University Communications

Instead, Smith-Siegenthal is an author, and sometimes she writes her real name, and other times, on the inside covers of her Harlequin historical romance novels, she writes Deborah Simmons.

“Some romance novelists pick names near the middle of the alphabet so that their books appear at eye-level on bookstore shelves,” Smith-Siegenthal says.

But that concept eluded her back in 1987, the year she wrote her first romance, Heart’s Masquerade.“I did everything wrong,” Smith-Siegenthal says. “It is amazing I was ever published.”

Smith-Siegenthal is one of many book authors who once walked the Wittenberg campus. For some, their path to paperback grew from their Wittenberg experience. For others, their desire to author a book developed over time.

For many, however, their careers began with baby steps. Smith-Siegenthal, for example, started her writing career at a newspaper. Unfortunately, the long hours and late nights began to take their toll on the Ohioan.

An avid reader, she always wondered if she could write novels like the ones she read by Mary Stewart and Georgette Heyer in the second grade, but it wasn’t until the birth of her daughter that she decided to say goodbye to news and go for it.

“It was now or never,” she recalls. Despite her decision, Smith-Siegenthal’s road to romance writing initially proved difficult.

From sending multiple submissions to different publishers to submitting a hodgepodge of different chapters rather than just the first three, Smith-Siegenthal learned to break into the business the hard way.

Following seven rejection slips, Smith-Siegenthal finally heeded an editor’s advice found at the bottom of one of her thanks-but-no-thanks letters.

There, an editor wrote that her manuscript was shorter than what the publisher wanted. Going back to her typewriter, she expanded what she had written, and shortly thereafter, Avon called to talk about publication.

“My editor suggested I take a pen name since my married name was difficult to spell and pronounce,” Smith-Siegenthal says.

“Unfortunately, there was already a Deborah Smith writing romance, so I chose Simmons just out of the air.”

Since her initial writing between her daughter’s morning and evening naps, Smith-Siegenthal has cooked up 20 historical romances and novellas primarily published by Harlequin Historicals.

USA Today’s Bestseller’s List once featured an anthology, The Brides of Christmas, to which she contributed, and her other novels have been translated and reprinted in 19 countries worldwide.

“I’m really popular in Japan,” Smith-Siegenthal says. “Way more than in North America.” Harlequin recently flew her to New York for a meeting with Japanese fans on a world tour to meet their favorite novelists.

“That was like being really famous,” she says. But the glamour and glitz of her writing boils down to sitting in a room in her home and staring at a blank computer screen. It is her work and a job like anything else.

“Deadlines are a good motivator,” she says. A sociology major at Wittenberg, Smith-Siegenthal has found that her college courses have played a pivotal role in her writing.

“I think writers use a lot of sociology and psychology and the study of people in their writing,” she says. “They have to if they are going to create interesting characters and situations.”

As a historical novelist, Smith-Siegenthal also conducts a great deal of research. “So many of my ideas come from nuggets I’ve discovered in my reference books,” she explains.

“As a writer, I’m naturally an observer of people, so I garner ideas from life, too.” Her novel, The Last Rogue, still stands among her favorites.

Her research for the book allowed her to plunge into the dusty literature of 17th-century gothic and weave it into her own
historical fiction. She also enjoyed the slapstick added to romance in Viceroy’s Daughter.

“I feel I’ve been very lucky to be able to do something I enjoy and stay home with my children as well,” she says. Another 1978 graduate also found his niche in historical writing, but not the kind Smith-Siegenthal fashions.

Rick Kennedy fell into the arms of jazz music, finding time to research and write about his passion in two different works of music history. Getting to this point in his career took some time, though.

“Two months after graduating,” Kennedy recalls, “I got a weekend gig at the Springfield News-Sun covering a semi-pro football team on the city’s south side. I was hooked.

Reporting required improvisation, just as I had experienced playing jazz.” Kennedy remained in the newspaper industry for the next 10 years.

By 1991, the history major burned with ideas for a book about Gennett Records, “a 1920s pioneer jazz and blues record label,” he explains.“Indiana University Press stewed over the idea for five months.

