Saturday Spotlight: Susan Oleskiw & For the Love of Parvati

Good Morning and welcome to another Saturday Spotlight with our returning guest, Susan Oleskiw. Susan has a personal post to go along with this book, so I'm going to turn it over to her straight away....

Most people think of India as that very poor country on the other side of the world that’s completely different from the US. They’re partly right. India is on the other side of the world but it is not a poor country (it has the fifth largest army in the world and its share of billionaires) and its problems are not all that different from ours. India faces many of the same problems as the US—particularly in terms of immigration.

The United States worries about illegal immigration mainly from the south—from the Caribbean and from Mexico. India faces illegal immigration along all its borders. The Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950 displaced thousands of people. The war between East and West Pakistan that led to the creation of Bangladesh displaced millions of people, many crossing into India. The long-running resistance by Tamils in Sri Lanka gave rise to waves of immigrants crossing the channel to South India.

For the Love of Parvati grew out of my greater awareness of the immigration/refugee problem in South India. In the United States I am used to meeting people who are citizens but speak English with an accent. I don’t think anything about it, and I rarely identify someone’s origins by their speech unless it’s an accent particular to America. But in the South India states, Indians often identify people by their language, their accent and dialect. For an immigrant to speak freely in a bazaar or another public place is to risk being identified as a foreigner.

 In India as in the United States, people respond to illegal immigrants according to their own personal character. Some dislike the newcomers for fear of what they will take from the country—jobs, stability, services. Others meet an illegal immigrant and see only the individual escaping violence or discrimination against a minority. Many Indians willingly hire illegal immigrants for a variety of jobs that “fly under the radar,” and think nothing more about it. For the Love of Parvati is one of these stories.

Tamil Tigers

 Parvati is a young woman who fled the war in Sri Lanka with her brother. They have separated, and she has been hired as a maidservant. As the story opens she is living and working in the hills, wondering when her brother will show up. She learns early on what has become of him, and is now entirely alone in the world. The rest of her family died during the wars in Sri Lanka. As a former member of the Tamil Tigers, Parvati took a risk in escaping,   and she takes another risk by living openly with a family.

            The idea for the story originally came during a conversation with another writer. Sarah Thomas, who lives in Trivandrum, South India, is well known for her socially conscious novels, but after a while she decided not to write this story. When it was clear she wasn’t interested in it any longer, I decided to write it. We are very different writers, and I would love to have read her interpretation, but as it is I can only speculate.

            Parvati faces every refugee’s worst nightmare when she realizes that for her there may never be an escape. For her, every day is part of a never-ending flight from what she left behind.

To read Parvati’s story click HERE.

To read one of Sarah Thomas’s books, go Here.

    

Susan Oleksiw writes the Anita Ray series featuring an Indian American photographer living at her aunt's tourist hotel in South India (Under the Eye of Kali, 2010, The Wrath of Shiva, 2012, and For the Love of Parvati, 2014). She also writes the Mellingham series featuring Chief of Police Joe Silva (introduced in Murder in Mellingham, 1993). Susan is well known for her articles on crime fiction; her first publication in this area was A Reader's Guide to the Classic British Mystery. Her short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and numerous anthologies. Susan lives and writes outside Boston, MA. To learn more about Susan’s two series, go to www.susanoleksiw.com

                     

Hope you enjoyed this week's Saturday Spotlight! On Tuesday I'll be joining with a group of authors for Rocking Summer Reads blog hop so check back often!

Until later...take care & God Bless!

PamT

Saturday Spotlight: Susan Oleksiw & The Wrath of Shiva

Good Morning Friends and Welcome to another edition of Saturday Spotlight!

Today Susan Oleksiw is returning with another great "Anita Ray" Mystery, The Wrath of Shiva. So without much further ado, here's Susan.....

 Every writer has a weakness in her work. For some the weakness is dialogue. The dialogue sounds wooden, every character sounds alike, the language is awkward. Other writers zero in on plot. They can’t get a story moving, or create suspense to hold the reader, or create a murder plot that doesn’t give away the ending. And for others, the weakness may be creating compelling characters.

