AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT: SHARI RAY

INTERVIEW WITH THE WRITER

WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO START WRITING?

MRS. RAY: Thank you for that question. I really have loved writing since I was a young girl [and] student. In middle school and upper school, I wrote a lot of poetry. And I've always loved literature, and I knew early on . . . I knew in high school that I really wanted to study English and probably most probably be a teacher. So, but I had a lot of success with poetry when I was younger. You know, in the school magazine and stuff like that. So I've known for a long time. I've journaled for a long time, not routinely, not like now. But then I got busy and wrote sporadically like through my career, since I went college, got married and had a child. Then we moved to Belgium in 1998, and for the first time in my adult life, and by adult life I mean college and after, I wasn't working because I didn't have a visa to work. And so my husband, we were there for his job. So I had those four years not working. I did a lot of things. It was great, but I went back to routine writing and wrote lots and lots and lots during that time. And then I've kept it up since then. So that's the brief history.

I KNOW THAT YOU HAVE WRITTEN TWO BOOKS, SO WHAT WAS YOUR INSPIRATION FOR THE FIRST ONE? WHAT IS THE MESSAGE YOU WANTED TO TELL PEOPLE WHEN YOU STARTED WRITING IT?

MRS. RAY: So the inspiration for the book came from--I wrote the very first story in that first book, Surprised by Imperfection, came from when my father had Parkinson's disease, and with it sometimes you can have dementia, and he had dementia. So with that diagnosis, which would have been maybe ten or twelve years ago now, maybe a little bit more, we started to take advantage of the time. And so I wanted to get--he's a great storyteller, all of my family, big storytellers--and I wanted to get all of his stories down while he still could remember them. So I started interviewing him like [you are interviewing me], I started recording his voice; I started writing those things down. And what I wanted to know is a story I didn't know [. . .] when they were, when I was born, that was in 1960, there was no ultrasound or sonogram or anything like that. So if your child had any kind of birth issue, any kind of abnormality, anything like that, you didn't know. You didn't know until the baby was born. And so I wanted to know, and they were poor, and they didn't have any money, and they had moved to Memphis, and they've just been here from the country, and they've just been here for a little while. And I wanted to know what he thought, what his thoughts were when I was born. with a birth abnormality. I was interested in that as a person who was now a mother and [. . .] a teacher and all that kind of stuff. So he got talking about that. And so my inspiration for that book was to focus on how things are imperfect and we expect perfection from ourselves and others and are disappointed when we don't meet our own perfect expectations and when you don't meet my perfect expectations when in reality the bar is all wrong. Everyone is imperfect in different ways and so that that bar is a very a cause for anxiety. If we could not [seek] to lower the bar of expectation but just realize you're an imperfect person [. . .] I'm an imperfect person physically, emotionally [. . . ] we're all doing our best. I think it would lower anxiety but that's not what the book is about. The book is about recognizing one's own imperfections and learning to love yourself and others not in spite of but because of. That's very cool side note.