When it finally accepted my proposal, my euphoria was soon tempered by panic. I had 18 months to write an additional 60,000 words — in my spare time!”

That book, titled Jelly Roll, Bix, and Hoagy: Gennett Studios and the Birth of Recorded Jazz, was released in 1994. It sold throughout the United States and Europe, and it was just released in paperback two years ago.

Another book, co-authored by Kennedy, also appeared on the shelves in 1999. Little Labels, Big Sound: Small Record Labels and the Rise of American Music outlines the production of music from the 1920s to 1960s.

“My two books on jazz and blues record labels combine a love for original American music with my understanding for the realities of business,” Kennedy says.

Kennedy currently manages media activities for General Electric’s jet engine headquarters in Cincinnati, but he continues to works on book projects at night, on weekends, and on marathon plane flights.

With 22 years of non-fiction writing behind him, Kennedy now hopes to write a work of fiction.“I love wrestling with words,” Kennedy says. “I love storytelling, from any source — journalism, biographies, hard-boiled crime novelists of the 1930s, film noir, Delta blues, jazz or the portraits of Edward Hopper.”

Like Smith-Siegenthal, Kennedy also credits Wittenberg for aiding in his success. “While attending Wittenberg, I was clueless about a career,” he says, but “the university grounded me with a passion for music and American history and that has served me well as a writer and in the corporate world.”

Grace Adolphsen Brame ’51 can relate to Kennedy’s love of music.

A music major at Wittenberg and former director of five choirs and three youth groups in Madison, Wisc., Brame has criss-crossed the world as a professional opera singer, performing in Russia, Estonia, Siberia, Germany, Switzerland, England, France, India, the Caribbean and the United States, among other areas, before writing her three books, all of which integrate theology and spirituality.

Following her singing career, the Lutheran pastor and La Salle University professor began to study this integration, earning her master’s and Ph.D. degrees in the area at Temple University.

She discovered that her own travels as an opera singer had provided her with knowledge of many cultures and religions, which in turn helped her to see her own faith in a new light.

In 1981, she wrote her first book titled Receptive Prayer. She describes it as a book about contemplative prayer and its results in life.

“In its quiet form, it replaces asking God for things in order to receive God’s love, guidance, healing and inspiration,” she says. “In active life, it’s trying to stay connected to God so that God can talk and touch through us.”

Brame followed this book with A Manual of Receptive Prayer.“I know how hard it is to live,” she says. “I cannot imagine a life without passion.

I have a passion to help people find the Holy Spirit within themselves, not just as God above and beyond. We need to stop talking and let God speak to us.”

In 1990, Brame introduced the literary world to writer Evelyn Underhill’s missing retreats, which Brame discovered while researching Underhill in England.

The collection, titled The Ways of the Spirit, also includes an introduction by Brame. She hopes to complete a fourth book soon, titled A Capacity for God: Eveyln Underhill’s Theology of Spirituality.

Currently, Brame is presenting talks and retreats on her latest work, Faith, the Yes of the Heart.“Faith as trust, is a response of the whole person to God’s call for love. We live and die for what or whom we love and trust,” she says.

For Brame, writing allows her the opportunity to communicate her passion. “When I write, I hear the words musically,” she says. “Until it sounds good, I won’t let it go.

I love communicating with people about the things I care about the most,” she adds. “My passion is to empower them and give them hope.” Tanya West Dean ’79 also has a passion about writing, but she tailors her tales to a much younger crowd.

Author of Baby Animal: Furry, Fuzzy, and Fun! and My Cool Stuff: A Creative Cool Place for ME!, among others, Dean says she aims to teach her young readers about life and the world around them.

Originally a social studies teacher, Dean describes herself as a born teacher. When her family moved to Florida, however, she had trouble getting a teaching certificate, so she began looking for other work.

On a whim, she applied for an assistant editor’s position at Pages Publishing. Three years later, the Wittenberg history major became the company’s vice president, producing 60 titles a year, some of which she penned.

