EARLENE FOWLER:

SUNSHINE & SHADOW

Earlene Fowler composed her first genre effort, Fool’s Puzzle, and shared it with her then-writing instructor, a successful mainstream novelist.

Fowler’s instructor read it and sent it to her own agent. Within two weeks, the writer had secured a three-book contract. Her life, Fowler said, "changed overnight."

Seems too easy?

Prior to writing her first mystery featuring Benni Harper, a folk art museum curator/sleuth who makes her tenth appearance in Fowler’s newest novel, Sunshine and Shadow (Berkley Prime Crime, 287 pages, $22.95), the author had committed herself to a career as a short story writer.

She spent a decade banging her head against the high, hard and not-particularly lucrative wall of so called "high" literature.

Earlene Fowler spoke with the interviewer from her home in California.

McDonald: Sunshine and Shadow is your tenth book. Is it still exciting for you as each new book comes out?

Fowler: I'm anxious to see what people think about each one. With my books, I try to do something different each time — and I do that just as a writer, to try and challenge myself. But when you do that, fans, when they read a series, have certain expectations. One of the things that they love about series is that you sort of do the same thing. But when I try to do something different sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, so I'm always a little anxious to see what people think.

McDonald: What would you describe as the "different" thing in this book?

Fowler: Well, it's written in parallel story lines. One part is written in 1978, when Benni’s first husband is alive, and the second part is written in 1995 when the husband she has now is alive and the two stories connect. Actually, it's the hardest book that I've ever written.

McDonald: Your books employ quilting as a metaphor. How much of the techniques of that artistic style or endeavor plays into your artistic style? I read somewhere you don't write to outlines.

Fowler: No, I don't write to outlines at all, which can sometimes be good and sometimes be bad. I think that it's one of those things where you don't have a choice: You're either an outliner or you're not. I have friends who write wonderful books that use outlines. I just happen to be the kind of person that doesn't, and because of that, I have to do a lot of rewriting.

When I teach classes on writing — and I teach a class on rewriting — that's one of the things that I point out as the negative thing about writing the way that I do. In fact, that's the thing that I'm doing now on my next book, is the rewriting part and you have to catch all the stuff that you didn't get because you didn't outline. For me, it makes it more exciting to write it.

As for the quilting aspect, I'm not much of a quilter. I wasn't a very good quilter, which is why I ended up being a writer rather than a quilter. When I took a quilting class I found myself getting more fascinated with the quilters and why they quilt and the stories behind them and all that. I decided to use it as a metaphor. Very few of my books have huge parts of quilting in them. That's why a marketing thing sometimes works for you and sometimes works against you. I've had people say to me, "I didn't read your books for the longest time because I wasn't interested in quilting. Then I read one, and I realized it's not about quilting." And I'd say, "No."

Quilt patterns have such evocative names. To me they always were stories in themselves. The book I'm working on now, the title is Broken Dishes, which is a wonderful title. Any writer I know could probably come up with a story for that title. So that's how I started using quilts as titles. And, because of her (Benni Harper's) job as curator of a folk art museum, sometimes quilts actually work into the story. But I have lots of other subplots that have nothing to do with quilting.

McDonald: Sue Grafton kind of locked herself in with the 26 letters. Are you running out of quilt pattern names?

Fowler: I have a book of 4,000 quilt patterns….

McDonald: Four thousand?

Fowler: Four thousand, so no. Actually, the funniest part is picking the titles. Broken Dishes is one that actually early on I wanted to use. I've wanted to use it for the longest time and I've finally thought up a story that I could use it with. I just go through that (quilt pattern) book. The very first book, Fool's Puzzle, I didn't have a title for it halfway through the book. So this quilting thing is not something I did consciously as a marketing technique. People think it's brilliant and I go, "That's great, I wish I could take credit it for it, but I can't." I made her the curator of a folk art museum and I made her a rancher and all of this kind of stuff that I found interesting and I happened to just have a quilt show going on in the book. Well, halfway through it, I was at a quilt show and I was looking at the titles of the designs of the quilts. I thought, "Oh, there's a good title, I'll do that," not ever thinking it was ever going to be a series, because I didn't think that my first book was every going to even get published.

McDonald: What was your path to publication?

