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 waterfall park. They just know what they're going to get every time they come and visit.
Debbi (06:54): Yeah, yeah, that's really cool. I think our environments do affect us as people, so definitely living in Wisconsin would have a different effect on people than say a person living in Arizona, their environment.
Joy (07:11): Definitely. And I think the more I travel, certainly the more I am aware of how local things really are in this really huge country that we live in. And I talked to so many readers who have never been to Wisconsin, and you get your own conception of a place. I mean, I think of Florida and the first thing I think of is Disney World. So people think of Wisconsin, and what I hear from people is, oh, it's cold there, but it's not cold all the time. It does get cold, but that's only part of Wisconsin. And I really wanted people to see that there were so many layers in Wisconsin and so much different kinds of beauty, because again, I think people also think farmland. And there's a lot more than farmland in Wisconsin too. There's many different landscapes.
Debbi (08:11): Well, Madison is a really nice little town. I went there for a Bouchercon once. I really loved it. It was so walkable.
Joy (08:20): It is, and it's such a popular community. It's very artsy and cultural and yeah, I love Madison. That's where I went to college, so it's kind of one of my favorite places too, to be in Wisconsin.
Debbi (08:36): Kind of like the old stomping grounds.
Joy (08:38): Yes, indeed.
Debbi (08:41): You had, I think, mentioned in one of the descriptions of this series that they're kind of like standalones in the same place. You could start with any of them?
Joy (08:52): What I would say is, I mean, you actually could, but what I would say is there's a definite arc in my main character. She very much changes from somebody who is very unsure of herself in the beginning because she starts doing this amateur investigative reporting, and she doesn't know how to ask questions. She doesn't know who she should talk to. She certainly knows she shouldn't cross police tape, but she does anyway. And she knows some things about the law because she herself had worked in the legal field for a time before she decided to run a bakery in a wine lounge.
(09:40): But there's a definite arc to her character. Her character changes quite a lot and evolves quite a lot from being that uncertain person as she goes through a lot of different things throughout the series and also even in her relationships. Those change as well. Be that, and after having said that though, I'm a person who, I read series sometimes and there's 25 books, and I'm not sure I'm going to commit to 25 books. And if I see something and I pick it up and I say, this catches my eye because of the plot line or the concept, I read the back of that book and I tell people the same thing. If you read the back of my book and you say, oh, this is cool. This is about a legendary curse, which is my second book. Oh, this is really cool. This is about birding. If somebody is really into that and says, I just want to pick up book three or four, I say, go for it.
Debbi (10:45): But you still have a protagonist who is, I take it a reporter or a ...
Joy (10:50): She is.
Debbi (10:50): Kind of a newbie reporter,
Joy (10:52): A newbie reporter. She has a lot to prove. In the first book, she conveys to the readers that she wanted to be an investigative journalist, and the local newspaper editor would not hire her. Instead, he wanted her to hire her to print stories about her winery and recipes from the bakery and things like that. And she took that, took that as a little bit of an insult, like, oh, maybe you're not taking me seriously because I'm a woman, or maybe you're just not taking me seriously because you think I just bake for a living. And so it's an opportunity that happens with her in the first book, is she stumbles upon a crime scene or a suspicious murder. It isn't even a crime scene, but it's a suspicious death. And she says, it's January in Wisconsin. There's not a lot going on at the bakery. I think I'm just going to poke around a little bit and ask some questions. And so she evolves in the newspaper reporting sideline that she has, and eventually she gets hired by a regional paper to just be an occasional reporter. But lucky for her, even in this beautiful cozy town, there seems to be a lot of murders.
Debbi (12:20): Nobody's immune from murder, even small towns.
Joy (12:24): No, exactly.
Debbi (12:27): Let's see. So how is the Bay Browning series different? I noticed that it tends to be more literary focused.
Joy (12:36): Yes. So for me, the series was born out of the fact that I was missing teaching literature. I actually really loved teaching literature. I loved having discussions with my high school students about classical books and poetry, and I was missing that. And I thought, well, what can I do? And then somehow this new character came to me and I said, oh,...