The company’s policy was that no “in-house” books could be published under a single author’s name because they passed through the hands of other individuals on the staff.

So Dean combined the first names of her sons and came up with her pen name, Cary Jordan. Writing and editing for this kind of audience proved thrilling for Dean. “We could put the word ‘booger’ in our books,” she explains with a laugh.

“The kids loved it.” Now, after raising three sons, Dean admits that she primarily hears male voices when she sits down to write characters, but she notes that writing for girls can be a bit more fun.

This is obvious in her newest book, My Lips Are Sealed: A Book about Secrets, complete with stationery and invisible ink. Dean has even tucked a secret into the spine of the book, but she is not telling.

To date, though, her biggest challenge has been the freelance consulting she does for other authors, including Andrew G. odges, author of Who Will Speak For JonBenet?

As a freelance consultant, “you don’t have to answer to anybody,” she says. Still, Dean recommends keeping a day job, which for her is as an executive editor at McGraw-Hill in Columbus, Ohio.

In this position, Dean works on children’s book series, phonic products and workbooks for kids in kindergarten through sixth grade.“Books are a really safe place for me,” Dean explains.

“A place where I feel normal.” Producing books for children, she says, is like giving back all of the comfort that she found in books as a child. “Children’s minds are musical,” she says.

“They haven’t heard so much junk. Writing for them means hitting the notes right.” Another alumni author has to hit the right keys on her laptop, or at least teach the public how to hit theirs.

Carolyn Jabs ’72, who currently freelances for Family PC Magazine, has written two books in her career, including Re Uses: 2,133 Ways to Recycle and Reuse the Things You Ordinarily Throw Away and Heirloom Gardener.

Today, Jabs addresses the impact of computer technology on the family in her writing. Her goal is to teach families about the changes and issues brought about by computers and the Internet.

Early on in her writing career, though, Jabs lived in New York City, and it was there that she picked up the writing bug. “In New York, it is in the air. Everybody’s writing.” She then moved to a farm in upstate New York.

“It was either write or go to work in the local gun factory,” the Wittenberg English major says. It was during a long, country winter that she wrote her first manuscript on the energy crisis. The manuscript soon turned into a book.

Her second book developed out of a gardening article she had previously written for The New York Times.

The topic was heirloom seeds and open-pollinated varieties that may have arrived on the Mayflower or were originally cultivated by Native Americans.

On her farm, Jabs grew her own garden of heirloom plants and talked to seed collectors throughout the United States. This book, to the author’s amazement, can still be found on Amazon.com.

Jabs says that she would like to write another book someday. “You’re only as good as your last article,” she says. “Books have a life of their own.”

Cynthia Crane ’83 certainly proved this true with her first book, Divided Lives, hich focuses on 10 women whose Jewish/Christian marriages tore their families apart in Nazi Germany.

The stories revealed in Divided Lives hit close to home for Crane, who is actually the granddaughter of a mischehe, or mixed-marriage, couple that escaped Germany in 1938.

Her father’s last name was Cohn, meaning rabbi. Although he was baptized Christian and the family could trace no Jewish relatives in their pedigree, he was beaten every day by his Nazi-sympathetic teacher.

The teacher would tell the class that he was an example of impure blood, Crane says. They called him a mischlinge, or half-breed, because of his mother and father’s mixed marriage.

Moving to America did not erase the slurs her father had to endure. He eventually changed his last name to Crane. “He’d been a Christian all his life, but he was carrying around this loaded name.

For Hitler it wasn’t a religion; it was a race,” explains the English professor at the University of Cincinnati. The idea for her book came from the stories her grandmother told her about Germany before and during World War II.

Crane’s grandmother had even written a manuscript about her experiences, but she never published it. Crane dug into the memories buried in her grandmother’s house, and “it all unfolded from there,” she says.

With a Fulbright scholarship, Crane went to Hamburg, Germany to uncover her family’s secrets. It began as her dissertation for Xavier University, but it developed into much more.

