 Thank you, Rachel, and to the library for hosting us. This is a bit of a different kind of event from what I usually do, and I think it's going to be really interesting because I have read Elise's book and really liked it and have lots of questions for her. For those of you who don't know who I am, I'm Paul Dwarin. I write crime novels about a main game warden named Mike Bodich. The one that is out now is called Stay Hidden. It takes place on a fictional offshore island, which may come up in our conversation or not, but I think that's all I need to do by way of introduction on my part. Elise, do you want to go? Yeah, well, I just wanted to say I'm really happy to be sharing the bill with Paul. And as I already told him, I was reading his book last week in preparation for this event, and then totally by coincidence my dad gave his book to my husband as a birthday present. So my husband and I have been sitting side by side reading our copies of the book saying like, did you get to this part yet? So it's been like a very big part of our lives for the past week. But I'm really excited to talk about it. My book, if we had known, is a set in Maine, and it focuses on a teacher, a writing professor, who after shooting realizes that the gunman had been a student of hers some years prior and wrote something for her class that maybe indicated that he was violent, something that she missed. So that's the basic premise. I'm going to start off by asking you a question. Why did you decide to set this book in Maine? Well, Maine is my favorite place in the world. So it may sound really counterintuitive that I set this tragic happening in Maine. I guess for one thing, Maine, there's only so many places I as a writer feel like I can write about with some degree that I have enough familiarity with to write about in fiction. I've been coming to Maine since I was a little girl. My grandmother was from Denny'sville, Maine. So my grandparents had a house there. Then when I went to college, I got the college guide, and I just turned to the M section and chose Bowdoin because I knew I was coming to Maine, so I went to Bowdoin. And then I spent many summers living on Ores Island writing, and much of this book was actually written on Ores Island. So I think on one level, I was sort of surrounded by Maine while writing the book. But I think maybe more significantly, the book is, you know, Maine for me is a place that feels so comforting. A place I sort of equate with a feeling of security, actually. And this event that happens in the book is such a loss of that feeling. So I think maybe that's strangely part of why I set it in Maine because that would underscore to me the feeling of, like, losing that sense of safety and sort of calmness and goodness. Well, in my books, Maine is an incredibly violent and dark place. Horrible things happen constantly. Yeah, I was curious about just the choice to set yours on an island. Yeah, I've been wanting to write about a Maine island for a long time. I grew up on the coast. I grew up in Scarborough, actually, and have lived entirely on the coast. But my character is a game warden, and one of the things that you learn if you talk to game wardens is they spend very little time offshore. I mean, there are a handful of islands that have deer populations where there's some hunting or whatever. So I had conflicting desires, I guess, is what it came down to, where I really wanted to write about an island, but I didn't have a plot in mind. I couldn't figure out a way to get Mike offshore, is really what it came down to. It's like, well, maybe he's out recreationally fishing, and the boat sinks. It was just stupid things. But eventually I got to this place in his life where I promoted him to a warden investigator, which is kind of a plainclothes detective for the warden service. And they investigate hunting homicides, which is the term for what we call hunting accidents, which are not accidents, typically. And I said, oh, I got it. I could have this... There could be an island that has deer on it, and it's hunting season, and somebody gets shot on the island, and Mike has a reason to actually go to one. And so I started to write this book and about this island, and I realized that it probably could have been like 750 pages long, because there's so much I wanted to write about, just because I'd never had a chance before to do an island. And for me, when I read the book, it also allowed for this element of kind of lawlessness, or just the fact that they're so cut off and kind of like living by their own rules. I'm curious about something that you wanted him on the island and needed to get him on the island. So do your books often start with sort of a place? Very often, yes. The way that I start each of the books is actually by trying to figure out where Mike Bodich is in his life. I say to myself, where is he personally? Where is he professionally? And then I try to come up with a story that brings to the forefront whatever struggle he's going through. And very often, the setting kind of comes from that. But the books move around the state of Maine quite a bit, and that's by choice. I like to showcase the fact that Denny'sville... How many people know where Denny'sville is, by the way? Okay. Denny'sville is way down East. It's a beautiful place. And I have not... I think I might have mentioned Denny'sville in a book, but I've not literally set a story there. So one of the things that I really responded to in your book is I write about... My main character is... I'm trying to think of the right word to just... He's deeply flawed. And one of the things that I liked about your book was that Maggie, who's the