The struggle with cancer was coming to a close. Shelley Powers and family members clung to the bedside in Biloxi as her beloved mother, Sue, slipped from this world in 2023.
“Losing someone’s horrible, I know,” Powers told the Mississippi Free Press, “but I’m the only girl, and so it really hit me hard when Mom passed. … Just a couple of days before she passed, she was saying a prayer for all of her kids.” Powers wished she could remember her mom’s words for her three younger brothers, but they were lost to the emotional turmoil of the moment.
“I was just overwrought, but I can remember what she said about me,” she said. Powers huddled with her dad in her mother’s room, her brothers yet to arrive.
“She started praying, ‘Shelley will have such success, such success,’ and she just said it over and over again,” Powers recalled in a voice flecked with emotion. “My dad was, like, ‘Sue, Shelley’s already had success,’” she said, noting her self-sufficiency, communications career and more.
“But you know, I had this feeling like she knew I had more potential in me than what I’d accomplished,” Powers concluded.
Her grief over her mother’s loss lingered for several years. So, too, did her mother’s words, echoing in memory and reminding her that there was more to come. “It kept sitting with me: ‘I need to do something with my writing,’” said Powers, who lives in Madison.
Something more, to be specific, with her own writing. Powers saw her name in print plenty early on, as a reporter and feature writer. She later edited curriculum with JBHM Education Group and worked in communications at state agencies, including her current full-time role as a communications director.
“I’ve done a lot in publishing, but I’ve always wanted to write fiction. And I have started and stopped, on and off, many times over the years,” she said, having sought publication for more than a dozen efforts before calling it quits. It was time to circle back.
She pulled out a piece in progress with a 21-year history and vowed to see it to completion. “Dad had been reading it to Mom in her final days, and he kept saying, ‘Shelley, you really need to finish this story.’”
She finally did, brushing off her half-finished middle-grade novel, and setting timers for nightly writing bursts. Powers finished it, and while that piece was in the hands of beta readers, she poked around to see what else she had.
A short story, inspired by memories of washing dishes with her mom while lizards crawled on the window, turned into a children’s chapter book, and she followed that with a middle-grade reader. She wrote several picture books in a row, sent those off and slowly got back the rejections. “I could see it was going to be an extremely long process, and here I was going through this burst of creativity and work was mounting.”
Then 55, she felt like she didn’t have time to wait. Powers turned to self-publishing, forming her own imprint, Creekline House, to catch different age genres—picture books to teens—under a single roof, and go ahead and get her stories into readers’ hands. Now 56, she’s seeing that unfold, with the January release of her debut middle-grade novel “A Very Strange Reversal of Scales,” aimed for 8- to 10-year-olds.
Her next one, “How to Fry Chicken & Ditch the Nightlight” which came out in April, is also a middle-grade reader, but skews a bit older, for 9- to 11-year-olds. “It’s all about growing through fear and realizing you can do more than you thought you could do.”
‘Slowly But Surely’
Powers pegs September for the launch of her “proper” novel as she calls it, “the one that Dad had been reading to Mom … the one that he was, like, ‘Shelley, you really need to finish this,’ and it’s the one that has bridged this 21-year gap since I’ve really been working on my fiction.”
Her “Lost & Found in Lantern Hollow” is an upper-middle grade to early young-adult novel set in Woolmarket, Mississippi, an unincorporated community about three miles northwest of Biloxi. In the book, a teen girl’s summer plan goes sideways after her fall from a Biloxi River rope swing and the broken leg that follows. When a strange neighbor befriends her and her pals, a mystery ensues that opens up new wonders. “There’s laughter in it, but there’s also some tears, some good mystery,” she said. “I’m really excited about it.”
The heart, light humor and tenderness of stories for the younger set work with her writing voice, Powers said, hence her concentration on books for the middle-grade lane. “This is where I find that I do my best.”
She does not have children of her own, but violin lessons she has taught over the years, Sunday school classes and her siblings’ progeny have brought plenty into her orbit. “I don’t like to talk down to kids,” she said. “I do think they’re pretty entertaining, and they’re fun to write for, and it’s a challenge to see what’s going to make them excited about reading.”
As the sole Creekline House creator, Powers manages design and layout as well as writing and editing. She relied on AI generated images, with her own editing and manipulation, for the scattered illustrations for her younger readers in the early titles. “This is just bridging the gap for me now,” Powers said, hoping for a human illustrator when it comes to the picture books she envisions.
Ushering her Creekline House fiction into the world—a process she thought would be all marketing and social media—turned out to be delightfully analog. “So appropriate for books,” she mused, recounting calls and drop-bys to libraries and book sellers.
“It’s a whole new way of stretching myself. … The last 30-plus years I’ve been sitting at a desk. This is taking me out in the world and I actually love that,” she said, recalling aspects that enticed her into reporting at her career’s start. “That’s what I really loved—getting out and being around people, and this is taking me back to it.”
A couple of book signings, shelf space in libraries and a few independent booksellers (including Lemuria Books in Jackson) in the state are leading to book sales “slowly but surely,” and a recent library author exhibit with readings and activities with kids have earned early, positive results.
She plans to write more stories set in Mississippi and looks forward, too, to more presentations at bookstores, libraries and maybe even a school in the future. “That’s what I’m hoping to grow, along with the writing.”
When prompted, Powers imagined her mother’s response to her Creekline House imprint and the creative spirit behind it alongside the titles it has produced. “I definitely think she’d be proud. Knowing Mom, she’d be my biggest champion, and my biggest encourager to keep growing.
“I think she would be excited, and want to be a part of it. And, she is.” Powers pulled her mother into a scene in her book, “How to Fry Chicken & Ditch the Night Light.”
“It’s one of my last, really wonderful memories about Mom,” Powers said. “So, I think she’d be thrilled.”