“It was like living in the Third Reich,” the English major says, “which is what you do as a writer — submerge yourself in another world. I was looking at my family’s immigration files and what the Nazis had stolen.

Then I had an epiphany in the archives; I wanted to find more people.” She eventually interviewed more than 20 people but scaled the stories down to 10 for Divided Lives.

“When I went to Germany, a hole closed up inside of me,” Crane says. “I had grown up hearing stories about a world I didn’t know about. All these pieces that I had dreamed about suddenly became reality.”

Her first book signing was at Joseph Beth Booksellers in Cincinnati. More than 100 people attended. Crane says it was a defining moment in the process of producing this book.

“I saw the book in a bigger way,” she says. “I saw how it was affecting other people.” She hopes that her book will remind people of Nazi Germany, and that it will be a lesson for the future.

Alumnus Charles Finsley ’60 has also written a book based on his grandparents’ life during wartime, but their experiences were during the Civil War. In 1997 he published Hannah’s Letters, a collection of a wife’s letters to her husband away at war.

Still, Finsley’s interests primarily rest below ground, not on battlegrounds. For 34 years and since retirement, Finsley has worked at the Dallas Museum of Natural History, where he has written about his findings on dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures.

It’s a career that grew from a fieldtrip to local museum in elementary school. During the trip, Finsley recalls staring up at the great dinosaur bones and at the little brass plates with the engraved names of the discoverers proudly beaming from them.

“I thought to myself that I wanted to grow up and get my name on one of those.” Years later, Finsley’s name appears on a prehistoric mammoth, a dinosaur, an ancient sea turtle the size of a Volkswagen and a swimming sea lizard.

A former Springfield resident, Finsley attended Springfield High School, now Springfield South, before heading to Wittenberg. Once on campus, Finsley majored in sociology, but he found his true love in a self-designed honors course in archeology.

In his thesis for that class, Finsley combined writing and archeology.“I carved out a career of my own at Wittenberg,” Finsley says. “As a result of my honors thesis, I got the chance to excavate a mound in Illinois in the summer of 1961,” shortly after graduation.

While in college, Finsley also experienced a change in climate when his parents moved to Texas. Following his summer of excavation, he headed south to his new home, and since then he has been in love with Texas.

It comes as no surprise then that his first book involved Texas. Titled Field Guide to Fossils of Texas, the book evolved from a small magazine article on the subject.

The article caught a publisher’s eye, and Finsley was soon asked to expand the article into a book. Finsley took his own pictures for the book and wrote whenever he could find the time.

In 1999 he revisited the fossils of Texas, but this time, he focused specifically on dinosaurs. He published the book himself and did all of his own marketing. Finsley said he prefers writing without a publisher breathing down his back.

“It is impossible to fit writing into a small amount of time,” Finsley says. “You have to get into the mood to write, and getting people to give you time is hard. Some days I sit down to write and never touch the keyboard.”

Currently, Finsley is fiddling around with ideas for his first work of fiction based on his ancestors of New Amsterdam. “It is a historical novel about my family’s pirates,” he says with a laugh.

He is also working on a book of anecdotes about nature derived from his time as a curator of the botany collection at the Dallas museum.

In addition to these two projects, he and his wife, Rosa, are also collaborating on a book about the use of rock in landscape architecture.

Like Finsley, Paul Schullery ’70 also takes pride in his surroundings — the vast, natural landscape of Yellowstone National Park.

A technical writer for the National Park Service, Schullery uses his setting as a source of inspiration in his personal as well as professional writing.

“Thousands of books have been written about Yellowstone,” Schullery says, “everything from wildlife to its philosophical origins to its history to its sociology to its ecosystem dynamics. What to write next has never been the problem.

Finding time to write it all is the trick, and for some years it’s been clear to me that I can’t possibly live long enough to write all of the books I have in mind.”

Schullery has already penned 11 books on different aspects of Yellowstone, but those works only hint at the history major’s talent. The author has also written, edited or co-authored some 30 books on such topics as fly-fishing to crawdad eyes.

