Our brief business meeting will start at approximately noon CT on Saturday, March 11. Our speaker will be Maryka Biaggio. More specifics are provided below. Please let us know if you have questions or would like to attend via Zoom. Guests are allowed to attend 2 meetings before being required to join the group.

Program: “Writing Detail and Dialogue to Time and Place”

All authors work hard to write telling detail and dialogue that will bring their fiction to life. This presentation will discuss what parameters authors should consider when trying to tailor details and dialogue to the time period and place they are writing about. Research strategies for gathering good details and appropriate language will be presented, and rules for writing good dialogue will be reviewed.

Maryka Biaggio is a psychology professor turned novelist who specializes in historical fiction based on real people. She enjoys the challenge of starting with actual historical figures and dramatizing their lives–figuring out what motivated them to behave as they did and recreating some sense of their emotional world through dialogue and action. Doubleday published her debut novel, Parlor Games, in 2013. Her second novel, Eden Waits, was published by Milford House Press in 2019. In 2021, Milford House Press released The Point of Vanishing and in 2022 The Model Spy. Her fiction has won several awards, including Willamette Writers, Oregon Writers Colony, Historical Novel Society Review Editors’ Choice, La Belle Lettre, and U.P. Notable Books Award (U.P. is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan). She has served on the Board of the Historical Novel Society North America Conference since 2015.

She has read at bookstore events, visited numerous book clubs (in person and virtually), given radio interviews, and contributed several guest blogs. She’s an avid opera fan and enjoys gardening, art films, and, of course, great fiction. She lives in Portland, Oregon.