It’s only two months until the launch of the first book in my new Tuscan mystery series. With the second book done, I’m deep into the third book and at the same time, trying to keep up with the necessities of production/marketing on the first book.

Maintaining this balance between marketing and writing fiction leaves me discombobulated. (One of my favorite words for being confused and disconcerted – still, knowing the definition of the word doesn’t change how I feel!)  

Anyway, by late afternoon, I’m knackered, and I find escape from both marketing and mystery by reading a motley array of books that seem unrelated to writing mysteries, but aren’t.     

The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland

A Mapmaker’s Dream: The Meditations of Fra Mauro, Cartographer to the Court of Venice by James Cowan

Afghanistan: A Short History of Its People and Politics by Martin Ewans

Reading these books and others, I’ve learned that there isn’t any book unrelated to my writing. Everything I read becomes entwined, one way or another, with my characters, with plot or landscape, with my understanding of human behavior.

Fra Mauro. I never thought to read about a Renaissance cartographer. I am writing a series of mysteries set in Venice, but I bought the Mauro book on a whim. How could Fra Mauro, enigmatic Renaissance monk and cartographer who stayed in his cell and reaped knowledge from visiting merchants and adventurers, contribute to a mystery set in modern Venice?  Reading the book, I discovered that Fra Mauro was not just recording information to make a physical map. As he says in his notebooks: “The things [the merchants and adventurers] had observed were phenomena only; what I attempted to inscribe onto my map was the transformation of their observations into that uncluttered grace we find in all living relationships.” How could a writer of any genre not appreciate the summons to fulfill the idea of finding the “uncluttered grace…in all living relationships?

Studying poetic forms in The Making of a Poem and trying to write a villanelle or a pantoum is a demanding exercise in the use of language and form. Using Strand and Boland’s book, I’ve turned creating different poetic forms into a weekly challenge and am gratified to find how effort instructs me in keeping my language tight, precise.

Afghanistan has been in the news recently and by coincidence, I lived in Afghanistan for a year and a half. When I inadvertently came across Ewans’ book I bought it, not sure when I would read it. But I am reading it, and through this scholar’s work am firmly reminded that personal experience never provides the full picture of a place or of a people. We travel, we live elsewhere for a while, we know some things first hand. But there is always more to learn, more to make one amazed, more understanding to destroy stereotypes, always new perspectives on culture, always some thunderbolt detail that makes you wonder how you missed such important wisdom.  

Victor Hugo said, “… to read is to light a fire, every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” 

For me, this is particularly true about serendipitous reading: I surprise myself with a study of rain, expand my understanding of what it means to be a woman by reading a book on the courageous, intelligent women of the Bible, and give myself a fruitful invite with a layman’s book on astrophysics (From which, too my surprise, I conceived a poem that was later published.)

I know that details can add up to knowledge but perhaps not to wisdom. Still, reading in myriad directions outside usual channels ignites my mind, hands me some new tools for awe, and nudges me toward understanding the lived-experience under the facts.