Help! My Writer’s Brain Was Kidnapped by a Town!

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Visiting a place is one thing—we’ve all been to places that are captivating and unique. But have you ever been kidnapped by a place?

Provincetown Massachusetts is absolutely magical—have you been there? As author Diane Wald reveals, P’town put her under its spell the moment she stepped onto the sand. 

Help! 

My Writer’s Brain Was Kidnapped by a Town!

by Diane Wald



Yes, that’s me, on MacMillan Pier in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1951, on vacation with my parents. (Dig that saucy nautical outfit, and the ever-stylish Mary Janes!).

 Little did I know then that more almost twenty years later, I’d end up living in that town for three years, and then in another twenty or so years, feel irresistibly drawn to writing a novella set right there.

Provincetown sits like a funky, sun-kissed monarch at the very tip of Cape Cod, where its high-duned beaches, crashing waves, and aromatic pine forests combine to satisfy all your senses. On the outer side of its curved-arm peninsula, the wildness of the Atlantic Ocean beckons; on the inner curve ripples the less rambunctious Cape Cod Bay.

 It’s a simultaneously boisterous and meditative spot where the tiny winter population swells after Memorial Day to a diverse crowd that fills every rentable nook and cranny. That can be overwhelming, but don’t be alarmed: what you really need to do is visit off season.

My parents packed up me and my younger brother and drove us almost every summer from our home in New Jersey to one of the towns on the outer Cape for a week or two, and every year one day was dedicated to visiting Provincetown. I not only got to know the place; I fell in love. Actually, I fell under some kind of a spell. I went back every chance I had. It was as if I’d been kidnapped, but not by evildoers—by a beguiling and mysterious setting.

I was in my twenties, a burgeoning poet, when I was accepted for a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. The fellowship was extended for a second year, and I stayed on for a third year working in the town. I was more than hooked; I only forced myself to leave because I wanted to go to grad school. I wasn’t writing fiction then, and I’m sure I wasn’t aware I had the beginnings of a book in my mind, but the perfect setting had been quietly percolating there since I was a young child.

After many years, the arc of my kidnapping came to its inevitable conclusion: I had to pay the ransom and write the novel! Once I fleshed out my main characters, I realized that an unexpected character—Provincetown itself—had made itself indispensable. Sometimes my “town” character actually took over, interacting with the other characters in ways that furthered the action, offering a built-in drama rife with conflict and challenges.

Sure, I could have set the story in an art colony just about anywhere, but I knew it wouldn’t have been as good. In addition to my first-hand knowledge of the place, I needed its texture, its aura.

 Here was a place where a wide array of lifestyles, ages, careers, art forms, and beliefs would allow me to explore my themes of unravelling personal ethics, creativity, love, and friendship. I lived in Provincetown in the 1970s, but I decided to place the story in the 1980s, which allowed me to work in a subplot about a character who succumbed to AIDS.

I know a lot of other writers have had this same experience of using their setting as a character. None of us can imagine To Kill a Mockingbird taking place anywhere but Maycomb, Alabama, or Wuthering Heights anywhere but on the moody Yorkshire moors. I never could have written The Bayrose Files without being kidnapped by Provincetown. 

As I say on the Acknowledgements page at the back of the book, “I’ve got sand in my shoes forever.”

So, I’m wondering, has this ever happened to you? Were you ever kidnapped by a city, town, or geographical location that later became a character in your prose? I’d love to hear about it.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, good question! I’ve been in Provincetown a million times, and it is swarming with people, amazing, hilarious, wonderful. And the food is spectacular. And the atmosphere is beyond unique. 

Readers, have you been to P’town? What place has “kidnapped” your imagination? And as Diane asks, if you are writing, were you ever so captivated by a place that it became a character?

Diane Wald is a poet and novelist who has worked as a motel manager, library assistant, journal circulation manager, English professor, academic dean, and in-house writer for a national animal welfare organization. She has published five chapbooks, four full-length poetry collections, two novels, and hundreds of poems in literary magazines. Her new book, The Bayrose Files, launches May 17, 2025, from Regal House Publishing. She lives seven miles outside of Boston and 65 miles from Provincetown.

