It's Never Too Late: Debut Author at 76

 

Lareida Buckley and I met three years ago on the Big Island of Hawaii when I was housesitting for her neighbor. 

On a stroll with several of her woman friends, Lareida mentioned she was curious about my work as a writer and editor. I asked her if she, too, wrote—and when she said yes, her friends turned to her in surprise saying, “You do?” 

Lareida explained that for years she’d been working on a story collection based on her small-town Texas upbringing. Her father had been the sheriff and her family lived next door to the jail. “I want to finish it. I’m not getting any younger,” she’d said in her soft Texas twang. 

Later, she sent me some pages, and I immediately knew her voice had to be out in the world. Filled with passion for a project I believed in, I supported her in finishing and submitting the manuscript—and now Stories From the Sherriff’s Daughter, has come out TCU Press, making Lareida a debut author at age 76. 

I decided to interview her to share her story with the world.

 

How long were you working on your stories, and why didn’t your walking group friends know?

I always wrote stories, ever since college. About twenty years ago I wrote more seriously and put these stories together as a collection while participating in a very informal writing group, just for fun. I toyed with making it into a novel, tried making the voice reflect the narrator’s age, and other false starts. Life intervened, and I set the project aside for years. Though when I met you I’d finished what I thought was a pretty good rewrite, I hadn’t shared the stories with anyone except a few close friends in many years. When I got the book deal, friends and family alike were amazed. Me too.  

 

These stories are autobiographical in that you grew up the daughter of a sheriff in small-town Texas and lived in a house attached to the jail. Why did you decide to write this as fiction rather than memoir?

When I started these stories, I’d been gone from Texas for many years. It had been a long time since my father had passed away, so I felt I couldn’t write a memoir at that distance, both in time and place, and do it justice. Also, taking situations and people that I remembered, making them fictional and more interesting, was way more fun. I could add excitement or humor where there might have been none. I could try to bring my childhood to life. Creativity was the draw for fiction.

 

In the book, the narrator, Dolly, starts out as a nine-year-old girl and we see her grow up living next to the jail. How do you think Dolly’s life would have been different if her mother had had her way and moved the family away from the jail permanently?

Her life would have been dramatically different. Though people coming to the door with terrible calamities and tragedies became normal to her, and me, it still affected us all to one extent or another, making us into more compassionate and caring people. Had she moved out, as her mother wished and even tried to accomplish during those early years, Dolly would have missed out on contact with people of all races and all walks of life, as well as the appreciation of how hard life can be.

 

The book has a wide array of colorful characters. How were you able to write about so many different people richly and authentically?

To say there were colorful characters around the jail is an understatement. I could often describe on the page the characters exactly as they were in real life, could have them act exactly as they did. Real people living real life adversity—and the people who tried to help them—made for authentically colorful characters I could portray honestly.

 

You do a beautiful job in the book of dealing with both humor and tragedy. Was it your intent to grapple with both? If so, why was that important to you?

Actually, the tragedy was more obvious, and it stood out more clearly in my memory, making it easy to write. Humor is how I’ve dealt with difficulties in my own life. It was simply a part growing up and came naturally in my writing. I especially used the grandmother to add humor throughout the stories.

 

Was your real-life grandmother funny?

Some of her jokes and snarky comments were really my own or others, but I enjoyed the persona she took on as the stories progressed. I imagined she would have, too. 

 

I was moved by the loving relationship Dolly has with her parents. How are they similar to or different from your own parents?

That relationship was easy to write about because it was absolutely real. Busy and absorbed with law enforcement as they were, they were wonderful and loving parents in the midst of all that.

 

Why did your father want to be sheriff? And is it true, as in the book, that your mother later became sheriff herself?

I’m not sure if he wanted to be sheriff. He was a kindhearted man, involved in community activities and helping people through various organizations, like the church, and the Masonic Lodge long before he became sheriff.  Perhaps he saw it as a way of making that work a true vocation. He’d been a dairy farmer, and the dairy business was changing with pasteurization, milking machines, and other modernizations that might have been beyond his means. His visits back to the dairy farm on a regular basis, and how important those visits were, always made me wonder why he’d moved on to law enforcement. I tried to show that dichotomy in the stories. And he was never the stereotypical gun-toting authoritarian Southern sheriff you might picture. He was a quiet man who in his years as sheriff never fired his gun. My mother took the job because she didn’t know what else to do when my father died, but she was never the typical sheriff either. Her gun was never fired either.

 

Was it true that the boys you dated were more entranced by your dad the sheriff than by you?

Some definitely were! It’s absolutely true that years after relationships were over, several old boyfriends would keep coming by to see him, ride around with him on patrol, even when I was away at school. It became a family joke.

 

As a white Southerner, how did you address racial issues in this book?  Did you find this difficult, and if so, how and why?

We must have been a liberal family for that time, though I don’t think I thought about it then. It was all I knew. But I say in the book, and I felt it to be true in our years in the jail, that race didn’t determine character, and there were good and bad people, black and white. Also, we had much more contact with black people than most families ever did during those segregated years. Not only with black prisoners, but with their families, lawyers, teachers and preachers. I tried in the book to show that racism was definitely there, but not as much in evidence in our family or around the jail. It seems unbelievable, but I remember there being two water fountains in the courthouse basement, one labeled for whites and one labeled for coloreds. In my lifetime! With that sort of thing surrounding my formative years, I worried that I might not be able to treat those issues with the respect the people of that era deserved, so I tried to take care with it. I can only hope that I didn’t offend anyone.

 

How was it that you were able to finally finish the book after all these years? What was it like getting the manuscript ready to send out?

I have a lifelong friend who took my stories more seriously than I did. She encouraged me, bullied me, made me finish them. I’ve read that writing is really revision, and these stories were revised so many times, I think making them better in the end. The fact that I’d just done a massive rewrite with my friend’s encouragement right before I met you was serendipity, and then your edit was the final powerful push. I was finally, to the extent an author ever is, satisfied with the work, and was preparing for a long process of submissions and maybe even self-publishing.

 

What would you like people to know about getting your first book published in your seventies?

Over the years, I kind of thought of myself as a writer, even though in my real life I had a country mail route along the ocean in Hawaii. I even had business cards made once. Lareida Buckley, Writer. Actually, Reader would have been more accurate. I listened to literally thousands of books over my 25 years on the mail route. My sage advice, from the vantage point of 76 years, is don’t give up on a dream. I’m a prime example. I’m Lareida Buckley, Writer. It really is never too late.