Shaffer Receives SELA Outstanding Southeastern Writer Award for “Moon Over Sasova”

Dr. Chris Shaffer, Dean of Library Services at the University of Troy, received the Southeastern Library Association’s Outstanding Southeastern Author Award in the non-fiction category for his book “Moon Over Sasova: One American’s Experience Teaching in Post-Cold War Slovakia”.

This year’s award was presented at the Joint Mississippi Library Association and Southeastern Library Association conference in Meridian, Mississippi on October 12.

Presented twice a year, the award honors a native or resident of a state within the Southeastern Library Association’s 11-state footprint for a published work of fiction or nonfiction of outstanding literary merit. . The first prize was awarded in 1978 to Pulitzer Prize-winning Mississippian Eudora Welty. John Grisham, Charles Frazier, Sena Jeter Naslaund, Sue Monk Kidd, Pat Conroy, Rick Bragg, and Jimmy Carter, among others, are among other previous Outstanding Southeastern Author Award winners in the fiction and non-fiction categories.

Shaffer said being included in the company of such notable past recipients is humbling.

“Absolute elation,” Shaffer said, explaining his reaction to being selected for the award. “But, I’m also not arrogant enough to think that I’m really a writer in their league, each with a canon of outstanding work. I had a compelling story to tell, and I thank the committee so much for deeming it worthy of such an award. However, I would need to write a lot more and be a lot more successful before I could really consider myself an author in their league.

“Moon Over Sasova” documents Shaffer’s time teaching English and traveling in post-communist Europe in the 1990s. Shaffer arrived in Slovakia in 1993, two weeks after Velvet’s divorce, which peacefully separated Czechoslovakia, resulting in the creation of an independent Slovak state.

“Since 1993 I wanted to write a book about my time in Slovakia,” Shaffer said. “It took me 28 years after the experience to write the book, but I found the title my last night in Slovakia.”

In addition to his own writings and recollections of the experience, Shaffer used letters he wrote to family and friends during his trip as a valuable resource for the book.

“I had the letters I wrote to my grandmother and some I sent to my parents,” he said. “I also regularly wrote letters to one of my best friends. He died four years ago and his brother found the letters while rummaging around his house and sent them to me. It was good to have those memories and to be able to include them in the book.

Shaffer likened the book’s writing process to the old adage, “How do you eat and elephant?” One bite at a time.

“There’s something to be said for getting a PhD because it teaches you a lot about the writing process,” he said. “I understood how to do it. I set myself the goal of writing two hours a day with the goal of writing 5,000 words a week. I discovered that doing this was not difficult. I was having fun and reliving these wonderful experiences.

Shaffer said he frequently got the question most newbie authors get – “When are you going to write your next book.”

“I’m starting to toy with the idea (of writing a second book),” he said. “Three years after this first experience in Slovakia, I made the trip again. I have a working title, so we’ll see.