Author of Almost Family, 2024 Sarton Winner in Contemporary Fiction
It’s fiction and not autobiographical, but Almost Family, Ann Bancroft’s winning novel in which a fictional character is suffering from stage four cancer, turned out to be just about as true to life as a book can be.
“This may sound weird,” Ann says, “but when my own metastatic lymph node was recently discovered, one of my first thoughts was actually, Yes, I got it right!” The author explained that she felt as if she had company, having already lived through the experience and fallen in love with her book’s characters. “I had laughed and cried with them but now feel closer to them than ever.”
Ann, the youngest of three daughters of an Army surgeon and a mother who managed to make moves an adventure, was born in Germany. She lived in Washington, California, Colorado, Hawaii, and Texas before moving to San Franciso in her senior year of high school.
“Even though I loved writing and had been writing since my first book at age eight —a construction paper and crayon sequel to Pippi Longstocking—it never occurred to me that I might actually make a living doing something I loved.”
It was a journalism professor who liked her work in an introductory class who hooked her on journalism. After graduating from college, Ann got a job as a copyboy at the Oakland Tribune, hoping she would eventually get promoted to the newsroom.
“Instead, they sent me to the fashion section, and my male cohorts to sports. I still laugh at that because I had no fashion knowledge or sense, and even sometimes wore hiking boots to work.” The fashion editor, however, taught her a great deal. “And finally, after a couple of years, I moved to the newsroom, which could have been the set of a 1940s movie, down to old men in green eye shades, pneumatic tubes for sending copy to the composing room, hot type, and waxed-on page dummies. It was a great deal of fun, a lot of work, and we wrote important stories, from Jonestown and the Harvey Milk assassination to an undercover stint with the Moonies cult.” Ann adds that she picked up a couple of press rewards before being picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle.
In 1976, she married and moved to Sacramento, where she has now lived in the same house for forty-three years. Ann continued writing for the Chronicle off and on over the years, and then for the wire services, the Sacramento Bee, and a few other writing jobs. She only started writing fiction after taking a short-story writing class in 2010.
“I wrote a story about a fake survivor on a breast cancer walk, some of which eventually wound up in the “Walk for the Cure” chapter in Almost Family. After that experience, Ann trained to be a facilitator in the Amherst Writers and Artists prompt-writing workshops and has been leading them ever since. She also took some fiction classes and in 2014 started working on a novel called The Oakland Mets, which ultimately became Almost Family.
“Getting to publication was a ten-year saga,” Ann says. Thinking she couldn’t write fiction, she was about to give up on the book when a writing teacher pointed out that when Ann walked into her first algebra class, she didn’t know how to do that either.
“So why would you think you could sit down for the first time to write a novel and know how to write it beforehand?” the teacher asked.
What she took from that, the award-winning author says, was both the need to accept her imperfection of the craft, and the need to “Practice, practice, practice. Have patience, do the work, and eventually you’ll get good at it. You have to love the process of writing as much as the outcome.”
Pat Bean is an SCN Board member and a regular contributor to the Journal. A retired award-winning journalist, she traveled the country in a small RV for nine years with her canine companion, Maggie. Her book about that time is Travels with Maggie. Pat is passionate about nature, writing, art, family, and her new dog, Scamp. She blogs at https://patbean.net/.
