As my tagline states, this blog is about writing and the places that inspire. I’ve been focusing on places in the Inland Northwest: it’s now time to connect them with the writing part of the blog.
Back to the past:
El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico
To do that, we have to go back a couple of decades to the island of Puerto Rico. I started my first novel there, choosing the tried-and-true formula of writing about what you like to read and what you know well. I liked mysteries and knew the island’s rain forests, having written a book about one of them [Where Dwarfs Reign: A Tropical Rain Forest in Puerto Rico, University of Puerto Rico Press]. So I came up with this idea:
In 1942 Puerto Rico, a middle-aged American woman dies alone in the heart of a tropical rain forest. Who was she, and why was she there?
For a year or so, I worked on the novel, creating a primitive draft of part of the story. In it, a teenage boy takes on the challenge of finding answers, with unanticipated, often perilous consequences in wartime Puerto Rico. As I pondered the story line, I realized I had a problem: there were certain things the boy could never know if the book was to be at all realistic (no seeing the future in a dream, in other words).
At about that point, my daughters started school, and fiction writing gave way to more lucrative freelance writing and eventually to university teaching again.
On to the present:
After my husband and I moved to Spokane, I discovered employment opportunities here were few and far between. What to do? The answer—work on the partially completed novel. Dusting off the manuscript, I took stock (with much cringing) of what I had, joined a wonderful novelists group (more of that in a future blog), and started writing.
After reading Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins, a brainstorm came to me: Why not have a dual narrative? Have an American woman go to Puerto Rico decades later to take up the search, eventually piecing together the puzzle of the dead woman’s life. She could tell her story after she returned to the States. Where in the States? What better place than where I’m currently living.
And so, the Inland Northwest became the secondary setting of my first (not yet published) novel, The Irony of Tree Ferns.
Mt. Spokane, Washington