You were a CBC journalist for ten years. Has that affected your fiction?

There's a reason why old journalists never die, but often turn to a second career in fiction writing.  Journalism provides the skills needed to persevere in a tough business:  Research, editing, craft and productivity.  The latter is the most important.  When you work as a journalist, you have to feed 'the beast' on a regular basis. You soon learn that even when the idea well has run dry, if you just sit down at the keyboard and start typing, before too long a story will come.   You just can't afford to
sit around waiting for lightening inspiration to strike.   Most journalists love words and language.  I was born to live my life on the page.  Going from journalism to fiction, I simply made the transition from telling other people's stories to telling my own.    

Your work has been adapted for radio and also for the theatre. Did you work on the adaptations? Tell us a little about the process and how it worked for you.

CBC producer Bill Lane and Heather Black worked with me at the Banff Center of the Arts on the adaptation of the short story LEARNING TO SPIN for the Summer Drama Festival.   This is a mystery about a woman who walks along the river in winter, and every day she passes a queer old man who she gradually becomes convinced is involved in foul play.  We work-shopped my first draft of the play with writers and actors in Banff, which was great fun.  I had the chance to meet some of the people behind the 'voices' I'd heard on radio for years.   I especially loved one young actor, barely out of his teens, who managed to make the old man in the story sound creepier than Anthony Perkins in Psycho.

Afterwards, Bill asked me to help the technician select the sound effects.   I bet you didn't know that the best way to get the sound of feet crunching on snow is by squeezing a box of cornstarch?  Even the top technology can't accomplish a thing without creative imagination.  

Your writing is lyrical and deeply rooted in the New Brunswick soil. What role does setting play in the characters you choose to write about?

The history and the land play a huge role.  The history on the east coast is rich.  During the Great Famine (1845-1852), there was a flood of Irish emigration to Saint John.  My grandparents come from Finland; very quiet, staid, private people.  I think that's why I love the Irish, their colorful folklore and passion for life. It fascinated me from day one.  Because this city is one of the earliest settled in Canada, the library has detailed books, diaries, histories on the Loyalists, Irish and Acadians. It's every writer's dream.  But it's the Irish folklore that intrigues me, the mysterious magic and secret rituals taking place around a circle of stones. That's illustrated in LET THE SHADOWS FALL BEHIND YOU through Brannagh's love of her Gran's stories of the people of Erin.  Brannagh, in turn, creates her own myths that she passes along to Annie, Tish and Diane in their club Tuatha-de-Dannans when they're growing up.   The magic of mythology offers a window of hope, a belief in something bigger than the tangible world, in Brannagh's life, particularly after her mother is murdered.

With regard to the land, this is where I live, and so it naturally infuses my creative work. I love the Kennebecasis river.  Something inside me expands when I look at. I don't think you can be beside a body of water and not have that happen.  So, bringing Brannagh to the cottage by the river, to come to terms with the disappearances in her life, to solve Nikki's vanishing and her mother's murder, felt right.  It also ties into the theme of nature's unseen power, how closely and instinctively we are linked to it, how we need to be still sometimes to absorb the rhythms and beauty to get in touch with the deepest part of ourselves. You see that as well with Nikki and Brannagh in the flashback scenes when they are on the actual bird count. They are both very cerebral, but as they get in tune with the heartbeat of the wild surrounding them in the Lake of the Woods, their bodies and senses awaken.

You've mentioned the eccentric grandmother.  Tell us a bit about Brannagh's grandfather, the psychiatrist. He's opposite in nature: Intellectual, controlling, cold.

Grandfather's very old fashioned, Edwardian. I think he has bottled up his emotions completely, and his work allows him to project those emotions onto his patients, and experience them at a distance, vicariously.  His work in psychiatry fills a deep emotional need by, ironically, allowing him to remain unemotional. He intellectualizes emotion. This way he can always maintain control.  That is the crux of his personality, maintaining control, and why Brannagh has always upset him so much.  She will not 'get with the program' if you will.  As a child she's far too curious and rebellious, and when she gets older she just reminds him too much of all the things he lost control over: Brannagh's mother, the murders, Aunt Thelma. Brannagh brings him face to face with family secrets that he'd rather keep tucked into a box and sitting high on a shelf out of sight.

How did you happen to move from short fiction to suspense?

A lot of my short stories were mysteries.   I've always loved the mystery/suspense/thriller genre.  The first suspense novels I loved were Patricia HighSmith's Strangers on a Train and Joy Fielding's The Other Woman.   They showed me that you could write about a woman's life and the things that mattered most to her, mirrored against an act of foul play, and create all the degrees of psychological suspense and tension that thrill a reader.   I think I've accomplished that in LET THE SHADOWS FALL BEHIND YOU.  My favorite writers today are Harlan Coben (someone always disappears), Ruth Rendell and Nicci French (a British husband and wife team).     

I started writing short stories to learn the craft of fiction writing: Character development, theme, pacing, setting.  I quickly realized, however, that I craved a much larger canvas.  Short stories versus novel writing is like a photograph versus film.  I wanted to pan across a character's whole life and add all the layers of conflict that make a truly good thriller stand out.

In the South, it's very common for a female to use both a first and middle name, often a family name, but the hyphen is not common between given names. Is there a story around your name?

My mother went into labor out at my grandparent's farm.  She told my sisters they could name me.  They came up with Kathy-Diane.  A lot of people just call me Kathy though; or KD (not to be confused with Kraft Dinner).

To read an excerpt of Kathy-Diane's new thriller or to look up more information go to the following Web sites.
http://kathydiane.wordpress.com.  
http://kathy-dianeleveille.com

Carolyn Haines is a 2009 recipient of the Richard Wright Literary Excellence Award. The ninth in her Sarah Booth Delaney Mississippi Delta Mystery series, GREEDY BONES, will be released by St. Martin's Minotaur on July 7. Find more information or sign up for her newsletter at www.carolynhaines.com