Local woman has novel published

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July 19, 2012

Local woman has novel published

By JOE MAHONEY Staff Writer The Daily Star Thu Jul 19, 2012, 09:33 AM EDT

COOPERSTOWN — Lisa Morgan figures she may never have become a published author were it not for the encouragement of her eighth-grade teacher at Cooperstown Central School, James Knodel.

In response to his assignment to crank out a 1,000-word essay for an English exam, Morgan, then known as Lisa Folds, said she handed in nearly two dozen pages of the most polished prose she could muster.

“He pulled me aside and said, ‘Always carry a notebook and pen with you, wherever you go,’” Morgan said. It was advice the girl — now a stay-at-home married mother of three children, residing with her husband, Brian, in the Schoharie County community of Warnerville — would not forget.

Today, Lisa Morgan, who grew up in Hartwick and graduated from Cooperstown High School in 1994, is launching her first full-length novel aimed at the young adult audience.

Falling within the fantasy genre and growing out of Morgan’s vivid imagination, it’s titled “Phoenix Rising,” and is published by Firefly & Wisp Publishing of Ravenna, Ohio.

The novel, Morgan said, is the first in what she hopes will be a series of four books that centers on a 16-year-old girl named Maggie Henning. Not only was the character’s father wrongly accused of killing eight people, but the girl also discovers that she is a phoenix with supernatural powers, including the ability to control fire.

While Maggie learns to wield her power, she must cope with monsters in the form of revenants, creatures that resemble animated skeletons. Maggie, all along, is straddling two worlds, and it becomes her objective to save both of them.

Morgan said it took her about a year to write “Phoenix Rising.” She said she completed the follow-up novel, “Phoenix Burning” — to be released in September — in about six months. That’s a pace that she said she hopes to continue for subsequent books.

Morgan, acknowledging she never went to college, said reading books is a top priority in her household. If a movie or TV series is produced from a book, she said she and her husband require their three children to read the book before they watch the show or film. To her, reading is “like taking a mini-vacation,” she said.

Asked how she juggles her writing exercises with running her household, she said, “Typically, I’m writing from the time the kids go to school at 8 in the morning until they come home at 2:30 in the afternoon, and then I’m running around with them, here, there or wherever.”

Morgan’s far-flung literary influences go from The Morganville Vampire series authored by Rachel Caine and set in the vampire-controlled city of Morganville, Texas, to “Gone with the Wind,” the romance novel by Margaret Mitchell that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1937.

She said she is also an avid fan of the Harry Potter books by British author J.K. Rowling. She said she is eagerly awaiting Rowling’s adult novel, “The Casual Vacancy,” due to be released in late September.

Morgan said she gets so wrapped up in her stories that when she can’t go past a building without wondering how she could set a scene in it.

“Maybe it is my overactive sense of imagination,” she said.

More than two decades after her encounter with Knobel at Cooperstown Central School, she said she wonders if she would have ever taken a stab at fiction without the nudge from the teacher.

Her first book, she said, is dedicated to him.