Three Women in Mexico

In writing Three Women in Mexico, I sought to immerse the reader in a landscape, to conjure up a vivid sensation of a single place or moment. In doing this, I drew upon the journals and notebooks I kept while living and travelling in Mexico in 2009, recalling the sights and sounds of those wonderful journeys. I also revisited photographs I had taken of my visits, feeling, like Proust, that the photographs contained ‘a past impression, a fragment of life in unsullied preservation.’ In the re-reading of the journals, I discovered a curious truth, that my memories were both real and imagined, just as my stories are. As Margaret Atwood, a strong influence on my work, has claimed, ‘There has to be some blood in the cookie for the Gingerbread Person to come alive.’ However, the stories are not entirely autobiographical; they merely draw on personal experience for inspiration. Other inspiration has come from many different fields; the exquisite stories of Katherine Mansfield for their simplicity...