Sarah Stewart Taylor's Strangest Job Ever

**Late breaking news! Jay Roberts is the winner of Jeri Westerson's The Isolated Seance! Lucy D is the winner of Alicia Bessett's Murder on Mustang Beach! The winner of Barbara Ross's Hidden Beneath is Deborah Ortega!

Now back to our regularly scheduled program...

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I am such a huge fan of Sarah Stewart Taylor's books, and as I was fortunate enough to read an advanced copy of her latest Maggie D'arcy novel, A STOLEN CHILD, I can personally vouch for it being a terrific read and I'm thrilled to have her as our guest today.

What a great topic, too. This came up recently at a writers' conference and hearing about everyone's weird jobs was fascinating.

Here's Sarah to share some of hers!

In my new Maggie D’arcy mystery, A Stolen Child, Maggie has just started a new job as a patrol officer in Dublin, Ireland when she and her partner are first on the scene of the murder of a young model and reality TV star. As Maggie realizes that the woman’s toddler daughter is missing and starts to unravel the threads of the investigation, she feels an extra level of pressure to do well in her new job, and to prove herself so that she can make it onto a homicide team. Focusing on Maggie’s mindset while I was writing got me thinking about jobs, the ones we hate, the ones we love, the great ones and the weird ones.

If you don’t count getting paid a nickel each to pluck slugs and snails off of the plants in my grandparent’s garden, I got my first job when I was ten years old and was hired by a Mary Kay saleswoman in my suburban neighborhood. I would walk over to her house after school and she would pay me to put shiny gold stickers on the pink boxes of Mary Kay products stacked against the wall in her guestroom. She had a very pink and pristinely clean house and I loved sitting on the bed in her floral-scented guestroom, peeling off the labels and placing them carefully on the boxes. She didn’t yet have a pink Cadillac, but she was working toward that goal, something she talked about all the time, and I remember feeling proud that I was somehow part of it.

Between the ages of eleven and fifteen, I was a babysitter. I babysat often, for all different kinds of kids and families, and managed to save quite a lot of money by watching movies in other people’s houses and eating their snacks after the kids went to bed. I loved seeing different houses and getting a window into all those different family dynamics.

And then, I got a job in a bookstore. That was my high school job, and in many ways it was the best job I ever had. The bookstore was a beloved, independent fixture in my Long Island town and enjoyed enthusiastic support from the community. I stocked the shelves, recommended books, and learned a lot about literature and about the world. I met a lot of real-life authors too and I think that my bookstore job made writing books seem possible. And since it came with a discount, it also served as the gateway to my lifelong book-buying addiction . . .

During high school and college, I had a whole variety of jobs. I worked as a receptionist and constituent services assistant in my congressman’s district office and as a sandwich delivery person in my college town. I waited tables at an extremely fancy French restaurant, where I had to speak in a soft voice, and clear the tables in one graceful, confident take, balancing all of the heavy china plates on one arm so that the guests wouldn’t have to look at dirty dishes for a moment longer than necessary.

After college, I moved to Ireland and worked in pubs, and then eventually as a nanny. I went to graduate school there, and when I returned to the States, it felt like it was time to get a “real job.” 

I worked in publishing for a while — an invaluable experience for someone who wanted to write books. I am grateful every day for the experience of seeing how the sausage gets made — but what I really wanted to do was to write and while I was getting my journalism career going, I got a part-time job teaching writing and literature at a men’s prison. It was another one of my favorite jobs, illuminating in so many different ways. It provided me with a look at our imperfect and inequitable justice system and at the terrible things humans do to one another, as well as at the transcendent humanity that can be found in even dismal places. 

I loved being a daily news reporter and spent the next few years writing new stories during the workday, and fictional ones at night and early in the morning. When my husband and I moved to Washington, DC for a few years, I felt like I was close to finishing my first novel and got a job as a dog walker to allow myself more time to write and revise.

Every day, between eleven and two, I would walk all over the city with my furry charges, picking up dog poop, greeting the regulars at the dog park, breaking up scuffles, and giving out treats. My husband had a prestigious job with the Clinton administration and I secretly loved going to his fancy work events and to cocktail parties and seeing people’s faces when they asked what I did and I told them I was a dog walker. The job offered me time to plot and think about my writing while I wandered all over the city and it gave me lots of ideas for future novels. Every day, I got to go into my clients’ houses when they weren’t home. I saw their photographs and personal belongings. I could tell when a spouse had moved out, or when someone was sick. Those glimpses of strangers’ houses gave me endless fodder for novel writing. 