“I do a lot of digging around in obscure sources of information; research has a wonderful ‘thrill of the chase’ for me. Writing, the actual act of putting the words down, is easily the best part of being a writer,” Schullery explains.

But Schullery also credits his wife, who, he says, provides him with inspiration because she encourages him to “do something for natural resources.”

Additionally, Schullery finds inspiration in the excitement of telling stories and in transcribing the beauty around him. “Nature never fails me,” he says.

Even when he isn’t paying much attention, Schullery says, “nature will reward me with something unforgettable. Always does.”
An outdoorsman to the end, Schullery hopes that he can continue to share his world through words for years to come.

In the future, “I hope I’m still writing, living somewhere beautiful, with the same wife I have now. Actually, that hope applies to the next thousand years just as well. Whatever I get, I’m grateful.”

David Wright ’66 can also be grateful for a career that has taken him around the world. Author of 38 books, including travel-related ones, Wright has sojourned to such diverse locations as Albania, Cambodia, Canada, Burma, Brunei, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and back to his college roots with his book, the Ohio Handbook.

It was during the Vietnam War that Wright attended Wittenberg. An English major, Wright says he read constantly, and through reading, he discovered a love for the written language.

He then challenged himself to become a great writer despite the constant images of violence overseas, which loomed over his college experience.

“Looking back, I feel my senior year was blighted by what was to come,” he explains. “I was so preoccupied with the war, both personally and from the standpoint of being a citizen, that I was almost inert. I went to class but my mind was frequently elsewhere, trying to comprehend the incomprehensible.”

Wright received his draft slip the day after graduation, “so it was useless to do any job planning,” he says. The experience later provided the basis for six of Wright’s 30-plus books, including Vietnam is My Home and a four-volume set titled War in Vietnam, Causes and Consequences of the War in Vietnam.

“I’m 58 and have had lymphoma twice,” Wright says. “The Veterans Administration tells me the disease is a result of exposure to Agent Orange while in Vietnam. I may not be alive in 10 years.” Knowing this, Wright has set out to capture life in his writing.

“I’m trying to emphasize the quality of work and life rather than the quantity. That’s not hard to do in a pleasant place like Madison, Wisc.,” Wright says of the town he calls home.

His first book was actually the result of his just being at home rather than circling the globe. Like Smith-Siegenthal and Kennedy, Wright previously worked on newspapers, but he wanted something more.

By coincidence, he met an editor who needed someone to write a book on the Harley-Davidson Motor Company.“He chose me essentially because I lived near the Harley factory,” Wright says.

“That book has been my biggest seller, with 85,000 hardcover sales in three editions. A paperback edition is coming out in 2003 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the startup of Harley-Davidson.”

It was a big start for someone who had never owned a Harley and still doesn’t. With or without a Harley, though, Wright certainly gets around to places most people only dream of or have never even considered.

“Writing a travel book means going somewhere, acting like a tourist and then recording it all,” he says. “What’s not to like about that?

As a writer, I’ve been to southeast Asia half a dozen times, as far north as Swan River, Manitoba and as far south as the island of Borneo.” Wright has freelanced full-time for 22 years and says he is embarrassed to tell people what he does for a living.

“It sounds like the occupation of a character on a soap opera,” he says, despite having more than three dozen books under his belt and being approached by Newt Gingrich to ghostwrite a book.

Although many of these alumni authors have sacrificed some security at various points along their publishing paths, they still remain passionate about their trade. They can inspire others, and they can also laugh at themselves.

Interviewed on different days, at different hours, in different states, and from different backgrounds, many, for example, would advise young writers to marry into money.“It all depends upon how badly you want to do it,” Schullery explains.

“I fear that many people never realize how completely they control their own direction.

The ones who do, and who are willing simply to go ahead and make whatever sacrifices are necessary — lousy income and living conditions, sleeping in your car, uprooting yourself, not uprooting yourself, whatever honorable thing needed — seem to have the best odds.

But family or school connections, wealth, and absurdly improbable good luck should never be underrated.”