THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 28, 1996 TAG: 9607300517
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Bill Ruehlmann
LENGTH: 78 lines
Chesapeake writer and teacher MaryAnne Gleason, a survivor of cancer, finds her days at midlife particularly precious.
``It teaches you to appreciate every moment,'' she says. ``It washes away the petty things in your life. If you survive cancer, it makes relationships - what's important and not important - clearer, the way you appreciate a meadow after rain.''
It took stubbornness and effort for her to stick around, and Gleason applied the same tensile will to her art. She has been writing for a decade, steadily turning out book after book. Life came a day at a time; fiction, a page at a time.
``She's giving and she's funny,'' says Felicia Mason, the Daily Press editor who has been her friend and critic for years. ``She embraces life. And MaryAnne is a fabulous storyteller.''
Now Gleason's sixth full-length manuscript, a romantic thriller, has become her first published novel.
Forbidden Obsession (Ocean Publications, 373 pp., $6.95), set in and around Hampton Roads, is as essential company on the beach this summer as shades and a sand bucket.
``I papered my walls with rejection slips,'' admits the third grade teacher from Tallwood Elementary in Virginia Beach. ``My motto was `Have something ready so when one thing comes back you can send another.' It's a hard industry to break into.
``But you can't give up.''
She didn't; now Gleason's both alive and an author. Her continuing allegiance to teaching is further testimony to determination. She's tougher than a shoe sandwich.
``I don't write about wimpy women,'' Gleason notes from her home in Great Bridge. ``I'm not one, and I don't like them.''
Certainly self-assured Melody Moon, the potter heroine of Forbidden Obsession, is no wailing frail.
``My work,'' she proclaims at one point, ``has been on display in some of the most prestigious galleries in Richmond.''
But Melody comes to Norfolk to attend her antique-dealer brother's funeral. Ben committed suicide - or did he? Bad guys brood over Botetourt Street.
Allied with her against them is Father Mark Stone, a troubled 38-year-old parish priest with ``deep brown eyes and chiseled features.'' He was a U.Va. grad with a year's experience as a Charlottesville architect before attending seminary. Now he's an ecclesiastical hunk.
There was a connection, an electricity, and she detected just the slightest possibility of passion smoldering behind his dark eyes.
``I like to write about the church and priests, though I'm not Catholic,'' Gleason says. ``I'm an Episcopalian. So we're close.''
Is she giving religion a black eye by portraying a renegade priest?
``I think there are a lot of renegade priests,'' the author says. ``I talked to some of them in writing this book. But Stone is not so much a renegade as one who had a problem with the church from the outset.
``Melody is simply a catalyst for the final decision about what he wants to do.''
Stone's no wimp, either. He's at war not only with his emotions but some urbanely violent art thieves as well. They don't agonize over ethics.
Gordon Lathem walked on to the deck, casually carrying the gun he had inside the camel cashmere jacket. He walked to one of the chairs and sat. ``You are a deep regret, Melody,'' he said as he stretched out his long legs. ``I had grown fond of you. It wasn't something I'd planned on doing, you see, but it happened anyway.
``But you've left me no choice, my dear.''
Goodnight, Moon.
Gleason's second book, Shattered Image, will be out under the Ocean imprint early next year. She is mother to Ryan, 25, part owner of Muscle Beach East gym in Ocean View, and Jennifer, 14, rising ninth grader at Hickory High. MaryAnne is married to mortgage broker Michael, who is not in the least surprised that his wife wrote and sold Forbidden Obsession.
``What surprised me,'' he reports, ``is that I liked it so much.'' MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia
Wesleyan College. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
MaryAnne Gleason by CNB