The Third Novel By Jill McCroskey Coupe

By Jill McCroskey Coupe

“Last year at the Kauai Writers Conference, Salman Rushdie offered a keynote in which he said: ‘Writing is a mess.’ He couldn’t be more right. There’s nothing about the process of writing a book that follows a prescribed way of doing things or a specific formula. Just keep writing and letting it unfold until things start to become less murky. There is no way to an ending but through the mess.” (Posted on Facebook by Brooke Warner, publisher of She Writes Press and Spark Press, May 30, 2025)

How I wish I’d come across these words of wisdom back in 2019, when I began writing my third novel, Gemma Sommerset. There would be a few glitches this time, I knew, but I was experienced enough to know how to handle them, right? 

Not necessarily, as it turned out. 

In July of 2019, I took a very rough draft to John Dufresne’s novel workshop in Taos, New Mexico. Back home in Baltimore, discouraged by the feedback I’d received, I decided to try to tell Gemma’s story in flashbacks.

After a bad fall, at age 76, she would end up in a nursing home in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Confined to her room, she would spend her days looking back on her life while gazing out a window at the mountains she loved.

When COVID arrived, I realized that maybe a nursing home was not the best place for Gemma. I wasn’t ready yet for her to die. 

But I didn’t want to make any big changes to the story I was trying so very hard to tell. Maybe because, with my own life curtailed, I couldn’t help commiserating with Gemma’s inability to go anywhere.  

The nurse’s assistant who brought Gemma’s meals each day would often stay to chat. The two of them became friends, exchanging stories about their families. 

But then the woman stopped coming. Hungry, Gemma tried to open the door to her room. It was locked. 

There were no cars in the parking lot below her window. 

Panicked, she didn’t know what to do.  

I didn’t either, so I stopped writing.  

In July of 2021, I flew up to Vermont for a week-long visit with my son and his family. It had been years since I’d seen them.

During our hour-and-a-half drive to the airport for my return flight to Baltimore, I hesitantly told my son that I was thinking about maybe moving to Vermont. We discussed the pros and cons of such a major change for both of us, and, as I boarded my flight, my becoming a Vermont resident was beginning to seem like a real possibility. 

By the first week in October, I’d sold my condo in Baltimore and moved into my new house in Vermont! Once I’d unpacked all the boxes and was feeling at least somewhat organized, I sat down with Gemma and realized that the novel made no sense. By alternating scenes at the nursing home with scenes from her earlier life, I’d created a confusing patchwork of Gemma’s life story.

The solution seemed so simple—start at the beginning and depict Gemma’s life as it happened. Evidently, I’d needed to move from Maryland to Vermont in order to figure that out.  

So I started over, beginning with an early-morning horseback ride at a girls’ camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina and ending in Lexington, Virginia, with Gemma, nearing 80, greeting yet another sunrise from the deck of her house. Below her, a deer with an important role to play, is asleep in the grass.  

This time, without all the switching back and forth from present to past, I had a better idea of who Gemma was. What she wanted from life. The woman she would turn out to be. 

Two major themes of the novel had become clear to me: 1) feminism and 2) chance.

From an early age, Gemma had resented the idea that all she should ever be in life was a wife and mother.

Lady Luck would end up playing an important role in her life.

Once I’d finished this new draft, I read through it, making corrections and telling myself it was better than the earlier drafts. For reassurance, I asked for feedback from my son and from a good friend in Baltimore, both of whom kindly agreed to read and comment on the new version. 

After incorporating most of their suggestions, I submitted the manuscript to Rootstock Publishing, in Montpelier, VT. Gemma Sommerset will be published on July 1, 2025!

Based on my experience with this third novel, here’s some advice to  other writers. 

Don’t give up. There are a million stories out there. It may take a while to figure out exactly which one you’re trying to tell. 

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Award-winning author Jill McCroskey Coupe’s novels, Beginning with Cannonballs (2020) and True Stories at the Smoky View (2016), depict unlikely friendships and have been reviewed in Library Journal, Booklist, Necessary Fiction, and Smoky Mountain Living. Gemma Sommerset (July 2025) tells of a woman searching for her true self. Jill’s master’s degrees — an MFA in Fiction and an MLS (Library Science) — are a dead giveaway: she has always loved books. A former librarian at Johns Hopkins University, she recently moved from Maryland to Vermont.

GEMMA SOMMERSET

In the 1950s, as a teenager attending summer camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Gemma Sommerset, from Lynchburg, Virginia, is given a glimpse of her future self-a woman capable of accomplishing just about anything. She dreams of traveling and writing. But with the expectations of marriage and motherhood, what are the odds that she’ll get to live on her own terms? Isn’t life, after all, a game of chance?

A literary fiction of a resilient woman coming into her own power, Gemma Sommerset, the third novel from indie-award-winning novelist Jill McCroskey Coupe, shows it’s never too late to follow your dreams.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing