Our Research Notes series invites authors to describe their process for a recent book, with “research” defined as broadly as they like. This week, Chris Cander writes about A Gracious Neighbor from Little A.

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I’d never heard of the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Susan Glaspell until my daughter, Sasha shared one of her short stories with me. Sasha’s English Literature teacher at her women-only high school had assigned the haunting “A Jury of Her Peers,” which was written and set in the early 1900s, a time when women’s lives were restricted mainly to domestic concerns. She wanted the young women to contemplate the myriad ways the female characters were disenfranchised. Sasha told me, “Mom, you have to read this story. You’ll love it.” I did.

In the story, Martha Hale accompanies her husband, the sheriff, and the sheriff’s wife to investigate the home of Minnie Wright, a quiet, reclusive woman accused of murdering her husband, John. Looking around at the unkempt kitchen, the men see evidence of Minnie’s shortcomings as a wife, but the women begin to understand that the disarray is a reflection of Minnie’s mental state. The men instruct the women to gather some of Minnie’s things to take to her in jail, then leave them to inspect the crime scene upstairs. After discovering clues about John’s oppressive, abusive tendencies toward his wife, Martha and Mrs. Peters reach their own conclusions about Minnie’s guilt and judge her actions to be justified. They understand Minnie’s plight, because they’ve dealt with their own versions of male domination in their own lives. Martha Hale says, “we all go through the same things — it’s all just a different kind of the same thing.”

While sexism and misogyny are central themes of Glaspell’s story, I was struck by the dramatic evolution of the relationships among her female characters both on and off the page. Martha and Mrs. Peters move from negative assumptions and misjudgments to empathy and even law-breaking support of Minnie. The idea that now, over a hundred years later, women still often misjudge and mistreat one another was the impetus for reimagining the story in a modern setting. Because I live in a glamorous neighborhood I couldn’t afford if I were to buy into now, surrounded by women whose concerns sometimes seem at odds with my own, I decided to pluck Glaspell’s cast — turn-of-the-century names and all — out of 1917 Iowa and move them into 2019 West University Place, TX.

Unlike all my novels before this one, which demanded a great deal of research to achieve a level of authenticity, this book required no trips to the library, no phone calls or emails to experts across the country or around the world, no reaches into the depths of the Internet to help me establish my setting and learn the skills that my characters needed. I had only to literally look around.

I knew my earnest, hapless protagonist, Martha Hale, would live in one of the community’s original 1940s bungalows and that her glamourous would-be friend, Minnie Wright, would move into a luxury new-build next door, but I wanted to actually see an example of the two properties I had in mind. Because my imagination flies so much more freely when it takes off from a solid launchpad, I went to Zillow and searched for houses priced over $1.6M. Almost immediately, I found the ideal place: a new construction that happened to be flanked by two cottages built in 1940-41. It felt like magic, like a gift from the Universe, affirming that I was on the right track with this pursuit.

I looked up the available property on a local realtor site, and poured over the gorgeous, staged photos of what would be Minnie’s house. On another, I found pictures of the interior of Martha’s: the compact, dysfunctional bathrooms, the sad, small kitchen, the add-on utility room. Instantly, I had a deeper appreciation of both women as residents of their respective homes, knowing that they each had a certain defining pride in the spaces they occupied. I looked up the home values on our appraisal district website — a voyeuristic adventure if ever there was one — and saw that “Martha” had added on a garage in 2001 and that the tear-down that existed before “Minnie’s” was built was also an original bungalow that had belonged to a family for decades.

These concrete discoveries, which I used in the novel, were invaluable to my understanding of the inherent conflicts among and between the “haves” and the “have-nots” in a community. However, it was one thing to compile data online, and quite another to witness it in person. So, I put on my well-worn walking shoes and set out to see for myself if the grass was actually greener on the other side of the fence.

Boy howdy, was it ever — at least on the exterior. That both homes, built eighty years apart, were painted white made it easy to compare and contrast the two. I stood across the street and took a photo of them, then went home and set the image as my desktop picture.

Having that photo visible all the time gave me constant insights into the characters who lived there: what their gardens looked like and how they were managed, how the rising and setting sun lit and heated their lawns, what windows they looked out of and what they saw looking out from them. I could better imagine Minnie’s vast, cold interior and Martha’s cramped and awkward rooms. Their homes became analogous to their characteristics, which I might not have developed without the visuals to support the idea.

The streets in West U, to my delight, are named after universities and (sadly, mostly male) poets, but to protect the identities of the very real people who live in my characters’ homes, I reoriented everything east-west to north-south, and changed the names of the streets. My characters live on Alcott St. — an homage to Louisa May Alcott, whose work introduced readers to educated, strong female heroines and greatly impacted American literature. The chance to reinforce feminist ideology, even with a street name, served the greater goal of this novel, which was to emphasize that we, especially women, should respect, honor, and exalt one another, and to recognize that the grass is only as green as we keep it.

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