Ask the Author: Suzanne Gates
Answered Questions (8)
Suzanne Gates
This summer I'm beginning all of Dorothy Sayers' books. I've never read her before (nor Patricia Highsmith, another writer on my to-read list), and it's well past time I did. I'm beginning with her first, and reading them in order.
Suzanne Gates
I have two answers for this, but one mystery is no longer a mystery. It's a tragedy.
First answer: The family that lived in my childhood home before my parents bought the house had a son who had served in World War II and had a tremendously difficult time adjusting to home life when he returned from war. Now we would term his illness "PTSD," but at the time (and when I was growing up) the term was "shellshocked." This man retreated into his bedroom, and came out rarely. On one such occasion, he went to his bank, withdrew everything he had in savings, and buried it in a Kerr jar in the crawl space underneath the house.
Eventually the family moved out. I don't know what happened to the man; all this happened way before I was born. My parents, a young married couple, bought the house with a caveat from the prior owners: They asked to come back and dig for the money their son had buried. They did return several times, but didn't find the jar. After they gave up, my parents began digging. By the time I was born, the "buried treasure" was family lore and my friends and I would crawl underneath the house and use trowels to dig for treasure. We never found anything.
I've thought about a book that would move between the son's story, the terrors he must have lived through that made his return home intolerable, and the story of a contemporary woman who desperately needed the money, although she wouldn't know how much money the jar contained. Mostly, though, I think now about the son and what moved him to feel his only recourse was to hide what money he had in a canning jar. I wonder what became of him, and hope that his pain lessened with years. And somewhere, underneath that house in Portland, Oregon, the jar waits.
The other mystery in my life was no mystery at all, but it had a profound effect on my choices and on my writing. In the mid-1980s, a serial killer emerged in the Portland area. The Pacific Northwest is ground zero for serial killers, and I remember my worry in the 1970s that my sister was a target for Ted Bundy. She was beautiful, with long brown hair, parted in the middle. But by the 1980s, Ted Bundy was jailed in Florida and my sister was safe. Not so for the women whose bodies were found in Molalla, an area just outside of Portland. One of the bodies belonged to Maureen Hodges, a grade school friend of my best friend, Kelly.
There's no mystery here, as I said. The murders were horrendous, the killer was caught, and I refuse to write his name. It's Maureen Hodges who is important to me, the young woman who one night stepped into the wrong car. My best friend and I read everything we could about the case, about Maureen. Our question, and maybe this is the mystery, was "What separated her from us?" We all grew up in the same shoddy neighborhood (for context, figure skater Tonya Harding lived down the street. That should tell you all you need to know). We went to the same schools, the same seedy parks. But Maureen became a prostitute and worked downtown Portland for a fix, and Kelly and I became college students. Protracted college students, but still.
The difference was heroin. At some point in her life, maybe late grade school or high school, Maureen made a decision that led her into the Molalla forest, and her detached feet into the freezer of a psychopath. I took drugs in grade school. In my neighborhood, most kids did. But heroin--that was something else entirely. As Kelly remembers, Maureen was smart, funny, a terrific friend. Our question, again: What separates us? Maybe it's simply luck.
First answer: The family that lived in my childhood home before my parents bought the house had a son who had served in World War II and had a tremendously difficult time adjusting to home life when he returned from war. Now we would term his illness "PTSD," but at the time (and when I was growing up) the term was "shellshocked." This man retreated into his bedroom, and came out rarely. On one such occasion, he went to his bank, withdrew everything he had in savings, and buried it in a Kerr jar in the crawl space underneath the house.
Eventually the family moved out. I don't know what happened to the man; all this happened way before I was born. My parents, a young married couple, bought the house with a caveat from the prior owners: They asked to come back and dig for the money their son had buried. They did return several times, but didn't find the jar. After they gave up, my parents began digging. By the time I was born, the "buried treasure" was family lore and my friends and I would crawl underneath the house and use trowels to dig for treasure. We never found anything.
I've thought about a book that would move between the son's story, the terrors he must have lived through that made his return home intolerable, and the story of a contemporary woman who desperately needed the money, although she wouldn't know how much money the jar contained. Mostly, though, I think now about the son and what moved him to feel his only recourse was to hide what money he had in a canning jar. I wonder what became of him, and hope that his pain lessened with years. And somewhere, underneath that house in Portland, Oregon, the jar waits.
