Julie Shapiro's Backstory

Jen-Zen and the One Shoe Diaries

In Southern California I noticed flip-flops and running shoes left on the beach, the freeways, construction sites and parking lots and felt this uncanny urge propelling me to write about them. I couldn’t escape them, nor the unshakeable sadness and loss I felt emanating from the shoes themselves.

Why singular shoes I kept asking myself? Is it a Cinderella complex?  Is this a poem I should write or a short story? I wrote them all featuring singular shoes and then one pivotal day I remembered a time as a teenager when my friends and I had been goofing around with a Ouija board and a shoe moved by itself. It was this big aha moment! Of course, the shoes are haunted. Why didn’t I see it before? And that’s when I found Brad, my main character, the photographer who chronicled the shoes in the wake of his girlfriend’s uncertain death. In the singular shoes he saw, Jen-Zen, the eternal soul mate and relived their love affair in search of answers as to why she died.

He snapped pictures of the shoes and tried to say goodbye and get on with his life, but he couldn’t for the very shoes started to tell him something.  When outsiders called his photographic odyssey nuts and others wanted to capitalize on it Brad believed most of all in his gut instinct and his intuition telling him…there’s a message in the shoes…just believe…believe in yourself.

I identified with Brad, pursuing a dream and love, no matter what anyone says. Even if his Grandma told him, “intuition is a fool’s wobble and you got the wobble all right!”

Like Brad, I listen to my intuition. So it didn’t seem out of the ordinary when in the midst of searching for a publisher that a real life photographer, Randall Louis Hamilton contacted me and mentioned having a shoe photo collection. Guess what he called it? It’s the One Shoe Diaries like the original name of my novel. What’s even stranger is that Randy wanted to be named Brad and he photographs dolphins like Brad.

My novel is not Randy’s life story. It just captured his artistic vision somehow and some way. From two separate coasts we each shared this unifying vision, albeit independently. Neither one of us knew about the other's work or the many parallels that existed between us. Simultaneously in Florida where Randy lives and in Southern California where I live, a fascination with the "one shoe sightings" emerged. We each wondered about the untold story of the singular shoes. I imagined a tabletop book of the shoe photos to go along with the novel; the very photographic collection Randy is amassing. Randy also imagined people sharing stories about where and when they noticed a “singular shoe sighting” as in my novel.

When we hung up the phone from that pivotal day both of us felt like we’d stumbled into the Twilight Zone, proving that life sometimes is stranger than fiction. It validated for me that intuition is anything but a fool’s wobble, that is, once you set it straight, a lesson Brad and Jen-Zen learn in my novel and one that continues to surprise and amaze me in everyday life.

Please visit Julie Shapiro's author's website here.

Comments

[Julie Ann Shapiro]

Hi Jessica,
Thanks so much for posting the back story of my novel, Jen-Zen and the One Shoe Diaries.
Warm regards,
Julie Ann Shapiro
http://www.julieannshapiro.com

[Randy Hamilton]

And I owe you a thanks as well, if anyone is curious to see my photo collection visit my site and do me a favor drop me a note in my feedback section. i always like to hear from everyone.

[Randy Hamilton]

Whoops forgot the site
http://www.oneshoediaries.com

[Carolyn Burns Bass]

The premise of JEN-ZEN AND THE ONE SHOE DIARIES intrigues me. I've often noticed single shoes tossed about in much the same way as Julie Ann and Randy have described. I think my fascination began with the first death I ever witnessed; a young man thrown from his motorcycle so hard his Nikes were found still tied twenty feet away. I've been told this is not uncommon with accident victims.

[jessica]

A pleasure.

Jessica