How Moving to Panama Made Me a Better Writer (Really!)
Back in 2012, my husband and I had been through some rough years.
He had gone back to grad school with the idea of changing careers and becoming a teacher. He graduated in 2008, and over the next three months our local school districts let go more than 3,000 teachers.
I had lost my “safe” job, writing reports for a lawyer, when his major client simply pulled out of the US. Over the next 12 months I applied for more than 200 jobs, and got an interview. One. Lousy. Interview.
Somehow we managed to survive until our youngest daughter got established in college, then we hightailed it to the Republic of Panama, where the living was easier and far less expensive.
During that interim time when we were preparing to go, I started taking on some freelance writing jobs. I also took two semesters of Spanish at a community college, and listened to Pimsleur CDs in my car every time I went anywhere. So when we arrived and took up residence in the small town of Las Tablas, I was able to carry on the most rudimentary of tasks in Spanish.
I continued with my freelancing. Thanks to the internet, and my intentional choice not to take on any local clients when we were still in the US, my clients didn’t even realize I had relocated.
But a funny thing happened. After we’d been there a couple of months, my writing improved. I noticed I was using a larger vocabulary (and my vocabulary wasn’t small to begin with!), more precise and descriptive verbs, and my sentences flowed more smoothly.
What caused this dramatic shift? I believe it was my immersion in a place where the primary language I heard wasn’t English. (I suspect it could have been any other language — French, Italian, Swahili — it just happened to be Spanish.)
Hooray for neuroplasticity!
What I’m Reading
The Queen of Poisons by Robert Thorogood
This is the third in the delightful Marlow Murder Club series, featuring Judith, Becks, and Susie.
Marlow’s Mayor, Geoffrey Lushington, is the nicest man anyone can imagine. He’s kind, thoughtful, takes care of people, and nobody has a bad word to say about him. So how can our trio of amateur sleuths account for his murder in the middle of a meeting, let alone identify the killer?
After being thoroughly stumped for most of the book, Judith eventually figures it out, all while unwilingly confronting her own past.
A Death on Corfu by Emily Sullivan
This book says it’s first in a new series. (There’s no second book as of yet.)
Widowed Minnie Harper is raising her son and daughter on the Greek island of Corfu just before the turn of the twentieth century. It’s what her husband, Oliver, wanted, and what she promised him after they left the hurly burly of London a few years before his death. He didn’t leave her very well off, so to make ends meet she sometimes takes on secretarial work for English visitors and residents.
Just up the hill from their house, a new resident moves in. He’s a well known mystery author, and he hires Minnie to type his current manuscript. It’s all going okay until she deviates from typing and makes some suggestions, which he doesn’t take well. Furious and frustrated, she rushes out and stumbles across a body. A dead one.
In addition to the mystery, Minnie has to face some unpalateable truths about her own, and Oliver’s past.
It’s a charming book, with two caveats.
First, for anyone who’s familiar with the true adventures of the Durrell family on Corfu during the 1930s, the characters and setting seem a bit derivative. Widowed British mum, adolescent daughter, and young son who’s crazy over creatures of all kinds, with a local naturalist willing to hang out with him and teach him. (See the delightful TV series, The Durrels in Corfu, or The Corfu Trilogy by Gerald Durrell, a terrifically amusing and entertaining writer.)
Second, although published by a recognized imprint, Kensington Books, it’s riddled (at least the Kindle version is) with typos and mistakes. It says a lot about the entertainment value of the story that I continued reading to the end.
Notable Quotes
“Not every woman is intent on becoming a wife these days.” Now he was just trying to shock me.
“I am aware,” I said tightly. It was true. I had met enough so-called New Women while at Girton. Why, if I hadn’t married Oliver, I could very well be one of them: sharing a flat in Chelsea, wearing a pair of bloomers while riding my bicycle, smoking cigarettes in public, and whiling away the evenings at literary salons.
It sounded rather lovely, to be honest.
- A Death on Corfu by Emily Sullivan
I chose both of today’s quotes because they have a lot in common: both the speakers are British women from the turn of the twentieth century who view their roles in surprising ways. Minnie Harper, from A Death on Corfu, is a wife and mother, but she refuses to be relegated to the subservient position expected of women in that society. And Amelia Peabody is also a wife and mother with a professional career as an Egyptologist and who never took second place to any man, ever.
As I crawled along in the dark, with sharp edges of rock jabbing into my knees and hands, I acknowledged, as I had so often done, that I was the most fortunate of women.
- The Hippopotamus Pool by Elizabeth Peters
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Wise Words
Welcome back to Wise Words, clever readers. After our last foray into a different kind of puzzle, we’re going back to our usual fare today.
As always, select the word that fits more appropropriately into the quote below. Your choices are shone and shown. Bonus points if you explain why your choice is the better one.
The shadow had passed, and the midday sun now _____ as usual…
- A Death on Corfu by Emily Sullivan
As always, I’ll share the correct answer next week.