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.
