Deborah E. Baker

Work Samples

Excerpt from Work

According to the inscription in the foyer, the Baltimore Museum of Art was one of the first in the country to obtain a collection of African art. The masks and headdresses are impressive, both in size and color, but I am all about the ceremonial weapons and the notion that weapons can be used to show power and status instead of just for combat. But by far, I am most blown away by the staggering collection of art amassed by Etta and Claribel Cone of Baltimore.

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About the Artist

Written by Gail Obenreder

Deborah Baker grew up in the beautiful colonial town of Oxford, Maryland, where one of her earliest memories was the sound of the river lapping the shore. She feels that writing was a profession that “chose me, because at 3 years old I began to hide in the lower kitchen cabinets … with a stack of books to ‘read.’” Those kitchen cabinets housed writers like Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Louisa May Alcott, and Anna Sewell, along with Carolyn Keene, author of the Nancy Drew mystery series, one of her all-time favorites.

Baker has now come full circle; she received her Division Fellowship on the strength of an excerpt from her young adult novel DNA: Destiny Needs Assistance, the first in a series of “reimagined Nancy Drew-like mysteries” that will feature a similarly gifted young detective heroine. She finds that writing for young adults is “particularly challenging and rewarding, as the vernacular changes so rapidly,” and she works diligently to “create an authentic window into [that] target audience.”

Her professional career in education afforded Baker a natural path toward writing for a YA audience – she taught high school language and linguistics for over thirty years. Though as a youngster she yearned to be a journalist, she decided on a teaching degree, realizing that “one day I must earn a living.” During her decades as a full-time educator, Baker dreamed of a day when she could devote all her time to writing. “Ecclesiastes 3:1 gave me the patience to know when the time would be right to devote myself to my craft, [and] my season is right now.”

Still an avid reader, she’s a fan of the great Irish writers like Colm Tóibín and Seamus Heaney, as well as Laura Spencer-Ash, “whose prose can make you forget to eat or sleep.” But now that she’s writing full-time, Baker often finds herself challenged by the many “neglected passions [that] pop up and taunt me.” She’s creating new habits of discipline and prioritizing her time so that “I may have ‘Ikigai,’ a reason to get up in the morning.”

Baker finds yoga important both as a physical activity and as “a centering practice” for her writing. It’s a discipline and a place in which she’s able to access the state of consciousness called “flow, where I lose sense of both time and place,” surprised at what she discovers and can harness for her work. She’s also a dog lover, having “been owned” by seven golden retrievers, and she considers herself a “rabid Francophile, from the cuisine to the culture.”

Enormously grateful to the Division, Baker was “actually shocked to receive the grant,” and the Award has been transformational in restoring both her motivation and her confidence. The Fellowship “came at a time when I was certain that I had missed my chance.” She plans to travel, take classes, and attend the workshops that will help her to finish the mystery series.

Having spent thirty years “learning and teaching the joys of languages and linguistics” Baker looks forward during her next thirty years “to expressing those joys through my own writing, [finding] inspiration in nature, psychology, and the absurdities of life.”