Romance Writer Turns Heads

Liz Johnson-Gebhardt threw herself into a snowbank and cried the day she closed the book on Kenzie Hammond.

“I had nothing left. I was drained,” she says, clearly still sick of the emotionally needy woman.

But Kenzie refused to disappear - and now Liz is grateful. The frustrating protagonist in Liz’s first book, “Vancouver Rendezvous,” caught the attention of a Canadian publishing house last year.

Her work hit bookstores and buyers’ hands all over the United States and Canada last spring. It’s even stirred some interest in Hollywood. Liz, who’s 38, is a bit overwhelmed.

“When I saw my book on the shelf at Aunties (Bookstore), that’s when it really hit me,” she says. “I was pretty emotional.”

“Vancouver Rendezvous” is a 582-page wildlife romance about troubled Kenzie and her bond with wolves. It leads into two more books. Liz tapped out the story on a laptop computer in her remote home north of Priest River nine years ago.

She was so absorbed in her work that she didn’t stop for a printout until she finished - three years after she started. The dot-matrix printer she powered with a 12-volt battery coughed out 4,000 pages.

“It took two weeks to print out,” Liz says. “I can’t believe how long the books I write are.”

A vacation a la James Michener’s “Drifters” 18 years ago persuaded Liz to write. She had time. A lifetime in Catholic schools in Minnesota had taught her self-discipline. Most importantly, she liked to write.

“I always had a fetish for words,” she says. “I just never really thought I had talent.”

Her teachers in Eastern Washington University’s creative writing department were published and so skilled that Liz nearly decided she couldn’t compete.

For three years after graduation, she yielded to her physical side. She and her husband, Dave, moved to their wooded hideaway where Liz worked herself to exhaustion maintaining 40 untamed acres.

She reveled in the sweat and solitude, but also missed people. A job as a concessionaire at concerts throughout the Northwest solved the problem.

“I loved it, ate it up,” she says. “I could deal with the crowds, then come back here.”

Still, the urge to write nagged at her. She finally pulled out an old typewriter in 1985 and began writing in her cabin by kerosene lamp. She was so insecure that she kept her work secret for months.

Her first effort went nowhere. But it convinced her she could write and introduced her to the gantlet of the publishing world.

By the time Liz started “Vancouver Rendezvous” in 1987, Dave had built her a workplace. They’d bought 100 more acres of wilderness and were building a home.

Liz had a basic idea for her story, but let her character, Kenzie, determine the course. She pored over articles on wildlife to learn about wolves and traveled to Vancouver to research her scene. Dave, an engineer in Spokane, liked helping her research.

Publishers weren’t interested in Liz’s final, 20-pound draft and still stonewalled her story after an agent persuaded her to break it into parts.

“It was way too wordy, self-indulgent,” Liz says, as if she wishes she could write it again with the experience she’s gained. “The story’s good and I like the characters, but the writing’s immature.”

She waited five years for a publisher to want “Vancouver Rendezvous,” then decided to promote it herself. The reintroduction of wolves to the United States was big news at the time. Her book covered the same territory. She let publishers know.

Commonwealth Publications in Edmonton, Alberta, sent her a contract in November 1995.

“I started bawling,” she says.

It was a no-frills, prove yourself agreement, but Liz was up to the challenge. Books hit stores last March and so did Liz, reading aloud, signing, unable to stop smiling.

“It’s such a joy when people say, ‘I read you,”’ she says.

Liz’s second novel, “Thread Clock Scissors,” is due out this fall. It’s a 700-page mystery complete with disappearing people and a Brazilian prostitution ring.

Publishers are considering the second part of her Kenzie series and Liz is reworking the third part while she writes another new novel. Her agent has sent a draft of “Vancouver Rendezvous” to a producer in Hollywood.

Through it all, Liz’s forest sanctuary keeps her centered and strong.

“I don’t mind starting at the bottom,” she says. “I just want people to read me.”

, DataTimes