Dear James
By Jon Hassler

600 Pages • $13.95

Dear James
By Jon Hassler

About the Author  •  Links about the Author

Jon Hassler’s novel Dear James is a tender and touching story about ordinary Catholics living in the small Minnesota town of Staggerford, which has some of the same charm as Jan Karon’s Mitford. The novel’s small-town setting seems comfortable, and its residents are warmly familiar. But as is often the case with such small towns, an intricate drama exists just beneath the surface. Dear James is a spiritually complex story about malice and forgiveness, debility and old age, and the possibility of second chances.

The story centers on Agatha McGee, a starchy but beloved spinster teacher at Staggerford’s Catholic school, and Father James O’Hannon, an aging priest in Ireland whom Agatha got to know through correspondence. Once friends, the two no longer speak, because James did something so offensive that Agatha cut off all contact with him. (Hassler tells that story in his novel A Green Journey.) 

Both Agatha and James suffer personal setbacks in the first part of Dear James.Agatha’s lifelong teaching career suddenly ends when her school unexpectedly closes. James retires and falls into a spiritual ditch. In Staggerford, Agatha is the victim of an act of small-town animosity that seriously damages her reputation. In Ireland, James falls ill and gropes for a new direction in life. But out of their turmoil and newfound vulnerability arrives a mutual desire to revisit their friendship.

Together, Agatha and James find new purpose and direction. They do so by reconnecting through letters and facing up to their own failures. Agatha forgives James and the Staggerford busybody who lied about her; James forgives the British, who killed his father. By relinquishing their pride, they learn to listen to others.

Much of the healing in the story takes place in sacred settings. Agatha and James decide to escape their familiar surroundings and set out to explore Europe together, reconciling while on pilgrimage to Rome and deepening their relationship in Assisi. James finds new direction for his priesthood with the help of none other than Pope John Paul II, who whispers a private message to James in the middle of a papal audience.

In following Agatha and James’s recovery of their friendship, and each one’s renewal of faith, Dear James demonstrates the moral power of fiction. As James puts it, “Stories can move people, Agatha. I learned that in the pulpit. You can preach till the cows come home and not awaken a single soul, but the right story, well told, goes straight to the heart.”

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About the Author

Jon Hassler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1933. His father, a grocer, moved the family north to the small town of Staples, in the center of the state, when Jon was a baby. In his teens, the family moved once more, to Plainview, southeast of Minneapolis.

Hassler graduated from Saint John’s University, a Catholic school associated with the Benedictine order, in Collegeville, Minnesota, in 1955, with a BA in English. During his years teaching English in high schools, Hassler also attended graduate school at the University of North Dakota, receiving a master’s in English in 1960.

In 1965, Hassler moved to teaching at the college level, first at Bemidji State College, then at Brainerd Community College, and finally at Saint John’s, where he taught and served as writer in residence from 1980 until he retired from the university in 1997.

It was during his time at Brainerd that Hassler first began writing. As he recounts it in My Staggerford Journal, “I, upon waking one morning in September 1970, . . . [heard] a voice in my head saying, half your life is over, Hassler, you’d better get started. Obediently, therefore, after teaching my 8:00 a.m. class that day . . . I went to the campus library with a pen and notebook and began to write ‘A Story Worth Hearing.’” Hassler published several short stories before his first novel, Staggerford, was published in 1977.

Jon Hassler has written many novels in the years since then, including The Love Hunter (1981), A Green Journey (1985), Grand Opening (1987), Dear James (1993), The Dean’s List (1997), and The New Woman (2005). His memoir of real and fictional people who have influenced him, Good People . . . From an Author’s Life, was published by Loyola Press in 2001. Several of his novels have been adapted for stage and television. The Jon Hassler Theater in Plainview, Minnesota, is a highly regarded regional theater that has produced adaptations of many of Hassler’s works.

Novelist Richard Russo wrote that Hassler is “a writer good enough to restore your faith in fiction.” Hassler splits his time between Minnesota and Florida. He is married to Gretchen Kresl Hassler and has three children.

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Links for Jon Hassler

Jon Hassler’s Web site

“The Wit, Wisdom and Wonder of Writer Jon Hassler,”
by Anne M. Cormier

“Hope on Ice: The Felicitous Fiction of Jon Hassler,”
by Charlotte Hays

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