  | A mechanical engineer and an English professor team up to become romance writer May McGoldrick and adventure writer Jan Coffey. | ||||||||||||
Love RewardedBy Jennifer Sherwood ’89 It’s tempting to use a lot of adjectives when writing about Jim and Nikoo McGoldrick: charming, beautiful, witty, passionate and, of course, Romantic with a capital R. All of these words fit. But how do you describe a couple who have truly written the book on romance? Actually, to be accurate, they have written 16 books. The McGoldricks, both graduates of the University of Rhode Island, are collaborative authors who write under a variety of pseudonyms. As May McGoldrick, they have co-authored 11 historical romance novels published by Penguin Books; the latest, The Rebel, will be released in July. As Jan Coffey, their first contemporary suspense thriller, Trust Me Once, was published in July 2001 by MIRA and the second, Twice Burned, will be out this July. Under their own names, they are the authors of Marriage of Minds: Collaborative Fiction Writing, a nonfiction work published by Heinemann in June 2000. In addition, they were recently asked to write a novel for young adolescents, and as a result Harper Collins will release May McGoldrick’s Tess and the Highlander this summer. In an age of two career couples and latch key kids, the McGoldricks are something of an anomaly. Happily married for 22 years, they live, work, and raise their two sons together. They have built an extremely successful writing career that allows them to focus on their relationship and family while doing what they love to do-telling stories that whisk the reader away to a place of adventure, temptation, and love rewarded. “Our feeling was that in life there are so many things that pull you apart as a couple. I mean that’s just the way it is—our lives kind of pull us in different directions.” said Jim. “We made the decision early on that we wanted to do things together. And that was going to be the core of our marriage. We were married eight years before we had kids, and we had a blast. And, when we decided that we wanted to have kids, that was also a blast.” Just like the plot of a good romance novel, their success story truly is the product of passion, courage, perseverance, and a lot of hard work. Nikoo moved to the United States from Iran when she was just 17, and because of the revolution, she has never been back. She met and married Jim, a native of Meriden, Conn., during her freshman year at the University of Connecticut. She transferred to URI in her sophomore year and pursued a degree in mechanical engineering, one of only three women in her class. Nikoo and Jim chuckle as they recall the first years of their marriage. Nikoo was attending school full-time and working the equivalent of a full-time job as a researcher at the University of Connecticut, and together they were renovating a 100-year-old house in Westerly, R.I. “Sometimes we were paying the rent with green stamps,” laughed Nikoo. Despite all of those pressures, Nikoo couldn’t resist her passion for writing and would always make time to take some English courses. In her senior year, she signed up for a graduate-level English class with legendary English Professor Warren Smith. “He taught Shakespeare and was a very funny man” she reminisced. “He took one look at me sitting in his class and yelled ‘what is an engineering student doing in my class!?’ He was giving me a hard time because I was graduating, and he thought I should be taking an easy elective so that I wouldn’t bring down my grade point average. I told him that this was where I wanted to be.” She aced his class. After Nikoo graduated in 1984, the McGoldricks concentrated on building practical careers. Jim became the manager of a shipyard, and Nikoo advanced steadily in the primarily male profession of engineering. However, their priorities shifted after their eldest son Cyrus was born. “We were both working at General Dynamics. We had very good jobs, a beautiful house in Newport, and we were taking trips to St. Martin every year,” related Jim. “When Cyrus was born, we had it all planned out with day care etc. But suddenly, we looked at this baby and said ‘why are we doing this? Why do we need this?’” added Nikoo. Jim had always wanted to go back to school to pursue an advanced degree in English. In a gesture that defines the synergy of their relationship, Nikoo suggested that this was the time for Jim to follow his dream. He could care for the baby during the day while she was at work and then she would take over at night while Jim concentrated on school. The McGoldricks moved to Pennsylvania where Jim had landed a position as an associate professor of English at DeSales University. Nikoo continued to build her career as an engineering manager. Then, after 13 years of marriage, the McGoldricks reassessed their life once again and fearlessly embarked on a new chapter. In the introduction of their book Marriage of Minds the McGoldrick’s describe the winter that led them to their career as collaborative writers. After being stranded for several days at home by ice storms and still recovering from the shock of their infant son’s heart surgery, they sat down together to write a short story for a fiction contest advertised in a writer’s magazine. They haven’t stopped writing since. And, of course, they’re living happily ever after. Jennifer Griffin Sherwood ’89 is the director of development and marketing for Young Audiences/New York. She holds a B.A. in Music from URI and an M.M. in Piano from the University of Texas at Austin. |
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