Welcome Susan Van Kirk to Writer Wednesday

I’m excited to have Susan as my guest today on Writer Wednesday.

Susan and I both grew up in small towns, which is where she sets her mysteries. Her description of small-town life brought on a flood of memories growing up in West, Texas. Read about how Susan uses settings to establish a sense of place in her writing.

Susan’s latest mystery, A Fabric of Lies, is now available.

A Sense of Place

Over the years, I’ve watched television series that have one thing in common: their small town settings. From “Virgin River” to “Friday Night Lights,” the towns, their cultures, expectations, and human relationships gave them “a sense of place.” I understood and felt comfortable in those towns with their characters—some with a huge sense of decency and selflessness, and others guided by money, fear, or their pasts. Of course, there was also the gossip of the residents that flew faster than the internet. They felt like familiar places.

For Robert Frost, a sense of place was New England with its birches, snow, pastures, and streams. For William Faulkner, it was the South with its brooding knowledge of the past. John Steinbeck’s sense of place was the California arroyos and Hoovervilles of the Great Depression. For Nathanial Hawthorne, the Salem area with its witches and dark forest provided a setting that resonated with good and evil.

Sometimes I wonder if —in this worldwide, corporate, digital, interconnected world—we’ve lost a sense of place. Some might call it a sense of “home.”

The mysteries I write are heavily dug into a sense of place. My three different fictional towns—Endurance, Sweet Iron, and Apple Grove, are small Illinois towns that have the culture where I grew up and currently live. The stories that resonate remind me of how comforting it is to be surrounded by the familiar. A farmer dies in a farming accident and his neighbors organize to help bring in the crops. Recognized names and places, local politics, and even obituaries of familiar family names form a subconscious framework for my life and writing. The thoughts that appear in my stories are products of seventy-nine years in the same area among familiar people, names, and events. It is not the East or West coasts; it is the heartland.

My children grew up in the small town where I still live. They have memories of their neighborhood with back-door neighbors, pick-up games of baseball in the yard, walking to and from school, and weekend evenings at the local roller rink. When one of them drove his hot wheels off the neighbor’s porch thinking he was one of the Dukes of Hazzard, all the doors flew open, and everyone rushed to see what the noise was after his wheels landed on the sidewalk. Another child of mine rode her tricycle down the middle of our busy street to go shopping downtown at age four. At the time, I was busy changing the diaper of her younger brother. A local cab driver brought her back unharmed—fortunately to the next-door neighbor’s house since I would have died of embarrassment at her escapade. Small towns.

While I spent several winters away in an urban area sharing the freeways with thousands of cars, standing in lines with total strangers, and living in a neighborhood with people I never saw or met, I came back to small towns in life and my writing.

Despite the joys of living in the heartland, I delve into its secrets, past histories, and murders.

A sense of place. There is something to be said for that.

Summary of Fabric of Lies

Grace Kimball and Jeff Maitlin are now married, and into their lives comes an unsolved mystery from 30-some years earlier. In 1981, Matt and Gemma Blackburn disappeared from the house next door to Grace. At that time, the Blackburn’s two-year-old, Anthony, was in the hospital recovering from pneumonia. Now, a thirty-five-year-old Anthony Blackburn returns to Endurance to find out what happened to his parents and solve a mystery deeply embedded in the town’s history.

Meanwhile, Jeff Maitlin, Editor-in-Chief of the Endurance Register, is threatened with a takeover of his local newspaper. The same family has owned it for four generations, and it would be a disaster for the tight-knit community to lose their local news and local ownership. But Jeff is fighting against a huge competitor—a corporate vulture hoping to steal everything of value and destroy the fabric of the town and Jeff’s beloved newspaper.

Website: susanvankirk.com