Category Archives: Themes and Issues in My Writing

Tracing the Rainbow

Here’s the blurb for my newest book on Amazon:

Mark Pacer, a U.S. diplomat serving at the American consulate in Montreal, Canada, is called to the scene of an American citizen killed in a traffic accident. On closer inspection, Mark realizes the death was not an accident but a carefully planned murder. Who wanted his death? And are they also searching for the murdered man’s wife, Clair Bancroft? Mark, a widower with two small children, finds himself increasingly attracted to Clair. But what is she hiding? What is the reason she and her husband fled to Canada? And is the murderer a threat not only to Clair but to Mark as well? Who stalks them, even as their friendship continues?

Here’s the cover and more details:

Tracing the Rainbow

Tracing the Rainbow

FIC042100 Fiction/Christian/Contemporary

FIC022070 Fiction/Mystery & Detective/Cozy/General

FIC045000 Fiction/Family Life/General

FIC037000 Fiction/Political

 

Publisher: Redemption Press (February 12, 2024)
Publication date: February 12, 2024

The Year I Lost and Found Christmas

My father died when I was thirteen. When the first Christmas after his death approached, my mother was finding it too difficult to celebrate our usual Christmas. She and my brother, seven years my senior, decided we would do Christmas differently that year. We would travel to Florida and perhaps find some enjoyment in celebrating Christmas in new ways—enjoying the seashore and perhaps visiting some historic sites, like St. Augustine.

I, in my teenage angst, was not in favor, but I was overruled. Glumly I went along.

Fortunately, their patience with me was rewarded. Gradually, I succumbed to the lure of travel, which I have always loved. We enjoyed interesting food. I went swimming in the Atlantic on Christmas Day. And as the days progressed, we laughed a lot.

The road from family loss is going to be hard and hurting at times. One cannot lose a loved one without grief. The ways of handling it, however, can lead to acceptance and even growth.

For my family, that trip, which I was so against, gave us new experiences that helped us deal with our grief in ways that grew us even as it healed us.

Especially for a hurting teenager.

Us and Them

Working for the U.S. State Department in the diplomatic corps changed my life. Serving my country in cultures as varied as Saudi Arabia and Canada gave me a new perspective on this wonderful human community.

Anyone who has read my novels knows I have tried to incorporate these discoveries into my fiction.

Often the characters, like their creator, have little knowledge of foreign cultures before they leave the United States. They find, especially if they serve in a culture quite removed from their native one, that they make mistakes because of this cultural ignorance. I remember with embarrassment in looking back at how I sometimes showed up for meetings with my skirts shorter than they should have been for that particular culture.

Coming home from a year or so immersed in foreign happenings, I also wondered at the lack of interest my fellow Americans showed in the rest of the world. We were the premier leader of the free world, yet sometimes Americans seemed to have not the remotest interest in anything except mall shopping and eating.

I also think Americans tend to be unaware of the responsibility given them by their privileged position. Once you serve as a visa officer in a U.S. embassy and see the long lines of people who want to visit, study, do business, and, yes, will lie to get a visa to enter your country, you realize it will be a while before you take for granted the blessings given you.

You also understand that if Americans squander the opportunities given them to lead humanely and humbly, they will forever forfeit their privileged position.

Murder and Pilgrimage in Montreal

Probably the most enjoyable of several locales to which I was assigned in the U.S. Foreign Service was Montreal, Canada.

Montreal is a vibrant city in the French speaking province of Quebec. The St. Lawrence River flows past it on its way from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

My husband and I biked several times along the river. We also hiked up Mount Royal, overlooking the city.

We ate in Montreal’s many restaurants, sampling the cuisine of numerous countries from which its migrant populations have come.

We rented a condo in one of the renovated buildings in the older section of the city, a locale reminiscent of French towns known by many of the early settlers.

The old town features prominently in my newest novel, A Second Grieving. Indeed, Mark Pacer, the main character of Grieving, is drawn into the aftermath of a murder in the lobby of an old Montreal building.

A fiction, of course. No murder occurred anywhere near us while we lived in the old city, but it made a stunning locale for the book.

