Deborah Rice
Deborah Rice is an award-winning novelist of thoughtful international mystery and suspense. She studied with Tony Hillerman—who kindly took her under his wing. She’s passed that mentorshop on, giving writing workshops to both elementary school children and at university writing conferences. Deborah has degrees from Harvard and Columbia, where she did not study writing at all.
She did, however, grow up near Concord, Massachusetts, breathing the air of the Alcotts, Emerson, Hawthorne, even teaching swimming at Thoreau’s Walden Pond. She now lives in New Mexico with her husband, two unruly cats, and daughters and grandchildren nearby.
The Global Village Mysteries
After college, Deborah went straight to Ethiopia to work with refugees from the Sudan. In the remote border village of Gambela, on the banks of a tributary of the Nile, she taught sewing, health and English classes, did home visits for leprosy and helped cultivate experimental crops. She met her husband there.
She was left with enough imponderable questions to last a lifetime, questions she is still attempting to ponder by immersing herself in the Global Village Mysteries. (See blogs “The Global Village” and “Coming of Age”)
Deborah has just finished Crocodile Tears, the first of the Global Village Mysteries, and is immersed in the second, Tigray Claws.
Spinning Wool
Not too long ago, Deborah’s experience with refugees drew her to Albania and Kosovo and lead to the novel Spinning Wool. To research Spinning Wool, she trekked through Albania and Kosovo, where she met Antonia Young, ethnographer of Albania (Women Who Become Men), who commented after reading the manuscript, “This book makes you feel as if you’re in Albania, sitting in a circle of stumps under a tree sipping raki.” (See Why Albania?)
Other elements of Spinning Wool required no research, since they come from Deborah’s life experience. She taught rock climbing as a counselor at a summer camp, supervised hand-tool work crews on outdoor conservation projects for the Youth Conservation Corps in Utah and New Mexico, and was brought up skiing off-trail steeps from snow camps at Tuckerman’s Ravine in New Hampshire.
