Meet Peggy Williams

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Peggy Williams a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Peggy, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?

I never thought of myself as having resilience or even needing it. Resilience is something people develop when enduring hardship or tragedy. I’ve had a blessed life. My parents had resilience in spades, both having lived through the Great Depression. During WWII my dad became a bombardier in the Army Airforce. His plane was shot down on his 33rd mission. He was captured and spent the last year of the war in a German POW camp. My mom bore five children and worked with my dad in their struggling small family business. Yep, resilience. The kind that enabled them to provide my siblings and me with a fairly idyllic childhood.
There was one glitch, however. When I was a toddler—the year before the vaccine was made available to our small town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula—I contracted polio. I was so young, I have no memory of it; but my mother told me that when I recovered from the virus, I had to relearn how to walk. Still, I was one of the lucky ones who survived the disease with minimal damage—or so I thought. No one back then knew that having even a mild brush with polio could result in continuing degeneration of nerves and muscles that later in life would make walking nearly impossible.
I was a clumsy child because of the polio. At the doctor’s recommendation, my parents scraped up enough money to enroll me in ballet and tap-dancing lessons for a couple of years. My legs wouldn’t exactly do what the other kids’ legs were doing, but I loved dancing anyway.
From a young age, all of us siblings worked in my dad’s warehouse, unloading boxes, shelving products, waiting on customers, helping Dad on the truck when he ran the route to deliver candy and chips to area stores and restaurants. It wasn’t drudgery, it was what family did—at least what our family did.
An active kid, I loved roller skating, biking, playing anything with a net—tennis, badminton, volleyball. And going for long walks. I also loved reading and I enjoyed writing. I was blessed with friends who liked to gather and make up stories that we wrote in our notebooks. In high school, I wrote for the school newspaper, and I won a state-wide essay contest, awarding me a small scholarship toward college.
In college I earned a teaching degree. Afterward, I taught kindergarten and first grade. I loved working with little kids. I especially loved taking my classes on field trips. After I married, I took some more dance lessons and jazzercize. And my husband and I took long walks.
I was in my early thirties the first time I fell. My right leg simply gave out. Then I fell again. My doctor couldn’t figure out what was happening; I seemed healthy in every other regard. It was my mom who came across the first news articles about something called post-polio syndrome. I shared those with my doctor. We learned about it together. I enrolled in a research study at the local university. What the doctors were learning was that people who survived polio as children were experiencing the overuse of the surviving muscles, and those muscles were aging faster than normal—they were degenerating. Most polio survivors ended up with the same level of disability they had when they first had the virus. I had lost my ability to walk, way back then.
Was it all the dancing and roller skating and biking, the volleyball and tennis that caused the hyper-aging of my leg muscles after having had polio? Likely. But would I have wanted a life without those activities? Absolutely not. I have always considered myself one of the lucky survivors. I’m not in a wheelchair. Not yet anyway.
Post-polio syndrome explained why in my forties, I fatigued so easily and had leg pain at night that kept me from sleeping. And why in my fifties, my daily walks with my husband grew shorter and shorter, going from around the neighborhood to struggling to make it around the block. The thing I learned, however, was that I had to keep walking to keep my leg muscles from atrophying and keep the pain at bay, but if I walked too much I risked damaging my muscles even faster.
In spring of 2011, I was in my classroom filled with boisterous first-graders when suddenly my legs refused to move. I managed to get to a doctor who said it was the next level of muscle degradation. I started physical therapy and began using a cane. Switching from the classroom to a support position allowed me to keep working at the school and to set my own pace in terms of mobility. I continued to walk as much as I could with the aid of the cane. When I took vacations, I walked too much
Through the years, to supplement my teaching income, I had been doing freelance work, writing educational and industrial video scripts for a local production company. I partnered with a fellow writer and began to write screenplays. And I teamed up with my sister-in-law and co-wrote two mystery novels which we self-published. My handy cane in hand, I accompanied her on research trips for the books.
More recently, I tackled writing historical fiction loosely based on my own French-Canadian ancestry. I can barely walk to the end of my driveway now, so most of my research has been via the internet. My first solo book, Courting the Sun: A Novel of Versailles was published by a small traditional press in 2024. The second, Braving the Dawn: A Novel of New France will come out in January 2026.
So yes. Resilience. I guess I do have it. Where does it come from? First, from my parents who made working in their small family business feel like a privilege. And maybe from all those ancestors who traveled over rough waters from Europe to Canada and the U.S., and who inspired my novels. And definitely, my resilience has been supported by my siblings, my husband, and my children and grandchildren, as well as by my circle of writing friends.
My closest friend and screenwriting partner, Christine DeSmet, chided me at one point after I turned down the opportunity to attend a popular writing conference, saying the venue was too large and I could never walk that much. She said there were people there in wheelchairs and on mobility scooters. This past summer, confronted with a family vacation where large amounts of walking would be necessary, I bought an electric scooter. If I couldn’t walk with my family, I would roll with them. And I am happy to say that this fall, not only did I go to a writing conference at an impossibly large venue, I drove my scooter into one of the workshop classrooms and co-taught the session with Christine.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

