While 1997 Concordia graduate Stacey (Kaufman) Potter’s first novel, the award-winning romance novel “The Project,” somewhat mirrored her life at Concordia, her second romance novel, “Relatively Complicated,” takes a new path but includes elements of truth within the fiction. Potter, a psychology major, said there are three random points in her life that she pulled from to make the bones of the story.
“In fall of 2019, I was at my son’s JV football game and observed the female student athletic trainer taping the ankle of a football player,” Potter recalled. “They seemed flirty, so I was questioning if they were maybe dating or had a crush on one another.”
Potter, a former Concordia cheerleader, said the stereotype is that football players date cheerleaders. “But I just started thinking ‘what if’ my main character, Capri, was a student athletic trainer and the male main character, Matt, was a football player, and they had to work together regularly due to an injury,” she said. “Forced proximity is a popular romance trope that is an ingredient for falling for each other.”
In her early elementary years, growing up in Devils Lake, N.D., a family member had a business that ended up folding due to illegal activity by a business partner. That inspired an idea: What if two families that are the best of friends, and their children are inseparable, become divided due to a business scandal and move apart? When the children (in this case the main characters) reunite, she tried to imagine the complexity that comes with the past.
“Finally, there are elements of me in the character Capri for sure,” she added. “When I was at Concordia, I was very determined and driven to graduate in four years — earn good grades, take on extra work as a psychology department TA, and complete an honors project — so I could apply to a master’s or Ph.D. program or find a great job after school. I was so determined that I forgot to balance it with being carefree and having fun. Hard work is important, don’t get me wrong, but it’s also important to have balance, to be part of the college community, and get involved. Capri is trying to learn the same lesson, to not be so serious all the time.”
Potter works full time at Optum, a UnitedHealth Group company, as an associate director within the behavioral health product division. She creates and writes materials for the sales teams about Optum’s mental health services such as product playbooks, client case studies, newsletter articles, etc. She said the role combines her educational background (from Concordia and Northern Arizona University) in psychology and her love of writing.
“It’s a perfect role for me,” Potter said.
The basis of what she loved about psychology is how humans act and cope when faced with difficult things. She has found a way to put her female characters into life’s challenging situations (e.g., grief, anxiety, divorce, romantic relationships, parental relationships, friendships), and she gets to help them grow, evolve, and become resilient.
As with her first novel, this one is also published by Minnesota-based Hadleigh House Publishing, where one of the three co-founders is a fellow alumna and former Concordia cheerleader, Anna (Jose) Biehn ’96.
“We are delighted to be working with Stacey again after the success of her debut novel,” Biehn said. “We expect her follow-up book, ‘Relatively Complicated,’ to resonate with readers in the same way as her first. Stacey is a talented writer, and her stories have endearing characters and strong female protagonists which we love at Hadleigh.”
As an extrovert, Potter said the solo act of writing is difficult, but she loves it.