Featured in Grieving is the new swell of displaced people disturbing settled democracies. Though the story takes place in the late 1980’s, the movements which would roil the world in later decades are a part of this story.

Countless immigrants have found new beginnings in both Canada and the United States. But what of native cultures overwhelmed from the beginning by these new cultures?

No easy answers exist. The story frames questions in a fictional format.

Along the way, Mark continues his spiritual pilgrimage, some of it while sitting in a chapel of the Notre-Dame Basilica in old Montreal.

A Pilgrimage from Nashville to the Purpose Based Novel

Southern Writers Magazine has published a blog of mine in its Suite T section: “Pilgrimage with the Purpose Based Novel.”

It’s an updated rendering of a Southern gal’s journey from the home of the Grand Ole Opry to a career in lands she’d only dreamed of visiting. Inevitable, I suppose, that I did as I’d always done: tried to make sense of overwhelming changes through writing.

I’d tried telling it first in From Y’all to Assalamu Alaikum: A Southern Baptist Discovers the Middle East.

The article is a shorter version, which means maybe I’ve learned at least something along the way.

 

 

Story and Place and Growth

Most fiction series follow the story of a main character—perhaps through major life changes and/or some type of inner growth. The changes may happen even while the character is solving crimes or experiencing world changing events.

Mark Pacer, main character of the series I’ve chosen to write, changes through relationships and solving problems thrust at him. The countries where his job takes him also exert influence.

Mark is a U.S. Foreign Service officer. Another name for that profession is diplomat, but Mark doesn’t like to be called that. It doesn’t sound like who he is, an Appalachian boy, the first of his poor but proud Southern family to attend college.

They clash sometime, his profession and his upbringing. He is forever a non-belonger.

Nevertheless, he learns from experiences in each place his career takes him: Washington, D.C. for his training, then the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Egypt (so far).

Through the various cultures and the challenges in each, he explores himself and his country, his family and his inner yearnings.

The world, he begins to understand, is a huge mixture of peoples and cultures. His own upbringing may stand the test of the challenges, but he will be changed, no doubt about it.

Indeed, none of us today lives in a single culture. To understand the times is to understand how the computer/internet age has forever made impossible an understanding based only on one’s country of citizenship.

Stuck

My latest fiction attempt isn’t flying off the pages lately. Maybe it’s because Mark Pacer, my main character, is stuck, too.

With the help of a friend, he overcame the early stages of grief (Thy Dross to Consume). He has family; he’s not alone.

Still, he’s just going through the motions lately. Coping.

My idea is: shortly, someone is coming into his life to shake him up. He’ll have to decide some things.

I’ve left Mark in the late 1980’s time wise. Maybe I’m coping myself with this fictional return to that in-between era. It’s a return to that time immediately before my life changing decision that took me around the world. Both the world and I changed after that.

In this return to that in-between time, the Soviet Union already is changing. The U.S. President is an older guy, conservative. Is he too set in his ways to handle potential changes? Is the country he leads too set in its ways?

Mark is serving his latest U.S. diplomatic stint in Canada. It’s nice to live in a country with western values again. But maybe it’s a little boring after the Middle East?

Something is going to happen to shake him up. I’ve got the idea, but it’s still fluid, seeking its course.

Though he’s not yet middle-aged, Mark has traveled to the outskirts of a Dante-an dark wood.

Someone from the past enters his life again. His children are growing and asking hard questions. Finally, his work involves him in the first tip of an iceberg coming into view—the refugee crisis that later will turn into a flood.

What does he do now?

Writing Journey in Thy Dross to Consume

Mark Pacer, a U.S. diplomat raised in Mocking Bird, Georgia, solves mysteries related to his profession. He is again the main character in Thy Dross to Consume, the fifth novel of the series.

An older American man lies in a coma in a hospital in Cairo, Egypt. Mark, from the U.S. embassy, must find a next of kin to notify. The phone number in the man’s U.S. passport has been disconnected. No one, it seems, in the States or in Egypt knows who he is.

For Mark, suffering his own recent loss, the search for this man’s family becomes a pilgrimage.

