Why I Write About Places That Aren’t Quite Safe

For me, most places have always embodied both possibility and instability. Seeing somewhere new can be exciting, beautiful, even exhilarating, while also reminding you that you don’t quite belong there. It's a tension I have experienced growing up, and it has carried over into my novels.

As a child, moving was routine, but I never developed quite the same relationship with “home” that someone who grew up in one place might. The military life reinforced a different sense of impermanence—new places, new environments, and learning to orient myself again.

Perhaps that’s why I tend to write passive settings. Atherton is beautiful, but Wesley is never entirely at home there. Ria inherits a home in Ireland, yet inheritance doesn’t automatically create belonging. Lucas watches the familiar world become unfamiliar. Heartland promises Ian a place where he belongs, but belonging comes with horrifying conditions. The Blackwater novels repeatedly put people into communities where being an outsider—or returning after you’ve been gone—changes what you’re allowed to know.

I’m drawn to how people react to their surroundings. Two people can stand in the same place and experience completely different worlds. One person sees a beautiful isolated farmhouse; another sees vulnerability. Someone sees a small town where everybody knows everybody; someone else sees a place where privacy is impossible. One person finds an empty road peaceful; another feels exposed. Someone sees mountains and thinks they are beautiful; someone else thinks there’s only one road out.

Maybe that’s why the places in my stories are rarely completely safe. I’ve always understood that a place can be beautiful and unfamiliar, exciting and lonely, welcoming and unsettling, all at the same time. I’m interested in what happens to people when the world around them shifts — and what they discover about themselves while trying to find their place within it.