The Story of a Writing Residency in 7 Crimes

Dispatches from South Carolina

A week to the day before I was due to fly out to a writing Residency in South Carolina, a video popped up on my fiance’s TikTok feed.

Tragic news coming out of South Carolina today as we have reports in of a mass shooting at a bar in St. Helena Island, leaving four dead and many more injured. Among the deceased are a seventeen year old girl…

I stopped reading, but didn’t look up from my book. Out of the corner of my eye I watched him scroll past the video, then back when his brain caught up to its content. I watched him play the video in full, then pause it and aggressively side-eye me. I didn’t react. Eventually he gave in. 

“Isn’t this where you’re going?” 

It was a rhetorical question. His way of soft-launching a conversation about how he didn’t want me to go. For context, he’d never wanted me to go. My fiance is a wonderful man, who has been unfalteringly supportive of my writing career to date, but I was testing his limits with this Residency. Since I was invited on it the month before he had been grappling with the fear that I would be shot to death at a gas station, or run off the road by an eighteen-wheeler, or kidnapped by a psychosexual sadist with a torture chamber in his backwoods outhouse; or any of the other myriad things that could happen to someone In America. 

On the subject of the mass shooting, we went back and over for a while. I acknowledged that yes, of course it was awful and frightening, but surely the island was a big place. He Google Maps-ed it and informed me, with genuine panic, that the bar where the shooting had taken place was a five-minute drive from the house I was staying at. I countered that lightning was unlikely to strike twice and now was probably one of the safest times to visit. I mentioned the logic of disaster tourists. He didn’t respond out loud, but his expression told me to fuck off. We went to bed on the promise that I would email the Residency host the following day and scope out what the feeling was over there. Also that we would both track the news and wait to see if anyone was arrested. 

I followed through on my promise and emailed Mary-Ellen the next morning. 

So sorry to hear of the tragedy on the island. Hope you’re all safe and well.

As I waited for her to reply I cycled through my own set of anxieties. Was it actually safe for me to go? What if they didn’t catch the guy, and there was some paranoid fugitive hiding out on the creek with his trusty AK-47 for company? What if he’d been watching the house I would be staying in, saw it was empty, and decided to make a move right as I arrived? What if, one night as I slept, a desperate burglar broke in through the bedroom window and I couldn’t fight back because he had a gun and I did not? What if I went to do a bit of shopping and got caught up in a completely unrelated mass shooting? Everything came back to guns, and everything came back to the devastation it would cause my family if I never came home and how that devastation would be completely my fault. I should have known better. I considered not going, cancelling my flights and attempting to appeal to my travel insurers that this counted as extenuating circumstances. Then Mary-Ellen emailed me back:

Hi Ciara, wow, news sure travels fast. Very sad. Sorry I haven’t been in touch, we had the church bake sale on Sunday and I made lots of pumpkin pie. Kitchen is a mess!

I smiled at my computer, even though it really wasn’t funny at all. I’d just hit the definitive American trifecta - church sale, mass shooting, pumpkin pie. 

I pretended to consider pulling out of the Residency for the next couple of days, but truthfully, any doubts I had were dispelled by that email. If the locals weren’t worried, then neither was I. Besides, I really, really wanted to go. The following Monday I got on the plane, out of naivete or apathy or the selfish, single-minded pursuit of adventure and literary accomplishment, who knows. I kissed my fiance goodbye and told him I’d text him when I landed. He told me not to die. 

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I’d been thinking a lot about crime in the run-up to the Residency. My debut novel had recently gone to auction and sold for quite a bit of money in a two-book deal to a Big 5 publisher. The synopsis I’d provided of my second, as-yet-unwritten second novel, was of a……