From Provost to Novelist: Dr. Shirley Williams Spends Her Retirement Years Writing Her Family Into History
After decades in higher education leadership, Dr. Shirley J. Williams applies a researcher’s rigor to her own family’s untold story in her debut novel, “The Road to Winona.”
[CITY, STATE] — Dr. Shirley J. Williams built a long career in higher education, serving as a teacher, department chair, dean, and provost. In her retirement, she turned that same scholarly discipline toward a much more personal subject: her own family. The result is her debut novel, The Road to Winona, now available on Amazon.
The novel traces Williams’s Finnish ancestors from the famine-stricken countryside of late nineteenth-century Finland to the copper mines and lumber camps of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, centering on her great-grandmother, Marija, whose strength anchors the book. Williams spent years on the project, combining archival research with conversations with family members, including her uncle, Walter Rippa, who helped fill in stories from early drafts before they could be lost.
“I spent my career teaching people how to research and how to ask good questions of a source,” Williams said. “Eventually I turned those same questions on my own family. I wanted to know not just what happened to them, but what it cost them, and what it gave them.”
The project began, in part, as a way of holding onto a place. Williams spent childhood summers visiting her grandparents in Winona, Michigan, a former copper mining town that has slowly emptied out over the decades. Returning as an adult to find the schoolhouse, the post office, and many family homes gone or abandoned prompted her to begin documenting what remained before it disappeared entirely, both in memory and on the page.
The Road to Winona blends careful historical detail, including the mechanics of nineteenth-century sawmills, the realities of transatlantic steerage travel, and the terms of the Homestead Act, with the more intimate, oral-history-informed dialogue of a family telling its own story. Williams describes the finished novel as a tribute to the determination and resilience of immigrant families, grounded in true events from her own family tree.
The Road to Winona is available now in eBook format on Amazon.
About the Author
Dr. Shirley J. Peterson Williams was born in Hancock, Michigan, shortly after World War II and spent part of her childhood with her grandparents in the Upper Peninsula. After a career in higher education administration, she devoted her later years to researching and writing her family’s history. The Road to Winona is her first book.