That’s the plot in a nutshell: a mystery, changing relationships, and the old question of “why do the innocent suffer.”

Mark constantly struggles to reconcile his upbringing in a dysfunctional Appalachian church with his desire for a genuine faith.

A reviewer of one of my earlier books hit on a dilemma I face in marketing my writing. I’m not what is commonly called a “Christian” or “inspirational” writer.

I’m a Christian who writes.

If I say I’m a “Christian” writer, some take this to mean a certain type of literature. This genre is for Christians, often Christians who desire stories with strong “evangelical” themes. (Though I find the term “evangelical” unhelpful these days. It has become political, not simply related to spreading good news.)

This is not to denigrate those firmly set in the “Christian” market. I don’t write science fiction, but I certainly consider science fiction a legitimate genre.

I’ve decided, I write fiction for Christians, as well as other spiritually attuned, who don’t normally read “Christian” fiction.

Creativity’s A Funny Thing

If you have a story to tell, tell it. If you have an image to draw, draw it. If you have a song to sing, sing it. A poem, a sculpture, a wall hanging, a garden . . . Whatever.

Maybe you’ll be able to share it with the world. Maybe not. But strike while the muse is hot. Use it, or it will disappear, and you’ll be the poorer, if not the world.

Creativity is a subjective process, not like a journey from Point A to Point B that you plot on a map. The fulfilment of the creative process requires discipline, to be sure, but it is never tamed or owned, only borrowed from the Creator.

“The components of the material world are fixed; those of the world of imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without any destruction or rearrangement of what went before. This represents the nearest approach we experience to ‘creation out of nothing,’ . . . Thus, Berdyaev is able to say: ‘God created the world by imagination.’”
                                       —Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

Writing Down the There

Reviewing my earlier novels for newer editions, I revisit my struggles to explain what my stories are about.

I’m not even sure I can define their genre. They’re all over the place. History—yes, at least “near” history, post World War II. Romances? Sometimes. Mysteries? Partly. Relationships and spiritual struggles? Often.

I write because it’s there. Whatever “there” is. Even as a child, I imagined stories to make sense of experiences.

My religious faith occupied and occupies a defining part of my life. I do not, however, write books to “convert.” I’m neither evangelist nor apologist. More searcher, I suppose.

I don’t set out to write what has been defined as “inspirational” or “Christian” books, but neither do I hide a faith journey as a part of my characters’ stories. At least two editors have told me that I can’t go between like that, neither fish nor fowl. Well, I do, but it hasn’t been easy.

My earlier novels do bend more to the “Christian” kind of writing. However, my first book issued by a publisher (the then Broadman Press, in 1984) was the closest to “inspirational” writing. Yet, this book’s main character was a divorced woman, something unusual in those days for a “Christian” publisher.

My newer series is the story of an Appalachian young man traveling literally and figuratively between two worlds. his home, in the 1950 and 60’s, and the world as it evolves in later decades and into the twenty-first century.

I call it “near” history. Our rapid journey from what we were only a few decades ago to what we are now surely spans more changes than ever in human history. Why? How?

When the culture of a religiously influenced generation meets a different world, what happens?

Specifically, what happens to the beliefs and allegiances of an Appalachian young man and his family and friends in a world of terrorism and refugees and upheaval?

It’s an intriguing quest.

Notes on a Fractured American

Quotes from Where I Belong:

“If you want to live in foreign parts, you should be a missionary. That’s what we wanted for you. God gave you this miraculous way with languages—that none of us ever had or even thought about. That’s why we let you take that scholarship and leave us to go to college.”

And the son answers his father:

“I never felt called to be a missionary.” The words escaped, propelled by frustration that found its outlet. “That was your dream, not mine.”

A young man raised in the north Georgia mountains accepts a career as a U.S. diplomat—about as far away from his upbringing as his father could imagine. A career, his father believes, that would surely involve becoming “a fancy pants who talks all uppish and probably drinks a lot—well, things like that don’t belong to people like us.”

The young protagonist, Mark Pacer, becomes a kind of hybrid. He’s left much of his upbringing behind to follow a totally different career and lifestyle, one hardly understood by relatives and friends from his childhood.

