Former Garden City resident Grace Sammon
Photo by Stephanie Dubsky
Former Garden City resident Grace Sammon has published her first novel, ‘The Eves.’
“The story revolves around a woman who is emotionally broken, almost beyond repair,” said Sammon, who graduated from Garden City High School in 1971 and currently resides in Florida. “She has no relationship with her mother or her daughter, lacks ambition, has let herself go and in order to deal with her pain, she has turned to drinking.”
The main character is a woman named Jessica Barnet, who ends up finding solace with a group of older women at a sustainable farm community in Maryland. The farm is known as The Grange, and it is run by an African American doctor.
“I think this book captures the conversations we wish we had with our parents, if we had taken the opportunity and the lessons we would want to impart to our children, if they were ready to listen,” said Sammon.
She describes the character, Jessica, as a psychologically complex person, who served as a primary witness in a messy trial, has a partially finished doctoral degree and lives in a row house in Washington DC, that is badly in need of repair.
“She has let go of her ambitions and her appearance, but not her vodka or her sense of loss and guilt,” said Sammon. “When she meets and gets involved with these diverse and sometimes ditzy older women living in this sustainable community, everything changes for her.”
Sammon said that a former Garden City school teacher, Inez Spiers, was a big early influence on her writing career.
“She was head of the drama program at the high school,” said Sammon. “Before that I was involved with the theatre program at St. Anne’s and my dad was a television director in Manhattan.”
Sammon graduated from Catholic University in Washington DC and earned dual degrees in psychology and drama.
After college she worked in the education field for thirty years and ran a nonprofit educational consulting firm.
“A lot of my work involved improving and reforming high school’s in low income communities. I traveled to many cities including Detroit, Houston, Baltimore and to tribal lands in this country, developing plans to improve the school systems.”
In her time as an educator, she wrote three books on the subject, including Creating and Sustaining Small Learning Communities, Strategies and Tools for Transforming High Schools and Battling the Hamster Wheel Strategies for Making High School Reform Work.
She retired from her position eight years ago and started formulating ideas to write her novel.
“I really thought about and developed the characters for the book a few years ago and than put the pen to paper. There are some unique characters that Jessica meets in her journey including a black lesbian couple, a Latinax woman and her daughter and this doctor who runs the farm.”
