Spotlight Profile
February 2007
Sharon Wildwind, a writer and gerontology nurse, is a native of Louisiana. Twenty-five years ago she moved to Alberta, Canada to do public health nursing in what she refers to as "the near north." She wanted to see what it was like to live in a small town, in a remote area, and, she says, "to experience Winter---yes, with a capital W---first hand." She loved it! She worked for several years in the northwest corner of Alberta, traveling to four small communities, and eventually married a man from Calgary, where she now lives. Her first book, Dreams that Blister Sleep is a memoir based on her experiences with the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in Viet Nam. Her Elizabeth "Pepper" Pepperhawk mystery series is also based on those experiences.
IC: Do you think your work as a nurse and your work as a mystery writer draw on the same or different skills and attributes? Do you think they fulfill similar or different needs?
SW: Good nurses are good observers. Nurses, like detectives, look for clues and find patterns. I've been fortunate to work in a variety of different settings, from intensive care, where the clues can develop in a few crucial minutes to community care, where the patterns develop over months. That helped me understand that different parts of a story require different pacing. Nursing is also full of human interest stories. My work has shown me many different ways to be human and that certainly helps with character development. And any nurse has a whole list of no-kidding-there-I-was stories, which usually start with "Let me tell you what came into the emergency room today." My personal favorite---and no I'm not going to tell it to you because doing it justice requires me to do it live as performance art---involves a psychiatric patient; a locked, windowless room; and a child-proof pill bottle.
For me, nursing and writing fulfill different needs. As a nurse, I have a professional responsibility to maintain boundaries, act in a safe manner, and follow ethical guidelines. My husband, who teaches Spanish rapier, is fond of saying, "To understand the dance, you have to understand the freedoms and restrictions of the circle." Nursing is about dancing within freedoms and restrictions of the health care system. When I write my characters are much freer to color outside the lines than I would ever be in real life. They get into some terrible scrapes, and have to pay the consequences, which makes for a better story.
IC: How do you balance your work as a gerontology nurse with your writing? They both seem like demanding professions!
SW: I work a 3-11 shift in nursing, so after I finish writing at noon, I have two or three hours to decompress, get my bearings and shift gears. Okay, so sometimes I think about the characters while I'm doing my nursing job, but I rarely think about nursing while I'm writing. One nice thing about the writing is that it helps me leave my clients at work.
IC: How did you become interested in the mystery genre?
SW: My dad was a great mystery fan. He introduced me to the genre when I was about ten. My first crush was on Archie Goodwin. This was at the tail end of great radio mysteries being broadcast. Yours truly, Johnny Dollar was probably my all-time favorite, but I listened to everything I could on the dial. It was also the beginning of television detectives and policemen: Daren McGavin as Mike Hammer, Brodrick Crawford in Highway Patrol, and Robert Stack in The Untouchables. My second crush may very well have been Elliot Ness.
IC: How did you become involved with Sisters in Crime?
SW: Through a terrific lady, the late Elizabeth Daniels Squires. Liz and I took some creative writing courses together in the early eighties, and when she found out I was writing mysteries, she told me to get myself over to Sisters immediately, which I did.
My experiences with Sisters in Crime have been consistently wonderful. It's a hard call what I look forward to more in the morning: my first cup of tea or my first SinC e-mail. I must confess to a small amount of heroine worship. Sometimes I'll exchange e-mails with a Well-Known Author and I feel just like Sweet Honey in the Rock sings: "The power of the universe knows my name." I hope no one takes that as sacrilegious, because it's not intended that way. It's just, as a beginning writer, for a well-known author to crack a joke with me or says "I saw your posting and . . ." makes me feel like I'm going to make it after all.
IC: Your first book was a memoir based on the journal you kept during your tour as a nurse in Viet Nam. Why did you then decide to write a mystery based on those experiences?
