A really fantastic reading

I went to a really fantastic reading a few weeks ago at a little cafe called Trotter's in St. Paul, MN. I was enthralled by the way the author, John Hershey, described his writing process--a magical process even when Hershey dissected it for us.

I asked John Heshey if he wouldn't mind sharing the text of his reading with other writers on this blog and he graciously agreed. This is one of my longer postings but well worth reading.

Here is the text of John Hershey's talk about his books Window Dressing (2006, Outskirts Press) and The Healing Stone (2007, Authorhouse):


I want to start with some caveats.

First, Jim Rogers kind of twisted my arm to do this reading and what seemed a not-so-good idea at the time really seems like one now. I just don’t like being the center of attention all that much and I’ve never done a reading before. So I’m kinda anxious up here.

Second, when I asked my wife if I should do this reading, she responded immediately by saying “Yes, that’s what writers do…”

I’d never thought of myself as a writer, kind of like I don’t consider myself a fly fisherman even though I’ve fished with flies for trout for 30 years.

I know I am a husband, a father, a good citizen. I have some faith. I’m a guy who goes to work everyday…so let’s just leave it there and you can decide if I’m a writer or not.

Only much later did Jim tell that I couldn’t do a reading the Irish Way. He said Americans are more interested in entertainment than in literature and that got me feeling really uneasy because I write literature and I’m certainly not an entertainer.

Then Jim downright scared me by telling me a story about a person who did a reading in a coffee house while a stranger made an Amway presentation at the front table…. Great.

And finally, you can see that I’m published but let’s be up front about it. I paid for the right—and how it came to that was a total whim. I had no intention of seeking publication or self-publishing. And after I did decide to do a book, I refused to purchase any of the marketing packages the publishing houses try to sell you.

I certainly didn’t think practically about a “target audience” as I wrote. But you can see things got kind of carried away and here I am. So I’ll share some of that process with you.

I like a good story. I listened to radio stories as kid – Johnny Dollar, Long John Nebel, liked to hear grown-ups talk, listened to books on tape, and for several years as I browsed in libraries or books stores, I thought how I’d like to write a story. So when I turned 50 I decided I’d like to write a book and kind of challenged myself. I wanted to see if I could write a longer story that would keep people turning pages.

I figured having short chapters would help.

I really wanted it to sound like I was telling a story. Like you might hear it said. I used one of my favorite writers as an example. Before John McPhee submits anything for publication, he reads it aloud to his wife and hearing it read aloud became important to me.

So I didn’t have a story, but I knew what I wanted in it.

I had a vivid dream about the magical qualities of black stone I’d picked up on the beach. So started with that.

I knew I wanted my story to occur in a small town because I like small towns. So I invented one with a trout stream in it because I also wanted to have trout fishing in the story—and the stream also gave the town an identity and water to supply a bottling plant.

Ultimately, I settled on the name Clear Spring, which has a double meaning.

The story had to have a barber shop because I wanted to have a place where people could gather and talk. Furthermore, I wanted the barber to speak guy-speak and call shots plainly. To be a conscience for the main character. In this case Fenton Carmody. Though one could argue that point.

I knew I wanted the town to have a comfortable watering hole and I kinda used Mauer’s in Elba as a prototype. Except the place I invented, the Artesian Well, serves much better food and beer.

I knew I wanted to infuse bird watching and star gazing and cooking and dinner table conversation in it because I like those things.

Then it occurred to me to write about something I knew about. Granted, there are those who will disagree with the premise that I know about basketball but I am nevertheless content with laboring under that delusion.

So I began thinking about a story loosely based around one autobiographical premise (I have coached college basketball for over 30 years): How a middle aged white guy committed professional suicide by coaching small college basketball at an institution where the juxtaposition of its name with the word athletics is an oxymoron. In the text, I define a successful basketball season for fictional Augustus Parker College as follows:

Respectable for the lowly Augustus Parker Mustangs meant a .500 season. A win for every loss. In truth, not a bad result for a school where the general public derided the institution’s traditional and longstanding athletic ineptitude.

