This woman has traveled! She's been to places all over the map. Here's Edith--read on:
Thanks
so much to Kaye for hosting me here again.
I've been
thinking about how traveling is like writing, how living in another country is
like writing a novel. In my adult life, I have lived overseas for various
periods of time: from half a year to two years in almost a half-dozen
countries. Brazil for a year as young seventeen-year-old exchange student.
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| Just home in 1971 from a year in Brazil |
Japan for almost two years, teaching English and living with an American beau
who was in the US Navy.
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With friend Tomoko in Japan, 1977
|
France for half a year with my husband and infant
first-born. Mali for a year with same husband, same first-born, and the
second-born, when they were five and two. Burkina Faso for a year when the boys
were twelve and nine.
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| With a diviner and her
grandson in Burkina Faso, 1999 |
Before I packed
my bags and headed for a new home, I'd mostly never been to that country
before, with brief exceptions for France and Mali. I'd certainly never lived in
any of those places and didn't really know what to expect. The language,
people, and culture revealed themselves to me as time went on. When I came
home, I was done with that life. I haven't returned to live in any of those
places, and only to Brazil did I go back for a brief visit. I’ve made plenty of
repeat visits to places in the US and Canada, but I haven’t returned to live on
other continents.
Writing a book
is like that, too. When I start, I might have an idea of where I'm going, but I
don't really know the story. I've never written it before. I create a cast of
new characters to go along with the core series characters, and these new
people gradually reveal themselves to me: the way they talk, their problems,
their joys. And after I turn in the book, I'll never write it again. I’ll refer
back to it when I write the sequel, talk about it at a library event or on a
panel, or write a blog post about it, but basically I'm done with that story
and moving on to the next.
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| Where Edith writes |
Since the books
I write are all set in northeastern Massachusetts (so far), my research keeps
me at home. I haven't lived overseas since I started writing novels in earnest
in 2009, although I have visited Costa Rica and Puerto Rico, and am planning a
trip to Italy in a couple of years. I guess I'm doing my traveling in my head
and on the pages these days. And I love it.
Readers: do you
repeat visits to far-off places? What would be the one place you’d like to go
back to again and again? And do you reread books?
Here's Edith's biography and contact information: Edith Maxwell writes the Local Foods Mystery
series (Kensington Publishing), the Speaking of Mystery series under the
pseudonym Tace Baker, featuring
Quaker linguistics professor Lauren Rousseau (Barking Rain Press), and the
historical Carriagetown Mysteries, as well as award-winning short crime
fiction.
A mother, world traveler, and former technical
writer, Edith lives north of Boston in an antique house with her beau and three
cats. She blogs every weekday with the Wicked Cozy Authors. You can find her
here:
@edithmaxwell