teacher who had this... This really troubled young man in her class and failed to sort of recognize that he might be potentially violent. As I was reading the book, I could see her making mistakes all the way through. I'm like, oh, no, don't do that. Don't do that, don't do that. And so in some ways, I felt like I was getting a taste of my own medicine because I know that that's how people read my books. What was it that you were trying to accomplish? I mean, both with Maggie as a teacher and as a mother in this, because her daughter goes through a real hardship in the course of the book. Yeah, I mean, the original idea for a novel... I've been teaching creative writing for about 20 years. And I actually started working on this... The idea for this book about 10 years ago, shortly after the Virginia Tech shooting, there was an interview with the shooter's creative writing teacher who said she had seen this very troubling material, kind of violent material in his writing and had known that he needed help and in fact tried to get him help, unlike what happens in my story. But I was so haunted by that interview and just thinking about... I had never had a student write something so unambiguously violent, but I've definitely had students writing things that have concerned me. And there are moments where you just wonder, do I need to intervene or this is fiction, but is it really? I think those moments come up for writing teachers and all teachers a lot, just thinking, is this a student who really needs help? So I was thinking first about the teacher and I wanted her to be... I think she's actually a very devoted teacher at the expense of a lot of other things in her life, which is where the flawed part comes in. She sort of neglected her marriage. She kind of overlooked her own daughter's problems, even as she's so focused on her students' problems. Her daughter had a lot of things going on that sort of got by her. So I deliberately wanted to have the daughter in there. At the time that the story is told, the daughter's the same age as her students and heading off to college herself. So I wanted that parallel to be there where the daughter is actually in the position of Maggie's students going off to college, a troubled young woman. Are there people at her college on her campus who are paying attention and getting her help? So that feels like a long answer to your question, but... No, no, no, it was a great answer. So just thinking again about Mike Bodich and the deep flaws, when you write... This is, I guess, just a bigger question about the series. How do you sustain... So you have each sort of individual, really tightly plotted story, but then you must be thinking long range about the character and how he's evolving and what he's going through. I guess just how do you balance the two? Keep his story just moving and interesting. That's a really hard question. I'm going to go in the back room and think about it for five minutes. Well, it is very much... Most mystery series are books, consist of books that you can just pick up, and you don't really need to know what happened in the last book, and there's a reason for that, because they sell well. You don't want to make people feel like, oh, I can't read this book because I haven't read the other one and that sort of thing. So I have an editor who really sort of tries to keep me on task and make sure that each book can be read by someone who hasn't read any of the others. I mean, to varying degrees, that's successful or not. But what's happened is that I've come to look at my books less as a series and more as a saga in the sense that, yeah, you can read each book individually, but there's a lot in them that you... Hopefully, you gain from knowing how some of the relationships formed several books ago or that sort of thing. So it is a bit hard to keep it all in mind. It reminds me of George R. R. Martin. How does he have this Game of Thrones world? How does he know all the supporting characters that he's mentioned over the years and things? I've had to put together a series Bible where to remind myself, oh yeah, Colonel Malcolm has this color eyes because I just don't want to get those details wrong from book to book or whatever. Again, I'm not sure that's really answered your question, but it's a bit of a struggle, but I also find it compelling and it keeps me moving forward. I feel like, okay, where am I going to take him next? One thing I wanted to bring up about yours, which is probably kind of a little bit... You might have considered it to be a strange question, is this is a compliment. I loved the way that you dealt with social media in the book. I feel like most novelists that I read do not know what to do with our culture. When it comes to things like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and it's because it's hard and you feel like it's ever changing and yet it's so defining of the way that we live now. I wondered, you must have known going in that that was going to be sort of a stumbling block and yet you made it central to the plot of your story. What happens essentially is that the public gets wind of the fact that Maggie, the teacher, had read the student's disturbing essay and it sort of goes viral and everybody suddenly is attacking Maggie and attacking her daughter and this sort of thing. So can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I mean, I'm in real life not much of a social media person, are you? Yes. And when I started the, actually I envisioned it, it was just going to be told from Maggie, the teacher's point of view. As I kept writing it, other perspectives crept in, like the daughter who's like now a fairly big