 Chance Place and At the Crossroads each took eight years to write, sixteen in total, because these two novels were written alternately and simultaneously. This odd strategy resulted from finding myself in a writer’s critique group with members who knew nothing about my chosen subjects. The strategy provided the objectivity necessary to polish my work.
 About Chance Place. When my youngest son, Tom, was diagnosed with schizophrenia at age fifteen, I was the single mom of three. This event initiated a “mental health decade,” during which I came to know and love many souls struggling with remarkable courage toward wellness. Statistics are astounding: in any given month 16,000,000 people in the U.S. seek help for major mental illness and/or substance abuseone person in every fifth household!
As my children and I sought healing and understanding out of pain and confusion, Tom fought to regain the life he had known and lost. Tom now resides in a responsible, trustworthy, and caring halfway home. Constantly he gives us rare examples of human courage, resilience, and perseverance.
While Tom’s story inspired Chance Place, it was fiction that allowed me to protect his privacy. Chance Place is a composite drawn from many lives that touched Tom’s and mine and reflects a journey. Along the way the kind of mystery that brings out the worst and best in all of us was unveiled. Chance Place searches for goodness and hope; it offers friendship mixed with misunderstanding, tears riddled with laughter, pain overcome by redemption.
Perhaps Minnesotan Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, who served under President Lyndon Baines Johnson, said it best: “The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life—the children; those who are in the twilight of life—the aged; and those who are in the shadows of life—the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.” May reading Chance Place transform you as much as writing it transformed me.
At the Crossroads
 For sixteen years nuns were my classroom role models and feminists before we used that term—women who taught me to think for myself, to pay attention to my conscience. Though I no longer identify myself as Catholic, I remain indebted to these women who clearly combined professionalism and moral integrity. From their example I built my character and learned my most important lesson, that I am free only to the extent that I am self-disciplined.
Current American women’s history texts include the experience of Causcasian women, hispanic women, native American women, and Afro-American women, but not the experience of nuns, who helped settle this nation and define American culture. One in five Civil War nurses was a nun. Nuns established schools, hospitals, and social services, many of which still exist today. As a group nuns are more educated than the men to whom they report. Feminism arrived late to convents, but it did arrive. Convent dissent is very real and often quiet.
In Afghanistan, we all witnessed what silencing women will produce. The Church keeps excommunication handy. Notice what’s happening now. As scandal sets the abuse of priestly power in the spotlight, the Church asks for understanding of this spiritual matter, while in the parlor the elephant is trumpeting a summons for the end of prideful control.
Though At the Crossroads is fiction, Vivian, Mary Ruth, Kimberly, and Sister Dominic accurately reflect what’s happening in today’s convents. At the Crossroads is a timely story dedicated to the single, largest, most educated group of successful career women in the world.
Frankie Schelly has published numerous short stories and articles in magazines and journals. Before turning author she worked both as an Advertising Manager and as Associate Creative Director of an advertising agency. In 1984 she earned her CCDP — Certified Chemical Dependency Practitioner — in Minnesota, and volunteered as a facilitator to groups in recovery from addiction. She is the mother of three children and lives with her husband in Asheville, NC.
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