Jacqueline Sheehan, from Volume 3:1

Jacqueline Sheehan, Ph.D., is a fiction writer and essayist. She is also a psychologist. She is a New Englander through and through, but spent twenty years living in the western states of Oregon, California, and New Mexico doing a variety of things, including house painting, freelance photography, newspaper writing, clerking in a health food store, and directing a traveling troupe of high school puppeteers.

Her first novel, Truth, was published in 2003 by Free Press of Simon and Schuster. Her second novel, Lost & Found, was published in 2007 by Avon, Harper Collins. Lost & Found has been on the New York Times Bestseller List and has been optioned for film by Katherine Heigl, star of Grey's Anatomy.

In Volume 3:1, Sheehan contributed an excerpt from Lost & Found that concerns a woman named Tess who has, of all things, synesthesia. Below is an excerpt:

Tess did not regret for one minute the uniqueness of synesthesia, only that it took her so long to know its name and that she was not alone, that there were others. There were a few kindred spirits out in the world who were touched by the cross firing of senses, touched by the same tweak in genetics as Tess, and finding them had changed her life. As a child, she was driven to silence when she discovered that none of the other children saw numbers as colors. She would say, “The answer is number four, right next to the red three.” The second grade teacher tilted her head as if to hear her better and squinted her eyes trying to see her better. “No, Tess. We’re only doing the numbers now, not the colors.” In one horrible moment, built up from a few months of clues, Tess understood that her teacher and her classmates lived in a monochrome world where numbers were only black lines, sad lonely things. Piano notes did not brush against their cheeks and smell like cinnamon, and most odd of all, when they fell and scraped their knees, they did not shout, “It’s too orange, now red!” They cried of course, as she did but they could not see the pulse of the pain in great orange splats with a deep red core.

1913 painting by Wassily Kandinsky

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Open up Synesthesia Literary Journal Volume 3:1 to read Sheehan's entire excerpt!