Maintaining a focus on their creative lives weaves through the daily routines of three Shaker authors. Something their readers truly are grateful for.
By Zach Lewis
Lauren Moore, aka Lauren Cecile, a longtime Cleveland judge and author of six books, including “Eyes Like Mine.” Photos by Gus Chan.
A judge, a lawyer, and an engineer walked into Shaker Heights. But they didn’t do or say anything funny. Instead, they became authors.
Each of them bravely set aside high-powered posts or carved out time amidst busy careers and lives to take up the pen. Now, like other professional authors in Shaker Heights, they’re enjoying legitimate success and looking anywhere but back – to their next books and beyond – all while acknowledging Shaker as a major character in their development.
“Shaker figures out how to bring the greatness out of you,” says Cecile, a graduate of Shaker Schools.
“If I can do both, I would like to do both,” says Lauren Moore, aka Lauren Cecile, a longtime Cleveland judge and author of six books including her 2015 debut novel, “Eyes Like Mine.” “That would be the ideal situation. I know I can do it.”
In some ways, Shaker’s career-women-turned-authors could hardly be more different. Cecile writes historical fiction and guidebooks on travel, vocabulary, history, and etiquette. DM Pulley is an acclaimed writer of mysteries. Melody Chu, meanwhile, is a new author, with just one self-published novel under her belt. Each boasts a unique style and voice.
Also disparate are their backgrounds. Cecile grew up in Shaker, attended Spelman College, and spent 21 years in Cleveland Municipal Court before taking her current post in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court. Chu, on the other hand, like the characters in her novel “Mathey Girls,” attended Princeton University and worked for a large international law firm before switching to a three-person outfit.
Then there’s Pulley (a pen-name), who grew up in Central Michigan, attended Case Western Reserve University, and has translated a still-active career in construction forensics and consulting into a quartet of page-turners centered on old buildings. Her first book, “The Dead Key,” won Amazon’s 2014 Breakthrough Novel Award, and her subsequent three titles, “The Buried Book,” “The Unclaimed Victim,” and “No One’s Home,” have all done well.
“Buildings are filled with stories, tragedies, and secrets,” Pulley says. “I’ve always been fascinated by the secret lives of things.”
Drawing In From Real Life
And yet the three also have much in common, beyond their shared belief and residency in Shaker Heights. All three, for instance, are mothers. Two have children still at home and remain active in Shaker schools and youth sports.
Melody Chu, author of the debut novel “Mathey Girls”
All three are also still working in their original fields, even as they continue to chart paths as writers.
More significantly, all three feel a similar drive to write and a willingness to put something of their real lives and experiences into their creations. They saw and continue to see openings for what they have to bring to the literary table.
“Writing became my way of processing,” says Chu.
Writing never figured into Chu’s career plans. Had she not brought her husband, now a physician at University Hospitals, to her hometown of Cleveland, or had children, she might have remained in Hong Kong and continued working beyond full-time as a specialist in international finance law.
What really inspired her writing, though, even more than the support of her husband, was her traumatic experience giving birth to her third child, during which she suffered an amniotic embolism. Thankfully, both Chu and her baby survived (that child is now 7), but for a time, neither’s fate was certain. Chu also endured the death of an older brother, at age 11.
Out of that emerged “Mathey Girls,” Chu’s novel, which follows a close-knit group of friends (“Mathey” is the college dorm where they met) after one of them dies in childbirth. When it came to giving birth, “It had never crossed my mind that that kind of risk was involved,” Chu says. “Writing became my way of processing that.”
Inspired by a City’s Colorful Past
Pulley returned to writing under a different amalgam of urgency and inspiration.
She, too, sought a creative outlet after stepping away from full-time work, picking up the pen she’d once used to write poetry while her young boys attended pre-school or napped. Her fuel, though, was her undeniably unique experience nosing around (and even rappelling off) abandoned structures, investigating insurance claims, and dealing with shady contractors. One especially intriguing discovery was an old bank building, complete with a vault full of unopened safety deposit boxes.
Combining that with her lifelong interest in mystery and horror and newfound fascination with Cleveland’s colorful past – “Walking through Cleveland is like walking through American history,” Pulley says – she had more than enough fodder to begin writing the fresh variety of mysteries she’d imagined.
