Marilyn's Musings

  A couple of years ago a friend persuaded me to discovery my genetic ancestry. So I ordered a kit from 23andMe, spit in a vial, and sent the vial back to the company through the US Mail. In six weeks I learned that I was 68.6 percent northwestern European and 24.6 percent Ashkenazi Jewish, which did not surprise me. What did surprise me was my ancestry timeline. In the 1700s most of my genes came from Scandinavia, the Iberian peninsula, and Oceania. My British and Ashkenazi Jewish genes predominated only after 1860. I started thinking about all the intercultural lovemaking that went into creating "me" over the 200,000 years of humanity's past and all the secrets some of those lovers had to keep when their societies viewed each other as enemies. This pondering of genetic ancestry led me to write Dam Witherston , the third in my Witherston Murder Mystery series. What if, I asked myself, everybody disclosed his or her genetic ancestry routinely? What would we...

Thanks, Marilyn, for inviting me to contribute to your Musings today. I just ordered your book Final Respects , and I am excited to get into your mystery series. Ever since my childhood in El Paso, Texas, I have read mysteries. I started with Nancy Drew, Judy Bolton, and the Hardy Boys, and went on to Perry Mason as I grew older. When I finished all of the Perry Mason books at the age of thirteen I worried that I'd never find another series I liked as much. Then I got busy studying literature and teaching literature—difficult literature, like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"—and forgot the pleasure I'd once had figuring out who dunnit in mysteries that engage the reader in the sleuthing. In 2011, after thirty-eight wonderful years, I retired from the University of Georgia as professor of comparative literature and director of the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. While writing a biography of the ecosystem ecologist Eugene Odum, I had become ...