Interview with Joy Ann Ribar – S. 11, Ep. 18

My guest interview this week on the Crime Cafe podcast is with the author of two mystery series, Joy Ann Ribar. Learn all about the Deep Lakes and Bay Browning series here! Transcript available here. Debbi (00:12): Hi, everyone. I hope the year is going well for everybody. Today I have as my guest, the author of two mystery series, the Deep Lakes Cozy Mysteries and the Bay Browning Mysteries. She is also a frequent traveler by RV with her husband and has blogged about some of her travels that have included some landmarks of literary note I might add. It is my pleasure to introduce my guest mystery author, Joanne Ribar. I’m sorry, Joy Ann Ribar. I mispronounced your first name instead of your last. Joy (01:35): Something is always bound to trip somebody up. It’s quite right. It’s so nice to be here with you today, Debbi. I feel like I’ve waited for this day forever. Debbi (01:47): I feel like I wait for a lot of things forever. I got to tell you. Yeah, the waiting is the hardest part. Oh boy. Don’t sue me, Tom Petty, please. It was just a small snippet. I didn’t even really sing it. Joy (02:02): Right. Exactly. Anyway, less than 30 seconds. I think you’re good. Debbi (02:05): Oh, there’s no real. Yeah, there is no nothing like that. It’s all very depends on all these factors as they put it. It’s like a combination of factors. Anyway, having said all that, how are you doing today? Joy (02:22): I’m doing really well. Speaking to you from Arizona today, which is a whole lot different than Wisconsin right now. Wisconsin is very snowy. They just got dumped on again and here in Arizona it’s sunny and dry. Debbi (02:38): Oh my gosh. Wow. Yeah, it’s better than … we’ve got snow all over the place here and we have more snow here in Maryland. That’s supposed to be coming, so that’s throwing all sorts of spokes in our … sticks in our spokes, so to speak. Joy (02:55): Right. A wrench in the works. Debbi (02:58): Yeah. Totally a monkey wrench in the works for sure. I mean, it just screws you up all around. Traveling. Any sort of plans you have, who knows? Maybe things will happen, maybe they won’t. Joy (03:10): Right. Debbi (03:11): I’m curious, did you have a career before you started writing fiction or have you always written fiction? Joy (03:17): Oh, definitely. I’ve had a few careers. I started life as a, well, I was a journalist first and worked as a newspaper reporter and an assistant editor and a photographer, and then I went on to work for a law firm as a paralegal. So I did a lot of legal writing, which everything I’ve done seems to be centered around writing. And then I became an English teacher and I taught high school English, followed by college English. And then in 2017 I became a semi-retired part-time teacher. Found out I had a lot of time on my hands and decided I would try to do some writing of my own with fiction. And so I wrote my first book in 2018. Debbi (04:14): And which book was that? Joy (04:16): And that was Deep Dark Secrets, and it was the first in the Deep Lakes Cozy Mysteries. I wrote it in real time. It was January. I was in Wisconsin, looked out the window. It was snowing. It was cold. The streets were quiet, the snow was piling up in the crooks of the trees, and I thought, it’s beautiful out here, but how do I share the beauty of winter with readers who don’t know winter? And that was kind of how all of my mysteries then became set in different seasons in Wisconsin because I wanted to focus on the season even as much as I wanted to give them a good mystery. Debbi (05:02): That’s really interesting. It’s like you’re focusing on a local area and the way it changes over time. Joy (05:10): Yes, yes, exactly. And in that series, which there are five books plus a standalone Christmas book, but I wrote each one in a season and I picked up, I just continued where the last one left off as far as it being set in the same year, but in the next season and in the next season. That was how I set those mysteries, and it really gave the characters a chance to evolve even within their own relationships and in their own maybe quirks and obstacles in life. Debbi (05:50): It’s really fascinating because this is the first time I’ve heard somebody talk so much about setting, the setting as a part of the story. Joy (06:00): And I think for me, because it’s a cozy series, it was so important to have that setting become a place where maybe people wanted to come and visit and escape. It became a central part because it was a small town or it is a small town set in a tourist town, and everybody knows everybody. And so all of the shops have their own kind of personalities, and the people come and go, and they’re recurring characters. So it almost is kind of like a TV series in a way where people can come in and they know exactly what to expect. They come to that town, they come to the bakery, they come to the wine lounge, they go to the ...