THE BAYROSE FILES

Ambitious young journalist Violet Maris secures a coveted residency at a prestigious artists' and writers' colony in 1980s Provincetown using a file of stories written by a friend. Her intention: to write a captivating exposé. However, Violet's promising start at the colony takes a dark turn when tragedy strikes—her friend, the true author of the stories, succumbs to AIDS. This plunges Violet into turmoil, compounded by the weight of the terrible secret she carries. Compelled to confess, she confides in a member of the colony's board with whom she has become romantically involved. The revelation of her deception leads to Violet's expulsion from the program, grappling with disgrace and searching for a path toward redemption and reconciliation—with herself and those she has inadvertently hurt.

https://regal-house-publishing.mybigcommerce.com/the-bayrose-files/

The Ghosts in the Layers?

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HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: It's tempting, isn't it? To think of who has been the same places you've been, in the past, and waaaaay in the past? It crosses my mind whenever I walk on Boston Common, or go to Lexington and Concord,  or stroll down the street in Salem. You cannot tell me the present is all that's--present.

Our dear friend of the Reds Jeannette DeBeauvoir has been thinking just the same thing. 

The Ghosts in the Layers
By Jeannette deBeauvoir

I walk down Commercial Street—which here in Provincetown is our Main Street—and I think about what I’m seeing. I pass Lewis Brothers’ Ice Cream, and smile at the memory of my stepdaughter working there when she still lived with me. 

I stop in to East End Books for a lively conversation with my friend Jeff. I might go to the Portuguese Bakery for a decadent pastry—bittersweet memories, those, of breakfasts with my ex-husband. I have to go see Chomo at her Himalayan shop and find out what’s on sale. I’ll check out what Nan or Deborah put in the window at the venerable Provincetown Bookshop. If it’s a nice day, I might treat myself to a Bulgarian salad that I’ll take out on the pier and eat while watching the harbor. I’ll end up at the post office and have at least two conversations and three dog-petting sessions there. As I walk, I say hello to a lot of people; those of us who live year-round in this tourist destination pretty much know each other, at least by sight. 

And as I do all this, I realize that what I’m seeing is just a small slice of this street. I’m seeing what’s relevant to my life.

Which means I’m missing rather a lot.

I’ve talked a lot about the importance, to me, of using place when writing fiction, of populating one’s books with real shops and restaurants and streets and people. But it’s only recently that I’ve begun to think about the layers that exist everywhere, layers certain people see and others don’t. 

Commercial Street also has smoke shops, leather shops, bars, clothing stores, sex shops, antiques and home décor… I know they’re there, but they don’t really register. I don’t have a reason to go in, or a memory to attach to them. And what that means is readers of my Provincetown mystery series aren’t really experiencing Provincetown, are they? They’re experiencing my experience of Provincetown, and everybody’s mileage varies.

When I start thinking like that, I feel my head might explode.

To complicate things even more, there are ghosts that live in those layers, faces and voices and memories of people and things that are no more. I already mentioned two of my own: the ghost of my former marriage, the ghost of my stepdaughter handing out ice cream cones. There’s the memory of the old gatehouse at the Murchison estate, now replaced by something modern and forgettable; the real soda/malt shop with a long shiny counter that used to be part of Adams’ Drugstore; the horse farm over on Nelson that’s now condos.

Provincetown has more than its share of real ghosts, too, as we remember a time when men came here to die of an alienating plague; back then, there was a new funeral every week. Or we can listen to the wind that whispers over the dunes, reminding us of all the shipwrecked victims who died on our shores when the Cape was still the Atlantic’s favorite graveyard. 

Marc Cohn might have seen the ghost of Elvis when he was walking in Memphis; I strive to see the ghosts of my literary predecessors here, of Edna St. Vincent Millay scratching away in a cold attic room, of Eugene O’Neill staging plays on Lewis Wharf, Tennessee Williams at the Little Bar of the Atlantic House, Norman Mailer roaringly drunk and brawling with fishermen, John Dos Passos decrying war in three volumes of work. I don’t even expect most people are looking for the same ghosts as I am!

These thoughts could rapidly become paralyzing, as you can well imagine.

Of course, realistically, my perspective is valid. It’s the perspective I’ve given to my protagonist, Sydney Riley, who is actually quite a lot like me in ways both comfortable and distressing. But I also wonder if I have a responsibility toward those other layers, those other ghosts. Am I being honest in not including them? Yet how can I access things I don’t know about?

I don’t know the answer to those questions. Do you?

The one thing I know I can do is keep some of it alive. Honor some of the people who lived and died here and whose lives were so meaningful to the town. Ellie, the transgender woman who used to—at age 78—belt out Frank Sinatra in front of town hall.

