You're Not From Here, Are You?

[Writers Plot]

Posted by Vicki Lane, Guest Blogger

In 1975, seduced by Mother Earth News and The Whole Earth Catalogue, my husband and I decided to give up our jobs as teachers in suburban Florida and become farmers – somewhere. We had poured over the United and the Strout catalogues that offered dairy farms in Minnesota and Wisconsin at amazing low prices; we had ogled the ads for “Govt. Land-$1 an acre; we had wondered about Canada – how cold was it, really?

But something like fate saw to it that we ended up in western North Carolina on the east-facing mountain side farm we call home. And something like fate gave me the setting for my mystery series.

I call my books the Elizabeth Goodweather Appalachian Mysteries but I always issue the disclaimer since I’ve lived in these mountains for only 32 years, I’m a transplant -- one of those “damn Florida people.” I can’t pretend to know Appalachia like a native but I can bring to my efforts at depicting mountain culture, the eyes and ears of one to whom Appalachia is utterly fascinating -- at times it’s as familiar as my grandmother’s voice, at other times as strange as a faraway song in an unknown language.

Like me, my protagonist Elizabeth Goodweather is a transplant who’s put down roots that grow deep and draw nourishment from her adopted home. We may be Florida people but at least we saw the error of our ways and moved to the mountains where we learned to raise tobacco, plow with mules, milk cows, and butcher pigs. We got to know our older neighbors and tried to learn from them, to work with them. Rather than sealing ourselves away in an exclusive compound comprised of other newcomers, we tried to make a place for ourselves within the existing community.

Like the song catchers who once roamed these mountains, writing down the old ballads and recording the old tunes, I listened and learned and remembered and often jotted down some of the wonderful things I’d heard. And when the day came, about seven years ago, that I began to write a novel, here was all this wonderful material just begging to be used– characters who became Miss Birdie and Aunt Omie; the landscape and life of the mountain farms and forests; the history of the region; and the language -- oh, the language -- like poetry. “I wuz weedeatin’ in that ditch there and one a them big ol’ gorf rats like to run up my britchie-leg,” said Mearl. The rhythm and the turn of a phrase here in the mountains is a constant source of wonder and delight to me – and an invaluable resource for my writing.

And the stories! These mountains are full of stories. My first book, SIGNS IN THE BLOOD, opens with a scene described to me by a home health aide – an old woman dying peacefully at home, surrounded by friends and family, a church choir is singing in the living room, and two teenage grandchildren have just gotten saved in the kitchen. I wrote down the bare bones of this scene years before even thinking about starting a novel. It was just too wonderful to take a chance of forgetting.

In ART’S BLOOD, I use a story I was told by a woman in a quilting class I used to teach. This woman said that she had always loved to read but that her daddy belonged to some very strict church that didn’t hold with reading anything but the Bible. When she brought home her copy of Romeo and Juliet that she was studying for school, he asked her what it was about. She told him and he said “You oughten’t to be readin such as that.” “But Daddy,” she wailed, “hit’s Literature.” “Well,” he replied at last, “you kin read it but you better not enjoy it.”

I’m still looking for a place to use the following: While we were building our house, we camped in the barn. Our neighbors, about a quarter mile down the hill, let us use their phone for the occasional call back home. One day our neighbor started hollering for my husband. “John! John!” she yelled. John took off down the hill to see what was the matter. When he reached her front porch where she was rocking calmly, he gasped, “Louise, what’s wrong?” “Ain’t nare thing wrong. But Vicki’s momma wants her to call.” Still, trying to catch his breath, he said, “Louise, why’d you holler for me instead of Vicki?” “Because,” she said, “when I holler ‘Vicki,’ my store-bought teeth fall out.”

Vicki Lane's latest addition to the Elizabeth Goodweather Appalachian Mysteries series from Dell is OLD WOUNDS, a Book Sense Notable for August 2007.