Nurturing a Farm and Its Farmer: Guest Post by Susan Oleksiw

Susan Oleksiw: 
Nurturing a Farm and Its Farmer

When my family purchased a farm in central Massachusetts forty years ago, I knew almost nothing about the area. My mother described her first view of the property as "dreamy," and listed the reasons she and Dad were drawn to. The first time I visited the area, I knew the real reason they'd chosen it.

The Franklin County landscape looked a lot like southwestern Connecticut where they'd had their first farm, in the 1930s and 1940s, and where my brothers and I were born. In their retirement years they were going back to their roots, or at least some of them. For me, the attraction was different.

The Berkshires have the mountains and pretty tourist resorts, the coastal areas have the ocean and access to Boston, but the central part of the state has a sense of time past, of small farming communities straddling the age of the decline of light industry and growth of bedroom communities. Life eddies along the border with New Hampshire and Vermont, and Boston is no longer The Hub. These towns have a sense of rooted authenticity, now fading.

This is the kind of setting that seems perfect, in my view, for stories that explore different ways of life and contemporary issues. Farmers are certainly at the forefront of environmental concerns, with questions of pesticide use, fluctuating markets, and political winds swirling. And yet, despite being remote from urban centers, such areas struggle with some of the same problems, such as a diversifying population seeking work, an influx of well-educated workers looking for cheaper housing, and an aging population worried about the next generation of workers. At present, the average age of farm owners in this state is in the mid-fifties.

The idea of a woman who had the gift of healing came to me when I realized I knew someone who was a healer in a Spiritualist church in the area. Feeling very ignorant and uninformed about all this I began my research, beginning with reading about the cunning folk of Ireland, practitioners of magic and considered wise men and women who counterbalanced black magic and aided in solving crimes. Active up to the nineteenth century, the cunning folk gradually faded along with fears about witchcraft. A history of the occult in America, including the rise of spiritualism, was fascinating, and very informative, and I was slowly inching my way toward a clearer identity for Felicity O'Brien, my protagonist.

Though I had listened to my parents and older brothers for years talk about the Connecticut farm, I didn't know a lot about farming. I turned to memoirs by farmers, and decided not to take up beekeeping or open a small mill. I also discarded the idea of apple orchards, pigs, and horses. I quite liked the idea of goats and chickens--for a while.

Even though I grew up doing a lot of handwork, I discarded the idea of making my sleuth a quilter, knitter, or other craftsperson. I preferred having her outdoors, and often in the woods. With an unexplained gift of healing inherited from her mother's line, Felicity would be a regular farmer coping with the stresses besetting a traditional way of life in a modern world.

I located my fictional town of West Woodbury in Franklin County, considered the most rural county in Massachusetts as well as the poorest. Home to 71,000 people, 26 municipalities, and over 700 farms, the County is one of three defining The Pioneer Valley, running along the Connecticut River. Both towns and farms are small; the average farm is about one hundred acres, and only four municipalities have more than five thousand residents. Felicity's property, Tall Tree Farm, is on the large side, at 500 acres, and my fictional town, West Woodbury, is closer to four thousand people.

The cliche of dozens of murders occurring in tiny fictional towns has never bothered me. If I try to justify it at all I think of all those murders as a literary manifestation of the normal conflicts that arise between people when they're fighting for what they care about. Farm communities and small towns may seem quiet, but plenty of dark feelings seethe beneath green corn stalks and baskets of shiny red apples.

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Susan Oleksiw is the author of the Mellingham mystery series and the Anita Ray mystery series. Beyond the Treeline, her first installment in A Pioneer Valley Mystery series, debuted on September 8 from Midnight Ink. 

Born and raised in New England, Susan Oleksiw has long been fascinated by the traditional New Englander and the way of life found there. She is the co-founder of Level Best Books, which publishes an annual anthology of the best New England crime fiction. Her writing has appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, and she has served as coeditor for The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing. 

Before she entered into a life of crime, Susan studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where she received a PhD in Asian studies. The author has also spent time living in India, and her fondness for the country lives on through her passion for photography. You can see more on all of her mystery series, as well as featured snapshots of her travels to India at SusanOleksiw.com.

