Interview with Lee Cooper, Heroine of Turning the Tides by Nell Castle

Where are you from? Somewhere in South Korea. My American parents adopted me at the age of two. I’d only been at the orphanage for a few months, and they were told almost nothing about my history. I only have one memory of the orphanage, and it haunts me. 

Did you have a happy childhood? My adoptive family was great, trying to give me every opportunity to thrive; pushing me to achieve academically like my brother and sister. It was hard to live up to their standards sometimes.   

Where do you live now and what do you do for a living? Is there something you'd rather be doing? I just moved to Pomegranate Key, a small island off the coast of Florida, and took a job at a social services agency. I help teen moms become good parents--kind of ironic, since I don’t have much experience with kids. My parents are finally proud of me, though, since it took me so long to get my psychology degree. They worried I’d never find a job in the field. They’re just glad I dropped out of art school and quit dreaming about a career as a painter. 

What's going on in your life right now? I’m trying to help one of my clients reunify with her son. She’s being accused of abuse and neglect, and she only gets one hour of supervised visitation a week. No one seems to believe her except for me. Even though she’s too strict with her son, and she has a hard time showing affection, I truly believe she loves him. And he needs his mother in his life. 

Is there someone special in your life? No. I mean, not really. I mean, there’s a guy….It could never work. He’s just a player. His real name is Bricker Kilbourne. Bricker, ha. Sounds like an adult film actor. He’s never been serious about a woman in his life. 

How did you meet? What's his/her family like? The first time I saw him was on the beach, but I’m sure he never noticed me. He’s one of those super good-looking guys that all the women fall for. He’s a bartender at Whistler’s Grille, and when he waited on my table, we basically hated each other immediately. So it was just the worst possible luck when I found out he’s the guardian ad litem for my client’s son. All he sees is the bad in my client. I’ve tried to get him to look a little deeper, but he’s really stubborn. He doesn’t realize that everybody isn’t lucky enough to have a mother like his. Corinne Kilbourne is one of the strongest, most amazing women I’ve ever met, and she doesn’t let multiple sclerosis stop her. Bricker adores her, I have to give him that. His dad died a few years ago. He was a successful lawyer and an all-around great guy, from the sounds of it. I don’t know where they went wrong with Bricker.  

What's keeping you two apart? Well, for one, we really shouldn’t even be dating while my client’s custody case is up in the air. Not that there’s any risk of Bricker actually getting serious with anyone. He just wants to conquer all the women on the island. I could never trust him. We keep getting thrown together, and I just have to keep my wits about me. I’m not going to be another notch on his belt. 

What one thing could you do that would make you feel like the relationship will work out? Look, there’s no way I’d ever put my hopes into a relationship with a love-’em-and-leave-’em guy like Bricker Kilbourne. I know what it’s like to be abandoned. I’ll never let myself be in that situation again. 

Amazon  The Wild Rose Press  

Blurb: Ever the black sheep of her adoptive family, Lee Cooper has finally buckled down to a responsible job as a social worker in Southwest Florida. Defending her client against charges of child abuse awakens buried memories of her own abandonment in a Korean orphanage. Can she remain objective for the sake of the child?

Bricker Kilbourn, the court-appointed guardian, doubts Lee's judgments--and his opinion might determine the little boy's fate. He's got his own family issues and haunting secrets to keep. Falling for a woman is not part of the plan.

He's running from the past. She's searching for answers. Will their resolution to protect a child bind them together or wrench them apart?

Amazon  The Wild Rose Press 

Excerpt:

The Gulf waters were turbulent, rolling toward the shore like the underwater shrug of a giant’s shoulders. Diffuse orange light lit the sky, brightening to a manic yellow as the sun settled into the horizon.

A storm was coming.

Wind whipped her hair into her eyes as she started down the long dock toward Bricker’s boat. Against the darkening sky at the end of the dock she could just make out the silhouette of the Tequila Mockingbird. With each wobbly step, she fought the nylon skirt clinging to her legs like a drowning man to a mast.

Steady.

Heart pounding, she forced herself onward, arms out to her side for balance. A wave washed the lip of wooden planks and growled away like a dog straining at the end of its leash. She stopped, paralyzed. What if the waters washed over the dock? She’d drown in this surf.

She sank to her knees, gripping the dock cleats at the plank edges with fingers as cold as bones. To her left, the sky was charcoal gray, bleeding into blackness. White light pulsated from behind the dark clouds. Lightning. How long before it struck overhead?

Squeezing her eyes shut, she stifled the urge to scream for help. It was too windy. He wouldn’t hear her. Why hadn’t he answered his phone? She should run back to the safety of her car, now, before the waves washed her off the dock. She glanced over her shoulder at her car across the road. It was solid; secure. Dry. If she went back now, she could make it before the clouds opened up overhead.

