I’m reprinting my earlier posts on food banks as a response to the current world crisis brought on by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This is Part Two. – Jadi
“Justice of Eating Produce Stand”
The first thing I noticed is that the food bank takes up an entire warehouse. Outside the front doors a lovely mural depicts people harvesting a garden for an old-fashioned produce stand. The next wall has a quote from Pablo Neruda.
The reception area has tall walls with high windows, metal filing cases and the ubiquitous, moveable office divider walls. Boxes in the gigantic pantries are stacked impossibly tall, 10-15 palettes high. Signs direct donors to head to Dock 1; at another dock, vans load food to be delivered to distribution centers.
These boxes store all sorts of food goods, not bananas!
Beverlee moved to Eugene from the Oregon coast where she was one of the humans instrumental in releasing an orca back to the ocean (you know that story as “Free Willie”). She’s always loved community development work.
She says, “In the non-profit world you wear so many hats. You can be responsible for so many things. If I like coming to work, I certainly want my employees to enjoy coming to work… it’s a whole lot easier to manage an organization where folks are happy. It’s great to keep my finger on the pulse.”
Of the staff of 58, thirty-six employees are full time, and six of those are involved in fund raising and marketing. Many of the workers have been with the non-profit for 18-20 years. All are passionately committed to FFLC’s goals.
A typical employee “is a guy who had a really good job, great bennies, and a good salary. But it wasn’t meaningful work. So at a certain age he decided that he needed to change gears and do something more meaningful.
“It’s a paradox sometimes,” Bev says. “We have people working here who need our services. A liveable minimum wage is $15/hour. But all of our full time employees get health care and retirement benefits.”
Entry-level employees usually are young people (frequently part-time), working their way into careers. Other positions are filled by a highly educated group who usually hold graduate degrees and have an interest in non-profit management. Many are Peace Corps veterans or people with experience as volunteers. The 16 men who work in the warehouse are a range of ages, all of them interested in physical labor.
FFLC runs 13 food programs, each with a unique way of distributing food to the hungry. Most of the food bank’s 140 partner organizations are staffed by volunteers.
Bev wanted to know first-hand what it’s like to budget for food on a limited income. “The first thing that happens when people are strapped,” she said, “is they decide not to eat. They want to pay the bills and keep the roof over their heads.” Persons on food stamps provided by the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, or SNAP, feed themselves on what comes to $31.50 a week, or $1.50 a meal. Bev had to think ahead and prepare food all the time to make it work. She realized that “[a] person who has limited access to food by necessity spends a lot of energy trying to figure out how to meet that hunger.”
Former President Donald Trump attempted to cancel SNAP benefits for millions of Americans. [1]
Food For Lane County is Eugene’s most popular non-profit, and she hears stories every day about people who have been touched by their services. Bev volunteers at FFLC’s programs and especially loves FFLC’s restaurant. The Dining Room serves nightly free meals with a piano playing in the room, artwork on the walls, and newspapers to read. The homeless and the hungry are fed with dignity. Bev describes being there as “a Buddhist moment”.
I asked her for any last thoughts. She notes that America has no national discussion about hunger and poverty. People cared when the recession first hit, but events have moved on in terms of dialog or visibility. And in the meantime the problems of hunger and the hungry in the USA have worsened.
Before the afternoon ended I knew I was going to blog about Beverlee and Food For Lane County.
Beverlee Potter, former Executive Director, Food For Lane County
***
FFLC’s vision: To eliminate hunger in Lane County. Their mission: “To alleviate hunger by creating access to food. We accomplish this by soliciting, collecting, rescuing, growing, preparing and packaging food for distribution through a network of social services agencies and programs and through public awareness, education and community advocacy.”
NOTES: *Food insecurity—the condition assessed in the food security survey and represented in USDA food security reports—is a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food. [1] As reported in December 2019, the Trump administration had ‘sought to tighten requirements for food stamps without congressional approval after Congress blocked a Trump-backed effort to pass new restrictions through the Farm Bill last year.’ (Reuters www.reuters.com) I’ve updated the link on food security:USDA Report on Food Security
Watch “A Place at the Table” with Jeff Bridges, about hunger in America. A Place at the Table
The facts in these two posts speak for themselves. The bald reality of hunger in America is outrageous enough, and Putin’s war in Ukraine means that countries around the world face starvation.
