Write domestically, dream worldwide.

Gage Rich

01 September 2008

Her 1st novel, The Seamstress, isn't just an exciting and sad story set in Pernambuco, Brazil -- her birthplace -- but also a tale about growing up and leaving home. It made it that much less complicated to write on the subject of her homeland and the riveting personalities, sisters Luzia and Emilia dos Santos, who navigate it. "Being away gave me time to make sense of the information," Peebles expounded. I wrote certain scenes as they came to me. But I felt like when I got here to Chicago I sort of threaded the pearls.". Peebles covered her home office in Lake View with pictures of the Brazil's backlands, for inspiration.

And she even kept close a couple of leather sandals like the ones her personalities could have worn as they trekked thru the agricultural, rolling scrublands that lead to the stretching, beach metropolis of Recife.

From there she painted an image of a country at a crossroads -- at the corner of progress and practice. The one consistent was the violent clashes between the cangaceiros -- something similar to the bandits of the Wild West who wandered the backlands in groups -- and the land barons known as colonels. Emilia is the pretty, refined one whilst Luzia, whose left arm was crippled in a childhood accident, is the hot-tempered one ( most likely because of the schoolyard provoking and the nickname Victrola ). They were sure to be seamstresses, maybe marry domestically, till one fateful night when a band of cangaceiros kidnaps Luzia, leaving Emilia to follow her real dreams of living well in the massive town.

Peebles was born in Brazil and was raised in Miami, one of 2 sisters. She is saying they were fortunate enough to visit family in Brazil annually and that, indeed, it feels like home. That research included hiking the strong scrubland and interviewing a midwife about birth in the 1930s -- an interview that flowered into one of the more moving, even instructive, passages in her book. Peebles asserts she is just getting to grasp the lakeside metropolis of Chicago that she currently calls home. Asked not long ago if, as a transplant here in Chicago -- removed from Miami and Brazil -- if she misses home. "Every year, I'm going back for almost 6 weeks. "I think there is something that should be declared for missing that place and the memories of that place and to have them come to you each day. Rather than being in the middle of it, you are roughly watching it from afar.".