Then I had a vision.

Several years ago, a young couple bought the house out across our back yard. We got to know them casually and a time came when I began to see the woman through my kitchen window in her upstairs study: She sat framed by a window before a desk or some kind, her image dimly lit by a lamp. She concentrated on some project before her and I just saw a head shot. But for a time—late at night, early in the morning—she never seemed to leave that spot. So I used that vision as the opening gambit and, to use a pun, I dressed it up, or rather undressed it, to start a book.

I knew all these things but I needed to populate the tale. And in the process, I discovered that I liked to make things happen through conversation and not by events. I liked working with characters.

I had a definitely flawed protagonist in mind, one who needed meaning in his life and didn’t know how to ask for it…

I gave him a bunch of things he wanted and took them away…a wife, a child, a career. I emptied his house through divorce of all but a few meager possessions. Then I started to give all those things back … and then since I’m not big on outlines I just trusted my pen. I figured that first draft would be my outline.

And that’s how it worked out. So even though I like The Healing Stone better than Window Dressing, I’ll share a few readings from Window because it better illustrates where and how I started. It all starts in Fenton Carmody’s kitchen…

This from the first chapter, titled DISTINCT ENOUGH TO LAUNCH A DREAM:

Fenton Carmody tipped his chair on two feet, draped his legs on the kitchen table, and pondered the cold November pre-dawn light. He unconsciously massaged his graying temple in a futile attempt to ease the headache that wouldn’t dissipate. He sipped strong coffee sweetened with dark brown sugar, welcoming the caffeine infusion which exacerbated the pain. That and alcohol. And the beer he’d consumed last night after the game at the Artesian Well hadn’t helped on that score. So Doctor Carpenter said. Carmody never thought the day would come when he’d be older than his general practitioner. That he’d drop his drawers for a yearly exam before a female physician who’d matter-of-factly grope his prostate. Life was full of surprise for Fenton Carmody.

Fenton continues by musing over last night’s loss and of his failings as a coach…ultimately, he decides to do what most coaches do when they’re not quite sure what to do next. They go watch game film.”

So he rises from the kitchen table and peers out the window at his bird feeder in early morning light:

He caught movement in the upstairs window of Dorothea Christian’s house across the back yard, an unusual light in an unused part of her third floor. Fenton Carmody looked after the elderly widow. He mowed her lawn, shoveled her walk, and did occasional odd jobs for the retired sculptress who owned the substantial dwelling that fronted on Boundary Avenue. Her house towered over a neatly kept ribbon of park land, which edged the banks of Clear Spring where the healthy trout stream bubbled through town even on the coldest of days. The person he saw in the window was definitely not Dorothea Christian. Fenton Carmody stood stock still, transfixed by the vision, as if his feet had sprouted roots.

A younger woman stood naked from the waist up, her tawny skin illuminated softly from the front by a table lamp in the window frame. She pulled a towel from her head and bent slightly to run a brush through long dark hair. Definitely brown, maybe auburn? A vision, a maid in her bower—pure, clean, innocent. Sexy, he thought. Life without fig leaves, indistinct enough to leave much to imagination, distinct enough to launch a dream.

Carmody knew he shouldn’t watch but could not tear himself away. Emotions he hadn’t felt in the years since Annie left stirred in his breast and elsewhere. He finally broke the trance and moved from the window, navigating on slightly wobbly legs through a largely empty house to gaze in the coat closet mirror. He made a frank evaluation. Bags under his eyes, gray running through a beard in need of a trim. A face like his father’s, especially the eyes.

Who is that guy? Carmody wondered. Not the same one who took the Parker job ten years ago. The one who delighted in his work. The one who passionately wanted to succeed as a college basketball coach. He had the world by the balls. An important job, a pretty wife, a Victorian house in town. A baby boy. Everything he always wanted. Trouble was, he got it.

That’s where I started and I had no idea what would happen, what substance I’d give to the characters I needed to invent, or where it would go. I just kept writing and using the things I wanted to write about.