Yet he’s shadowed by that upbringing. His accent, of course, follows him, always setting him apart as soon as he speaks.

But more than that, he retains much from his childhood. He has shorn away many of the prejudices that warped some in his early community, but he finds many of his father’s teachings reflected in the oddest places where he travels in his career.

They shine back at him from a “foreign” friend who strengthens him to keep promises. Or they press him to help the vulnerable people he meets. Or they lead him to turn down career-enhancing moves because of less selfish motives.

Throughout his career, beginning in the 1970’s, Mark mirrors the disjointed society his country becomes. He struggles to toss out the garbage of an outmoded, even evil past while cherishing its treasures.

Some of the foundation built in his childhood is bedrock, other is sand. His life is an effort to discover which to stand on and which to let wash away.

Using Story to Explore Questions

When I was young, so young I barely remember those times, my father told me stories. I don’t remember that he ever told me fairy tales. He told me stories from history, from the books he was constantly reading. I grew up on stories of middle Tennessee, where we lived, and others from American history, including World War II and the beginnings of the Cold War.

If he had the chance, he would have been, I’m sure, a marvelous teacher of history to young people. Unfortunately, his formal schooling ended two years into high school after he dropped out to support parents and younger siblings.

I never heard him complain about it. He enjoyed the opportunities that came to him. He loved working with young people in our church. He read widely, from history and sometimes novels.

When our family visited historic sites on family vacations, he told us stories that encouraged our imagination about the events that happened there. And he passed his penchant for history to me.

I didn’t become a history teacher, either. I turned to journalism, then other circumstances intervened. My years of working overseas in U.S. embassies and consulates fed that love of history, of exploring how and why countries were different or alike.

As the world changed dramatically in those years, I wanted to know what led to those changes. I explored the events and processes happening years, decades, even centuries ago leading to today’s current events.

I write novels to explore what happened to the people in the midst of those changes. Fiction frees our imagination to see beyond the facts and encourages flashes of insight.

Midnight Wanderings Led to New Novel

Terrorists attacked a residential compound in Saudi Arabia in May, 2004, where Americans and other expatriates lived. I was working in the U.S. State Department’s “watch” or operations center in Washington at the time.

On my last overseas assignment before returning to the U.S. to work on the watch, I lived near the attacked compound. I visited for meals in restaurants there. I attended meetings of American women, one of whom was wounded in the attack. Because I knew the area, I was able to provide a summary of the compound’s layout to the watch team as we kept up with events and provided input to State Department officials.

The State Department operations center is staffed with career U.S. Foreign Service officers taking a Washington assignment between appointments overseas, as I was. Some hours on weekends or nights were dull, but worth it for the privilege of those adrenalin laced moments when we had a front row seat to a crisis erupting on the world scene.

Coming to work for midnight shifts on the watch, walking down empty, echoing hallways in the State Department, my overactive imagination pictured lurking spies waiting for the opportunity to steal classified documents, perhaps to kill if they were thwarted.

It seemed natural to center my third novel in the Mark Pacer mystery/family relationship series around those evenings loaded with my imaginings . . .

He reached the nearest elevator and punched the button. The elevator hummed as it descended from an upper level, then shuddered to an opening. He began his first step inside, his hand instinctively held out in case the elevator door started to close prematurely.
Then Mark halted, one foot in the doorway, his hand remaining out as he saw a man’s contorted face staring back at him. . . .
The man collapsed with his knees bent. Was he aware of his tall frame and the small space of the elevator floor? He turned slightly, resting on his left shoulder, his face toward Mark.
Mark forced the elevator door open as it tried to close, his mind noting further details; a part of him frozen in shock, another part of him driven to analyze. The man forced a groan, as though it was pulled involuntarily from him, and his right arm stretched to within inches of Mark’s foot. Finally, a dark stain puddled on the floor from the man’s right shoulder. His expensive suit would be ruined . . .

Thankfully, this experience never happened during my tenure on the watch. During those nighttime hours, however, with their aura of haunting, I could easily imagine it.

