01:00 AM EDT on Thursday, June 24, 2004

By KATIE WARCHUT
Journal Staff Writer

GLOCESTER -- Each day on her way to work, Kimberly Newton Fusco would pass a graveyard, row after row of cold granite marking the resting places of loved ones.

On one side of the lawn stood huge angels and statues. At the other, there are only faux flowers and plastic crosses.

"What is it about our world that some people get huge gravestones and others get these plastic things?" she wondered.

Suddenly amid the graves, Fusco envisioned a girl. The girl was skinny, with short black hair and a black Salvation Army dress. She became the beginning of Fusco's first book, Tending to Grace.

As a former journalist, the author, who now lives in Foster, spent a year with seventh graders she called "on the bottom track." The experience helped inspire the book's main character, Cornelia. But she also drew from her own experience when she created Cornelia's main obstacle -- a stuttering problem.

Fusco, quiet-spoken in front of a group of Ponaganset High School students earlier this month, talked about her speech impediment.

"It was pretty strong when I was a kid," she said. "It still comes back when I'm very nervous."

In the book geared toward middle school students, Cornelia's mother heads out West with her boyfriend, leaving Cornelia in the hands of her great aunt Agatha, whom she has never met. Agatha introduces Cornelia to life in a rural town similar to Foster.

The girl is smart and a voracious reader, but she tries to become invisible at school to avoid speaking and revealing her stuttering problem.

Cornelia defines people who are "look-aways," meaning they avoid her eyes as she attempts to complete a sentence. She both misses and resents her mother, and she struggles to get along with quirky and hardheaded Agatha.

She quoted one of her favorite authors, Toni Morrison, who said the best books have simple stories but complicated characters.

Her chapters are short because anyone who is afraid of talking would never speak in long chapters, she said. A lot of chapters started as poems.

"I write a poem to get deep into the character," Fusco said. "There's something about poetry that brings out feelings."

The names of characters are old-fashioned, such as Cornelia and Agatha, and seem to fit the rural setting.

"Mostly, I want people to remember my book and remember who my characters are," she said.

Fusco studied creative writing in college and went on to graduate school in journalism at Columbia University. She was a stringer for The Providence Journal and an intern for the Boston Globe, before taking a job at the Worcester Telegram and Gazette.

"Journalism allows you to go into these worlds you wouldn't see otherwise," she said.

At the same time, she hated being assigned stories, and the rules of journalism tied her down. If her book had been a newspaper article, she would have had to research the science behind speech impediments, and the controversy of finding a cure, Fusco said.

"Writing fiction is freeing and empowering," she said. "All I had to do is write what it feels like."

Who here likes to write? she asked the freshmen and sophomore honors-students. More than two-thirds raised their hands.

"You need to read really good stuff, sometimes more than once," she said. She read Morrison's Beloved at least eight times.

She said not to be discouraged by their first efforts that may not be perfect.

"You have to have really crappy first drafts," Fusco said. "The gold comes out of the first draft. I believe that anybody can write if you write from your heart."