By Maggie FitzRoy
Susan Shipe Calfee is an accomplished writer, author, and poet who hails from a family of writers. When her 96-year-old mother lay dying and asked Susan to finish a novel that she had been working on for years, Susan readily agreed.
Susan’s mother, Bess Paterson Shipe, had completed 22 chapters of a sweeping historical mystery suspense about a young woman who inherits a house off the Maryland Shore. She had written many short stories, but this was her only novel, which she began writing in the 1960s.
Now, seven years after saying goodbye to her mother, Susan has fulfilled her mother’s dream. After adding 17 chapters, including an ending she knows her mother would love, she published the book, “The Forces of Bay House” by Bess Paterson Shipe and Susan Shipe Calfee, now available on Amazon.com and at the Ponte Vedra Beach Library.
“Writing the book was her life’s literary dream,” says Susan, who is also a singer, musician, and the author of a local children’s book called “St. Augustine A to Z: A Young Reader’s Guide to America’s Oldest City.”“Little did I know my mother’s dream would also become mine.”
Q: How difficult was it to finish your mother’s book?
A: It was quite a stretch to go from a children’s alphabet book to a full-blown suspense novel of 465 pages. My mother lived with me the last two years of her life and arrived with 14 notebooks filled with versions of the novel. Her mother had lived to 101 and she always assumed she’d have time to finish it.
Q: How were you able to finish it?
A: I was studying the craft of fiction at the time with “Shantyboat” by Lynn Skapyak Harlin, who taught The Shantyboat Writers Workshops from a houseboat on pontoons moored on the Trout River, across from the Jacksonville Zoo. I studied with Lynn for 12 years and Lynn had read my mother’s book and encouraged her to polish and finish it. Since my mother and I were extremely close, I was able to finish her book in her voice. It was like two hands on the same pen. I joke that I’m not a ghost writer — I’m the ghost’s writer.
Q: When did you start singing?
A: I’ve always been a singer, since I was five. Cherub Choir. Madrigals. High school musicals. Glee club. The University of Maryland Chorus, where I went to college. Then in my twenties I was hired by Busch Gardens in Tampa to become one of 17 members of The Busch Garden Singers, the first human entertainment group at the park. We put on costumed, choreographed, 30-minute shows.
Q: What was it like performing at Busch Gardens?
A: We did 42 shows a week, six days a week, seven shows a day—outside, with a live orchestra, after the baby elephant act and the sea lion act. I also rode on a camel and an elephant while singing with a handheld mike—but not simultaneously, I never achieved that. They asked me: ‘Susan, can you ride an elephant?’ and I said, ‘I guess.’
Q: Where do you sing now?
A: I sing with The Heritage Singers of Jacksonville. I also sang with the Jacksonville Symphony for 15 years and as a volunteer for a nonprofit called Body and Soul, the Art of Healing, founded by the Jacksonville Symphony’s principal tuba James Jenkins. Body and Soul brings entertainment to hospital patients’ bedsides. I loved going to the hospital. I did several shifts a week for about 12 years.
Q: How long have you lived in Ponte Vedra Beach?
A: Since 1991, when I moved here with my family.
Q: When did you write “St. Augustine, A to Z?”
A: In 2013. It continues to be sold in many stores in St. Augustine as well as online. I also give talks in local schools using the book to encourage a love of reading in children and to teach them about the city. My mother and sister wrote a children’s book about Charleston, South Carolina and I decided to write one about St. Augustine. I was really into rhyme, writing poetry, and I chose the most kid-friendly places for the alphabet.
