When I'm choosing a book to read, I'm happiest when I can find books that are firmly and authentically situated in a place--preferably a real place, even more preferably, someplace I've lived or visited or know something about. But I also like to read about foreign places, far-away places, even imaginary places. As long as the place seems real to me (even if it is entirely fictional), I'm happy.
The same thing is true when I settle down to write. Place is almost always at the top my mind. I may be writing from a place, or in a place, or about a place--whatever, place is important to me. And so, when I begin to think about a new book, and especially about a new series, place is one of the first things I think about.
I've already written about choosing the 1930s as the time period for my new mystery series, The Darling Dahlias. That part was easy. But it wasn't so easy to choose a place. At first, I thought about setting it in Texas--but that seemed too close to the China Bayles series, which is also set in Texas. Then, I thought about my home state of Illinois, or my mother's home state, Missouri. Both of those would be okay, but...
Then I thought about the South, and about Eudora Welty (who gardened in Mississippi) and one of my favorite garden writers, Elizabeth Lawrence, who gardened in North Carolina. Southern gardening, Southern women (like the wonderful characters in Fried Green Tomatoes and Steel Magnolias and To Kill a Mockingbird.) and Southern writers: Faulkner, of course, and Flannery O'Connor and Harper Lee and Truman Capote and Welty. Yes, the South. That's the place. But where? Near the Gulf coast, or in the mountains? East, in the Carolinas, or west, in Louisiana? Or....
I was thinking about all this when Bill and I drove through Alabama on the April book tour, and stopped in Monroeville. It's just a little dot on the map, but it's an important place, the site of Harper Lee's Mockingbird and Truman Capote's The Grass Harp. That's when I decided the series would be set in southern Alabama, and I would use Monroeville as a model--not an exact replica, but a source, a place in which imagination can take root, and flourish, and blossom.
So that's my place, these days. I'm living here in Texas (in the middle of the hottest, driest period in human record-keeping), but I'm also living in Southern Alabama, in the 1930s, with the Darling Dahlias. And I'm loving it.
Reading note. Feelings are bound up in place . . . Can one explain otherwise what makes a given dot on the map come passionately alive, for good and all? --Eudora Welty