One day last summer when I was downtown in the city I now
call home, I met one of the forwards from the local minor league soccer team, and
congratulated him on his last goal. I
recognized the mayor—on foot, as she often is.
I waved to two acquaintances from the Farmers Market, and I paused to chat
with the editor of the daily newspaper, who lives next door to a friend of
mine.
That was unusual; I don’t often run into quite so many
people I know except at soccer matches.
Still, a woman I met as a grocery cashier is now a Facebook friend and
known to me as an artist, and my favorite librarian came to the Post-Season
Picnic we fans threw for the soccer team.
With 40,000 residents, Bremerton’s a small city. My fictional Oakville is even smaller, only half
as big.
Most of my life until the last seven years has been spent in
larger cities. I was shy when I was young,
and always had my “nose in a book” as my mother used to say, so I didn’t try to
know my neighbors—and indeed, we moved too often for that to be easy. Whenever
I went out in those cities, I pretty much imagined I was invisible. In my twenties and thirties, I was “artistic”
and often dressed outrageously—and yet I still thought of myself as
invisible. Later I heard the same thing
from professional actors: when you’re on, people don’t see you:
they see the costume, the character, not the person inside.
In a small town, no one is invisible.
When Liz Archer (in You’re So Vain) walks with Trent
Callahan in downtown Oakville, Lucy Grant is bound to see them—or if she doesn’t,
someone will be kind enough to tell her about it. In a small town, gossip (as I like to say of Oakville)
is a force of nature.
In a small town, even in these nomadic times, people are still
more likely to know their neighbors. I’ve
gotten to know some of mine without even trying.
Although I’ve lived for forty-four years in Western Washington,
my Oakville is not out here but in the Midwest.
There are several reasons for that.
One is that an extremely popular local author, Debbie Macomber, has
immortalized a small town in Kitsap
County already. Not only do I not want
it to look like I’m copying her, I don’t want
to copy her. So my small town is
elsewhere.
For several formative years I lived in the Midwest, and my
romantical adolescent soul adored its preposterously grandiose Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century
architecture. I longed for the day when I could escape to Europe, but in the
meantime I found rich food for daydreams in the churches’ soaring (if smoke-stained)
stone spires; the college campus with its pillared and porticoed Classical halls
and neo-Gothic dormitories; the ornate county courthouse behind its
wrought-iron fence. So when I began to
envision Oakville, memories of Indiana and especially of Ohio with its strong
Italian influence, came to mind.
Every day I write—that is, almost every day, in spite of all
my procaffinating—I meet more of
Oakville’s residents and fill in more of Oakville’s geography, just as I would
in a bricks and mortar town. In You’re So Vain, I discovered Harmony Coffee and Manzano’s Italian Restaurant with its famous—or infamous—secluded booth.
 |
Past meets present, yoga meets Christmas,
40-yr-old bachelor Sid meets orange-haired
Melody with her lived-in face--and a
very large puppy steals the show. |
In Comfort
and Joy (a Christmas story, out soon), I've revisited Harmony Coffee and
introduced a bookstore, a natural food store, and the downtown library—which will
play an important role in the Valentine story I’m working on now, Heart of Stone.
So far I’m hearing from my readers, both those who have
purchased You’re So Vain, and my critique
partners and advance readers of Comfort
and Joy, that they like Oakville. One of them says, "Tell me where Oakville is, and I'll pack up and move there!"
I
hope you enjoy your visits to Oakville too.
P. S. Procaffination,
in case you’re wondering, is the act of procrastinating while drinking coffee.
The first thing about me is that I write. 
