Thinking about Travel

I like to travel, though it’s increasingly expensive–and exasperating, especially at airports.  My husband and I recently flew from Portland to Austin via Denver on Frontier Airlines, the planes with cute wild animals on the tails.  I don’t know what the animals symbolize, but each plane displays a different one.  We flew a polar bear.

Apart from the Rockies–always spectacular–and the odd architecture of Denver airport, my slantwise view of Colorado caught the very straight roads and very square fields, which led me to historical musing, easy to do from the middle seat.  What would this nation look like if nineteenth century surveyors hadn’t cut the whole country into a vast grid?  The mountains would be the same, but not the land around them.  Even the lakes and rivers have been altered by human intervention, sometimes spectacularly, sometimes subtly.  All I know is that in Denver the grass at the airport was already tan, whereas Portland is still green.

My friend Sarah met us at Austin airport, and we hugged and laughed and chatted for awhile, but I was still in historical mode.  How wonderful it is that close friendships can continue even when friends move away.  Until WWII, Irish families used to hold an “American wake” when family members immigrated, because they’d never see each other again.  My brothers are now scattered from Mexico to Florida to Washington, my sister lives in Colorado, my nephew Todd lives in Norway, and my nephew Charlie is in Afghanistan, bless his heart.  We can still talk, and so far we can still visit some of them, but how long will that amazing freedom last?  My husband’s nieces post daily photos and comments on Facebook, and so does my son, but virtual visits lack the splendid detail of a real face-to-face.

So what did I notice in Texas?  How pretty it is in the hill country, now the drought is easing.  April is wildflower time–not just bluebonnets, but Indian blankets, sneeze weed (fine yellow flowers despite the name), prickly poppies (tall stalks with delicate white blossoms), wine cups, mustard, Indian paint brush, Missouri primroses, and some early prickly pear blooms.  Lady Bird Johnson did a lot to ensure the survival of that splendid array of spring flowers, and the hill country is Johnson territory.

Sarah’s house is near Burnet on Lake Buchanan, which went down considerably because of the drought.  Elaborate boat ramps stick out over fields of flowers instead of over water.  There are frustrated fishermen.  Indian sites which had been inundated were exposed along the banks of the river that was dammed to form the lake, and it’s fairly easy to find chipped flints and even hand tools lying there quietly where they fell.  The lake is on the immigration route for birds and butterflies.  We got to admire both the permanent residents and some of the visitors.  The buzzards, strangely enough, were particularly graceful, and it was lovely to wake up to bird call every morning (though not to buzzard call).  Sarah has a resident blue heron.

Where Sarah lives the dirt is reddish.  Elsewhere, near Marble Falls, it fades to the gray of granite, and huge batholiths, exposed caps of granite, dot the landscape.  When I was writing my first novel, I could not get it going until I knew the color of the dirt in my chosen setting.  That involved a trip to Hampshire and Devon.  (Gray and chalky in places, in the first instance, and red along the coast of Devon with exposed fossils and seams of blue clay.)  I got three novels from all that dirt, though I “had to” take another trip for the last of the regencies.  Of course, I saw other things too.  Like people.

This Texas trip brought me in contact with a lively audience of about forty at the Burnet County Public Library, where I did a talk on “Latouche County,” a.k.a. the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge.  They were very kind and cordial, and their questions showed they were sharper than tacks.  They even bought books.  I also met with Sarah’s book club–terrific women, and the meeting was held at a farm with a handsome herd of goats.  A couple of days later we visited Fredericksburg, once a colony of German settlers.  It was also the birthplace of Admiral Nimitz, among the few people who could control Douglas MacArthur.  My father served under Nimitz, so I bought my brother Al the most recent biography.  (Al was a Navy captain and is a history buff.)  Then we hopped in the van and got lost looking for Luckenbach.  No highway signs, probably because there was no highway.  However, we finally found the place and caught the tag-end of a boozy outdoor country-music concert.  For some reason, they were also playing chicken s–t bingo.  The winner was whoever had the number a chicken pooped on.  It was funny at the time.  At Austin airport there were T-shirts inscribed Keep Austin Weird.  No problem doing that with Luckenbach.

