The long, winding road to being a writer

Remembering the passing of one woman from the French Resistance

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Like so many things in life, this story starts with a girl.

Sterling Goodspeed was a senior at St. Lawrence, well, a long time ago. His senior year he took an upper-level creative writing course with a professor named Peter Bailey and a young woman he knew, but wanted to know better.

You'll get the idea if I let Sterling set the scene:

"Her features were soft, her face round, gentle, forgiving. I didn't understand it then, but contrary to the way I perceived her, she had another trait as well. She was ready to take a chance, ready to make the unexpected move. To me, she seemed vulnerable, ready for someone to take care of her but that was far from the truth. In fact, she was resilient, a little stubborn and always working to find her way. She quietly, secretly thought she was destined for something. It had to be writing."

You can probably tell that was not Sterling talking. That was Sterling writing from a memory of a half-century ago.

"I wrote a story; the second story in True North," Sterling explained. "I wanted to prove to her I could write."

Something as old as time.

He was trying to impress a girl.

"Peter Bailey told us the first day in class that no one gets a 4.0," Sterling remembered. "But me and (the girl) got a 4.0. After that the dream was stronger."

He kept the story and he held onto the dream.

He graduated from St. Lawrence, went to law school, worked at a law firm in Glens Falls - met another girl who became his wife - returned home to North Creek to practice law like his father did and eventually served two terms as Warren County district attorney (1994-2001).

You may have heard of that Sterling Goodspeed, the lawyer, not the writer. That was the Sterling Goodspeed I knew. His writing consisted of those boring legal documents based on the law not life.

Meet Sterling Goodspeed, the author, not the lawyer.

Sterling tells me now writing was his first love and it was Peter Bailey's class at St. Lawrence that kick-started it, gave him an inkling he could be good at it, but like the girl, he moved on to other endeavors.

Life often does that, blowing us around from career to relationship on a whim.

Sterling became a lawyer, a husband, a father and a politician, but not a writer.

I've always said there are two types of writers: Those who write and those who HAVE to write. For long time, Sterling did not HAVE to write, but it was buried in his subconscious, taunting him, gnawing at his soul until he finally had to do something about it.

I've known Sterling a long time. He was my wife's boss when he was district attorney and eventually did our legal work, too. We never talked about writing, never talked about literature - until last week.

It was during Covid that the feeling bubbled up to the surface again.

His law office was closed.

There was no work to do and no reason not to pick up a blank legal pad. He is old-fashioned that way. He still writes his prose long-hand and refuses to arm himself with a keyboard.

So there in North Creek in the dark days of Covid, the memory of the girl, the memories of growing up in a small rural town in the North County came tumbling out like never before. It was as if he was going through a mid-life crisis, but really it was a midlife re-awakening.

He went back and found the story he wrote to impress the girl. It was his first-born. The other stories followed, one after another.

Five months later he had his first book of short stories.

It wasn't long after that when Sterling was updating our wills, he stopped by and gave my wife a copy of the book.

I was curious, but you know these days with self-publishing, everyone has written a book, so it went up on the bookshelf.

Sterling Goodspeed now has two books under his belt and is working on a third.

Earlier this fall, I took it off the bookshelf. I was going on a trip. The stories were short and the book lightweight so it traveled well, But as I turned the pages it wasn't what I expected.

Sterling is a great story-teller and even during serious legal appointments, he manages to spin a yarn or two to keep us entertained. If not for his wife Sue, he would never be on time for any appointment ever, so what I was expecting was tales about the interesting characters he had met in politics, odd cases from his law practice or is time as district attorney.

I was expecting real-life experiences, non-fiction.

Instead, I got prose.

Old-fashioned literature.

This was the type of quality writing the girl at St. Lawrence would be impressed with all these years later.

These stories are Hemingway-esque with a North Creek vibe while providing insights you only get when you have lived in a place your whole life.

Sterling says there is a subtext in the writing that small towns like his are filled with alienation and isolation. There is a sense of loss about those innocent times, but there is also a certain charm to the stories and often excitement.

