An Evening With Susanna Kearsley

Last evening I had the chance to see Susanna Kearsley in action at the Central Rappahannock Regional Library here in Virginia, and it was such a treat! This time around, she was on tour(there’s still a few stops upcoming!) and promoting her new release, A Dangerous Fortune.

A nice big crowd packed one of the library’s biggest auditoriums, and it was so much fun to see so many enthusiastic readers. Seriously, the library closes at 9 but the signing and chatting portion of this event was still going strong well past closing time!

So, what did Kearsley have to say? Well, we started with a Q&A, and then readers threw in all manner of questions about her books, her writing process, and even history in general. If you’ve never heard Susanna Kearsley speaking live, she’s a wonderful storyteller and I learn something new about writing and history every time. This time around, we got to hear that:

– Kearsley told the crowd that she doesn’t think it’s quite fair to expect readers to pick up all of her books in order. However, while her stories stand alone, there are often characters from various books that make appearances in future books. So, her latest novel has a few appearances by characters from other books, but it’s not a true sequel to any of them.

– In writing her books, Kearsley often starts with the letters and diaries of her historical characters, and she credits this as a reason why her historical characters don’t come off as 21st century people playing dress-up. She spoke of some of the universal ways in which people connect, telling of poetry written by fathers mourning lost daughters, and letters showing family dynamics not entirely dissimilar to what we see today. In speaking of relationships across various time periods, she stated, “People connect in exactly the same way. You have to put the human back in the history.”

– And yes, she got to go on another trip to research her latest novel, A Desperate Fortune! Given the setting of the book, she traveled to France and then to Rome. She explained that in order to really get a feel for characters and what they did, she needs to see some of the places that they saw. Often, she will discover a location that ends up being pivotal in her stories and which she would not have known about had she not traveled to the location. For example, in Desperate Fortune, it was only while visiting Rome that she discovered a bridge that ended up being an important place for her characters.

– As with many of Kearsley’s books, her latest has both a modern-day and historical storyline. In this particular story, the modern-day heroine, Sara, has Asperger’s Syndrome. Kearsley mentioned that this posed special challenges because when a narrator has Asperger’s, that person isn’t going to recognize social cues in the same way others would, so she had to find other ways to get ideas across when storytelling through Sara’s eyes.

– Susanna Kearsley’s best ideas come to her while she’s in the tub. The endings of more than 1 book have revealed themselves this way.

– And her next book?  The latest book in progress, Bellwether, is her first set entirely in the United States, and it will have ties to Revolutionary War New York. I can’t wait!  Though, as Kearsley pointed out, she tends to be a slow-ish writer so her books usually come out every other year.  In my opinion, they tend to be well worth the wait.

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And here’s the blurb for A Desperate Fortune: