Blog #European History
The Story Behind the Story of "The Shopkeeper of Alsace." Part 1.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how stories come to us. Sometimes, they arrive fully told, from prologue to The End, in one complete waterfall. Sometimes they reach out to us hesitantly, in little pieces…a photograph, a memory, a question…. breadcrumbs put on our path, but it’s up to us to notice them. My forthcoming novel,The Shopkeeper of Alsace, came to me in breadcrumbs. The first dropped before me in the mid-1980s, when I was an exchange student in Strasbourg, France. That’s the capital of Alsace, an eastern province right on the Rhine River and the German border.