Sheila Grandison-Marshall: The Wonderful World of A Writer/Author
Sheila’s works are non-fictional and humorous. She has published 3 books and has 2 more in the works. She started writing when she was young, and she became inspired by a very radical person from Berkeley California who attended Springfield College.
Sheila was attending that class as well. As he was speaking on started talking about racism and civil rights, she became inspired to write her first book entitled “Visionary Testimony”.
She explains this was a militant book about civil unrest and racism that was going on around her right here in Springfield. Her second book entitled “Urban Folk Tales”, is humorous poetry about her experience.
She wrote a third book about a young boy who was a bully.
She explained he was something else at 3 years old he was already able to cuss as well if not better than any grown-up. The name of that book is “Bookee Goes Inside”. She followed this family and witnessed how this little boy brought negativity with him when he was on the playground bullying the kids, and then when he started kindergarten, he brought those behaviors into the classroom. He did eventually turn his life around. When she published this book, it was around the time that bullying was happening here in Springfield, and some young people’s lives were lost by suicide.
Sheila tells me she and her girlfriend, Pearl Baptiste, started a greeting card business, her son did the artwork and then got the idea for a t-shirt business.
She looks back very fondly on that time, saying, ‘Even though I have a college degree, vending was one of the best times.” She explains it was “free form with”, no one looking over your shoulder. She says they did not intend to work together, it just seemed to fall in place.
Creativity runs in Sheila’s family. Her son is a self-taught artist, he was awarded the Boston Globe Scholastic Award when he was in eighth grade. He draws from feeling about life whereas Sheila writes from life experience. She also says her late husband George Marshall was an artist as well. He did the illustrations in “Bookie Goes Inside”. George was a right-arm amputee and a self-taught artist. So, he did his art with his left hand. Sheila says she remembers that George was a perfectionist, he took extra care to make things right. She remembers him drawing Bookee, who had an afro, and he drew each strand of hair very intricately.
When asked if she is still writing, she says “I am getting back to it”. She had taken a break when she was taking her husband during his illness. During this Covid era, she kept wondering what she could do being locked down and not able to really go anywhere.
She said the messages kept coming to her to get back to her writing. She also says it is therapeutic to her. Sheila and her son are looking to do a calendar for 2022 which is another avenue to expose people to her son’s work. She took fifty pieces of her son’s art and divided them to go into her Adult Coloring Books.
I genuinely enjoyed interviewing Sheila Marshall, she has a great personality, she is intelligent humorous, and humble.