One thing traveling always does for me as a writer is to invigorate language.  That’s partly a matter of listening to local speech.  You sit down in the evening to eat supper in Texas.  And somebody called someone on a sale.  That turned out to be a cell phone.  Traveling has a more fundamental effect on language than pronunciation and vocabulary differences.  It stretches the meaning of words.  River, for instance, and tree.  When I hear river I think of the Columbia because I see it every day, and I was terribly disappointed the first time I saw the Seine.  On this trip, I had to stretch the definition of river to include the Pedernales, although it’s a pretty stream or crick (my pronunciation) or rivulet.

The trees (juniper and live oak mainly) are thick on the ground in the hill country of Texas, but the oaks are dying off.  Around here, of course, we have what I was surprised to know is a rainforest, though obviously not tropical–all the conifers you can name with just enough native deciduous trees to make autumn interesting.  And two major national forests.  I don’t think I could live very long where there are no trees.  For me, though, the biggest stretch on this word trip was hill.  It’s called the hill country.  So where are they?  I saw some bumps in the flatness.

My husband’s grandmother, who was raised in Nebraska and eastern Colorado, felt cramped and oppressed by our mountains when she moved west as a young woman (part of the way by covered wagon).  I once trailed a bunch of students from the Pacific Northwest through England with a tour guide who took us to the Cotswolds, leapt from the coach, gathered the students around her, and announced that when she was there she felt as if she were on top of the world.  They laughed.  She was offended, but they didn’t mean the Cotswolds weren’t pretty.  They are, not to mention historical and picturesque.  But they aren’t mountains to someone who wakes up to Mount Hood or Mount Saint Helens, and they’re surely not the top of anything.  Snowden, I grudgingly admit, is a mountain.  It’s said that the Inuit have forty words for snow.  Maybe English needs forty words for mountain.

Travel is good for writers for a lot of reasons, but shaking up the language may be the most important benefit, and when you come home you notice where you are.  I think I see a river.

The Grand Adios. Or is it holá?

Wendy Hornsby

The big topic of conversation at our house of late is retirement.  Though Paul is already a pensioner, I am still a couple of years away from finishing at the college and crossing that threshold.  Before I pass over, there are many decisions that need to be made about how, when, where we retire.

The why of it is easy:  I’m not getting any younger and I want more time to write while I still have a few brain cells and we want to travel while we still have good knees.  The folks at the State Teachers Retirement System have answered the how question; let me assure you that “rich teacher pension” is an oxymoron, and if anyone tries to persuade you other wise, send them to me.  Every Monday morning I grow more certain about the when part.  The next question, then, is where?  Do we stay put, or do we move elsewhere?

Recently, Paul and I got together for dinner with three of my former UCLA housemates and their spouses.  We have remained friends through college, boyfriends, marriage, babies, launching careers and now, ending those careers and scattering out of the Elay area.  Among the eight people at the dinner table, five had already retired and the rest of us would soon.  The question of where to retire dominated the conversation.  All of the others had, or were in the process of, selling the homes where they raised their children and were planning to move to less expensive areas.

Our hosts had recently purchased a brand new home on a fairway in a brand new over-fifty-five development out on the far edge of civilization, i.e. the desert.  All over the Mojave and the Sonora deserts, like mirages shimmering in the distance as you zip by on the Interstate, you will find random gated communities for seniors, instant towns built around golf courses and Costcos.   The developments aren’t there because someone thought the desert was good for oldsters, but because the land comes cheap.

For about the price of a one-bedroom condo in our beach-front neighborhood, our hosts bought a lovely big house with a fairway as a back yard.  The trade-off for us living so far out would be convenient access to certain amenities we think are essential:  an airport and good medical facilities, tolerable weather and some cultural offerings, such as an accessible symphony or some theater, good restaurants, an interesting community outside the gates.

Another couple at the dinner—for her wedding she dressed me in harvest gold silk moiré, I put her in hot pink chiffon for mine—was selling a big house overlooking thirty acres of avocadoes and moving into a 450 square-foot RV.  For a while, anyway.  They will head off on the land version of a cruise around the world while they decide where to end up.  Sounds interesting, and challenging.  I’d be more inclined to load up the trunk of the Honda and invoke my AARP discount rate at hotels than live in an RV, even a very big one, but wandering for a year or so could be a grand and fun adventure; something to think about.