That’s one of the beauties of being your own editor. You can write what you want. I’m my own publisher. I can include what I want even when people tell me not to. And I do. So anyway, I wrote Window Dressing as a kind of challenge and then I followed it up with The Healing Stone because I just wanted to see if I could take the story to a different place.Now they’re both done and I’m done with them. In some ways, I feel like I don’t own them anymore.

So because I don’t know what else to do at a reading, let me introduce you to some of the characters. Some people swear they know who they are but they’re really not. At least not in my mind.

The protagonist needed a foil. So I invented a “mean dean”, someone looking for reasons to fire the coach who represented a threat to the dean. It was important to for him to be unlikeable. Here’s Owen George, new dean for student affairs, a power-hungry control freak:

Folks on campus called him ‘Dog’ behind his back. Owen George owned a nasty habit of dogging coeds with his eyes, a not so subtle weighing and measuring of anatomic parts of interest. The acronym connected the verb to the first letters of his title and initials.”

The protagonist needed someone to keep him on track. To keep him honest and that’s where the barber comes in.

Rennie is Fenton’s truth-teller and calls things as sees them to keep Carmody in line. Rennie is the only one not to handle him with kid gloves. There are chapters where he bluntly and frankly berates the coach with tough love. In fact, the first time we meet Rennie, he blames the coach for a last night’s lost game. I give him free profane reign and gradually reel his language in, but I wanted to Rennie to reflect how I hear guys speak a lot when they with other guys. I wanted him to be authentic. So here’s Rennie:

Rennie was an iconoclast, to say the least. A sixties holdover who sounded like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider, the wiry, pony-tailed barber served time for armed robbery, a teenage mistake. He took to styling hair in prison, read way too much Alfred Adler, and ultimately invented an award-winning hair curler that he made from a chicken bone. The recognition earned him a job in a Manhattan salon.

“I lasted a week,” Rennie said, “and couldn’t fuckin’ take it. I wanted to do my own styling, not what someone else told me to do, man. That didn’t cut it. I quit and hit the bottle and went on a two-year bender.”

Ultimately he landed on Commerce Street in Clear Spring. Rennie Michaels opened a town-and-gown barbershop where locals gathered to drink coffee and talk sports, weather, politics, and, when women weren’t present in his equal opportunity shop, women.

That still wasn’t enough to go on, so I gave the protagonist more problems. I invented a floundering parental relationship and introduced a laconic father who had succeeded precisely where the son had failed. I made him a successful high school basketball coach, revered as an icon in New York. But the same coach was so harsh on coaching his own son that he drove him away. So harsh, in fact, that even though they both loved fly fishing, they’d never done it together.

Sean Carmody loses his wife to cancer and then loses his way in the world. He sells his house, leaves his fretting full-grown daughters worrying, as he outfits a pick up for an extended western camping trip where he plans to fish all the trout rivers he’d never seen.

His first stop is Clear Spring where it becomes clear what he’s really doing is trying to mend a relationship: from her death bed Sean’s wife challenged him to make things right with his son.
So in a twist of fate, Sean Carmody finds himself in Clear Spring, living in his son’s house for the winter while working for his son as an assistant women’s basketball coach, an irony because Sean’s never had time for the women’s game.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was creating a second main character—another person trying to define a new life.

Next I invented Kate Skinner, fashioning her after a vision I had in my head of a girl I had a grad-school crush on.

First I planned to use Kate as a way for the father to talk to the son.

Second, I needed a reason to keep Sean in town for longer than the basketball season and a person to encourage him to make good on his promise to his wife.
Kate became that person.

In this segment, I introduce Sean and Kate. Over a couple of pints, the good Father Geary has convinced Sean to do a good deed for a widow on crutches … to take her grocery shopping since she has trouble driving.

It sounds good to Sean in theory but when the day comes, he’s reluctant. Sean has now arrived in front of Kate’s house.

