Bridging Careers, a guest post by Sharon Dean

 JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Here at JRW, we are all about celebrating the creativity that blossoms and continues as we grow older. We had a wonderful conversation about "third act creativity" with Amanda Le Rougetel this spring, and I'm delighted to welcome Sharon Dean, with her new mystery CALDERWOOD COVE, today. Sharon and I have a lot in common, including an Air Force husband, living in an old New England house (she's since mercifully escaped to beautiful Ashland, OR) and, most importantly, leaving another career behind to take up the mantle of author.  She explains how she did it - and what she brought with her - today.

Writing sustains us, but so does money. As Melville wrote to Hawthorne in 1851, “Dollars damn me; and the malicious Devil is forever grinning in upon me, holding the door ajar. . . . What I feel most moved to write, that is banned, – it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot.”

 

Melville was most successful not when he was forced to make money to support his family, but when he drew on his experiences whaling to compose his early novels and later his magnificent Moby-Dick. In his novel Pierre, he imagines a writer locked in a back room trying to write despite the constant need for the damned dollar. But the idea of the solitary writer removed from world is more myth than reality. After all, Hawthorne came out of his garret room to marry Sophia Peabody. Without exiting the garret, he might never have produced anything except Fanshawe, a novel so imperfect he tried to burn all the copies.

 

A subset of writers seems to be emerging today. Some self-publish; others, like me, publish with independent presses. Many of us have retired, and though we’re not rich, dollars no longer damn us. We’re privileged to have had careers that bridge us into writing that sustains us emotionally even without the windfall of the best seller.

 

Because we write what we know, we draw on our past careers. Retired actor Clive Rosengren has created Eddie Collins, sometimes actor, sometimes PI. Rosengren sprinkles his deep knowledge of Hollywood like glitter throughout his Eddie Collins series. Toxicologist BJ Magnani fills her Lily Robinson series with poisons. S. Lee Manning’s international spy thrillers draw more on the writing skills Manning honed as lawyer than on any experience as an international spy.

 

I was an English professor for many years before I hung up my academic hat and began writing novels. My Susan Warner series features a retired English professor and reluctant sleuth and my Deborah Strong series features a much younger character who, widowed, returns to her hometown to become a librarian. Neither of these series puts me into a faculty meeting or a classroom, but I’ve been surprised at how much I draw on my knowledge of literature and my skills with researching as I write.

 

Much of my academic work was on the nineteenth-century writer Constance Fenimore Woolson. I re-imagined her as Abigail Brewster when I put my protagonist Susan Warner at a conference celebrating the fictional Brewster’s life and work. I reprised Brewster again when my librarian character Deborah Strong discovers a letter written to Brewster in the archives of a New England college. While I was writing these novels, I learned about an actual woman named Madame Restell, who in the nineteenth century was dubbed “The Wickedest Woman in New York” because she performed abortions. My habit of research often leads me to discoveries like these that I integrate into my work.

 

But therein lies the challenge I’ve faced as I’ve bridged the distance from academic writing to fiction. I’ve learned the fine art of omitting––how much research to use, how much becomes a mere “fact dump.” I’ve also had to learn to eliminate my analytical voice and to find ways to let characters and plot make the story come alive. I’ve learned to leave the analyzing to readers, but I hope that there’s room for analysis in what I write even though my novels will never be discussed in a college classroom.

 

I thank my former career for giving me not only the tools to write and research, but also the luxury of a retirement fund. Neither career has made me rich, but both have fed me.

 

Do you enjoy reading or writing novels that draw on your own or another author’s career?

 

When Deborah Strong accepts an invitation for a reunion with high school friends who will all be turning fifty, she anticipates a lovely Fourth of July weekend in Maine. But soon a murder disturbs the quiet of the summer homes that dot the isolated cove. Deborah's suspicions follow her like the Maine landscape--plenty of sunshine, plenty of fog, and plenty of evening mosquitoes that arrive like the sparks of fireworks. Where is Brenda's husband? Where have her caretaker and cook gone? Who is the anorectic young man who keeps appearing? Is one of them a murderer? Or is it the old woman who lives across the street, her son who runs an oyster farm in the face of global warming, her poet-tenant who lives in her apartment? Deborah even suspects each of the friends she grew up with. By the time she finds the answer, she is ready to leave Calderwood Cove where an idyllic summer retreat turned as deadly as contaminated shellfish.

