Photos courtesy of Stephen Rusiniak

By Steve Sears

Stephen Rusiniak didn’t start out as a writer. In fact, he was a career police officer, and he often says that it he hadn’t been a cop, his career as a writer may not have been born.

“I was a detective,” Rusiniak explains. “I worked with kids, and I had to go around and give lots of different talks and presentations, and at one of them I threw in a lot of personal stories from my kids and growing up. All things that were relevant to what I was there for.”

To Rusiniak’s amazement, the presentation received applause, and he noticed among the attendees a mix of laughter and tears. “I started thinking about it, and I couldn’t get it out of my head. The power of words, and how the things I said evoked these emotions.”

Based on his speech, he wrote a short piece called “The Power of a Son’s Kiss,” which was about his son kissing him goodnight. He submitted it to some good news publications where it met rejection except for one spot, the Chicken Soup for the Soul series, which published the piece in their Chicken Soup for the Father & Son Soul offering, as did The Parent Paper for their Father’s Day edition. The two published pieces unveiled a different career opportunity for him. “That suddenly showed me that the kinds of things that I liked to write about, or started writing about my speeches, people liked it. So, I wrote another piece about my daughter, that was published, and that was the beginning of how it started.”

Thus far during his writing career, the Wayne resident has had over 100 pieces published in a variety of magazines and newspapers, as well as in Chicken Soup for the Soul and the Not Your Mother’s Book series. Also, he records his stories for the Our American Stories (www.ouramericanstories.com) radio series.

So he’s a writer, although he may have had a detractor after he’d had a popular military piece published. When speaking with someone about writing one day, Rusiniak happened to mention his perhaps unorthodox method of working on that one particular story. When told that his process was wrong, Rusiniak told the other individual that it worked. The response he received back further fired him up. “This person looked at me and said, ‘But you were just a cop.’ It was like I couldn’t string together a couple sentences because of my law enforcement background.” Rusiniak revealed his publishing credentials and, better still, took the conversation and that statement and, in his words, “wrote a little bit about my writing history, called it “But You Were Just a Cop,” and it got published in a Chicken Soup book.” 

Now Rusiniak and his wife are entering the realm of children’s books, and the star between those covers he and his wife, Karen, met in Maryland. He explains. “We were sitting on our deck, and there’s a pond behind our townhouse. We saw a goose, and it was hobbling around. You really could tell that its leg was mangled, and it would go over to a flock of geese that were there, and the flock wanted nothing to do with it.” The couple watched the goose for a couple of days, Rusiniak’s wheels turned, and he headed for the keyboard to start a story about Gary the goose. “One day a duck appeared with a couple little ducks, and they were the only ones that befriended him, and then after about a week they left, and then eventually the goose left. I started coming up with a little story, and I don’t know why I did, because I don’t do children’s books, and I don’t do fiction. I was sort of talking about it with my wife – she was a special education teacher for years – about fitting in and inclusion and discrimination. And suddenly we had this story.”

And a short time later, a publishing contract was in place for Gary the Goose Belonged. Now, he and his wife are working on two other books for children. In addition, Rusiniak is working on getting a collection of his nonfiction pieces between covers and out to the public. 

Rusiniak, who writes primarily in the morning from his deck or his basement writing nook, wakes up with excitement every day, knowing that at sunrise he’s got another morning of writing ahead. And yes, his biggest reward may not be his many published bylines, but instead how his words move people.

Gary the Goose Belonged is available online and in stores where children’s books are sold. For more information about Rusiniak and his writing, visit www.stephenrusiniak.com.