A retired elementary teacher, I have re-tuned my life to devote it to two passions: genealogy and fiction writing. I began working on genealogy shortly after I married but set it aside to raise our family and teach elementary school. I picked it up again after I retired and have enjoyed amazing journeys along my and my husband’s family trees. I discovered I really enjoy research.
That fit in well with changing course on the writing I had been doing. Prior to my retirement, all my professional writing was collaborative—working with a local production company writing video scripts, co-writing screenplays and mystery novels. However, when I delved into my family ancestry, I discovered I had a story that only I could tell, inspired by my 7th- and 8th-great-grandmothers, a number of whom emigrated from France to Canada in the late 1600s through a program sponsored by King Louis XIV that today is referred to as les Filles du Roi—the Daughters of the King.
That drive to write a book inspired by their unique experiences turned into two books: Courting the Sun: A Novel of Versailles and Braving the Dawn: A Novel of New France, both of which were picked up by a small traditional publisher, Black Rose Writing. To capitalize on the research I did for those two books, I started writing a historical mystery set in the same era, in Paris, but with entirely different characters. I plan for it to be the first in a mystery series.
But for now, my focus is on promoting my historical fiction, Courting the Sun which was released in May 2024 and Braving the Dawn which will be released January 15, 2026.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

As I look back, I think my three key qualities that were most impactful on my journey toward self-fulfillment as a fiction writer are curiosity, social engagement, and persistence. Curiosity drove me to learn knew things, to take courses to develop skills like teaching and writing, and it fueled my love for genealogy and my love of research. Social engagement—whether family, friends, teaching cohorts, or my writing support and networking circle–supported my efforts every step of the way, introduced me to new avenues to pursue, and sustained me when the going was rough. And finally, persistence—some might call it the stubborn sister to resilience—was what got me to where I am today and where I will be tomorrow and every day thereafter. I was late in life to get my first co-written book published, my first co-written screenplay made into a movie, and even later to find my own solo path in writing and get my historical fiction published. It is never too late to switch paths and never too late to see your dream come true.

Okay, so before we go, is there anyone you’d like to shoutout for the role they’ve played in helping you develop the essential skills or overcome challenges along the way?

My husband, Mark, deserves the credit for being most influential in my journey to becoming a published author of books we are both incredibly proud of. Even as we were raising our family and both of us working, he made sure I had time and that our family’s needs were met and the kids cared for so I could go to writing workshops and conferences to learn my craft. He planned many of our vacations around my research needs. More recently as it has become more difficult for me to walk, he has taken on the majority of the housework, cooking, and grocery shopping. He has never stopped believing in me as a writer who would one day be published. And now that I am published, he chauffeurs me to all my book events, hauling my boxes of books and making sure I have everything I need. When we get there, he sets up everything, sits through talks he’s heard multiple times, and packs me up afterward. And he proudly talks about my books to anyone who will listen. I could not have achieved what I have without his loving support through all our years together.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://peggywilliamsauthor.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peggyjoque/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PeggyJoqueWilliamsAuthor/

Image Credits

Creative Imagery, Middleton, Wisconsin