For the last twenty years, since my first book was published, I have described my profession as “writer” or “novelist” wherever it needed to be described, but like most fiction writers I have had to do other things to make money as well: teaching, journalism, P.R. writing, farming, and the most wonderful and demanding — and unpaid and undervalued — work of parenting.

What is the strangest work you’ve ever done? What’s the best job you ever had? 

 

Sarah Stewart Taylor is the author of the Sweeney St. George series and the Maggie D'arcy series. The first Maggie D'arcy mystery, The Mountains Wild, was on numerous Best of the Year lists and was a Library Journal Pick of the Month. The fourth Maggie D'arcy mystery, A Stolen Child, is out now.

Sarah grew up on Long Island, and was educated at Middlebury College in Vermont and Trinity College, Dublin, where she studied Irish Literature. She has worked as a journalist and writing teacher and now lives with her family on a farm in Vermont where they raise sheep and grow blueberries. Sarah spends as much time in Ireland as she can. 

DEBS: Dog walkers are like real estate agents and house cleaners, they get to see everything--so perfect for the perpetually nosy writer!

I highly recommend following Sarah on Instagram to see fun updates on her farming life. The lambs!

REDs and readers, share your strangest job!

Sarah Stewart Taylor--Be Fearless

DEBORAH CROMBIE: One of the perks of being an author is getting to read advance copies of upcoming books. Another is following the careers of other authors who have become friends. Such is the case today, with the publication of Sarah Stewart Taylor's THE MOUNTAINS WILD. I loved Sarah's Sweeney St. George books, and missed her writing in the years she was doing other things. So I'm thrilled to bring you Sarah today, with a wonderful new novel, THE MOUNTAINS WILD.

Twenty-three years ago, Maggie D'arcy's family received a call from the Dublin police. Her cousin Erin has been missing for several days. Maggie herself spent weeks in Ireland, trying to track Erin's movements, working beside the police. But it was to no avail: no trace of her was ever found.

The experience inspired Maggie to become a cop. Now, back on Long Island, more than 20 years have passed. Maggie is a detective and a divorced mother of a teenager. When the Gardaí call to say that Erin's scarf has been found and another young woman has gone missing, Maggie returns to Ireland, awakening all the complicated feelings from the first trip. The despair and frustration of not knowing what happened to Erin. Her attraction to Erin's coworker, now a professor, who never fully explained their relationship. And her determination to solve the case, once and for all.

  
Here's what I said about it: 
"With its evocative Dublin setting, lyrical prose, tough but sympathetic heroine, and a killer twist in the plot, Sarah Stewart Taylor's The Mountains Wild should top everyone's must-read lists this year!" ― New York Times bestselling author Deborah Crombie

Julia liked it, too:

"Lyrical, moody, THE MOUNTAINS WILD unfolds like an Irish ballad, at turns stirring, tender and tragic. Sarah Stewart Taylor has written a book as much about the mysteries of the human heart as the questions surrounding the long-missing woman at the silent center of the tale. A triumphant return to the genre." ― New York Times bestselling author Julia Spencer Fleming

So this one comes highly recommended indeed! Here's Sarah to share her inspiration--

BE FEARLESS

I am not a slogan-y sort of person. I have never made an inspirational collage. I don’t have any “Success” posters hanging in my writing room. I am generally of the mind that a single motivational sentence or word could never contain enough nuance to be actually useful.  

And yet, a few years ago, when I embarked on a writing project that would become my new mystery novel, THE MOUNTAINS WILD, I found myself turning over and over again to two short sentences: Do Your Work. Be Fearless. Finally, I typed them up and pinned them above my desk. 

I needed a bit of fearlessness. The heart of the novel -- about a Long island homicide detective named Maggie D’arcy who returns to Ireland twenty three years after she first went there looking for her beloved cousin Erin -- had been lodged in my head since the night in 1993 that I drove with a group of friends up into the mountains outside Dublin, Ireland, and someone said to me, “This is where the American woman disappeared. She was from Long Island, like you.” 