SW: I was doing a reading for Dreams That Blister Sleep: A Nurse in Vietnam. Someone in the audience said, "I hated that you ended the book with coming home from Vietnam. I wanted to know what happened to you afterwards." Truthfully, my coming home was pretty mundane, but I thought it might be interesting to have some veteran-characters who had a harder and more interesting time that I did. I didn't want a book (or a series) where characters sat around and bemoaned how hard it was to be a veteran, so I knew I needed a hook for adventure. What if one of my characters stumbled over a body a couple of weeks after she got back from 'Nam? What if she kept stumbling over bodies?
IC: Did you know at the time that you were writing a series? What decisions did you make in order to create a character readers (and you) would want to live with over the course of several books? (Or, what decisions do you wish you'd made?)
SW: Yes, I intentionally set out to do a series for three reasons. One is my age. I'll be 60 in a couple of months, so while I don't fret (much) over my age, I also know realistically that I don't have as much time for my writing career as someone who is 22. Second, I had no idea how being a mystery writer would work out. I figured writing a five-book series would be like training wheel on a bike. If I did okay with that, then I'll take the trainers off and head for Thrill Hill. Thrill Hill was my parents' name for the only big hill in my relatively flat hometown. The third reason was that I saw the adventures of Pepper et al fitting neatly between two dates: July 1, 1971 the day I reported to Fort Bragg, North Carolina after my year in Vietnam, and April 30, 1975, the date the American embassy fell in Saigon.
IC: Can you tell us a little about the books in the Elizabeth "Pepper" Pepperhawk series?
SW: In Some Welcome Home, Pepper is numb. She's been back from Vietnam for less than a month and spent most of that time fighting with her parents. Finding a body in her bed is the last thing she needs. The friends she makes, Military Police Officer Avivah Rosen and Special Forces Sergeant Benny Kirkpatrick, are just what she needs.
First Murder in Advent, starts the week Pepper leaves the Army. Benny is already a civilian and Avivah still on active duty. All of a sudden there is a big, scary civilian world out there, which is hostile to Vietnam veterans. Pepper and Benny are essentially looking at one another and saying, "Who the heck are we? What do we do now?"
Soldier on the Porch is slated to come out next fall. The hospital where Pepper works blow up. No it's not her fault. Well, not exactly her fault. Let's just say civilian life is catching up with all three of the characters. The working title of the fourth book is Missing, Presumed Wed. It's about broken promises, false hopes, and the art of redemption. In 1974---depending on your point of view---either all the troops were out of Vietnam, or there were still men Missing in Action who needed to be brought home. The Paris Peace Accord was holding and Vietnam literally dropped out of the American consciousness for everyone except the people who had been there. There was very much a feeling of dusting off your hands, saying "Well, that's over. Let's just forget it and get on with our real concerns about high oil prices and the cost of beef."
IC: Pepperhawk is a great name. How did you decide on it for your protagonist?
SW: It was a name game that another writer taught me. Write down a list of nouns, all of which have some baggage attached. Then combine the nouns at random. Pepper (hot, spicy, burn your tongue, make you sit up and take notice)+Hawk (majestic, bird's eye view, remote). Elizabeth Ann Pepperhawk: a woman best handled with asbestos gloves.
IC: Can you tell us a bit about Pepper? How is she like (and unlike) you? What do you like best about her?
SW: Angels watch out for people like Pepper. She has absolutely no boundaries. She plunges head-first into an activity and only after life gets sticky does she give any thought to whether what she is doing is a good idea. In spite of having been to Vietnam, she starts the series naive and trailing a lot of emotional baggage from her Catholic upbringing. In a time of sexual revolution, she's still a virgin. She might be able to run a hospital ward, but she has a lot of trouble managing her private life, particularly where one officer with blond hair and smoky-blue eyes is concerned.
My family is very conservative. I was the one who thrived on odd experiences. That part of me is like Pepper. But I was also always a worrier, who even as I was buying her plane ticket to the next adventure, had this voice in my head going "Is this really a good idea? Now would be a good time to turn back." Sometimes it took a lot of courage to tell that voice to be quiet. Pepper gets to have the adventure up front, then do the worrying later.