This is part of IT WOULDN’T BE ALL THAT BAD

… Sean Carmody braked uncertainly in front of the house on Pomfret Street. Pommes frites. French fries, he thought absently. He mounted the shoveled steps, noting as he walked that he seemed to be adjusting to the cold weather. Five degrees didn’t feel all that cold. The air tasted crisp and clean. He knocked, eliciting a series of barks from behind the door.
A trim, bright-eyed woman appeared and pushed aside a jet black border collie with her crutches. “Scout,” she commanded. “Sit.” The dog sat.

She wore jeans and a white oxford button-down, tucked in at the waist, and a simple gold cross on a chain around her neck with matching posts in her ears. Katherine Skinner brushed at her chestnut hair, elegantly streaked with silver, moving it away from her face. She waited for the man to speak.

He’d expected an old granny, not a contemporary. Handsome, Carmody thought, not beautiful but handsome. Surprised, Sean Carmody felt even more surprised he was pleasantly surprised. “Mrs. Skinner?”

“Mr. Carmody? I’m almost ready.” Her handshake was firm, sure. Her voice sounded steady and belied the anxiety she felt at this ‘set up’ courtesy of Father Geary’s meddling in the lives of widows and widowers. “I’ve got my list.” She braced her crutches against the door and reached for her coat.

Sean Carmody moved to help and bumped against the crutches which bumped Katherine and she stumbled. Carmody grabbed for her and they folded in slow motion on the carpet, Carmody’s right hand pressed firmly against the woman’s breast.

“Ah … I’m sorry.” He regarded her awkwardly from a distance of about six inches. “Are you okay?” Aware of the placement of his hand, he felt powerless to move it. Scout stood over the entangled couple and tentatively licked Carmody’s cheek.

“I think so. I guess it’s good to get the formalities over, though. And you must have passed some kind of test. Scout’s pretty fierce when it comes to strange men at the door. If she likes you, you can’t be all that bad. But it’s been some time since someone felt me up. You may remove your hand now,” she said calmly.

He retracted it as if he’d touched a hot griddle and in the process, lost his precarious balance and rolled off her onto the floor. The thickly furred dog, her black muzzle going gray at the edges, slurped him again.

They burst into simultaneous laughter and, aware of each other’s bodies, regained upright positions. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” she said. “But now that we’re introduced, please call me Kate.”

So as the chapter I’ve just read from proceeds, I start to put together a quasi-family for a group I call the Clear Spring orphans. The same group will ultimately establish a B&B in Dorothea’s spacious house but that doesn’t come until the second book.

In this segment, Sean and Kate are shopping for the group’s first communal meal, Thanksgiving dinner, in a place I call the Red Rabbit, named after an IGA in Apalachicola, Florida.
I put Sean in awkward position in the grocery store where he doesn’t know what to do or say so he has a reason to talk to Kate.

At the same time, I let Sean see a bit of his son’s pain because one thing is certain. Father and son aren’t sharing. They can talk basketball but not much more.

So in the Red Rabbit, Sean and Kate meet Fenton’s ex-wife and her lover.

“Sean Carmody?” a familiar feminine voice queried. “Sean Carmody?” The man turned to face his ex-daughter-in-law.

“Annie?”

They hugged—or rather Annie hugged Sean—and stepped back to arms’ length. Neither knew what to say. “I heard you were in town. Sooner or later, I figured our paths would cross,” she started. “Rumor has it you’re here for the season.”

“I am,” he said with hesitation in his voice. He shifted the conversation. So much to know.

“Annie, it’s good to see you. How are you?” He added, “I’m sorry about … well, I’m sorry.”

She said, “Me, too. But I’m good. I’m fine.” She peered at him, giving him an evaluative once-over. “You look good,” she said. “How’s Carolyn? And how on earth did you convince her to come along on such an extended trip?”

“You didn’t know?”

“What?”
“You didn’t know Carolyn died? Cancer. A couple of years ago now.” He knew exactly. Three years, eight months, six days.

She didn’t and her smile evaporated and her eyes brimmed with tears. “I’m so sorry. Fenton never told me. He never said a word. But we don’t talk anymore.”