 Richard Olson, the historian, who for decades sat at the bar at Napi’s and dispensed amazing wisdom. Tim McCarthy, activist, who was never without his video camera, documenting life. Names that in another ten years will have disappeared from memory, because they weren’t famous anywhere but here. But they were part of here, and so in my latest mystery, A Killer Carnival, Ellie is remembered; it’ll be Richard’s turn for my November release, The Christmas Corpses. And perhaps someone will pick up the book and muse, “yeah, right, I remember Richard! Gosh, I’d forgotten all about him.”

And maybe somewhere Richard will be smiling.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I'm sure that's true! And lovely to think about. And yes, we can honor them through our writing ,and our reading, as well. 

I know we've talked about "ghosts" before. But even if you haven't encountered them personally, where are places you've gone where you think they might still be?

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Jeannette de Beauvoir writes mysteries and historical fiction, sometimes intersecting the two. A Killer Carnival, Book Four of the Sydney Riley Provincetown mystery series, is just out, as Ptown’s Carnival parade starts with a bang—literally. More about her at jeannettedebeauvoir.com.

(PS from Jeannette: Just as a postscript, as I was writing this article, Atlas Obscura popped up in my inbox inviting readers to share a real place they’d discovered through a work of fiction. Timing is everything! You can see them all here.)

Globe Trotting with Jeannette de Beauvoir

INGRID THOFT

Our own Lucy raised the issue of setting a few weeks ago—how well does a writer need to know their setting for it to ring true?—and today, Jeannette de Beauvoir joins us to share her experience with choosing the perfect place for her mysteries.  

Where in the World?
I wrote my first novel when I was eight years old. (It wasn’t very good.) I was living in my hometown of Angers, France, and it didn’t occur to me that Angers was a very nice place to live and would make an excellent setting for a book. Instead, I invented a place. I’m not going to blame the book’s awfulness on the venue I invented, but that should have told me something.

Over the years I followed up that rather pathetic beginning with a bunch of historical fiction rooted mostly in time—which has always been important to me—and in place only incidentally, merely because it happened to be where the events I used as a backdrop to my stories actually unfolded.

I remember the first time I realized how exciting it was for readers to read a novel set in a familiar place. It was one of Linda Barnes’ Carlotta Carlyle mysteries, and at the time I was living in Cambridge: I remember being entranced, not just by the story or the characters, but by the familiarity of the setting. I know that street! I eat at Mary Chung’s!

That familiarity delivered something a lot of the other mystery novels I was reading at the time didn’t: an instant physical rapport with the character. A sense of belonging in their world. And the more I thought about it, the more I wanted that to be part of my writing, too. 

It works two ways: people who live in the venue feel at home, and people visiting it for the first time feel like they’re coming home.

There’s a story about the wonderful suspense novelist Phyllis Whitney that’s probably apocryphal (though I hope it’s not): it’s said that she would decide where she next wanted to go on vacation—say, Greece—and that choice would then become her setting for her next book, her vacation turning into a (pleasant) research trip. I can say from experience that visiting a place through a novelist’s eyes really does bring a new dimension to one’s travel: one is always wondering what if my protagonist went here? Who might she meet there? Where could some adventure befall her? It’s a game I play now all the time, and even though most of the places I visit don’t end up actually being used in a book, the exercise is rather fun.

I fell in love with Montréal decades ago when I first visited, but it wasn’t until I started really thinking about the place as inspiring the story—instead of the other way around—that I did some serious research into the city’s past and found the historical events that inspired "Asylum" and "Deadly Jewels," my two mysteries centering on PR director Martine LeDuc. And it wasn’t until I’d lived in Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod for several years that I felt I really knew the place enough to situate a mystery series there; that’s the one I’m engaged in now, with wedding consultant Sydney Riley becoming what one of the shop owners in town calls “Provincetown’s answer to Jessica Fletcher.”

And while I love what every mystery novelist loves—readers contacting me about how they like a story, or my characters—what I love most of all is people who’ve lived here for decades telling me that I’ve really captured a sense of Ptown, that for them the venue is as much a character as the people who inhabit it.

I gave my dentist copies of my Montréal books to read before she and her husband went to Canada on vacation, and I was delighted when she came back and said, “okay, so I know that Martine prefers St. Viateur bagels to Fairmount bagels, but we tried both and I have to say I disagree with her.” While she obviously has no taste in bagels—Martine takes after me, professing St. Viateur allegiance in the long-established rivalry between the two bakeries—I was pleased that I’d made the city come alive for my dentist before she went, and enlivened it for her while she was there.

