Essays & Media

As host for a New Books Network channel, I receive an ongoing stream of pitches from authors, publishers, and publicists. I try to respond to all of them and sometimes agree to an interview, but my favorite way of finding new authors is from recommendations by those I’ve already interviewed.

As host for New Books in Literature, a podcast channel on the New Books Network, I’ve interviewed over 275 authors and have over 20 interviews scheduled for this year. Every month, dozens of pitches from publishers, publicists, and authors show up in my inbox.

I have always excelled at dispensing advice and would probably be writing an advice column if newspapers still mattered and publishers respected the wisdom of age.

We had advice columns and other such offerings back in the last century, but today, the advice is relentless and requires a monthly subscription. Also, I’ve apparently spent all these decades living incorrectly.

Q: Charred is the third in your Whipped and Sipped mystery series--do you think your character Alene has changed over the course of the series?

The moment I got the email offering to publish my first culinary mystery is unforgettable. I hurried into my husband's study, my excitement barely contained. After facing rejection and ghosting from over 100 agents for a year, it felt like winning the lottery.

I didn’t realize I was reading an early cozy mystery when I first picked up a Diane Mott Davidson novel in 1990, but it was a pleasure to read about a crime that didn’t involve hardboiled grit, disgusting descriptions of blood and guts, and moments of spine-chilling fear. Instead, it centered on a divorced caterer worrying about the flakiness of her pie crust as she solved a tricky murder in a small, fictional mountain town in Colorado.

Why are there endless murders in so many cozy mystery towns? Cozy mystery readers might eventually notice that safe and sweet fictional villages have very high murder rates. Those murder rates are even more distracting than the children who never grow older and cozy protagonists who never marry their sweethearts. As an avid reader and the author of the Whipped & Sipped culinary cozy mystery series set in Chicago, I probably think about murder more than most people.

As a host for New Books in Literature on the New Books Network, I usually look for ambitious, character-driven fiction. These novels, whose authors I interview, span the decades and explore human suffering, resilience, and transformation. In between reading gorgeous novels for NBN, I like to refresh my palate with an excellent cozy mystery.

When I remarried years ago, I chose Villeroy and Bach’s Frutteto pattern for our dairy dishes. The beautiful porcelain plates, bowls, and serving platters edged with warm-colored fruits and vegetables, served us for over twenty-five years until many were scratched and chipped and no longer made me happy.

I love historic cozies because there’s something about diving into the protagonist’s community, eavesdropping on the protagonist’s inner thoughts, and watching her (because cozy protagonists are mostly women) solve what at first seems to be an unsolvable crime.

Long before I started writing books, when I was focused on creating, teaching, and performing music, I was plagued by a little voice continuously telling me I wasn’t good at any of it. That voice never shut up. When I was raising children, I never felt like I was the best mother, and years later, when I began inventing recipes, I questioned whether I had it in me to get the flavors right.

Cozy mysteries got me through cancer. Maybe medical intervention did most of the work, but I spent over a year exhausted, foggy, and barely functioning. I’d lie on the couch devouring cozy mysteries about aristocrats, ancient Roman informers, or butterfly collectors, and the hours would speed by. Tales of amateur sleuths baking a peach pie or cooking for a crowd could make me feel better.

I’m just recovering from a bad night filled with bad dreams about a short but enervating fling I had in the early nineties. I should have known the guy would turn out to be controlling when he commented on my hat the first time we met.

Unless you knew that we shared a birthday, you'd think that I have little in common with the First Lady of Song!