THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 20, 1995 TAG: 9508180587
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 84 lines
Some of us stroll the Virginia Beach Oceanfront and see surf.
Others stroll the Virginia Beach Oceanfront, see surf and surmise: What if there were a witch in the water?
Folks in the surmise category are probably writers.
``It was a stormy day, and the surf was tremendous,'' explains Charlottesville author Linda Cargill, 40, in a telephone interview. ``I looked out to sea and just imagined that a mysterious, phantom surfer was riding a gigantic wave up to the shore. These things pop into my head.''
She has often visited Hampton Roads with her lawyer husband, Gary, and son Kenny, 11. One of those excursions contributed the surreal image at the center of her new young-adult novel set in Virginia Beach and Norfolk, The Surfer (Scholastic, 195 pp., $3.50). Not far from the Norwegian Lady, a stranger goes airborne:
As if that perfect balance was not enough for such an expert surfer, the girl now lifted one leg up from the board and rode the cresting wave with only one knee bent. And then, incredibly, she thrust the leg out behind her, balancing herself first on her hands and then again on one foot. It was as if the stranger were a ballerina who could walk and dance on water.
It's a haunting, action-crammed tale for teens about a family curse that goes back to the 19th century and gale-force Scandinavian sea-captain forebears. As if protagonist Jessie Rogers didn't already have troubles enough, with her parents' impending divorce and the sudden mood swings of her boyfriend, swim-team star Nick Stieveson. Bummer.
``Kenny advises me on lingo and things,'' Cargill reports of her editorially useful son. ``He thinks it's neat that I write about places he visited. He likes to see his name on the acknowledgments page.''
Actually, he would prefer the hero, or at the very least the villain, to be called Kenny. Kenny is quick to tell his Mom what is interesting for kids and what isn't. Awesome.
Linda Cargill is a direct, confiding woman with a background in classical archaeology from Bryn Mawr and English from Duke University. She has been one to surmise stories from childhood; growing up in Bethel Park, Pa., she illustrated them and distributed copies to neighbors. As a senior in high school, Cargill won honorable mention in the Atlantic Monthly Short Story Contest for Young Writers for a yarn about her father.
By the time she was out of college, having acquired graduate degrees in English and English education at Duke and the University of Virginia, she knew how to write; but it would take her years more to learn how to sell.
``I wrote historical novels about the ancient world,'' Cargill notes, ``and I got real frustrated trying to get them published. I thought you simply wrote what you liked to read, and then somebody automatically bought it. Wrong.
``You have to target a market.''
In 1991 a small press, Cheops Books of Charlottesville, printed her first-person novel about teenaged Helen of Troy, To Follow the Goddess. Kirkus, the influential review service, pronounced it a ``spirited page-turner'' and ``a delightful read.'' One savvy agent who saw the review advised Cargill to stop scribbling about monsters in the ancient world and start writing about them in our own era.
Enter such up-to-date specters as the phantom surfer - and lucrative mainstream publishers like Scholastic Inc. of New York, Toronto, London, Auckland and Sydney.
``Now I don't research the material so much as the location,'' says Cargill, who travels about the country with her family in a van each summer, seeking out likely settings for saleable stories.
Next year HarperCollins will publish Hang Loose, concerning a spooky lighthouse on St. Simon's Island off the Georgia coast; already in the works is another Scholastic entry, Pool Party, featuring criminal activity around a north Florida haunted house.
``And they only take several months each to write,'' adds Cargill, ``as opposed to two or three years for a historical novel. They keep me entertained when I'm writing them. I never quite know how they're going to end.
``It pops into my head as I'm going along.''
Fun to write and fun to read. Surf's up, and so are her spirits. Scholarly Linda Cargill has broken into popular print with a splash. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
Linda Cargill and her son Kenny.
by CNB