I’ve always loved archaeology. I didn’t know much about it, but I loved the idea of recreating the past from concrete bits and pieces left behind. Archaeologists seemed like fertile ground for fiction, these people focused on reconstructing the past in such a concrete way. Then several years ago, I had a phone call from my best friend, whose boyfriend died back in college. She’d found a mixed tape he’d made her in high school, the kind with handwritten titles on  the cassette case that used to popular when I was in high school. Somewhere in that conversation she said, “I can’t believe a piece of plastic can last longer than a human being.”

That line was the beginning of Ren. I loved the idea of this amazing, brilliant woman, charming and funny, who was totally gutted by an early loss. A woman who had never gotten over that loss—hadn’t really been allowed to process it—and was left perpetually trying to bring back the past, trying to hold on to her life as it had been before the tragedy. With that somewhat shadowy outline, I had a personal and emotional anchor for the story—a woman trying to reconnect to the present and the future, trying to open herself up to life and love as it could be. I saw her sitting in the hot sand, wanting the feel of the past—the heat and the dust and the itch of it all. There was this great physicality to how she thought about ancient history.

But I didn’t have a sense of place yet. I didn’t know how archaeology fit in. Then two things happened: First, I visited the Peabody Museum in Boston, and I stumbled on a Mimbres exhibit. The beauty of it was astonishing. I loved the idea of a people unremarkable in any way except for one stunning exception—their art. But mostly it wasn’t a very logical process. I just couldn’t forget the Mimbres images, couldn’t get them out of my head. I started doing some research. And then I met Karl Laumbach, an archaeologist involved with an Earthwatch expedition in New Mexico. He talked about frontiers and the intersection points of cultures and a thousand other things. He really helped me to flesh out a whole world in prehistoric New Mexico, and he brought Lynay and Non’s world to life. When I came back from my first dig with Karl, I had a new sense of the texture and the beauty of both Lynay and Ren’s lives. And I sat down to write.