Author of Un-Valentine Book Does Have Heart
By Laurie Williams Sowby

Sam Beeson really does like Valentine’s Day, although from his latest story in verse, you’d think otherwise.

The Un-Valentine, a small hardback book (Shadow Mountain, $12.95), is a whimsical tale about a very practical girl named Lily who finds Valentine’s Day and its attendant sentiments a waste of time — until she gets a crumpled-up note from a boy who feels the same way.

Check out the meter and rhyme:

Yes, Lily was a cloaked and brooding cynical inferno,
And frantically she scratched her hot misgivings in her journal.

Artist Jesse Draper created the lovely oil paintings from which the illustrations are taken. Each page appears like an old-fashioned Valentine, kind of an ironic backdrop to Lily’s sentiments about the holiday. There are even tear-out un-Valentine cards at the end of the book for the less romantically inclined who don’t care to send the very best.

But it’s all in jest. Beeson and his family really consider Valentine’s Day a big deal. For a week before, Beeson, his wife Sarah, and five children, 3-14, write kind sentiments to each other and stuff them in a decorated box. Come Valentine’s Day, they spend a quiet evening sharing the notes together.

Beeson, a BYU grad in English who also earned a master’s degree in education administration, has taught creative writing, English, and Shakespeare at American Fork High School since 1997. He tries to write something every day, and usually it’s verse, "because I can do that."

He originally wrote the un-Valentine story three years ago as an assignment for a writing club — with a deadline. He has published two earlier stories in verse, 2003's "Kissing Kringle," which he says he’d like to rewrite now that he’s had more experience, and "Santa’s First Flight," published by Covenant in hardcover last year.

Writing is not something Beeson has done all his life. He only took it up after he married shortly after returning home from a mission to Scotland in 1992. He’s tried to write prose but finds verse comes more easily for him: "I like to picture people picking up the book and reading it" — undoubtedly, with a smile on their faces. Therefore, "I’ll probably never write something serious," he says, although he reads serious books.

Right now, he admits to an unfinished stack of books on his bedside table, but is devouring Rough Stone Rolling, Richard Bushman’s biography of Joseph Smith. As a creative writing teacher, he enjoys reading short stories, especially in the science fiction and mystery genres.

In his spare time, he’s a drummer with a band in his ward called A Fistful of Dudes and works on a game he created, called Grammar Punk, which has recently morphed into a board game called Twelve Tall Tales. And there are at least two more stories — another Christmas book and The Queen of Halloween — waiting to be written.

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Laurie Williams Sowby has been writing since grade school, and getting paid for it the past 30 years, with articles in LDS Church magazines, Exponent II, This People, Good Housekeeping, and Redbook, as well as the Deseret News , Provo Daily Herald and Utah County Journal . She is a graduate of BYU, taught writing at Utah Valley State College for 12 years, and has traveled to all 50 states and more than 35 countries (so far).  She and her husband, Steve, recently returned from serving as fulltime missionaries in the Chile Santiago West Mission. They live in American Fork, Utah. Their youngest son, Rob, has returned from serving in the Germany Berlin Mission. The older four children are married and have provided more than fifteen grandchildren.