Local Author Pamela Binnings Ewen

by Mimi Greenwood Knight

SPENDING TIME with local author Pamela Binnings Ewen calls to mind a quote from a family friend of the Marx Brothers. He said, “When you’re with Groucho, you feel like you’re with the greatest person in the world. When you’re with Zeppo, you feel like you’re the greatest person in the world.” Somehow, with Ewen, I feel both simultaneously. Here is this absolutely fascinating, completely accomplished woman who is, at the same time, so innately generous that she makes me feel whatever I’m saying is fascinating. Munificence is just one of her gifts.

Raised in Sulphur, Louisiana, by New Orleanian parents, Pam didn’t always seem destined for greatness. In fact, she flunked out of the former St. Mary’s Dominican liberal arts college, prompting the mother superior to declare her “simply not college material.” After that, she worked a succession of what she called “survival jobs”: at Shell Oil, an insurance company and Touro Hospital. She married and found a position she enjoyed, working in reservations for Delta Airlines. But when she became pregnant, airline policy dictated she leave her job at five months with no guarantee it would be there when she was ready to return. It was not.

“My husband was a professional student,” she says. “I was out of work until Scott was 18 months old, and I brought in some money typing papers for students.” As soon as the baby was old enough, Ewen found a job she enjoyed as assistant to the assistant to the dean at Tulane University. She loved the work and the collegiate atmosphere.

“We didn’t have a car, so I’d take Scott to daycare on my bicycle,” says Ewen. “We went everywhere on that bike. I’d work all morning, have lunch, then start classes at Tulane, which I was able to attend for free as long as I worked there.” Scott became a regular on campus, often hanging out with his mom in class or in the library and entertaining himself by drawing, a pastime that eventually led to a career as a visual artist.

Four years later, the girl who flunked out of Dominican graduated cum laude from one of the top colleges in the country. By then, her marriage had ended, and she needed to support herself and Scott. “I asked myself, ‘What can a woman do to support a child if she’s bad at math?’” says Ewen. “I didn’t know any female lawyers, but law school seemed like the answer.”

There was the problem of tuition though. “I’d heard about the Louisiana Legislative Scholarship,” says Ewen. “I went to Representative John Hainkel’s office and just asked him for it. He asked me, ‘Why should I give it to you?’ I told him about Scott, and that I needed a career. But it didn’t sound encouraging.” The tuition deadline had come and gone when Ewen was surprised by a call from Hainkel. “He called me from the house floor,” she says. “I could hear all the noise in the background. And he told me they were giving me the scholarship.”

For years afterward, when something good happened in Ewen’s career, she contacted Hainkel, who had become a senator. “When I graduated from law school, I sent him a letter and said, ‘this is because of you.’ I wrote him when I got my first job and in 1989, when I made partner. When I had the chance, I stopped by his office and told him, ‘I want you to know you changed my life.’”

Ewen remarried and moved to Corpus Christi, Texas, where she commuted 200 miles to finish law school in Houston. After graduation, she worked as in-house counsel for Gulf Oil for four years, a job she loved. Then she went to work for a large firm in Houston doing corporate finance for twenty years. (Ironic, since she’d gone to law school to avoid math.) As though a full-time law career with one of the top firms in the country wasn’t enough, Ewen also served on the boards of directors of Inprint, Inc., a non-profit organization supporting the literary arts in Houston, and the local chapter of Junior Achievement.

It was during that time Ewen began to wrestle with her faith. “I always wanted to believe,” she says. “But over the years, I’d lost my faith. Surprisingly, it was the movie Amadeus that set me on a journey to rediscover it. Here was this highly flawed man who was so shallow but who received this glorious gift of music. It didn’t make sense.” Ewen began researching everything she could about the composer, reading whatever she could get her hands on.

“From my research, I finally concluded there is something outside the human brain and our world that we don’t understand,” she says. “And I thought perhaps if the writings about Jesus by witnesses in the New Testament of the Bible could be proved true, then this could perhaps provide a foundation for faith for those of us still seeking to understand— that is, for a faith based on reason.” And so, this avowed agnostic and seasoned lawyer set about to put the testimony of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John on trial. “In a civil case, the court’s standard of proof is based on the preponderance of the evidence—that is, in weighing all the evidence jurors (readers) must decide if the testimony of these witnesses is found more likely than not to be true,” she says. “At the end of my search in 1999, based on the evidence, I concluded in my book Faith on Trial that it’s more reasonable to believe the truth of the Bible than not to believe it.”

Almost immediately, the book became a best seller at Barnes & Noble and regional book stores across the country. It is, to date, her only non-fiction book. But since its publication, Ewen has written and published five novels: Secret of the Shroud; The Moon in the Mango Tree (2009 Christy Award Finalist andwinner of the 2012 Eudora Welty Memorial Award given by the National League of American Pen Women); Dancing on Glass (2012 Christy Award Finalist and winner of a Single Titles Reviewer’s Choice Award); Chasing the Wind (Romantic Times ‘Top Pick’); and An Accidental Life.

Her latest book, set to hit bookshelves in 2019, might be her most intriguing. The Queen of Paris is a novel limned from the shadows of history. Without giving too much away, it’s the surprising tale of Coco Chanel’s own battles waged during the four-year Nazi occupation of Paris in World War II, the controversial choices she made and why.

“It took me 15 years to write Faith on Trial,” she says. “I was practicing law and suddenly doing radio and TV interviews about the book. I decided I’d achieved my goals where my law career was concerned, and I had to choose whether to write full time. In the end I did.”

Ewen moved to New Orleans to marry longtime friend Jimmy Lott, and continued to write while finding time in 2005 to found the Northshore Literary Society, along with local author Deborah Burst. She’s also served on the boards of directors of the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society and the Tennessee Williams Festival, both in New Orleans. In 2009, Ewen received the St. Tammany Parish President’s Arts Award as Literary Artist of the Year. In 2017, she was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by Marquis Who’s Who.

Interestingly, Ewen is only the latest writer to emerge from a talented extended family. Her cousin, James Lee Burke, won two Edgar Awards, for his novels Black Cherry Blues and Cimarron Rose. Other writers in her family are Andre Dubus, Best Picture Oscar nominee for The Bedroom; his son, Andre Dubus III, author of The House of Sand and Fog, a Best Picture Oscar nomination and an Oprah pick; Elizabeth Nell Dubus, author of the Cajun trilogy; and Alafair Burke, author of the Samantha Kincaid mystery series.

As for Ewen, she’s already at work on her next work of fiction, which will further flesh out some of the minor characters in The Queen of Paris. “The story is mostly spinning around in my head right now,” she says. “It’s with me most of the time, in some fashion. But then, this is the fun part.”