The writing life
Barker's second novel, "Mending Horses," which continued the story of Daniel from the first book, was published earlier this year. PRIME submitted photo
After two successful novels, Michele Barker follows her dream career
By Debbie Gardner
debbieg@thereminder.com
At 54, East Longmeadow author Michele Barker is finally following her passion to write novels as a full-time career.
"I had wanted to write fiction when I was a kid and wrote stories for myself and friends," Barker told PRIME over coffee at the Shelburne Falls Coffee Roasters on Shaker Road in early June.
As high school drew to a close however, she put away those dreams.
"Not many people make a living as a novelist," she said.
Instead, she pursued degrees in English and history, graduating from the college of Our Lady of the Elms in 1981. A few years later, she added a Master's degree in historical preservation from the University of Vermont to her credentials.
Jobs with Merriam Webster, the city of Chicopee, Sturbridge Village and the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum (now the Springfield History Museum) filled her work life.
But her desire to write was never completely extinguished. Barker started dabbling in fiction again, taking courses at local community colleges in the early 1990s and submitting her short stories to the East Longmeadow Library's Homegrown writing contests from 1997 to 2000.
"I won a couple of years; it was very encouraging," she recalled.
About that same time she joined a writing group, where her responses to the facilitator's suggested writing prompts planted the seeds for her first full-length fiction. Those writing exercises eventually evolved into the award-winning historical novel "A Difficult Boy," published in 2008.
But it wasn't until 2013, when she was balancing a job with Preservation Massachusetts, putting the finishing touches on her second historical novel, "Mending Horses," and starting research a third book that Barker began thinking about becoming a full-time author.
The ultimate catalyst, she said, was a blog post she read online.
"I still have it on my desk, it's called 'The Tick-Tock of the Death Clock' by this writer who was in his 50s and trying to decide whether to pursue a writing career or keep on with the reliable, steady-paying job," Barker said. "As I'm reading this I'm thinking, 'who does this sound like?' It was exactly the dilemma I was pondering for several months."
The article's author, she said, ultimately decided to take the plunge and "had not regretted it."
It was a move that resonated with Barker.
"I'm past the half-way point of my life," she said, adding that her grandmother had lived to 102. "And I want to spend more time pursuing something creative."
Taking the leap
The issue behind her decision was not completely one of finding the time to write, Barker said. She'd been successfully combining part-time work with serious writing since 1998 when she began working on "A Difficult Boy" – the story of two indentured servants who, through their shared love of a horse, overcome their differences to work for their freedom.
"My husband [Joe] is a firefighter so he works a weird schedule. Usually he works some nights, he works some days and works some weekends," Barker said. "So when he's working, I'm sneaking in writing hours."
It was more a question of the type of job she'd been doing since that first book came out in 2008 that's led her to choose writing as a full-time career.
Her work in the 1990s and early 2000s as an archivist had literally inspired the plot for her first book – the idea for "A Difficult Boy" sprang from historical documents donated by a Holyoke family that included a bill from a master to the family of an indentured servant for recovering a runaway boy.
Archival work, she noted, was the kind of job you "left at work" when you went home to your daily routine.
"For me, those times when you're doing laundry, or driving somewhere, or working in the garden and your brain is doing something else, those are really good times to be thinking about a story," she said.
However her job as a Circuit Rider – a resource person who traveled throughout Western and Central Massachusetts assisting groups involved in preserving historic sites and structures – for Preservation Massachusetts, which began in 2008, didn't offer that kind of separation of thinking.
"It was an really interesting job, and it was part time," Barker said. "That should have given me plenty of time to write, but I was finding it was the kind of job that was always in your head even when you're not doing it."
She said she found herself frequently thinking about ways to help clients get more funding, or worried she hadn't told them about enough help and resources, a pattern that wasn't always conducive to working on other writing.
During her years an archivist, Barker recalled, she found inspiriation for the early work on "A Difficult Boy" in the writing groups she joined, first the Longmeadow Writers and Poets, and later an offshoot of that group that met weekly to "free write"in Chicopee.
During writing group exercises, Barker said she started thinking about that master's bill, and inserting a servant boy and a master into various writing-prompt inspired scenes, trying to figure out "why did the boy run away . why was the master so interested in getting him back."
When her writings from some of the exercises resulted in "these random scenes" and some defined characters, she began to think "maybe I should turn this into a book."
Encouragement to "publish the book" from "Mystic River" author Dennis Lehane and "The Jane Austin Book Club" author Karen Joy Fowler, instructors at the Stonecoast Writing Conference she attended in Maine in 2001, kept her going.
Those factors, she said, were crucial to the discipline it took to edit down her original 700 page manuscript for "A Difficult Boy." It also helped her have the courage to enter –and win – the Penn New England Children's Book Caucus Discover Award in 2003.
When Pen eventually rejected her second revise of the book in 2005, she drew on her own belief in the book to "send out over 135 queries" on her own in the pursuit of an agent and publisher for her first finished work.
And despite the sometimes all-consuming nature of the Circuit Rider job, Barker said she did, through the help of the witing and critiquing grops she beloned to at the time, finish writing and editing her second novel "Mending Horses" – a continuation of the story of Daniel, the older servant in "A Difficult Boy" – while with Preservation Massachusetts.
"The earliest documents [for "Mending Horses"] on my computer are from 2003," she said, adding that in effect she was working on her two first books at the same time for a period of years and like "A Difficult Boy," "Mending Horses" took nearly 10 years to complete. She also began working on a third novel about a sea captain's wife and daughter, and how their lives change when the captain does not return from a voyage during her time with Preservation Massachusetts.
But a leave of absence from circuit riding in the summer of 2012 to consult and work on a non-fiction book about the Sisters of Providence with Tom and Suzanne Strempek Shea – one of two consulting jobs she did while with Preservation Massachusetts – showed her that other types of writing jobs were available if she needed them.
A more recent trip to a Stonecoast Writing Workshop – this one in Ireland with famed Irish writers Ted and Annie Deppe, who "were really, really enthusiastic about the new book I'm working on right now made me feel maybe I should push harder to get it done sooner," started her thinking about writing full time.
The, she said, she read the "Death Clock" blog post.
"When I get to 70 or 80, am I going to say to myself, 'I should have gotten more serious about writing?'" she said. "I didn't want to do the shoulda, coulda, woulda about the whole thing."
Barker said with the support of her husband, who said, "Give it a shot," and the confidence that "if it doesn't work out financially I will be able to find work," she left Preservation Massachusetts in April.
The writing life
Barker said her days are now filled with consulting work, and research for her newest book.
"I'm finding with every book I write, each novel gets subsequently harder to write," she admitted. "I started out with something that was well within my comfort zone in terms of research and background – a lot [in "A Difficult Boy"] was from working at Sturbridge Village."
It was also a book told from one point of view, that of Ethan, the younger servant.
In "Mending Horses," she said she knew a "tiny bit " about the Irish in the small towns of Western Massachusetts, but still had to learn about the circuses of the time. She also branched out to multiple characters telling the story, creating a more complex plot.
The new book has settings she's not that familiar with – the sea coast of Massachusetts and Polynesia, both during the late 1800s.
"But the research is so much fun," Barker said. "It gives you the chance to learn about something new. Maybe that's why things get harder [with each book]. You have more questions and you want to learn more."
