My Almost-Forgotten Family Writing Connection

There's another novelist in my family tree, and she nearly completely slipped my mind.

I’m in the last few stages of my second draft of the novel I started for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and once that’s done I’ll send it to my publisher for her thoughts and suggestions on how to make it better.

I’ve thought about how my family has played a role in nurturing my writing talent. My family is full of great storytellers — as I’ve mentioned in the storytelling chapter of Neon Crosses — and my grandfather and his generation, along with my mom and her sisters and cousins, have nurtured my love for telling a good story.

For some reason, I almost forgot about the other novelist in my family. Maybe it’s because she passed away a few years ago, but I’m kicking myself for forgetting about her when I wrote Neon Crosses. But I guess the Lord brought her to my mind a couple of days ago, and now I’m trying to keep her in my mind as an inspiration when I write fiction.

Julie L. Cannon was my cousin — Second? Third? Fourth? Definitely not close enough to have interacted with her much. Our paths must have crossed at family reunions when I was a kid, but I didn’t really get to know her until after she had published her first novel.

After she was a published author, she and I met several times and had wonderful inspiring conversations. She inspired me as a writer, even though at the times we had met, fiction writing wasn’t anywhere near my radar.

Julie published her first novel when she was in her late 30s (or maybe early 40s). Even though her writing was — Dare I say it? — more akin to chick-lit than anything I would normally read, I enjoyed it. Always Southern, always involving faith in some way, and always conversational, Julie’s writing deserved such a wider audience than it ever got.

Her first books came out simply under the name “Julie Cannon,” but once she found out that there was another Julie Cannon who wrote lesbian erotic fiction, she added that middle initial.

She wrote at the time:

I was really crushed as I pondered the long road I’d traveled since 2001. I’d put in miles and miles along backroads, reading and speaking at hundreds of libraries and book clubs to build a readership under the name Julie Cannon. I’d put my family through a lot! Lots of missed PTO meetings, lots of frozen burritos and lots of dustballs rolling around under the beds.

As somebody who had to untangle some other book by some other Chris Queen from my Goodreads profile, I can identify, although I didn’t have to worry about readers telling me they wouldn’t read my books because of the other Chris Queen.

My favorite novel of hers was Twang. A story of a girl from a hard-luck life who makes it big in Nashville, Twang read like a terrific movie to me. It came out shortly before she passed away in October 2012. It was a wonderful swan song, even though she had another novel that published posthumously.

(Good grief, I just realized, she was 50 when she died. Man, that hits home.)

I’m so glad she has crossed my mind now because she’s still inspiring me. I came across her last blog post as I was writing this, and man, oh, man, she wrote something that really hit home for me.

She wrote this exactly a week before she passed away: “These stories, these characters, these words, plus untold more, are alive inside of me.”

I’m not going to (nearly) forget Julie anymore. As I write more fiction, I want her inspiration to stick with me.

And I also hope that she can look down from Heaven at me when my first novel — and every one that comes after, God willing — comes out. I hope she’s proud.