part of the book is her story. Once I had a character who was 18 telling a lot of the story, I knew that I needed to address social media. But I did so with great trepidation because I'm really not a savvy social media person, I'm much more like Maggie in that respect. But just in thinking about the response to these tragedies, social media would just inevitably have to be addressed in the book, I thought. And unlike most of my books where I don't maybe pin down the story in time, this one I felt like I needed to know exactly what year it was set just because the climate around all of this and around gun violence is changing so much and has, from the time I started working on it actually changed so much. So yes, so social media, I turned to my students who are 18 and exactly the savviest age for this kind of thing. So I actually ended up giving them some portions of the book and asking them to vet the social media talk and making sure that it sounded authentic. And the funny slash sad thing is that the biggest comment they gave me was that it needed to be more mean. It wasn't mean enough. And they said people go on social media and they're mean. So I took that note. But yes, it became a much bigger part of the book than I expected. But fortunately I did have people sort of reading it along the way and giving me tips. One thing I didn't know was that actually abbreviating in text is not really something my students do. I think they consider the texting as like such just a form of talking. I had kind of thought they would use more of that shorthand but they said they don't really. Anyway, so news to me. I was thinking, my mind is back on your last comment about your book. Just about like you talked about the development of the series but thinking about the development of the individual books to me, writing a mystery seems so daunting. I'm just wondering how that kind of evolves for you. Do you have the whole thing set in your mind before you write it? Are you ever surprised along the way by who did it? Every once in a while I'm surprised by that. I'm not a meticulous outliner. I don't sit down and map out the entire book chapter by chapter or whatever and the reason I don't do that is primarily because I can read a book and sort of tell when a writer has done that and I feel like there's a certain heartlessness, not heartlessness, but soullessness to that approach. You're almost taking your characters and moving them like chess pieces because you need them to do certain things in service to the plot. What I prefer to do is to sort of think of the characters and let the characters make decisions. I've said this many times before but I feel like if I'm not surprised, you're not going to be surprised. I begin with a sense of, I know what the crime is, I think I know who did it and generally I don't know how I'm going to get to the end. But again, the challenge of that I think is one of the things that really drives me and I like to be able to go off on detours while I'm writing and then obviously when you're revising you have to go and get rid of the dead ends and connect things that are sort of disconnected in the first draft. I don't like really overly deterministic mysteries unless they were written by Agatha Christie. Well, I found it as I was reading it so suspenseful and surprising and really spooky. Maybe part of that was the setting but it felt really eerie. Yeah, I was going for a Gothic book. I like Gothic. This is actually a related, very specific question about the deer. I thought it was really interesting how the deer represents this overpopulation of deer on this island and I could see it had sort of a function plot-wise but it also just felt more symbolic or atmospheric or something. I was just curious about that choice. Yeah, so in Stay Hidden one of the aspects of the book is that the island is overpopulated with deer and this is something that is a problem on several main islands currently. Islesboro has been dealing with this pretty profoundly or I would say not dealing with it and it was a big problem on Monhegan Island years and years ago and what they ended up doing was they ended up hiring a guy in his company to come in and to exterminate all of the deer from the island just because there were so many and they had become sickly but from a human perspective what was worse was that they were carrying lime ticks and a large proportion of the population had come down with lime disease and so that was a public health issue. So I said to myself, well, okay, on my fictional island I want to have that overpopulation problem going on because it is where you have that. It's very disconcerting. I don't know if anybody's ever been to a place where or lives in a place where deer are so accustomed to not being hunted and having people around all the time that they begin to act almost tame or they act in a way that's not really the way that a deer is supposed to act. Deer are really... the essence of a deer is its ability to elude being hunted. That's what makes a deer and so when you have deer that are sort of functioning like livestock, it's wrong. There's something fundamentally flawed about that and so I did a lot of research about places that have suffered these sorts of things and I learned things. For instance, there's a scene in the book where the deer are on the beach eating seaweed because there's just not enough brows for them elsewhere. This does happen. It happens off of islands, off of Alaska and elsewhere and so that's one of the fun things about writing a book when you set yourself this goal and you have to learn things in order to write the book and do research. What kind of research did