Tell us a little about yourself and your writing.
I grew up in north central Pennsylvania not far from The Office territory. To fend off crushing boredom, I joined every arty thing: band, choir, art club, school newspaper, and speech and drama. I often scribbled stories during class when my teachers thought I was taking copious notes. (As the youngest of five children, I have a bit of a mischievous streak.)
As an undergrad, I majored in English with a communications minor (lots of theatre classes) and studied abroad in the UK. I went on to earn a master’s in journalism while working full time as an editor in Philadelphia. I have 30+ years’ experience in trade, association, and academic publishing.
During my post-college years, I gravitated toward poetry and put much of my creative energy there. (My poetry collection, Muddy-fingered Midnights, includes some early work as well as many new pieces). From 1995-2000, I was editor and publisher of a Christian literary magazine, About Such Things. Through it, I got to know the philosophy PhD student who became my husband. Our daughter was born in 2002.
I grew restless as a stay-at-home mom, and a friend urged me to pick up writing again. Something inside me lit up when I unearthed character sketches for Danielle Deane, a grieving teen I’d first imagined while on a walk in 1992. I’d heard her voice tell me about her difficult relationship with her mother since her dad had died, and her struggles to hang onto her faith when her church-going parent had been snatched away and she was stuck with the atheist. I’d lost my own father to renal failure a few years before this, and it felt like the time had arrived to work through that loss. There was enough difference between Dani’s circumstances and mine to help me have creative distance, yet emotional truth.
It took six years of writing and revision, research trips to NYC and England, and critiques from three writing groups to get Never Gone into its final form.
Why did you write this book?
I wanted to explore how loss and grief are handled well–and poorly–in Christianity. People of faith can at times have an unhealthy stoicism about death. By emphasizing heavenly rewards for the departed, they can make the bereaved feel as if they’re spiritually deficient for having emotions like sadness, anger and loneliness. But when someone isn’t given space to fully grieve, the emotions will come out sideways and be far more damaging. Yet the story also has positive counter-examples of folks who comfort and support well because they understand the church as a body: “when one part suffers, every part suffers with it” (I Cor. 12:26). I wanted to encourage teens not to settle for platitudes when it comes to hard questions like “where is God when we suffer?” but to really engage deeply.
Writing this story was also a way to indirectly work through my grief after I lost my dad in 2003, but under very different circumstances.
How did you get your ideas for Never Gone? What inspired you?
The idea of parental haunting is pretty old. Shakespeare uses it in Hamlet, for example. I also was inspired by the TV show Providence that aired from 1999-2002, in which a young woman moves home after her mother’s death, and often has long heart-to-heart talks and arguments with her mother’s ghost. The idea of a parental presence lingering to help a child fascinated me, especially when it’s unclear why it’s happening (is it supernatural or psychological?).
After losing my own father, I began reading about grief experiences and how varied and confusing they can be, especially for kids. I got thinking about other circumstances that might make grieving more of a pressure cooker – like being left with the parent you’re alienated from, having a family culture that frowns on expressing negative emotions, and coming from a faith tradition that tends to emphasize the joys the departed gains in the afterlife. The question of “how do I cope without my loved one?” will be more urgently felt in circumstances like that. The psychology of father-daughter relationships inspired me quite a bit too.
Clearly everything I read and experience is fodder for fiction. Putting research time into areas that naturally raise my curiosity has led me to be a bit more fearless about story situations I’m willing to tackle.
Why is religion so prevalent in Never Gone?
Spiritual questions about the nature of life and of a higher power naturally come up when a person is grieving. To remove religious thinking on the topic seems to me inauthentic.
My approach was simply to write a character for whom faith is a natural part of life. It’s Dani’s framework for understanding the world, just like her artistic ability is. The imagery and stories of her faith weave through her thought world as much as the language of painting and drawing. Like any teen raised in a Christian home, she goes through a coming-of-age process in which she has to decide if she truly believes for herself, rather than believing in her parent’s belief.
Most centrally, Never Gone is a dramatic story, not a handbook or a “how to grieve well” manual. Readers walk with Dani through sadness, longing, first love, turmoil, broken relationships, confusion and doubt. The adults in her world sometimes help, sometimes fail her badly. She has to come to grips with what is really real, with who God is, and with how she must grow and change in order to become her best self.
Combining ghosts and God is pretty unusual. Why bring those things together?
Generally, ghost lore in our culture is associated with bad deaths, with unfinished business. The question for me is whose unfinished business? The departed’s or the survivors’?
My protagonist, Danielle, is a fairly grounded Christian who knows enough “proof texts” to shut down her own natural emotions in the wake of a devastating loss. Her dad is bound for a happy eternity in heaven, she reasons, so she’s really not supposed to be upset.
This kind of warped stoicism that sometimes arises in my faith tradition concerns me. It’s bad theology to my mind, giving a false view of who God is and how he relates to humanity. In the face of it, a really hurting person can suffer some pretty deep internal fracturing. My story’s ghost is in some ways a manifestation of that inner state.
Why is the opening of Never Gone set in New York City?
Most of my story decisions develop out of the characters, rather than the other way around. As I got to know Dani’s parents, it became clear that no other place would work for them. Grace is a driven advertising executive, and though there are some great, creative ad agencies in Philly, she isn’t the sort of person who would settle for working outside Madison Avenue. Making a living as a professional photographer—which is Graham’s career—requires proximity to the most potential purchasers of this kind of service, like ad agencies.
How much are your New York locations real, and how much a fabrication?
I did five research trips to New York to go to each of the locations I describe, including the terminal where British Airways flights disembark.
Dani’s homes in Park Slope Brooklyn and the Upper West Side are based on real buildings. In fact, I was able to find real estate listings for her UWS high rise at the corner of 93rd and Columbus, including floor plans, which I adapted slightly.
Dani’s school is a fabrication based roughly on a private school two blocks from her apartment (I place Rexford 14 blocks away, in the West 70s). Her church is riff on All Angels in the Upper West Side, mixed with St. Mark’s Philadelphia and a few Anglican/Episcopal churches I’ve visited in the US and Britain.
I think it’s important to make fabricated settings realistic by basing them on real places. A private school with extensive grounds is not going to exist in the Upper West Side—land is too valuable. And high rise apartment buildings vary in terms of how luxurious they are, even within the same block.
Much of Never Gone takes place in a rural British village called Ashmede. How did you choose the location? How real are your British settings?
Dani needed to spend time in her father’s hometown, in part to challenge her strong identification with him. As much as she allies herself with her dad, she’s American and a city kid through and through. Thus her father Graham needed to come from the country.
I’d originally planned to use the Cotswolds where I studied for semester in college. Family friends invited us to stay with them in Durham in 2006, and I fell in love with the place. I did a ton of research during that trip. There is no real Ashmede. It’s an amalgam of some towns I visited during my 2006 trip and a place I stayed in North Yorkshire during spring break when I was a student.
Durham Cathedral is of course real and I urge anyone who visits England to make the trip to see it. It’s a bit off the usual tourist route, but absolutely worth it.
Kings Cross Station is where all the northbound trains leave London, so that worked nicely on a couple of levels, including Dani’s love of Harry Potter.
