(light music) (bell ringing) (machine clanking) (light music continues) - [Stacy] Hi, I'm Stacy Willingham and this is "Forget Me Not."

"Forget Me Not" tells the story of Claire Campbell who has been avoiding her hometown for the last 15 years, ever since her big sister Natalie went missing there when they were kids.

Until, she gets a call from her father and forces her to come back home.

When she gets home she accepts a seasonal job at a Muscadine vineyard where she finds a hidden diary that she realizes contains some disturbing details of various unsolved crimes.

- She's lost her sister.

- Yeah.

- She's lost her childhood, she's lost her parents, really.

- Yeah.

- And is off an her own.

- Yeah.

- What is about these kinds of stories that draw us to them?

- Family is arguably one of the only things that we don't have any control over.

We can't choose our family.

- Right.

- You can choose your friends, you can choose your career, you can choose where you live, but you're born into your family.

So what happens if something terrible happens in our family and in the instance of Claire, you can try to move forward and put it in the past, but it's always kind of hovering there and so I think I like to use the idea of family, but also this kind of unresolved trauma of the past because even when you're trying to move forward and forge a new future there's just this phantom finger tapping on your shoulder that won't really let you go.

(light music) - "There was a program politeness that inherently comes with being a woman in this world."

Talk to me a little bit about what that means to you.

- We are taught to be polite and to not make people uncomfortable and to always say please and thank you and of course, being a woman who grew up in the south manners are important, but sometimes we take it a step too far and we put ourselves in a dangerous position just for the sake of keeping other people comfortable.

My characters will find themselves in situations where the reader probably wants to throw the book against the wall, but if you put yourself in the shoes of the character, how many times have we maybe been in the situation where there's something not right, but you don't want to make the other person uncomfortable?

Or you don't want to offend - Right.

- anyone.

And I think that's unfortunately, a universal feeling.

- This was so much fun that just went (fingers snapping) like that.

- I know I can't believe we're already done.

(both laughing) - Thanks for being here.

- Thank you for having me.

- And thank you for watching "A Word on Words."

I'm J.T.

Ellison, keep reading.

(bell ringing) - [Stacy] I live in Charleston, South Carolina and there is a Muscadine vineyard on a small barrier island about 45 minutes from my house.

It felt like the perfect, beautiful, but creepy remote setting.