Writer's Voices

As part of the Shelter Springs series, Snow Kissed is book three of this charming collection, following Christmas at the Shelter Inn and The December Market . While each book can be read as a standalone novel and has a completely new story, Thayne finds that readers enjoy when recurring characters from the previous books pop in, so all of her female protagonists within the series are linked in some way. “It’s kind of a group of women who knew each other in high school, were great friends in high school, have gone their separate ways, have lived different experiences, and now for different reasons are back in this community and finding their way together.” And for those who loved this novel and all the books in the series, you won’t want to miss her next book, tentatively titled A Cozy Little Christmas , where we will meet Holly’s twin sister, Hannah!

I like my books to be something that people can relax into during the chaos of the holiday season. I want this to be a book to remind people of the joy of the season, of what we celebrate, and the love for other people, and the kindness that we try to bring to other people.”

The best of all gifts around any Christmas tree: the presence of a happy family all wrapped up in each other.”

Drawn from her grandmother, Verna Hintz Kurtz’s, experiences as a trombone player and a musical whistler in the Swarthmore Chautauqua Circuit, Fern came up with the idea for this novel after discovering her grandmother’s photographs, scrapbooks, brochures, and newspaper articles tucked away in a box under her parent’s bed. She knew her grandmother whistled, but she had no idea that she was a professional whistler before she got married. Fern noted, “What made my grandmother even more unique is she had perfect pitch so she could whistle and sing in a perfect pitch all the time… it was a very popular thing that people entertained by doing these whistling songs and then also doing bird calls, and my grandmother knew over 50 bird calls – the distinct, different types of bird calls. She was very talented with all that.”

At the height of the Chautauqua Movement in 1924, there were over 1,000 different circuits and they went to over 10,000 towns, and they reached forty million people.”

He who does not know Chautauqua does not know America.”

While there are elements drawn from her own life, Zarin emphasizes that Caroline is a unique character shaped by her own distinct, intimate experiences. She reflected, “Caroline is a character. Of course, she has many of the references that I grew up with… but she speaks for herself… She was talked about quite a lot in the first book, and then she kind of said, ‘Well, it’s my turn now and I’m going to speak…'” And as far as what is really happening in the story and what Caroline is imagining, Zarin says that the uncertainty was intentional. “She is telling her story and it’s a true story, according to Caroline. I mean, we all tell stories about ourselves all the time. We emphasize certain things, we leave out what we call ‘telling details’ because they would tell something we might not like to have told, right? So, Caroline is no different. She is telling a story about herself, and I am really almost like a reporter writing that down.”

The sentences in Estate have been revised at least a dozen times, every single one of them.”

Everyone can be reduced to someone who has been forgotten.”

While Marr always loved writing, she didn’t pursue it professionally until she was living in France and teaching English. From that point on, she learned the craft of storytelling by just doing it. “I learned by writing that first novel, and then ripping it apart and revising it for about three years before I finally said, ‘Ok. I should probably just let this lie…’ so I put it down, and I started writing another book which became my debut thriller, The Missing Sister … I also watched a lot of movies, to be honest. Movies and film are so excellent for story structure understanding because they are so precise in their beats… so if you don’t have the time ‘to read a 300-page novel,’ although you must read books to be a good writer… just watch your favorite movie and note the points at the 25% mark, 50% mark, 75% mark… they hit exactly what must happen for the character on that specific journey, so I did a lot of movie watching and craft book reading.”

I’m constantly consuming headlines and whenever a headline stays with me, I write it down and so when I’m plotting my next book, I tend to scan my list.”

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.”

While there are many notable figures that are famously associated with Iowa including talk-show host Johnny Carson, music conductor Glenn Miller, and Oscar-winning actress Donna Reed, Behrens’ book focuses on lesser-known people tied to the state such as Salvador Dali, Mark Twain, and Buffalo Bill. Although Behrens’ initial intention wasn’t to write about these individuals specifically, he was able to, by chance, find information about them as he was exploring other topics. According to Behrens, “I was wanting to write about people who were born here and who are largely unknown, but whose accomplishments are worth spotlighting. What I didn’t want to do was to write about the ones who most people already know about… it’s ‘Field of Dreams,’ whereas I wanted to do Dreams of Fields . That’s a pretty good description of my memories of Iowa.”

Most of these happened not because I was really searching for Iowa connections, but because I was researching other things and I’d be reading along and suddenly the word Iowa would pop out of the text!”