Fowler: I was at a novel writing workshop here in Southern California at a junior college and the teacher really liked the book and said "I'd like to send it to my agent, have you got an idea for other books in this series?" I was just like, "Uh, how about quilt patterns?" And she said, "Okay, we'll put that down" and that's how it happened. It wasn't this brilliant notion. I had no idea how many quilters there were in the United States. The only experience I've had with quilts is my Grandma’s quilts. After the book was accepted for publication, I thought, "Gee, maybe I’d better go to a quilt guild and see what this whole thing is about." I saw one in a newspaper and it was at a Presbyterian Church and I thought, "Okay, that's cool, I'll go," expecting to find 25 or 30 older ladies. I went and there were 200 women there and they're doctors and lawyers and accountants. I was just amazed.

McDonald: Your readers are quite a range of people, too?

Fowler: It runs the gamut. That's what's so interesting about quilting and I think a lot of people don't realize what an interesting subworld this quilting world is. Just all kinds of women do this. Actually three of my best contacts that I've gotten for the criminal part of my work have been a deputy district attorney who was a quilter — that's how she got to know me. There’s a highway patrol officer who was a quilter, and the assistant director of the Riverside Forensic Laboratory, who is a cross-stitcher. All of them came to me because of their hobby, but said, "Oh, by the way, I do this for a living if you ever need any information…."

I'm like, "Whoa!" It's just fascinating, because when I first got into the whole quilting thing, I was sort of like everybody else: I assumed it was people like my grandma. She passed away at 97. She was from Arkansas and quilted so that you had blankets. She thought I was crazy that she would make me a quilt and I would hang it on the wall. She was like, "Why have you got that blanket on the wall?" My grandma would make these beautiful quilts and then she would wash them and dry them — in the dryer. I would be going, "Oh no, oh no, that's really valuable."

McDonald: In the new book, Sunshine and Shadow, you mention you toggle between the past and the present, and parts of her life with her two husbands. In an earlier book, Mariner's Compass, you wrote from the character's perspective when she was 75. That leaves you room for a lot of improvisation in the books, but I'm wondering if you have a last story in mind for this character?

What's interesting for me — one of the reasons I wrote that prologue — was people just continually asked me, hundreds of people, "Are Gabe and Benni — Gabe is her second husband — going to okay? They argue a lot … are they going to be okay?" I knew that in Steps To the Altar, the book that I wrote last year, they had real severe marriage problems. He had an old lover come back into his life who was his partner when he was in LAPD and all that. I knew people would be so anxious, so I thought, "Okay, I'm going to write this prologue. And in this prologue they will see that 40 years later these two people are still married." That leaves me open to bringing all kinds of trauma into their life and I can still tell people, "See, it's going to be okay."

McDonald: With a series character you never quite believe they're going to be offed, but you really took away that doubt — explicitly.

Fowler: Yeah. Who are we kidding? There is a certain suspension of disbelief with mystery fiction, anyway. Especially with an amateur sleuth. I know the real police chief of San Luis Obispo, which is what San Celina is based on, and he said "If my town actually had as many murders in the two years that you have had Gabe have all these murders" he would be fired.

McDonald: I know you've said you have some chronological issues with the series you've tried to work out by stipulating that all of the books occur over a three year span — those would be three very bloody years.

Fowler: Right! It's one of those things I had to put into Sunshine and Shadows (a explanation of time's passage) because so many people kept writing and saying, "I don't get it. You say she's only 37… why is this happening?" The whole timing aspect of a series is awkward. In Sue Grafton's case, from what I've read, she plans on ending her very last one when Kinsey turns 40. Well, that means she's still in the 1980s in her books, so there's, like, no cell phones. People have asked me, "How are you going to handle 9/11?" I say, "It's not even close to 9/11 yet. I don't have to worry about that for awhile."

McDonald: You’ve mentioned Mariner’s Compass as being a favorite of your books, and that’s the one that won you an Agatha. What’s the appeal of that particular book?

Fowler: For one thing, the prologue was something that I just really wanted to write. I had to talk my editor into letting me use it. It’s one of those things where I tried something that had never been done in mystery fiction — I told you what happened to the character at the end of her life. My editor said, "Oh, I don’t know about that." I said, "Just read it and we can discuss it after you read it." After she read it, she loved it. So I tried some new things. Plus, it’s a murder mystery without a murder. I like doing that. Steps to the Altar was the same thing — there really wasn’t a murder. People don’t realize it until they get to the end and go, "Well, there was no murder in this" and I go, "Right…." It’s fun to do that sort of thing.

McDonald: You set out originally writing short stories.

Fowler: For ten years and none of them got published.

McDonald: Might you at some point resurrect your short stories for publication?

