Sharon Randall

Sharon Randall’s weekly column began as what she calls “a personal column about everyday people and ordinary things,” for the Monterey County Herald, in 1991.

Today her syndicated circulation, in 400 newspapers nationwide, demonstrates how extraordinary her insight into ordinary stuff – the lessons that spring from stormy nights, old friends and red-headed grandkids – is for some 6 million readers.

This Thursday, Feb. 4, she excerpts her columns as part of a luncheon fundraiser for a cause: Seaside-based Community Partnership for Youth. CPY, as Randall puts it, is “a fabulous grassroots program serving the needs of underprivileged children and teenagers on the Monterey Peninsula,” through mentoring, tutoring and enrichment activities ranging from sports to arts.

What still surprises you about what you hear from readers, even after thousands of letters?

Their incredible capacity for kindness – their ability to feel for and care about and even pray for someone they’ve never met.

How would your writing be different without having a blind brother? Without time in Monterey? If you didn’t have children? Without losing your first husband?

I can’t imagine my life, let alone my writing, without any of those (or countless other) experiences. They are so much a part of who I am. They inform what I know and what I’m still trying to learn. Writing doesn’t require writers to experience suffering, but it often insists that we examine it, whether it’s our own, or that of others.

What less conventional qualities are most important for a writer to cultivate?

Ask questions. Listen to the answers. Pay attention. Tell stories; good writing is always just a good story well told with good words. Read what you write out loud. It should sound like you. If it doesn’t, fix it. Everything, everything, everything has been written. The only thing unique about your writing is your voice. Read the writers you like to read. If you like them, it’s probably because their voice speaks to the voice within you. Develop that voice. As a writer, it’s pretty much all you’ve got.

Not everyone can navigate the deeply personal in a way that provides meaning for so many. How would you guide people who want to do that?

First, ask yourself why on Earth would you want to do that? Seriously. If it’s for your own personal need to vent, or draw some measure of sympathy, go find another way to do it. All writing – most especially, the deeply personal – begs to be universal. The experience may belong to the writer, but the meaning, and whatever truth might be found in it, belongs to the reader.

I have a few rules for my writing. Here are two: If anyone plays the fool in it, it has to be me. And if anyone sheds a tear for it, I want it to be the reader, weeping for something it has caused them to remember or discover or feel for themselves and those around them – never, ever for me.

Facebook just made a big investment in virtual reality. How do you see technology affecting the way we tell and absorb stories?

Uh, virtual what? Sorry, the word “technology” tends to make me a little nervous. A more serious answer is this: We need to keep telling stories by whatever primitive or futuristic means possible. I welcome anything that allows us to keep in touch.

Favorite author?

Anybody who wrote the last good book I read. Favorite authors are like favorite foods. Whatever you’re in the mood for. My moods tend to vary quite a bit.

How does writing help you make sure you’ll never go, as you’ve written, “blind to beauty, numb to joy or rob you of the life you’re meant to live”?

We don’t have to write to see beauty or feel joy or live the life we’re meant to live. It helps, yes, but it’s not necessary. My stepfather never learned to read. And yet he enjoyed life in ways that some of us never will. The gift of writing is that it allows us to relive all those fine things, all those lovely moments, time after time after time, by recording them for ourselves and for our children’s children’s children. Writing is hard work. Absolutely. But after 25 years, I have to say, it’s been a pretty good gig.

Read an extended version of this interview at www.mcweekly.com. To purchase $60 tickets to her Feb. 4 reading, visit www.cpy.org