Photo By Jymi Bolden

Stacy Sims had to find structure in her life before she could write a novel.

There's a chink in Stacy Sims' armor of confidence. Midway through the interview, she shows her hands. She's encompassed a stillness to her, a sense of assurance that comes from years of meaningful meandering laying course to its proper path. Yet there's that movement from under the table, barely detectable but jarring Sims' peace-of-mind facade. And then the Pilates instructor-turned-author withdraws her hands from their hiding place, placing them forth on the boardroom table. Her delicate hands virtually wring together as she playfully fidgets with a series of hair bands.

Or maybe they're bracelets, dainty enough to fit snugly around her thin wrists. Looking at Sims, it's easy to see two different things. This infinitesimal restlessness is the closest Sims comes to baring all.

She speaks as intellectual businesswoman allowing her naked emotions to come through her writing. For her, it's her debut novel, Swimming Naked, a story of a mother and daughter reconnecting after the mother's cancer diagnosis.

"There are only so many stories to tell," Sims admits.

The challenge is spun in the narrative, in finding something unique in an author's voice. To get her book afloat, Sims chartered a reassuring ebb and flow in her storytelling, alternating her chapters between the past and the present.

"Ultimately the past is going to meet up with the present," she explains. "I have a very clear idea. I have a visual in mind, and I have an emotional anecdote or point. I rarely set out just writing. It just feels a little lost."

Sims refers to Naked's muse as "an idea of a moment in time." She envisioned a little girl on the beach with her mother, a nugget she gleaned from a personal friend.

"Her mom looked real glamorous and was smoking a cigarette," she says, breathing in the excitement of relating the tale. Her words whir together as aural cinema.

"It's territory I know, all emotional territory I know," she says. "When I write chapters I think of them as scenes. I tend to write in an impressionistic way."

Yet nothing in her writing or her persona gets lost in translation. Sims spliced her inspiration into the story of Swimming Naked, but her life is unaccountable -- at least in her writing.

There's no thinly veiled biographical factualism in her novel, though personality parallels exist between Sims and her protagonist, the daughter. Lucy Greene is described as "an incredibly appealing young woman who wields a bone-dry sense of humor as a shield."

Nowadays, Sims captures the role of the fabulous fortysomething. Her highlighted curls bounce against her businesslike nature. She's professionally dressed, yet her Pilates experience has helped her tone her physique and her sense of being. (See Breath of Fresh Air, issue of Jan. 22-28, 2003.) And her wit is so deadpan, it's almost imperceptible.

"I started as a copy writer," she says, hitting a beat before continuing. "To be perfectly fair, I started in restaurants as a waitress."

Sims bloomed as head of public relations and marketing at the Contemporary Arts Center in the controversial Robert Mapplethorpe heyday. She drew artistic savvy from her time toiling in graphic design, most recently in Cleveland. And she stretched herself mentally and physically in the role of Pilates instructor with two studios to her name.

"Nothing really made a lot of sense. It wasn't a hard, fast plan," she says of her professional journey that often included keystrokes and phrasing. "I was never writing fiction. In a funny way I fancied myself a writer, but I wasn't writing. I didn't want to never try the thing that I always wanted to do. We have an idea of what we're supposed to be using our energy on, and I certainly had that idea."

Sims had to grow up to get Naked. Artistically minded, she was a commitment-phobic writer in need of firm wisdom and life lessons.

"I was really living and learning a lot of what it takes to be a human being in this world," she says of her earlier self. "The obstacles are the obstacles. I didn't have the discipline, the focus, the resolve and the ability to lay yourself bare."

This assessment is self-assured sincerity. Sims is at a point in her life where she's structurally sound. Dreams fulfilled breed contentment.

"I didn't find the process hard," she says. "I loved writing the book. Sometimes it's lonely. Sometimes it's scary. But ultimately it's rewarding."

"I have a been a reader of good literature my whole life. That is my school," she says, noting a breadth of beloved works from The Great Gatsby to Middlesex. "When the author has an ego need, they're not paying attention. I like authenticity in the story. I like a voice that is bold. I don't like to work too hard. I like a solid, well-told tale."

Her appraisal of good writing flows into her own work.

"I really tried to make a story that was like life as least as I know it," she says. "It wasn't perfect because life isn't perfect."

The poise, eloquence and truth with which Sims speaks are punctuated by the wringing of her hands.

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STACY SIMS signs and discusses Swimming Naked at 7 p.m. Monday at Joseph-Beth Booksellers.