Women of the Wall co-founder to speak at Jewish Center
By Anthony Stoeckert, Packet Media Group
As an avid reader, Priscille Sibley says she loves spending time in bookstores looking for something the get her hands, and eyes, on. But a recent day she spent browsing the bookshelves of area stores was something special.
Ms. Sibley visited Target, Barnes & Noble, Sam’s Club and libraries to see her just-published novel “The Promise of Stardust” (William Morrow, $15.99) on shelves. It’s the debut novel of Ms. Sibley, who works as a registered nurse in the neo-natal department at St. Peter’s University Hospital in New Brunswick.
Her book is about a pregnant woman who gets into an accident and falls into a coma, leaving her husband to decide if she should be kept on life support, which he knows she doesn’t want, or keeping their child alive.
Though Ms. Sibley has worked as a nurse for years, she’s always loved books and has long wanted to write one of her own. Aside from a poem and short story, she hasn’t been published before.
”I think it was always in me,” she says of writing a novel. “I wrote poetry as a kid,and I’ve always loved books and dabbled with journals as most writers have. I just kind of sat down one day and said, ‘It’s time to sit down and try to write some of these stories that are in my head.’”
The book is published by William Morrow, an imprint of Harper Collins, and getting a genuine, printed published novel was what Ms. Sibley wanted.
”That was always my goal,” she says. “I recognize that e-publishing has come a long way, and that’s a route that a lot of people are trying but I really wanted to do it the traditional way after growing up in a household full of books. I don’t care too much about shoes, but put me in a bookstore and I’m lost. So I really wanted to see my book in a bookstore.”
When asked if she was confident her book would draw interest, Ms. Sibley says she knew she had a good concept, but that the story also covers some dark themes.
”I actually didn’t think it would sell,” she says. “It was an idea that I had in my head as a nurse, I had taken care of a child with inner persistent vegetative state — that was a very different story than the one I wrote. Certainly as a nurse, I can’t write the stories that I see, there are ethics involved, personal privacy issues. So this is a very different story but the emotional core came out of that.”
She says the book isn’t autobiographic but she has a personal connection to the story because of her struggle with quality-of-life and end-of-life issues.
”This story was just nagging at me and I felt I had to write it,” she says. “And because every book you write is a different story, unless you’re writing something that’s very formulaic, I felt, even if it doesn’t get published, I’m going to learn so much as a writer writing it. I couldn’t let it go.”
As a part-time nurse who works 12-hour shifts, Ms. Sibley says she makes time to write on her off days. She’ll write at midnight if a scene hits her. And anyone who dreams of writing his own novel should note that while she likes the storytelling and characterization found on many television shows, Ms. Sibley says she stays away from television to read and to write.
She’s also thinking about her next book, though the publication of “The Promise of Stardust” is making it hard to find time to write. The story, however, is brewing in her head, she says.
One thing she didn’t do on that outing to bookstores is buy a copy because her publisher provided her with a few copies. She’s saving three of them for her young children.
”Someday they may want to read it,” she says. “They are not particularly interested yet, but they will someday, I suspect. They may be 40 years old before they do but they will want to read the book their mother wrote.”