Shawn Nocher's Blog

I grew up in a home with many bookshelves that were constantly being stuffed with new releases. But there was one bookcase that remained...

Thrilled to share I’ve been nominated twice for the Pushcart Award this year! 

Grateful to both Flash Frog and The Forge Literary Magazine.

Check out the two stories that were nominated:

The Girls

The Boy in My Kitchen

Photo of founder Bill Henderson’s tiny treasure of a bookstore in Maine.

Even after publishing two novels and numerous short stories, I still can’t believe anyone cares what I have to say...

And that, my friends, is why you don’t get bombarded with newsletters from me. 

Today, however, I’m about to head out to yet another book club that has invited me to be a guest and I find myself both grateful and yearning to connect with the readers who have championed my work. Since publishing my first novel in 2021 I’ve had the honor of being a guest at more than forty-five book clubs. I’ve been warmly welcomed in living rooms, on patios and decks, in coffee shops, restaurants, libraries, schools, private clubs, churches, synagogues, and Zoom. And always with genuine enthusiasm.

Each invitation has brought with it a sense of privilege and appreciation. To share in the intimate gatherings of readers, in the passion for literature, and to engage in spirited discussions about books is my honor and my privilege. 

When I first started doing this writing thing, I was certain that even if I never sold a story or a novel, I’d keep on doing it. Weaving stories and putting words on paper is what I do. But—WOW—it’s so much more fun when you know people actually want to read the words you sweated over.

So, I am here to say thank you for reading my work, for gifting my novels to friends, for promoting my work on social media, and for choosing my novels for yourself and your club’s reading list.

Because newsletters should have news in them, I will say that I am deep in my next novel. (More on that later because we writers are superstitious, and I don’t want to jinx anything). But I will keep you in the loop in the days ahead. I have stories to tell, and perhaps more importantly, I have a community that wants to hear them!

With heartfelt appreciation and warmest regards,

Shawn

Twenty years ago, I spent an afternoon teaching poetry to seventh grade boys. I focused on some

pieces by Mary Oliver thinking that the clear and precise language, not to mention the hawks and

grasshoppers, alligators, bears, and vultures might be just the thing to pique their interest. I was

playing to a tough crowd. But still, there were moments.

The experience was a bit like corralling cats. Boys perched, in spite of my warnings, on the thin

lip of the back of their chairs, tempting a classmate to kick it out from under them. The door was

slammed more than once. There was elbowing and crotch scratching, armpit farts and belching

alphabets. But there were also small wins, those moments when I knew a boy was feeling seen

by the page. A boy here or there, perhaps the ones I least expected—the one with the pricey

sneakers or the one who insisted on running out to the hall and back again for no other reason

than he knew it startled me, or the one who used a black sharpie to paint his nails—would

suddenly twist his head on his birdlike neck, blink, his lips silently mouthing the words of a

passage, and I could see it. That moment of recognition. And the wondering. Wondering how his

secret feelings, the ones he hadn’t yet revealed to himself, had found their way to the page. And

there was, among a very few, a creeping blush drawing itself up over a still androgynous face.

I never asked, “What does this mean, what is the poet trying to tell us, what is going on here?”

Those were the questions my grammar school teachers always asked and poetry became problem

solving, as if it was an algebra equation. Instead, I had them read their favorite parts out loud to

the class—not even the entire poem, just the lines they were most drawn to. And I didn’t ask

them why they chose that particular passage, didn’t dare make them wear their feelings on their

sleeves. Towards the end of our hour, I had them memorize the part they liked best, to practice

reciting it to a partner. I instructed them to carve it into their memory banks and recite it to a

parent that evening.

Had another teacher walked into my classroom in the last of our moments together, they would

have heard a strange cacophony of nonsense about alligators crashing on banks, muskrats

swimming, crows puffing their feathers, moth wings, and water snakes. But I knew better. I

knew there were those among them who would now carry a stringing of private words in the

pockets of their consciousness. Like the spy who must eat the paper bearing the secret code once

it is revealed to him, they no longer needed the pages themselves.

I like to imagine now, twenty years since that day, that every so often a young man comes across

those words in the creases of his memory, presses them out flat, reads them to his mind’s eye,

and once again feels seen.

I have a list of favorite books. I’ve been building it all my life. It started when I was twelve and read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. That was the first time I can recall feeling like the writer was speaking only to me. It wasn’t my story, nothing at all like my life, and yet I felt like I merged with the story. Over the years there have been dozens more I’ve added to my list and today I want to share my most recent find—a book that I will always ALWAYS recommend, no matter what you say your favorite genre is.