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”

Regarding the trad (traditional) wife lifestyle that has been widely promoted on social media platforms, Church believes that the history and reality of the lives of housewives from the 1950’s has not been fully explored by those who are glorifying this trend. As Church explains, “…when we take off the rose-colored glasses that we like to look back on history with and we really take a close look at what actually happened, sometimes what we find shocks us because I think we want to reminisce… but we’re not really exploring all the nuance that there was… and so when I see these trad wife movements and social media posts and stuff, I’m like, that is an alternative reality. It has definitely not been what most generations of women have experienced within the history of humanity so to idealize this… let’s really take a close examination of what that looked like for those who were housewives and really what their reality was.”

It starts with an issue or a theme, and then as I really start digging into that, that’s when a character comes to mind. I do plot a bit more than what I initially did.” -on the development of her stories

No one has a corner on depression, but housewives are working on it.”

In the novel, Parman also includes a touch of magical realism by giving the bees magical qualities, and she admits to not knowing much about them when she was first began writing the story. “I was fascinated to learn so much about them. It was tempting to put more information than I did in the book, but I didn’t want to overload the book so I just saved what I thought was just the most amazing facts to include… you think about scooping out a big spoonful of honey to put on your toast or English muffin… think about how much work that is for the bees, and it… made me think differently, about the work that bees do and how much we take for granted.” And while bees do perform a significant amount of work, their lives are surprisingly short. Parman explained that bees born in the summer can live from 12 up to 18 months, while those born in the winter do not live as long. “It’s not a long life, but it is the life they are given, and how they choose to use it and how we are the benefit as we are with so many things that bees do.”

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.”

As readers may observe, a sense of grief and melancholy permeates throughout The Irish Goodbye . This is because O’Neill had initially set out to write a book about grief that centered around the events of September 11th. “…[9/11] is something that my family did experience. We lost a lot of people in the terrorist attack… my father’s company was on the 104th floor of the south tower. He wasn’t there, but his company lost 66 employees including a lot of my friends, a lot of my sister’s friends, our cousin, Peter, obviously a lot of people my father loved dearly… it was a really tragic, tragic day for us… grief can be really insidious and I always knew that that was something I wanted to write about. I just didn’t know exactly… what the story was and so when I did realize what the story was going to be for the Ryan family, a lot of things began to click for me there because I, kind of, found a way in.”

Through that experience, I got to witness the impact of grief on so many different levels – on the level of community, on the level of family, and on the level of the individual.” -on the impact of 9/11 which devastated her father’s business in the south tower of the World Trade Center

Death leaves a heartache no one can heal. Love leaves a memory no one can steal.”

For those who aspire to write, Lynn, a published author since 2015, shares some words of wisdom: “You’ve got to commit to it… also don’t be aiming for perfect because I think that is the other thing that stops people. You get that first draft done and you go and edit it, but instead, people will spend so much time on that first chapter… and you know what? …things will be cut. A lot of things are going to be cut or are going to be changed, and it’s a lot harder to do that when you have spent three months on this one scene, that then you find out you don’t need. Get to the end of that first draft. When you’ve got to the end of it and you know what you need, then you can edit until your heart’s content…” And how does she know when she’s done editing? “It’s when there’s no more niggles to go back and check, I think. You could have the niggles forever!”

It’s about the relationships between these women and all of them giving and sacrificing to achieve this life that they want.”

The Greeks were extremely ambivalent about the stories of Amazons; they found them both thrilling and rather daunting at the same time.”

As far as the immigrant experience, Tian noted that migrant families may feel some level of displacement about their identity especially when they grow up in a community that offers little connection to the traditions of their homeland. She reflected on how difficult immigrating to America must have been for her parents and their friends. “I have vast amounts of respect for my parents and their friends who came to the United States to build a life that would be easier for obviously our generation and I think that in many ways, we feel endlessly indebted to them for that decision and I think Stella feels that too in the story where she feels like… my parents did so much and how could I make this worthwhile for them… I think just by watching the immense amounts of sacrifices that they’ve made, you feel that you have to make it worthwhile to them in some way because it’s just incredible for them to [have] been able to do that.”

I wanted to be able to write about that concept of something potentially tragic happening in the family and how that lack of communication or that vacuum can create difficulty for everyone involved in being able to find closure and move on.”

All Americans have something lonely about them. I don’t know what the reason might be except maybe that they’re all descended from immigrants.”