Northshore Authors

by Ann Gilbert

Books open wondrous worlds for us. We laugh, we cry, we shiver, we get angry, we feel hopeful and we learn much about ourselves and this creation in which we live. At this time of year, those who love to read often honor a friend or relative with a special book. 

The culturally rich northshore is not short on great literature or great authors. It was difficult to select just a few. In this issue, we feature four novelists.

Good reading!

Beverly Marshall
Mentors Encouraged
Novelist’s Belief in Self

Would-be writers would do well to take notice of Beverly Marshall’s rise to success. Mentors all along the way encouraged her to break out.

The professor in her first writing class was a dead ringer for Robert Redford. She says, “I moved up to the front row and told myself, ‘I will learn to write.’” He later told her she had written the best short stories he ever received, and invited her to join his writers group. Marshall recalls saying, “You mean I can do this?”

When her husband retired from the military and they settled in Mandeville, she began working on a master’s degree in English at Southeastern. Here, she heard yet more encouragement from her professor, acclaimed author Tim Gautreaux (“The Clearing.”) Upon reading her short stories, he urged her, “Send these out to publishers.”

Now a Ponchatoula resident, she became a novelist by accident. “One of my short stories got out of hand. It kept getting longer and longer. That was the turning point when I realized I could do a novel,” she says, with a laugh.

Marshall formed a writers group—they are still meeting 20 years later—to exchange ideas and get support and criticism. She also struck out for New York and a gathering of some of America’s best writers. “I was the only Southerner at the conference. They had me read often,” she says, with a big grin. No doubt, her fellow attendees were fascinated by the Mississippi drawl of this McComb native.

Marshall brought an unfinished manuscript of her novel “Right as Rain” to be critiqued. She was advised, “Quit your job [teaching at Southeastern] and write fulltime. Get an agent. This needs to be published.”

“I cried,” Marshall says. “I was a country child who had walked barefoot with mud between my toes.” The man who reviewed her work was Douglas Glover, who would win the Pulitzer Prize in Canada.

When her first editor said to lengthen the ending of “Right as Rain,” Marshall added 300 pages and presented a bulky 600-page manuscript. “You ruined it,” he told her.
“I know,” she said. There would be five rewrites of “Right as Rain.”

Her second novel grew out of long days spent at her father’s bedside in the hospital. “Tell me a story, Daddy,” she said. “Have you ever heard about the murder of the young girl at the dairy?” he began. Marshall scribbled furiously. That inspired “Walking through Shadows.”

When Marshall submitted the first draft of “Walking through Shadows,” the editor said, “A child wouldn’t say those things.”
Marshall almost bought a shredder to destroy the manuscript, but while browsing in her library, a particular book jumped at her. “I am psychic, you know.” That book was “Follow Me Down,” by fellow Mississippian Shelby Foote. She threw away 200 pages and rewrote her book, using insights gained from the Foote novel.

A publisher called one day and told Marshall he was buying her book, offering a two-book deal. Her agent was in the wilderness and unreachable by cell. “I didn’t even know what book he was talking about. I didn’t know what she had sent him. When he told me, I said, ‘I didn’t mean to sell that one!’” Do you get the feeling that Marshall was pulled up the ladder of publishing success?

“Walking through Shadows” was honored by Book Sense. A German company bought both books and turned them into radio plays. Her third novel, “Hot Fudge Sundae Blues,” received the New York Public Library Books for The Teen Age designation. She shares an agent with Ann Patchett (“Bel Canto”) and Douglas Brinkley.

Marshall says that, as a child, the only books in her home were the Bible, an encyclopedia and the paperbacks hidden under her mother’s bed. “When I found the library, my world opened up. I thought I was going to be a librarian.” When the Mississippi librarians named “Right as Rain” as Fiction of the Year, she told them, “Well, I did worm my way into your library.”

Marshall credits the strong storytelling habit of her family with planting the seeds that would lead to her writing career. Her dad still tells her stories, and she still writes them all down.

Charles Gramlich
Sci-fi Writer Wears
Psychology Prof Hat

While doing chores as a young teen on the Arkansas family farm, science fiction writer Charles Gramlich says he dreamed of intergalactic swashbuckling heroes. His vivid imagination was no doubt fueled by his passion for reading. “I would hide in the barn to escape the work and read, and I was grateful when it rained,” he says.