Writing Setting, Writing Tokyo: Guest Post by Michael Pronko

Michael Pronko’s Tokyo-based mystery, The Last Train, was released May 31, 2017. Michael is the author of three collections of award-winning writings on Tokyo Life, Beauty and Chaos, Tokyo’s Mystery Deepens, and Motions and Moments, the latter won twelve indie press awards. He is a professor of American Literature and Culture at Meiji Gakuin University, in Tokyo, where he has lived for the last twenty years. He also writes about jazz on his site Jazz in Japan. He is currently working on the next mystery in the series, Japan Hand, due out in early 2018. www.michaelpronko.com @pronkomichael www.facebook.com/pronkoauthor/ 

Michael Pronko:
Writing Setting, Writing Tokyo

Setting is one of the trickiest parts of writing a novel. It can enrich a scene or dampen it, act as a springboard or a wall. When I set my mystery, The Last Train, in Tokyo, I wondered how much readers would have seen of Tokyo, if anything. “Lost in Translation” maybe? I knew the setting was integral to the story, but how to get that across to readers with only a few telling, or rather showing, images?

I had it easy when I wrote columns about Tokyo life from a foreigner’s point of view for Newsweek Japan. The readers of the Japanese-language column were mainly Tokyoites, so I could skip a lot of description. If I wrote, “ramen shop counter,” everyone in Tokyo knows just what that looks like and what happens there. If I wrote, “large sake bottle,” people know what the size and shape and color is, how one pours from the big bottle into a teensy cup. So, how to choose the right details for readers who have never been to a sake bar or to Tokyo at all? That was the challenge.

Action helps immensely. When I write a Tokyo setting, certain actions make sense: taking trains, looking up at the buildings, weaving through the crowds. So, I included those actions as part of the overall setting, and integrated them into the story. Typical, everyday action adds to the static descriptions of setting to make it come alive. Tokyo without the ceaseless trains, blinking neon and fast-moving crowds would not be Tokyo. The dynamism of each setting keeps it from becoming static description and helps the reader feel that this action—and this story—could only take place in this setting.

When writing about Tokyo for people who may have never been there, it is hard to know which details work best, and in what proportion. Too much detail and the setting sinks like a dead weight. Too little detail and the story could take place anywhere. I’ve lived in Tokyo for twenty years, so when I started working on the settings, I spent a lot of time thinking back to my first impressions of the city. I also watched tourists (there’s been a tourist boom recently) to see what they were looking at, and imagining what grabbed them. When I write the first draft, I always slather on way too many details. I jam in every color, object, smell, size and sound I can. But then on successive drafts, I ask myself, what is quintessentially Tokyo? With that in mind, I peel off and discard what’s unneeded. It’s more chiseling and whittling than writing.

Another way I think of setting is cinematically. When visualizing a scene, I try to think like a cinematographer. (Check out the documentary “Visions of Light” on cinematography.) Lighting, framing, angles, distance should all be part of the description of a setting. Most importantly, a setting should create the feeling of motion. I think in two ways, long shot and close-up. I try to look around a scene to find both a sweeping detail for the big picture (“Lighted signs listing the clubs zipped up the sides of buildings from sidewalk to rooftop.”) And then small, pointed details bring it up close, like the name of a club, “Black Moon, Kingdom Come.” That doesn’t have to be like a helicopter over the city kind of shot, or a long, lingering shot on the face of the heroine, which is a bit outdated, but just a sentence or two that moves the reader’s mind’s eye over the space and then onto a central focus.

To get setting right, I close my eyes a lot when I write, and often go back to places I want to describe. Tokyo is big so that takes a lot of time. I go there and let my emotional response direct me towards details and words. And sometimes I google things. What does a metal lathe look like? I kind of know, but since it’s a key object in one setting, the main character hides money below the lathe, pulling up a few images of lathes and looking them over helps decide how to present that part of the setting. All of this is aimed at making the reader not just see the lathe, but smell the machine oil and dust of the factory floor, to not just see the glass holding cold sake on a humid night, but to taste it. When I wrote: “The sake flowed gently over the top of the lip of the glass into the box, arousing the aroma of cedar and fresh rice,” then the first sip of sake is anticipated. Or, at least, it is for me.

In working with the setting of Tokyo, I am lucky, I feel. The city is photogenic in all kinds of ways, and endlessly diverse. It’s also a huge place, so I’ll never run out of settings. I’ve lived here writing and teaching for long enough to know the city well, but that’s not enough. I always re-view and re-imagine Tokyo from the reader’s point of view. In The Last Train, I wanted to be sure readers could not just see Tokyo, but feel they were in Tokyo, or want to be.