Last week, spring break for me, we took a trip that began with what we call The Kid Loop.  We went up the San Joaquin Valley to visit my son and his wife in Fresno, and then crossed the state to see my daughter and her husband in Menlo Park. Menlo Park put us next door to Palo Alto, so we were able to meet Meredith for a lovely lunch before we headed up to Sonoma County to go house hunting.

Everywhere Paul and I visit, we try on the area.  We tour neighborhoods, look into the real estate, talk to the locals.  This is what we have learned:  no matter where we end up, there will be trade-offs; college towns, even if they are small towns, offer most if not all of the requisite amenities on our list and are far less expensive than big cities are; we are spoiled by Southern California’s weather.

That last one, the weather, keeps coming up when we consider the Midwest where Paul’s family is, and the Pacific Northwest where much of my family is, as well as the Southwest and the Atlantic shore.  Parts of Europe are gorgeous, cheap and clement, but too far from family; I am still hopeful of a grandchild one day.

The dream retirement house will have space for a real garden again, a guest room that doesn’t double as an office, a beautiful view that doesn’t include either stucco or asphalt, good walks, a nearby village.  And, of course, will cost less than our beach house sells for.  Is that too much to ask for?

We have some time to make the big decisions.  And once made, those decisions won’t necessarily be final.

Turn Your Page into a Stage: a Little Theater in Your Fiction

by Nancy Means Wright

Ever since I played 18th-century Mrs. Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer in high school I’ve been in love with theater. Decades later I can still recite the opening lines–in a British accent, of course: “I vow, Mr. Hardcastle, you’re veddy particulah!“  I recall the struggle to relate not only to a frustrated mother with a son my age, but to a female from a different century and culture. What could she and a 16-year-old girl possibly have in common? But then our director introduced us to the Stanislavsky method of acting, based on the concept of emotional memory in which an actor goes deep inside herself to recall moments of anger, sorrow or jealousy, and then transfers these feelings onstage, both physically and psychologically. In this way, the actor becomes not only the characters but her own self.

So I recalled the anxieties I had living in an all-girls school boarding school where my mother was a disciplinary housemother; and before that my older brothers, teachers, pastors, uncles who were forever, it seemed, shushing and telling me what to do. And I poured all these restrictions into the character of Mrs. Hardcastle, who was always being put upon.

Since then I’ve acted in or directed dozens of plays for amateur (mostly) and repertory theater. My son has inherited my passion and has his own Very Merry Theatre for children and young adults in Burlington, Vermont. Summers his ancient van travels the state, pulling a stage on a flatbed trailer. Many of the plays in his repertoire are adapted from Dickens and Shakespeare, keeping the original language, and a few are plays I’ve adapted for him from my own novels. For theater has crept into my writing as well; I can’t seem to keep my fictional characters from putting on amateur shows. In Midnight Fires, set in an Irish castle, my sleuth discovers a clue to a killer through a family rehearsal of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and a local village presentation of Macbeth heightens suspense as my sleuth observes the spectators’ reaction to Macbeth’s imaginary dagger.

Of course I use “the method” to physically set the scene and to become my character(s).  I’ve always thought of a novel as a play in three or five acts, with each scene propelling the action forward. As I write, I’ve taught myself to envision the scene as if on a stage: to see how the characters use their props, to observe gestures, reactions to a bit of action or dialogue. To watch the body language: a shrug, a roving eye, a frown or grimace that suggests conflict. And then to show it as one does in theater.

It’s fun, for instance, to see how relationships alter as a character enters or exits a room. And I try to set a goal for each scene–a character’s desire or plan that either works or fails; at chapter’s end I leave a hook as a play might do. My spouse and I have been watching reruns of the 70′s Poldark, in which each episode ends with a gasp. Will Poldark escape when the smugglers are betrayed and the soldiers come charging? Will pregnant Demelza drown in her fishing boat when the storm blows up? We know the main characters will persevere, but oh, the suspense and conflict!

