Ann Bancroft logs into Zoom. One by one, names and faces pop up on the screen, smiles extending across all the squares as hellos are exchanged.
Bancroft leads a writing group on Thursday mornings.
Established in Coronado, her group now has members as far as Sacramento, Michigan and New York after the pandemic moved them online.
She is 70 now, and her writing group is just the tip of her writing career iceberg.
Writing for a half century
Bancroft has been writing for the last 50 years since college, the first 30 years focusing on newspaper reporting.
She studied journalism at University of California, Berkeley before moving to write at several newspapers including the San Francisco Chronicle and at United Press International after graduating.
She then reported for the Associated Press for the next decade before working for state officials, writing speeches.
But Bancroft’s life took a turn when she was diagnosed with breast cancer at 55, and when it returned 13 years later.
A new writing career
She retired and wanted to try her hand at fiction writing.
“I didn’t have to retire because I had cancer, but it made me want to go do other stuff,” she said.
And Bancroft wrote her first fiction book, winning the 2018 Unpublished Novel Award from the San Diego Book Awards Association.
The novel, which changed its title to Almost Family, follows three women who meet in a support group for cancer patients but ultimately leave the group together to explore the meaning of friendship.
Interwoven in the fabric of her fiction are real emotions and nonfictional lessons she learned while living with cancer.
“Sometimes people just disappear because they don’t know how to deal with it,” Bancroft recalls, but she feels fortunate to have had a strong support system while going through radiation and chemotherapy.
One of the other things Bancroft realized was how people treated those with cancer.
“Just because you’re dying doesn’t mean you’re an angel.”
-Author Ann Bancroft.
“You have a terminal illness and they confer sainthood on [you]…You still have all your flaws,” Bancroft said wryly, referring to the characters in her book. “Just because you’re dying doesn’t mean you’re an angel.”
Almost Family is set to be released in the next year.
Second novel draws from childhood
Bancroft’s second fiction novel also whispers thoughts from her nonfictional mind.
Her life growing up very much resembled her career as a journalist, experiencing different environments and never staying in one place for too long.
Born in Germany with a parent in the Army, Bancroft was constantly moving around, never really knowing what to call home, she said.
“My mother was very good at presenting our moves as adventures.”
-Bancroft growing up as an Army kid.
“My mother was very good at presenting our moves as adventures,” Bancroft says. “But I have thought a lot about what it means to not have a home.”
Her second book, Home for Brats, draws from her childhood as an Army kid.
Still in the rough start of a first draft, Bancroft has lived her book, attending nine different schools in 11 years.
But finally, now at the age of 70, she now considers her home split between Northern California and Coronado.
“I would finish a chemo session and go straight to the airport…and go to Coronado and just, you know, sleep by the waves,” Bancroft said. “It’s so healing.”
