Guest Author J. Schlenker
I never dreamed I would one day be an author. I was facing retirement and wondering what to do next. While cleaning out our bookshelf, my husband found a thin spiral-bound notebook of poems I had written in high school. He said, “Why don’t you write?”
On NPR, I heard about GATHER, a site for writers, now defunct. I moved on to blogging. While on a hike, I remembered Sally and began writing what I called Sally Shorts on my blog. I met Sally once in 1961. I was eight. She was 103.
I never intended to write a book. I was content to blog, but I discovered NaNoWriMo, a writing challenge that set the goal of writing 50,000 words in one month. Although I tried writing about Sally, I always fell short. I moved onto fiction, determined to complete the draft of an entire novel during my third stab at NaNoWriMo.
I knew nothing about writing contests, but my husband works on university grants, and a creative writing contest through the Faulkner Society came across his desk. He encouraged me to enter. My extremely rough, unedited draft of Jessica Lost Her Wobble was a finalist. I self-published the book in December 2015. The following year, I published The Color of Cold and Ice. It also won some awards.
Even after seven years of researching Sally’s life, I knew I would never know the full truth, but I wrote, incorporating as many facts as I could. The research was one of the most satisfying experiences of my life. I gathered anything written about her, which wasn’t much considering that at the time, “black lives didn’t matter.” I made cold calls and numerous in-person visits to anyone who had met or knew her. The people I talked to were in their eighties and nineties. They came alive recounting the past. I made friends along the way, several of whom went out of their way to research for me. I published Sally as historical fiction in September 2017. The book won the bronze Wishing Shelf Award.
The following year, I began working on A Peculiar School, a book about a peacock. Someone who had also met Sally when he was young came to see me. He wanted to give me a piece of Carnival glass that Sally had given his mother when she was young. When I saw the peacock on it, I cried. I felt Sally was sending me a sign. I published A Peculiar School the following year.
Author Bio: J. Schlenker, a late-blooming author, lives with her husband, Chris, out in the splendid center of nowhere in the foothills of Appalachia in Kentucky, where the only things to disturb her writing are croaking frogs, a screaming guinea, and the occasional sounds of hay being cut in the fields.
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