Most of all I use memory and transference to morph into my main character. It helps to nurture a close connection with the protagonist–a little empathy goes a long way. This has been easy with my historical Wollstonecraft series. For though far less famous, I have quite a lot in common with Mary: our writing and teaching, our conflicted nature (reason versus the hormones), our empty pockets, the faux pas we’ve made, and yes, the rejections. So through that connection I feel free to imagine and invent. In a new memoir, A Memory Palace, author Mira Bartok describes her traumatic brain injury after an 18-wheeler plowed into her car on the NY Thruway. To write her award-winning book, she employed a method called a “mental walk,” using visualization to recall information: faces, lists, emotions. She’d imagine the layout of a building, or placement of objects within a room, and then create links to things she wanted to remember. She’d take an imaginary journey through a house, recreating each room, letting it act as a memory peg: the kitchen might bring to mind a special event, or recall a person, an emotion.

In much the same way the mental walk might help us to turn into our fictional characters and thereby live alternate lives. Truly, I can’t think of any career, other than the actor’s, in which one writer can live so many lives–and in one book!

“It’s a Puzzlement” – Yul Brynner, c. 1956

 

I’ve been a puzzler (some say, I’ve been “puzzling,” and that may also be true!) all my life. It started with math, where every day’s homework was a puzzle. For algebra: If one train leaves a station in Chicago going 30 miles an hour . . . For geometry: Given two sides of a triangle …

I loved those problems, which to me were just games and puzzles. My newest protagonist, Professor Sophie Knowles feels the same way. She teaches math at a small New England college, creates puzzles for magazines, and, by the way, solves one or two murders per book.

We often hear that mysteries are like jigsaw puzzles, that writers and readers enjoy putting the pieces together, ending up with a satisfying solution, much like turning 1500 jagged pieces into a reproduction of Monet’s Water Lilies.

In a way. But mysteries have to be like challenging puzzles, not the easy kind where all the pieces are piled before us with one brisk dump from the box, and what’s required is simply to sort them by color or shape and fit them together to match the picture on the cover of the box.

Are mysteries like crossword puzzles? Sort of. In a regular crossword, all the clues are there in a couple of columns. In most cases, there are black squares that are cues to word length. We fill in the blanks and enjoy a sense of accomplishment when every square is filled in.

Again, good mysteries are more challenging than that.

In a good “whodunit” mystery, there are many sets of clues that unfold: some are hidden in plain sight, some are subtly presented, some not; some are within the character profiles and arcs, the setting, or the plot. These mysteries are solved not by simply putting a given number of known pieces together, but by first sorting out the pieces that matter from the ones that don’t. Maybe there are a couple of red herrings; maybe there are no herrings of any color.

I’ve seen jigsaw puzzles where the manufacturer has deliberately included extra pieces that don’t belong in the scene. Similarly, there are the crossword puzzles that are diagramless. No black squares give us the word length; we have to figure that out ourselves.

Those puzzles are more like the great mysteries, where the clue is that the dog did not bark or the answer has been in the letter on the mantel all along.

Sometimes I worry that I’m wasting time with the morning acrostic, or the Sunday NY Times crossword, or the countless word games I find in print and online.

Is it enriching my life that today I located 40 Beatles songs in a word search grid?

I take my answer from no less a puzzle figure than Erno Rubik (b. 1944), sculptor, architect, and inventor of the Rubik’s cube (patent, 1975). He has this to say: “The problems of puzzles are very near the problems of life, our whole life is solving puzzles.”

Some of us get more practice than others.

Inventing Agriculture

 

Last year, in transit between one life and another, I didn’t have time or space or roots enough to create a vegetable garden.

 Oh, I could feel my sap rising.

 The urge is deep in my genes, my ancestral memory. I’m the first woman to drop grape seeds on the ground and make the connection when plants sprout.  While the men were out spearing mastodons, I was noticing that corn was growing from the band’s garbage heap. Aha. Put seeds in the ground, reap a crop. What a concept. 

But I didn’t plant anything in the small patch of  thin hard soil back by the pampas grass. Instead, I watched the purple wildflowers live, breed, and die, collected  the nasturtium seeds that rolled around in the driveway, and ate tomatoes bred for long-distance shipping.

 And when we found our house, it already had a raised-bed vegetable garden in a far sunny corner of the lot.  Kismet.

 So now, when I should be writing, or reading someone else’s manuscript, or teaching, I’m staring at the dirt measuring the progress of the Blue Lake stringless pole beans, wondering who is nibbling at the tiny leaves of chard and who stepped in the beet seedlings, asking the squash seeds why they haven’t germinated, and thinking maybe I should pinch off those little tomato blossoms.

