Novel time

She'd been stressed out by a pressure-packed job, and the lingering pain of divorce didn't help. But Joan Lehmann, an emergency room physician in Glen Burnie, never guessed she'd find herself sitting bolt upright one night, her heart pounding, jolted awake by the worst nightmare she could remember.

There was a wiry young man, running for his life through the snow, his bare feet trailing blood. There was the 5-year-old girl lying in his arms. And there was her dread that if their pursuer caught them, he'd kill them on the spot.

For reasons even she couldn't explain, Lehmann, 46, a doctor at Baltimore Washington Medical Center, decided not to push this nightmare aside but to probe it. She made it the pivotal scene of her first novel, "Heaven Below," available on Amazon.com and in a few bookstores. It's the tale of a Depression-era miner who learns to do what he must to keep his family alive - and at the same time sustain his lifelong dream of seeing the ocean. (The book's final third takes place in 1930s Baltimore.)

The most twisting journey was that of Lehmann, for whom writing the book - and now, trying her best to sell it as a rookie author - has been "an act of therapy." She's having fewer nightmares, and writing has given her a new lease on life.

"I have less anxiety since I challenged myself [in this new] arena," says the busy mother of two from Pasadena. "The art of expression is a powerful thing. It freed me."

Determination

Her main character, Sean O'Connell, never planned to become a Pottsville, Pa., coal miner, or to take a job later on at the stately Lord Baltimore Hotel. He did those things because he had to.

So it was with Lehmann and writing.

Joan Burton grew up on a farm in Lothian, where her father, Jim, grew vegetables, raised some livestock and ran a nursery on his 10-acre patch. Self-reliance was the family fertilizer.

"Nature doesn't give vacations," Lehmann says with a shrug. "The flowers have to be watered, the animals fed. You care for them as you would your children. You can't leave them behind when you want time off."

Every day on her way to school, though, she passed the local physician's office, a place that gave her a different dream.

When she was 12, Joan told her dad she was going to be a country doctor. After he bragged to some friends, she figured she had to make that stick.

She did, even under duress.

After college in West Virginia, the plain-spoken "math and science girl" was twice rejected by the medical school at Marshall University in Huntington. The second time, she stormed the dean's office.

"You're missing out on the best damn doctor you never got to know!" she hollered.

Weeks later, a student fainted upon seeing a cadaver, and the school called to invite Joan to take her place. She was there within 48 hours, sleeping on the floor in another student's room.

A week later, Lehmann was one of a small number who passed a tough exam in gross anatomy. Four years after that, she graduated near the top of her class.

"Determination," she says, her voice tinged with a subtle Southern twang. "I'd be darned if I was going to blow my chance."

Cleaning the room

The early years were an education in themselves.

She always hoped to return to Anne Arundel County and the bay one day, but she started out working the "hills and hollers" near Huntington. Lehmann stumbled on moonshine stills while hiking, met local residents who bragged that "marijuana is the biggest cash crop in the state," and treated patients who sniffed metallic spray-paint - "huffing" for a $1.99 high.

"Nice people," she says. "Some of them just didn't seem to mind the brain damage."