My books are Broken In: A Novel in Stories, Tsunami Cowboys, Grounded, and The Trail Back Out.
Tsunami Cowboys was longlisted for the 2019 ScreenCraft Cinematic Book Award. The Trail Back Out was honored as 2021 IAN Book of the Year Award Short Story Collection Finalist for the Independent Author Network and with a Red Ribbon by the 2021 Wishing Shelf Book Awards of England. In addition, The Trail Back Out was an American Book Fest 2020 Best Book Award Finalist: Fiction Anthologies. The title story The Trail Back Out was longlisted for the 2021 ScreenCraft Cinematic Short Story Award. Broken In: A Novel in Stories was a semifinalist for the international 2020 Hawk Mountain Short Story Collection Award from Hidden River Arts, as well as a Finalist for Greece’s 2021 Eyelands Book Awards.
Click here for my author page to learn more about me and purchase my books. My main character in Tsunami Cowboys goes to the food bank.
In light of the current food crisis brought on by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it seems like a good time to reprint my posts about food banks. I wrote this two-part post back in 2013. Since then, need brought on by food insufficiency has only grown more dire. May these posts give my readers food for thought.
– Jadi
I visited the Food for Lane County food bank while doing research for my second book Tsunami Cowboys. One character visits a food bank. It’s a brief scene, a couple pages. Easy enough. Nonetheless, the scene matters.
I spent hours trolling the Web for information. The back of my brain always insists, Get it right, Jadi. Then I remembered I actually know several people who work at non-profits… and I’d never visited a food bank. So, in the interests of research (and a wonderful excuse to see what a friend does all day) I made an appointment to interview Beverlee Potter (at that time Beverlee Hughes), Executive Director of Food For Lane County [FFLC] in Eugene, Oregon.
I thought I knew about the reality of hunger. Uwe and I travel to out-of-the-way places, and God knows we’ve seen poverty and malnutrition in countries and regions all around the globe. But the visit to FFLC brings it back home.
Fact: 20% of the U.S. population lives in poverty
Fact: 46 million Americans are on food stamps
Fact: The number of people needing services has tripled in a decade
Fact: 1 in every 5 people in Oregon is eligible for food assistance
Fact: Oregon State has highest rate of childhood hunger in the country (29.0%)
Fact: 30% of children in Oregon are food insecure *
Fact: 39% of Lane County residents are eligible for emergency food assistance
Fact: In some Lane County schools, 95% of all children are eligible for free or reduced cost lunches
What do you do with these facts? If you’re Beverlee, you get to work. She and her staff of 58 achieve an astonishing range of goals:
Emergency & Mobile food pantries (distributing just under 8millionlbs. of food/year)
Emergency Meal sites & shelters
3 Child Nutrition Programs
Food Rescue Express & Fresh Alliance (distributing 1 million lbs. of food/year)
2 gardens & a 6-acre farm that grow food & build self-esteem. FFLC hires at-risk kids and through internships teaches them teamwork, punctuality, customer services, etc. Daily lunches at the gardens teach people what freshly harvested produce tastes like.
Extra Helping, food for low-income housing sites
Rural deliveries
Delivery of once-a-month food boxes for low-income seniors
A farm stand outside PTA meetings where parents can pick up food as they leave
The Dining Room, the food bank’s sit-down restaurant in downtown Eugene, offering free 4-5 course meals. They serve up to 300 meals a night.
Shopping Matters, classes to teach people on limited budgets how to shop for food
Cooking Matters, free cooking & nutrition classes
***
Beverlee Potter has since retired. The amazing work of Food For Lane County continues. For more information: https://foodforlanecounty.org/
My books are Broken In: A Novel in Stories, Tsunami Cowboys, Grounded, and The Trail Back Out.
Tsunami Cowboys was longlisted for the 2019 ScreenCraft Cinematic Book Award. The Trail Back Out was honored as 2021 IAN Book of the Year Award Short Story Collection Finalist for the Independent Author Network and with a Red Ribbon by the 2021 Wishing Shelf Book Awards of England. In addition, The Trail Back Out was an American Book Fest 2020 Best Book Award Finalist: Fiction Anthologies. The title story The Trail Back Out was longlisted for the 2021 ScreenCraft Cinematic Short Story Award. Broken In: A Novel in Stories was a semifinalist for the international 2020 Hawk Mountain Short Story Collection Award from Hidden River Arts, as well as a Finalist for Greece’s 2021 Eyelands Book Awards.
