Friday from the Archives: “Sister-in-Crime: An Interview with Margaret Maron” by Art Taylor from NCLR 2.1 (1994)
We’ve had many of the NC Book Awards recipients grace our pages over the years. Margaret Maron won many awards during her career and took home the Raleigh Award in 2004, before receiving the NC Award and being inducted into the NC Literary Hall of Fame.
In this 1994 interview with Art Taylor, readers get a glimpse of the depth of research Maron did for the book Shooting At Loons and how it affected her personally:
“There are a lot of really serious, far-reaching decisions that are being made now about the coastal waters – decisions that are going to set the course for the next 30 or 40 years, and I have only been tangentially interested in them. And now that I’ve become aware, because of my research for the next book, I’ve become very partisan. I want to go out and get on a soapbox about the issues.
… Such things as who owns the commons, by which I mean the commonly-held resources that make an area, a state, or a country a desirable place to live and work. Do we allow those commons to be
degraded simply because such degradations give short-term economic benefits? There are hard social and economic choices in our very near future. I would hope that North Carolina could formulate some long-term plans for preserving our common resources, but I’m not very optimistic. Special interests always seem
to come before statesmanship. Not that we, as private citizens, are blameless if we keep electing foxes to guard our hen houses. Or maybe we’re the foxes, unable to quit fouling our own dens.”
More of her stories’ background research can be found in Maron’s own essay in our 2018 issue, where she talks about visiting not only Harker’s Island, but also High Point, Blowing Rock, and Wilmington as settings for more mysteries.
To nominate a new book (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or for young readers) for this year’s NC Book Awards, see details here.
Read the entire interview on Gale Cengage or purchase a copy of the 1994 issue.
