Okay, call me soppy, but I do love writing romance (as J. Arlene Culiner). I love inventing a countryside, one that can’t possibly exist in real life because it’s colourful and fun and filled with cranky oddballs. My main characters don’t conform to rules but they’re wonderfully intelligent and gentle. And because they have passionate interests in unusual things (baroque music, or debunking myths, or spiders, or snakes, or archaeology, or the origins of country music) we know their love stories will definitely work out.
There are the other books, too. Two mysteries set in France. I admit to being a voyeur, so what fun they were to write! Nothing soppy there. Just a peek into local life doused with bad behaviour, and unpleasant reality. Do the stories end well? Almost.
And then there is my most recent: Words for Patty Jo. A general fiction, it is a love story… sort of. But there are social issues; the characters refuse to conform to pressure; there are nasty folks; there is an intimate view of marriage; there are terrible choices that need to be made. It is a portrait of our world; it is a study of us all.
Yet nothing was more splendid than working on my three creative non-fiction books. Each was an obsession; each was like a great detective story. They meant shifting across countries, going through the archives in Romania, Germany, Holland, Hungary, France, England, Canada, and the USA. There was always doubt — would I find anything? A clue? A hint? A poem? A story? And when I did? Ecstasy!
Finding Home in the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers had me walking all across Romania, then taking the immigrant trail over Europe, to England, and on to Canada.
For A Contrary Journey, my biography of a forgotten nineteenth-century poet and songster, I lurked in Ukrainian, Romanian, and Austrian bars, just like he did. I looked for addresses on Ukrainian streets that have vanished, took the wrong rusty buses through the countryside, and trekked through snowstorms.
For my recent book, Those Absent on the Great Hungarian Plain, I went to live in a small Hungarian village for five years in order to create a portrait of local society and investigate a pogrom that took place in 1946.
All three non-fiction projects took years and years of research. I had to learn new languages, sleep in fields, on trains, buses, and in very doubtful inns. I met strange folk — black marketeers, thieves, and scoundrels — who were, often enough, quite helpful. Then I had to write the books. Then I had to convince publishers to take them on.
But boy-oh-boy, did I have fun! And, to my delight, two won prestigious awards.
You see what I mean? Why choose? Each genre has its joy.