Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Shelley Blanton-stroud. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Shelley, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

My father’s family were Dust Bowl okies who migrated from desolate Texas farmland for California, where they picked cotton and potatoes to survive, not just the parents but the children too.

Growing up, I was fascinated by Dorothea Lange’s WPA photographs of families like his. Lange captured not just hardship, but dignity. My dad would tell me how those tough years actually made him stronger, how it grew the calluses that toughened him up.

Yet I also had the example of my mother, who was struck with polio as an eighteen month old and lived many months in a hospital, in an iron lung, which left her with emotional and physical limitations she’d face for the rest of her life.

These two very different family stories—my dad’s experience of becoming stronger through adversity, and my mom’s struggle with permanent hardship—got me thinking about this fundamental question: how much does struggle help shape us into better, stronger people, and when does it wound us irrreparably?

This wasn’t some abstract question for me. It was deeply personal, tied to understanding my parents’ very different experiences with hardship and even how I felt about my far less significant hardships. In writing Copy Boy, I found myself digging into this territory, looking at how different people handle extreme circumstances and what that tells us about resilience.

So the book’s subject matter was meaningful. But so was the whole process of discovery the novel required of me. I’ve always loved those moments when something clicks, when a conversation or observation suddenly shows me something I never saw before. (I taught writing for 34 years and the pleasure of such revelatory moments was why I stuck with it.) Writing this novel became a way to create those moments of revelation not just for me but for readers, especially exploring strategies for revealing my truth without hitting readers over the head with it.

The book became a way of honoring my family’s story while exploring bigger questions about what makes us break and what makes us stronger. Writing it, I came to understand not just my own family’s journey better, but something larger about how people face adversity. I got to weave together the historical backdrop of the Depression, my family’s personal story, and even bigger questions about human nature in a way that felt real and true.

It took the questions I’d been turning over in my mind for years and transformed them into a story that other people could step into and explore for themselves. And now I have the pleasure of continuing this process whenever I talk to readers. Writing Copy Boy wasn’t just about telling a story. It was about creating space for readers to find their own insights about resilience, struggle, and what it means to become who you’re meant to be.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’ve walked a winding path to develop my voice and, honestly, I haven’t always known where I was going. Growing up, I was really only good at one thing. Reading. I wasn’t especially focused in school, but I was constantly absorbing stories through books—Little Women, Nancy Drew and Anna Karenina come to mind—and through family jokes and tall tales, though I had no idea how useful all that storytelling would turn out to be. I kind of led my life in a library cocoon through adolescence, rather than in the real world.

Then I made my way to Claremont Men’s College (now Claremont McKenna), where I got to witness first hand how different cultures operate. (I’d never seen a penny loafer or a popped Izod collar before I arrived at that preppy campus in 1979.) Though I felt like an outsider there in a freshman class with only 25 women, I made lifelong friends, including my husband, who all continue to teach me about different ways of knowing.

With our two sons, we settled in Sacramento, where I discovered that teaching writing wasn’t about telling people what to think, but helping them discover their own understanding. This idea wound up shaping everything that followed. While I taught, I also spent ten years running library book clubs, learning as much from the readers as they did from our discussions. Then I wandered into work coaching writers in the energy industry, helping scientists, economists and engineers communicate complex ideas clearly.

All of this merged into my interest in learning how to reveal ideas that matter, which flows through my Jane Benjamin Novels. Set in 1930s and 40s Northern California, they follow a cross-dressing, tomato-picking, San Francisco gossip columnist who investigates crimes that never make the front page—the kinds of stories that reveal how power really works in a city, especially for women pushing against society’s constraints. The series explores how gender, class, and institutional power shaped California during a pivotal time that eerily echoes our own era’s struggles. My next book, An Unlikely Prospect, coming out in August, continues this exploration of power and gender through a new protagonist.

I can see how this drive to investigate and reveal has even shaped my volunteer life. I serve on the Board of Advisors for the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at Claremont McKenna College and, until recently, I co-directed Stories on Stage Sacramento, bringing writers’ works to life through theatrical performance.

My voice is strongest when I’m helping others transform the systems they’re part of.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Seven years ago, I was sitting in a friend’s Sacramento backyard for a house concert, watching singer-songwriter Rita Hosking perform under the summer stars. I saw her up there, making her music and sharing it, lifting her audience up into joyful meaning, even though she wasn’t an international sensation, making lots of money.