you end up doing beyond vetting your social media posts? Vetting the Twitter. Well, I guess the most considerable and also most kind of harrowing research I had to do was just about the psychology of shooters. The shooter is not actually in the novel at all. He's kind of like the absent center because he dies at the scene but all the different characters had some kind of connection to him or remember him in a different way so I wanted to make sure that I had an idea of who he was so that all of these other people could sort of think about him and remember him and look at him realistically so that research was pretty harrowing just reading about different accounts and I felt very concerned with just trying to get details right even just like the response to the scene or the feelings there. Yeah, it was an unusual book and then just coming out when it did we were talking a little about this already but just a difficult book to feel like promoting just because of what it's about in a way you don't want to feel like you're exploiting a situation like this. On the other hand, writers respond to what's happening in the world so there were actually several books that came out this spring on the topic so I can see why writers are kind of reacting to this thing but it feels like a complicated sort of book to go out promoting like I am right now. I always find that too there's sort of this line between being topical and then being too topical when you have an idea for a book you say, geez, that just seems like we're really dealing with this as a culture right now but you have to anticipate that it's going to take you a year to write and then it's going to take months for it to be to go through the publishing process and who knows what the state of things is going to be when the book finally comes out so you sort of tackle a topical subject at your own risk and you just hope that it's going to belong in part of the national dialogue or whatever you want to call it. Because I started working on it when I did ten years ago it wasn't as topical and the climate around it has changed so much. Hopping topics again but thinking about the deer and thinking about what you said about research I was interested in, I know you have a huge fan base in Maine but then you also got readers obviously outside of Maine who might not know as many of the sort of Maine specific details I mean even just something like there's a line in the book, something like lobsters, bugs, that's what we call lobsters here or something like that but I wonder just how do you know like how far to go with that the lines that are kind of explanatory about Maine details? Yeah I mean I think that so my, let's see how to answer this question I think there's sort of two aspects to it one is that the Maine character is a game warden which means that he lives outdoors he understands the natural world in ways that most of us who don't have that kind of a lifestyle you know can't really comprehend and so I have to in order to sort of bring him to life I have to do a certain amount of expository stuff I recently was thinking about it and saying to myself okay you know what one of the differences between writing about a game warden and say you know who in rural Maine versus writing about a public I mean a private investigator in New York is I could say to you right now okay the next scene takes place in a subway station in August the hottest day of the year and even those of us who don't live in New York have probably been in a subway station I mean that's probably all I need to say but if I say to you the next scene takes place in a cedar swamp in June now all of those New Yorkers don't know what that means right they don't realize that Mike is going to be you know like sucked of all of his blood by the black flies so I have to put that kind of thing in and you know there's a but I don't want to do too much of it it you know it's it's always a bit of a balancing act that way say beyond that but so I found it interesting I have to say that in your book that the note that triggers this whole the story is the essay that's triggered the story was about this shooter going out hunting it was a fictional hunting trip and that's not a spoiler is it I hope but in my books everybody goes hunting but I mean you know but I read it and said yeah you know I think though it does speak to the fact that people in many places you know at hunters as people who are interested in guns I mean I think to me that was the thing that I responded more to was the fact that he was in his essay he was talking about different kinds of guns and what would be most efficient at you know to do different things yeah I mean that was one of the things that I've just found as a writing teacher it's not always just what the students are writing about it's maybe the way that they're writing about it that's concerning I mean I have a lot of students who write just scenes of violence and that's a lot of what they see in movies and that's how they think of stories and you know and that comes up in my classes a lot but it's sometimes just the way that it's written it's like so gratuitous or so gleeful or something that just feels a little off and so I think actually back to your question about setting it in main precisely in part because it is in main so it's a story about a boy who goes hunting with his dad which is like not unusual and so I think part of why it didn't raise any kind of red flags for his teacher but looking back it was kind of the way that he wrote obsessively about the guns and what the guns did of course after the shooting happens that might look different and I think that's part of what