Norrie Thomas and John Benson: Pharmacy alumni flex their creativity as fiction authors

Pharmacy is commonly considered a “left-brain” profession, rooted in logic, analysis, reason, and mathematics. On the other side of the spectrum, the “right brain,” there’s creativity, intuition, and emotion. Alumni of the College of Pharmacy are multifaceted and contribute to society in a multitude of ways — Norrie Thomas and John Benson are two such alumni challenging that binary. 

Thomas, a 1983 graduate of the college’s Social & Administrative Pharmacy doctorate program, spent her career in managed care pharmacy. Not only did she start a successful company and serve as the director of pharmacy for one of the first health maintenance organizations in the Twin Cities, but she spent 40 years designing information systems that allowed pharmacists to communicate with physicians about prescribing in a managed care environment. Writing, though, is no stranger to her. She grew up journaling throughout her teenage years and around twenty years ago wrote and published Death Under the Oak, a murder mystery novel. Though it’s a work of fiction, the novel is loosely based on the love and life she built with her late husband, Forrest. Thomas intended for the novel to be the first of a trilogy, but when Forrest passed away from cancer shortly after she finished writing Death Under the Oak, she struggled to continue writing his character and never finished the trilogy. Then, just over a decade ago, Thomas welcomed her first grandchildren, who rekindled her fiction writing. Her active life as a grandmother led her to publish The Hackensack Cafe Adventures, inspired by adventures with her grandchildren and the Minnesotan city of Hackensack, which she often traveled to as a child and where her grandchildren pass through on family vacations. The book found its way to a Hackensack librarian and the town invited Thomas to be the grand marshall of Sweetheart Days, their annual festival honoring Paul Bunyan and his sweetheart, Lucette Kensack. 

“I just absolutely love [writing]. It's just so much fun. I mostly love when the book gets a life of its own— all of a sudden the characters are truly alive and they're affecting your life,” Thomas said. “It's great fun. I did not have that much fun writing my thesis, although my thesis became my life's work.”

Thomas identifies with Agatha Christie’s “Miss Marple,” an elderly woman who excels at crime-solving because of her breadth of life experience and the multitude of people she’s known. Even while she worked in a hospital, Thomas said she was always “a dreamer by nature” with a wild imagination, which she believes helped her reimagine structures of the pharmacy profession. 

“If you talk to people who have excelled at social and administrative pharmacy, they will be pharmacists who have imagination,” Thomas said. “They've taken the pharmacy profession to exciting places… They haven't designed a new compound, but they have designed a new way for pharmacists to practice their profession.”

Benson, a 1972 graduate of the college’s pharmacy program, found his love for writing in retirement and recently published his fourth novel. Benson started his career as a hospital pharmacist, worked in market research and sales analysis for pharmaceutical companies, started a video conferencing company for service between doctors and pharmaceutical companies, and finally served as a clinical program manager consulting health plans on formulary designs and benefit structures before his retirement in 2010. 

Before retirement, Benson had never written fiction — now when he’s working on a book he writes nearly every single day. His first idea for a novel flourished after he stumbled upon a vintage license plate in the lake near his home in northern Minnesota.  

“I was walking off the dock and saw a piece of metal in the lake that looked like junk, so I scooped it up and was surprised that it was a 1934 license plate,” he said. “That got me wondering— how did it get in the lake? Was it attached to a car?” 

Benson wrote about six chapters before coming down with a case of writer’s block. His draft sat in computer memory for around 11 years before the rest of the plot dawned on him “like an epiphany” in 2022, he said. Then he sat down and wrote the rest of his first novel, Swan Scream, in about six weeks. 

“I can't say that I had a lifelong ambition to write, and I had no idea I could,” Benson said. “It was only upon finding the license plate and formulating a story around it that I discovered that I had some talent. Thankfully, enough readers liked my writing to the point they purchased my books”.

Swan Scream prompted him to comb through other parts of his past that could make for a good story. Benson next authored Scout Scream, a mystery novel inspired by his time winter camping as a boy scout. A scene in the book draws from a memory of Benson’s father, who was once robbed at gunpoint while working in a community pharmacy. Benson wrote the retail pharmacist character to end up the town's hero by stepping in as the town's hospital pharmacist during an emergency and taking care of patients. Then, a speakeasy that historically resided on the south end of the lake near his home during the Prohibition era inspired his third mystery novel, Swan Dive. Lastly, this November he published Sweet Serendipity: From Darkness into Light, which follows a young, orphaned girl through a series of hardships. 

Although his venture into writing fiction began after retirement, Benson recalls that much of his career involved creativity, including the development of clinical programs, creating a hospital pharmacy department from scratch, and designing hundreds of market research studies. He claims the writing process comes easily, but his pharmacy experiences most likely honed his craft.

“I was always historically accurate, which probably goes back to the pharmacist side of the brain. In pharmacy school, we would talk about the ‘decimal point of death’... so we tend to try to be very accurate and orderly,” Benson said. “Right now I'm not writing anything... I may be done. I may be just beginning.”