Click here for my author page to learn more about me and purchase my books. My main character in Tsunami Cowboys goes to the food bank.
Hear ye, hear ye, I was interviewed. Read it here. Shaz’s Book Blog. Sharon describes herself as a bookaholic and she asks great questions! This is a very cool blog.
I worked on the answers in Costa Rica and sent them to her as soon as we got home, and I can’t grasp what that sentence even means now.
SPECIAL NOTE: If you try to comment in the wordpress.com reader and get the message “Sorry – there was a problem posting your comment”, click on the title of this post to get to jadicampbell.com and post your comment there. Sorry for the ongoing problem.
Click here for my author page to learn more about me and purchase my books.
I wrote as free lance European Correspondent about massage and healing techniques around the world for about a decade. I interviewed therapists. I got (and still get) lots of massages. I drank stinky healing waters and sat in hot mineral waters, cold mineral waters, and peat bog mud (really!). [1]
I was transformed into a human pretzel in Thailand and had my back walked on by a barefoot Hanoi therapist as she held onto ceiling railings.
I wrote the following article not long after I came to Germany…
My first spa massage: I had exotic visions of a sea algae wrap first, steaming fluffy hot towels wrapped deliciously around my entire body, perhaps a dip in a pool filled with aromatic, green mud. Don’t ask me where these visions came from. All I know is that when I made my appointment at Das Leuze Spa in Bad Cannstatt, Germany, this was what I hoped to experience.
The reality was… well, more realistic. I had to wait a week for a time slot. There wasn’t any possibility of an hour-long or longer massage; half an hour was the time limit. Patients come with a doctor’s prescription and German insurance covers the therapy sessions. But private patients aren’t so unusual, and I had no trouble getting an appointment.
I showed up twenty minutes early as requested. I paid roughly $18 at the appointments window and, taking my receipt, wandered towards the spa massage rooms. I had some time before my massage, so I decided to look around a little bit.
It was the 4th of July in southern Germany and we were having the hottest summer in recorded weather history – which meant the hottest summer in over two hundred years. I looked longingly over the grounds towards a spa pool. The water looked so cool and inviting. But I was here to research European massage methods. Plus my shoulders had been killing me for weeks; I really needed this massage.
I turned back and saw a woman dressed in white with a name tag on her shirt. I showed her my appointment slip and receipt, and asked if I was in the right area. She smiled and answered yes, got a half-sheet from a hallway closet and led me into a treatment room.
“What do I do with the sheet?” I asked. “Climb under it?” It seemed pretty hot for a cover, but what the hey. How was I supposed to know?
“Lay the sheet down on the table and lie on top of it.” She smiled encouragingly as she closed the door behind her.
I looked around the room to see where I could set my clothing. The room had an open window that looked out on a pool, the Mineralbad Berg. I peeked through the doorway: the next room contained a huge tub. I must be in one of the two Quiet Rooms attached to every hydrotherapy room. I knew these Quiet Rooms are sometimes used to give massages, or the patients rest on the massage tables after hydro treatments.
There were hooks on the wall and a handy string bag in which to place clothes and jewelry. I looked over and noticed a wool blanket hanging from a rung. Just looking at it made me itchy. Why didn’t the rest of the world catch on to air conditioning or fans? Germans consider AC umweltunfreundlich (bad for the environment and energy drains to boot) but I longed for a waft of breeze. Anything to make the day less sticky.
There was a knock on the door and in walked my massage therapist. He said hello and began without ceremony on the bottom of my legs with effleurage [2].
“I like deep tissue work,” I said. “And my back and shoulders need special attention.” If he was surprised that I had a special request, he didn’t show it. My calves began to melt. He noticed they were tight. He worked his way along my hamstrings and used an inverted J stroke from my sacrum to my neck. There he somehow screwed his knuckles into my shoulder. It felt wonderful! How was he doing that? I hated to interrupt the massage by asking. I also didn’t want to distract myself from the way my shoulders were finally loosening up, so I gave myself mental requests to shut up and stop analysing the massage. Relax! He worked the right side of my back and then the left, and raked my ribs as I lay there prone.
I could feel my stress slip away. Then I felt something drip. Was he applying more oil? I didn’t feel a break in his massage rhythm. A few more drops came. Then I realized: my massage therapist was dripping sweat on me.