To be fair, I was a teen in the late 70s and so this book may have rung especially true and honest to me, but even if you were born yesterday, you should know that this book is authentic in the way it represents the larger mindset of the 70s. Yes, Virginia, people really did think it was a woman’s fault if she was raped, even if she was a child. And yes, Virginia, even women thought this.

I loved this book so much—was so grateful for it—that I did something I’ve never done before. I wrote a letter to the author, Elizabeth Wetmore. To follow is an excerpt from that letter.

Thank you so much for writing Valentine, for sweeping me into a place I knew nothing about and immersing me in characters that will stay with me for a long time. Such a wonderful book--engrossing, rich and oddly empowering. You so deftly handled various POV and each character rose up off the pages as a fully formed and independent character with their own distinct voice. I tend to read as a writer (sometimes diluting the experience) but I found myself so immersed in each character and voice that I was reading again as a reader and loving every minute of it. In fact, after reading the first chapter I tweeted (and I seldom tweet), that the award for best first chapter was certainly yours. And in the end, by the time I turned the last page, I can only say that there was a kind of relief in that the story of Glory and the women orbiting her trauma had been told. All along, I had felt a keen sense of urgency, a strange need to have this story be told, as if the story had always existed without the words to contain it and--in the end--I could breathe a sigh of relief in that it had found the voices that needed to tell it.

Some people think that a book should come with a trigger warning. I’m not sure how I feel about that. A trigger warning might have stopped me from reading so many wonderful novels over the years. Afterall, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is also about rape and its aftermath, among other things. I can’t help but wonder if I would have missed the most important read of my youth had I known what the book was about. I hope you will take a chance on this important novel, but here’s your trigger warning: The book opens in the aftermath of the rape of a teen girl. Power through. It’s the town’s reaction to the rape and the women who find themselves asking questions of themselves and the men who quietly oppress them that is important. There’s humor, female bonding, and a kind of triumph in the end that felt satisfying.

This is Elizabeth Wetmore’s debut novel. I can’t wait to see what she will do next.

Full disclosure, Bill Black has been a mentor and writing teacher of mine for many years now. Lucky

me. I love his work and I love listening to him talk about writing. He’s the real deal when it comes to craft, and his latest latest collection—having won the 2019 George Garrett Fiction Prize—is a

treasure. It’s from a smaller press so you may not find it on the shelves, but you can definitely order

it from your local indie bookstore. You will not be disappointed.

These are the kinds of short stories that connect a reader with a place so organically that you can't

help but feel that you have become embedded, invested, in coal country's collective history. Hope

and hopelessness are tangled amongst fully realized characters, and there is an intimacy with the

characters that means you will carry them with you--whether you want to or not--long after you turn

the last page. This is storytelling that draws the reader in without ever letting the writer get in the

way. Clean, precise, but lyrical language against the backdrop of disappointment, a collective

history, and deeply nuanced characters make this one of the very best literary collections I've read in ages. Highly recommend.

We all assume that as our parents move into their golden years, we will tend to them with love and

compassion. But what if their demands are unreasonable and they are, ultimately, unworthy?

Complicated family dynamics are at the core of this earnest book that examines how we love those

who have been the source of dysfunction and hurt.

Jules, her sister, and her brother are navigating a tricky space in their family. Their aging parents are demanding, cynical, and narcissistic. Unpleasant at best. But a sense of duty and a lopsided familial love forces the well-intentioned Jules to make some tough choices about how much she can or will sacrifice for them. Jules’s parents are accustomed to a certain lifestyle and they’re not willing to let that slip in their later years—no matter the cost to their own children. A series of bad financial decisions are leaving them in a precarious place and they must rely on their children—especially Jules—to pull them out of their financial nosedive. But at what cost to Jules and her own family? 

This beautiful and poignant book examines an adult child’s desire to know unconditional love from two people who are hardly capable of such, the lengths that we will go against our own best interests to resolve family dysfunction, and the strength it takes to break free of our own childhoods. Diana Y Paul is a writer who deftly examines the nuanced cracks in a family that looks bright and shiny to the outside world. She peels away, in fine layers, the jealousy, spite, overt cruelty, and arrogance that lies at the heart of two failed parents who have no interest in redemption but demand homage on the part of their children. A fascinating examination of a damaged family from a wonderful writer.