Shelley Blanton-Stroud

Shelley Blanton-Stroud: I grew up in California’s Central Valley, the daughter of Dust Bowl immigrants who made good on their ambition to get out of the field. I recently retired from teaching writing at Sacramento State University and still consult with writers in the energy industry. I co-direct Stories on Stage Sacramento, where actors perform the stories of established and emerging authors, and serve on the advisory board of 916 Ink, an arts-based creative writing nonprofit for children. I’ve also served on the Writers’ Advisory Board for the Belize Writers’ Conference. Copy Boy is my first Jane Benjamin Novel. Tomboy (She Writes Press 2022) will be my second. The third, Working Girl, will come out in November 2023. My writing has been a finalist in the Sarton Book Awards, IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards, Killer Nashville’s Silver Falchion Award, the American Fiction Awards, and the National Indie Excellence Awards. I and my husband live in Sacramento with an aging beagle, Ernie, and many photos of our out-of-town sons and their wonderful partners.

 Twitter: @BlantonStroud

Instagram: @BlantonStroud

Are there particular films that have influenced your writing?

Barry Levinson’s Avalon stays with me. It follows a large Jewish family that comes to America from Russia, settling in Baltimore. They work hard but put their extended family at the center of their lives, living near each other, sharing meals, pooling money to help family members who need it. As they assimilate, they also atomize, breaking off into many smaller nuclear families. At the end of the film, Grandpa sits alone at a TV tray in front of the televised Macy’s parade on Thanksgiving day. It’s heartbreaking. It reminds me of the difficulty and urgency of family connections, a topic in my own writing. But also, in a completely different way, I’m influenced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, a witty Hollywood classic, starring Bette Davis as diva actress Margo Channing, who, fearing her own aging, confronts that fear in her most adoring fan, the supposedly shy, secretly ambitious Eve. The movie looks straight at female ambition, with both admiration and loathing. It remains the most amazingly entertaining movie I’ve seen about the ruthlessness of show business. All business, really.

Is there a genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music while you write?

I can’t listen to music while writing. I get distracted by lyrics. I even struggle to write with instrumental music. When the tone of whatever song comes on next doesn’t work with the scene I’m writing, I’ll stop to fix it. But I’m such a natural-born procrastinator that this becomes just one more way for me to put off what I intend to do. But I am influenced by music I listen to before or after writing time. As I wrote Copy Boy, I listened to a lot of alt country music, especially Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch, the Avett Brothers, because it’s kind of rootsy, reminding me of my protagonist Jane’s family background out of the dust bowl, but at the same time modern, contemporary. I never wanted the voice of my characters to be too of-the-time, like historical novels often are. I wanted to build in the sound of now, which alt country put me in the mood to do.

What’s your favorite comic strip or graphic novel?

I love Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir, Maus. It’s Spiegelman’s account of interviewing his father, Vladek, about surviving of Hitler's death camps. And the consequences of doing so. The Jewish characters are mice. Germans are cats. One of the many things about it that moves me is what it shows about memory, how fleeting it is, how influenced by emotion and personality. I think a lot about Spiegelman’s conversations with his father as I talk to my own parents, about the way their stories change in the retelling, so I never quite know what the real truth is, or whether all of the different versions combine to make the real truth.

Is your go to comfort food sweet or savory? Is it something you make yourself? Does food inspire your writing?

Can it be both? Sweet and savory. Fruit and meat. I’ve loved the Silver Palate recipe for Chicken Marbella forever, salty chicken with briny olives and capers, butter, brown sugar. I mean…

If you could create a museum exhibition, what would be the theme? 

I’d call it, ARTIFACTS OF AMBITIOUS WOMEN. It would be organized into rooms according to the types of artifacts gathered there.

One room might have items representing how they hid it—the tiny parsonage desk where Jane Austen wrote and the cross-stitching she threw over her writing when she heard someone approach down the hall; a clipping from The Family Circle with Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chocolate chip cookie recipe; Tina Turner’s wigs; all the title pages of books claiming to be written by men—George Eliot for Maryann Evans, Currer Bell for Charlotte Bronte, Ellis Bell for Emily Bronte, Isak Dinesen for Karen Blixen, J.K. Rowling for Joanne Rowling.

Another room, we could call, critiques. Here, we’d show newspaper and magazine clippings, televised comments, tape recorded private conversations, where female ambition is discussed. A newspaper columnist describing Eleanor Roosevelt as “impudent, presumptuous and conspiratorial.” The viral twitter hashtag about Kamala Harris, #heelsupharris. The print news, including the NYT, commenting on Joyce Maynard’s biography of her time as an eighteen year old seduced by JD Salinger, calling her “Leech Woman,” “indefatigably exhibitionistic,” “stalker,” “opportunistic onetime nymphet,” and author of a “tawdry boudoir confession”. A former president on television, calling his opponent, “a nasty woman.”

Here’s another room. Let’s call it, consequences. Serena Williams’s gold medals and trophies. Marilyn Monroe’s empty pill bottles. Oprah Winfrey’s bank statement. Brittney Spears’ shorn blonde hair. Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother Nipomo.

I want this exhibit to happen.