 No, I decide, I’ll let the tomatoes make their own decision about the blossoms.

 The invention of agriculture takes patience, observation and respect.

 I stand there looking at the dark, soft dirt and I am so perfectly happy.

 

Good Horse Books for Kids

by Laura Crum

Since my eleven year old son is a voracious reader, and he has a horse and loves him, horse books are very high on our priority list. We’ve read quite a few of them over the years, some of them written by authors from the Equestrian Ink blog (a blog I have been part of for four years). So today I want to talk about some of our favorites. And I’m going to start out with our “home” authors.
The first book we read that was written by one of our authors was Linda Benson’s “The Horse Jar”. My kid had seen this book on the sidebar of our blog, and thought it looked interesting. Linda very kindly sent him a signed copy (a big thrill). We read it together, and we both really enjoyed it. The characters were very believable and the story was one that a 9-10 year old could totally relate to. I loved the basic storyline, which shows a child making a very mature, loving, but difficult choice. My son is still very fond of this book.
Then, more recently, Alison Hart came out with “Risky Chance” in the Horse Diaries series (this series is written by different authors, the common elements being the theme—books from a horse’s point of view set in different periods of history—and the excellent illustrations by Ruth Sanderson). My kid had wanted to try these books for a while (they were featured in the Chinaberry catalog—one of our favorite catalogs), so we ordered “Risky Chance.” This one my son read on his own, and reviewed here on the blog. I also read it, and really enjoyed it, particularly the setting (Southern California TB racing during the Depression). At this point my son became a Horse Diaries fan, and Alison very kindly sent us a signed copy of her other Horse Diaries title, “Bell’s Star.” The book is set in New England in the 1800’s and deals with a runaway slave and a Morgan horse– we both liked that one a lot, too. Again, this was a book my kid read on his own and it kept his interest right until the end. Alison’s knowledge and love of horses really shines in both of these books. Now we’re busy acquiring the rest of the series.
Most recently, I ordered Alison’s book, “Gabriel’s Horses”, because after reading about it on her website, it seemed like it would make a perfect start to doing a “unit” on the Civil War. As a homeschooling mom, I am always looking for books that will provide a good prop for learning about something. And “Gabriel’s Horses” did not disappoint.
Set in Kentucky during the Civil War, the book is about a slave boy who wants to become a jockey. Gabriel is about my own son’s age, and the story painted a vivid portrait of what his life was like. We read the book chapter by chapter, with exercises (provided by me) of mapping the Confederate and Union States…etc. The book was GREAT—really kept both of us interested, gave you the feeling and many facts about the Civil War and slavery, without being too horrifying (which many books—even kid’s books—about this war are, because it was a truly horrifying event in terms of suffering). I recommended it to the teacher who leads our homeschool group, and she is going to read it to the whole group of kids next year. Again, the horse element was very well portrayed.
That covers the children’s books we’ve read so far by authors from the EI blog, though I’m sure we will be reading more. Certainly the second and third books in the Gabriel trilogy, and possibly Linda’s new book, if we ever start reading ebooks or it comes out in paper. So far we read only paper books, but who knows what the future will hold.
We have, of course, read many of the old classics—just finished “Black Beauty”, which is still a great read. Read “The Black Stallion,” which was well liked, and “The Island Stallion”, which I loved as a child, but my kid was not as enthralled by it as I was. We read my personal favorite, “Smoky the Cowhorse,” again, not as big a hit with my kid as it was with me. Maybe he needs to be older. Misty of Chincoteague was well received, also another childhood favorite of mine, Elizabeth Goudge’s “The Little White Horse.” I thought about reading “My Friend Flicka”, but when I reread it myself to preview it, I decided no, it’s just too dark. Maybe in awhile. Same verdict on Steinbeck’s “The Red Pony.”
So, there are a few good kid’s books about horses. Anyone want to chime in with your own favorites?

Too Much Information

by Taffy Cannon

In a world awash in acronyms, some have become so universally known that everyone from Great-Aunt Edna to your neighbor’s preschooler can tell you what they mean.  One of those is TMI, for Too Much Information.