Gramlich leads two lives. He’s a writer of fantasy and horror, and he carries the title of Ph.D. when teaching psychology at Xavier University. He’s been imbedded there since graduating from the University of Arkansas 20 years ago.

His first major was biology—he teaches biological psychology—and that background helps him to create his extraterrestrials, he says. After working with college students all day, he writes every night at home in Abita Springs, even if it is only one paragraph. “It keeps the flow going. You don’t want to lose the momentum. When your character wants to tell you something, you have to listen.

“It seems real to me when I am writing. I really get caught up.” Almost anything goes in his genre, he says, but it has to be consistent. One cannot violate the rules.

There is more magic in the fantasy field today, the author suggests. He doesn’t like that. He prefers adventure and a good sword fight. But they must be gentlemen in the Errol Flynn mode, fighting with honor and integrity, and never stabbing someone in the back.

Gramlich’s three-part series, “The Talera Cycle,” belongs to the sword and planet genre, a division of fantasy. Books One and Two were serialized in a science fiction magazine and won Readers’ Choice awards. Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan, was the founder of the sword and planet genre. Gramlich finds older folks like his work because they miss Burroughs. They were looking for something to fill the gap. His other major audience is young men.

The author says men are largely interested in science fiction, while women predominantly read fantasy. Both groups are grabbed by horror, and gory is how critics describe Gramlich’s other novel, “The Cold in the Light.” It is set in rural Arkansas, and, as one reader said, “It leaves a shiver on the spine that doesn’t go away in the rising sun.”

People want to be scared, Gramlich says. “They want to see something that never seemed possible before. But there must be some realism. Although it has never happened, it could happen, but it is unlikely.” He continues, “Take a good character and put him in a dangerous situation, whether it is realistic or unrealistic. If you can get them to believe in your characters, they will believe in your monsters.”

Gramlich is a member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association of America, and has a small book coming out on vampire haiku. The three-line poems will be printed vertically down the page as it is done in Japan. He notes that it takes practice to read it.
Helping other writers is a large part of Gramlich’s life, whether teaching non-fiction writing (academic and scientific papers) at Xavier or fiction writing through his Internet column, “Illuminata.” Those columns are being compiled into a book called “Writing with Fire.”

Gramlich’s other great interest is motorcycles. He’s got the biker look with flowing salt-and-pepper hair. But he doesn’t have a bike now. He totaled two in the streets of New Orleans when hit by automobiles, and has the scars to prove it. “People are too crazy. It’s too scary now,” says the horror writer.

Pam Ewen
Determination Marks
Attorney-Author’s Life

As a pre-teen, Pamela Ewen became the family librarian, indexing and making notes on the beautifully bound classics sent by a favorite uncle. She says she was “a nerdy little person” who taught herself to type and who obsessively worked on her “Jane Austen rip-off” after school.

Writing is in the family genes. Ewen is a distant cousin of James Lee Burke—they share ancestors that he wrote about in “White Doves at Morning.” Arthur DuBus II, author of “House of Sand and Fog,” is another relative.

On her first try, college would slip through Ewen’s fingers. “I became a flower child of the ’60s,” she says, with a chuckle. As single mom at age 28, the determined Ewen went back to college and was accepted into Tulane’s law school on a scholarship.

Never one to give up, when her second husband was transferred to Corpus Christi, she entered law school in Houston, making the 200-mile, four-hour commute twice weekly. In the summers, she took her young son to class with her.
She also took a gun. The long drive was lonely between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. The weapon gave her comfort, despite the fact that she didn’t know how to use it. One day, a mechanic working on her car found the loaded gun and placed it on the seat next to the bullets he had removed. “I don’t like guns,” he told her. Ewen stopped at a service station as she began her trip home and asked the attendant to load her gun. He refused. She recalls she was terrified as she drove home that dark night with her unloaded gun.

Ewen worked for a prestigious Houston law firm for 25 years. During that time, she become agnostic and spent years trying to find God. She wrote about her search in her first book, “Faith on Trial,” in which she uses courtroom techniques in presenting biblical evidence to prove the existence of Jesus. The text was used in a Yale law school class and made several minor bestseller lists. She had a small part in the film based on the book.

