FAIRHOPE, Ala. — If the picturesque Middle Bay Light on the cover doesn’t grab the eye of local readers, the title of Jennifer Paddock’s novel will: Point Clear.

That legendary lighthouse in the middle of Mobile Bay, and the historic locale of Point Clear and its stately hotel, are settings for Paddock’s second novel, which was published in 2006.

This Saturday, she is the featured speaker at The Pensters Writing Group at the Fairhope Public Library.

“I will be talking about character, plot and rhythm, as well as how to get published,” Paddock said Monday. “I worked in New York at Simon & Schuster and at three literary agencies, so I have a good understanding of how the publishing industry works.”

Paddock’s first two novels received major acclaim from writers in New York City, where she received her master’s in creative writing at New York University, to Fairhope, where a portion of Point Clear was first published in Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe, edited by local writer, Sonny Brewer.

A Secret Word, published in 2004, is a remarkably subtle and nuanced coming of age novel, which captures the dreamy rhythms of adolescence between staccato moments of crisis as three perfectly ordinary and utterly memorable young Southern women find themselves transported inexorably into the cosmopolitan landscape of womanhood,” said Jay McInerney, whose novel Bright Lights, Big City took the New York publishing world by storm in the mid-80s. “While many first novelists wave their arms and stamp their feet to get our attention, Jennifer Paddock seduces the reader with the narrative equivalent of a raised eyebrow or the almost imperceptible nod of the head. At the end the reader is inclined to ask of the writer as well as her characters — what’s next?”

That question was answered two years later in her second novel, of which Brewer said: “Paddock has worked some kind of sorcery and imposed a strange and beautiful quiet on a situation that’s ready to explode, writing people whose hearts you can hear beating.”

Paddock’s appearance Saturday is the first event of 2009 for The Pensters Writing Group, now in its 44th year on the Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay.

Upcoming guest lecturers include Sonny Brewer, Sue Walker, Linda Busby Parker and Anastasia McFadden, said P.T. Paul, the group’s vice president. Past speakers have included Terry Cline, Robert Vaughn, Gene Owens, Judith Richards, Mary Riser, Steve Hedrick and John Sledge, she said.

“I met Jennifer Paddock when she spoke to Frye Gaillard’s ‘Writing the South’ class at the University of South Alabama,” Paul said. “We were assigned her novel, Point Clear, along with such classics as Deliverance and Killers of the Dream. As a contemporary novelist, Jennifer struck a chord with several of my classmates who identified with her heroine to the point where they actually booked rooms and tennis lessons at the Grand Hotel as the character does in the novel.”

Paddock is the recipient of a 2008-2009 literature fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and lives in Point Clear with her husband, the writer Sidney Thompson. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in a number of publications.

“I'm now hard at work on my third novel, which is about father/daughter relationships, and I also work at the Grand Hotel as an assistant tennis pro,” Paddock said. “I’ve lived in the Fairhope/Point Clear area about seven years. It’s such a lush, beautiful place to write with a wonderful community of writers.”

Paddock will discuss “Character, Plot, Rhythm” from 10 a.m. to noon, Saturday, Jan. 10, at the Fairhope Public Library at 501 Fairhope Ave. For more information about The Pensters Writing Group, contact Claiborne S. Walsh, the group’s president, at 626-0275 or P.T. Paul at 625-3504.