Fowler: Oh, I don’t think so. That was my training period. For 10 years I competed in such a high market and I’m kind of glad that I did. This is what I used to do for fun: My husband and I used to drive to UCLA — we live about 50 miles from there, in Orange County — and we would spend the whole day in the library because they would have all the literary magazines that you could read. I would read all these stories and I would know that mine were not as good, but I couldn’t figure out why. I kept working on it and working on it, and then I just got so discouraged and realized that the literary world is just this really difficult world to break into. You need to go to the right schools, get the right degrees. That’s when I decided to write a mystery. But I think that that 10 years of trying to compete in that made my prose better.

McDonald: Whose books did you have in mind when you decided to enter the genre? Were there particular writers you really admired at that point? A particular series you were swinging for?

Fowler: I really liked Margaret Maron books. And James Lee Burke … I learned a lot from him about writing first person. I don’t think that anybody writes first person or writes setting better than he does. His books are a little more violent than I prefer, but I forgive him of that because he’s such a good writer. Tony Hillerman, of course … I really like him.

McDonald: You just signed a new contract for three books — two more Harpers; Broken Dishes will be the 11th, then there will be two more beyond that, for certain.

Fowler: Right, and then a mainstream novel.

McDonald: Can you preview that book a little bit?

Fowler: I’ve got a hundred pages of it written. It’s along the same line as the books I write. The books I write really straddle mainstream. One of the things that me and my agent and my editor discussed at great length is whether I should use my real name or not — whether I should use "Earlene Fowler." A lot of times when somebody is in a genre and wants to take a step into another genre, they say, "You know what? You need to change your name." But I would say a good 50-percent of my readers are not traditional mystery readers, or even quilters. I have a lot of readers who say, "I don’t read any other mysteries, but I read your books." In my books, it’s the characters that people read for more than the mysteries. The mysteries, I will admit to anybody — the plot — is probably the weakest part of any of my books, except for a couple of my books….

Interestingly enough, Seven Sisters has one of the strongest plots and I got the best reviews for it, but my fans like that one the least. This mainstream book is along the same lines: there’s a death in it, but it’s not a murder mystery, per se. I don’t have to worry about putting in red herrings, and suspects and this sort of stuff. It’s set in the foot hills of the Sierra Nevadas, in the town of Bishop. It’s like the little western town that people stop in to get food before they go to Mammoth, which is a big ski area. It’s this old town. If you remember the movie China Town, back in the early 1900s when all of the water was stolen for L.A. with the California aqueduct, well, Bishop used to be this incredible ranching town, until all of their water was taken by Los Angeles. It’s set in this little town, with it’s great history, about a ranching family — I’m still sticking with the ranching theme — and it opens up with a woman coming into town with her husband’s ashes. He had told her he was an orphan, but she found out he was actually part of a huge ranching family and she inherited one-fourth of the ranch.

McDonald: So it’s a Western novel? I noticed many of your favorite authors are southern writers, such as Harper Lee.

Fowler: My dad’s from Colorado and grew up in the west, and my mom’s from Arkansas. They met at the end of World War II and settled in California, which is how I ended up becoming a native Southern Californian, but with these weird roots. I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, but I have my dad’s western influence. Add California to that and you end up with me, I guess.

McDonald: I take it that, much like your character, the name "Earlene" is a combination of your parent’s names?

Fowler: Actually just a take off on my dad’s name. My mom’s name is Mary. I’m the second of four girls. My dad never had a son. So my oldest sister is named Mary, after my mom. I was the second child, so my dad got me, so I was Earlene. My grandfather’s name was Earl, also.

McDonald: Returning to your path to publication: How’d you get the first book contract?

Fowler: I took a junior college novel writing workshop in the evening and took my manuscript in there. The teacher — who was local author Joanne Matheson (she now lives in Alaska), a mainstream writer — read it, sent it to her agent and within two weeks I had a three-book contract.

McDonald: Astounding.

Fowler: Yeah. My life changed overnight. The first couple of years was really hard. Really, really hard. I had no idea what this world was like. It was sort of a shock. The whole public thing….

McDonald: Writing is such a solitary, introspective craft, yet you’re expected now to go out and just beat the bricks.

Fowler: Right, the marketing part.

McDonald: Is that something you’re comfortable with, in terms of the public speaking? I read also where you make something like 170 or 200 appearances a year.

Fowler: That’s because when you’re brand new, nobody knows you. I come from a blue-collar background, so it’s one of those kinds of things, when somebody gives you a job, you figure out what the job is and you do it. The public stuff wasn’t as hard as it could have been, because I worked for five years in a public library as a clerk in the children’s department. The library I worked in was a huge one: Huntington Beach Library is the biggest library west of the Mississippi. It’s a huge library. So I was used to working with the public, so that part wasn’t hard, so that was okay.

