Marginalia: Welcome to Carrefour
(Population: Fictional, But Only Technically)
If you've ever spent any time around me in person, eventually when people ask me— how's your writing coming along, you'll get bombarded by my ADHD hyperfixation rants and then it's three hours later and I'm still talking about my characters and their little quirks like they're my kin I don't see that often, but love to tell stories about.
Today's post is the one where I have to actually talk about the thing I think about more than almost anything else. more than my to-do list, more than what's for dinner, some days more than the rare moment when I can find time to take a nap (I end up thinking about it still anyways). That thing I think about most often is a town in Mississippi that doesn't exist.
Carrefour. I've had the Mississippi river in my head for years now, especially the way the light hits it on the Natchez side when the dusk starts to settle. A diner with stools that wobble and a name like the Old Block.. A town square with brick underfoot that the tree roots have slowly heaved up over a century, because nobody in this town has ever been in much of a hurry to smooth anything over.
If you've been around a while, you already know I'm drafting a seven-book series set here in this strange little town just north of Natchez, Mississippi. If this is your first stop — hi, welcome, grab a Diet Coke. I'm about to talk about a fake town like it's somewhere I used to live. And honestly, it kind of is.
Okay but why "Carrefour"?
Carrefour means crossroads. French — carre, four, four ways. I didn't pick it because it looks nice on a cover, though it does and it makes me feel fancier than I am. I picked it because a crossroads isn't just where roads meet. It's where you make a choice. And older than that, in folklore, it's where you make a deal. If you don't know about Robert Johnson's blues, then do yourself a favor and listen.
Robert Johnson — "Cross Road Blues"
Even better, grab your popcorn and watch one of Brad's favorite movies and take your time watching this scene in particular: O Brother, Where Art Thou? (3/10) Movie CLIP - Crossroads (2000) HD
Regardless of what actually happens at the crossroads, the myths that surround the rural places that intersect lean heavy into the strange and mysterious. I've always been fascinated by that idea. To stand in the middle of four roads converging means to find the 'thin spot.'
The Thin Spot isn't some grand idea of mine. It's been the subject of countless myths and legends to try to give names to where things feel weirder than they should. The place where the ordinary rules go soft around the edges and where something's listening if you're willing to bargain, and no matter what you walk away with, you've always paid more than what you thought you'd signed up for. Often paying more than you can afford to ever lose.
Now, take that crossroads and set a town on top. Boom. And now you’ve got Carrefour.
See, in Carrefour the founding families that chose to settle there didn't just pick the nicest little bend by the river. They built their homes and their lives over that thin spot, and some of them are still paying the interest on it two hundred years later.
Every person in my series is standing at their own version of that crossroads. Who they were, versus what a bad bargain made them. The family they were born into, versus who they're choosing to be in spite of it.
I didn't sit down to write a Big Thematic Statement (though I do love it when the theme fits the vibe!) I just wanted a good town name, and then the name kept telling me what the series was about before I'd figured it out myself. Which, if you've ever written anything longer than a grocery list, you already know: the story tells on its own before you're ready to hear it.
And back when I started writing a story about a woman facing down her roots and family, I had no idea I was pulling truths from myself first. (But that's for another post).
Seven families. Seven sins. Seven women who are so tired of being told who they're supposed to be.
Carrefour was founded by seven families, and if you've read even one Southern Gothic novel you probably see where this is going. The Barrows. The Hallers. The Mathers. The Sommervilles. The Treadways. The Delacroixs. The Riveaus. Names on street signs and building plaques and the spines of ledgers nobody's opened in decades, long after the people who earned them are dust. They founded the town to keep themselves safe, but they each made mistakes in what they would do for ensuring their line’s prosperity, safety, renown, and even legacy.
Each book follows a heroine caught up in that legacy and every one of them ends up tangled up with a man the town's oldest sins have left cursed, or bound, or otherwise not entirely his own. Most of these women carry founding blood in their veins whether they want it or not. The ones who don't carry something else entirely — a different inheritance, a different kind of claim on this place — and that's a story for its own post, when the time's right. No spoilers, okay?
Each pairing maps to one of the seven deadly sins and its answering virtue: gluttony and charity, pride and humility, wrath and patience. And yes, my church upbringing is showing, but like Flannery O'Connor, I cannot separate my faith from how I see the world no more than I can snap my fingers and become a sentient kudzu creature that haunts the landscape and the narrative.
The series covers seven women proving that what you inherit doesn't have to be what you keep. That one's personal for me, more than I probably need to admit in a blog post. (Self-awareness queen, okay?)
The vibes, because I know some of you are here for vibes
Picture this: Flannery O'Connor's unflinching gaze into the grotesque, crossed with the slow-build magic of Susanna Clarke, with a real, aching romance underneath the whole thing. This isn't a book series where the magic explains everything away and ties a bow on it. The magic is just one more thing the town's quietly agreed not to look at directly. The very same way as it doesn't look directly at the brass historical marker on the square, because of the truly historical tragedies that are represented by those brass plaques is still a wound that no one can bear to heal or even acknowledge.
Kudzu that grows on buildings and fence posts like it's keeping score, because the vine that ate the South would keep score. A jukebox that seems to already know what day of the week it is and plays Johnny Cash or Patsy Cline accordingly. Prayer cloths as safe passage through an unfamiliar pine forest. A fig preserve recipe passed down for generations that tastes like stepping into an old sepia photograph. A river nobody will admit they're scared of, regardless of its shifting waters carving new paths into the land over centuries. A diner where a stranger walks in out of a storm one evening and says the place is one of his old favorites in a tone that makes you wonder exactly how old old means, and whether you actually want to know.
Why I'm letting you in on this now
I've been living in Carrefour in my head for a long time now. Truly, it's been long enough that I'll catch myself mid-laundry-fold thinking about what the light looks like on Market Square around 6pm in February, or which grocery aisle a specific character heads to first, like she's a real friend I actually know and not a woman I made up during Charlie's naptime three years ago. Writing a place this specific means I've got a hundred little textures that'll never make it into a query letter or a back cover blurb. It's the small stuff that doesn't sell the book but is the book, if that makes sense.
So that's what I want this corner of the blog to be. Not a pitch, though I hope you end up wanting to read the thing and then have coffee with me about it! Just — come sit at the Old Block's counter a while. Everybody in this town's got a reason for the way they turned out, and the crossroads is always right there, patient as kudzu, waiting on the next person ready to make a choice.
Welcome to Carrefour. There's always room for one more.