The other mystery in my life was no mystery at all, but it had a profound effect on my choices and on my writing. In the mid-1980s, a serial killer emerged in the Portland area. The Pacific Northwest is ground zero for serial killers, and I remember my worry in the 1970s that my sister was a target for Ted Bundy. She was beautiful, with long brown hair, parted in the middle. But by the 1980s, Ted Bundy was jailed in Florida and my sister was safe. Not so for the women whose bodies were found in Molalla, an area just outside of Portland. One of the bodies belonged to Maureen Hodges, a grade school friend of my best friend, Kelly.
There's no mystery here, as I said. The murders were horrendous, the killer was caught, and I refuse to write his name. It's Maureen Hodges who is important to me, the young woman who one night stepped into the wrong car. My best friend and I read everything we could about the case, about Maureen. Our question, and maybe this is the mystery, was "What separated her from us?" We all grew up in the same shoddy neighborhood (for context, figure skater Tonya Harding lived down the street. That should tell you all you need to know). We went to the same schools, the same seedy parks. But Maureen became a prostitute and worked downtown Portland for a fix, and Kelly and I became college students. Protracted college students, but still.
The difference was heroin. At some point in her life, maybe late grade school or high school, Maureen made a decision that led her into the Molalla forest, and her detached feet into the freezer of a psychopath. I took drugs in grade school. In my neighborhood, most kids did. But heroin--that was something else entirely. As Kelly remembers, Maureen was smart, funny, a terrific friend. Our question, again: What separates us? Maybe it's simply luck.
Suzanne Gates
I'm finishing a draft of my second novel, a retelling of the classic adventure novel TREASURE ISLAND. Except in my version, it's 1934 and the island is downtown Los Angeles. The pirates (there has to be pirates) are gangsters, and the treasure is real: three million dollars that perhaps is still hidden somewhere in Los Angeles.
Suzanne Gates
Perhaps some day I'll have meaty advice for aspiring writers, but for now, since I still feel like an aspiring writer myself, I'll have to take my own advice. And that advice is: Write it anyway.
I stopped myself for so long from writing this, that, and the other because I didn't think it would be good enough, deep enough, sparkling enough. The result? Nothing. So now on days when I know that what I'm writing is complete manure, I write it anyway. I guess since I love to garden, I know the secret about manure. Write it anyway. See? I'm telling myself this right now.
I stopped myself for so long from writing this, that, and the other because I didn't think it would be good enough, deep enough, sparkling enough. The result? Nothing. So now on days when I know that what I'm writing is complete manure, I write it anyway. I guess since I love to garden, I know the secret about manure. Write it anyway. See? I'm telling myself this right now.
Suzanne Gates
The friends I've gained! Through years of workshops and professional organizations, I've met people who I know will be friends for life. We began by sharing common interests in writing, but now share our lives. Writing is solitary, but around that solitude is a clamoring community of writers who celebrate life. It's fantastic.
Suzanne Gates
Not well! I've found that if I stop writing, even for a day or two, then fear builds up in me and it's difficult to get going again. So I guess I deal with writer's block by not stopping long enough to feel afraid again.
Suzanne Gates
I am only inspired while I'm writing! If I waited for inspiration to flag me down, I'd never get any words written at all. I toodle around with words until something hits me, and then I write that down and toodle some more. It's less inspiration and more a series of small gasps on the page.
Suzanne Gates
After my mom passed, we found in one of her drawers a Hollywood scrapbook from the 1940s. She had collected publicity shots of movie stars, and cut out articles from fan magazines of the day. I was transfixed, as this scrapbook gave me a perspective on my mom that I had never known. I held in my hands a version of my mom--her 1940s-era dreams--that made her at once both human and vulnerable. I set out to learn more about those dreams, and to learn about the many young women who moved to California hoping to have those dreams fulfilled.
I suppose you could say that THE GLAMOROUS DEAD is an exploration of my mother's movie star dreams. I found out that the dark side to those dreams was very, very dark.
I suppose you could say that THE GLAMOROUS DEAD is an exploration of my mother's movie star dreams. I found out that the dark side to those dreams was very, very dark.
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