Social work alum's career inspired novel about family connections
Arizona State University alumna Shayla Dugan is the author of the novel "Learning to Swim" (Egret Lake Books, 2024). Courtesy photo
Shayla Dugan says 2015 was “the year of suck.”
“And I left my job in 2014,” she said, emphasizing how tough 2015 was in comparison.
The year started with her husband’s neck surgery. Later, her father suffered cardiac arrest. Dugan stepped up and took care of them both. Helping her father meant a four-hour round trip in the car between her Valley home and his in Camp Verde, Arizona.
Then, in 2020, her grandson started having seizures, needing attention from her as well. And after surviving bouts with colon and bladder cancer, her father succumbed to heart failure in 2022.
Dugan, who received both bachelor's and master's degrees in social work from Arizona State University, said the tribulations of 2015 and the years that followed formed an early basis for her novel, published earlier this year.
“Learning to Swim” (Egret Lake Books) is not just a story about being in the sandwich generation. “It’s about being in the club sandwich generation,” she said, as in three pieces of bread instead of two.
Dugan said her ASU social work education, followed by many years working in hospice and palliative care, prioritized life choices for her and set the stage for the novel.
“People come to the end of life and want to settle their balances. They want to find long lost children or friends, want to fix things — in some cases fix a lifetime of hurt — in a period of months or less. There is laughter and sadness in the structure of death and dying,” Dugan said.
Learning more about relationships through social work
“I would not have had the ability to relate to that kind of stuff in my writing if I hadn’t had the exposure (through social work) to family dynamics, beliefs, cultures, religions,” she said. “You learn a lot from the macro level, too, working with entities, how to maneuver through the red tape. It helps you be more well-spoken. You learn to work around different types of environments.”
Dugan was born and raised in Phoenix, where she attended Moon Valley High School. She married at 19, and was 21 when the first of her three children was born.
Dugan attended several local colleges — “I went on the community college tour, and probably went to every one in the north and west sides of the Valley” — and won second place in a poetry contest at one of them. At first, she thought she’d pursue a writing career.
One day, she watched a broadcast story about an infant who was violently killed by his father. Dugan said she was moved by the boy’s suffering. The incident played a big role in changing her career focus.
“I felt no child should live like that,” she said.
Experiencing grief and loss
Not long afterward, Dugan took her first social work class at Glendale Community College, followed by volunteer work with Parents Anonymous and Westmarc. She decided to enter the profession, enrolling at ASU’s West Valley campus.
Cacciatore, who had lost an infant daughter in 1994, today is a full professor who primarily researches grief and loss issues. Partly inspired by Cacciatore, Dugan switched her emphasis to serving people who are grieving or facing terminal illness. She worked in hospice care, and for a few years was a palliative care director.
Eventually, she left social work.
“I decided to do what I started out to do: writing,” she said. A few years ago, she started putting some things down on a flash drive, occasionally taking it out of a drawer and revising what was on it.
It was the beginning of what became “Learning to Swim.” In it, a woman named Gabrielle Malone and her teenage daughter, Juniper, move in with Gabrielle’s ailing mother, Ida. Ida is a former Olympic swimmer who just survived a health scare and learns that her granddaughter, her legacy, never learned to swim. So Ida resolves to teach her.
Dad said it’s never too late
“When Dad passed away, I thought I’d be brave and submit this book (to a publisher),” she said. One asked her to send the first three chapters. She did, but didn’t hear back for a month and thought that was the end of that.
“Then I get an email from her asking for the full manuscript. Another month went by. Nothing. Then I got another email saying, ‘I’d like to work with you!’”
Today, the grandmother of five said she knows more about herself than she did when she started writing the book.
“I know that I can do it and reach my goals no matter what age," Dugan said. "A lot of that was the influence of my dad. He said, 'You’re going to be that old anyway someday, so you might as well get something accomplished.'”
He was right, she said. It’s not too late. Dugan now has a second novel in rewrite, and has also begun a third.
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