Sarah: The genesis of The Quiet Place was and is Abby Aceves, a friend who was born in a tiny mountain village in Mexico and who moved to this country when she was nine years old with her family to a place very different from her colorful high dry tiny, tiny, tiny world as I say, a tiny village world. They moved from that place to Gary, Indiana.
David: Which is?
Sarah: Which is…
David: A contrast.
Sarah: It’s a big contrast. It’s a city and it’s up north in this country…
David: Industrial.
Sarah: So very different environment. But I met her when she was, she and I were middle aged and her sister said, her sister who is a member of a family, Abby’s family where everyone is in the restaurant business, everybody cooks, everybody’s creative to some degree. And I was asking about the family, I’d never met Abby, and she said well the family’s fine, thank you for asking. David and I were eating in her Mexican restaurant, Mi Ranchito in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
She said we’re all fine, but Abby. And she’s quit her job and I think she’s really going to act on her dream, which is to have her own restaurant. So I handed my card to Abby’s sister, I said tell her to call me, our village would be a perfect place. And I do this all the time, no one ever calls me. And Abby called, and I met her the next day. She came to the village, we walked up and down our one block downtown, she fell in love with the building, I introduced her to the people who owned it and then I introduced her to our Amish neighbors who restored it for her.
And she changed the face of our village with her creative making of beauty in her food and her gardens around the Bistro Rio and just in her world that she made there. And so I wrote this story for Abby because when she was nine and first came she said to me many times it was tough. And the “it” was everything; everything was new and a little scary. And she had this very supportive loving family, still does. But she was like myself shy and she knew a lot of English, but she didn’t know enough to feel comfortable. And there wasn’t any more Spanish around her, much less color.
And so father bought her mother a refrigerator she told me and she asked for that big box, and that was the beginning of the idea of this story. It’s just like all my other stories; it begins with something someone does or says, someone real in my life, and it triggers something in my writer’s head. And she gave me this scarf and I’m wearing it as a kind of a talisman today.
