Forgotten Arts

by Linda Rodriguez
(Linda is taking a blogging break this summer. This blog was previously published on June 4, 2018)

In my series of Skeet Bannion mystery novels, Skeet’s best friend, Karen, owns a shop called Forgotten Arts, offering knitting, spinning, and weaving supplies, as well as a farm with a herd of sheep. This shop is basically in the book because I love to knit, spin, and weave, and I’ve always had a little daydream of having just such a shop of my own.

It probably all began with my grandmothers. One of them was an excellent needlewoman who taught me to sew doll clothes and doll quilts, using the scraps from her many sewing and quilting projects. This grandmother even made spring corsages for each granddaughter from old nylon stockings, cut up and dyed into violets, iris, lilies, and roses. The other grandmother knit and crocheted afghans, sweaters, even golf-club covers. Neither of them knew how to spin or weave, as far as I know.

Both of my grandmothers were great “makers from scratch,” though, whether with food, such as bread, butter, cheeses, and such, or with household items, such as candles, lotions, soaps, washcloths, and dish towels. My Cherokee grandmother even made her own baskets and medicines with herbs from her garden and wild-harvested plants. Most of these medicines, foods, and household items were more effective or better-tasting than the mass-produced versions available in stores and pharmacies.

Beginning as a childhood apprentice to these two grand old dames, I set off on a lifelong quest for the forgotten arts. I had a huge library (it's still larger than most), and one of the categories within it is that of how-to books. I have books on how to design and make furniture from cast-off materials, how to make braided rugs, how to make doll houses and furniture, how to make canned foods and jellies, how to make your own purses and shoes, and books on yogurt making and felt making—and I have made all of these things and more. I seek out books on forgotten arts, such as spinning, weaving, smocking, rug hooking, tatting, and bobbin-lace making. (I’ve done the first three, but haven’t tried the last three yet.) I even have books on how to build your own log cabin or barn from scratch, how to raise and milk a goat, and how to grow and use your own natural-dye garden. If all these dystopian novels and movies come true and we have some kind of societal collapse, I’m the neighbor you want to have.

Of course, now that writing—and a move half finished—has taken over my life, my big floor loom sits, disassembled, in one end of the living room, my sewing machine is packed away in its box, my spinning wheels sit, neglected, in a corner, and gorgeous hand-knit projects languish unfinished stacked in plastic bins in what will become my combination office and studio. I still believe these crafts have great value. I used to make time for them in a busy life, but I’ve lost that knack somewhere and need to recover it for a sense of balance, so I wrote into my books a character who has that balance and that fibercraft store that I used to dream of owning.

Now that I have downsized and moved (though my unpacking and settling in was

interrupted by various physical illnesses and injuries), I have let go many of the books, including some of the how-to books (like building log cabins and raising goats), but most of those and the loom, spinning wheels,and sewing machine made the move with me. I've decided that a new house can also equal a new way of living and am determined to put more balance into my life. But I still won't have my own fiberarts shop or herd of sheep, except in the Skeet books.

In your own writing, what aspect of your life finds its way as a part of your story? Do you give a character some passion or aspect of your own personality? And when you’re reading, do you like to see these bits of the author’s personality embodied in the work?

Linda Rodriguez's Dark Sister: Poems has just been released. Plotting the Character-Driven Novel, based on her popular workshop, and The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East, an anthology she co-edited, were published to high praise in 2017. Every Family Doubt, her fourth mystery novel featuring Cherokee campus police chief, Skeet Bannion, and Revising the Character-Driven Novel will be published in 2019. Her three earlier Skeet novels—Every Hidden Fear, Every Broken Trust, and Every Last Secret—and her books of poetry—Skin Hunger and Heart's Migration—have received critical recognition and awards, such as St. Martin's Press/Malice Domestic Best First Novel, International Latino Book Award, Latina Book Club Best Book of 2014, Midwest Voices & Visions, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, Thorpe Menn Award, and Ragdale and Macondo fellowships. Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” published in the anthology, Kansas City Noir, has been optioned for film.