But if she turned back now, she’d never see Bricker Kilbourn again.

With a strangled cry, she wrenched herself up and staggered forward. Gusts of air blew her hair into her eyes, and she shook her head like a wet dog. Thunder rumbled from far out over the ocean. Streaks of lightning scorched the skies above Bricker’s boat. She rocked back on her heels as the walkway swelled beneath her. The waves were growing stronger. If she didn’t get off this dock soon, she really might die out here.
Amazon  The Wild Rose Press 
 

Nell Castle grew up in western Pennsylvania and graduated from Temple University in Philadelphia. Since then, she's lived in Key West, Anchorage, Sarasota, and Virginia Beach. She moved back to northeastern Ohio to raise her kids closer to the family homestead, but looks forward to moving bck to a gentler climate. Until then, she revisits white powder beaches and craggy mountain tops only in her writing. Turning the Tides is her second release with The Wild Rose Press.

Amazon Buy link: https://www.amazon.com/Turning-Tides-Nell-Castle-ebook/dp/B06ZZ19WTC

Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/Nell-Castle/e/B01F5CJK4Y?ref_=pe_1724030_132998060

The Wild Rose Press: http://catalog.thewildrosepress.com/1309_nell-castle

Website: https://nellcastle.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Nell-Castle-1113668521990989/

In Honor of Deaf History Month: Wordless Love

Sharon, Age 3, with Cousin Gloria

In 1954, at the age of three years old, my mother put me on a plane in Washington, D.C., and sent me to Connecticut to live with my deaf, non-speaking grandmother, my aunt, uncle, cousin, two Chihuahuas, and a parakeet. At night, I would cry because I missed my family. As I sobbed, my grandmother would take me in her arms and hug me, making grunting noises. I’d fall asleep to her wordless lullaby of love, wondering if I’d ever see my family again, not knowing that my parents were divorcing.

A year after being shipped north, I was reunited with my family. Another year later, we moved out of my aunt’s basement and into government subsidized housing. Now when we visited my aunt’s house, I had to share my grandmother with my siblings. On birthdays and graduations, she created scavenger hunts for us, leaving a trail of written clues. She must have spent hours planning the hints, writing them out in her beautiful calligraphy, and placing them throughout the house.

As I grew older and wrestled with the demons of poverty and abuse, my desire to break away from my home life dwarfed my relationship with my grandmother. Opportunity arrived in the form of a large scholarship to a university in Texas, over a thousand miles away from my mother. During the first semester of my freshman year, my grandmother became ill and died at home at the age of eighty-nine. Claiming that she didn’t want to “disrupt” my studies, my mother withheld the knowledge until I came home months later. I was devastated. I never had the chance to say good-bye to the woman who loved me unconditionally.

As I hit my fifth decade, I began to reflect on my life and lack of closure regarding her death. I felt compelled to research my family tree, beginning with my grandmother. My only clues were embedded in childhood memories of kitchen table conversations between my mother and aunt. The family legend, told and re-told, with hand-signed consultations for verification, was that my grandmother was born hearing and healthy to a wealthy family.

“Oh yes, her people were landowners,” my aunt said.

“She had pet peacocks,” my mother added, “and a pet pig that came when she clapped her hands.”

“She came down with spinal meningitis when she was three. If her parents hadn’t been so rich, she would have died,” my aunt said between puffs on her cigarette.

“Grandma’s parents sent her off to a boarding school for ladies,” my mother recalled. “She was too wealthy to be with the other girls, so she stayed with the teachers.”

As I searched for family records, calling my sister and brother for confirmation, tantalizing tidbits emerged.

“After she graduated, she went to work in Washington, D.C., addressing envelopes for a Congressman because she had such beautiful handwriting,” my sister said.

“Grandma and Grandpa were fixed up on a blind date. He was a wild young man with a motorcycle, a graduate of Gallaudet University. He was deaf from scarlet fever.” My brother, the oldest child, recalled vividly. “They fell in love and married against her family’s wishes. She was supposed to go back to Kentucky and marry a cousin, but she wouldn’t leave her gardener.”

Oral history wasn’t much to go on, but it was a start. It helped that I recalled the name of the town where we’d visited another uncle, aunt, and cousin on the way to Texas: Stanford, Kentucky. Using an online genealogy site, I was able to see U.S. Census records dating as far back as the 1700’s. I rooted around in the 1800’s with no luck. One night, I received an excited call from my best friend from high school and genealogy genius. By searching in an online National Society Daughters of the American Revolution registry, and entering two of my family names, Engleman and Harris, my friend found my Stanford, Kentucky ancestors and my family lines tracing back to the Revolutionary War. Thanks to the DAR, I had the first clues in my very own family scavenger hunt.