Generally it’s used to cut off somebody who is sharing a whole lot more than you want to know about a medical problem or procedure, or reportage of somebody else’s outcries in the throes of passion, or an explanation of just exactly what goes into the passage of federal legislation.  It can also be more benign, as when a fervid engineer shares all 1,439 steps in the creation of a biodeboomax, or when your dieting cousin takes you on an eight-ounce by quarter-cup rundown of the previous week’s caloric intake.

Too much information, however, is something altogether different to many writers, more on the order of  a way of life.

We are always accumulating too much information, because most of us love doing research and have great difficulty stopping, even when it’s time to write the book.  And then we have to continually fight the urge to provide an information dump when a casual aside is more appropriate, to mention somebody’s use of a galvanized widget-cutter without outlining the history of widget cutters, or taking a side trip into the galvanizing process.

There’d be a Twelve-Step program for this, except that the committee researching bylaws is still checking out how other nonprofits got started.

Too Much Information is also descriptive of everything that is currently right and wrong about the emerging electronic society.

Every minute of every day, anyone who logs on to the Internet has the possibility of being sucked into a million different informational black holes.  It is deliciously easy to follow a story that appeals or intrigues, to learn the nuance of who said what and how, to become an instant expert on pretty much anything that currently tickles your fancy.  And if you’re following it on Facebook, you also get to add your own impressions, and maybe even start a little war if you’re feeling feisty.

What’s scary is how quickly this informational explosion has happened, how fast we have moved from looking something up in the outdated Britannica in the hall bookcase to immediately exploring every aspect as seen by an array of different but attentive eyes.  Now we can get not only the background but also every tiny development on a breaking news story.  Not in the morning when the paper lands on the porch, or on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, but right this very minute.  As it unfolds, usually with video.

Simultaneously as reports whiz in from parts of the world recently viewed as remote and exotic, the bloggers rev up: pinstriped political reporters briskly tapping New York Times keyboards and dudes in their underpants hunched over laptops in the parental basement.  No need to wait for analysis any more.  It’s concurrent with the events, and often precedes them, since a frightening number of these people know exactly what they want to say long before there are any facts to bolster the prejudices.

So who do you believe?  What’s really happening?  And how will future generations make sense of this informational explosion, if they even care?

James Geddy House

When the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg began, archaeologists were puzzled by fragments of glazed terra cotta found in digs around town, often in the filled-in privies where broken crockery had been routinely tossed.   It wasn’t much more than two centuries after the pieces had been discarded, but nobody had any idea what they were from or for.

Then a complete whatever-it-is was unearthed at the James Geddy house, and contemporaneous documents finally revealed the answer. These odd pieces of pottery were known as “martin-pots” and hung beneath the eaves of houses to attract nesting birds.  The birds, in turn, would feed their fledglings with the omnipresent Virginia coastal mosquitoes and other bugs, providing themselves with dinner and the colonists with natural pest control service.

Eighty years after the baffling question first arose, you can Google “Colonial bird bottles” and get nearly five million hits.  Of course, mosquitoes are still biting in the Tidewater, too.

Special Libraries in My Life

Lea Wait here, celebrating National Library Week by honoring the libraries that have meant the most in my life. It’s hard to pick just a few, since I’ve spent so much time in so many, but there have been three very special ones. 

The first library I remember was near my grandmother’s house in Roslindale, Massachusetts. She’d bought me a copy (I still own it) of Thornton Burgess’ Chatterer the Red Squirrel and I had, with some difficulty but much joy, read THE WHOLE BOOK by myself.  I must have been 5 or 6 years old, and the words I’d asked for help on are still underlined in my copy. When I finished she took me to that library … and showed me an entire shelf of Burgess’ books. I still remember looking at them with awe and realizing I could now read them all. (And I did.) As I think back, that was also probably the first time I  understood that authors wrote books, and if you liked one book by a person, there were others to be read, too. 

Most of my childhood reading, though, came from the Glen Ridge Public Library in New Jersey. When I was in 6th grade I was given permission to walk there by myself on Saturdays, and I did, taking out as many books as I was allowed every week. When I was in 10th and 11th grade I worked there after school and on Saturdays as a page and discovered the shelves of books on writing, and the adult mystery section, and the roped off stacks, which, as an employee, I was now allowed to enter.

