I grew up in Gulfport, Florida, about thirty miles from Tarpon Springs, where in the early 1900s Greek sponge divers plied their trade after an extensive bed of natural sponges was discovered. Many divers stayed and raised families, and over the century and beyond, more came to join them. What had once been a quiet coastal fishing village became a thriving Greek community with award-winning restaurants, a noteworthy cathedral, and an Epiphany celebration that draws thousands each January. There are more Greek Americans in Tarpon Springs than in any other city in the United States, and it’s not unusual to hear Greek spoken in the streets.
While I’ve heard parents criticize school systems for organizing field trips outside the classroom, I’ll have to disagree. Field trips can and do change the trajectory of a child’s life. A class trip to Tarpon Springs changed mine. The Tarpon Springs Sponge Docks was a destination I never would have visited otherwise. I still have a vivid picture in my mind of a sponge diver in a deep sea diving suit and helmet demonstrating the way sponges were originally harvested. That memory even influenced my first “diving” novel, Beautiful Lies, about searching for Australian pearls off the coast of Broome–where I took a “field trip” of with my own family as an adult. While snorkeling is as adventurous as I get, both trips helped me imagine the thrill of finding “treasure” deep on the ocean floor.
In 2019 when I decided to pursue an idea inspired by a newspaper account of a woman who became homeless after her hard-won rent money disappeared, I knew I wanted to set this new novel in Florida, my home once more after most of an adulthood away. My last book, A Family of Strangers, was set in a fictional Florida city, Seabank, on the Central Gulf Coast, and at first I considered setting The House Guests there. But memories of Tarpon Springs kept tugging at me.
Of course. writing about a place that doesn’t really exist is simpler in many ways Making up details means nobody can dispute them. Did I know enough about sponge diving, about the Greeks who settled this very real town and are still a sizeable percentage of its citizens? Could I learn enough about Greek culture or running the Greek restaurant, Yiayia’s Kouzina, that features in the story?
The answer was of course not. Novelists rarely know enough about any subject that inflames their imagination. The good news is that we can research.
Before Covid-19 reared its head, I visited Tarpon Springs several times, spent three nights in town during the Epiphany celebration, and expanded my already healthy appetite for Greek food with multiple restaurant visits. Since visiting Greece years ago I’ve routinely made moussaka and pastitsio for my family, along with horiatiki salad. I grow my own Greek oregano, and feta is as much at home in my refrigerator as a carton of milk. But now research spurred me to perfect my recipes, although baklava still eludes me. I need Yiayia herself to show up in my kitchen and guide my hand. As you’ll see when you read The House Guests, we can’t put that past her.
Here’s a secret. Often novelists choose settings purely because they want an excuse to visit, and not because that setting immediately lends itself to the idea they have in mind. Instead the story evolves from that idea, from the research that’s conducted, and the hours of dreaming connections.
The House Guests evolved in just that way. So here’s to school field trips, to long expanses of time when ideas grow and flourish, and to Tarpon Springs, which kept its unique identity and generously fed this novelist’s imagination.
Emilie Richards is the author of seventy plus novels which have been published in more than twenty-one countries and sixteen languages. Her most recent novel is A Family of Strangers, a June 2019 trade paperback and hardcover release from Mira Books. Emilie has won the RITA from Romance Writers of America and multiple awards from RT Book Reviews, including one for career achievement. She regularly appears on bestseller lists, and ten of her books have been made into television movies in Germany. Emilie lives in Sarasota, Florida with her husband in the winter and Chautauqua, New York in summer.
