I am often curious about what shapes us as writers. In spite of the fact that my novels are all set in Europe with British narrators, I am actually a Southern writer, heavily influenced by where I came from. I am a sixth-generation native Texan, with roots on my mother’s side going back to the War for Texas Independence. In Texas, like the rest of the south, women gather in the kitchen to gossip, but the men like to tell a tale or two, and more than once I found my grandfather in the yard, telling the same story my grandmother was passing along in the house. Scandal was served up in juicy tidbits, and I learned that if I was quiet and still, they often forgot I was listening. I got an accidental education in some rather grown-up subjects.

Tales of untimely deaths or the occasional incarceration were related in ghoulish detail. I listened to stories about angry fights that erupted into gunfire, and accidental deaths couched as suicides. We were the south Texas version of the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, with more than a few nasty things to be seen in the woodshed.

I heard about the great-uncle who fell into a bonfire and perished while burning autumn leaves, and I learned about the wife-killer who carved a hope chest in prison, emblazoning the word “Mother” across the lid--it now sits serenely in my mother’s bedroom, and you would never guess it had such dubious origins. And I personally knew five of the family bolters, women who cast off the responsibilities of marriage and motherhood, abandoning their husbands and leaving their children to be raised by relatives.

But family gossip became warp and weft to me of the fabric of storytelling. I learned that conflict is the essence of a good story, and that a tale should twist like a corkscrew to be truly memorable. Like most Southerners, I learned that eccentricity was to be flaunted rather than hidden away. And while my own storytelling might seem to borrow more heavily from the English side of my family, I owe my love of the macabre to my Texan heritage, to men and women who rustled horses and killed their spouses and abandoned their babies and broke murderers out of prison to lynch them. They lived larger than most, and because they insisted on living by their own lights, I have a hundred stories to tell.

www.deannaraybourn.com