(bell dings) (typewriter clacks) - I'm Rachel Howzell Hall, and this is "What Fire Brings."

The story is about a woman who goes to Topanga Canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains of Los Angeles to find a woman who is missing.

And she is pretending to be a writer at this writer's residency, but she is looking for a missing woman.

- Topanga is an unbelievably strong character in this book.

Without it, we had this conversation the other day on a panel.

When you have setting as a character, what does that actually mean?

And it means that if you take the setting away, the story collapses,.

- Right.

- It can only be set where it's set, - And it can only be set in Topanga or someplace like that, where there's all this beautiful, it's a beautiful forest of Santa Monica mountains.

And you know, we have mountain lions in the middle of Los Angeles.

You know, we have all this wildlife.

So I wanted to take the story of a place where I didn't really know it, because it's hard to get there.

It's this two-lane highway with boulders and trees and cliffs, and you wanna look, but you don't, because then you're like, fly off the side of the hill and then you're dead.

Some (indistinct).

- So I wanted somewhere that was close enough, and yet you're a world away.

What does that do to someone who is going up there under false pre pretense anyway?

And who doesn't really know anything about living with mountain lions on a day-to-day basis?

(laughter) The story started a long time ago, before I even put pen to paper.

I read Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island, which I loved, my absolute T favorite story.

Then I saw Christopher Nolan's memento.

So it's like, ooh, memory.

And how do you remember things?

And who gets to remember what?

It's like Oh, I wanna write a story about memory, about trauma, about arriving to a place and not knowing exactly why you're there or even who you are.

- Rachel, thank you so much for being here.

That was an absolutely fabulous conversation.

- I had a wonderful time.

Thank you for inviting me.

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

I'm JT Ellison.

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Oh, you had questions?

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