Fifty Years in the Writing Life

“Take an event and turn it into a story,” our speaker, Shelley Fraser Mickle, told a full-house audience on Sunday, July 12, 2015. “Give yourself permission to make it entertaining. Story has its own needs, facts can be twisted.” Her engaging presentation of good advice for writers sprinkled the afternoon with laughter.

Mickle said she fell in love with story at age five, when her family had given her the nickname “Screaming Mimi,” after the German rockets in World War II. Stories were her grandmother’s way of calming her down. She decided that stories must be something necessary, like “air, water, or a good purse.”

She grew up in Arkansas and Tennessee, and headed to the University of Mississippi after graduating high school. Being a brash high school senior, she wrote to William Faulkner, teaching at U of M, and told him she would be coming in the fall. She gave him permission to introduce himself to her if he saw her walking around campus. Unfortunately, she told us, “He had the audacity to die six months before I arrived.”

She had the advantage of studying writing in the fertile culture of the Mississippi Delta where her husband was practicing medicine. She wrote her first novel, Queen of October, in 1992, and sent it to Louis Rubin to read through. Unknown to her at that time, Rubin was the most illustrious literary critic of his time. He worked with her for two and a half years on the novel, and they remained friends until his death in 2013.

When is your writing good? That’s a question she asked herself every day, which led to her practices of getting up at 4 a.m. before her inner editor, and her children, were awake and of buying a new typewriter when she got rejected. “Don’t give up,” she told the audience. “It’s all a matter of taste when it comes to agents and editors.”

After publishing several books and appearing on National Public Radio both locally and nationally with her essays, she and her husband started a publishing company in 2009. They had observed there were no books in which children with physical differences were heroes. Wild Onion Press was born.

Mickle challenged the audience: “Have you written a story powerful enough to change a life?”

She received a manuscript from a mother whose daughter had been born with only four tiny fingers on her right hand. The five-year-old had dictated her memoir to her mother before she could write or read. Grace Mary McClelland had been the victim of bullying. “You must be stupid because you have stupid little fingers,” she was told. Wild Onion published her book, The Gift of Grace, exactly as Grace wrote it, Mickle revising only one sentence in the manuscript.

Mickle said the story changed her life and her way of thinking. “Have you written a story that reflects an act of bravery, that’s changed someone’s life?” she asked the audience again.

She told us the story of Isabelle Hadala, born with a condition that limits the development of fingers, teeth, and toes. At a camp for disabled children, Mickle led a writers’ workshop for parents. They wrote a first-day-of-school speech for their children to say: “Look at me, and get over it.” This led to Isabelle’s book, The First Day Speech. After the book was published, Isabelle appeared on Good Morning America, modeled for Aeropostale, and was a guest weather girl on the local news channel.

Mickle said, “I never understood what a book can do. It can change a life.”

A prolific writer, she is currently working on several projects, and has no thoughts of retiring.

An audience member asked the question, “Was there anything you couldn’t bring yourself to write about?”

Mickle’s reply: “No, but I wanted to write about things nobody wanted to hear about.”

[intense_spacer height=”20″] [intense_hr] [intense_spacer height=”20″]

Shelley Fraser Mickle, author of several award-winning books, shared how she got her start in the literary world and her path over a period of fifty years.

Mickle grew up in Arkansas and Tennessee and graduated from the University of Mississippi in 1966. She studied writing at the University of Mississippi, the Harvard Extension School, and Wellesley College. Her first novel, The Queen of October, was a 1989 New York Times Notable Book. Her second novel, Replacing Dad, became a CBS movie and is now shown on the Hallmark channel.

Mickle began reading her humorous essays on National Public Radio in 1995. In 2000 some of these were published in The Kids are Gone, the Dog is Depressed & Mom’s on the Loose. That same year she was honored to be a commentator for NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast out of Washington, D.C.

In 2006, Mickle’s novel, The Turning Hour, was recognized with the Florida Governor’s Award for the best suicide prevention tool in an educational setting. The novel is based on the true story of a high-school senior’s recovery from a suicide attempt. Mickle’s masterwork addresses the emotional challenges of modern American youth.

Mickle and her husband, Dr. John Mickle, a retired pediatric neurosurgeon, live on a horse farm in Alachua County, Florida.
[intense_spacer height=”30″]