The elusive “ladies’ school for the deaf kept me awake at night. More weeks, more digging, more walls. After months of research, I was ready to quit. But I kept feeling as if my grandmother was standing behind me at the computer, smiling and urging me to find her. At last, I found the Kentucky School for the Deaf (KSD), in Danville, Kentucky. It was the first public school for the deaf in the United States, originally called the Kentucky Asylum for the Tuition of the Deaf & Dumb when it was built in 1823. I emailed the school, asking for information on a possible alumna named Bessie Engleman.

In the meantime, I kept mousing around in the 1900 Census files for Danville and randomly selected Enumeration District 88 (ED 88). When I retrieved the image, I discovered that the majority of people counted in ED 88 were enrolled at the Kentucky Institute for Deaf Mutes. My eyes adjusted to the old-fashioned script of the census taker, and there she was on line 19: Engleman, Bessie, White, Female, born in 1883. Within days of that find, a KSD staff member sent me an email telling me he had found her original admission card.

Bessie Engleman was student number 933 admitted to KSD. The daughter of George and Susan Harris Engleman became deaf from meningitis at sixteen months, not age three, as the family legend told. The middle child in a three girl family, KSD admitted her from Lincoln County, Kentucky when she was eight years old in 1889 and graduated her in 1902 when she was twenty-one years old. Nine years later, she married Carl E. Rhodes on September 20, 1911 and lived in Washington, D.C. in 1918.

I now had enough information to find my great-grandparents, my great-great-grandparents, and beyond, because all my grandmother’s “people” lived in Lincoln County, Kentucky—and married their cousins. In some census records, I found Harris and Engleman in-laws, brothers, sisters, and cousins, all living in the same household.

My curiosity was piqued. If the oral history about my grandmother was fairly accurate, why wouldn’t the part about my grandfather be true, too? Gallaudet University’s alumni office found my grandfather’s records on microfilm. According to the Secretary of the Department of the Interior, my grandfather, Carl E. Rhodes, was deemed a “…proper person to be received into the Columbia Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, and to be instructed and maintained therein at the expense of the United States…” The same department responsible for the welfare of Native Americans in the 1800’s was responsible for my grandfather’s education. He attended the Kendall School from 1892 to 1903, but did not attend Gallaudet University, contrary to family stories. And, he wasn’t deaf secondary to scarlet fever. Congenitally deaf, a midwife home-delivered the sixth child, Carl E. Rhodes, to a grocer named James H. Rhodes and his wife, Elizabeth Cockrell Rhodes: my great-grandparents.

Despite their incredible obstacles in life, my grandparents attended school, graduated, obtained good jobs, weathered the anger of my grandmother’s wealthy family, and raised six hearing and speaking children to become productive members of society. During the depression and beyond, my grandfather was employed by the federal government as a gardener, often tending to the roses and other plantings at the White House. My brother owns a book, handed down from my grandmother, with a photograph of my grandfather working as the Assistant Head Gardener in the U.S. Botanical Gardens.   

What predicts who will be disabled in life? What foretells if a disability will cripple an individual emotionally? When I was a little girl and refused to cave in under my mother’s abuse, she would say I was stubborn, “just like your grandmother.” Instead of being humiliated, I was proud to be linked in some clear way to the woman who raised me, who loved me, and whom I adored. Today, looking back across half a century, I have a few clues to her inner strength and resilience. When I think of her, which is often, I thank her for teaching me that having a disability does not mean inability and for holding me tight and rocking me to sleep with her lullaby of wordless love.   

Interview with Peggy Jaeger, Author of First Impressions

What made you decide to be an author? I think, in all reality, writing chose me. Writing is my oxygen. Without it, I can’t exist. Sounds a little wacky, I know…but it’s true.

What do you like best about being a writer? What do you like the least? The best part of being a writer to me is being able to have control over the lives of the people I create.  That feeling of being all-powerful is a writing rush. The one and only thing I despise about the whole process of writing is the marketing/self promotion. I don’t like talking about myself and I feel pushy when I do. I know I need to suck that up, but believe me, it’s hard.

How do you think your life experiences have prepared you for writing? This is a great question! I’ve lived a strange life. I came from divorced parents when no one’s parents were divorced and that made me somewhat of an oddity and a pariah in school. Both my biological parents remarried, so then my mother’s last name was different from mine and that added confusion to the mix with other people.  We were very badly off financially and many times there wasn’t money for the basics like food. A debilitating eating disorder to deal with stress and loneliness took over much of my young and mid adult life and since I was always the smartest kid in school – or one of the smartest – I was shunned by the “normal” kids. I married a wealthy, educated man and then had to deal with being in the public eye because of it, so I’d say each and every one of those experiences has given me thousands of avenues for stories and characters. MY characters are always complex emotionally and I really think this is where that comes from.

