About Liza

I was raised in a small town in Pennsylvania which, at the time I was growing up, was fairly rural and very lovely. Over the years, though, I’ve watched the countryside be taken over by endless housing developments and strip malls. This seems to be the fate of so many American towns — a fate that was accelerated by the recent housing bubble and building boom.

After college, a part of which was spent at the University of Iowa writing workshop where I studied poetry, I moved to New York City and started a career in publishing and advertising. In the late 1980s, I founded an advertising agency that specialized in book publishing accounts and watched it grow over the next decade and a half to be the most successful of its kind. About the same time I started the agency, my husband and I began to vacation and spend weekends in the Berkshires, renting for many years and then buying a small cottage not far from the Columbia County border.  Like so many weekenders, we found ourselves drawn more and more to the serenity and natural beauty of the area — the corn fields, dairy farms, and rolling hills.  When I was able to sell the agency several years ago to devote myself to writing, we also decided to devote more of our time to this lovely part of the world.

Though I continued to write poetry for several years after moving to the city, I found it difficult — especially after my business career began to take off — to give it the deep concentration that I believe the art form demands.  More for fun than anything else, I tried writing a romance, then a few mysteries and suspense novels, and I was lucky enough to find an agent who saw some potential in them and helped me get published.  Though I learned a lot about plot and pacing from writing those books, they did not reflect the love of language that first led me to writing poetry and they were not the kind of emotionally honest and character-driven stories I longed to produce. 

It took me a while, after selling my agency and deciding to write full-time, to find the right story to tell.  I’d long been struck by the striking differences between the small, close-knit rural communities in the Berkshires— and the upscale primarily urban weekenders who have the money to buy up and develop the land that had been owned by local families for so many generations. While these newcomers have the resources to build their “dream homes,” many in the local community complain that their children are being priced out of the area.  What sort of resentments must these local people harbor toward their entitled neighbors? How does it feel to have to sell your birth-right, the land you inherited, in order to survive? I found this a rich vein to mine thematically, but I’d long ago realized it’s the characters — not the plots and themes — that really make a story worth reading.

It wasn’t until I a met a young woman, a local real estate agent, who became the model for Maddie Alden, who tells Local Knowledge in the first person narrative form, that I came upon a way to bring these concerns to life. The other real elements — a marijuana farm discovered in a nearby county in the late 1980s, a “sculpture garden” somewhat like Luke’s, the collapse of dairy farming in our area — coalesced quickly, and the story took on a life of its own from there.

I’ve always loved to read fiction because it offers a singular escape: it actually allows to you enter someone else’s life, walk around in someone else’s shoes and share his or her thoughts — to empathize and, possibly, be a bit transformed by the experience.  At its heart, Local Knowledge is about an age-old question: how far would you go to gain your heart’s desire?  I’m not talking about big dramatic elements — murder, mayhem, etc. — but the small, subtle betrayals and accommodations most of us make every day to get what we want. To paraphrase something I read recently: there’s nothing like fiction to get at the truth. I’m hoping readers will see something of themselves in Maddie — and perhaps learn a little something from her as well.