Main Hall Glen Ridge Public Library

I memorized the Dewey Decimal System. When I ran out of books to re-shelve, I’d take a section and check it, book by book, to see that it was shelved properly. In the two years I worked there (at fifty cents an hour) I “found” hundreds of books that were shelved in the wrong sections. I loved that job. And when, a few years later, I was living in Greenwich Village in New York and working on a masters’ thesis on the role of the mother in teen literature in the 1950s and 60s, the librarians in Glen Ridge helped me find books long out of print by doing inter-library loans in New Jersey for books that had long since disappeared from the New York library system. 

Another library that has a special place in my heart is the Wiscasset Library in Maine. In the summers, as a child, I joined the summer reading program there, and often “won” it, with my picture ending up in the Wiscasset Newspaper. The children’s librarian would keep books aside for me, knowing I’d finish off my reading list (I’d read every one of the “suggested books”) by mid-July. As an older summer visitor to Maine the Wiscasset Library was also a regular stop, and when I finally was able to call Maine my fulltime home, obtaining a card there was one of my first steps as a Mainer.

Wiscasset Library

The Archives room at the Wiscasset Library is the source for much of the historical information in the novels I’ve written. I’ve spent hundreds of hours, there, exploring research trails, reading old journals, and examining genealogical materials. The Weymouth Library in Shadows of a Down East Summer is very much like the Wiscasset Library. 

When my first book, Stopping to Home (set in Wiscasset in 1806,) was published in 2001, Janet Morgan, then the head librarian in Wiscasset, was the first person to ask me to do a reading and signing.  

I was nervous, but thrilled. I was even more thrilled when she introduced me to an older woman who arrived early that day and sat in the front row, so she wouldn’t miss anything. To my amazement, she was that children’s librarian who’d helped me find books for the summer reading program, so many years ago. She hadn’t forgotten me. 

Since then, I’ve spoken at many libraries in Maine, and in other states, too.  But every time I have a new book published, historical or mystery, I first go back and speak at the Wiscasset Library. 

It’s kind of like going home.

Writing a Muscular Mystery

People often ask me where I get my ideas, as if they were hard to come by.  Most authors will tell you the problem is quality, not quantity.  How do you know an idea will lead to an entertaining, well-wrought book?  You can never be sure.

I write an academic mystery series and because other books of mine have been taught around the country, I’ve done a lot of readings and talks at universities in the U.S.  At almost every school I’ve visited, Ivy League or community college, someone tells me about a scandal, feud, or vendetta worthy of Monty Python or Joseph Heller.

The ideas and stories people offer me compete with the ones already swirling through my head. I’ve always been making up stories about people I see, whether in restaurants, malls, parks, theaters, wherever. It’s a habit my parents noted when I was very young. That’s just how I see the world, or the many worlds within this world.

One of those is the enormous health club that I’ve belonged to for twenty years. It’s a great mix of old and young, student and professional, single and married, real athletes and wannabes–and ethnically diverse. It’s a place where strangers will talk to each other and friends might not, because they’re too into their workout. It’s also a place where people change themselves by undressing and putting on a costume — and attempt to change themselves by their exercise routines. But are they really different? And what do they reveal at each stage?

People have told me stories there, and I’ve imagined many of my own, which is why my latest mystery Hot Rocks is set at a health club.  My sleuth Nick Hoffman likes swimming and working out there because he can escape the problems in his twisted academic department, a place the New York Times Book Review said the Borgias would feel at home in. Unfortunately, trouble stalks him even at the gym.

Nick finds out that there’s plenty of simmering lust and rage underneath the gleaming surface of this gorgeous, upscale gym. The beautiful people have some ugly things to hide. Despite himself, he’s drawn into unraveling sexual secrets and much more than he could have imagined in a world of pecs, passion and Pilates.

This blog appeared in a different form on The Huffington Post

MAKE ‘EM LAUGH, MAKE ‘EM CRY

Note: This essay is in honor of the month of April, which T.S. Eliot called the cruelest month. It’s a month of rain and taxes, but it’s also a month of practical jokes and humor. We’re all April Fools at this time of the year. So here are a few thoughts about writing in a humorous vein.