He recounts having coffee with one of his childhood friends and talking about times past. They decided there was two types of people in North Creek: The Flatlanders who have moved there and you can't trust and the locals, multi-generational folks who didn't trust anyone. Then his friend told him there was a third group that was worst of all. Those that left and then came back.

That was Sterling.

The revelation is a bit startling.

This past year, Sterling published a second book called Shadows of Gore, but it is not about skiing.

The first story returns him to the beginning, to the girl in St. Lawrence. He remembered she had written a story about a crush on a boy they called "Hornrims."

He had an idea for a story and it involved "Hornrims" and wanted to tell the girl his idea. Imagine a story percolating over a half-century.

Perhaps, he wanted to pay homage.

Maybe, he still wanted to impress her.

Or maybe he just wanted to see how it turned out for her.

He tried to find her and tracked her as far as Kansas City, but no further.

Sterling says the second book is stronger than the first.

He is 62 now and winding down his work as a lawyer, but speeding up his commitment to writing.

He is doing what he always wanted to do. So the golden years will have to wait.

"It was all about me evolving into a person who had patience," Sterling says about the writing.

As he prepared to start his third book of stories, he faced another dilemma.

After telling his wife Sue his plans, she stared back at him and gently told him: "No more freaking short stories. Write your novel!"

Or words to that affect.

And maybe not so gently.

"I can't," Sterling responded.

"You will do it," Sue told him.

"She is not someone who gets in my face like that," Sterling said.

So Sterling stared down the fears of a half-century - he says he tried to start the novel five times - and started writing nine weeks ago.

He has 30 chapters.

He thinks it will take another two years to finish it.

But the hardest part is done.

He started.

Editor’s Note: Both of Sterling Goodspeed’s books are available on Amazon and Barnes & Nobel. It is also available in Queensbury and Glens Falls at Ace Hardware, Crandall Library and the Chapman. In North Creek area it's available at Hudson River Trading Company, The Foothills, Hart Studio, Barkeater Chocolate, Town of Johnsburg Library, and All Season Sports, Basil and Wicks and Izzy's Marketplace

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The Resistance

While visiting France several years ago, my cousin took us to Oradour.

It was a time capsule from 1944. Nazis had massacred 643 villagers there and burned it to the ground. It sits that way today as a testament to the brutality of the Nazis.

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that Madeleine Riffaud, a member of the French Resistance who had grown up near Oradour, had died at the age of 100.

In 1944, she volunteered to enact revenge on a Nazi soldier who had been part of the massacre.

Riding a bicycle along the Seine and carrying a stolen pistol, the 20-year-old came upon the solider gazing across the river at the Tuileries gardens. She stopped and shot him twice in the head.

She was captured, locked in a Gestapo jail, tortured and scheduled to be executed. But while being transported to the concentration camp, she escaped only to be caught again and later freed in a prisoner exchange.

Later, along with three colleagues, she helped capture a Wehrmacht train where 80 soldiers surrendered to them.

“Hundreds of young women like me were involved,” Riffaud later wrote. “We were the messengers, the intelligence gatherers, the repairers of the web. When men fell or were captured, we got the news through, pulled the nets tight again. We carried documents, leaflets, sometimes arms.”

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Robert E. Lee’s former home has a different look these days in New Orleans.

Harmony Circle

Seven years ago, the city of New Orleans took down a prominent statue of Robert E. Lee from atop a tall pedestal in what was called Lee Circle.

It is a crossroad where the St. Charles streetcar line crosses on its way to Canal Street and the French Quarter.

It is now called "Harmony Circle."

The pedestal has remained empty.

This week while visiting my son, I noticed it had been decorated for the holidays.

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Ken Tingley spent more than four decades working in small community newspapers in upstate New York. Since retirement in 2020 he has written three books and is currently adapting his second book "The Last American Newspaper" into a play. He currently lives in Queensbury, N.Y.