Yes, it was hot as hell, he was working hard, there wasn’t any air conditioning… but still. Uggh. I suddenly felt squeamish. This had never happened to me before. Before I could decide what to say, he stopped and asked me to turn over.
He used too much pressure on my quadriceps. I had to tell him it hurt, and he eased up. The massage strokes were mostly a flowing effleurage that was quite penetrating and a deep petrissage [3], plus that same interesting J stroke.
Afterwards I sat up and slowly stretched my limbs. Everything felt good. The crepitus in my shoulders had disappeared.
I left feeling looser, definitely sweatier (and it wasn’t even my sweat), and thoughtful about the difference between massage as a professional medical service versus the tentative situation that still exists in some parts of America.
The things I liked about the spa massage? The massage was extremely competent, did me much physical and emotional good and was everything I could ask from a session with a skilled therapist. The facility is absolutely top-notch even without air conditioning. It has everything you could dream of: Hydrotherapy. Fango mud treatments. Wet and dry saunas. Therapies of a wide range and variety. The spa grounds are in a beautiful natural setting. At no time did I feel awkward, either as a foreigner or wandering around as I found my way to my therapy room.
All in all, my spa massage was a positive experience and one I wouldn’t mind repeating… maybe sometime when the weather’s not so hot.
NOTES: [1] The spas of Baden-Baden, Germany; Pammukale, Turkey; Karlovy Vary and Marianske Lazne, Czech Republic, and Bad Kohlgrub, Germany.
[2] Effleurage is a series of long smooth strokes used in Swedish massage to warm up the connective tissues and underlying muscles.
[3] Petrissage may be squeezing, kneading, wringing or skin rolling, and massages more deeply into the muscles.
This article first appeared in slightly different form: Campbell JB. In the Heat of the Spa. Massage Jul/Aug 1995; 56:114, 117-9.
I’m more than thrilled to repost the interview I just did with Steve Wellings at Write A Revolution. My thanks to Steve for his terrific close reading of the text and thoughtful questions.
Interview with self-published author Jadi Campbell
I’m hard at work on my next novel. You’ll meet a psychotherapist with a fear of flying, cult members, and a woman with strange dreams. One character visits a food bank. It’s a brief scene, one page or maybe two, tops. Easy enough. Nonetheless, the scene matters.
I spent hours trolling the Web for information. The back of my brain always insists, Get it right, Jadi. Then I remembered I actually know several people who work at non-profits… and I’d never visited a food bank. So, in the interests of research (and a wonderful excuse to see what a friend does all day) I made an appointment to interview Beverlee Hughes, Executive Director of Food For Lane County [FFLC] in Eugene, Oregon.
I thought I knew about the reality of hunger. Uwe and I travel to out of the way places, and God knows we’ve seen poverty and malnutrition in countries and regions all around the globe. But the visit to FFLC brings it back home.
Fact: 20% of the U.S. population lives in poverty
Fact: 46 million Americans are on food stamps
Fact: The number of people needing services has tripled in a decade
Fact: 1 in every 5 people in Oregon is eligible for food assistance
Fact: Oregon State has highest rate of childhood hunger in the country (29.0%)
Fact: 30% of children in Oregon are food insecure *
Fact: 39% of Lane County residents are eligible for emergency food assistance
Fact: In some Lane County schools, 95% of all children are eligible for free or reduced cost lunches
What do you do with these facts? If you’re Beverlee, you get to work. She and her staff of 58 achieve an astonishing range of goals:
Emergency & Mobile food pantries (distributing just under 8millionlbs. of food/year)
Emergency Meal sites & shelters
3 Child Nutrition Programs
Food Rescue Express & Fresh Alliance (distributing 1 million lbs. of food/year)
2 gardens & a 6-acre farm that grow food & build self-esteem. FFLC hires at-risk kids and through internships teaches them teamwork, punctuality, customer services, etc. Daily lunches at the gardens teach people what freshly harvested produce tastes like.
Extra Helping, food for low-income housing sites
Rural deliveries
Delivery of once-a-month food boxes for low-income seniors
A farm stand outside PTA meetings where parents can pick up food as they leave
The Dining Room, the food bank’s sit-down restaurant in downtown Eugene, offering free 4-5 course meals. They serve up to 300 meals a night.