Have you ever felt as if you were being dictated to while you wrote a book--as if the words came of their own accord? If yes, which book did that happen with? This is a little like asking if the book wrote itself and the answer is yes. The book is the one that’s currently being released, First Impressions. I feel like I woke up one day knowing exactly how Clarissa and Pat’s story was going to unfold, and it did, right in front of me. I wrote the book during NANOWRIMO 2014.

You’ve written 27 novels (3 published so far) and are working on a 4^th novel in your current MacQuire Women Series. What’s your favorite time management tip? The Nora Roberts rule of writing: sit in a chair, put your fingers on the keyboard, and write. That’s it. I write everyday, whether it’s for twenty minutes or 14 hours. Every day. Between cooking meals, laundry, grocery shopping and household chores. My laptop follows me around the house if necessary.

Are you a plotter or a pantser, i.e., do you outline your books ahead of time or are you an “organic” writer?  Total and complete plotter.  I even plot out my website blogs. I need to know where I’m going, how I’m going to get there. I think the need for this is because my younger life was such an upheaval, never knowing where we were going to live, moving a great number of times, never feeling settled. I tried to be a pantser once…it didn’t work out well. Enough said.

If you had one take away piece of advice for authors, what would it be? Don’t ever let someone squash your dream of writing and/or being published. I had my first romance book published at 54 years old. I never gave up on my dream of being a published author, and I never let anyone take it away from me by telling me I was too old, not talented enough, dedicated enough, or was wasting my time.

Did music help you find your muse with this book? If yes, which song did you find yourself going back to over and over again as you wrote? I don’t listen to music when I write – I’m one of those people who needs quiet or else I’d be singing along and not getting any work done.

Tell me more about First Impressions:  

Family Practice Doctor Clarissa Rogers' first impression of Padric Cleary is biased and based on gossip. The handsome, charming veterinarian is considered a serial dater and commitment-phobic by his family and most of the town. 

Relationship shy, Clarissa refuses to lose her heart to a man who can't pledge himself to her forever. Pat Cleary, despite his reputation, is actually looking for "The One." When he does give his heart away, he wants it to be for life. With his parent's marriage as his guidebook, he wants a woman who will be his equal and soul mate in every way. 

Can Pat convince everyone--including Clarissa--she's the only woman for him.  

How about an excerpt from First Impressions: 

He crossed the room and took one of her hands in his own. She startled a bit, but then her shoulders relaxed as she looked up at him.

“I have a call to make. New calf giving her owner some worries. I’m sorry, Clarissa.”

“Don’t be. If anyone understands being on call, it’s me.”

“Does the dinner offer still stand, even though I’ve gotta leave for a while? I know this won’t take long, but...” He shrugged, letting her make the decision and hoping she’d make the one he wanted.

Clarissa squeezed his hand and smiled her shy smile. “Of course it does, Pat. After all you’ve done for me today, the very least I can do is cook you dinner.”

“You know you don’t have to cook for me for taking care of Teeny, don’t you?”

She swallowed and nodded, staring down at their joined hands, she said, “Yes.” She lifted her gaze to his. “I want to,” she said simply.

“Okay,” he said at last. “I’ll text you when I’m done to give you a time frame. ’Kay?”

She told him it was.

With one last look at her, he rubbed a hand down her arm and let himself out.

In his truck he blew out a breath and sat, hands gripping the steering wheel. In the past few hours, he’d learned more about her than he’d known in the previous five months since meeting her, and yet, she was still a complete mystery.

He put the truck in gear and drove, all the while thinking about Clarissa and how she’d looked today. Sad, frightened and grief stricken, to be sure. But resolute, strong, and accepting, as well.

She’d also been embarrassed when it was revealed she knew how he liked his tea, and nervous when she’d asked him to stay for dinner.

So many different qualities wrapped around one tantalizing woman.

And Pat was coming to realize how much he wanted to learn about each and every one of them.

Where can readers find more about your stories, books and you on the Internet?

Website: http://peggyjaeger.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Peggy-Jaeger-Author/825914814095072?ref=bookmarks

Twitter: https://twitter.com/peggy_jaeger

Amazon Author Page: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B00T8E5LN0

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/peggyjaeger/

Buy Links:   

Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/First-Impressions-MacQuire-Women-Book-ebook/dp/B0140AMFIU

The Wild Rose Press: http://www.wildrosepublishing.com/maincatalog_v151/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=195&products_id=6373

Peggy, thank you so much for being with us here today. I know my readers will enjoy your work and your interview.

Sharon – the pleasure has been all mine. Your questions are fabulous! I may steal a few of them.