(gentle music) - Hello and welcome to The Bookmark.

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today my guest is Lareida Buckley, and we're gonna be discussing her debut novel, "Stories from the Sheriff's Daughter."

Thank you so much for being here today.

- Thank you for having me.

- I'm so excited to talk about this book.

I've done so few novels on the show and I love fiction, so I love to talk about novels, so I'm excited to jump in.

But just to start, can I ask you to introduce the book to us?

- The book is a fictionalization of my early life.

When I was nine years old, my father was elected sheriff of the county, and we moved into the living quarters of the jail in Burleson County.

My father was 24/7 Sheriff.

My mother was kind of defacto jailer with the big jail keys and the cup towel drawer, that kind of thing.

She cooked for the prisoners.

So any kind of mayhem or complaint or problem came to our door.

We didn't have a 911 system, so any phone calls of trouble came to our phone.

So the book is just a fictionalization of those stories.

- And as you mentioned, it's fiction, but this is based on, maybe drawn out of some real experiences you had.

And tell us where you were, because it's close by to where we are now, where you grew up.

- Really, Caldwell.

So Caldwell, about 25 miles from here.

And we had lived on a dairy farm out in the country, not far from town, and then moved into town to live in the jail.

It was a little bit different life.

We considered it normal, though, we didn't think anything of it.

My brothers and I just grew up thinking, "Well, yeah, everybody lives like this."

We didn't think it was that strange.

- I think that's one of the, maybe charms of childhood is you just think your experience is the universal experience, and it's not until you grow up that you learn, maybe this is different.

- That was a little weird, yeah.

(Christine chuckling) Now I know.

- Right.

So a common piece of writing advice is to write what you know, and you certainly took that advice, I would guess.

How do you go about fictionalizing your real experiences and making them a novel?

- When I started these stories, I had been gone from Texas for a long time and my parents had passed away, so I really didn't think I could do a memoir justice, but I thought it was an interesting enough story, so I just thought, "I'll do it fictional instead."

And fiction was way more fun.

I could be creative, I could add humor.

If a story was not quite exciting enough, I could just make it a little more exciting.

So I really enjoyed the creativity that fiction allowed.

- Well, it's certainly a piece of Texas tradition to make our tails a little taller than they normally or truthfully were.

So I think this fits right in with our literary tradition.

- Exactly.

And I didn't really have anybody to check facts.

So if I couldn't verify a fact or if I couldn't figure out, oh, did that really happen?

Then I would just fake it and make it fiction.

- [Christine] The beauty of a novel is- - Exactly.

- Nobody's gonna fact-check you, yeah.

I did wanna ask about research though, because we haven't talked about time period, but this book takes place over a number of years.

It's kind of slices of life of this young girl, our narrator's life, from the fifties and sixties, which if you all have been to Caldwell or even Bryan-College Station, it's a lot different now than it was back then, even 20 years ago.

- [Lareida] Right.

- So did you have to do any research or did you maybe phone friends or something to say, "What was really there at this time and what am I misremembering?"

- I did check a few things with my brothers.

Not enough.

My brothers didn't read the book until it was already published.

I thought that was probably safer.

But I did check a few things like that.

But no, I didn't really do any research.

If I wasn't sure about a fact or something, I just left it out.

Because I was in Hawaii, writing from Hawaii, so I didn't really have a chance to check it.

- Which is about as far from Caldwell as I would guess you can get.

- Yes.

I think it's 3084 miles from my house to Caldwell.

(both laughing) - And worlds of difference, as far as climate and views.

I imagine the views are a little better in Hawaii than they are in Caldwell.

(chuckles) So this is your first novel.

- [Lareida] It is.

- Was that daunting to get started or did you just jump in?

- Well, it was.

I had the stories around for a long time.

I had belonged to a writing group and we had an assignment that we would come up with a story every couple of weeks.

So I had some stories and I couldn't really decide how to proceed from there.

I had the stories, I'd written them.

About six months or so, I came in contact with a writing professor from San Jose State.

She read them, made some edits and said, "Just submit it."

And I thought, "Whoa, well."

I'd read these stories where people submit and they submit 25 times and get rejection.

So I was set up for a really long haul and submitted it to TCU Press.

I researched who does Texas fiction and TCU Press was a good one.

And I submitted it and they called me the next day and said, "Yes, we're gonna do it."

So I was on my way, 76 years old, doing my first book.

- Wow.

- So it was very exciting.

It was daunting to do it, to make the decision to actually submit.

That was a horrifying day.

I was very nervous, but turned out fine.

In fact, I was gonna say, in my forties, when I was writing stuff, I had some business cards made, "Lareida Buckley, writer," just to encourage myself.

I always say though, reader would've been more accurate.

(chuckles) So now I have a business card.

I probably have given you one that says "Lareida Buckley, author."

And it's the real thing now.

- [Christine] That's an exciting jump.

- It is.

- From reader to writer to author.

- [Lareida] It is, it is.

- I also wanna pull out there, I was gonna ask you if you have advice, but before I ask you that question, you unknowingly, I think, gave a great piece of advice to anybody who's looking to maybe publish is to find the right publisher.

- Right.

- Because I do get asked that question a lot, and at A&M Press, we don't publish any poetry or fiction.

- Right.

- So the best advice is to know who would publish your book and try to target those people.

You did the right thing, you started it with the right place, clearly.

- Exactly, exactly.

After I did it and it was accepted, my husband said, "Why didn't you send it to Simon & Schuster?"

(both laughing) I said, "Well, they don't accept anything without an agent."

So it was the perfect mix and the perfect fit, and I think that's what everybody needs to do.

- And that's the beauty of smaller publishers, regional publishers like our friends at TCU, UNT here at A&M, we are not Simon & Schuster, but that's also a benefit to the people of Texas who maybe wanna read local regional stories.

You don't have to have an agent to submit to a smaller publisher.

- [Lareida] Exactly.

- Generally.

So if you're just getting out, a smaller publisher might be a better fit.

- And I didn't really intend it as a bestseller or a money-maker or something.

In fact, I started off just writing.

I wanted to kind of honor my parents, the sheriffs and the stories.

- Okay, now I'm gonna ask you, what advice would you give to people who are maybe wanting to write down their stories or their novel or any kind of book?

- Just do it.

(Christine chuckling) Do it, and just keep writing.

I think, though, we get kind of, writers especially, you revise and you worry and you worry over your pieces.

But I think just do it.

Just dive right in and do it.

And my success with this book and submitting it and getting it published on the first try is encouraging.

- [Christine] It's still possible to have it.

- It is.

- [Christine] Yeah.

- It is.

- And you also mentioned writing groups.

Do you find having a peer group help you write?

- It did.

And having to come up with something, that's encouraging too.

You had to come up with something for each time we met.

So that was helpful.

- [Christine] Yeah, having a deadline sometimes motivates us.

(laughs) - Writing groups were good fun.

- What books or what authors inspired you or did you maybe draw from to write this book?

- Well, "Sheriff's Daughter," there's a young girl, and this "Larger than Life" father.

"To Kill a Mockingbird," (Christine laughing) of course.

- [Christine] I was hoping that would come up.

(both laughing) - But I mean, that's a high bar to aspire to.

But the story in the sense of having the "Larger than Life" community-loved character as the father was inspirational.

And then I've read a lot of that southern literature, kind of dark and gothic, Carson McCullers, that kind of thing.

But my upbringing or my stories were not quite that dark or painful.

(chuckles) But those kind of writers I've read.

- Well, I'm glad you mentioned 'cause I noticed that.

I was maybe 20 pages and I thought, "This seems," not familiar because it's a very different story.

- Right.

- But the broader themes of a precocious young girl who clearly loves and admires her father, but also the kind of small town, you know?

And the time period is not too far off.

I mean, it's a very similar.

If you're a fan, I was gonna say if, who doesn't like "To Kill A Mockingbird"?

But if you like that book, there's some similar things to be found in this one.

And that's one of my favorite novels, so.

- Right.

Well, and I would hope for that comparison.

When I submitted the book, one of the questions on the submission was, what's a similar book?

I put it down, but it was intimidating to even write it down as similar.

But yes.

- Well, I would say it certainly is.

So, this book though, unlike "To Kill a Mockingbird," which is kind of a contained story.

This is a series of looks into her life over a period of time.

Why did you decide to structure it as maybe a longer form time period?

- Well, it had many lives.

(chuckles) I tried a novel and trying to make a story arc: beginning, middle, and end.

But the stories were so individual, even though they're chronologically in order, there really wasn't one sustained arc that I could use.

So I tried to put them together in chronological order, showing the girl's progression as she grew up, and how these different events helped shape her life.

It just worked better for me.

- I found that it works too in a way that not everybody, we have a lot of these coming-of-age novels where something happens in the span of six months or a year, and that's when you come of age.

But so many of us don't have that one singular experience.

It's our collection of experiences of us coming of age.

And so in that way, I found it more relatable because I didn't have that one summer that changed my life forever, I had 20 of them.

- Right.

And this, each chapter is something that had something to do with her coming of age.

That was the idea to have her come up of age gradually and appreciate and learn from each incident.

And each incident was kind of a learning experience.

- Was it difficult to get back into that young girl?

Because we start out, she's, I believe, nine years old.

- [Lareida] Nine years old.

- Was it hard to write from the perspective of a nine-year-old again?

- Well, the point of view of the nine-year-old, because I kind of remembered it, was not that hard.

I had a false start where I tried to make it a nine-year-old voice.