Rodriguez is past chair of the AWP Indigenous Writer’s Caucus, past president of Border Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of International Thriller Writers, Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, and Kansas City Cherokee Community. Visit her at http://lindarodriguezwrites.blogspot.com

A Life of Her Own

by Linda Rodriguez

My husband came home after a run-in with someone at work who inherited wealth and who specializes in not doing the work she’s responsible for, creating discord and trouble for/with everyone who works with her, and then having loud, angry, public meltdowns to get her way. Husband’s the only one at work who will stand up to her, and once again he’d had to draw a line in the sand and tell her that her behavior was inappropriate. Our son asked how she can possibly expect to keep her job with such incompetence and unprofessional behavior. I told him she felt entitled because her inherited wealth had always cushioned her from consequences and quoted someone, as I often do. It could have been Helen Keller, Emerson, the Dalai Lama, Eleanor Roosevelt, but this time it wasn’t. I quoted from my third Skeet Bannion mystery, Every Hidden Fear. “As Skeet says, ‘It’s amazing the crap people will put up with from someone with lots of money.’” My son looked at me with a little concern and said, “You do know Skeet’s not a real person, right? I mean, she’s not really alive. She didn’t really say that—you did.”

Of course, technically, he’s right. I write every word that comes out of Skeet’s mouth. But Skeet says and does things that surprise me all along. I can begin a book or chapter or scene expecting to write about Skeet doing this and saying this, only to find once it’s written that Skeet’s actually doing and saying something else entirely, something I never intended or planned or even wanted.

Skeet’s not the only character who’s become her own person. I have some others from the Skeet books and from other stories and books I’ve written or am writing who have come to life and move and speak in ways I don’t expect. It’s an extension of my lifelong reading, in which beloved characters come alive for me and continue their adventures in my head long after the book’s adventures are over. I just notice it in Skeet so much because I’ve written four books with her and am planning the next one, planning that she will blithely disregard as soon as I allow her on the page again. So I quote Skeet and other characters and ask myself what they would do in certain situations that call for strengths they have that I don’t. And yes, I am aware that very little separates me from the bag lady with the shopping cart who walks down the street having arguments with the voices in her head. I just don’t do it in public—yet.

So, tell me, am I alone in my affliction, or do you also have these people in your head who insist on living lives of their own?

Romance in the Mystery Novel—Yes, No, Maybe, Only Under Very Specific Circumstances?

My second Skeet Bannion novel, Every Broken Trust, is under production in New York right now. It will launch in April 2013. I’m playing around with an idea for a very different kind of series before I have to start my third Skeet book. This new series would not be first-person and would have two protagonists, a man and a woman who were teenage sweethearts with a disastrous ending, involved years later in a murder investigation with high stakes for both of them. The unresolved feelings from their earlier relationship, their reluctant attraction for each other as adults and the sexual tension it causes, their concerns about blame, trust, and commitment—all of these standard romance-novel elements will play a role in this series, but the primary focus of the series (and of these elements) is still solving the mystery and preventing great harm to people they care about.

This is a far cry from the Skeet Bannion series. In those books, there are men who are interested in starting or resuming a romantic/sexual relationship with Skeet, but she’s too busy taking care of a kid, an ailing father, friends in danger, and solving cases—and too afraid of commitment—to bother. I suspect it’s Skeet’s problems with intimacy and commitment that draw men after her.

All this has me thinking about romance in mysteries and thrillers. I have strong feelings about the place of romance in these books and movies. I can enjoy sexual tension and romantic relationships in books as much as anyone—but mysteries and thrillers are about high-stakes quests to stop murderers and/or to save the city/country/word from destruction. I have been known to scream at the screen when a hero has only seconds to prevent death or destruction with no assurance that those few seconds are enough—and he or she takes much of that precious time to engage in a passionate clinch with the love interest. After the earth is saved, after the murderer is arrested, or earlier in the story when it’s not an interruption of a vital action, romance is fine, but I don’t want it to interfere with the high-stakes quest the hero is on.

Julia Spencer-Fleming is someone who has used romance well in a mystery series. The romance progressed over the course of seven books, and it was always tied into the mystery as a subplot. Margaret Maron also followed that pattern in her Debra Knott books, as did J.A. Jance and Susan Wittig Albert. These are just the first names that come to mind, along with, of course, Deborah Crombie’s partnered British police officers, who finally marry after many books and must come unpartnered at work because of that.

I hope to use these authors and others as guides when I write this series of books with such a strong romantic subplot. Passion, sexual tension, romance are all allowed, as long as the mystery quest takes top precedence.

What are your thoughts about romance in crime fiction? Do you like it or hate it? And who are authors that you think do a good job at mixing the two?