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11/18/10
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ECHO MEMBERSHIP MATCHING GIFT
On the Same Page
He writes dark and she writes light, but Jon and Wendy Clinch are each other’s best readers B Y MARG O T H AR R IS O N
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28 FEATURE
SEVEN DAYS
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SEVENDAYSVT.COM
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Photo credit: ECHO volunteer, Monica Beers and a Giant Snapping Turtle.
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11/19/10 1:06 PM
t a recent writers conference, mystery author Wendy Clinch introduced her husband, Jon Clinch, to Charlaine Harris, best-selling author of the Sookie Stackhouse novels. He was also a writer, Wendy said, but of literary fiction. “Oh, you poor dear!” exclaimed Harris, creator of the “True Blood” characters. Jon Clinch remembers an equally memorable reaction at a conference five years earlier. When he told an agent his work was literary Jon Clinch rather than genre bound, she asked simply, “Why?” There was a world of difference between those two interactions, though. In the interim, Clinch learned how to sell his fiction. He went home from the 2005 conference and started writing his novel Finn, a dark retelling of events in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Huck’s Pap’s point of view. Unlike Clinch’s previous (unpublished) manuscripts, this one had a strong hook, and he landed an agent before it was half complete. The proceeds from Finn, published in 2007, enabled the Clinches to close their advertising agency in the Philadelphia suburbs and move to their second home in Plymouth, Vt. Now they reside full time near
Echo Lake, minutes from the slopes of Okemo. That’s especially important to Wendy, who skis every winter weekday: She has to hold on to her “ski diva” edge. Clinch runs a popular online community for female skiers called theskidiva.com. In the summers, she’s taken up a new, related occupation: writing mystery novels. Her Ski Diva series, published by St. Martin’s Minotaur, started with this year’s Double Black
and will continue in January with Fade to White. Though they’re no longer toiling in the advertising trenches — as they did for three decades — the Clinches had a busy 2010. July saw the publication of Jon’s second novel, Kings of the Earth. The Washington Post raved, “This is the kind of fiction we should be reading,” and Kings appeared at the top of
the 2010 Summer Reading List in O: The Oprah Magazine. Not bad for a literary novelist.
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hough Jon, 56, and Wendy, 55, write very differently, they regularly read and critique each other’s work. They’ve been together since they attended Syracuse — “We were children!” says Wendy. And, during an interview at their home on a recent Friday, they converse like two halves of a veteran comedy duo.
Take their response to a question about the research Jon did for Kings of the Earth. The novel’s protagonists are hardscrabble farmers based on a rural