I could go on identifying aspects of writing that are difficult or challenging, but that’s unnecessary. The point is we all have an area where we are weak. My weakness is not one I’ve mentioned above, though I may be weak in one of those areas too.

When I first started to write fiction I had trouble creating a fictional environment that seemed real. I had no sense of how long it took to cross my fictional city, or how the roads were laid out in my fictional town. When a reader asked me once, just how large is this park, I knew I was in trouble. If I want my setting to feel authentic, I need a real place to describe. I may alter the location or setting in specific ways, but I must first begin with a real place so I can judge correctly how my characters behave in the setting.

The Wrath of Shiva grew out of a trip I took through Central Kerala. I booked a room at a traditional home that was turned into a homestay, as bed and breakfasts are called in India. The homestay offered six rooms, with beds for up to eighteen individuals. The property was slowly being crowded by new homes built on land family members had sold off, but enough of the original estate was left to offer the tourist a rare, almost unique experience of the world of old Kerala.

The estate consisted of several acres, probably up to fifteen, and three buildings, or wings, in the form of the letter L. Two buildings were perpendicular to each other, linked by a gateway. The third was an independent structure with three rooms opening onto a veranda. This structure served as an unconnected extension of the longer leg of the L. Between the two structures was a small pond where the laundry was done and water was drawn for the gardens.

The three wings and their rooms were built along traditional lines. The third wing, where I stayed, was a concrete plinth on which was set a wooden frame with walls and a roof. I stepped over a foot-high sill to enter the room. The upper part of the walls were latticed. The wooden superstructure could have been lifted off the plinth and carried away if the family wanted to do so.

The estate sat along the river, and part of the land included a kavu. The kavu is unique to Kerala. This is sacred land that cannot be entered. It is dedicated to the family deity, whose image is set up at the mouth of the kavu and given offerings certain times of the year. The kavu is really one of the earliest known efforts to preserve land in its pristine state, and is important for protecting rare plants and animal life.

I walked around the property during the afternoon I arrived and again in the morning, but I was unsure about the distance from the edge of the kavu to the river. I had to rework part of the novel involving the kavu because, of course, I couldn’t enter that piece of land. In the story a villain enters the kavu, and I had no idea how long it would take that person to crawl through the jungle to reach the edge. I couldn’t be sure how long it would take someone to climb through the jungle to the river and how much the river curved, either expanding or reducing the size of the kavu. In the end I had to graft onto the real estate part of another one I passed on my way to a boat ride on the river. I used the distances from the second kavu for the story, but I sorely wished I could get inside the first one and be sure.

To be certain that I get distances and time spent traveling correct I use a map of the town or area I’m writing about. I record who lives where, what business or other buildings are where, names of streets and private residences, and anything else that is permanent. But when it comes to walking a path through the woods, or crossing a city by foot, I need to do it myself to be sure.

To learn more about the Anita Ray mysteries, go to www.susanoleksiw.com and click on any book cover.

Susan Oleksiw writes the Anita Ray series featuring an Indian American photographer living at her aunt's tourist hotel in South India (Under the Eye of Kali, 2010, The Wrath of Shiva, 2012, and For the Love of Parvati, 2014). She also writes the Mellingham series featuring Chief of Police Joe Silva (introduced in Murder in Mellingham, 1993). 

Susan is well known for her articles on crime fiction; her first publication in this area was A Reader's Guide to the Classic British Mystery. Her short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and numerous anthologies. Susan lives and writes outside Boston, MA.

Well friends, hope you enjoyed this spotlight! Check back next week for more Tuesday Treasures, Thursday Thoughts and Saturday Spotlights!

Until later....take care & God Bless!

PamT

Saturday Spotlight: Susan Oleksiw

Good Morning Friends and Happy Easter to Each of YOU!

Thank you for taking a moment out of your holiday weekend to stop by. It is my pleasure to bring to you another fellow 5 Star author, Susan Oleksiw with her Anita Ray Mystery book, Under the Eye of Kali.

