LETTER FROM JOYCE

IN THIS LETTER:

1. * Leaving Lake Atitlan (and returning there)
   

2. * My new novel
   

3. * An unlikely basketball tournament
   

4. * A thirty-year-old murder case
   

5. * Some words about friendship and sisterhood
   

6. * Three different ways we can work together on your writing
   

7. (in California or Maine)
   

8. 
   

Dear Friends,

As many of you know, if you’ve been following my stories on Facebook, I spent most of this winter in Guatemala, where I host the Lake Atitlan Writing Workshop—my fourteenth at the lake, and the best ever.  (Click here for a slideshow.)

I'm home in the Bay area again.  But though I’m not in the habit of commuting to Guatemala—and  I’ve barely unpacked my bags—I’ll be heading back to the lake again next week for a last hurrah there before making the full hemisphere shift.

This trip has a very particular purpose.  It's about a gift I want to give to two women who are dear to my heart, and to their families.

Some back story is necessary here:  For the last year and a half, I've been working hard on a new novel, loosely based on events that took place in Northern California, in the late seventies, when a man known as the Trailside Killer remained at large.  Over a period lasting well over a year, half a dozen young women were murdered in the vicinity of Mt. Tamalpais, where I've made my home for the last seventeen years. I see this mountain from every window of my house in Mill Valley.  The idea of murders taking place so close to home has haunted me.

Although I'd been dimly aware of this story for years, the experience that inspired me to explore it further occurred when two sisters, Laura and Janet, now in their forties, showed up at my home in Mill Valley to attend one of my one-day writing workshops.  As it turned out, they were the daughters of the homicide detective who had been in charge of the investigation — who died only a few years after the arrest of the killer. READ MORE HERE...