That was very hard.

I couldn't do it.

I kept thinking, "Would she know that word?"

Or things like that.

So, I made the voice looking back from adulthood.

But the point of view, I didn't really have trouble with that.

And I wanted each story to be from her point of view, because in each story, something happens that she has to come to grips with or understand or learn from.

And so the point of view, even if it was over her head in the beginning, she would come to grips with it.

And as you're going along, the reader knows what's going on.

Even if she doesn't know.

- This was gonna be my next question.

She's dealing with very heavy, it's a jail.

So there are, even in small town Texas, there are heavy topics; suicide, murder, almost every human tragedy that you could think of, she, not experiences, but is is proxy to.

And how do you write something that maybe she's not understanding at first or even at all at the time, but let the reader know this is what's happening.

- Yeah.

It was kind of tricky because I wanted the reader to know what was going on fully, whereas she didn't always understand, didn't know what things meant.

But then her coming to understand was the good part where she would come to grips with or come to understand and then have a change in her.

That was a goal to have her grow and expand and learn from all the things that are going on.

And lots was going on.

I mean, there were some very dark moments.

- To me, one of the moments that stands out is she's dealing with another young girl who has a developmental delay who really doesn't understand the gravity of what's going on.

And now she kind of has to be maybe the adult to help her through it.

And that was a big turning point, I feel like, for the character.

- It was.

And that story was based on a true event.

Not all the stories were, I'll say that right away.

Some of them are totally created from whole cloth.

But that was a story that was real.

And it helped the girl, which at the time was me, (chuckles) learn and grow from that experience.

- I like reading historical fiction, but normally, I can Google something to find out was this really true or is this a piece of fiction?

And I could sit here and just ask you, did this really happen?

Did that really happen?

So I would encourage people to read it and then maybe try to figure out for themselves what was true or not.

One fun chapter that was a fun piece of fiction, but is certainly based on truth, is the part about the UT-A&M rivalry, which is currently on pause, but who knows what'll happen in the future.

- Right, right.

- Was that a really fun chapter to write?

- It was a fun chapter to write.

I went to A&M, I'm a class of '68 graduate.

I was just telling the people here, when I graduated from A&M, there were 2000 men and 34 women in my class.

And there were only 12,000 students total.

So it was a much smaller school, but very lucky for me, it was a first-class university right here on our doorstep.

But there was this rivalry, University of Texas and A&M played every Thanksgiving.

It was a big deal.

People in the towns chose up sides.

You were either an Aggie fan or you were a Texas fan.

And there were pranks.

They stole things, would paint on the stadiums, different things like that.

And there were abductions of the mascots.

For this story, I added to it, I made it a simultaneous abduction of both Reveille at the time and Bevo.

And actually, Bevo was abducted and found in a pasture, I think in Hearne, but I put it in Burleson County, made it in Burleson County.

So that was, yeah, that was a fun one to write.

- I enjoyed that.

I grew up here.

I'm a local to Bryan-College Station, so I do remember very, very vividly the rivalry and it felt so real that I had to, "Did that really happen?

(Lareida laughing) Was there ever really?

I feel like I would've heard of that."

And you're right, it did kind of happen.

So it's totally believable in that historical fiction realm.

So, kudos.

And we had to mention that sitting where we are in the shadow of Kyle Field, literally.

- [Lareida] Exactly.

(Christine chuckling) - How much of this character is you or your sensibility?

- Well, it's fiction.

- [Christine] Sure, of course.

(Lareida laughing) - Let me start there.

It's pretty much, in fact, as far as the characters go, my mother and father are pretty much exactly as they were.

I didn't really add or detract from them at all.

My brothers are pretty much exactly the same.

They might disagree, (Christine laughing) but they're pretty much exactly as they were in the book.

As far as myself, I may not have taken things quite as seriously as my character did.

I did try not to get too involved with the things going on around the jail.

But I was always aware.

And I was gonna mention earlier about the stories.

I wanted each story to have an ending and that ending be how that particular story affected her.

A lot of short stories you read, I don't know if you read short stories, but a lot of short stories are just like a slice of life and then they're over.

They end and you wonder, "Whoa, what happened?

Where do we go from here?"

So I wanted these stories to end with her coming to grips or coming to some understanding.

That part was real.

I wanted to come to grips and come to some sort of understanding.

- Sure.

That's the beauty of fiction is that you can make it wrap up and then it doesn't always end cleanly.

- Things don't end that way.

- Yeah, so that's the beauty of something like this that you can make it.

- There is one of the stories about the suicide where she wanted it to end.

She wanted to make an ending and there was no ending.

The fellow had just disappeared and the girl wanted to come up with an ending.

And so she kind of made one up that worked for her.

- [Christine] Which is something we all do.

- We're probably all doing it.

