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NEPM brings you interviews with New England authors to add to your summer reading list.

The 'Quirkiness Of Western Mass.' In A Fictional Small Town

Joan Livingston of Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, has mashed up her actual profession with a measure of fiction and come up with her latest book. 

Livingston is editor-in-chief at The Greenfield Recorder, and is author of "Checking the Traps," a murder mystery set in a small fictional community in western Massachusetts.

Livingston talked with NEPR about the origins of her latest mystery novel.

Joan Livingston, author: I think writers take what they know and have their way with it, and that's what I've done with this. I've set the book in the hilltowns of western Mass. I lived in Worthington for 25 years, which is a really small town. It's one of those one-store, one-stoplight, one-church, one-school type of town. 

I loved it there. And then I moved to New Mexico, and lived in an unincorporated area in New Mexico for 11 years. And then two years ago, moved back to western Mass., but to Shelburne Falls.

Carrie Healy, NEPR: What do you like about this area?

I like the quirkiness of western Mass. I like that people care about each other, that they’re really personally involved. I like country people an awful lot.

Journalism is not a foreign language to you. How important was it to you to create a character who is a former small-town reporter, and now private investigator?

There is a lot of me in Isabel. And I know there's a lot of me not in Isabel. When I decided to write a mystery, I sat down, and it all just worked out that way. It wasn't something I planned: "I'm gonna write about a journalist who becomes a PI."

But you got there somehow.

Yes, I did. It just made sense that she would use transferable skills from being a reporter or an editor as a PI. You ask questions, you look for sources. In fact, the name of the book — I was talking about "checking the traps."

When I was a reporter, on Fridays, I would go "check the traps," and I would go talk to the school secretaries, because they really knew what was going on. Or I would go to a couple of general stores. I was only misled once. Then when I became an editor, I would tell my reporters, go "check the traps," and then make sure you don't get caught in one.

Can you read a passage?

I'll start the beginning with a chapter called "The One-Armed Bartender."

It's Friday night at the Rooster Bar and Grille, and I'm behind the bar taking care of business with my one good arm. The other is in a sling. A broken collarbone and a few badly bruised ribs are souvenirs from my second case, that and the satisfaction I nailed the bastard who ran my car off the road. I'm right-handed, and luckily, my injuries are on my left side, so it's a piece of cake, really, snapping the caps off Buds with the opener mounted on the back of the counter. I only need one arm to reach for beers in the cooler and drop empties into the carton below. I'm not able to deliver food or clean tables, but then again, I have a very understanding boss. You remember Jack Smith, don't you?
Besides, my getup is a conversation starter here at the town of Conwell's only drinking establishment. The Rooster's True Blue Regulars, of course, are all aware of what happened two weeks ago, but being nosy New Englanders, they prod me for details. They can't get enough of the story. I gladly accommodate them. They're friendly guys and good tippers.

Author Joan Livingston reads an excerpt from the start of her novel, "Checking The Traps."
Credit Carrie Healy / NEPR
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NEPR
Author Joan Livingston reads an excerpt from the start of her novel, "Checking The Traps."

How were you able to generate so much poetry while writing this novel? Is that something you like doing, too?

I started as a poet when I was in college, and I really couldn't sustain a thought in prose. I fancied myself a poet, you know.

And then I had a serious 25-year writer's block when I was raising six kids, and I put all my creative energy into them. Then I got into journalism, and I finally started writing prose again.

So it was kind of fun to go back to being a poet. And it wasn't that hard. I don't know if I would do write poetry again, but I didn't mind that one of my characters was going to do that. Actually, two of them.

Keep up here with the NEPR Summer Fiction Series.

Carrie Healy hosts the local broadcast of "Morning Edition" at NEPM. She also hosts the station’s weekly government and politics segment “Beacon Hill In 5” for broadcast radio and podcast syndication.
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