Between Literary and Commercial, Religious and Secular, Plot and Character, and Other Conundrums

In “Literary Lust vs Commercial Cash” (Writer’s Digest, December 2006), the successful author, Jodi Picoult, commented on her struggle between writing commercial or literary fiction.

“At some point in your career, you’ll be forced to choose either the commercial path or the literary one.” The reason, she said, has less to do with writing and more to do with marketing.

Similar to Picoult’s dilemma between literary and commercial (she manages to write books that are both) is my dilemma between marketing myself as a “religious” writer or as a writer of international mysteries and family relationships. My books aren’t what are termed “inspirational” even though religious choices exert influence on the main characters, if only made in a distant past.

My intended audience is the “spiritually engaged news junkie” as well as the reader who just prefers fiction with an international element.

Some of the audiences I’m aiming for are Christians who don’t normally read “Christian” books. They prefer certain secular books that, to them, present deep truths in a more subtle fashion.

I also write for tolerant unbelievers who don’t mind a character wrestling with life’s perplexities within a faith context.

In terms of character and plot, I enjoy the type of hybrid novels written by Charles Todd, writer of the Inspector Ian Rutledge series. These novels are not strictly a detective series. They are character mysteries about a British detective afflicted with post traumatic stress disorder due to service in World War I.

For myself, I’m still searching for that hybrid connection between authentic faith and a messy world, one that doesn’t always color between the lines.

Revisiting the Melungeons, Spur to a Story

When I was growing up in Tennessee, I was fascinated by legends about the Melungeons. The legends told of a mysterious people, with European practices, already in the Appalachians when the earliest white settlers arrived.

Speculation abounded, even as the group was shunned, a dark people, looked down on by many of the newcomers. Were they descendants of whites married to native Americans? Descendants of shipwrecked Portuguese sailors off the coast of North Carolina? Descendants of free blacks married to native Americans? Descendants of the Lost Colony of Virginia, which vanished from history at the end of the 16th century? Or even descendants of European Jews escaping persecution?

Imagine my surprise when I picked up a copy of The Economist (August 27, 2016) to find an article on the Melungeons. The author had traveled to “Snake Hollow . . . between the ridge and Powell Mountain and hard on Tennessee’s northeastern border.” Stories from that neck of the woods don’t often make it into the pages of an international magazine. The article concludes with a quote from the president of the Melungeon Heritage Association: “The Melungeons . . . are part of the fabric of Appalachia. The fabric of America.”

A few years ago, I put the Melungeons into a story of mine, Quiet Deception, a hybird mystery/romance set on the mythical college campus of Adair in one of my favorite places, the Appalachians of east Tennessee. I called them the Painter Mountain people. One of the Painter Mountain people attends Adair, the first in her family to enter college. Her sympathetic understanding of the distraught main character gives this character an incentive to find answers to two mysteries, including a possible origin for some Painter Mountain people. . . .

If Winter Comes

“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”
–Percy Bysshe Shelley; “Ode to the West Wind”

Many years ago, I watched a television interview with one of the American hostages of the 1979 Iranian takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. The hostage, released with the others in 1981, spoke of her ordeal. She impressed me with her courage and resilience.

Later, after I joined the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service, I worked with another former hostage. I also served with one of the Americans who escaped capture, the basis for the fictionalized movie, Argo, winner of the Academy Award in 2013 for best motion picture.

In security seminars, required before we left for our foreign postings, other former hostages passed on to us the lessons they had learned during captivity. We were aware that, as embassy officers, we would probably be evacuated at least once or twice from a post threatened by terrorism or insurrection, if not worse, in our careers. (The magic number for me was two evacuations.)

No surprise, then, that Mark Pacer, the protagonist in my new series, beginning his State Department career in the late 1970’s, would be affected by the 1979 hostage crisis. If Winter Comes takes place from 1977 to 1981.

The hostage taking and its aftermath form a major part of the book. It’s a story of the crisis, but also of how one couple deals with the resulting threats to their marriage.

Don’t Straightjacket Fiction by Genre

The Grantchester books by James Runcie are a mystery series. Yet this designation alone straitjackets them. These stories of an English priest in the decades following World War II are also about relationships and cultural change.

