Schoolmarm Wood Publications: About the Author

Stephen D. Dighton

First published at the age of fourteen, Steve Dighton has always been a writer. But, he says, "I needed seasoning--a lot of it--before I was ready to take on book length fiction." He wrote on all kinds of subjects, sometimes for national magazines such as Family Motor Coaching and the American Journal of Nursing, more often for regional and local publications, and sometimes just for the pure joy of writing. Even then, it took four unpublishable novels to learn enough to write one that deserved publication. During those years, he sold shoes, cooked hamburgers, studied for the Christian ministry, served as the Student Assistant Pastor of a church (which convinced him he was not suited to that calling), was the stage manager at his college, and spent nineteen years in jail.

"It was those years as a correctional nurse in a county jail that prepared me to tell lies convincingly," he says, "That's what a novelist's job is, according to Lawrence Block, and he's right, if you stop to think about it. I would only add this: we tell these lies to distill the truth, to make it clearer, which is how Dean Kuntz defines the best fiction writing. And I couldn't agree more."

Steve retired after twenty-eight years in nursing. "Mostly to save my sanity," he confesses, "but also to be able to devote more time to writing." And he knows a lot about keeping and losing one's sanity. The majority of his nursing career outside the jail was spent in the mental health field. "And at least eighty percent of the jail work was the same thing without the nomenclature."

The experience provided him with a host of interesting characters and an anthology of fascinating stories, some of which are actually true--or mostly so. A few of them, he says, are even publishable. It also taught him to be very observant. "That's just a survival trait. You don't pay attention in there, bad things can, and usually do, happen."

His first published novel, Locked In, takes place, though, in rural Oregon instead of a jail. "I got tired of killing people. When people asked what kind of stories I wrote, I used to say, 'murder and mayhem, the things I know best.' But it got old and stale. I mean, you can only kill people in so many different ways and for only so many different reasons. And then what do you do with them? So, I decided to tell a story in which people don't die, but suffer something worse. And there are a lot of things that are worse than dying."

He settled on Ventral Pontine Syndrome, better known as Locked In Syndrome, a very real medical condition which is possibly the most frightening condition imaginable. Its victims are fully conscious and aware of their surroundings with all of their senses intact, but the only thing they can do is blink. Some can even breathe on their own, at least at first, though that is not the normal course of the condition. Most wind up having to have a machine breathe for them. As far as the victims are concerned, their bodies are dead and they are trapped inside them, sometimes for years, until death releases them from the world's most confining prison. Only a few ever recover.

Steve's second novel, Breathe Not the Sins of Others, is his jail novel. It's focus, though, is not on the inmates or their stories. "Inmates are interesting characters, but only in small doses," he says, "and they've been done so often in books and films that I didn't think the world needed another story about one." Instead he focuses on the people who work in jails. How they came to work there, and how they cope, not so much with the physical brutality of such places, but with the brutalization of the soul that all too often becomes the norm.

In addition to writings novels, Steve has served as editor of The Oregon Baha'i, and as an editorial consultant to the American Journal of Nursing on correctional nursing issues. He now lives in the woods in Oregon and runs Schoolmarm Wood Publications which he founded as a means of making his ARCHIVE software available. He has since expanded its offerings to include ArtPrints of photographs he and his wife Kathy have taken; the unique Hubble ArtPrints created by his brother, Randall; the video DVD's The Light of Unity and Praise Be to God; and music CD's (Palimpsest) featuring Randall's other major talent, music. Kathy and Steve also travel extensively on photo shoots for the series of video DVD's he is now producing.