“I’m a building detective, essentially,” Pulley says. “I get to snoop through people’s homes, which I love. It’s like stepping into someone else’s skin… We all grow up hearing and telling stories. We have an ear for it, whether we know it or not.”
D.M. Pulley (a pen-name), author of four novels, including “The Dead Key”
A Challenge to Make a Connection
Cecile has a business trip to Los Angeles to thank for her literary career. After touring the Tolerance Museum and the California African American Museum in quick succession, the strong parallels between the two facilities inspired her to weave fictitious tales from each place into a single story.
Thus – after three years of research, writing, and editing – was born “Eyes Like Mine,” a novel about the overlapping lives of a Jewish lawyer in Nazi Germany and a wealthy Black man in the Jim Crow South. “That was probably the hardest thing,” Cecile surmises, “figuring out how to bring [those characters] together.”
But the effort was worthwhile. Not only has the book done well for a self-published first novel, a giant metal edition of it now graces the Reader’s Garden at the Shaker Main Library. “I’m really, really proud of that,” Cecile says.
Success has greeted the efforts of Chu and Pulley as well. Pulley has sold more than 800,000 copies of her four books and recently landed a contract with a new publisher that will result in two more. Chu, meanwhile, said she has been in a promotional “whirlwind” since her book’s independent release in May, doing media interviews and speaking regularly at book clubs and cultural groups.
“There seems to be critical mass in terms of local interest,” Chu says. “It’s giving me a lot of validation that I made the right choice.”
The Shaker Heights Affect
One indisputably correct choice all three writers made was to live in Shaker Heights. One way or another, the city played a crucial role in each of their personal stories, shaping them as people and authors.
Never mind that judges are always writing. For Cecile, the experience that pushed her to become an author was the Advanced Placement English course she took at Shaker Heights High School.
She’d always been a good student. She and her family were avid readers.
“Buildings are filled with stories, tragedies, and secrets,” Pulley says.
“We always had a book in our hands,” she says. Her grandfather, James Farley Ragland, was a prolific and respected poet. But that English course, with its steady demand for essays? That’s what steeled her literary resolve.
“It was a rude awakening for me,” Cecile says. “I refused to drop down. I had something to prove. That’s how I learned to do real writing. Shaker figures out how to bring the greatness out of you.”
Chu flipped that equation around. By setting part of “Mathey Girls” in a westside Cleveland suburb, she indirectly draws the greatness out of her current hometown. This dichotomy wouldn’t have been possible just anywhere. In the westside district where Chu grew up, Asian-American students were in the distinct minority, Chu says. That felt like a natural and credible backdrop within a story about Asian-Americans struggling in the wake of calamity.
For Chu, too, it also underscored what she loves about Shaker Heights, by contrast. As the setting for her home, if not her book, “We chose Shaker because we valued the diversity,” Chu says. “We believe strongly in the community ethos of ‘Let’s value all people.’”
Pulley draws on Shaker even more directly. Her most recent book, “No One’s Home,” takes place in a fictitious mansion on Lee Road and references, among other things familiar to locals, sites associated with the North Union Shaker Community.
In other books, Pulley drew inspiration from real events in Shaker and Greater Cleveland, irresistibly drawn, after a lifetime of reading Stephen King, to murders and misdeeds. “I’m very interested in the darker side of things,” Pulley says. “I like to delve into true crime. It’s stranger than fiction.”
Fiction, though, is Pulley’s realm, and it’s where she and her Shaker colleagues plan to abide for the foreseeable future.
What’s Next?
Pulley herself has two books in the pipeline. The first, “Stone Mad,” inspired by her work investigating insurance claims, is due for release next October. One year after that will come a Gothic thriller tentatively titled, “She Lived Alone.”
Chu is also well on her way. Her next novel will again be set in a fictional Cleveland suburb, this one more closely resembling Shaker Heights. This time, too, the story – about an Asian family reunion – will be funny, not sad. “Things are definitely growing and building,”
Chu says. “It’s all very exciting.”
Cecile’s next work, by contrast, remains theoretical. She, though, has two things many authors staring at blank screens do not: an idea and a plan. She knows the book will be a legal thriller, based on her work as a judge, and that she’ll begin writing soon.
“In 2026, that’s my goal: to start,” Cecile says. “I’ve been filling all these niches. Now I need to write my blockbuster.”
