Valerie Browne Lester (1939-2019) was an independent scholar, writer, and translator. She is the author of three biographies, a history of Pan American told in the voices of its cabin crew, a novel set in the West Indies, and a translation of Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes (The Magnificent Meaulnes).

She was born in England, but spent her early childhood in Barbados and Jamaica. At 11, her parents went to work in Nigeria, and she was sent to boarding school back in England. She wrote letters to her parents on a weekly basis and continued this writing habit until her parents died four decades later. In addition to the letters she began to write poetry and had some of her poetry published. She moved into playwriting and completed two which she produced and directed in local theatre in Maine. She then started work on a novel which she says was “was far too clever for its own good” and shelved it until just before her death.

APRIL 1962, SAN FRANCISCO AIRPORT - VALERIE 5TH FROM LEFT

As a young woman in the 1960s, I worked as a flight attendant for Pan American. When the airline folded and my mother died in December 1991, those two deaths prompted me to create a fitting memorial for both. What better way to do this than to write a history of Pan Am, told in the voices of its flight attendants, and dedicate it to my mother, who had herself christened a Pan Am airliner in 1947? What a marvelous project this was! In the course of my research, I traveled all over the country, meeting the pioneers and heroes of Pan Am’s cabin crew. I tape-recorded their voices so that I could use their actual words, and then strung their stories together into a historical narrative of the airline. The book became Fasten Your Seat Belts!

PHIZ BY EDGAR BROWNE

With one successful publication under my belt, I needed another topic. I found it close to home. My great-great grandfather was Hablot Knight Browne, better known as “Phiz,” the principal illustrator of the novels of Charles Dickens. Feeling that he was underappreciated and cast into shadow by Dickens himself, I decided that it was time for an appreciative biography. That led me down many winding paths and took me as far afield as England, France, Australia, and Canada in search of my elusive ancestor. Find him I did, and that became the book Phiz, the Man Who Drew Dickens.

In my travels, I had somewhere acquired an unwelcome guest, the parasite giardia. For nine months I suffered gastro-intestinal problems and huge fatigue. Incapable of original thought, and on a whim, I took down from my bookshelf an old copy of Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier’s dreamy novel about coming of age in France just before World War I. I translated the first page. I was intrigued. I translated the second. I kept going, and during the course of my illness, I completed the translation. (Just as I finished it, the doctors finally figured out what was wrong with me.) I gave the translation the title The Magnificent Meaulnes and sent it off to Vintage publishers, who snapped it up and gave it a snazzy yellow cover.

Restored to health, I started looking around for a new topic, and found one at a dinner party. “I had a phone call from a rare book dealer today,” said my host. “It turns out that I have a stolen book.” The stolen book was the Manuale Tipografico, the masterwork of the great Italian typographer, Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813). Intrigued by the story of the theft, I soon became even more intrigued by the author of the Manuale. This fascination has now become the book Giambattista Bodoni: His Life and His World, which was published by David Godine in September 2015.

I met my husband Jim Lester in the air, when I was working on Pan Am’s flight 1 between New Delhi and Tehran. He was on his way back to the U.S. from Nepal, where he had been a member of the first American Mt. Everest Expedition. A psychologist and jazz musician, he too later became a writer, and published Too Marvelous for Words: The Life and Genius of Art Tatum in 1994. Our children, Toby Lester and Alison Jean Lester, are also writers. Toby is the author of the non-fiction books The Fourth Part of the World and Da Vinci’s Ghost; Alison is the author of the novels Yuki Means Happiness and Lillian on Life, and of Locked Out, a collection of short stories.

In 2010, I did a talk called ‘Stories on the Spot’ at a TEDxSingapore event. If you have time to watch it (11 minutes), you’ll hear about how important I feel it is to reframe what ‘the box’ is when we’re asked to think outside it, and will learn a wonderful exercise that improvisers use to increase their mental agility, trust their ideas, and have a rocking good time. You’ll see me assessing what I need on the spot, making links that would be impossible if I let myself worry about what was happening, or might happen.

For any writer experiencing writer’s block, I’d highly recommend signing up for an improv workshop. It’s hard. You’ll come up against your concerns pretty quickly. I certainly did when I started. I wanted to be able to do it so badly that I’d hit a wall in the middle of a scene, and sometimes I’d even cry. Doing comedy! Eventually I learned how to get out of my brain’s way, because it had amazing responses when I stopped trying to be clever and stopped pushing myself so hard. Now, when I sit down at my desk because it’s time to write, and things are quiet in my head, I know that something is happening and it will make itself known when it is ready. I wait. Things float to the surface when I don’t churn up the water with worry. Maybe the idea that comes along will be something that I’ll end up cutting later. So be it. Maybe it’s just a piece of scaffolding, and can be taken down when the structure is sound. 

I don’t write in fancy notebooks. I figured out pretty early on that expensive notebooks were intimidating, and I couldn’t bear the look of my penmanship in them, let alone the words I was writing. I keep the ante low. I have often written in exercise books, on scrap paper and used envelopes. For me, the pen is more important than the paper. I often use my grandfather’s Parker 51 fountain pen because the ink flows so nicely.

Lately, I’ve been writing directly onto the computer more than I’ve been writing by hand, but I find that when I’m not making headway it can help to pick up the pen again. I enjoy the feeling. Maybe that calms me, and my thoughts flow better as a result. The more I relax, the more I write; the more I write, the more likely I am to get from What do I need? to Look what happened.