Sebastopol writer shakes off early rejection

by Dawn Pillsbury, Sonoma West Staff Writer

SEBASTOPOL - Shelagh Mooberry submitted a book for publication in 1944. She was 12 years old and living in convent school in England.

It was rejected by a publisher, citing a war-time paper shortage.

Fifty-nine years later, Mooberry's first book, "Chronicles of an American Family 1913-2259," has been published.

"It took me three years to write, working all the time," said Mooberry, walking through Ives Park on a cool spring day.

Mooberry, who retired to Burbank Heights Senior Housing from San Francisco five years ago, said living in Sebastopol made it possible for her to write.

"In San Francisco, I had to work too much just to live in a tiny apartment," she said. "Here, I have time to write."

The book had its beginnings in two first-person short stories she wrote in a creative writing class taught at Analy High by Santa Rosa Junior College instructor Richard Speakes.

"My teacher said they were good - sell them," she said. "No one wanted to buy them. They were too long for short stories, too many characters."

So Mooberry used the stories as part of a novel. In "Chronicles," 23rd-century San Francisco historian Gabrielle Malik-Perez discovers the texts while researching her ancestors.

Malik-Perez lives in a world depopulated by plague. Mooberry said she wanted a low-population world to explore ideas for a utopian society.

"When I was at Berkeley, I took a seminar on utopias," she explained. "I had to write a 25-page paper on how to make America more livable. I looked at all the utopias we'd studied and how primitive men lived.

"In my utopia, we had all those awful housing developments prettied up with gardens around them. People could do what they wanted, put on plays or whatever. I got an A, but the professor said it was extremely unlikely it would work."

Speakes wrote a review of the novel, which appears on the book's back cover.

It "will delight its readers for many different reasons (wonderful story, a cleverly made future, compelling characters), but my delight is in the way Mooberry lights up my favorite darkness, the human mind and heart," he wrote. "It is a splendid debut for a deeply talented writer."

In 2259 San Francisco, people enjoy long lives thanks to the longevity serum and spend their time throwing lavish parties, frequently orgies, and doing drugs - the story opens with Malik-Perez sipping her morning cup of marijuana tea. For 20 hours of work a week, they get spacious housing, food and a personal household computer. Extra work earns "luxury scrip."

Mooberry speaks with an English accent, the legacy of her upbringing in an English convent school.

"It was awful," she said. Her experience inspired a "Chronicles" character, Maureen, who dies young in 1966 after being unable to adapt to life outside the convent.

"I wanted to show what that upbringing does," she said. "It convinces you that you can't do anything."

At one point, Malik-Perez leaves the city to visit Forestville, which has become a very small grape-growing town.

"In the book, they travel through Santa Rosa to get there," said Mooberry. "I originally had them go through Sebastopol, but I got accused of putting every place I've ever lived in the book," she explained, laughing.

Why Forestville?

"My daughter lives there," she said.

Will there be a sequel? She said she doesn't know. She is working on a detective novel.

"My son Henry and I wrote a screenplay together and I'm writing the book from the screenplay," she said. "He has a lurid imagination but no patience for writing. He tells me and I write it down."

"Chronicles of an American Family 1913-2259" is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Powell's. Mooberry said she hopes to get it into Copperfields Books and to do a reading at the Sebastopol store this summer. She said her reading at Burbank Heights earlier this year was well received.

Visit www.shelaghmooberry.com.
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