Shopping Matters, classes to teach people on limited budgets how to shop for food
Cooking Matters, free cooking & nutrition classes to begin in January 2014
***
Part 2 will be posted tomorrow.
* Food insecurity—the condition assessed in the food security survey and represented in USDA food security reports—is a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food.
Author Interview: Jadi CampbellPosted on July 20, 2013 by Bronwyn // 2 Comments
Tell us about yourself…
What is your name?
Jadi Campbell
Where are you from Jadi?
Upstate NY; then the NW; and finally, Europe. Home is now a 1,200 year-old village near Stuttgart, Germany.
What do you do when you are not writing?
Ideally, travel. In my daily life I enjoy physical activity, exploring the cultural offerings here, cooking, and reading.
Do you have a day job as well?
I’ve been a massage therapist for 25 years. The intense one-on-one work is the perfect foil to the solitude writing requires. Also, working deeply with other peoples’ mind-body-spirit process provides a wonderful source of material for my stories.
Do you ever experience writer’s block?
I like each part of the writing process, so on days when new ideas aren’t coming, I’ll edit work-in-progress, or write blog posts.
Is there any particular author or book that influenced you in any way either growing up or as an adult?
Shakespeare. As a child I saw a college production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The theatre was filled to capacity, so my sister and I sat on the edge of the stage. When Puck sprinkled magical dew on the sleeping humans, we were showered as well. The drops that hit my skin were real to me! From that moment on, I was hooked. Later in college I studied Shakespeare and revere the way he knew us in all our foibles and flaws… and loved us in all our humanity anyway.
Tell us about your book…
Book title
Broken In: A Novel in Stories
Genre
Broken In may be read as a novel or as individual short stories.
Can you summarise the book for us?
In JJ’s, the bartender and a teenaged patron plan exotic trips. JJ’s chef meets several men who’d kill for her. Valuables and peace of mind literally get stolen. Couples celebrate, or split up. On a rainy night accidents happen and people vanish. These are the stories of people whose paths cross – or crash.
The tales begin in a bistro and move on to Bangkok, a carnival midway, and the bottom of a lake, among other places. Small acts have a huge impact, and people are connected in ways they never imagined.
How did you come up with the title?
Broken in can refer to comfortable shoes. It might be the way new employees learn the ropes, and how we adapt to our lives. But it’s often ominous, and signifies the theft of what we value. Each of my characters is forced to react to loss or the challenge of adjusting to being broken in, one way or another.
Is it going to be available as an ebook only or are you planning to print it too?
Broken In is available as a paperback and also as an eBook with Kindle.
How are you planning to price your book?
The paperback is £6.98 ($11.95) and the eBook is £2.49 ($3.99) on Kindle. The pricing in Euros is equivalent. These prices mean my book is reasonably priced for everyone.
Can you give us a little taster?
Here is an excerpt from “Looms Large” in Broken In: A Novel in Stories.
Judy reached the wading pool. Parents young and old dangled tiny children by their waists down into the shallow water. Other adults lurched, strangely hunched from the back. She walked past and saw the tiny people gripping index fingers and attempting the great walk of the upright, little feet between those of their parents, everybody’s legs sloshing happily through the water. At least 70 children had to be crowding into the pool: the surface was a dazzling panorama of tender sunbonnets in every possible color and configuration of flowers and cartoon characters.
Finally she found Steve. He’d been waving at her for some minutes to get her attention. Judy waved back. He’d laid a large brown blanket on the grassy verge at the edge of the lake. Tree shade just covered half of the blanket.
The park lawns were filled with bodies seeking the heat like winter creatures coming out of a long hard hibernation, but everyone was in a good mood. A family had claimed the next section of grass. The mother determinedly lay on her stomach with her breasts nestled in a pillow and her chin propped on the backs of her hands. Her entire concentration was focused on a popular paper back mystery opened on the blanket in front of her.
Her husband was left to supervise their children. A boy sat just above the water by two little girls in matching lime green swimsuits. The sisters bobbed inside bright orange life rings as they played in the lake. Their father was propped on his left elbow, leaving his right hand free for the beer hidden in a stubby can cooler. “Keep to where I can see you,” he ordered, but he wasn’t too concerned. He was sure they would be in less danger of getting drowned than they were in of being trampled. “If you go in deeper, you don’t go in without the life rings!” Okays drifted up the lawn towards him and all three turned back to their games.
