Today we’d like to introduce you to Dorothy Fletcher.
Hi Dorothy, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
As a kid, I fell in love with poetry because it became a lifeline for me during some dark times. If I could write a poem about my feelings, I could deal with them. This love of poetry led me to want to study English, so at FSU, I majored in English Composition and Literature. Then for the next 35 years, I taught high school English, teaching the best writing that had ever been written. This constant exposure to structure and to form of such fantastic works had to have gone deeply into my bones, so to speak.
When I retired, I was able to secure a writing gig as a monthly columnist for the Florida Times-Union. It was called By the Wayside, and it dealt with things that were once part of popular Jacksonville culture. When I had accumulated enough essays, I was able to approach The History Press about a book. They loved the idea and this led to a group of 6 Jacksonville books. I also had been working on novels with a modicum of success. Then, I was able to marry the two genres of fiction and history with my latest effort The Chambermaid. This is the story of an actual woman who, in 1564, accompanied the Huguenots to Fort Caroline which is located in the Arlington section of town.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Funny you should ask. I have been having no end of roadblocks lately. My agent retired. My go-to publisher didn’t do fiction, and a publisher who was always very approachable had to quit for health reasons. I quite literally had to start all over again, and at my age, that was quite daunting, Still, I have had to be very philosophical about it. This is the path I have chosen. It may have “made all the difference,” but no one said it would be easy. Even the best of writers have sold self-pub books out of the trunk of the car. Joseph Heller of Catch 22 fame picked that title because that was how many rejections his book had endured. The first Harry Potter book was rejected 12 times. Publishing is a brutal business.
It does help if a writer doesn’t take things personally. Still, the sting of rejection is real. That pain is best eased by writing more while sending the old manuscripts out to other places. Keep your manuscripts out there!
I think I should also mention, the same thing applies to getting an agent. That too is a difficult task, but persistence is essential. Never, never, never give up!
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I am a writer, which is essentially an artist. I love researching interesting people and events. I love digging for photographs, and I love telling stories. There are so many sweet, horrible, inspiring, and powerful stories about Jacksonville that needed to be told and preserved. I specialize in those things with my history series.
The sweetest story I ever found and wrote about was the one of Miss Chic, Jacksonville’s first elephant. When in 1927, she arrived in Jacksonville at the age of three years old, the docks at Talleyrand were filled with a multitude of children on bikes and on foot. They had come to see the elephant they had purchased with their nickels and pennies and dimes since the City Council had refused to provide the funds.
The proudest moment for me was when I was able to locate the news article of a pilot who had crashed in the Skinner’s Dairy pasture near my home. I had a difficult time looking for any hard information about this crash since those who had witnessed it all had different dates in mind. When I found the story that was published in the T-U on April 24, 1964, I wrote a piece thanking Lieutenant Grant Russell Williams and his family for their sacrifice. Had this man ejected, his jet would have demolished my neighborhood. My thank you became the forward of my second history. Eventually, with the help of a dear friend, we located his family and within a few weeks, his widow and four grown children came to visit Jacksonville to meet the many people who had been spared that horrible morning. It was extraordinary.
I suppose, if I were to think of a quality that sets me apart from others, it would be that I am tenacious. I may not be the fastest, I may not be the best, but I am like a dog with a bone. I will stick with writing, publishing, and promoting until I can’t do it any longer. You don’t want my work, I will send it elsewhere. You find my work lacking, too bad. I am what I am and my voice is as valid as any other. Someone will hear me.
How do you think about luck?
It’s not that I feel that luck (good or bad)doesn’t matter. It’s just that luck can’t be part of the equation of a writer’s life and discipline. We must make our own luck, so to speak. When the odds are not in our favor, then we have to keep plodding along anyway. Things usually shift, and with perseverance, a writer’s success will eventually come.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.rememberingjacksonville.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dorothy.fletcher.77/
