Photos by Samuel Hoffman | The Journal Gazette
Johnine Brown, left, and Margaret Yoder write novels as Margarite St. John.
Familiar Settings
Sisters put city spots, mentality into 2 novels
Lexie Royce is a 1994 Carroll High School grad. Her family owns a scrap metal yard. She dines at favorites such as Biaggi’s and Club Soda, and her nothing-but-trouble ex-husband is a professor at IPFW who is sleeping with a student who uses his money to buy jackets from Pappas Furs.
Oh yes, and her brother hired someone to blow up her car. And she’s a victim of the Panty Raider, that kinky thief who sneaks into women’s apartments and makes off with all their lingerie.
All of the above is fictional.
Royce, for all her Fort Wayne ties and history, is fictional, the product of Fort Wayne sisters Johnine Brown, 72, and Margaret Yoder, 56. The women are working on their fifth book, and all are written under the pseudonym Margarite St. John.
“I just thought (the pseudonym) sounds sexy,” Yoder says. “Who wants to read a mystery by ‘Margaret Yoder’?”
Yoder has lived in Fort Wayne since she was 13. She lives with her husband and has three grown children. One of the most important things in her day-to-day life is the Bible study she leads.
Her sister, who lives on her own, moved here in 2001 to be near family after she retired from her law practice in Chicago. A year or two after Brown moved to Fort Wayne, she came to that realization so many retirees seem to find: She was bored.
Brown has a Ph.D. in literature, though she had never considered writing before; she had trouble coming up with the actual plots. That’s where Yoder comes in. She’s the idea woman, the half of Margarite St. John who comes up with the “What happened next?”
Each woman considers the other her best friend, and they’ve found that they work well together – perhaps in part because each has such a specific role to play in the writing process. They meet periodically throughout the week to brainstorm ideas, either in Brown’s library or Yoder’s sunroom. They share ideas, discuss current events and think out how they might tie those into their stories. Brown will take time to write up a few chapters, and she shares them with Yoder. The chapters are further brainstormed, and Brown makes any changes needed.
Were they to actually try and write the chapters together, the process wouldn’t work, both say. It would be too difficult to write with the other hovering over her sister’s shoulder.
“Murder for Old Times’ Sake” is the first of two mysteries starring Lexie Royce, and it is chock full of Fort Wayne references and shout-outs.
Setting
The bulk of the action does take place in the Summit City. Picking a Midwestern setting in lieu of the bright lights of New York or laid back appeal of Los Angeles was a deliberate choice.
“People think all the excitement happens on the coast,” Yoder says.
“This part of the country is called ‘flyover country,’ ” Brown says.
And the sisters get specific with their shout-outs: Character Lexie Royce is called one of the most eligible women in the country by “Fort Wayne Monthly”; she dines at Club Soda on a date, at Biaggi’s with a friend for lunch; Royce’s lawyer’s offices are on the 18th floor of the Lincoln Tower, and he built a mansion in Sycamore Hills.
Mindset
“Every other part of America was déclassé, especially the Midwest, most especially Fort Wayne, his hometown.” The opinion is thought by a high power lawyer with a fancy Columbia University degree as he is flipping through his alumni magazine, scowling with jealousy at all his classmates accomplished while he got stuck in Fort Wayne. Brown pulled the idea of this scene from first-hand experience: She graduated from Barnard College, Columbia’s sister school.
“I know how those people think about the Midwest,” she says, and Yoder adds, “She reads (her alumni magazine) to me, and we just laugh. It’s so pompous.”
Lexie is catching up with an old friend when he remembers that time she backed into a streetlight in high school. While she is considered a high-powered woman of means elsewhere, in Fort Wayne, she’s the same girl she was in high school.
“… a girl from Fort Wayne, an undistinguished city that sat on a featureless prairie enclosed within a dome of gray clouds, where he now found himself stuck like a horse with its head caught in a barbed wire fence.” This is Lexie’s ex-husband’s lament about getting stuck in the Fort. The simple thought process behind the line?
“November in Fort Wayne is just iron gray,” Yoder says.
Sites to come
Brown has a few ideas of other sites she wants to give some lip service to eventually: a TinCaps game (she went for the first time last summer and loved it), the Embassy Theatre (it would be nice to work in the new conductor), the Fort Wayne Museum of Art.
“I love it,” Yoder says of Fort Wayne. “I think it’s a very safe place. You always hear it’s a good place to raise a family.”
“I moved from Chicago,” Brown adds. “Fort Wayne is sweet.”
For example: When her daughter flies into the Fort Wayne International Airport to visit, she is handed a cookie.
They don’t even make her pay for it.
jyouhana@jg.net
