“How did you come up with the idea for your book?”
Here is the answer to that question:
In a time very long ago, I lived in Tucson, Arizona. There, hiking and nature adventures were popular pastimes, and good hiking boots held a certain cachet. When I moved to Puerto Rico to teach within the University of Puerto Rico system, I brought my pastime notions, and my hiking boots, with me. Only later did I realize that mountain hiking, in the wet tangle of tropical forests, was not as popular in Puerto Rico as it was in Arizona. But I was smitten, and the first forest I explored was the Caribbean National Forest (its official name then), commonly known as El Yunque. For years, I hiked on its dozens of trails and eventually published a book titled Where Dwarfs Reign: A Tropical Rain Forest in Puerto Rico.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Decades before that happened, while I was still in Arizona and during my early years in Puerto Rico, I dabbled in stories and poetry—not very good ones, I must admit. When an editor invited me to write articles about places in Puerto Rico for a local Sunday magazine, I hesitated. This, in addition to my full-time teaching load? When would I have time to write my stories? Alastair Reid, a well-known author who was then visiting Puerto Rico, encouraged me to seize the opportunity. “All writing is good,” he told me, “all writing is important. Use the same skills you use in fiction to make the articles come alive.” Thus began a series of travel/adventure pieces for The San Juan Star. They in turn led to more travel writing, and editing—for newspapers, magazines, documentaries, and radio as well as the book about El Yunque.
After the book came out and while my two daughters were still young, I decided to return to fiction, this time to a novel. What could I write about? I’d read somewhere that you should write about what you love and what you know. Well, I loved nothing better than to curl up on rainy days with a good mystery, and at that point I knew El Yunque in great depth.
How about this, I thought—the body of a middle-aged American woman is found in the heart of a tropical rain forest in Puerto Rico? Who is she? Why is she there? And so the story began.
That was over twenty-five years ago. Why it took so long to write and publish the book is a tale for another time.
[photo El Yunque National Forest]