The chapter continues and Sean responds to her sympathy:

“It doesn’t hurt like it used to.” He spoke the truth. It didn’t hurt that much anymore—but he did feel empty, used up.

“And I’ve sold the house,” he offered. Moved into the truck outside. I wanted to get away from the Island and all the attachments there. Gonna be a fishing bum. There’s a lot of Western rivers I’ve wanted to see. A new chapter in my life. I guess you, too.” He hinted at the divorce and Caleb’s death.

“Forgive me.” Annie Holbrook motioned in the direction of her companion. “Casey Redfield, this is Sean Carmody. Fenton’s father.”

“I know. It’s in the eyes. Besides, I’ve seen you around the gym.” Redfield looked familiar to Carmody and the tall, athletically built woman stepped forward to shake his hand. “I’m the trainer at Parker. I’m sure Fenton would feel awkward introducing us.” She clarified the moment by sliding her arm into the crook of Annie’s.

Sean Carmody took the hint. I’m talking with my son’s ex-wife’s lover and she’s a girl?

The chapter continues with Annie offering to tell Sean her side of the story and then Sean and Kate sit quietly in Sean’s truck outside the Red Rabbit, Sean still pretty much in a daze starts to talk:

“You know a place where we can get a cup of coffee? Help me sort this out?” Carmody uncertainly asked for help and his question seemed to come forth from his subconscious. The unbidden invitation caught him off guard but he continued. “Funny thing is,” he added, “I’d like to hear her story.” He started the truck and put it in gear. “I’d like to hear Fenton’s, too.”

“Maybe Fenton would like to hear yours,” Katherine Skinner said.”

I want here to circle back to the title of the first book. Window Dressing has three meanings but I think most people only get two.

First there’s the obvious. From time to time, the Window Dresser we come to know as Susannah Applegate re-appears in her window late at night and Carmody is drawn to that window but, as he begins to know her, he is unable to tell her what he’s seen.
Second, the father uses the term in a brusque way when describing actions or events that are insincere and false. I introduce it first through his son who thinks of it in a meeting he has with his boss, Owen George:

“Suddenly (Fenton) remembered a phrase his father used. Window dressing. It defined Dean Owen George. Appearance over substance. Carmody let the thought go. No sense in making matters worse. He rose to leave.”

But the third part of the meaning is the obscure one. I use Susannah Applegate because I wanted a flawed and mysterious romantic interest for Carmody.

Someone to bring him back to town after he leaves.

I wanted Susannah to be a wounded healer, a seer, a herbalist, a kind of mystic, a reader of the heavens.

And I gave her those qualities because it was my prerogative.

This begins to create Susannah’s mystery in THE PROGNOSTICATION PROVED ACCURATE. It is a time when Fenton and Susannah have not yet met. It’s late at night and Fenton is tracking Susannah via his kitchen window.

She sat at some kind of desk, her face indistinct but illuminated as before from the front by a table lamp. Carmody could see her from the shoulders up as she bent at a task he could not discern. The mysterious woman with long dark hair swayed slightly while she worked, as if moving to music. She concentrated on the job before her.

Fenton Carmody concentrated on the woman. Dorothea hadn’t mentioned anything about taking on a boarder. As usual, basketball and the onset of cold and snow reduced their contact. But still. I think Dorothea would have mentioned it. Who is she? And what on earth is she doing? Especially at this time of night? With some effort, he turned his back to the scene and trudged up the stairs to bed. Will I ever see her getting dressed again?

Ultimately, we discover that Susannah is tying trout flies to make extra cash but, like every thing else, I kinda take my time getting there and, as usual, Fenton is always the last to know.
But understand that when one ties a trout fly, it can be called dressing a fly.

