Lost & Found (24 page)
Authors: Jacqueline Sheehan
I called on the good will and generous spirit of others for their expertise. Suzanna Choi Adams, a superb psychotherapist, read for clinical accuracy. Joann Berns and Joanne Blanchard, both physical therapists, offered insights into their profession. Police Chief Paul Scannell, of Westfield State College, provided information about tasers. Lee King, retired Animal Control Warden of Woodbury, Connecticut, and Carol Hepburn, Animal Welfare Officer of Amherst, Massachusetts, shed light on animal care. Tom Dussault, Agawam Sportsman Club in Massachusetts, tried to give me archery lessons, and Linda Randall, DVM, Cloverleaf Animal Hospital Medina, Ohio, spent hours on the phone correcting my mistakes about dog anatomy. I take all the credit for mistakes in each area.
Special appreciation goes to the members of my manuscript group who read every page: Marianne Banks, Kris Holloway, Celia Jeffries, Rita Marks, Brenda Marsian, Elli Meeropol, and Lydia Nettler. The members of the Great Darkness Writing Group also listened with care: Jennifer Jacobsen, Alan and Edie Lipp, Patricia Riggs, Morgan Sheehan, and Marion VanArsdell. I thank Sharron Leighton for her encouragement and Patricia Lee Lewis for the spaciousness of her international writing retrieats. Thanks to Mary Ellen and Jeffrey Zakrzewski for sharing their dog, Spud, with the rest of us. Carrie Feron and Tessa Woodward at Avon Books and Jenny Bent at Trident Media are a brilliant team of brains and heart.
I grew up in Connecticut and live in Massachusetts today, where I divide my time between writing, teaching writing workshops and yoga, and running a small psychotherapy practice. But I spent twenty years living in western states: California, Oregon, and New Mexico. For most of my childhood, I lived in a single-parent home, after the early death of my father left my mother with five kids. My siblings were 8 to 13 years older than I was at the time, so they really had a different childhood, complete with two parents. My mother was a nurse by day, but she had the spirit of an artist. My first memory of her was watching her paint at her easel on her day off. She was one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever met and even as a child, I
was aware of my good fortune to have landed in her nest.
Which is not to say that childhood or my teen years were easy. They were not. I was impulsive and wild, slipping out of my bedroom window at night to meet friends, smoke Newport cigarettes, and drive with boys in fast cars. After unsuccessfully attempting to rein me in, she wisely took another approach and gave me a very long leash, which was what I needed. At the end of my second year of college, a girlfriend and I hitchhiked across the country and to her amazing credit, my mother actually drove us to our first highway entrance and dropped us off.
At college in Colorado, I studied anthropology and art, preparing me for few jobs. During the summer I worked at an institution in Connecticut for people with mental retardation. This was truly the Dark Ages in how we regarded people with developmental delays and we clumped them all together under the umbrella of mental retardation. People of all ages were warehoused in large buildings in awful conditions. College students who worked there in the summer were acutely aware of the injustices done to residents and we plotted many small and not so small rebellions on behalf of the residents.
My career path after college did not lead straight to writing, but instead took a sometimes dizzying route. Among my more illustrious job choices were: director of a traveling puppet troupe, roofer, waitress, recreation worker and lifeguard for handicapped kids, health-food clerk, freelance photographer (the low point was taking pictures of kids with Santa, the high point was photographing births), substance-abuse counselor with street kids in Chicago, freelance newspaper writer, and something about baiting sewers for rats in Oregon, but that one is always too hard to explain. After the birth of my daughter, I returned to graduate school to study psychology, eventually earning my Ph.D. and working at university counseling centers.
As soon as I settled in with psychology, I began to write fiction. Short stories, long stories, novellas, novels, essays. I woke at five
A.M
. to write before I left for work, spent part of every weekend writing, most holidays, and parts of every vacation that I could squeeze out of my very full life. I have now switched the balance; writing is my primary occupation and private practice is my part-time job.
When people ask me how I find time to write, I am always puzzled, because finding time is not a huge problem. Pat Schneider, a wise writing teacher, once said, “You would find time for a lover, wouldn’t you? That is how you find time for writing.” And possibly the image of my mother, happily painting at her easel on her day off made an imprint on me that said, here is what you do with your life, do those things you love.
I have a backlog of stories and novels that are yammering to come out and I am doing my best to keep them in an orderly line. I am currently working on a novel that came to me in nearly complete form while I sat daydreaming on a ferry from the Isle of Skye to the mainland of Scotland.
www.jacquelinesheehan.com
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L
OST &
F
OUND
T
RUTH
Cover photographs by Petography / Getty Images, Dominic DiSaia / Getty Images.
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
LOST & FOUND
. Copyright © 2007 by Jacqueline Sheehan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition April 2007 ISBN 9780061748684
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