 

Libraries by Sharon Dean

LUCY BURDETTE: Today we welcome Sharon Dean to the blog with a subject I bet we can all agree on--our love of libraries!

SHARON DEAN: When I was in elementary school, I devoured a series of biographies bound in orange. I read now that they were published by Bobbs-Merrill and that there were over two hundred of them. I could still lead anyone to the shelf where they sat waiting for me to select enough to keep me busy for the week. 

My first job was shelving books in that little library that I still associate with orange-bound biographies. When I was about thirteen, I'd walk the half mile to my job and walk home by myself in the dark. Those were days when we weren't as fearful. The biggest fear my parents had was that I'd go to my job and find the librarian dead. Her name was Bertha and I remember her as a shriveled old lady, though she probably wasn't much older than fifty. But she was ill with cancer. A strange smell often filled the library. I think that it was the smell of death. And, yes, she died while I still worked there, but thankfully not in the library.

I gave Bertha's name to the elderly, former librarian in my novel The Barn. I based that library not on the one of my childhood but on the one in the town where I raised my children. There's a wonderful story about that library. It had once been a church. When the church closed and joined the other Protestant church in town, there was a stipulation that the building had to be used for church purposes or income. My kids went to youth group there and they roller skated around the former, now pew-less, sanctuary. My daughter took her first dance classes there. 

When the town needed a new library, this old church seemed a perfect place. It would absolve the other church of the financial burden of its upkeep and provide the town the space it badly needed. But there was that clause in the will that related not to the building, but to the land the building was on. It took years, but two women eventually tracked down the heir, who was, I recall, a librarian himself. He gladly gave permission for the church to become a library. 

Bigger libraries are now available to me. The library at the college in the East where I taught, the library at the college in the West where I now live, the Carnegie town library in my town, the many libraries I researched in when I was an academic: the Beinecke at Yale, the Hay at Brown, the Houghton at Harvard, the Morgan Pierpont in New York City. But my heart is with the small libraries of my childhood and my young motherhood and of that little library that Charity Royall is in charge of in Edith Wharton's Summer. 

When I was researching for The Wicked Bible, my forthcoming novel featuring Deborah Strong, librarian and reluctant sleuth, I read two books on the history of libraries: Wayne A. Wiegand's, Part of Our Lives: A People's History of the American Public Library (Oxford UP, 2015) and Matthew Battles' Library: An Unquiet History (Norton, 2015). What an interesting history it is. Big or small, libraries deserve to be labeled "sacred spaces."

In this age of easy downloads, how important are libraries to you? What stories about a library would you like to share?

About the book: In 1990, Deborah Madison and Rachel Cummings, both seventeen, are enjoying a bicycle ride on a beautiful September day in New Hampshire. They stop at a local barn that no longer houses cows but still displays a wooden cow’s head that peeks out from a window in the rafters. Sliding open the door, they find Rachel’s boyfriend, Joseph Wheeler, dead on the barn’s floor.

The case lies as cold as Joseph for nearly thirty years until Rachel returns to New Hampshire to attend the funeral of Joseph’s mother. The girls, now women, reopen the cold case and uncover secrets that have festered, as they often do, in small towns. Against a backdrop of cold and snow and freezing rain, Deborah and Rachel rekindle their friendship and confess the guilt each of them has felt about things that happened in the past. The Barn is a story of friendship lost and recovered, secrets buried and unburied, and the power of forgiveness.

About Sharon Dean: Sharon L. Dean grew up in Massachusetts where she was immersed in the literature of New England. She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of New Hampshire, a state she lived and taught in before moving to Oregon. After giving up writing scholarly books that required footnotes, she reinvented herself as a fiction writer. She is the author of three Susan Warner mysteries and of a literary novel titled Leaving Freedom. The Barn, the first novel in a new mystery series, features librarian and reluctant sleuth Deborah Strong as she and her friend solve a thirty-year-old cold case. Set in the depth of New Hampshire’s January, The Barn is a story of friendship lost and recovered, secrets buried and unburied, and the power of forgiveness.