                    

Every time someone asks me where I get my ideas, I instantly have an image of the person opening a notebook, writing it down, and then checking her calendar, so she can plan to go there, wherever “there” is and pick up some ideas, along with stopping for yogurt at the supermarket and the post office for stamps. I am tempted to say, “I subscribe to a magazine called IDEAS.” Or how about, “I steal them from my grandmother’s stash. She never used hers up.”

The truth is, no one knows where ideas come from because they don’t come from somewhere else. They are there, in front of us, in our brains, or sitting on the page open on the computer or rolled into the typewriter. And, again, truthfully, I wish there were someplace to go to get them. The discovery of Anita Ray is a case in point.

For several years I had tried writing about India, and whatever I wrote came out miserably. The story was awkward, the characters alien or flat or just strange. I couldn’t get the hang of a good story about India. I was frustrated. Perhaps I was too close to the idea? After all I’d been in love with India since I was a young girl; I’d studied the country and its culture and history all through school (I went to advanced schools). I’d lived there, written academic articles about it. Perhaps I was having trouble finding a popular India to write about.

After several false starts I decided to just write a mystery that hinged on something interesting about India. The result was the short story “A Murder Made in India.” And in this story emerged Anita Ray, the unmarried niece of the owner of Hotel Delite, a young woman who would rather take photographs than eat, who hated the idea of work, and who had managed to fend off her aunt’s ongoing efforts at an arranged marriage. The story was a success, it seemed, and appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine in 2003. I had loads of fun writing stories about India in which Anita Ray wielded her camera and investigated murders among relatives, friends, and strangers. The idea for the first story, when traditional India collides with modern India, pointed to an unlimited supply of mysteries.

Once Anita Ray as a character was established in my mind, along with circumstances that could lead to murder, I had little trouble expanding her stage, so to speak. I made one of my many return visits to India working out in my mind a story idea that would be substantial enough for a novel-length mystery. As I sat at breakfast one morning listening to other Westerners enjoying their meal and getting to know each other, the idea for the novel began to take shape. Strangers meet, share a few personal details, and soon are linked in an intricate web of lies, deceit, and murder.

Under the Eye of Kali appeared in 2010. The story takes the reader into Anita Ray’s world of a resort catering to foreigners where old grudges are acted out, the workers behind the scenes live double lives, and anyone can assume a new identity. The reader meets the restaurant owners, the tailors and booksellers, the touts and fruit sellers, and all the others who work mostly out of sight but are ever present. The murder occurs among foreign guests, and the reader gets to know them too, and enjoy their experiences in this strange land.

As I began writing the story of two women who travel through India, one of whom ends up dead and the other nearly so, I heard the voices of people I’d met long ago, during my first visits to India in the 1970s and 1980s. Out of the blue I heard the young man, probably still in his twenties, asking about how a certain sports team was doing back in the States. In those days, news about local matters traveled slowly if at all. Prompted by the curious way he posed the question I asked how long since he’d been home to the States. Something distracted me, and when I turned back he was gone. In less than a minute he evaporated. My husband commented, he was probably AWOL from Vietnam and my question had spooked him. I’ve never forgotten him, and more of that encounter will probably appear in another story, triggered by a character who makes an offhand remark and opens a door to murder.

This is where ideas come from—everywhere and nowhere, and somewhere we can’t find but we stumble into when we need it.

Under the Eye of Kali is the first in the Anita Ray series, and explores Anita’s home territory of the resort area where Hotel Delite is located. The Wrath of Shiva is the second in the series, and takes Anita into an old family estate. I’ll talk about the ideas behind that book next month.

To learn more about Susan and her books, go to www.susanoleksiw.com

Her books are available through Five Star/Gale, Cengage Learning and on Amazon, B&N, and Smashwords.

Well Friends, hope you enjoyed this spotlight. Thanks again for taking the time to stop by and once again....

Have a BLESSED & Happy Easter holiday!

PamT