I’ll be honest: I’m not the world’s best mystery reader. We’ve all consumed authors who present startling twists at the end of their stories–Thomas H. Cook comes immediately to mind–but I’m the kind of reader who finishes any story—Agatha Christie, Jodi Picoult, anyone—and says, “Whoa, I never saw that coming.” I am not one of those who figures out who did it in the first three chapters. In fact, once I’ve finished reading a novel, I’m still muttering about how I still didn’t “get” this or that. I’m always surprised by the ending. So you could argue that someone as little engaged with plot as I am would indeed look to other ways to engage readers in a story.

But I like to think it’s more than that. I like to think that I’ve stumbled across something that’s fundamentally important: that where we are, where our stories take place, is important. That we as people, that our lives, are rooted somewhere. That context is as significant as plot. That Sydney Riley would be a different person if she lived in Albuquerque instead of Provincetown, and that her stories, even with similar plots, would play out differently there.

I’ll never visit some of the places I’ve read about in fiction, though at the hands of a skillful narrator I often feel as though I know them well. One of Mary Stewart’s books begins, “I met him in the street called Straight,” plunging the reader right into the pre-war souk of Damascus. Elleston Trevor’s spy scrambling through a wintry Moscow night made me understand how the city is arranged. (He, of course, apparently never visited the far-flung outposts of which he wrote; he stayed at his desk, armed with guides and maps.)But Sydney is real because the streets she walks on are real, the shops she visits are real, many of the people she encounters are real. So to tempt you to come visit Sydney’s town here on the tip of the Cape, here are some of her favorite things:

1. Best oyster bar: Mac’s Seafood on Shank Painter Rd. There’s a special “happy hour” when the raw bar is half-priced. Mac is a fisherman himself, and it shows.
2. Best museum: Instead of traipsing up the hill to the Monument, stay on MacMillan Wharf and take in the Pirate Museum, filled with artefacts from Black Sam Bellamy’s ship Whydah sunk in a nor’easter off Cape Cod.
3. Best way to get out on the water: Either a cruise around the harbor on the Bay Lady, or renting a 19-foot sailboat from Flyer’s.
4. Best place for a drink (summer): The Aqua Bar. Bring something from one of the vendors at the Aquarium Mall and enjoy a dinner and drink al fresco.
5. Best sunset: Herring Cove beach
6. Best to-go meal: Relish (try their gazpacho!)
7. Required activity: Art’s Dune Tours. You don’t know Ptown until you’ve been on one.
8. Sydney’s clothes shopping: The thrift shop at the Methodist church, Vintage in Vogue, and occasionally something from Marine Specialties.
9. Favorite view: When you’re on route 6 and come to the top of the last hill in Truro and suddenly Provincetown is tin view, lying curved around the water that changes color every day. Sydney often says she lives in a postcard. It never fails to make her smile.

These and many other places make Provincetown what it is for Sydney: home.

Is there a place where you've visited that "speaks" to you?  Why?  Jeannette is giving away two ebooks of her latest, "The Deadliest Blessing."  Comment to enter!

The Deadliest Blessing: A Provincetown Mystery​​
If there’s a dead body anywhere in Provincetown, wedding consultant Sydney Riley is going to be the one to find it! The seaside town’s annual Portuguese Festival is approaching and it looks like smooth sailing until Sydney’s neighbor decides to have some construction done in her home—and finds more than she bargained for inside her wall.

​Now Sydney is again balancing her work at the Race Point Inn with an unexpected adventure that will eventually involve fishermen, gunrunners, a mummified cat, a family fortune, misplaced heirs, a girl with a mysterious past, and lots and lots of Portuguese food.  The Blessing of the Fleet is coming up, and unless Sydney can find the key to a decades-old murder, it might yet come back to haunt everyone in this otherwise-peaceful fishing village.

Jeannette de Beauvoir
I’m a novelist, poet, and playwright, and my work has appeared in 15 countries and has been translated into 12 languages. I like to explore personal and moral questions through different literary genres and I’m the author, under various pseudonyms, of mystery novels, historical and contemporary fiction, an award-winning book of poetry, and a number of produced plays.
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As you can imagine, I love to write. All the time. And I’d love to have you read some more of what I’m writing! My blog is over at Goodreads, and you can also find my posts at LinkedIn. And then of course there’s my monthly newsletter, to which you can subscribe on my website.

Finally, I don’t just write; I also edit manuscripts (from simple copyediting to much more substantive work) and teach writing, along with directing writing workshops and retreats, both online and onsite. I’d be very happy to help you with your writing projects!