Throughout the story, I did my best to keep Fenton from Susannah and the other way around. I don’t know why—other than if I got them together I was afraid the story would end. But I introduce the mysterious Window Dresser to Fenton Carmody this way:

Fenton has just risen early to blow new snow from his drive and from his neighbors’ sidewalks and he’s returning to his garage after discovering someone else has cleared the sidewalks and driveway for his elderly neighbor whose house is behind his. This is from IT’S CALLED A SINGING BOWL

…He noticed a young woman sitting in the snow in a lawn chair underneath a set of bird feeders which hung from Dorothea’s stately sugar maple. Carmody recognized her by the dark hair and tawny skin. He imagined the rest.

The woman sat still, intent on some thought, and stared vacantly into space. She wore a heavy Norwegian sweater and held a rimless, cereal-sized, gleaming brass bowl in her left hand. She rotated a short, lathe-tooled wooden spindle around the edge of the bowl. Then he noticed the soothing sound emanating from it—low toned, serene, calming; trance-inducing, like a humming choir.

The yard vibrated with bird life, all seemingly unaware of her presence. Cardinals, juncos, a few white throated sparrows, and some mourning doves fed on the ground at her feet alongside the neighborhood’s resident albino squirrel. Redpolls, gold finches, house finches, chickadees shared feeder perches with chunkier, more aggressive English sparrows. Several nuthatches and downy woodpeckers worked at nearby birch bark. This modern day St. Francis seemingly attracted the birds with the bowl. Carmody’s mouth dropped open and he stood transfixed as one brave chickadee perched lightly on her left thigh and selected a sunflower seed she’d evidently placed on her jeans for that purpose. The kind of scene pictured only in bird feeder ads.

“It’s called a singing bowl. It’s made in Nepal,” she said.

The birds scattered, their combined fluttering audible. Carmody gazed blankly at her and kept rubbing his hand…

The conversation continues awkwardly and Susannah notices his hand.

She stood up and walked to the fence. “Your hand hurt?”

Carmody’s tongue unknotted slowly. “No. Not really.” He paused and admitted, “Actually that’s not true. It’s nothing new. I’ve got some arthritis. From too much racquetball.” He added, “The snow blowing doesn’t help. Gripping the handle an all.” It occurred to Carmody he very much wanted to say the right thing, to make a good impression. He hadn’t felt that way in quite some time. I have absolutely no idea how to talk to this woman, he thought…

It’s at this point I introduce star gazing to the story and add another dimension to Susannah. As the story unfolds she will host full moon gatherings for her friends but that hasn’t happened yet.

“You’ll see the moon tonight,” she nodded at the clearing sky. “It’s full. It’ll rise a little after sunset. In colonial days they called the November moon the Beaver Moon. You can find Saturn, too. We’ll have three planets to see.

Carmody wanted to say something smart or clever but all he could manage was, “I’ll be watching.

The chapter concludes with Susannah accepting an invitation to see Carmody’s team play basketball. He gives her a pocket-size schedule:

She accepted it, imitated a small curtsy, and offered her serious gaze. “Thanks.” She started to move away. “I gotta be going. Nice to meet you. I’ll be watching, too.”

You’re not the only one, Fenton Carmody thought.

When he went to the office later that day, the vacant gym closed for the long weekend, Fenton Carmody Googled for a star gazing site. He discovered a sky calendar created by the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University and printed out the November edition.

Fenton Carmody vowed silently to learn more about the firmament. He had stars in his eyes.

Then there’s the stone itself. I wanted to use the stone as a way of adding a sense of magic. I was trying to make the unbelievable believable.

After a communal Christmas dinner with friends, Susannah stayed behind to give Fenton a present. This is from IT’S GOT SOME MAGIC IN IT

…Susannah lingered that evening after the group dispersed. She held out a small mahogany box, wrapped with a single red ribbon, and handed it to Fenton Carmody. “A present,” she said. “Merry Christmas.”