Something clicked for me. Here was this incredible artist who just kept showing up, kept making beautiful things, kept putting them into the world. No matter what the world did in return.

That night, I made a private commitment to my own writing. I was in my fifties then, and had spent decades teaching other people to write, but hadn’t yet committed fully to my own creative work. It wasn’t that I lacked stories to tell. But I needed to see someone else’s steady persistence to understand how I might channel that into my own work.

This kind of resilience—the quiet, steady kind—turned out to be different from what I’d always imagined. I’d thought the road would be more dramatic. It turned out it wasn’t about great moments of overcoming adversity, but about showing up day after day, about trusting that the work itself matters even when the world isn’t paying attention. It’s about writing four novels in seven years, starting as a fifty-plus year old debut novelist, not because anyone asked for those stories, but because I believed they needed to be told. And I needed to tell them.

Watching Rita that night helped me understand something crucial about resilience that I’d been wrestling with my whole life. My father always said his hardships made him stronger, while my mother’s struggles with polio left permanent limitations. I’d spent years wondering about that difference, even made it central to my first novel.

Rita showed me a third way. That resilience isn’t about whether difficulty breaks you—it’s about showing up for your art when there’s no guarantee of success.

This lesson has shaped not just my writing practice, but the stories I choose to tell. Whether I’m writing about Jane Benjamin navigating 1930s San Francisco in male disguise or exploring the aftermath of V-J Day through the eyes of women whose stories were suppressed, I’m drawn to characters who demonstrate this resilience. They might not always triumph over adversity in dramatic ways, but they keep pushing forward, keep finding ways to navigate the systems that would prefer to ignore them.

The most powerful resistance is refusing to let your stories go untold. Your voice matters, even if the world isn’t quite ready to hear it.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

To build a productive writing life, I had to unlearn my previous assumption that there was a “right way” to write, a way that was magically inaccessible to me.

When I started working on my first novel in my fifties, I carried so many conflicting assumptions about how serious writers worked—that they had a specific disciplined process or that they wrote fast and loose and organic or that they were governed by muses that dictated their stories straight onto the page. None of that described me.

I hated my own obsessive-compulsive process. I spent what felt like an excessive amount of time getting to know my characters before letting them loose—creating detailed descriptions of their education, their shames, their proud moments, even what they did with their hands when they lied.

I’d use the Enneagram personality typing system to understand how each character would think and feel differently. I’d disappear down research rabbit holes to uncover pivotal details like popular sandwich orders or swear words from 1945. I felt like some rough-drafting Sarah Winchester, forever building crazy rooms in a mystery house no one but me would live in.

Then, during a Buffalo Trace bourbon distillery tour in Louisville, I learned something that changed my perspective. The guide explained how they make Blanton’s Bourbon—a nine-year process of mashing ingredients with limestone-filtered water, letting it ferment, distilling it to pure spirit, aging it in specific barrels in specific locations. “Location matters,” she said. “Materials matter.” The care, the time, the precision—it wasn’t inefficiency, it was craft.

I realized my “excessive” planning wasn’t procrastination. It was my process. Those detailed character studies meant that when I finally started writing, my characters felt like real people who could walk right off the page. All those research rabbit holes meant I could recreate 1930s and 40s San Francisco in a way that felt authentic and lived-in. Like bourbon aging in oak barrels, my stories needed time to develop their full complexity.

Most importantly, I learned that this kind of preparation allowed me to explore complex questions from multiple angles. When I’m writing about a woman navigating male-dominated spaces or investigating how power really works in a city, I need characters who approach these challenges in distinctly different ways. My planning helps me create richer, more nuanced stories. It might not be necessary for other writers, but it is for me.

Now I embrace my process, even while recognizing I can’t let myself get stuck in the planning stage forever. I set deadlines to make sure I eventually take the leap into actual writing. But I no longer apologize for the time I spend getting to know my characters or researching historical details.
What looks like procrastination might be the work itself, wearing different clothes. Like bourbon aging in oak, good stories take the time they take.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://shelleyblantonstroud.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/blantonstroud/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/blantonstroudauthor
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@shelleyblanton-stroud738

Image Credits

Anita Scharf