But the having to promote yourself, that part … I was shocked. I was like, "What? I have to do what? I have to speak in front of groups of people? Oh no no no. I don’t think you understand, I’m a writer. I sit home in my pajamas and I write. And they said, "No, no." And that really has only been a phenomenon in the writing world in the last 10 or 15 years. I’ve always gone to bookstores since I was a little kid, and until Barnes & Noble and the big chains came around, how often did you see a booksigning? I had never been to a booksigning when my first book was published.

McDonald: Now there’re maybe 10 or 12 authors through town in any major city at any given time.

Fowler: Right, if you were really really big, like Mary Higgins Clark, you might read in the newspaper that she had gone to some bookstore in Beverly Hills. This was back in the 1980s. And then, in the early ’90s, which is just when I happened to get into it, that was when the chain stores started doing booksignings. And then the independents got in there too because they had to compete and now it’s this whole thing where it’s almost overdone now, I think. Sometimes I worry about that — that we’ve been out there too much. Sometimes the authors that are the best authors at public speaking are not necessarily the best writers.

That’s sad, because I have friends who are extremely shy people, but who are wonderful writers and they tend to not get as many readers because they can’t get out there and sell the soap. I’ve learned to do it because it beats hoeing lettuce — what can I say? — that’s what my grandma used to do.

McDonald: On that note, you have a phrase you coined I was going to ask you to elaborate on a little bit: "The Pink-Collar Ghetto."

Fowler: That was where I worked until I became a writer. I left home when I was 17. I grew up in a blue-collar background outside of Los Angeles. My mom was a housewife. My dad was a welder. Originally, my mom’s parents were sharecroppers, and my dad’s parents were migrant workers. World War II sort of did that for a lot of people — it sort of upped the poor classes to the blue collars. We were never expected to go to college. With some kids, they turn 17 or 18, and it’s assumed you go to college. In my household, it was, you turned 18 and you leave home. Your parents no longer take care of you.

I got my first job, in an office, in downtown Los Angeles at an insurance company. I got married at 19 to my high school sweetheart. This year we’ll have been married 30 years. He worked in a blue-collar job, too. That’s just what both of us did. I worked in offices, cleaned houses and never did go to college. Just writing classes — wherever we lived, I took writing classes at night. I’ve probably been through ten or fifteen writing classes at as many junior colleges. I’ve taken creative writing 101, like, eight times. (Laughing) But with a different teacher each time — you want something different. That’s how I learned to write. The "Pink-Collar Ghetto" — people don’t realize that these are the women who are married to the men who are in the blue-collar ghetto. We’re the ones that take care of your insurance claims and clean your houses and serve coffee. It’s a huge group of women. And those women are my readers.

My poor publicity department….When I first came to Berkley, they kind of didn’t know what to do with me, because I had no life. I remember the publicity person at the time said to me, when she was trying to figure something out for me. They send out these wonderful press kits — I’m sure you’ve seen millions of them — and the press kits are just incredible. You read these lives that these people have and you go, "Wow! Why are you writing? You have such a great life!" The publicist finally said to me in frustration when she kept asking me about my life and I couldn’t think of anything, "What’s the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to you?" I said, "I wrote a book. That’s the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me."

We finally figured out — this is true — that my fifth cousin is Buffalo Bill, so we put that in there. And I also own 25 pairs of cowboy boots.

McDonald: I saw the boots in the press kit, but not the Buffalo Bill reference.

Fowler: I think they used that Buffalo Bill thing until they ran it into the ground. I wrote a little essay about "What Do Buffalo Bill and Quilts Have In Common?" It was all about my history, because my dad’s family is originally from Kansas, and it was his great-great-grandfather who was first cousins with Buffalo Bill. And, now I have a purple pickup truck, so I sort of put that in my biography.

McDonald: Saw that. I assume that’s a custom order?

Fowler: Well, no, it actually wasn’t. I had a choice of five different colors, and my husband said, "Hey, buy what you want. I saw this purple one and thought, "I’m going to get teased by my rancher friends." Which I do. They tease me to death, because ranchers only buy one color of truck: White.

McDonald: White. Yeah, you don’t have to wash it.

Fowler: That’s it. White is it. So when I drive up in my purple pickup truck they go, "Oh, there’s the city girl." They think that’s funny.

McDonald: The eye-rolling commences.

Fowler: Yeah, but that’s okay. They get free books, so they don’t mind. But that’s my bio. It’s sort of sad: "She owns 25 pairs of cowboy boots and a purple pickup truck." I wish I had a better bio. I’m apologizing to my publicist — "I’m sorry I don’t have a better bio."

— © C. McDonald

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