By Page H. Gifford
Correspondent
Susan Pepper Robbins keeps writing and keeps churning out short stories, books, and flash fiction. Married to novelist and playwright Roy Robbins, she used to teach at Hampton-Sydney College. She once lived in Fluvanna and recalls a far more rural area than it is today and the people she knew often served as models of her characters. Some events in her life are also reflected in the stories she writes.
“My characters are not real in the sense that they can be named or identified, but are impressions, even layered impressions of real people. I have known people for four or more generations living in these areas, and I have heard many stories about them,” she said.
Her latest book I’m Jayme began long ago when her mother was declining and her care was complicated.
“I have changed and revised it a great deal to try to make it more up to date,” she said. Narrated by a young girl who faces adult troubles including the aging of much-loved grandparents, the separation of her parents, her own failures and the new pressures of a relationship with a boyfriend. “She has to learn how to pay for her mistakes that have come her way and that she is responsible for.” It is her sixth book of fiction.
Her next project she says are stories set in the secular afterlife of an older and very ill man who invites his wife’s first boyfriend to move in with them to help. The wife is worn out from caring for him and the old boyfriend is homeless so in the end it works out.
