I’ve been lucky enough to travel a little and see some different corners of the world. As a reader, I’ve even time-traveled from Ancient Rome to Victorian England and countless other times and places in between. There is something about these various places that captures my attention and taps into my imagination.
I find that I’m particularly inspired by the settings of my stories. There are times when the place helps me discover the story, as with Her Dear & Loving Husband. For HDLH, once I decided to set the story first in Massachusetts and then in Salem, I knew I had to incorporate elements of the Salem Witch Trials. For Victory Garden, I knew the story would be about the American women’s suffrage movement, so I knew part of the story would take place in Washington, DC, where the protests happened, and I decided on New York City because there was so much happening in that city in the early 20th century. For The Professor of Eventide, I knew the story would take place in New England, and I had already written about Massachusetts, so I decided the coast of Maine would be an atmospheric place for Eventide College.
For me, setting isn’t a place in the technical sense, as in a location you can find on a map, but place is also atmosphere and memory, and it helps to set the stage for the characters’ emotional landscape. Place shapes the people who inhabit it, and often I find that place becomes a force within the story itself, often becoming a character in its own right.
When I think about my novels, I can trace a map of the places that have captured my imagination over the years, such as Coastal Maine. Salem, Massachusetts, Victorian England, Biblical Jerusalem, Nampa, Idaho, New York City, and Washington, DC, just to name a few. On the surface, these places appear quite different from one another, and they are, yet they share something that I find fascinating: they all have a strong sense of history and the feeling that the past can still be found in the present.
Coastal Maine and the Shadows of Eventide
When I began writing The Professor of Eventide, it didn’t take me long to decide to set the story on the coast of Maine. There’s something about coastal New England that feels inherently Gothic to me–at least in autumn and winter, which is when the story takes place. I loved the idea of the rocky shorelines, the fog rolling in from the sea, the lighthouse winking in the distance, the weathered architecture, and the sense of isolation that can exist within a small community.
In many parts of America, history can feel relatively young, especially for those of us who have traveled to England and France. Coastal New England is different because the landscape carries layers of memory. There, old cemeteries sit beside modern roads, and colonial history remains visible in the architecture and local traditions. The past never feels entirely absent, and that atmosphere was essential to Eventide College. The novel explores questions about hidden histories, forgotten knowledge, the weight of eternity, and the lingering influence of what came before. Coastal Maine provided a natural setting for those themes, and the landscape itself seemed to participate in the mystery. I’m thoroughly convinced that Eventide College couldn’t exist anywhere else.
Salem and the Weight of History
Few places have captured my imagination as completely as Salem, Massachusetts, both modern-day Salem and the Salem of the witch hunts in 1692. I was lucky enough to visit Salem about 12 years ago, and the city exists in a fascinating tension between history, modern-day witch practices, and mythology. When I wrote the Her Dear & Loving Husband, I found myself drawn not only to modern Salem but also to its seventeenth-century past. The Salem witch trials remain one of the most enduring and haunting episodes in American history, but what interests me most is not merely the historical event itself.
Walk through Salem today and you can still feel the presence of the stories people tell about it, and there are several museums that commemorate Salem’s unfortunate past. The Witch Dungeon Museum is particularly harrowing as it shows how poorly the imprisoned “witches” were treated. In Salem, I found a place where the boundaries between history, legend, and imagination often seem blurred. For a writer like me who’s interested in Gothic fiction with a supernatural twist, that’s irresistible.
I learned from reading Dickens that places can become characters in their own right, and I learned from learning about and visiting Salem that places can both accumulate and become stories. Places absorb the fears, hopes, and beliefs of the humans who live there, and long after the original events have passed, those stories continue to shape how people experience the world around them. When I was in Salem, I couldn’t stand on the shore and not think about the 19 people executed for a crime of witchcraft they didn’t commit.
New York, Washington, DC, and the Energy of Change
The settings for Victory Garden differ from many of my other novels because they are rooted less in mystery and atmosphere and more in transformation. Early 20th-century New York City and Washington, DC, were places where history was actively unfolding. The women’s suffrage movement was gaining momentum and political battles were shaping the future while World War I was changing lives on both sides of the Atlantic.
These settings carry a very different energy than the isolated landscapes of Eventide or the haunted history of Salem. What fascinated me while writing Victory Garden was the sense that individuals were living through extraordinary changes in society without fully knowing how history would remember them. The women fighting for the right to vote couldn’t see the future from where they stood; they only knew the hard work that was ahead of them. For my character Rose Scofield, that work became an obsession. In the case of Victory Garden, the setting of the story wasn’t about nostalgia, but rather it was about immersing readers in a moment when the future itself felt uncertain. Kind of like now, as it happens.
Victorian England and the World of Hembry Castle
If Salem introduced me to the power of historical memory, Victorian England introduced me to the power of atmosphere. I’ve been interested in Victorian England since I discovered the books of Charles Dickens as a Master’s student in English. The Hembry Castle Chronicles grew out of that long-held interest.
There is something uniquely literary about the era, especially since so many of my favorite writers–Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, among many others–wrote during that time. The Victorian era produced some of the writers I admire most, and many of the themes that continue to interest me as a novelist, such as ambition, morality, memory, personal independence, and social change.
Beyond the history itself, Victorian England possesses a remarkable emotional resonance. The grand estates, country villages, fog-shrouded streets, and the strict social expectations that often concealed intense personal conflicts beneath the surface–all of it is fascinating to me. The setting allows characters to navigate both external and internal constraints, which is something else I’m fascinated by, and many of my novels explore these ideas. How do you live when society itself is determined to shape your choices? It’s a question I examine often in my fiction. While writing the Hembry Castle novels, I found that the Victorian England setting generated story possibilities I would not have imagined occurring elsewhere.
Why Place Matters
The older I get as a writer, the more convinced I become that setting isn’t just about where the story takes place. Places are alive in their own right. A place can influence how people think, what they fear, what they value, and even what possibilities they can imagine for themselves. The Salem Witch Trials happened because of specific events that would have played out differently in other places at other times. Landscapes, and the societies that live within them, shape communities. History shapes identity, and even a place’s architecture can shape someone’s experience.
As living, breathing people, the places we inhabit become part of our stories. And it does the same for our characters, our invisible people. Even before I can start writing a new story, I have to know where it takes place. Whether the story takes place on a coastline, a village, a city, or a college campus, I have to understand the atmosphere I want readers to breathe in. Often in my novels, the place becomes a character too.
The places I choose to write about share a common thread–they are places where the past remains visible. In other words, they are places that have stories to tell, and as a writer, I enjoy sharing those stories with others.