Carmody undid the bow and flipped the lid on the brass-hinged box. He extracted a gleaming black stone, its crystals so dense it felt smooth and polished—about the size and shape of a Vintage Brass No. 5 Smoke Stone cigarette lighter. The rock nestled in the palm of his hand and lay there as if it belonged. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

“It’s a healing stone, forged from magma heat. It’s metamorphic rock. That’s a sedimentary rock that’s been heated and pressurized. It started forming when Europe and Africa crashed into North America. When the continental tectonic plates collided they pushed the Appalachians into the sky. They were the size of the Himalayas but that was like two hundred and fifty million years ago. Then, during the Triassic, the continents separated and this rock came up from the rift. Only recently—like about forty thousand years ago—the Wisconsin glacier dragged it from the area around the Connecticut River Valley to what would become Long Island. I happened to pick it up on a North Shore beach. So,” she finished her geology lesson and got to the point, “it’s an ancient rock from the heart of the earth and it’s got some magic in it.” She reached out and touched his hand, molding his fingers around the stone, smoothed and polished by centuries of salt water action. “For the arthritis. It eases the pain. Feel the heat.”

Fenton Carmody gripped the object loosely in his right hand and immediately felt soothing warmth spread into his muscles and articulations. He glanced from her to his hand and back to her as surprise spread across his face. He tightened his grip. “Wow. This feels great.” He opened his hand and closed it again. “It fits,” he remarked as if trying on a glove.

“Merry Christmas,” she said again and slipped out the door, stepping into a wash of full moon light. She turned to Fenton Carmody who stood in the doorway, gripping his warm gift, quietly watching her leave, a black border collie at his knees. “I’m a healer, remember? But you must want to be healed.”

“I need healing?”

“You know the old question about the pope being Catholic?

“It’s that obvious?”

“What do you think?” She disappeared into the night.

I used the stone to monitor the strength of the relationship between Fenton and Susannah. Ultimately I titled the second book after the stone and there does come a time when the magic stone loses its healing powers.

But first I had to give Susannah troubles of her own, keep all her jobs mysterious at the same time.

I need to let Fenton Carmody think he’ll lose his coaching job. I’ll delay his firing and then surprise him with it.

I’ll forge a friendship between Sean and Kate and introduce a cast of minor characters.

I needed some players for Carmody to coach and I had fun giving life to them: a black woman from Mississippi, the daughter of cattle rancher from Saddlestring, Wyoming; and my favorite, Jenny Roanhorse, a shy first-year Navaho fresh off the rez who struggles with her identity and the betrayal of her body.

There’s a female assistant coach who ultimately gets her boss’s job. Like Fenton, it’s a dream come true for her. Then she realizes there are much better things a young woman can do with her life.

I give depth to Rennie’s life by giving him a special friend. He changes his life for the better while attending the Sturgis motor cycle rally.

There’s a wily female college vice president who unsuccessfully presses Carmody for damning I information about Owen George. The VP manages the college with a deft touch.

I should not forget my favorite character, widow Dorothea Christian whose husband was an advisor to Dwight Eisenhower. Dorothea comes from money and is a retired but influential sculptress. But she is largely estranged from her family. Don’t ask because I don’t know exactly why. But Dorothea and her home play a prominent part in the proceedings.

I also had fun with a classical guitarist, a Brit named Peter Blackstone who teaches music at the school.

Then there’s a fishing guide named Seth, a mysterious woman named Tasha, the good Father Geary who likes a dram or two, a host of barber shop kibitzers.

Of course, I weave a lot of basketball lore into the tale—but I get most of that out of my system in the first book—and that’s for the better—but I had some things to say.

The only true to life character in the book is a dog named Scout.

In the book, she is a good fishing companion. In real life, she is not. She swims in the water and scares the trout away.

Finally, I need to exact vengeance on the Mean Dean. Many assume he dies at the end of the first book…But to find out about all of that … well, I guess you’ll have to read the books for yourself.

John Hershey has worked in five colleges and universities for 33 years as a basketball coach, administrator, outdoor educator, teacher, and community relations liaison. He writes for the fun of it as time allows. He lives in St. Paul and is grateful his wife still loves him and his “late-teen” boys still talk to him. One day he hopes to find a situation where he can just write and keep his wading boots from drying out.