Over the next six years, a string of disappearances in and around those mountains would baffle Irish investigators. Most of the disappearances -- including that of the young American woman from Long Island who, like me, had recently moved to Ireland  -- were never solved. During the years I lived in Ireland, I traveled all over the country, visiting many of the places near Dublin and Wicklow where the women had lived or gone missing. It wasn’t until I returned home to the States though that, thanks to the advent of online news, I learned about all of the cases. I started writing crime novels set in New England, and then I had three babies in five years and for a while, I didn’t write much of anything. I could chase a toddler across a busy road while eight months pregnant and with another toddler strapped to my body and go three weeks in a row without sleeping more than two hours at a stretch, but could I still construct a mystery plot? I wasn’t sure. I was afraid I’d never be able to do it again. When I started finding the time to tell stories again, I wrote kids’ adventure novels and the Irish cases receded in my mind, but never went away.

And then a few years ago, a plot began to crystalize. I started to think about the families of crime victims, in particular the families of crime victims who have disappeared, of whom no trace is ever found. I wondered what choices those family members might make, how it might affect their choice of careers, their relationships, the rest of their lives. I thought about the ripple effects of disappearances, of how everyone in the victim’s orbit is changed. 

Glendalough Valley

I was afraid to write the book though. A story inspired by those disappearances in Ireland somehow felt like it wasn’t mine to tell. Ireland was my favorite place in the world. The years I spent there, working and going to graduate school, were among the happiest of my life. I became myself there. I felt funny writing about something terrible happening there. I didn’t feel confident even trying until I sat down with an Irish friend in a pub in Dublin and told her my idea. You have to write it!” she exclaimed. 

 I started to do my work. I started traveling back to Ireland as much as I could to research locations, reconnecting with old and new friends and revisiting places that had been important to me. I interviewed experts and read accounts of the cases written by former investigators. I tried to figure out how to write the book. Irish crime writers I admire had written some terrific novels inspired by the disappearances and I knew I didn’t want to attempt to write the novel from the point of view of the Irish investigators or families. I decided to write it from the point of view of an American in Ireland. I wanted to capture the feeling of being a foreigner in a country you may think you understand, but really don’t. I wanted to capture the excitement and intense focus of getting to know a new place, the sense of everything being just slightly different: the words for things, the electrical outlets, the understanding of historical events and social dynamics. And I settled on the first person, present tense, because I wanted to narrow my character’s viewpoint to her own limited knowledge, to show her experiencing Ireland moment by moment, rather than thinking she -- or I -- had anything like a bird’s eye view. 

Glendalough Valley Boardwalk

My main character, Maggie D’arcy, appeared in my head one day. She would have grown up in an Irish American enclave on Long Island, she would have a complicated relationship with her missing cousin. She would go to look for her and be surprised by what she learned of Erin’s life. She would fall in love with Dublin, and with one of the men in Erin’s life there. She would realize how little she actually understood about Irish history and politics. Despite some promising leads, she would fail to find any trace of Erin, but she would become a homicide detective and years later, when new evidence was found and a new woman had gone missing, she would have to return to Ireland to face the man she’d loved for all those years and to try and solve the case once and for all. 

I’d done my work, but I was still terrified. I’d been out of the mystery community and that part of the publishing world for so long. Could I even do this? Would anyone want to read what I had to write? Doubt swamped me. 

And that’s when that phrase came to me. Do Your Work. Be Fearless. There was something about those words that centered me, that showed me the way. Put your head down. Do the work. Then put it out there, knowing that a book is always a risk, that not everyone is going to like it. Staying in Maggie’s head helped me. What was she experiencing? What was she missing? Where had she misunderstood? Maggie, it turned out, needed a dose of bravery too. 

THE MOUNTAINS WILD comes out today. My husband and my kids, now 15, 11 and 10, are helping me celebrate. I have been welcomed back so warmly -- as you can see from the quotes from both Julia and Debs on the cover of my book -- and I am so excited for the day that I get to see everyone in person once again. 

When have you had to talk yourself into being fearless? What resulted? And what slogans or phrases have been meaningful to you at various points in your life? 

Sarah Stewart Taylor is the author of the Sweeney St. George series and the Maggie D'arcy series. She grew up on Long Island, and was educated at Middlebury College in Vermont and Trinity College, Dublin, where she studied Irish Literature. She has worked as a journalist and writing teacher and now lives with her family on a farm in Vermont where they raise sheep and grow blueberries.

DEBS: I love Sarah's questions! Stop in to chat and chime in!