Hello, Friends of the Wickeds. I hope you had a satisfying if odd Thanksgiving. Today we welcome author Sharon L. Dean to the blog. Sharon’s new book is The Barn.
Here’s the blurb.
The case lies as cold as Joseph for nearly thirty years until Rachel returns to New Hampshire to attend the funeral of Joseph’s mother. The girls, now women, reopen the cold case and uncover secrets that have festered, as they often do, in small towns. Against a backdrop of cold and snow and freezing rain, Deborah and Rachel rekindle their friendship and confess the guilt each of them has felt about things that happened in the past.
The Barn is a story of friendship lost and recovered, secrets buried and unburied, and the power of forgiveness.
I love mysteries that focus on uncovering secrets from the past, so The Barn sounds right up my alley.
Take it away, Sharon!
I often think of the saying “You can take the girl out of New England, but you can’t take New England out of the girl.” I’m the New England girl transplanted to the West eight years ago. Here in Oregon someone asked me how the West is different from the East.
He thought water. That’s certainly true. There’s a shortage of natural lakes near me. No Walden Pond. There’s the “wild and scenic Rogue,” but not the wide Merrimack that Thoreau paddled on with his brother. More than the dearth of water, there’s the absence of history. I can find a grave marked 1867 but none marked 1667. The literary history dates back to Helen Hunt Jackson and Jack London and Frank Norris. None of those writers of the so-called American Renaissance. No House of the Seven Gables to tour, no Walden Pond to walk around, no home of Emerson or Alcott or Dickinson. History here dates to the Gold Rush not Plymouth Rock.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my adopted home in the West. The mountains are higher, the Pacific coast more rugged and undeveloped than the Atlantic, the pace slower. I don’t want to “go home again” except in my writing, which plunges me into nostalgia. Susan Warner, the reluctant sleuth of my first mystery series is a retired English professor from New Hampshire. In Tour de Trace, I put her on Mississippi’s Natchez Trace, but she traveled it with the eye to its history. Death of the Keynote Speaker finds her on an island off the coast of New Hampshire studying the work of a fictional nineteenth-century writer amid the real history of the island. Cemetery Wine keeps her in New Hampshire in her home that was on the Underground Railroad. Deborah Strong, the character who inaugurates my second mystery series, is a librarian in a town much like the one I left when I moved West. The Barn allows me to remember what was, not what has changed. I re-imagined the library in that town, the cemetery, the cold and snowy winter, and the barn I used to pass when I was a kid. It has a wooden cow’s head peeking from the rafters. Yes, as a child I thought it was a real cow, and, yes, even with all the changes the cow is still there.
Behind the scenes
Nostalgia creeps into both the content of my writing and my writing process. I compose on yellow legal pads like the ones I used for my Ph.D. dissertation. I never model characters after people I’ve known, but I steal images of them and, occasionally, experiences. Deborah Strong looks like a photo I saw in my daughter’s yearbook; like me, Susan Warner was once mauled by a dog. I love to set scenes in the places I remember. My novels include memories of church services and cemeteries and days canoeing or climbing mountains or cross country skiing. My characters read books I’ve studied and quote passages I remember. I come from the world of literature, not music or art or film or sports. I draw on what I know and twist it to fit my novels. Except for one thing: I’ve never known murder.
Readers, do you gravitate to nostalgia in what you write or what you read? Nostalgia for what?
Webpage: https://sharonldean.com/
Goodreads page: https://www.goodreads.com/author/dashboard?ref=nav_profile_authordash
Publisher: https://encirclepub.com/