Writers understand that the space in which they create stories is vitally important.  While some writers, I suppose, can do their work in a closet, I, personally, need a window to the natural world.

Cityscapes and high rises evoke creativity as well: gritty crime novels, hard-boiled detective stories, or futuristic Metropolis-like science fiction.  But to me, there’s something uniquely inventive and inspiring about nature.

So when I moved (back) to a small town in Vermont from a big city in California, my writing world changed.  I now look out on a green landscape, okay, brown and white in the winter, with the sounds of birds as the primary auditory backdrop.  An occasional deer, moose, and, to my surprise, bear will be sighted in the distance.

I’m not a stranger to this environment.  I taught in Vermont after my college days.  It’s been many years since I’ve lived here yet it seems like yesterday.  Some things are meant to be.

Robert Frost lived in Vermont.  He became the official poet laureate of the Green Mountain State and wrote much of his verse in a log cabin in central Vermont.  The State of Vermont has recognized him with a Robert Frost Wayside picnic area and a Robert Frost Interpretive Trail, (along which selections of his poems are posted.)  There’s also a Robert Frost Memorial Drive, and, the Bread Loaf School of English that Frost cofounded, as well as the farm where he lived.  (He actually owned five farms in Vermont.)

Rudyard Kipling, the English writer, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, moved here in 1892 and wrote The Jungle Book and other short stories.  In fact, he lived less than a mile from where I now live.

Mystery writer, Archer Mayor, lives here and his mysteries do, indeed, take place in Vermont.

So, you ask, will my mysteries now center on tracking scat in the Vermont woods?  Nah. I will continue to write historical mysteries and solve them with modern technology.  Unless I can discover a true mystery in Vermont.

And there are some. Take the man who vanished in 1949 while on a bus trip to Bennington; or five people who went missing between 1945 and 1950, in the “Bennington Triangle” (really?) an area near Glastonbury Mountain; or a human skill found on the side of the road in Danby in 2012; or the disappearance of a Bennington college student in 1971 (there’s that Triangle again.)  Then, of course, there’s Champ, Lake Champlain’s own Loch Ness monster.  Over 600 people have claimed to see him.  Jeez Louise, why not me?

I never expected this window in my office to give me plots or characters or even backdrops for my books.  The beauty of my new landscape simply gives my imagination and inventiveness free reign to go where they will.  Isn’t that what fiction writing is about?