What I like best about Pepper is her ability to see both sides of the military. Heroes, patriotism, courage, and honor fascinate her but she has a strong understanding that the reality of being a soldier is, at the same time, better and worse than civilians could ever imagine. There was a sign over a MIKE Force bar in Vietnam, "You have never lived until you've almost died. To those who fight for it, life has a flavor the protected never know." Both Pepper and I have Zippo lighters with that second sentence engraved on them.
IC: Your books seem very character-driven. You speak of them as if you know and love them, and reviewers often mention your gift for creating "real" and rounded characters. How do you bring your characters to life?
SW: I wish I knew. Each one is a patchwork of people I've been privileged to know. I learned a lot about character development from Donald Maass. I try to go for his idea that readers want their characters bigger than real life, able to confront the challenges most of us would shrink from doing, to say the things that common sense tells us not to say, to have real passion for life.
It also helps that, even though I write characters living several decades ago, the characters are the same age in fiction as I was in real life. Pepper goes to Vietnam when she was 23 years old. So did I, and I can draw on that memory, not only of what it was like to be that young, but what it was like to be that young in 1970. I guess it's part of that write what you know advice.
One thing that pleases me is I'm getting away from what the writing teacher, Sherry Lewis, calls "perfectly nice syndrome." None of my characters are getting a free ride about anything, even the small details. I originally wanted to give Pepper a nice house. Fortunately, she ended up with a mortgage she can barely afford, and the place needs work, and she has housemates that make life entirely too interesting. I'm a great believer in what romance writer, Jo Beverly, said in a workshop, "I will be a cruel goddess. I will stress out my characters to the breaking point. A non-stressed character is a useless character."
IC: Have your characters changed over the course of the series?
SW: The whole series is about growth and change. And about romance. Each characters will come to some degree of peace with the idea that while the past may overtake you, it doesn't have to overwhelm you.
IC: You've said that you plan to write five books in the Pepperhawk series? How far ahead do you plan them? Do you know what each of the five books will be about, or do you plan the next as you finish the current one?
SW: I started with a global arc. I knew the approximate date on which each of the books would start; each date was pegged to either something in my own background or an event that happened at the end of the Vietnam war. I knew, in a general way, what major change would happen in Pepper's, Avivah's, and Benny's lives in each book.
When I start a new book, the first thing I do is spend a day in the library reading back copies of "Newsweek" for the six months before the book takes place. For "Married, Presumed Wed" I'm immersing myself in remembering/recreating what it was like to be 27 years old in the summer of 1974.
I think about where the character is, physically and emotionally, at the start and end of the book, but beyond that I don't do detailed lists or plot outline before I write the book. I try not to pick on the same character in successive books. The character who had a tough time in the last book gets to recover in the next book. Most of the time, I work chapter by chapter. Occasionally a really good scene occurs to me out of sequence, and I'll write it, then put it away until I need it.
IC: All right. I'm sold! Where can readers get your books?
SW: Dreams That Blister Sleep: A Nurse in Vietnam, my non-fiction book, is out of print. I have a small hoard of remainder copies, which I would gladly sell.
Some Welcome Home and First Murder in Advent are available through on-line vendors, such as Amazon, Books-A-Million, etc. Because Five Star deals primarily with libraries, they don't have a big presence in book stores.
IC: You're also working on a second series, one that is dear to your heart. What can you tell us about it?
SW: This one is the love of my life. It's also a five book series. Meg Porter, a nurse from North Carolina, picks up stakes and moves to a remote nursing station in northern Alberta. She's looking for a little adventure, and boy, does she find it.
IC: What appeals to you about this other protagonist, and how is she different from Pepper?
SW: Meg is 30, which is older than Pepper, and she's more thoughtful and settled. She's given the gift of falling in love with the most frustrating man on the entire planet. She has the opportunity for a kind of relationship that Pepper could never have because patience isn't Pepper's strong suit. Dan McLaughlin is the kind of Mountie you don't want to be involved with, unless you have a lot of stamina. Meg Porter thinks she does. Together they're trying to keep each other, and the people in Whiskeyjack, Alberta, alive. Despite their best efforts, people are dying, and finding the killer is complicated by missing gold, old secrets, and a peril that may drive Dan and Meg apart forever.