“You wouldn’t believe the road traffic!” Judy gave Steve a hug and set down the food she’d carried halfway around the lake looking for him.
“You wouldn’t believe the traffic here on the lake front.” Steve yawned loudly and stretched back out on the blanket. Judy nudged him with her foot as she unpacked the lunch. “Hey. Don’t go to sleep on me, I just got here.”
“No chance of falling asleep with this racket,” Steve assured her. It was true: the water out in the deeper part of the lake was filled with people swimming or floating on air mattresses, while closer to the shore line a hundred small children laughed and splashed and shrieked. They made a joyous sounding, truly loud racket.
It fit the afternoon though, the languid mood of summer time when shadows move slowly across park lawns and picnic blankets. A slight breeze riffled the water into little waves; each one would send small children shrieking excited back out of reach for a second or two. On blankets and towels all around them people turned on their sides like sunflowers following the rays of the sun, or curled like large sleeping cats. The mother remained absorbed in her paperback mystery. Her husband’s head lolled where he’d fallen asleep still propped on his side.
Steve and Judy played Old Maid, and Judy kept winning. She’d figured out a system for cheating as a child, and couldn’t stop laughing as Steve became more and more frustrated with each hand he lost. “Just one more round!” he kept insisting.
A low, insistent shriek broke Steve’s concentration. It was similar to the piercing sounds made all afternoon by the lungs of the small children who filled the park. This one sounded different, though, a wail preceding the announcement of a disaster.
He dropped his hand of cards and the blanket bunched as he jumped up. Steve got to the water just as the little boy lost the life ring he’d pulled away from his sister. The little girl gurgled and vanished under the surface. Out in the water the bright orange ring bobbed, now empty. The little boy stood up to his neck in the lake shrieking. The ring floated further out and away. His other sister began to scream; only she and Steve had seen what had happened.
Their voices were drowned under the hundreds of other shrieking, laughing children, tinny radio music and the baseball game being broadcasted on a loud speaker, all the chatter of a hot summer afternoon on a waterfront in a city park.
Steve ran into the lake. He swam in the direction of the floating life ring, hoping the little girl had sunk somewhere in the general vicinity. When he reached what he thought was the point where she’d gone under, he began to dive.
Visibility was murky under the surface. He swam with outstretched hands and eyes searching desperately for signs of a body. Something kicked him hard in the cheek, and Steve resurfaced choking. The small child snug in his life vest simply paddled on past Steve in the water and flailed with skinny arms; he hadn’t even noticed the adult under the surface. Steve gasped in more air and dove again.
This time he was luckier and spotted a lime green object wafting in the under current. Steve grabbed her by the first part he could clutch, which was her shoulder strap. He swam back to the surface with strong strokes. Steve pulled the child’s head into the crook of his arm and made his way back to the shore.
When he emerged from the lake everything sounded far away at first, as though God had pressed a button and the world had been put on mute. With a rush his hearing returned, and the sensation of his own raspy breathing. He felt the water running off of his clothes as he lay the child on the grass and felt for a pulse. She lay as limp as a deboned fish.
Steve pumped her chest and turned her body onto the side. The lake water she’d swallowed came up in a sudden gush, and the child began to cough. Steve let out a high laugh with a feeling of exhilaration: she was alive after all. She arched her back to take in new breaths of the air. As she breathed in Steve felt his vision come tunneling back, whistling in with her new air. Her lungs expanded and compressed, and the colors of the world dimmed and glowed brighter along the ragged edges of each one of her breaths. The multiple layers of colors in the kites flying overhead, the fluttering sound they made in the suddenly windy afternoon, the breeze creating gooseflesh over his entire body, and the shadows flying back and forth over the edge of the water were almost unbearable.
Nobody except Judy witnessed the rescue. There was simply too much other activity in the lake and on the shoreline. The child’s parents listened in dozy incomprehension as the girl’s little sister and brother hysterically tried to explain where she’d gone. Incomprehension turned to puzzlement, and to horror. They scanned the lake surface, frantic by the time they finally spotted Steve resuscitating their daughter. They rushed over, the father’s eyes spilling with tears even though he could see she was going to be fine.
“She’s alive? How could I have? What sort of parent? In just a matter of seconds?” He spoke in fractures, unfinished questions, knowing there could be no answer to the enormity of the monstrous disaster that had almost happened. His muscles shivered in hard spasms, matching Steve’s.
