Home » On The Inspiration for Violet is Blue by Anne Shaw Heinrich

On The Inspiration for Violet is Blue by Anne Shaw Heinrich

June 17, 2025 | By Women Writers Women Books | Reply More

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I understood the gravity of a bounced check.

Once I figured out that a checkbook was only as good as my rapidly fluctuating account balance at the bank, the act of writing a check to pay for anything felt like risky business. A bounced check can represent so many things: sloppy bookkeeping, withdrawals that outnumber deposits, and panic chased down with a healthy dose of embarrassment, of course. By the time I was navigating day-to-day living in two smaller towns as an adult, my eyes were capable of seeing another outcome of a bounced check.

Everywhere I went to pay for something—restaurants, the florist, the gift shop, the grocery store, the video store, anyplace that took cash, credit or check—I noticed on cash registers and counters hand-scrawled notes that said, “Do not accept checks from…John Doe or Jane Doe.” There were even a few checks stamped with “insufficient funds” tacked out in the open for everyone to see. These served as a small community’s wall of shame, a public pillory of sorts that was an accepted practice back then and in those places. Disgruntled business owners who took part in this practice justified it as a public service, a way to keep others from not being paid for their services or products. That’s fair, I guess, especially if you’ve been burned.

But after you live in a close-knit community like this for a while, you start to put names to faces. You know who these offenders are, and the public nature of the practice feels less about public good and more about cruelty. Once I understood this unspoken rule, I started to see it in nearly every small town I went through and I had to accept that I’d seen this as a child, too, in the town I called home. As a child and a grown woman, it made me uneasy to know the offenders as well as I knew the people who felt within their rights to participate in such a cruel norm. These people went to church. Our children were in school together. I sat on the bleachers watching baseball games, music programs and plays with these folks. I’d even, on a few occasions, not watched my own checkbook as carefully as I should have.

Even though I don’t see this as much as I used to, the capacity for cruelty that still exists, making similar shame-based practices possible. They take place in communities both big and small, but seem especially ill-suited in small places, where we know everyone, where the whole town turns out to raise money for a family facing cancer or some other hardship, where people participate in food drives and buy popcorn and cookies from scouts; cheese and sausage, or wrapping paper to send the marching band on a trip. I’ve seen people in these places turn out for funerals and visitations, willing to wait for hours to pay their respects. The same business owners who posted bad checks for all to see were sometimes the same souls sponsoring softball teams, ads in the high school yearbook, quietly funding scholarships, or a million other private acts of kindness we’ll never know about. How do groups of people with such an instinct to pitch in, rally, shore up others with goodness, also tolerate what I can only categorize as sanctioned cruelty?

The only answer I can muster is this: people are complex, and so are the ways that we exist together. We all have a fine line, and most of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, cannot pinpoint exactly why our lines are where they are. Thinking about it too long forces us into places that hit very close to home. We’d rather look away, or throw some more money in the plate at church.

Readers of my second novel, Violet is Blue, have a chance to explore all of this and more through the lenses of characters who make the fictional small town of Poulson their home. Two of the main characters, Violet Sellers and Jules Marks, would seem to have little in common, but their unlikely bond forces both to examine their places in Poulson and the world. They are fenced in by circumstances beyond their control, but others are also watching from afar, ready to rally as soon as these two young people have more power than they imagined.

Contradictions and unspoken rules that we accept exist everywhere but are especially interesting to unpack when concentrated. This is why I’m forever fascinated writing about small town living. It’s good. It’s bad. It’s sweet and bitter, ugly sometimes, but also beautiful.

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Anne Shaw Heinrich has been a journalist, columnist, blogger, and communications professional for over 35 years. Her writing has been featured in The New York Times bestseller The Right Words at the Right Time, Volume 2: Your Turn (Atria), Chicken Soup for the Soul’s The Cancer Book: 101 Stories of Courage, Support and Love, Midwest Family Magazine, Ms. Magazine, Writer’s Digest and Education Week. Violet is Blue is the second in Anne’s three-book series, The Women of Paradise County, and will be released by Speaking Volumes June 17, 2025. The first book in the series, God Bless the Child, released in 2024. Anne is passionate about her family, mental health advocacy, and the intrepid power of storytelling. To learn more, visit anneshawheinrich.com.

VIOLET IS BLUE

Violet Sellers is blue, and for good reason. She’s repressing a shocking secret she won’t tell anyone, especially her comfortably middle-class parents. When she makes a new friend in school, Jules Marks, who lives on the “other side of the tracks” with his five little sisters, she is introduced to a dark world of self-abuse. As Violet learns about Jules and his shifty mother, Lee, she retreats further into her shell. Her parents, Gloria and Skip, are horrified and do their best to find out what happened to their adolescent daughter while bending over backward to keep the whole town from knowing their business. Jules has an aunt and uncle who know his desperate story, and they finally get a chance to free him and his sisters from a loveless world of poverty. Meanwhile, a spinster named Margaret Burns watches and waits. She knows all about redemption and she’s got a master plan up her sleeve. Margaret and most of the quirky characters in Violet is Blue eventually learn to dance between the worlds of the “haves” and the “have nots” in ways none of them ever anticipated.