happened too it's interesting like I've met with several groups of teachers who thought she was not wrong I don't think she was wrong either I did neither I think I mean I felt like she knew he was a kid and you know she knew she he was a little scary but that didn't necessarily mean that he was going to four years later you know go shoot up a mall I mean I think it's the kind of thing in that instance you know in hindsight it just looked bigger you know it looked like it had a big it was like in bold letters or something and everyone missed it but at the time it wouldn't have been perceived that way I mean I think back to all of her flaws which are many I think what she missed at the time was just that that kid was a troubled kid and sitting in her class and she was more concerned with the rest of the students like she didn't want him to take away from the experience for the rest of the students who she loved and she wanted to you know just focus on them and not focus on this kid and that was probably a misstep more so than the paper do you think we should ask her questions? Sure Hi, thanks. First of all thank you Can each of you name a couple of your favorite authors and maybe why they are that way and this one we will follow which is tell you how your story speaks of the from the headlines and it's sort of vocal about that I should follow this. Have you met Roxanne Quimby? I guess I need to answer this one first then so the Roxanne Quimby question I think refers to my fourth book Massacre Pond which is about a wealthy woman who wants to create a national park in the state of Maine I wrote that book when the proposal seemed at that stage to be entirely dead in the water it really was languishing and Roxanne Quimby had not handed it over to her son Lucas St. Clair it came out of I'll try to be very brief about this my editor is also was the editor of Jackie Collins and so he kept saying to me Paul, can you put like a rich, glamorous woman in your books and I'm like, you know, game wardens don't meet rich, glamorous women but I found a way and so what I did was actually I transformed the character she's sort of a more of a combination maybe of Roxanne and Martha Stewart but I have not met her and in fact when I made the decision to write the book I stopped reading about her because I wanted my character to be her own person in terms of some of the authors that I read that I think are influential in my life I mean if I want to go back I mean Hemingway is always right there in the first and foremost but of contemporary crime writers James Lee Burke is probably at the top of my list he writes, he's very prolific the series of his that I like the best is about a Louisiana detective named Dave Robichaux who's a recovering alcoholic and just a really strong character Burke is great at bringing his settings to life and I remember reading those early books in the series never having been to Louisiana but feeling like I had once I put them down and I said to myself, well that's what I want to do with my books I want my books to bring Maine to life for people who have never visited Maine before but I mean there's so many good contemporary crime writers out there now Michael Conley somebody I read every book I'm trying to think we have John Conley and who's an Irish writer it's in town he lives part of the year in Portland John's a great guy and a great writer I gravitate toward, this might seem odd since I wrote a novel that involves a shooting but I really like sort of quieter like character based stories that are kind of about everyday dramas even though my book might sound a little scary it's really much more of a quiet character centric kind of a story I mostly, I love short story writers I think because they kind of deal in quiet moments I really love Tobias Wolfe Andre Dubuse, Alice Monroe one of my favorite books of all time I read it once a year is Olive Kitteridge probably as many of you have read I think Olive is sort of the embodiment of my grandmother from Denny'sville so I read it frequently but those are the types of stories I like I get it I've been fascinated with the age of some of your characters because he's younger than my youngest son and so I'm kind of projecting my son out there and I was wondering if as your books progress are you going to age him a bit? Yes, so Mike Bodich is 24 in the first book and he's a sort of a emotionally stunted 24 even I would say he's only 29 in Stay Hidden so it's over the course of nine books he's only gotten five years older I do try to, you know I've been trying to mature him slowly but surely through the series the laughter indicates that I've had maybe partial success doing that and you know I think that is the goal is to try to make this character to grow him up in a way that's believable and you know again I find that really fascinating one of the things that we're also dealing with in a topical way is we're dealing with a lot of conversation about young men who are not maturing you know, I mean typically it's been referred to people who are living with their parents and it's been a function of the recession maybe and this sort of thing so I didn't really get into it thinking that that would be an aspect of what I was writing the strangest piece of this for me is that when I started writing the first book Mike and I were much closer together in age and I'm aging a lot faster than he is Elise, when you were doing research on your shooters and young men that were shooters did you find any similarities in their formative years or their upgrades of things that happened to them? I think I think I more found similarities and say how their last few years like how they