The Phantom of Forest Lawn unravels a tale of love, legacy, and intrigue as a determined woman and a haunted man confront the dark secrets buried within a bustling cemetery. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

Years ago, I devised a kind of ‘mental yoga exercise’, which I believe keeps the mind flexible and able to see things from multiple points of view—and which sometimes results in a flash of inspiration. Here it is: Whenever I observe something, I try also to look at the very same thing from the diametrically opposed perspective and then come up with reasons why each can have substantially equal validity.

In the case of The Phantom of Forest Lawn, about a year ago I was walking through Forest Lawn Cemetery, and I began thinking about how cemeteries are places of grief and loss. Certainly, that’s a common and valid point of view—but then my little mental gymnastic routine began, and I stood it on its head: Could cemeteries also be considered places of joy and love?

Around that nucleus, ideas began to form. I began to imagine that grief and loss themselves are perhaps the opposite faces of joy and love. How, for example, can one know sadness without having once experienced joy? How possibly can one feel loss without ever having loved? That made sense to me, so I went deeper into each of those themes.

As to joy, I dreamed up a few scenes in which two lovelorn people at last find not only each other but also their own truest natures, in a cemetery setting. And as to love . . . well, at the most basic level, I believe every person interred in any cemetery was once, or still is, loved by someone. Now I had my story, or at least its underpinnings.

In writing the book, I came to believe that if anything can overpower and outlast death, it is love—and so I nowadays I see cemeteries not as places steeped in sadness and death, but as a kind fossil record of life and love and joy.

What drew you to make Forest Lawn Cemetery such a central and dynamic element of the novel?

As a fundamental matter, I believe that ‘setting’ (as in ‘setting, plot, and character’ being the basic elements of a novel) can be—and ought to be—a character unto itself. Otherwise ‘setting’ is merely a backdrop, and stage dressing which leaves the plot and characters to do all the work. Why not make every setting a character? That’s what I try to do in all my books.

As to Forest Lawn specifically, I suppose at first it was the incongruity of the whole thing that made me write it as a dynamic force. Cemeteries are normally considered the ultimate in ‘static’—hardly dynamic . . . why, they’re full of dead people! But before they became cemeteries, they were something else entirely—fields or forests or farms—and thus their metamorphosis into burying grounds is clearly one element of a larger dynamic process of life, death, and change itself.

Georgia Moffatt is a compelling character. Was she based on anyone from history or your imagination, and what was your process for developing her strong-willed nature?

Thank you for saying so! Georgia Moffatt is not based on anyone past or present . . . like most of my characters, she knocked on the door of my subconscious as the book was beginning to take shape, and asked to have a chat with me. She challenged me to put myself in her shoes, and to try to understand the grief, frustration, and powerlessness she feels after her father sells off the beloved family orchard lands (and her presumed inheritance) to become a cemetery, of all things. She asked me to look out over what had been lush acres of trees that are now only stark rows of headstones . . .

So at the start, Georgia Moffatt is a very frustrated heiress—angry and sad about what she saw as her father’s act of destruction. As the story goes by, though, Georgia begins to notice the aching beauty of this eternal place of peace and rest as the result of an act of creation. As her eyes open, she begins to notice someone very close that she has overlooked for a very long time. And, most important of all, for the first time she begins to understand herself.

What allows Georgia to grow in all of these dimensions is her indomitable will to challenge and reconsider her own prior perceptions, assumptions, and beliefs. That kind of humble curiosity is, to my mind, one of humanity’s best and rarest qualities. That Georgia possesses it, and in quantity, will tell you a little about how much I admire her.

The novel balances lyrical descriptions with moments of humor and grit. How did you strike that balance, and were there any particular challenges in achieving it?​

I try to write stories that touch on all dimensions of the human experience, and I think we can all agree that life itself is a mix of beauty, humor, and horror.

To achieve this comprehensiveness in prose, I approach writing books the way I would imagine that composers approach writing a symphony. Symphonies have slow movements and fast ones, and the music coaxes out different emotions at different times in the piece. So it is with a novel, or at least a good one . . . which to my mind is one that stirs a variety of passions, entices the reader to reflect, and offers up some good fun along the way.

Gritty scenes stir up passionate emotions—or release them cathartically. Lyrical passages, I think, create a mood conducive to contemplation, both about the deeper themes of both the story and of one’s own experience of life. And humorous bits provide the fun . . . and in books as in life, fun is very important!

As long as I can write ‘symphonic’ books that feature a number of different musicians (the characters) playing together in a particular place (the setting), I have infinite possibilities for thematic and melodic variation (the plot) along the way. And so long as life itself remains a mix of grit, beauty, and laughter which it always will—all I have to to is hold up a mirror to it.

Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon