Tag Archives: mysteryauthor

My Thanks

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This month I want to express a big “Thank You” to the community of people who stand behind all writers. From the beginning of any writing project this includes those:

who help set up a Web Page and other online venues
who maintain those sites;
readers who give time, attention, and thoughtful criticisms to rough drafts (and I mean often really rough drafts);
editors who accept our work and spend hours nourishing it, trusting it; improving it
reviewers who speak publicly about our books, encouraging readers to buy and read
readers who buy our work, who take the time to listen to our stories

My personal thanks on the Leah Contarini Mystery Series goes to:
Sabine Barcatta
Shanna Siporin
Dov & Lev Siporin
Steve Siporin
Mary Sharp
Steve Sharp
Carol McNamara
Greg Stout
Mark Levenson
Laura Fisher
Level Best Books:
Harriette Sackler
Shawn Reilly Simmons
Verena Rose

Writing and Walking in Tuscany

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Photos from my recent nine-mile walk to a neighboring village and back. These Etruscan trails are the same as those beloved by Leah, protagonist of my Leah Contarini Mysteries Series of Italian mysteries from Level Best Books. The first book in the series, Bitter Maremma is available now from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, etc; the second book, Death Will Find You, will be out this fall; and the third book, tentatively titled Precarious Refuge, will appear in 2023.  

From a review of Bitter Maremma:

Author Siporin’s novel works on a couple of different levels, first, as a murder mystery—and a very good one at that—and second, as a paean to the Tuscan region, its customs, culture and its colorful residents, all of which are richly drawn by the author. A far cry from the usual noir-ish streets of New York or Los Angeles, Bitter Maremma is a highly entertaining read, one that I most certainly recommend.

–Gregory Stout, author of Lost Little Girl, Gideon’s Ghost, and Finalist in Best First PI Novel category, 2022 Shamus Awards.

How Far to Wilderness?

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Given the recent snows and thinking of friends and family living in currently sub-zero weather, I’m posting a short essay from my book, Stories to Gather All Those Lost . Published by Utah State University, the essays were originally radio commentary aired on KUSU-FM, Logan, Utah,  and KUER-FM, Salt Lake City, Utah. The book is available on Amazon.

It is 8 P.M., and I have decided to go for a walk.  I will find out tomorrow that the winds tonight are 65 mph and, with the wind chill factor, the temperature is -80 degrees.  But I do not know this yet, and I think only of the walk.  I dig my jacket with the coyote fur hood out of the closet.  It is an old military jacket I was given when I was a visiting poet in a prison in the Midwest.  It embarrasses me to have it; every time I wear it I think of all the jackets like it and all the coyotes that were killed in order to make them:  thousands of coyotes, all slaughtered for the Air Force.  Still, I keep it.  It reminds me of the young prisoners, and me, immured in the sloping stubble fields of central Iowa, all huddling in our khaki green jackets crossing the barren prison grounds to the classroom building.      

     When I step off the back porch, away from the protection of the garage, someone punches me in the chest.  I suck air.  It is the wind.  I pull the hood as far forward as it will go, creating a six-inch, fur-circled tunnel around my face.  It could be perfect.  I am warm from the waist up and around my head, but I have forgotten to wear long underwear, and my jeans are too thin:  only a minute out and my thighs hurt. 

     But I will not go back.  I am alone with the wind, the way I want to be. 

     I turn left, skirt the golf course on the north, and head toward Lundstrom Park, where, on a night last summer, I lay in the grass next to the canal and watched the Perseid meteor showers.  Now the park is cold and barren, the wind slapping against the ball diamond backstops. The road and walks are clogged with drifts.

     Tonight the wind is in a wild dance with the snow, and the wind is the stronger partner. It howls across the surface of the streets and yards, ripping away the fine top layer of the drifts, incited to a cold stinging fog that swarms over the drifts and scuffles along a frozen gutter.  Bearing the snow, the wind shifts and dodges along the ground, stops suddenly, then leaps up again, lashing my feet and legs.  Across from Lundstrom, I turn west, toward the dirt hills.   The wind is behind me now, plummeting down from the Wasatch Front.  This wind wants me to do something wild.

     I cut off the street into the dirt hills.  The street is too safe, I’ve decided.  How far do I need to go for wilderness? 

     Fifty yards in, the drifts are suddenly waist high and hard.  It is as if I stood still and they crept in around me.  I start over them, slipping, regaining balance just before I fall and then slip again.  I can’t get a grip on the sanded snow. The drifts undulate in front of me.  Sucking air, I make my way.  One strong gust and I am blown down, rolling as I fall to the bottom of the drift. 

     Things are getting serious.  This isn’t suburbia, this isn’t Maple Drive winding gently through one of the older developments of Logan. 

     A friend, Kim, once told me to “Know your place.”  I think of him.  My place is a brick house behind a row of maple trees.  Secure in that warm house, I make stew and watch the snow drift against the juniper bushes. 

     But tonight, only blocks away, I find another of my places. I have walked here dozens of times before, and I know now I never knew this place;  I am only beginning to understand.  This wind torn barren field, scarred by backhoes, disfigured by the encroachment of ranch houses, is keeping itself.  The wind slaps me in the face, and I pay attention.

     I push myself up to my knees, dig in the steel toes of my boots, and heave myself up, leaning hard into the wind.  My hands ache, my thighs sting. 

     I begin to run;  I am only on the edge of being frightened. Mostly, I am cold.  I run in a jerky, uneven motion.  My boots grip one step and slip the next, one step slides and the next sinks, waist deep.  I stumble, fall, groping my way toward the road, head into a wind too painful to breath.

     My friend’s mother died in a drift at the end of her street.  She wanted to die there. She planned it that way, and she went there on purpose to freeze to death. She was only yards from a house.

     This story I’m telling is small. It is just one of many of a season when I learned to let the snow take me. To let the snow gather me in with all those lost.     

Beginning a New Book

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To animate work on a book, I gather ideas from three sources:  scholarly / public records; interviews; and notes from my own experience. Combining these three elements jumpstarts my imagination, and I know if I keep sifting through these elements, the story I discover, one of hundreds of possibilities, will make itself known. Personal memories of food, landscape, gestures, and the sounds of a language infuse scholarly information with vibrancy, and the scholarly writings provide details and facts that may have become fuzzy in friends’ telling of personal stories.

So when I was recently asked at a reading if my stories are autobiographical, or if the stories I am putting to paper are the stories of someone else, or if I just create the narratives whole cloth out of imagination, I say that none of these is the case, and yet, all of them are the case.

Everywhere I go, in everything I read, hear, and see, I find pieces of life — good, evil, and inbetween — and am compelled to make a story. The pieces appear everywhere: in a fact in a book, in a neighbor’s tears elicited by a memory, in the vison of a landscape, in the unique sound of a dialect, in the way the rain fell outside the window on a certain day, in the moment I understood the profound anger of a woman who remembers running through the forest, SS and dogs not far behind.  From these pieces, an incipient story nudges at me.

I begin a narrative. Perhaps the woman was crying when she remembers how it was raining the night she slipped from her house and fled into the forests of Tuscany, the SS not far behind.  It could be that the trail that  night was muddy, like the trails I explored years later in the same forest, the mud sucking at my feet. Perhaps the Italian peasant man I interviewed still makes the same sausage his grandfather made, and can give me the recipe, which in my story becomes a murder weapon.

These chunks of life add up to a story, which, good or bad, is a reflection of my vision, risen from the urge to create a narrative. My ultimate goal is to look into my own and others’ hearts, including the darker sides, to grasp some understanding of human nature.