BEHIND THE PEN

Writer, social worker, teacher, political and community activist, professor and university dean—I’ve enjoyed wearing many different hats but none as much as that of novelist, to which I now devote my life and energy.

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So why is it that whenever I’m asked why I write novels, I get tongue-tied. It’s not that I don’t know what to say; it’s because I have so much to say. Fiction writing called to me way back in 1964 when, with an undergraduate degree in English Literature under my belt, I told a friend that I wanted to write a novel. Then life happened, as it is wont to do—marriage, divorce, finding myself, losing myself, finding myself again, decades of professional experiences and achievements, unbelievable changes in our society—and my dream went underground. But it didn’t disappear.

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Fourteen years ago, it resurfaced. I was considering retirement when, out of the blue (or so I thought), fiction writing called to me again. This time I was ready to answer. I’d come to understand that how we see ourselves is most profoundly affected, even shaped, not by objective data and theoretical discourse but by the personal connections we make through the stories we’re exposed to and the stories we tell. I needed someone to listen. I wanted to engender empathy to mend what is broken in our world by bringing it to life through people and their stories.

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So that’s what I did. I began writing stories. I started by taking pieces of things that really happened, tweaked the characters and created new ones, changed the settings and the endings/outcomes. And what I discovered was that the stories turned into a kaleidoscope of my life that looked nothing like my real life, just shattered bits. So now, when writing novels, I always start with some of my own and others’ experiences and find that, in the end, most of the things that happen in my novels didn’t actually happen but that the feelings are close to home.

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I’m often asked what’s surprised me the most on this journey. Well, the answer to that one is easy. I never intended to write a mystery. It started with Sylvia Jensen, the strong woman who is the protagonist in At the Center. At first I based her character on what I knew about myself as a social worker but I didn’t stop there. I kept going and asked, what if I created a character that does what I wished I had done or could have done? What if I pushed the envelope and made her an outrageous, dysfunctional breaker of rules in the cause of justice? Before I knew it, Sylvia Jensen the social worker became the sleuth who solved the mystery of a boy’s death in a foster home. Sylvia does her sleuth thing again as a teacher in Death, Unchartered and voila! All of a sudden I am creating a mystery series.

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I want the Sylvia Jensen mysteries to have gripping plots, of course. But I also want them to explore mysteries much deeper, intricate and more universal than whodunit—like race, class and power—without muting what is interesting and particular about my characters’ ways of seeing things. I want all my novels to be deeper than the stories themselves. I want them to expose the truth, either on purpose or accidentally, about the human condition, to bear witness to how my characters are impacting and being impacted by the complex world in which they live.

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So, in a nutshell, as novelist I still get to wear my activist, social work, and educator hats. When I write, they all work together and my heart is exposed, like a river, as I’m carried along with the story; and when I become immersed in my characters’ lives, my heart breaks open to contain the whole universe . . . and I become the change I want in the world.