We chose to live in an unglamorous quartier on the border between Paris’ 9th and 10^th arrondisements for a few weeks because it forms the nucleus of the next Martin mystery.  I had decided months ago that Clarie, who will be the novel’s main protagonist, would be teaching at the Lycee Lamartine, which is on the rue du Faubourg Poissoniere, only four blocks from where we are staying, and that the Martin living quarters would be within walking distance. I had located the school, the little park, the Bourse du Travail (or Labor Exchange) where her husband will be working, but I had to see these places and walk the walks and find her an apartment to live in.  And I have to re-imagine (and research) what they would look like in 1897.

If I had my wish, I would only choose places that are easy to pronounce. But in Paris that is not always possible.  So in choosing the Martins’ apartment, I strove to avoid confusion. This is not always easy either. After all, the Lycee Lamartine is not on the rue Lamartine; one scene must take place on the Boulevard Montmartre, which is not the same as the rue du Faubourg Montmartre, and certainly quite distinct (and some distance) from the really famous Montmartre, the hill itself, topped by the Sacre Coeur church.  Within a day (despite almost constant rain) I found her street, rue Rodier, good for many reasons which will emerge if you, dear reader, have the patience to wait for the novel. I’ve also been able to enter her school, which has changed a great deal. (I’m hoping to be called back to peruse old photos.)  Although the principal was very young and very stern, I did encounter some friendly teachers in the courtyard. One even advised me, with a big grin, that he took care of the archives downstairs, and if I wanted to descend with him, the many little creatures that I’d meet would provide me with elements for a “Romanesque” novel. Knowing that Romanesque is our equivalent for Gothic, I laughed and hastily declined the offer!

The quartier today is hustling and bustling, and the farther north you go (at the big intersection a block away from the apartment) it becomes increasingly African. Two independent middle-aged women we have met (one is our delightful artist landlady) have testified that they liked living here—perhaps a little defensively, describing it as central and pratique, which, they didn’t say, but I assumed, meant as opposed to charmant. The Latin Quarter, the oldest sections of the city (the islands, the Marais) and the elegant West End of town—that’s where the charm is. Or just up the hill from us at Montmartre, with its combination of tourism and gentrification. When my Clarie lived here, it would have been just as bustling and dense (without, of course, the dangers of all those motor bikes zooming at you). Like all of Paris, there would have been shops everywhere. (How do they survive now?), but the vehicles, the products, the people, the buildings  have changed. (A friend once told me that Paris is always being built, this nowhere more true than in the streets that surround us.)

The major hallmark of our neighborhood now is the formal wear shops radiating out from the main intersection.  Shop after shop of wedding dresses and evening gowns and men’s suits and materials at cheap prices and poor quality. These shops, as much as anything, mark our quarter as “popular” as the French used to say, meaning petit bourgeois and working class. Now they would probably also describe it as “multicultural.” We are, as the French say, tres contents, here, in a quarter so pratique that it must be as real as the suburbs I wrote about last time.

Did you ever have one of those books on your shelf, one you just had to buy and been meaning to read for years? On my shelf that book was the Roissy Express: A Journey Through the Paris Suburbs (1994) by former French publisher François Maspero filled with wonderful photographs by his collaborator (and traveling companion) Anaïk Frantz. Inspired by my imminent research trip to Paris, I finally took it down.

Most visitors to Paris, landing at Charles de Gaulle, take the RER train into a Metro station and catch either a cab or a subway to finish their journey. Parisians Maspero and Frantz started at Charles de Gaulle and went out into the suburbs, pledging not to go back into the city for a month. They walked, they bused, they struggled (public transportation between suburbs is scanty) to get from one place to another to see what life is like in the belt of settlements that surround the French capital.

Unlike in the U.S. where the gentrification of the inner city is a fairly recent development, European upper classes have always inhabited the center of their cities. Public housing was for the outskirts, and, in Paris, the northern suburbs were stigmatized as full of crime and even fuller of North and Sub-Saharan Africans. Maspero and Frantz were fully sympathetic with those Africans, and the Spaniards, Italians, Portuguese, Poles, and “real” Frenchmen who live in the ring around Paris. Yes, the two adventurers scurried with silent, weary workers from commuter stations, through moonscapes strewn with drug paraphernalia and graffiti, to ugly high rises of boxy apartments with paper-thin walls. And, as they did, they pointed out that the problem was not so much the drugs or the graffiti artists as it was—and continues to be—unemployment.

But they also recorded other aspects of the suburbs. Men fishing along the canals, bikers on wooded paths, towns made up of pavilions or small detached houses, gardens: People who happily make their lives north of Paris, where there is “space.” Some residents remembered when they had been surrounded by rich farmland, now eaten up by development. None could recall the time, before sewers, when part of this region was a nightly dumping ground for the excreta of Paris (although many did fear that the north had become a dumping ground for human beings).

When Maspero and Frantz took the commuter trains south, the contrast between rich and poor—those living in public housing and pavilions—was even sharper. Here are parks and traditional towns, real communities, many founded for and still inhabited by artists and the intelligentsia.

As a graduate student in Paris I only went as far north as St. Denis, just beyond the city limits, to see the great national cathedral, which is of the same era but much less crowded than Notre Dame. I’ve urged others to go there, but tourists don’t take the time even though I tell them that they will see “real” working class Paris. As for the southern suburbs, names like Robinson and Massy Palaiseau still echo in my brain. I lived in the Cité Universitaire, the dormitory complex for foreign students, at the edge of the city. Late at night when we got off the metro, we would hear the final call for the last RERs to these mysterious places and hear the muffled sounds of feet hurrying to catch them. Maspero and Frantz have shown me, in words and photos, what lies beyond the borders. Perhaps when I sojourn in Paris this month, I will follow their call.

