect to my parents’ smoking habits and early deaths. Growing up and maturing when they did, they just didn’t know as much about the effects of tobacco. Whether my cancer was caused by secondhand smoke or whether it was a chance development springing from my asthma, I see it as unfortunate but understandable.”

Newton is working on her next book, a novel called “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön,” named after the Andrews Sisters song that she and two of her friends sang at a choir concert in high school. It’s about her mother’s time working in Germany for Selfridge Air National Guard Base after World War II. 

“I think I would also like to write a play,” Newton said. “In some ways, writing a play would be natural, as I feel that I already include a lot of dialogue in my fiction. However, I’m daunted by the idea of having the spoken word comprise the totality of everything that’s written. On a stage, characters can open their hearts to the audience in much the same way that characters do in fiction. Yet characters on a stage cannot easily share a secret with anyone else. Writing a full play strikes me as an overwhelming task, although my daughter and I have always loved theater, so attempting a screenplay would be a fun challenge.”

Keep up with Newton at dawnmarienewton.com.