Alice Fitzpatrick has contributed short stories to literary magazines and anthologies and is a fearless champion of singing, cats, all things Welsh, and the Oxford comma. Her summers spent with her Welsh family in Pembrokeshire inspired the creation of the setting of the Meredith Island Mystery series. She was a third of the way through the first draft of Secrets in the Water, the first book in the series, when she realized this story of lost family history was inspired by her own family. Alice lives in Toronto but dreams of a cottage on the Welsh coast. To learn more about Alice and her writing, please visit her website at http://www.alicefitzpatrick.com.
1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I always imagined if I ever became a published writer, I would spend my days writing, but I underestimated the amount of marketing I have to do to get my name, my book, and my series out there. Because I live in Canada but write a aeries that’s set in Wales, I have to promote to three geographical areas: Canada, the US, and the UK. Self-promotion doesn’t come naturally to me, but I’ve learnt to push myself. While I’m getting more and more comfortable with it all, I still wish I had time to write.
2 - How did you come to fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
My first publication was in an anthology of high school poetry edited by Canadian poet George Bowering. Buoyed by this success, I decided to become the youngest poet to win the Governor General’s award, until I realized I wasn’t a poet. I need space to tell my stories, and so I moved on to short fiction and later the novel.
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
It’s relatively easy for me to come up with ideas by asking “what if this happens?” I don’t normally do an outline for my books, but I do make notes on the characters, their relationships to each other, and their secrets. Before I begin to write, I have to know the identity of the first victim, their killer, and the motive. This gets me through the first seventy or so pages. When I’m writing, I need to know what’s happening in the next few scenes so I don’t get stuck.
4 - Where does a work of prose usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I always know what form a story will take. Obviously some ideas lend themselves to a shorter focussed format while others need the space of a novel. Having said that, the idea for Secrets in the Water came from a forty-page story I’d written decades before about the Welsh seaside resort where I spent my childhood summers. At that point, my protagonist, Kate, was a fourteen-year-old investigating her aunt’s death. When I decided to turn the story into a full-length novel, I made Kate a retired English teacher who wrote historical novels and gave her a sidekick.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I enjoy public readings. As a teacher, I’m quite comfortable standing in front of people and sharing my work with them. However, I get nervous if I’m recorded reading or being interviewed. I fear any mistakes I make will exist forever, whereas an in-person reading is ephemeral and quickly fades from memory.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
As someone who writes genre rather than literary fiction, I don’t feel my work offers any insight into deep philosophical issues, but I do have themes for each book beyond solving the mystery. Secrets examines different kinds of love and what we’re prepared to do for that love. It’s also about recovering family history, the fragility of memory, and how we tend to mythologize people who have disappeared from our lives. This makes Kate’s job of solving the fifty-year-old murder of her aunt all the harder. Whereas other authors might write crime fiction because it allows them to set the world straight, to provide justice to victims, and bring order to chaos, for me it’s the need to understand what happened and why. I’m intrigued by what makes seemingly ordinary people commit murder.
7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
In times of distress and uncertainty, we all need an escape. During the Depression, people flocked to movie houses, and the movie musical was born. The world of Meredith Island is one of community and support, and these days we need that more than ever.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I don’t have beta readers or belong to a writing group, so I value my publisher’s objective eye. When my edits arrive, I’m always nervous in case I’ve got things so wrong that the book can’t be saved.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
My favourite piece of advice comes from Darcy Pattison: “The first draft of a story is to tell you what the story is. The next drafts are a search for the best way to tell this story.”
As a perfectionist—and what writer isn’t or doesn’t aspire to be—I would get hung up on getting the first draft as good as I could. In the past, this would often stop me in my tracks as I edited and re-edited what I’d already written, often afraid to go on. Pattison’s advice gives me permission to let go of expectations of immediate perfection. Wandering off the path is a valuable part of the process.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (short stories to the novel)? What do you see as the appeal?
I started my career writing literary short stories. Secrets took me so long to write because I had to learn not only how to write a full-length novel, but the requirements of crime fiction. At the first Bloody Words conference I attended, an established crime writer gave me feedback on an early version of my first chapter. She observed there was very little description. When I told her I was a short story writer, she smiled and said, “Oh, that explains it.”
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I’m awake at eight, read for an hour, and then check my emails and social media—just in case there’s something important that has to be dealt with right away. There never is, although I tell myself this will free me to write uninterrupted for the rest of the day. While I’m eating my breakfast of oatmeal and tea, I watch one crime TV show which I rationalize as research and to kickstart the little grey mystery-writing cells. By now it’s noon, guilt is setting in, and I can’t put off writing any longer. This is when I drag myself up to my office and start to write—after checking my emails and social media one more time. The good news is that once I get started, I usually keep going until six, seven, or even eight o’clock.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
My writing only gets stalled when I don’t know what the characters will do next. That’s usually because I’ve started writing before fully understanding who they are and what motivates them. At that point, I have to take the time to flesh out their backstory.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Because I spent my summers at my aunt and uncle’s hotel on the Welsh coast, home is the yeasty smell of beer coming from open doors of pubs, the greasy odour of fish and chips from cafes, and of course seaweed and salt water. All of these have found their way into my books.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
When I was younger, I would listened to classical music and imagine that my writing would create the same deep emotional feelings in the reader that music brought out in me. However, music touches a place deep in the soul, bypassing the analytic brain. Words can’t do that. They need our brains to decode their meanings.
15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
When I first started writing my series, I discovered Jasper Fforde, a Welsh fantasy crime writer, whose books opened my mind to a new world of possibilities, giving me permission to create quirky characters and to ask my readers to suspend more than a little disbelief.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I would like to travel to Ireland and other parts of the UK. Ultimately I’d love to buy a seaside cottage in Wales.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
For most of my life, I was a high school ESL and English teacher. I taught people—and myself—about language and story-telling structure, and that has served me well. But I would also have loved to have been an archaeologist. My Master’s degree is in social history, and a lot of archaeology is social history. But I don’t have a head for science. So instead, I decided to have some archaeology students come to the island to dig for the remains of an early medieval monk’s cell in the second Meredith Island Mystery, A Dark Death.
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I’ve been a storyteller ever since I can remember. It’s how I comprehend and interact with the world. While other people arrive late and offer vague references to problems with public transit, I delight in recounting every detail. Before I graduated from high school, I’d received my first rejection letter when I sent Carol Burnett a sketch I’d written, completed my first novel, and was published in a poetry anthology edited by Canadian poet George Bowering.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz both awed and intimidated me, while Thomas King’s CBC Massey Lectures The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative taught me about the power of storytelling. I rarely watch films, but I do watch a lot of British television mysteries such as Midsomer Murder, Father Brown, and Sister Boniface Mysteries.
20 - What are you currently working on?
I’ve just finished the edits for A Dark Death to be released in June, 2025, and am writing The Secret House of Death, the fifth book in the Meredith Island Mystery series. I’m also searching for a publisher for a stand-alone private investigator/police procedural/suspense novel called That Which Was Lost which was inspired by a horrific car accident that killed eight teenagers in my hometown fifty years ago. And if someone would like to make a series or film from the Meredith Island books, I wouldn’t say no.
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