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| Off the Top of her Head: An interview with Agatha Award nominee Barbara Jaye Wilson, author and creator of the popular Brenda Midnight mystery series, with the fifth book forthcoming entitled A Hatful of Homicide (Avon, August 2000). Read our review of A Hatful of Homicide. Feature by Susan McBride. Barbara Jaye Wilson is not your typical author. Let me rephrase that. She’s not typical, period. Not content with the slower pace of the Midwest where she was raised, she took her creative energy to New York City. She worked as a potter, fringe cutter, painter, resume typist, backup singer, graphic designer and milliner before turning her talents to writing fiction. So it’s no wonder that Brenda Midnight,the protagonist of Wilson’s mystery series, designs, creates and sells sculptural, gravity-defying hats, much as the author herself once did - and still does on occasion when she takes breaks from writing to roll out the buckram and hat blocks, turning her own Greenwich Village apartment into a millinery studio. Wilson’s colorful and quirky characters engaged readers and critics from the start, earning her an Agatha Award nomination for Best First Novel for Death Brims Over, the series debut. Accessory to Murder, Death Flips Its Lid, and Capped Off only further secured Brenda Midnight a place among favorite amateur sleuths. The latest A Hatful of Homicide comes out this August. In the midst of her work on the sixth Brenda book Murder and the Mad Hatter, the author took time out to talk to me about her novels and other things. SUSAN McBRIDE - Okay, you might be sick of answering this one, but I have to ask it: Why hats? BARBARA JAYE WILSON - I designed and wholesaled hats to boutiques in New York City and Los Angeles. Yes, they were sculptural (I’d studied ceramics) and many defied gravity. I never had my own millinery shop. Brenda got that experience and was robbed on page four of the first book. Brenda has such a tight group of friends in the Village. Does this come from your experiences as a New Yorker? My first New York apartment was on a charming West Village Street. The neighbors hung out on the stoop, drinking jug wine and gossiping. Very much like a small town. Everybody knew everybody else’s business. Do you find it harder to write a series after a certain number of books? Is there pressure to keep it fresh? Or is it easier because you know your characters and the setting so well? Neither. Each book has a fresh new challenge with fresh new problems popping up without warning. How did you create Brenda Midnight? She’s definitely an individual who doesn’t care to follow the pack. Is there some of Barbara Jaye in her? Sure, some of me made its way into Brenda, but probably not nearly as much as people think. There might even be more of me in some of my other characters. You’re originally from my home state of Missouri, where conformity rules and eccentricity sets you apart from the crowd. What kind of kid were you? And what took you from the Gateway to the West to the East Coast? I was not a bookworm. That’s not to say I didn’t read, but I was more into the visual arts. I was always driven to make stuff - painting, sewing, constructing shoebox cities, whatever - all the while plotting to get out. What drew you to writing? And what was your experience like getting your first novel published? Lots of revisions and persistence? I always wanted to write, but didn’t do much about it until a couple of friends and I started a writing group. We met once a week. That weekly deadline made all the difference. When one of our members got published, I figured - if he could do it, so could I. And I began to take my writing more seriously. It took many false starts and about eight hundred full drafts before I had what seemed like a book to me. Pretty soon an agent agreed, and not long after that, she sold that book. Do you have any tricks you use when writing to maintain your discipline? Like telling yourself, "If I do just two more pages, I can have some Haagen Daaz?" What kind of writing schedule do you maintain? I can’t trick myself into doing anything. I start in right after breakfast, go until lunch, then get back into it. A couple of days a week I go to the gym. I work out a lot of plot problems on the Versa Climber. When you finish a book and send it off to your editor, how do you celebrate? I go to the garment district and buy fabric. If there’s time, I make the fabric into something. If there’s still more time, I take in a couple of museums. I’ve been on a pretty tight series schedule, so I have to get back to work real fast. So you’re working on MURDER AND THE MAD HATTER. Anything else in the works? Both. The sixth Brenda is underway, and I have many other ideas percolating. A couple are near the boiling-over point. Are there dreams you still haven’t achieved? Do your goals change all the time? This week, I’d like to up my pathetic bowling average. Last week, it was a music thing - I wanted to play "Rumble" as good as Link Wray and sing like Tina Turner. Next week it’ll be something else. What do you enjoy reading? Lately, I’ve been in a fact-gathering mode. I can’t get enough magazines and newspapers. I read everything from Wired to The Economist, The New York Times to New York Magazine, several graphic design publications plus whatever random material I pick up in the garbage room down the hall. This building is great for cast-off Wall Street Journals, Women’s Wear Dailies and big fat glossy fashion rags. How can readers reach you? BarbJayeW@aol.com |
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