were described and like what struck me about a lot of the descriptions that I read was this young men who felt isolated and then found a kind of community in this world online about shootings and shooters that it was those so isolated sitting at a computer in their room felt like they were part of something that was part of what it was providing I guess pre-internet that just sort of wasn't there but that really struck me in several cases it was interesting I got an email recently from a woman I knew years ago but her sister had taught the parkland shooter like two years ago and was apparently totally shocked like never had seen anything that would indicate that he was capable of what he did so anyway that just occurs to me because it was just thinking about how they're you know perceived and even just two years ago she was she just would not have thought I think in the past couple of years things changed so much but that was the thing that maybe more so than like a specific thing in their childhoods that really stood out and the kind of thing the world the online world provides at some point you have to give up your baby and marketing takes over I guess and I'm just wondering if you could speak to two things the choice of title and the choice of cover art because the more I read about those in a world filled with images things for sale and choices cover art's important and your title separate from what's behind those two things can make a real difference and I wondered how much of a say you have in it or how that process happens for you yeah I have had I've always been able to give feedback I guess though ultimately the decisions have felt like the publisher's decisions particularly about the cover art I don't actually think I've titled any of my novels this title I think was a suggestion of like an intern in my agent's office or something I don't even know and to be honest I didn't love it it felt a little bit just like it lacked it didn't feel that distinctive or something but it sort of got traction and that was the one that everybody liked kind of funny and disappointing thing happened with my cover the original cover was kind of an aerial view of like a painting of a small town and I loved it and then Celeste Eng who has a best selling book called Little Fires Everywhere her book came out and it's the same painter and the same not the same image but like a detail from that so they're like let's copy it but we can't use it because it will look like we copied it so we had to change it so that was disappointing I think that kind of thing happens a lot yeah I was concerned because they have a sort of like bullet hole in one of the letters on the cover and I was really concerned about that and I guess that's just a question like do you need that there for people to realize what the book's about or to create a sense of tension and feel unsure about it but I ultimately kind of lost that battle but I think your cover looks like a movie poster yeah my publisher has a rule that there can be no bullet holes on the cover or like rifle sights like where somebody is in a spot I don't know in my case it says that I get to consult on the cover art and I forget what it says specifically about the titles I have titled every one of my books but in many cases the title is the 20th one that I proposed I mean and in one case actually in Bad Little Falls it was I think it was the third title I proposed but they forced me to do 20 and then decided that number three was okay after all you know and in terms of the art the story I always tell about my relationship to the art the cover art is my publisher my editor will put it on it in secret they have a title from me and they have a description of the book although at that point because of the way that I write they have to be working on this even before they've read my book so you can imagine the difficulty of trying to come up with a cover for something that you know they don't know what it's going to be and very often they will put a computer image of the cover they will actually send me a printed cover which they've wrapped around some random book so that I'm able to hold it in my hands and you know along with a note that says isn't this fantastic this is we are so excited about this so what am I going to say you know like no I hate this I can't you know I can't go with it so you know sometimes I will suggest some tweaks but I've realized that that's the limit and you know in fairness I think especially with titles they've saved me from some titles that I know I would have regretted so one more question how about you so with both of your books and me and these motion painters which after I act you know well when I you know the funny thing is is that when I when I first started writing the book I've gotten that question for nine years and so you know my 24 year old character was you know like nine years ago I would have said you know oh I think Channing Tatum would have been fine for this role or whatever and now Channing Tatum is in his mid 30s right so it's like I have to be constantly on the lookout for like the you know the newest sort of heartthrob you know that's kind of coming up through the teenage ranks because he'll probably age into that perfectly into the role if that ever happens so if you have some suggestions my books have been optioned and they're looking you know they're looking for actors so send them my way oh gosh I have never been asked that question I don't have an answer at the ready but I think I'm going to go with Francis McDormand because Maggie is kind of a tough you know she's got the form kind of a tough character so that would likely be a good fit