By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
Award-winning mystery writer Sara Paretsky Friday afternoon at Union High School media center urged students to dream big dreams worthy of their era, in which anything is possible.
She grew up "at a time and in a place where girls were not encouraged to dream dreams about what they wanted to be when they grew up. I didn't have those dreams. I stumbled through my teens and early 20s like a sleepwalker. When I was your age, we all thought we were just going to be mommies.
A girl asked the author who had not imagined publishing books until she reached her 30s what, then, her career aspirations had been. Paretsky turned the question back toward her. "What do you want to do?"
She published her first story at 11 in "The American Girl," about children surviving a tornado.
Paretsky earned a political science degree from the University of Kansas. She completed her Ph.D. in history in 1977 from the University of Chicago.
She fell for the city the summer she spent there doing community service. She also earned a master's degree in business administration from the University of Chicago.
During her schooling Paretsky did everything from wash bottles in a science lab to manage conferences on employment problems.
For 10 years she worked as marketing manager for CNA Insurance in Chicago. She would find her experience in the financial world invaluable as background for cooking up white-collar criminal schemes for V.I. Warshawski to solve.
She wrote her first three novels at night while working fulltime. Though a fan of detective fiction, Paretsky was troubled by the genre's portrayal of women.
Teacher Teri Frantz asked her to explain where research fits.
Sometimes, research can be fun.
For an early book, "Deadlock," set in the Great Lakes shipping industry, Paretsky rode an ore freighter from Thunder Bay, westernmost port on Lake Superior, to Niagara Falls.
For the following book, Paretsky said, "I'm going back to the Kansas of my childhood.