The long and winding road
Eugene's Faris Cassell spent two decades researching and writing an award-winning book
A FEW MONTHS AGO, I was watching the “CBS Evening News with Norah O’Donnell” when she interviewed two twins who had survived the Holocaust—among the few twins who had done so, and, at 86, quite possibly the last ones still living.
I knew in an instant who and what had been the catalyst for this interview: Faris Cassell of Eugene and the book she wrote, Inseparable (Regnery, 2023).
“She’s the one who dug up the twins’ story,” I told She Who Watches as we took in the interview.
In almost four decades of book writing, editing and mentoring, I’ve seen a number of long-shot first-time authors get published. But nobody toiled longer and harder than Faris Cassell, whose story is a reminder of the value of tenacity, perseverance and sheer willpower.
Inseparable followed on the heels of her first book, The Unanswered Letter (Regnery, 2020), another Holocaust-related book that was published in September 2020.
“Most people don’t want to write a book,” the late writing guru, William Zinsser, was fond of saying. “They want to have written a book.”
In other words, they like the idea of being an author, but not the idea of 4 a.m. alarms, stacks of rejections, endless revisions and groveling for an agent and publisher.
Which brings us to Cassell’s long and winding road to becoming a published author.
I met her in the early 1990s when I was assistant features editor and a features reporter at The Register-Guard.
Cassell had an undergraduate degree in American History from Mt. Holyoke College, an Ivy League school in Massachusetts. For years, as the mother of three children—her husband, Sidney, was a doctor in private practice in Eugene—Cassell would take a journalism class here and there when time allowed. In pursuit of a master’s degree at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism, she wrote her thesis on young people and the media—usually late at night, when the kids were in bed.
When she earned that degree, with honors, in 1990, the achievement had the potential to propel her into journalistic orbit or, given the competitive job market, nudge her toward a barista job. Cassell leaned toward the coffee-shop side of the equation.
“I still have the impersonal rejection postcard after applying for a part-time job at The Register-Guard,” she says.
Instead, she landed a job teaching journalism—voluntarily—to her son’s fourth-grade class at Edison Elementary. Not exactly Columbia, but, hey, anything in a pinch, right?
“We planned to put out our own newspaper,” she said, “so I called The Register-Guard and asked if there was a reporter who might come talk to the kids.”
That would be me. After our first meeting, Cassell politely, but persistently, inquired about part-time jobs at The R-G. The paper wasn’t hiring, I told her. But instead of huffing away, Cassell wrote a handful of stories for the paper about young people, for which she was paid nothing.