How do you classify the Mitford series by Jan Karon? An American minister in his sixties falls in love with the divorced woman next door. A romance series? Small mysteries weave in and out, too. Are the books an example of the romance/mystery genre? Family relationships play an important role in the stories. In fact, for me, relationships are the key to the series. Family saga perhaps?

New designations for fiction like the Mitford series, the Grantchester series, and other novels of this type include the terms cross-genre and upmarket (a type of hybrid commercial/literary fiction).

My chief difficulty in marketing my novels is settling on a genre to place them in. Mystery? International intrigue? Love story? Family relationships?

In pitching fiction, writers are told, they must state the genre. Why? Because to market the book, a seller, whether owner of a physical bookstore or an ebook distributor, must know where to place the book—the shelf or category.

Genre is a marketing tool. It works well for novels like straight detective stories or romance or horror. It works less well for mixed stories. If they must be marketed by genre, at least the back cover copy can hint at a story beyond the genre straitjacket.

Where I Belong: a Novel About an Appalachian Non-Belonger

Yesterday I learned that my most recent novel, Where I Belong, is one of the 2016 finalists for the Selah Award.

Sometimes my stories begin in my head as a search for answers to questions. This novel began, as best I can remember, with the question: how does a young man from the southern Appalachians, raised by loving but imperfect parents, adjust to the outside world?

This age of refugees reminds us of the non-belonger. Refugees are those fleeing Syria’s brutal horror, but they are also the homeless in our cities.

Mark Pacer, the twenty-something young adult leaving tight-knit kinfolk behind to enter another era is, for a while, a non-belonger—to the older generation and sometimes to his new peers.

What do we owe our past tribes when we leave them, if anything?

What do we owe our families, if we are fortunate enough to have nurturing families? What do we not owe our families? What if we are drawn to different values?

When we leave one culture for another, whether as obvious refugees or less obvious ones, how do we handle our loneliness, the loneliness of the non-belonger? What values do we keep when entering a different culture, or when an alien culture threatens our own?

The Old Testament talks of the strangers and the aliens and calls us to treat them kindly.

Short as the Watch That Ends the Night

My father introduced me to history. For him, it wasn’t a collection of boring dates. History was people.

He enthralled me with fascinating tales of hillbilly ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War in lesser known battles like Kings Mountain. He told me stories of Winston Churchill and the Battle of Britain, when England stood firm against the Nazis after they conquered most of Europe.

With that upbringing, of course the stories I write now are rooted in time and place. The space that spoke to me and that I have put into my novels is the gray area that begins with the end of World War II. A schizophrenic time period—not historical fiction, but not contemporary either in its first decades.

I examine the times, asking why my country and the world changed so drastically during that time.

The Cold War with the Soviet Union descended almost immediately following World War II, when the United States accepted the mantle of world leadership.

Americans chose to enter the Vietnamese conflict, and it has haunted us ever since. Eventually, the world saw the miraculous end of the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust.

Spiritual changes were no less profound. The age of city-wide revivals passed into today’s age of the nones, the ones with no religious affiliation.

What did we do to the times and what did the times do to us? That’s what the characters in my novels seek to find out.

Why Write a Story?

In my “inspiration” folder, I keep articles by or about famous writers whom I admire.
Once in a while I review the obituary for Madeleine L’Engle, the author of the children’s classic A Wrinkle in Time, from The New York Times, September 8, 2007.

“Her writing transcended genre and generation,” Douglas Martin wrote in the obituary.

The series that included A Wrinkle in Time “combines elements of science fiction with insights into love and moral purpose . . .”

I ponder the concept of moral purpose.

L’Engle said of her most famous work: “It was only after it was written that I realized what some of it meant.”

I often write a story for no other reason than because the story is there. After I’ve written a draft or two, it dawns on me what are its reasons for being. It answers, I suppose, some question in my subconscious. The story is there, and I write it first.

In answer to the question, “Why does anybody tell a story?” L’Engle replied, “It does indeed have something to do with faith . . . faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

We divide into two camps: Life has meaning or it doesn’t. L’Engle came down on the side of purpose and blessed us with her insights.