Elm Creek Quilts [04] The Runaway Quilt (43 page)

6. Many authors find that their characters are extensions of themselves, in one way or another. Do you find that to be true? Which character do you identify with most? Are any of the characters in
The Runaway Quilt
based on people you know?
I don’t write autobiography, so none of the characters in any of the Elm Creek Quilts novels are based upon me. Writing fiction is a channel through which I can experience lives other than my own. Writing myself into a story would negate that experience. Sometimes my characters are composites of people I’ve known, and I’ve borrowed names or written a few quilting friends into my novels through the years, but I don’t write about myself. When I was a student at Notre Dame, one of my professors advised our class never to put ourselves into our stories, because inevitably those are the characters everyone
hates, and we would feel terrible about it. I suppose I took that advice to heart!

7. What made you decide to write the memoirs from Gerda’s point of view, as opposed to Anneke’s? Do you think the story would have read very differently had it been Anneke recounting the tale?
I chose Gerda because as an unmarried woman in her brother’s household, she occupied a rather precarious position both within the family and the community, one that allowed her independence of thought coupled with utter dependence upon her family’s good will for her material needs. She was within the family and yet not at the heart of it, which gave her a unique—though certainly not objective—perspective on the events recorded in her memoirs. Of course Anneke’s version of events would have differed significantly from her sister-in-law’s, even if the basic facts of the family history remained the same. Whether Anneke would have judged herself more harshly or more leniently than she did Gerda is an intriguing question.

8. Did you know, in your own mind, what Sylvia’s heritage would be? Did you set out writing the book knowing it was going to remain a mystery?
I didn’t plan it that way, but it still is a mystery, even to me! I may eventually write a story that requires the revealing of Sylvia’s heritage, but I don’t have any specific plans to explore it. As an amateur genealogist, I know that often even the most basic facts of an ancestor’s life can remain elusive. The unanswered questions at the conclusion of
The Runaway Quilt
reflect this reality.

Where do you think you’ll go next with the Elm Creek Quilters? Is there a character you’d particularly like to revisit?
Several of my books have had minor characters who’ve piqued my curiosity, and that has led to whole new books. Thinking about Joanna and what happened to her led directly to writing
one of my later books,
The Lost Quilter
. In it, I explore her story after the events of
The Runaway Quilt
. Dorothea, a relatively minor character in
The Runaway Quilt,
became the focus of a later book,
The Sugar Camp Quilt
. In fact, many of the characters introduced in
The Runaway Quilt
return in the seventeenth Elm Creek Quilts novel,
The Union Quilters,
which will be published in February 2011. I also plan to revisit several of the characters introduced in
The Quilter’s Homecoming
in a future book.

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