Shelley Blanton-Stroud grew up in California’s Central Valley, the daughter of Dust Bowl immigrants who made good on their ambition to get out of the field. She co-directs Stories on Stage Sacramento, where actors perform the stories of established and emerging authors, and serves on the advisory board of 916 Ink, an arts-based creative writing nonprofit for children. She teaches college writing in Northern California and has also served on the Writers’ Advisory Board for the Belize Writers’ Conference. She's had flash fiction and non-fiction in such journals as Brevity and Cleaver, and she recently published her first novel, Copy Boy.
Copy Boy, which one reviewer called "Raymond Chandler for feminists," is set in the 1930s depression era and centers on Jane Hopper, whose parents are trapped in a loveless marriage. When her mother threatens to leave her father for another man, he becomes violent towards her and Jane, and Jane strikes her father with a crowbar in defense. Leaving him for dead, Jane steals his truck and escapes to San Francisco to start a new life as a copy boy at the local newspaper, the Prospect. But copy boys are just that, boys, so Jane disguises herself as a man, even learning to smoke and swear. When she becomes obsessed with the mystery of a woman found unconscious after being assaulted with a crowbar—a woman who was photographed with Jane’s father—Jane’s old life threatens to come crashing down into her new life and expose her as a fraud.
Shelley stops by In Reference to Murder to talk about the book:
On July 18, it will be ten years since I got the call.
I was packing up to head out the door to my neighborhood Sacramento library to lead a book talk on Ann Tyler’s Digging to America. I’d been leading those talks for ten years but it still made me a little nervous, every time. I was last-minute-gathering the snacks, notes, discussion questions, the key card. Hunting a lost sandal. I was late.
When the phone rang, I didn’t expect to pick up—there was no time. But I looked at the handset in its cradle and the digital caller ID read, Monterey Bay Ambulance.
Which one is it?
My husband Andy and two college-age sons were on a scuba diving trip. Our oldest, Will, was a dive master. My husband and youngest, Henry, were getting certified, preparing for adventure. This was the final step—getting tested in Monterey Bay.
Which one is it?
I picked up the phone and heard twenty-year old Will. “Everything’s okay Mom. But I’m in an ambulance with Dad. It looks like he’s had a heart attack.”
Treading in the Bay’s 56-degree water, Andy felt pressure, everything yellow, a buzzing in his ears. His arms and legs went weak. Will saw how white his face was. He called to the scuba guide, who was treading water over the spot where eighteen-year-old Henry had submerged. The guide told him to get Andy to shore. The guide stayed waiting for Henry to come up.
Will did swim Andy to shore, paddling with one arm, the other hooked around his father’s chest. On the beach, he found a doctor with a phone. At the hospital, they discovered he’d suffered heart failure. He’d had a previous heart attack we’d never even known about. As I was running to his hospital room, five hours later, I could hear Andy down the hall, laughing and joking with the doctor. Acting like himself. Will was pleased with the scrubs the nurse had given him to wear. Henry was shaken, but fine. We were going to be okay. For now.
Ten years later, Andy is fine, he’s great. So why do I share this with you now?
Because it was that weekend, ten years ago, when the two of us really saw how everything could end, just end, before we were finished being who we wanted to be, doing what we wanted to do. That’s when Andy and I agreed, we’d better start doing it now.
That’s when I began to write my novel, Copy Boy, though I didn’t know yet that’s what I was doing. I was just recording family stories in a journal, getting down whatever I could remember seeing, hearing, being told, as I grew up, about my family’s history as Depression-era, Dust Bowl Okies, migrating from Texas and Oklahoma to California’s Central Valley, where they would have to work and fight and hustle themselves into the lives they wanted. Just getting it down.
Then I starting researching the bigger picture, the history all around our family. So many books, so many field trips to the Central Valley, to San Francisco’s neighborhoods, bars from the thirties.
Then I started taking local writing workshops, where I met teachers and other writers—mostly women my age, fiftyish—who encouraged each other to develop a voice. To make syntactical choices, patterns of them, that would become a kind of thumbprint, making each of us recognizable in the print. There were many such workshops.
Then, I started taking workshops about the science or architecture of story, especially the architecture of mystery. It was a revelation to learn the elements of it, getting under the hood of my own book. I attended the Book Passage Mystery Conference to learn such things and there I met writer friends who would become essential to my preparation. Some of us continue to talk twice a month by Zoom. It was also at this conference where a famous mystery writer told me the chapter I’d shown her was a mess. I had work to do.
So, I worked on it. Then, six months later, five years ago, I sent off a chapter to a couple literary workshops, hoping to get into one. Instead, miraculously, I was accepted by both the Napa Valley Writers Conference and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. (I got into this one off the Wait List.) In those places, I got more literary advice. I made terrific writer friends I’m in contact with now every day. I began to believe that maybe I could do this. At Squaw, a famous writer assigned to read my chapter, told me he was still hung over from the absinthe the night before, and that my kind of writing wasn’t really the kind of thing he liked to read. So that was bad. I was embarrassed. But when I told him one of my family stories, he said, Why don’t you put that in your first chapter? I did. He insulted me but I got over it. I used it.
The next year, I attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, again off the Wait List. (Did I mention I believe in wait lists?) There I heard brilliant talks on craft, watched authors perform their stories, had my first-ever chance to read one of my stories to an audience in the Blue Parlor. I cried up there as I read it. Some people in the audience cried too. I thought, maybe I belong here.
There were years of revising—I mean head-to-toe revising. The male protagonist turned into a female. The female became a cross-dresser. I moved from first person to third. From YA to adult literary historical mystery. I changed every inch of it. I spent three more years doing this, with feedback from so many freelance editors and critique groups, who made worlds of difference by giving me advice.
Once it got to the place where I was happy, I knew pretty quickly that I would sign with She Writes Press. That part was obvious. I liked the blend of support and control they offered. They’re a writer’s team. I like a team.
So, you’re probably thinking it’s odd that it took me ten years to make this book. But it also took me ten years of library book talks before that to develop a strong sense of what I just enjoy reading.
Ten years of book clubs. Ten years learning to make a book. You’d better believe I’m going to be making a new ten year plan next month.
You can read more about Shelley and her work on her website and also follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
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