Today we feature Fairhope author Judith Richards.   From “This Goodly Land”: Richards’ father was employed in the timber industry, and the family moved frequently as she was growing up.  Richards graduated from high school and joined a traveling show as an actress in ingénue roles and married her first husband, a fellow actor. In 1968, a newly divorced Richards moved to Montgomery, Al. She worked in a variety of jobs, including teacher, performer, and real estate manager. Richards became acquainted with C. Terry Cline while working for Colonial Educational Exhibits and Land Alive Foundation. Her first book, The Sounds of Silence, published in 1977, was based on some of her experiences with Land Alive.

Richards published four more books between 1978 and 1997, several of them loosely based on Cline’s Florida youth. Richards and Cline were married in 1979. They now live in Fairhope

 Doc: Some of your books are set in Florida Everglades — why?

JR: Summer Lightning and After The Storm are set in Belle Glade, Florida in the 1940’s. The protagonist of both novels is Terry Calder, a red-headed, freckle-faced, cigarette-smoking truant who is the little boy my husband (C. Terry Cline, Jr.) used to be. He is six years old (in Summer Lightning), very intelligent, irrepressible, and a bit of a liar. Trouble and the truant officer seek him and his friend, Old McCree, who earns a living catching rattlesnakes and collecting wild orchids from the swamps of the Everglades.
     The two novels are drawn closely from stories I heard told at the Cline dining table in Thomasville, Georgia when I first met my husband. The storytellers would laugh and cringe at the same time as they chronicled the exploits of the incorrigible little truant. All who were not Terry’s mother thanked Heaven that was so, and they often wondered how he’d survived a childhood of running away and hopping trains. His first grade teacher must have gritted her teeth, they said, to keep from thrashing him. But I fell in love with the boy and the man and found the idea of writing about him irresistible.   

Doc: How did you meet your husband and do you work together?

JR: I met Terry Cline in Montgomery, Alabama in 1968. He was the most creative and interesting person I’d ever known, and I was ready to expand my notion of what life and work was all about. Terry hired me to work with him on a public relations program that sent teachers to schools in the market areas of a large baking company operating in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and Mississippi. The program required the exhibit of live animals as visual aids, to teach students from Grade 1 through 12 the anatomy and psychology of animal groups including felines, canines, reptiles, and primates. In my lecture, I worked with an African lion cub and a Persian and Manx cat to teach Felines.
     Terry originally researched and wrote all the material used in the lectures and I became unofficially his apprentice. I learned so much about writing from him and we developed a unique working relationship that included his former wife. We three have each been published independently but always work together on every project, researching, plotting, and editing to the completion of the book.   

Doc: If Coastal Alabamians could read just one of your books, which one should it be?
JR: I’m quite fond of all my books and can’t begin to say which is best. Two of the books … Summer Lightning and Too Blue To Fly…. won the Alabama Library Association award for fiction. My favorite right now is the next one!
   
Doc: Tell us about your new book – “Ninth Ward Down.”

JR:  Everyone on the Gulf Coast has a story about Hurricane Katrina and we heard many of them after August 2005. Before the arrival of Hurricane Katrina, Terry had been plotting a suspense novel set in New Orleans. But the emotional devastation caused by the hurricane led us to reconsider. New Orleans had been beaten down and we wanted to lift it up. Through narrative, Ninth Ward Down shows life in New Orleans before the storm and after, primarily from the viewpoint of a nine year old African-American boy living in the Lower Ninth Ward. Below is a synopsis of the book, which will be published next year. A title change to Thelonious Rising is being considered but hasn’t been decided.
     Thelonious Monk DeCay has lived with his African-American grandmother on the east bank of the Mississippi River in the lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans since his mother’s death six years ago.
Monk and his best friend, Percy, tap dance and play harmonica for tourists in the French Quarter. Monk glues bottle caps to the soles of his shoes and dons worn clothing and a rope belt to create a ragamuffin image. He shares his income from tips with Grandmama and saves the rest of his money for the day when he can go in search of his father, a famous jazz musician. Some say his Caucasian father is dead. Quinton Toussaint, the old historian and friend of the father Monk can scarcely remember, says not.
     Monk learns about New Orleans jazz and the city’s colorful past from Quinton, who introduces Monk to the “ghost of Vieux Carre,” a strange recluse named Jon Latour. Although Monk aches to know his father, his is a good life until Hurricane Katrina ruptures levees and much of New Orleans is quickly flooded. Monk and his grandmother become trapped in the attic of their home. There she drowns. Because of his culture and upbringing, Monk does not trust authority figures to save him. Alone, he makes his way to the French Quarter and seeks refuge with Jon Latour in order to survive. Monk and Jon traverse the French Quarter at night by way of rooftops, courtyards, and alleys…stealing food, observing troops and criminals, and even the woman who is desperately in search of Monk, unbeknownst to him, to save his life and introduce him to his father, her brother.
This is an upbeat story that defines the relationships of a splintered family and an American city in peril.   

Doc: What local resources would you advise young authors to use to get published? What additional resources for authors do we need in the area?
JR: Writers are creative artists, and sometimes getting your work published requires the most creative effort of all. Writing articles about interesting local people or events or history and offering those to a newspaper or magazine might be a start. Look for writing contests to enter, locally or nationally. Start a blog.
The Pensters is a great group and I believe is open to writers of all ages. But I would recommend starting your own group of writers. Agree to discuss, read, and critique one another’s work. An outside and objective point of view is always very helpful in analyzing your own writing. Reading the writing of others sometimes helps to see your own more clearly. And …this is very important … you will support one another in the face of inevitable rejections to come, and in the celebration when you are published.
Editor’s Note: Mod Mobilian also accepts creative works for publication. Contact us.

 Website: www.judithrichards.com (includes excerpts)   www.threewriters.com
Follow the Google books links to bookstores:  Richards, Judith: The Sounds of Silence (1977)   Richards, Judith: Summer Lightning (1978)   Richards, Judith: Triple Indemnity (1982)   Richards, Judith: After the Storm (1987)  Richards, Judith: Too Blue to Fly (1997)

 Or buy her eBooks here for only $5.29: http://www.the-plot-thickens.com/fiction_library/list_own_books/226