We know our family stories – why Uncle Fred won’t eat peas, how Aunt Maude learned to drive, when Grandpa thought he was yelling at an intruder but it was just a stump.
Suzanne Ohlmann knew her family’s stories, too. But they didn’t seem to fit her.
Ohlmann was adopted as an infant, joining the family of Glen and Pat Ohlmann in Seward. As she grew up, she grew more certain that she needed to find her birth parents.
She chronicled her search in her book, “Shadow Migration: Mapping a Life.” Some have labeled it an adoption book, she said. For her, it was more than that.
“There’s a lot of going away and returning,” she said. “That’s where the idea of migration comes in.”
The cover, a photo of Sandhill cranes by Joshua Redwine, fits Ohlmann’s idea.
“I saw the cranes all the time, but I didn’t think about what that meant,” she said. “It helped me understand other themes that relate to me.”
Being on the Platte River in the midst of the cranes, a setting that has been the same since the mammoths roamed Nebraska, allowed her to think of time vertically and tell her story in a non-linear fashion.
She was born in Grand Island during the height of the Sandhill crane migration.
As she wrote the book, she searched out the players in her life – among them the nurse and doctor who delivered her and the social worker at Lutheran Family Services who placed her with the Ohlmanns.
“I found everyone,” she said. “It wasn’t like the wonderful tonic, but it put parameters to something that felt nebulous.”
She found her birth mother, who still lives in Grand Island, and her birth father’s family. He had died before she began her search.
Ohlmann said she identifies with the Charles Schulz character Pig Pen. Although he’s portrayed covered in dirt, he describes the dirt as “the dust of the ages,” possibly even from great kings of history.
“I did not come from kings,” Ohlmann said. “But I had to find the sad, broken people who made me.”
Ohlmann described her life as a boomerang. Seward is home, but the arc goes to St. Olaf College in Minnesota, New York City, Italy and three times to India.
“I always came home to Nebraska. I freaking love Seward,” she said. “I never thought of not staying connected.”
As she wrote her book, however, she realized she needed to go farther back, back to the connections before she was born. She went to Grand Island and Kearney to find her people, she said.
The more she learned, the more she was able to extrapolate details of her story. As she wrote it, she tried to make it universal. That way, she said, someone else could read it and if they didn’t identify with the specifics, they might identify with the themes.
“I hope they would feel better about their own sadness, their own shadows,” she said.
When she discovered her birth father was an addict, she described the knowledge as liberating.
“As a child, I wanted them to be heroes,” she said. “It was liberating to find out they weren’t. So I didn’t have to be one either.”
She started to get serious about writing her story in 2013 after she met her birth mother and birth father’s family. Mentors and advisors in graduate school helped her, she said.
She tried to write about 1,000 words a day, she said, and the first draft was over 300 pages. Outside readers, including mentors Bev Donofrio and Deb Lyons, helped begin streamlining the pages.
Ibrahim Ahmad, another outside reader who is now at Penguin Books, encouraged her to cut parts of it.
“He called it riveting but said it needed serious revisions and cuts,” Ohlmann said.
He recommended cutting 100 pages.
“It’s all about trusting the reader,” he told her.
Ted Kooser of Garland, another outside reader, agreed. He suggested cutting a 2x2 hole in a 3x5 card and focusing on whatever was in the window. Looking sentence by sentence and reading the work aloud helps focus and organize, as well, he said.
Through the pages of “Shadow Migration,” Ohlmann shared the new stories of her life – the background she learned about her birth parents and how “two worlds crashed together inside” her.
Today, Ohlmann is a heart failure nurse at Craig Cardiovascular Center in San Antonio, Texas. She and Dr. William Craig published a paper about remote patient management that will change the paradigm of how medical care reaches rural heart patients, she said.
The program developed in Texas uses tablets and Bluetooth to connect rural farmers with medical professionals.
Her patients in Texas remind her of people in Nebraska, she said.
“My job is to keep people fixing their Kubota tractor and taking 57 bales to cows,” she said.
While she lives in San Antonio, Ohlmann has a house in Seward and hopes to move back. She is working with Chapters Books and Gifts to schedule a book signing this spring.
