FROM PERRYVILLE TO `MAUD'S HOUSE'

Most people have started projects that now sit lifelessly in a desk drawer or in the basement. Sherry Roberts knows the feeling. She took 10 years to finish her first novel, "Maud's House," published last May by California-based Papier-Mache Press.

The book is set in a small town, Round Corners, Vt., where the residents all have artistic impulses but have misplaced their creativity -- much the same condition Roberts herself struggled with over those 10 years.

She grew up in a small town -- Perryville, where her parents, Faye and James Gibbar, still live. She was visiting last week from Greensboro, N.C., where she now lives with her husband, Tony, and their two children.

Completing the book taught Roberts an important and simple lesson: That she could finish a project of such magnitude.

"You have to learn that in everything," she says.

"I love tennis, but it took me a long time to find out how to finish off a point..."

For Roberts, a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism who was a reporter for the Springfield Daily News and the Burlington (Vt.) Free Press, the problem was with switching to fiction.

Her topical guest columns appear frequently in USA Today, but writing fiction is different, she says. "In fiction you have to be able to open up your veins and put yourself on the page."

Roberts' book, "Maud's House," is about art and love and the longing for community. The inspiration was reading about a Nova Scotia painter who was arthritic and so impoverished she could only afford to paint on the walls of her house.

"I wondered, What is it about the human spirit that can't stop creating?" Roberts said.

Maud is a prodigy whose father loves her so much he lets her paint on anything she wants to. Her wall paintings transform the family house into the town's primary tourist attraction. Art professors come from Harvard, tourists from Berkeley, Calif., and Perryville, Mo.

But Maud quits creating, about the time she marries a man who wants to whitewash her house. The whole community's artistic impulses -- the minister plays the saxophone, the sheriff builds birdhouses -- seem to get untracked.

Roberts drew from her childhood in Perryville in describing Round Corners, population 500, where the life of the community revolves around a restaurant.

In high school she worked at Perryville's Intersection restaurant which, she says, "still has the best cheeseburgers in the area."

It's true what they say about small towns, Roberts says: "People always know all your business."

Her novel was the first published by Papier-Mache, a California company previously known for anthologies, including the best-selling "When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple."

The turning point in completing it came two years ago when a friend invited Roberts to join a writers' group. She had quit journalism to get away from daily deadlines, but rewrite deadlines imposed by the writers' group forced her to finish the novel, she says.

"I don't think the book would have been published without the group."

Support and critiques from writers whose work she respects also made a difference for her.

"Writing is a very tunnel vision project," she says. "You think you've set up the motivation and developed the characters, but these people will see it right away."

Roberts' book turns the age-old question, What is Art?, inside out and asks, What isn't?

"Not all art is seen on museum walls. There's an artist within each of us," she says. "If we broaden our definition of art we will have more respect for it."

Art is "anything that makes us bigger than we were before we did it, that makes us more creative people," she says.

Roberts argues that a person who creates a business or a community organization is an artist, as is the person who plants and nurtures a garden.

"Recognizing that makes it more acceptable to pursue art," she says.

When Roberts and her husband, also a journalist, tired of the newspaper business, they created a desktop publishing business of their own that specializes in support services for book publishers.

Now she spends one day of the workweek writing fiction.

Overcoming her writer's block taught Roberts much about writing and herself.

Originally she planned the book as a mystery about a town whose creativity is stolen but discovered "I'm not devious enough to write mysteries."

She also discovered that blocks tend to be self-imposed.

"All the books I'm going to write are already inside me," Roberts said. "I just have to find a way to get them out."