Okay. Lessee. Okay. A guy slips on a banana peel and falls on his butt. No, wait. The guy’s all dressed up, on his way to the career interview of a lifetime, and he slips on a banana peel and falls in a steaming pile of dog feces. Make that cat feces.

Did you hear the one about the man who was so poor he was reduced to eating his own shoes?

How about the woman who reads someone else’s mail by accident, misunderstands, and thinks the man she loves is two-timing her. It breaks her heart.

This working-class married couple lives in an apartment in New York. They yell at each other constantly. Their best friends are neighbors, a couple that also yells at each other. Sometimes the two couples get together and they yell at each other. By the way, one of the men is obese, and both of the men frequently threaten their wives with violence.

So this salesman runs out of gas on a country road. A farmer takes him in for the night, but the salesman abuses the farmer’s hospitality by seducing the farmer’s teen-aged daughter, making her pregnant and ruining her life. The farmer forces the two strangers to get married at gunpoint, thereby ruining both of their lives.

There’s this starving coyote, see. His prey eludes him and he accidently runs off a cliff and falls thousands of feet to the rocks below.

A nice Italian or maybe Jewish or maybe both fruit vender is minding his own business when a gangster, a yuppie, and a cop all bash their cars into his pushcart, destroying his inventory and scattering all the money he’s earned that week.

A homeless drunk needs to urinate so bad that he.

STOP!

What?

That stuff isn’t funny.

Maybe I’m not telling it right. People have been laughing at this material forever.

It’s not funny. It’s sad.

I didn’t say it wasn’t sad. What do you think humor is, anyway?

Humor comes from sorrow, suffering, pain, cruelty, loneliness, and anger. Why is it all the Warner Brothers cartoon characters have speech impediments? What’s funny about speech impediments? I don’t know either, but those voices make us laugh. And speaking of cartoons, check out the topics covered by the comics in today’s paper. An average day might serve up unruly children, meddlesome parents, nagging wives, boring husbands, divorce, overeating, poverty, taxes, crime, political corruption, sexual harrassment, job stress, school stress, traffic accidents, sports accidents, phobias of all kinds, greed, jealousy, illnesses ranging from the common cold to Alzheimer’s Disease, and many different kinds of death, from shipwrecks to the electric chair. For starters. Real thigh-slappers.

There are two reasons not to be surprised that funny short stories originate in pain. First, good short stories must have conflict. Second, good short stories are about life, and life is full of pain. The Buddhists are right: the human condition is full of suffering.

So that’s the bad news. The good news is that we have humor to help us carry the load. In fact, the humor can carry the load for us. Got a problem? Turn it into a joke. Why do so many overweight people, of all ages, laugh so much?

If suffering is essential to humor, so is surprise. Another word for surprise, when we’re talking about skillful writing, is irony. Irony is a one-two punch. A good cop/bad cop routine. You set your reader up gently to expect one thing, and then pow. This device can work wonders at the sentence level, with twists of phrase that leave the reader reeling and rolling. Irony is even more important at the plot level, with events seeming to lead in one direction and ending up in another. Irony in a plot often involves the concept of karma or so-called poetic justice.

Another essential quality of good short fiction is originality: the humor has to be fresh. It’s true that there are only a certain number of jokes in the world, and they’ve all been told before, but there is an endless source of fresh humor in our imaginations. Even when we deal with familiar ideas, we can be original.

Another essential ingredient of successful humorous short stories is intelligence. That should go without saying, but there’s so much dumb humor in our culture, even dumb humor that’s funny, that I make a special point of requiring intelligence before I’ll call a short story good. It can’t trade on its humor alone; it has to engage the brain, not just the funny bone. The story must be, on some level, about something that matters. Obviously a story is first and foremost a story, and its first job is to entertain. This is especially true of humorous stories. But if you don’t give the reader something to think about, your story won’t last in the memory any longer than a comic strip or a sitcom.

Finally, of course, a good humorous story requires style in spades. Why is it that all the jokes I told at the beginning of this chapter introduction fell flat? No style. Zippo. Dullsville.

Everyone knows that the joke itself is only half the reason we laugh at a good comedian-if that. At least as important is the delivery. To tell a good joke you have to love language and practice daily all the many magic tricks you can do with it.

Become a magician and make your readers laugh so hard they hardly notice that they’re crying as well.