Steve had begun to shake so hard that he had to sit down abruptly, almost falling on the child as she tried to sit up. The father grabbed Steve by the arm and helped him sit while he pumped his hand over and over, a wordless thank you. Everyone except Judy was crying.
Let’s talk a little more about your story…
Who is your favourite character in your book and why?
My favourite character is Gabe Burgess, the bartender at JJ’s. Gabe is adopted, and comes from a mixed background. One month out of every year, Gabe travels the globe looking for his roots. He comes to see the world as his home and that he’s connected to everything, everywhere. Gabe never stops questioning or attempting to see the world as it is. He’s the sort of human being I would most like to know, and to be.
How did you go about developing your characters?
While they aren’t based on actual people, I write characters who are real. Readers should pick up the book and identify themselves and people they know in my characters. To begin with a character, I flesh out with emotions and a background, and give them a situation or event to respond to. What interests me are 3-dimensional characters; you will not meet good vs. evil stereotypes in my stories.
Is there anything you’d change about your novel?
I learned so much writing this first book and hope the books to follow will reflect that fact. But, no, I would not change anything. Once I decided to publish, I had to let go of my book and send it off into the world!
Tell us about your publishing journey…
Why did you choose the self-publishing route?
I spent over a year trying to find an agent, without any luck. The one agency kind enough to write me a detailed response explained that with the advent of the Internet they couldn’t keep up with requests. Where they used to get 100 letters a week, they now receive 200 queries a day. It was clear that I’d need to find another route to publication!
I did a lot of research and it felt right to try self-publishing. My desire to see my work in print pushed me to take the risk.
Did you make any mistakes along the way?
Is there anything you’d like to recommend to other authors?
Yikes. A marketing plan is vital. Like most writers, my weak point is self-promotion. (My words should speak for themselves, right?) I am still figuring out that piece to the puzzle and am slowly getting better at it.
Have you used any professional author services?
What was your experience with them?
No. However, I belong to a terrific writers’ group and get steady feedback from my peers.
Is this your first self-published book?
While this is my first published novel, I wrote for over a decade as a European Correspondent for international massage magazines.
Criticism/Feedback
What has been the toughest criticism given to you as an author? What has been the best compliment?
I took a writing class in college and the professor was clearly bored. We were a group of insecure young 18-year-olds, and her indifference was devastating. I would rather have a sincere critic than someone who just doesn’t care.
In terms of the best compliment, I have been told that dinner wasn’t cooked and conversations were delayed so that my readers could finish just one more page of my story! The second best compliment was that the story stayed with the readers long after they finished the novel.
Book marketing
How do you market your work? What avenues have you found work best for your genre?
I have a blog at http://jadicampbell.com/ and use it as a platform to build an audience and community. I email my contacts with information and updates as well. And my writers’ group does public readings several times a year.
Going forward
What can we expect from you in the future?
I’m working steadily on my next novel. In it you’ll meet a former cult member and a therapist with a fear of flying. A collection of short stories is also in the works and receives all the tales that don’t seem to fit anywhere else for now. The blog has been surprisingly fun (and way more work than I ever expected). The huge world of bloggers out there constitute a generous and fascinating community.
My husband and I are avid travellers and impressions from around the world have found their way into all of my stories. I write about universal themes, sometimes in exotic settings, with characters we can all relate to.
Is there anything else you’d like to say?
Writing is like breathing for me. I’ve wanted to write since the age of 6. It’s given me enormous joy and satisfaction to make that dream a reality. All readers are welcome!
Bronwyn is in charge of our editorial services here at standoutbooks. You will generally find her helping our authors perfect their work. Unsurprisingly, she loves reading and is always on the lookout for that next great book.
Thanks so much for talking to us today Jadi. I am sure that everyone will enjoy reading about your experiences as a self-published author as much as I did.
Don’t ask me where these visions came from. All I know is that when I made my appointment at Das Leuze Spa in Bad Cannstatt, Germany, this was what I hoped to experience.
Comments
Thanks so much for talking to us today Jadi. I am sure that everyone will enjoy reading about your experiences as a self-published author as much as I did.
Congratulations, Jadi on a great interview. Your characters are *very* memorable and I’m looking forward to reading more of your work.
Reposted from Standoutbooks:
https://www.standoutbooks.co.uk/author-interview-jadi-campbell