Imagine, for a moment, you’re Richard Russo.

You’ve turned two successful novels into equally successful movies. Your most recent book, “Bridge of Sighs,” stayed “lodged on The New York Times best-seller list,” according to CNN. Oh, and in 2002, you won this little award called the Pulitzer Prize.

How do you follow all that?

With “A Healing Touch.”

For the nonfiction collection, the Camden author and editor rounded up some of Maine’s finest writers – Wesley McNair, Gerry Boyle, Bill Roorbach, Susan Sterling and Monica Wood – to share poignant, uplifting stories of hospice care. The authors will celebrate the book’s launch from 4 to 6 p.m. Friday at the Hospice Volunteers of the Waterville Area’s community center at 304 Upper Main St.

HVWA offers free services to 27 communities within a 25-mile radius of the city. In addition, it runs Camp Ray of Hope, which serves families statewide. All six writers will donate royalties to the center, while publisher Down East Books will contribute 10 percent of all proceeds.

“All of us got far more involved in this than we thought we would,” Russo said recently.

Two years ago, Russo’s longtime friend Lee Duff asked if he’d do a benefit reading for the hospice, but Russo wanted to do something with greater fundraising potential. So Russo, Duff and HVWA’s executive director, Dale Marie Clark, sat down to brainstorm, but they kept striking out. Though they were starting to get frustrated, Duff and Clark couldn’t stop talking about the people – both the living and the dying – whom hospice had helped. In their conversation, Russo found inspiration.

“These people were poor in a lot of things, but they were rich in stories,” Russo said.

Through his friendship with Duff, who now serves as HVWA’s board president, Russo knew how powerful those stories could be. The men got to know each other while Russo was a professor at Colby College. They played racquetball regularly, and at the time, Duff’s wife was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. As Duff’s wife slipped away, memory by memory, hospice became a lifeline for both of them.

Duff’s story – like many in the book – had a heartwarming ending. But Russo and his fellow writers were still a little skeptical about the idea of a whole book about hospice.

“I think we all thought, ‘Who’s going to want to read a book about people dying?'” Russo said. “I had an inkling from the stories Lee and Dale told that there would be humor that you wouldn’t normally associate with the subject. These wouldn’t be stories as much about death as about life. That was a real revelation for all of us.”

But the revelations didn’t stop there. As the writers began spending time with their subjects, they became far more invested, far more attached, than they ever considered possible.

“There’s a classic saying from the ancient world: Be kind to everyone you meet, because everybody is carrying a great burden,” McNair said as he recounted the story of Stan Spoors, a hospice volunteer who suffered a series of losses, starting with his infant son. “[It was a surprise] to discover how heavy this burden was for this guy who seemed so ordinary and relaxed, just like you and me.”

Roorbach got to know and care for Nancy Chamberlain, a Winslow woman whose son, Jay T. Aubin, was the first American casualty of the Iraq war. At the time, Roorbach was struggling with his own grief over his mother’s recent death. The interview became his catharsis.

“I didn’t get how much hospice was for the living,” he said. “Doing this story turned into my hospice care.”

Wood had a similar experience. She chose a subject she thought was safe – Ellen Bowman, a music therapist. She wasn’t dying. But her story stirred long-suppressed memories of her own mother’s death. Wood tried to keep herself out of the narrative, but instead, her life and Bowman’s work intertwine.

“I thought it would be a reporter thing,” Wood said. “It couldn’t be.”

For Duff, who agreed to be interviewed for the book, the process was heart-wrenching. Over the course of several hours, he told Russo about losing his wife after 45 years of marriage. He wasn’t the same for days afterward. Though it has been nearly 10 years since her death, Duff still tears up when he talks about it.

“I had to be strong to survive that,” Duff said. “I had to know who I was as an individual and, frankly, move on, and move on, and that’s the hard part, moving on.”

Hospice helped. And now, he tries to return the favor. That’s how many volunteers become involved with the program.

“You discover as you talk to different hospice workers that they have their own story of grief,” McNair said. “Many transform that story into a work of compassion, but lying beyond that gift of compassion is their own struggle. It’s begun to occur to us, having done all this work in private, that the theme is so universal. Everyone has a story of grief.”

Even Russo – Pulitzer Prize-winning author, successful screenwriter – is not immune to the grief. What he didn’t know when he agreed to edit the book is that his own mother would become a hospice patient.

“My work was essentially done on it,” he said. “Seeing the wonderful, loving and very professional care she got in the last months of her life made this far more meaningful.”

For more information on Hospice Volunteers of the Waterville Area, visit www.hvwa.org. For more information on the book, visit www.downeast.com.

Richard Russo (front row, from left), Monica Wood, Susan Sterling, Gerry Boyle and (back row, from left) Bill Roorbach and Wesley McNair gathered recently at the Hospice Community Center in Waterville. The Maine authors teamed up to write “A Healing Touch” and will donate all royalties to Hospice Volunteers of the Waterville Area.

BANGOR DAILY NEWS PHOTO BY KEVIN BENNETT

“I think we all thought, ‘Who’s going to want to read a book about people dying?'” Richard Russo said about a collaborative effort with other writers from Maine to compile nonfiction accounts about the hospice experience. “These wouldn’t be stories as much about death as about life. That was a real revelation for all of us.”

For Maine storytellers’ project

hospice experience rich with …

hope & healing