Always Writing, Split, Croatia 2015

Nancy Stanfield Webb

My Writing Story in Nine Parts

1. At my forty-something high school reunion…

2. Sherry asked me…

3. I went on…

4. My small town had no library…

5. I share this "story of me" with you, because…

6. When I entered the business world…

7. The first novel I completed…

8. Later I ended up on YouTube…

9. A really big project

1.

At my forty-something high school reunion a while back I visited with a classmate, Sherry, with whom I grew up in Southwest Texas. Sherry lived on a ranch near my town, Big Wells (population 800), and I used to love riding my Tennessee walker the seven miles to her place. We'd hang out on the sandy creek that ran through her ranch on its way to the Nueces River.

We attended school together all twelve years; when Big Wells closed the high school, we had to take the bus eighteen miles to the county seat of Carrizo Springs.

2.

Sherry asked me, at the reunion, about my on-going writing projects. I told her, "Magazine articles, the perpetual short stories and on-going novels, but nothing big yet."   

Then she asked, "Do you remember the short stories we had to write for our senior English class?" (We adored Miss Nan Carpenter, fresh from graduating Southern Methodist University as "Sweetheart of SMU," who had returned home to teach our senior class of 43 sons and daughters of farmers and ranchers, field hands and merchants, and the owner of the Texaco service station in Big Wells—me.) 

I told Sherry that I remembered the title of the story I wrote; it was called "The Long Way Home," but I didn't recall what it was about. "Why?" I asked.

Sherry said, "Well, when Miss Carpenter handed back the stories, she said, 'Class, all your stories are good, but we have one real writer in the group. Nancy Stanfield!'"

"No," I told Sherry, "I don't remember Miss Carpenter's praise."  

3.

I went on to the University of Texas at Austin, planning to be a nurse—more so, a Navy nurse, an Ensign wearing that classy uniform!—but chemistry kicked my butt. Turns out I probably would have been on a hospital ship off Vietnam and followed a much different life path.

Instead, I signed up undetermined and took courses at UT in English and art and "met a guy." I then changed my major to that other respected degree for a young woman of the era: the MRS. I took up clerical and bookkeeping work and put him through law school.

Since I had to be quiet—invisible, preferably—while he studied, my home-away-from-home was the old Austin Public Library on Guadalupe Street where I would wander the stacks and take home books that spoke to me.

4.

My small town had no library, but Mr. and Mrs. Bowles who owned the hardware store did. The walls of their dining room were filled with books. Mr. Bowles was a deacon in the Methodist Church where Mother, a teacher and bookkeeper, played the piano for services. Daddy did his deacon stuff, too—except during deer hunting season … and sometimes when the fish were bitin’. My older sister listened to classical music really loud, so I’d read in my parents’ bedroom (the only air-conditioned room in our house) with all the doors closed. Or I’d saddle up Ol’ Tennessee and go for a ride.

The Bowles’ always let me borrow anything I wanted to read. In my early teens, I'd ride out to their place and gather books in my saddlebags. I read O’Neill’s plays, Gone with the Wind and The Grapes of Wrath and Lust for Life. I read Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald. I read The Readers' Digest Condensed Books and the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Or maybe that was from our living room bookcases; Mother loved poetry. Plus, the Bible was required reading in Sunday School.

Later I had that MRS, and during the years of office jobs and remodeling houses, travel, entertaining, raising two wonderful kids—and divorce—I always found time for reading, and for painting and writing. I attended the Houston Museum of Fine Arts School of Art for three years, part-time, of course, and audited writing courses at Rice University and the University of Houston.   

5.

I share this "story of me" with you because in this age of degrees in creative writing, I ain't got one. But according to my high school senior English teacher, I'm a real writer.

I know I kept her words with me, because I always wrote.

I wrote bosses’ letters and strategic plans and annual reports, and I learned to create an early website in HTML code. I joined organizations whose missions I liked and when they found out I could write, they bumped me up to their executive boards as Newsletter Editor.

I met regularly with a writing group and wrote short stories and short stories and short stories. We drank red wine, we drew red lines and happy faces. When our local writers association held a national conference, in between handling the newsletter and publicity I polished up the first three chapters of my novel-in-progress and it won in the mainstream category.

Several of my poems were published in short-lived poetry journals and I painted and exhibited what I called “poetry pieces” that enhanced my words.

During my years as newsletter editor of the Houston Chapter of the Women’s Caucus for Art, I wrote brochures and introductions to exhibit catalogues. I developed my own language for art that led me to interviewing visual and performing artists for magazines.

My interview articles were published in Southwest Art magazine.

Minerva Teichert

and

Jim Norton

For several years, I was contributing editor to (long defunct) In Art magazine.

7.

The first novel I completed, I typed meticulously on my old Remington upright, erasing and whiting-out typos on heavy paper (not on Eaton's Corrasable Bond! Remember Stephen King’s Misery?), and my words won me a month-long residency at Millay Colony for the Arts in upstate New York. Although the novel was never published, its nicest rejection letter called my story, "a work of art and beautifully written," but the agent didn't know what to do with it. It sits in a ream box.

I started other novels and finished some, but Life and Other Stuff usually got in my way. But with each attempt, I learned what to do and what not to do, the latter as educational as the former.

8.

Later I ended up on YouTube: A while back, I completed a character-driven thriller novel called Home Is Where You Go, and entered the prologue in the 2017 New Bedford Hollyhock Writers Conference. Mine was selected for a reading and critique by the Writer's Infusion group out of Boston.

Below is a link to the critique on YouTube, but unfortunately since we were not all individually miked, it is hard to understand.

But again, no takers on the finished story. Coral and Amber (my main characters) sit in their digital ream box anticipating a re-write to let them out again. But those contemporary women must wait.

9.

A really big project on an amazing woman named Sarah has been marinating in my head for over 30 years. During the past five years, I’ve written a two-part biographical novel covering my main character’s life that encompasses the 1800s.

This story is richly researched. I visited her grave several times and have traveled to each place Sarah lived. I interviewed a descendant who has since passed, and with her the last of the real memories. Along the way, magic appeared: I found a detailed description of Sarah’s speech and diction described by an acquaintance in an 1840s diary! I found her voice. How amazing is that?

I heard that voice in the words Sarah wrote in surviving letters. I found her fire and spirit.

Others in her family are well-documented, but few printed mentions remain of Sarah that have not been embellished by others’ interpretations. I peeled back the layers of those writings and exposed the woman I believe her to be.

There was a time in her history when I lost her trail entirely. Here is the timeline covering a two-year period when I followed her husband (in pink stickies) and other situations, finally finding notice of Sarah in the bright blue stickies of the lamplight.

And now she’s ready to share her story to the world.

Buy A Woman of Marked Character here!