IC: Does this mean Pepper is going to go on the back burner, or do you plan to work on both series at once?
SW: As long as the publisher keeps buying the Vietnam veteran series, that one has to be on the front burner. It is my fond wish to be able to work on both at once, but I haven't managed it so far. It is so frustrating to not be able to work on the northern Alberta series, which I haven't been able to do in almost seven months.
I have also begun preliminary work for a stand-alone, Dead Man's Curve, which is about a middle-aged nurse who finally gets the one wish of her life: to become a flight nurse.
IC: In addition to everything else you do, you teach "mystery appreciation" workshops. That sounds intriguing. What is a mystery appreciation workshop like, and how can we enroll in one?
SW: It's basically a one to two hour workshop to get readers to think outside the box when choosing mysteries. I talk about how wide open the mystery field is and how to find new authors to read. SinC of course gets a mention, as does other web sites and the journals related to mystery writing. If you're on any one of the Sisters in Crime lists, you are already enrolled. It's what we do every day.
IC: You also advise women to write their memoirs as an act of self-discovery. Why do you think this act is so beneficial?
SW: It's the act of creating that is beneficial. It doesn't have to be writing. It could be dance or pottery or quilting or paper crafts. It's so important to take time to not only look at the meanings underneath our lives, but to express that meaning in some way. I think women particularly spend a lot of time dealing with what's making us unhappy. We need to spend the same amount of time---or even better more time---dwelling on what makes us happy and how to express that pure joy of living. Pepper and I are negotiating right now about an artistic means of expression for her. I think she should be a potter; she's not convinced.
IC: In another interview, you said, "[C]ivilians think the military is about violence and death, and people who have been soldiers know it's far more complicated than that. . .My books are about what the job of soldiering does to the soldier. The books are a celebration of all of the thousands of us who have successfully made the transition back to civilian life." What would you like readers to bring away from your books?
SW: To quote the science fiction writer, Robert Heinlein, "There's no such thing as a free lunch." As human beings we have a choice, let our lives slide by or do what we want to do, what we feel compelled to do, and be prepared to pay the consequences. Transformation takes courage, whether it's the physical courage of dealing with forty-below blizzards in northern Alberta, or the emotional courage of looking at what it meant to be a part of the first war the U.S. lost. I'd like readers to come away with a sense of how much fun, and how much heartbreak, comes from being a strong, adventurous woman.
IC: Do you have any advice for would-be writers?
SW: Go back now before it's too late!
Okay, seriously, be honest with yourself about whether you're writing for therapy or writing for publication. I started out writing for therapy, to deal with not only Vietnam, but with emotional baggage I brought into adult life from my upbringing. Take as long as you need to write for therapy, but don't confuse being in that stage of your development with writing for publication. In twelve-step programs, the twelfth step says, in part, "Having had a spiritual awakening . . . we tried to carry this message to [others] . . ." There is a great temptation to think, "Oh, my gosh, suddenly I understand something and now I must share it, right away, with the world."
It's only after you play through your understanding, after the something you thought you knew has grown quite cold and unimpassioned, can you turn it into clay to be worked for publication.
IC: Do you have any words for our members who are primarily readers?
SW: Stretch yourself. Try something new. I'm not saying if you normally read the coziest of cozies that you should go for a blood-and-guts cannibal novel or that if you like the mean streets you should cuddle up with a pink rabbit, but look for authors that are unfamiliar to you.
One thing I did in the past year was to download the list of panels from both Malice Domestic and Bouchercon. Then I deleted all the information except the panelists' names, arranged them in alphabetical order, and used that as my reading list for 2006. I was pleasantly surprised at how many of the authors my local library had on hand.
Many libraries are adopting a policy that if a book hasn't been checked out in one to two years, it's discarded. It's in your power to salvage some of these books by checking them out.
IC: You're in the spotlight. Is there anything else you'd like to add or discuss?
SW: Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to piffle on. Goodness knows I can do it for hours.
This interview was conducted for SinC-IC
by Elizabeth Terrell.
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