I dropped off one of my books at the Tribune, and this was the result:

Columbia Daily Tribune headline:
NOVELIST'S FLIGHT PATH INCLUDED STUDY AT STEPHENS COLLEGE

Getting from Point A to Point B isn’t always as linear as some make it sound. But life, and story, is a process of one moment begetting the next, of points connecting — even when they do so with dotted or crooked lines.

F.C. Pearce’s debut novel, ”Listen for the Mourning Dove,” hones in on how the actions of one generation of a Texas family ripple out to the next, how a fixed point in time can lead to another.

Columbia was a significant point on Pearce’s timeline to becoming a published author. She attended Stephens College, a place she describes as having a nourishing, empowering effect.

“Though I had used the written word to communicate since scratching out my first sentences at age 5, and had declared at age 9 that I’d write a novel one day, it was at Stephens that I developed the confidence and resolve to make good on that early declaration,” Pearce said in an recent email.

In an email Q-and-A with the New Mexico-based author, she offers insight into the process of building a world through words and the way setting can function like a painter’s canvas.

Tribune: What were the first seeds of “Listen for the Mourning Dove” — was it a character? A situation? A theme? What’s the hardest thing about getting started and laying out the world of a book from that initial idea?

Pearce: In the case of this book, the first seeds of the work came from all three of those areas, leaning perhaps more toward that of theme — the age-old one of good versus bad, and how the consequences of every choice we make between the two (with the mystery of serendipity thrown in for good measure) affect every aspect of life going forward.

I would characterize getting started and laying out the world of this book as challenging in the sense that I had constructed in minute detail the last scene of the book first with very little idea about how to get there! I find outlines confining, so the hardest part of laying the story out was that I couldn’t.

Let me explain: there was a natural unfolding after the first paragraph was written. Although I knew where the story would end, I had no idea what paths it would take to get there until I arrived. Writing a book is a fascinating process, fraught with obstacles along the way, just like life.

Tribune: What were the distinct joys and challenges of telling a story through multiple generations of one family?

Pearce: There were distinct joys in intimately getting to know three generations of characters in one family — learning from their interactions, their joys, their experiences with love, with hate, their passing on of traditions and in some cases breaking with those traditions, the tensions created in their relationships by those experiences to explain why people do what they do.

It was equally challenging to thread together how the responses to tensions in one generation affected the generation to follow. Over the 40-year period this novel covers, experiencing the characters’ flaws, strengths, failures, successes, joys, aging and deaths, etc. was often emotional, challenging to write about, and at times an editing nightmare.

It was more than once that I awakened in the middle of the night, ran to the computer to re-read large sections of the book to confirm to myself that I hadn’t assigned one character’s traits to the wrong character or attributed one character’s ideas or activities to another’s.

Tribune: I know you’ve traveled quite a bit and are now settled in Santa Fe. What about the West Texas landscape inspired you? What role do you feel like setting plays in the work?

Pearce: West Texas is wide-open and fairly empty for endless miles. I remember considering that there couldn’t be a better backdrop to begin the creative process, the word “empty” being operative here. As an artist fills an empty canvas, so a writer fills an empty page.

Having been partly raised in West Texas, I knew the landscape and the culture and it was the perfect setting to bring the book’s characters into being against the backdrop of post-war, pre-civil rights America through the lens of the fiercely independent West Texas of that era.

The book does travel to other cities such as New Orleans, Atlanta, New York, Chicago, even as far away as Iran, but the West Texas setting that opens and closes the book provides a place in time that strongly influences what the book’s characters are able or unable to realize in their individual lives.

Tribune: I know a writer is always thinking, planning, scheming. Anything in mind as far as a next direction or project? Do you see your future work hewing close to this book in any ways, or would you like to go down a totally different path?

Pearce: Thinking, planning, scheming about what I’m going to write next is certainly an integral part of my daily life, whether I’m reading, grappling with problems, on the treadmill, playing music, falling in love, etc. I’m in the throes of writing another novel which could perhaps be considered a sequel to “Listen for the Mourning Dove”; not because it picks up where “Dove” leaves off (it doesn’t thus far), but because a few of the situations and characters from “Dove” may reappear.

I say “may” reappear because writing has a way of taking the author down myriad unrehearsed paths! I’m reminded here of the Buddhist thought: “There are a thousand paths to enlightenment.” So can there be many paths to the end of a book, or one sentence to the next! I may work toward a trilogy or stop at part-sequel.

Going forward from there? I’d like going down a totally different path, yet I suspect I’ll be dealing with the same theme of the effects of behaviors on human interactions.