Mixing the Personal with Fiction by Susan Van Kirk

 

Have you ever wondered whether books you read have names, places, or happenings that are personal to the author? It’s like thinking about songs you loved and wondering how they came to be written and what they mean to the composer.

People who live in my town of Monmouth, Illinois, or in my hometown of Galesburg, only twelve miles east, often ask me if a particular place in my books is really based on a location in one of these towns. Oftentimes it is. That’s part of the fun of slipping in the personal.

Grace Kimball, the protagonist of my Endurance Mysteries, is a retired English teacher just like me. So, of course that’s personal. Her town is much larger than mine, but it shares many similarities. Like me, she is often running into adults she once had as students—sometimes two or three-generation families. Here’s a true—yes, it really happened—story Grace tells in the book Marry in Haste. She’s walking down the corridor of the Endurance Hospital when she sees a hospital aide pushing a patient in a wheelchair. She remembers: Andrew Weatherby. His locker was right outside my classroom his sophomore year. One day I heard a commotion and walked out to the hallway. It was a girl fight—the worst kind of fight. Andrew nonchalantly leaned against the wall and pointed out his twin sister Ally. “She’s the one on the top, beating the crap out of Lisa Watkins.” He leaned forward and shouted, “Hit her again, Ally!” Alphabetical propinquity. The following year, their lockers were moved to the lower junior hallway and all was quiet on my hallway again.

The town square in Endurance is more a circle than a square. No one ever knew how to drive around it because there were two lanes, and trying to change lanes to get off the square was forever difficult. Everyone taking driver’s education in our town knows what I mean. In Three May Keep a Secret, Grace explains, “No one knew the official rules for driving around the square, so defensive driving was the local custom. This was particularly true since Danny Walker, after a few beers at Patsy’s Pub, decided to cruise the square multiple times in the wrong direction and took out a fire hydrant and two signs for the Little People’s Daycare Center and Bert’s Collision Shop (‘You Scratch It, We Patch It’). The only thing Danny missed was the neon ‘Open’ sign for the Homestretch Funeral Home, but the hazy memory of seeing it go past several times undoubtedly contributed to his contrition once he sobered up.” Last summer, our square was totally renovated with lots of green space, flowers, and a new traffic pattern. It’s so much better and less dangerous, so the old square is simply immortalized in my mystery.

Finally, I should mention the huge old mansion that is in every one of the Endurance mysteries. I lived in it on the first floor when my husband and I first moved to Monmouth. It had been built right after the Civil War and was divided into five apartments by 1968 when we moved there. It has a very intriguing history, much of which I found out at the local courthouse. This scene is written almost exactly as I lived it in Death Takes No Bribes. Grace goes to the county clerk’s office and asks for the plat book for 402 W. Broadway (the actual address in real life.) The poor young girl explains that that book hasn’t been digitized yet. Grace still wants to see it. So the girl goes up to the attic and finds this gargantuan book, drags it down, drops it on the counter, and dust goes flying in every direction. Yes, that happened in my real life. The gorgeous handwriting of the various clerks from the late 1800s is beautiful to behold. 

That house is in every one of the Endurance mysteries. A diary from the 1800s is hidden there, and Grace finds it in Marry in Haste. It tells the scary story of a young woman who lived in the house a hundred years earlier. Grace’s future husband, Jeff Maitlin, buys the house and renovates it to use as a bed-and-breakfast. Now you’re up to date.

 

The town of Endurance, a small town on the edge of the Illinois prairie, built by Scotch Presbyterians, civilized by women, and containing a town square, a huge Victorian, and a local college, are not figments of my imagination. Well, okay. I did change some of the details, but that’s why we call my books fiction.

If you're a writer, do you add the fictional to the real life adventures of your past?

Susan Van Kirk, an Illinois author, was educated at Knox College and the University of Illinois. She is the author of six Endurance Mysteries beginning with Three May Keep a Secret. Her standalone mystery, A Death at Tippitt Pond, was followed by the Art Center Mysteries: Death in a Pale Hue, Death in a Bygone Hue, and Death in a Ghostly Hue from Level Best Books. Her latest is a memoir about teaching called Mr. Vonnegut and Me (And Other Incredible Tales from a Teaching Life.) Member of MWA and past president of the Guppy Chapter of SinC. Her website: susanvankirk.com