“You spend years writing a book and find the work is not over when it is published,” says Ewen. “You have to market it. I spoke to dozens of legal groups and churches about “Faith on Trial.”
Three themes exist in her second book, “Walk Back The Cat,” available at St. Tammany Parish Library. They coalesce around a timid apostle, a tragic child and a worldly minister.

The week of this interview, Ewen was going to Nashville to approve the cover of her third book, “The Moon in Mango,” which is coming out next spring. The story of her grandmother, it is based on her “long, beautiful letters written home from Siam,” where her medical-missionary husband ended up as the king’s personal physician. Trained in grand opera, Ewen’s grandmother fled the jungles of Southeast Asia for Paris, after putting her children in a boarding school in Switzerland. Ewen says she fictionalized her grandmother’s story instead of just printing the letters because “I could tell a truer story by enlarging upon simple phrases, such as ‘They are trying to convert me.’”

Ewen’s fourth book, “Dancing on the Glass,” was a recent finalist in the Faulkner unpublished books competition, an international event with 200 entries.

When life tosses her lemons, Ewen seems to make the best of it. While in Houston in a state of depression over the failure of her second marriage, she called a childhood friend in New Orleans and asked him to take her dancing. Jimmy Lott eventually married Ewen, and they now call Mandeville home. “I married my oldest and dearest friend,” she says.

Erica Spindler
`Fridge Graveyard

Inspired New Thriller

If you’re a regular at Mandeville coffee shops and notice a woman furiously typing on her laptop while plugged into her i-Pod, you may be witnessing the birth of the next Erica Spindler thriller. Instead of being squirreled away in her home office, this St. Tammany writer likes to compose her novels in the midst of the busy life of a coffee shop.

Spindler’s life was seemingly well ordered in the late ’80s. She taught art at Southeastern, having received a master’s degree in fine art from the University of New Orleans. A bout with the flu would change everything. While picking up some prescriptions to kill the bug, she added a couple of romance novels that were displayed by the cash register to her purchase.

The little paperbacks caught her imagination. She began to read them daily and soon said to herself, “I want to write these.” But one doesn’t give up a day job, as the saying goes, until there is security, and she didn’t leave the university until the fifth novel was published.

Spindler reached the top in her genre, and was named a finalist for three years in the Reader Award competition. Her books were printed in about a dozen languages.

She “switched to the dark side” after 13 romance novels. “I didn’t plan to switch to suspense,” she says. “I was just following my muse. One of my novels featured a serial killer as a sub-plot. I had so much fun doing it, I wanted to do more.” But she notes it’s tough to switch in mid-stream. “Your readers are used to finding you in one certain section of the bookstore. You have to pull them along with you.”

While she whipped out three romance books a year, it takes longer to pen a suspense thriller. The plot is more complex, the book larger, and there is more research than in the “bodice rippers.” Now she is in hardback, too. Spindler successfully made the transition and has received the prestigious Daphne du Maurier award.

She attributes her success to the ability to spin something into the worst-case or scariest scenario. “Bone Cold” developed after a young pen pal wrote that she loved corn chips and cappuccinos, two of Spindler’s favorite foods. “I have a dark gift,” she says. “I immediately thought, ‘What if this is some deranged fan?’, and the book began there.”

This fall’s new release is “Last Known Victim,” in which a hurricane shapes the plot. The idea for the novel came when she saw photographs of the refrigerator graveyards after Katrina. “They looked like tombstones lined up in a cemetery.” The plot revolves around the discovery of six right hands.

A recent novel, “Copy Cat,” is now in paperback. It features two female detectives, one seasoned but burnt out, and the other a young and arrogant rookie. Her work in progress is a carry over of the two cops. “I loved the characters, and the fans and critics gave me positive feedback.” Spindler is looking forward to the research for a future novel set in Napa Valley.

Life with her publishers has been smooth sailing, she says, with no major rewrites. But covers are another thing. “We writers always complain about our covers. We seldom agree with what is selected. We have lived with the story, and would usually love to adjust the covers.”

The mother of two boys, ages 9 and 18, Spindler keeps a regular writing schedule of 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. daily. Her husband, who is in advertising, reads the thrillers, but didn’t pick up the romance novels. As they were leaving for the airport recently, Erica handed him an advance copy of “Last Known Victim,” and said, smiling, “Do a little advertising for me, honey. Read this on the plane.”