ART OF POETRY LEADS TO MYSTERY: Guest Post by Amanda Flower

Amanda Flower: Art of Poetry Leads to Mystery

I’m a good writer, but a terrible poet. It’s true, I have taken countless writing courses over my schooling and even as an adult, and I always dreaded the poetry units. Even though I can write a beautiful line now and again, poetry is not my gift as a writer. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate it. In fact, the art of poetry has inspired several of my novels, and I know that it will have a huge impact on my career in the future. But it won’t be the poetry I write.

My appreciation of poetry all started with Emily Dickinson. I fell in love with Dickinson when I was a teenager sitting in my American Literature class. I guess as a day-dreamy fifteen-year-old, I was fascinated with her writing about nature, life, and death. She struck the right notes with me at the time and has stuck with me as my preferences for literature have changed over the years. 

Twenty years later, my first novel featuring Dickinson released. Crime and Poetry was the first book in the Magical Bookshop Mysteries. In the novel, the protagonist solves a murder that takes place in a small village near Niagara Falls, New York with the poems of Dickinson. It was my chance to share everything I knew of Dickinson after years of study but allowed me to remain within the safety of my wheelhouse as a writer, which is writing contemporary cozy mysteries. The cozy subgenre is my first love as a writer, and I will always write them, but after writing Crime and Poetry and the subsequent books in the series that used the works of other famous nineteenth century writers, such as Alcott, Poe, Whitman, and Thoreau, I had the itch to write something deeper about Dickinson. This desire eventually led to Because I Could Not Stop for Death, my first historical mystery that features Dickinson as the sleuth.

Going into the book, I knew a lot of Dickinson, but what I discovered was there was so much to learn. The biggest surprise for me was discovering that Dickinson traveled to Washington DC in 1855 to visit her father who was finishing his term in the House of Representatives. The fact was so contrary to the typical image of Dickinson, which was a woman in white bent over a desk writing day and night. I knew this historical event had to be a cornerstone of the plot.

I was a librarian for fifteen years, and being a librarian in this case was an advantage and a disadvantage. As an advantage, I knew how to research efficiently and effectively. I also knew that if I wasn’t able to find something I needed, another librarian somewhere most likely could. As a disadvantage, I knew that I would never been able to know and digest everything known about Emily Dickinson, and I would have to force myself to stop researching at a point and actually write the book. That does not come natural to a librarian. Every librarian will tell you that she had researched a reference question more than once long after the patron was gone.

However, I finally stopped the research and wrote the novel, and I’m thrilled with the final result. It was my hardest book to write and the one I’m most proud of. Because I Could Not Stop for Death releases on September 20^th, and I think on that day my appreciation for poetry will come full circle. Even though I already knew at the age of fifteen that I wanted to be a mystery novelist, there was no way that girl sitting in the classroom could have imagined what an impact Emily Dickinson would have on her life.

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Amanda Flower is a USA Today bestselling and Agatha Award-winning author of over forty mystery novels. Her novels have received starred reviews from Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and Romantic Times, and she had been featured in USA Today, First for Women, and Woman’s World. In addition to being a writer, she was a librarian for fifteen years. Today, Flower and her husband own a farm and recording studio, and they live in Northeast Ohio with their adorable cats.