My life as a fiction writer is new. In fact, as I learned at a recent visit to Janet Rudolph’s Mystery Salon in Berkeley, others, besides me, have trouble calling themselves “writers” when they have spent most of their lives doing something else.

In a recent journey, that took me from Portland to Cleveland to San Francisco, I was reminded of those other lives that ground me and allow me to ride the writing life’s roller coaster with equanimity.

In Cleveland I attended my 50^th high school reunion. Lincoln High School was the white working class and immigrant high school on Cleveland’s near west side, bordering on the steel mills and downtown. It’s the place that I longed to escape from and, in my dreams, yearn to return to. I hope to put it in writing some day. Few of my US-born classmates have left northeastern Ohio or the expectations of their youth. The president of my class became an orthodontist. More typical were the teachers, the nurses, the secretaries, the postmen, the newspaper deliverers, the tech for NASA—smart, but without a college degree. Salt of the earth, certainly. Some had grown away from the racism and parochialism that marked our neighborhood culture, others had not. Escape and return.

My friend Livija, a chemist, drove from Pennsylvania to meet me. She was one of the many immigrants that came to live in our neighborhood after the Second World War. Most of them came from educated families and more easily moved up and away. For me, their world of violins and classical music, encyclopedias and foreign languages was exotic and formative. Spending time with Livija and her oldest sister, who was still directing both of us, brought me back into that time of discovery. Little wonder that when I went to college I majored in European history.

Days later I traveled to the East Side of Cleveland, to speak at the Alcazar Hotel and at Case Western Reserve University. Jane Kessler, an eminent retired psychologist and owner of AppleTree Books, sponsored me, and hardly believed that Lincoln High School existed. I could have told her that fifty years ago the feeling would have been mutual. The East Side of museums, concert halls, universities, and the famous Cleveland Clinic was foreign territory where I came from. Now it was all familiar. Another life. Not only did I have the opportunity to give a reading, but also to talk about my career as a university professor of history and women’s studies.

Then on to San Francisco and Bouchercon, the huge annual mystery writers’ conference. I was a newbie, assuming I would be lost in the crowd. But after my panel (one of scores), another newbie, Jane Hammons, approached me and told me that I had been the teacher who inspired her at the University of New Mexico over three decades ago. I was thrilled to be remembered for that past life. Later she wrote a touching homage to me on her blog.

When the writing roller coaster dips precipitously downward, these are the kinds of remembrances that can keep me up.  Thanks to my classmates, Livija, and the two Janes!

I just finished reading Lorrie Moore’s acclaimed novel, The Gate at the Stairs, and noted that, once again, small towns take a big hit, as boring, monochromatic places you want only to leave. Moore does, however, mitigate this judgment by also implying that they have an honesty that liberal university towns do not have. Given the fact that the author teaches at the University of Wisconsin, it’s no secret that she is contrasting Madison to the mythical small Wisconsin town in which her coming-of-age protagonist grew up.

Nature is beautifully observed in this novel. The writing is lovely throughout. Moore captures the voice of what it was like to be twenty and discovering, sometimes to tragic effect, what the wider world is really like. I was, however, frustrated by the number of loose ends she left as her heroine emerged into adulthood. Since the narrator speaks of events as in the past, I wanted to know a little more about her perspective in the present. And would have liked more backstory— we never learn how her offbeat father and Jewish mother landed on a farm in rural Wisconsin.

Maybe I’m sensitive to the issue since my first teaching job was in small town Wisconsin, and I spent two of my own growing up years (I was admittedly a slow learner) getting a master’s in history at the University of Iowa. Of course, to the rest of the state this is the habitat of weirdos, and like any other big college town of northern non-coastal America, it claims to be the “Athens of the Midwest.” (Well, it does boast the most legendary Creative Writing Program in the country.) My dearest friends still live there, both of whom have worked with the labor movement in this presumably (to us coastals) most monochromatic of all states. So I am proposing two antidotes to small-town-stereotyping.

Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989) gives us a much more complex picture of an Iowa town, in which her protagonist (a young Indian widow) settles for a while. First of all, she is there, and she and her banker husband also adopt a Vietnamese orphan. The town is in terrible shape; and she shows the pain of the transition from family farm to industrial farm takeovers. I’ll admit that at the end, Jasmine, like Moore’s protagonist, feels the need to escape.

But what about those who stay? You want a really small town? Take Oxford, IA. Population 705 in 2004. On my last visit, I met two artists who have built a life (and a wonderful apartment cum studios) just off its main street. One of them, Peter Feldstein, has produced a compelling book of photographs, The Oxford Project that reveals in the proverbial worth-a-thousand-words way the complexities of small town life. The Project contrasts individual inhabitants as they were in 1984 to what they are in 2004. The skeletal interviews reveal static lives as well as lives that changed dramatically, hippies and conservatives, fulfillment and regrets. Many of the regrets include an awareness of what is out there, beyond the borders of Oxford, and what they have missed or have experienced. I got the book as a gift at a dinner hosted by my wonderful Iowa friends in Oxford’s best restaurant (and good it was). As we walked back to Feldstein’s studio, we saw women sitting on a stoop, some smoking, some just chatting. They had just gotten out of their transcendental meditation lesson.  The teacher had been an army brat. Cigarettes and TM? Not only does small town life force an interweaving of everyone’s triumphs and tragedies. It’s, like all life, more complicated than it seems at first glance. Especially if your glance comes from the university town, the big city, or, gulp, one of the coasts.