- Speaking of wrapping up the stories, this does go through her young adulthood and I don't wanna spoil it for anybody who wants to read it, but it does wrap up nicely.

There's a nice ending on the book.

But I would've been happy to keep reading about her for another 10, 20 years.

How did you know when to end it and were there longer drafts where you kept going?

- There were longer drafts.

My mother had become sheriff by that time and I continued the stories with my mother as sheriff, but at that time, they had moved out of the jail, lived in a regular house.

So I felt like it was a new era and it didn't completely fit with the previous era.

So, I took those out and ended it there.

- I wanna actually put a pin, go back a little bit 'cause you keep saying in the jail and I've read the book, so you describe in the book what that means.

But for people who don't know, what is the layout here where we're talking about living in the jail?

- Right, right.

Well, it was a brand new building, so it was kind of exciting moving into it 'cause we lived out in the country in a big old farmhouse old.

And so it was a long low building, living quarters on one side, carport, and then there's jail cells on the other side.

So it was across the carport.

You could hear the prisoners.

If they'd laughed or coughed or yelled out, we could hear all that.

If my window was open, I could hear everything from the jail.

It was that close.

- It's such a striking image to think of, as you described it, like a duplex, basically.

- [Lareida] It was- - A house and a jail.

- [Lareida] That's what it looked like.

- I can see why you would wanna mine that for a novel because I've never heard of anything like that before.

But things are certainly different in my childhood than they were in yours as far as jails and College station's a little bit bigger than Caldwell was.

So that hooked me right away when, I think the opening chapter is like, "I just moved into the jail and I wanna see."

I'm in, let's go.

(both laughing) - Well, yeah, the moving into the jail was this really exciting thing and I remember myself and my character in the book very excited.

"It's gonna be exciting.

We're gonna live in town.

It's gonna be just wonderful."

Well, the first story lets you know that she comes to realize, "Oh, it may not be so much fun as I thought."

There's gonna be some pain and suffering.

There's gonna be crying.

In that first episode, my mother's crying because there's a kid in the jail and he's crying.

And you might remember this line, I said, "My mother cried when any of us kids cried, and now I'm afraid she cries when anybody cries.

It's gonna be really hard on her here."

- That first chapter really shows you the, I think, the difference between what a child's idea of life and grownups are versus what's real.

Because I think she references High Noon as her idea of what a sheriff is.

- [Lareida] Right, right.

- Which, that's a great film, but it's a little grittier.

It's a little dirtier.

It's a little messier in real life.

It's not a clean, sanitized movie.

- It is, it is.

And I talk about in my own life that people would come bleeding to our door, that kind of thing.

That I didn't expect, somehow I didn't see that difficult, hard side of things coming.

But it came.

That kind of thing did happen.

My parents did try to protect us, the kids, especially my mother.

At one point, she wanted us just out of there and we would leave for the weekend because the weekend was when everything kind of fell apart around there.

But I think the reason we were there, my father was 24/7 on the job working all the time.

And if we wanted to be a family with mother, father, and the kids all together, we had to live there.

If we lived out somewhere else and my dad was at the jail all the time, we would've not been a family.

So we were able to work it so that we were a family.

All five of us in this little jail.

- So what's next?

Are you gonna write a sequel or more novels or?

- Well, I do have the stories when my mother was sheriff, it was a shorter time.

She was only sheriff for three years.

I have those stories, but I don't think that's enough for a whole book.

But no, I do have a couple of things on the back burner.

One is Hawaii stories and what is like a Texan goes to Hawaii, (both laughing) what a different life it is.

Different culture, different speed of life.

Everything was pretty different.

So I have those stories.

And then I have another exciting kind of family story.

When my mother was born in 1923, her father disappeared, just completely disappeared.

Everybody thought, "Well, maybe he died somewhere."

Nobody ever knew what happened to him.

But then about 15 years ago, we started doing DNA on ancestry.com and we found that there were three other families where he had had children, lived for maybe 10 years, and then disappeared.

- [Christine] Wow.

- So, yeah.

So I'm working on that story.

The grandfather nobody knew.

- I'm gonna read that one.

(both laughing) You let me know when it's out 'cause that sounds really interesting.

- [Lareida] I think it'll be another fun one to work on.

And it's, again, it'll be fiction because I don't really know any details.

- Sure.

Well, that's the beauty of it.

You can just- - [Lareida] That's the beauty of it.

- Make it what you want.

Wonderful.

- [Lareida] Exactly.

- Well, unfortunately, we've run out of time.

Thank you so much for coming, for sharing your real story and your wonderful novel with us.

I really appreciate it.

- Thank you for having me.

And thank you to TCU Press for arranging this interview.

I appreciate it.

- Of course.

Thank you so much for joining us.

That book again is called: "Stories from the Sheriff's Daughter."

I really appreciate you joining us.

I'm Christine Brown.

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