4 Women Crime Authors Talk the Importance of Setting

4 Women Authors Talk the Scene of the Crime at Tennessee Williams New Orleans Lit Fest 

By Mark Mathes

Notes, paraphrased and direct quotes from speakers March 26-30, 2025 at the 39th annual festival, where I volunteered again, for the 14th or 15th year.

Moderator

Michael Allen Zell

Setting is the thing you can’t find in Google.

Who’s your audience? Someone who grew up there, or someone who goes on vacation there.

Most journalists are not very good novelists.

Christine Carbo

The main entry point of the story is the setting. The setting is not interesting unless it is part of a character.

Setting isn’t really a character. Dynamic characters change. In my mind a setting doesn’t change. Setting isn’t really important unless it’s dynamic with a character. 

In my first novel, the setting haunts the character. 

People want to know in Montana about the crosses along the road where people died. I put them in there.

I try to make the setting open to everyone, kind of universal.

I wanted to have things correct about the dream world. I can’t have the reader come across a river that isn’t there. I took pretty big liberties in two novels to make up park police. In the back matter, I acknowledged and fessed up I took the liberties. For the most part, I wanted it realistic.

To propel the reader along there has to be some emotion, plus place. 

Have they become fish out of water in NO? What is the dynamic between the character and the setting? What is about the setting that pushes the buttons for the character? 

Carbo is a Florida native, now living in Montana. Carbo is the author of the Glacier Mystery novels, an ensemble series set in and around Glacier National Park. Her books include The Wild Inside, Mortal Fall, The Weight of Night, and A Sharp Solitude. She is a recipient of the Women’s National Book Association Pinckley Prize, the Silver Falchion Award, the High Plains Book Award, and is a finalist for the Barry Award. She has an MA in English and linguistics and taught college-level courses for over a decade. She still teaches, in a vastly different realm, as a Pilates instructor. A Florida native, she lives with her family in Whitefish, Montana.

Sasha Rothschild

I start with plot, then characters. 

Miami was so vibrant when I was there.

Weather is so hot being there. Miami: It’s just a small town.

She grew up in Miami Beach, lives LA. Works in film.

Rothschild wrote Blood Sugar, her first novel.

In terms of understanding character and stories, it’s different. My first daft is very different.

I wrote a novel without describing what a character looks like. I thought mistakenly: that’s the director’s job.

Setting and character and plot are the same [in novels and film.]

Each chapter I wanted them to stay awake and keep reading.

I wanted my character to be in the ocean, she’s not me.

Does the character want to be there or not be there?

I’m honing into the details of the place so the reader says I know this place.

Sascha Rothchild is an Emmy award-winning writer, executive producer and showrunner who has written and produced the critically acclaimed global hits XO, Kitty, The Baby-Sitters Club, The Bold Type and GLOW to name a few. Sascha also adapted her LA Weekly cover article, “How To Get Divorced By 30,” about her failed first marriage, into both a memoir for Penguin and a screenplay for Universal Studios. Amidst her screen work and personal articles seen in Elle, Women’s Health and Psychology Today, Sascha has published her first novel, Blood Sugar, with Putnam. It was listed as a New York Times ‘Best of’ in 2022 and 2023. Sascha hails from Miami Beach, lives in Los Angeles, and always wears sunscreen.

Gwen Florio

I did set my first novel and subsequent novel in Podunk, Montana. The county is the size of Connecticut, which has 3 million people.

My god if you get in trouble here and you’re across the county, you’re on your own in Montana there’s a lot of conflict, with reservations, with law enforcement. The country is so beautiful but the weather will kill you.

There’s inherent danger. The beauty of the landscape and what can happen.

Florio was journalist in a previous life.

I write about things I know well.

I don’t want to be a reporter. I want to see it and experience it. One criticism of my first novel was it was too journalistic.

There are two strip clubs in town across from city hall.

I made up a town. Readers came up and said I know that place.

I never say a tree. I say an oak tree. And what kind of bird it is.

I want to make sure I get the characters right.

I go to the tribal council to get their opinion.

Journalists are always accused of making stuff up. When I sat down as a novelist and stared at the blank page, I said, what the hell?

The good thing about journalism is that I’m not afraid to talk to people.

I know research.

Dialogue and dialect goes a long way.

You have to be careful not to sentimentalize characters.

Gwen Florio “is one of those writers who regularly publish series and stand-alones that leave a lasting impression,” says the New York Times. Her fiction draws on a lengthy journalism career that took her across the country and overseas to several conflict zones, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia. Her debut novel, Montana, won the national Pinckley Prize for debut crime fiction by women and a High Plains Book Award. She’s published eleven since, with Best Be Prepared the most recent. Her next, A Senior Citizen’s Guide to Life on the Run, is set for publication in May.

Adrienne Harun

It seems like every story I write has an element of crime fiction. The setting out west is a very lonely place. 

I set a story in a dementia home.

I made up the town too.

There is that element of learning about a place.

I do pay attention to the landscape.

It’s a powerful job we have. Cultural mythology has a history. I follow it.

Setting is different for what people see in it.

Setting includes weather, the social milieu. 

You can use the setting to create suspense. Things are not what they seem.

You have to own [the setting].

Adrianne Harun is the author of two short story collections, The King of Limbo, a Washington State Book Award finalist, and Catch, Release, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award. Stories from her collections have been listed as Notable in both Best American Short Stories and Best American Mystery Stories. Her first novel, A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain, was long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award, a finalist for both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award and the Washington State Book Award and winner of a Pinckley Prize for Debut Crime Fiction. A new novel, On the Way to the End of the World, was recently published. A longtime resident of Port Townsend, Washington, Adrianne ran a garage, Motorsport, with the legendary Alistair Scovil and has also worked as a teacher and an editor for many years.

Now in its 40th year, The Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival is a five-day event held each spring in New Orleans' historic French Quarter that attracts participants from around the world. They also host Saints+Sinners LGBTQ Literary Festival the same weekend. Visit SASFest HERE.





mark mathes

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