
Christina Clancy, left, and the cover of her latest novel, 'The Snowbirds'
When she taught English at Beloit College, Christina Clancy reminded her students that drama in fiction often comes from unanswered questions. Which is no doubt why, in the first sentence of her third novel, The Snowbirds (Macmillan), a man goes missing in the San Jacinto Mountains of Palm Springs, California.
“I sprinkle a bunch of unanswered questions in the beginning, and then I just have the story answer them — sometimes in the past, sometimes in the present,” Clancy, who lives in the village of Shorewood Hills, tells Isthmus a month before the book’s Feb. 4 publication date. “It was a really interesting artistic challenge to figure out how to tell the story.”
That story revolves around Grant Duffy and Kim Hastings, an unmarried, middle-aged couple in a “separate but together” partnership for 30 years. Empty-nesters with adult twin daughters and a lot of personal and professional baggage, Grant and Kim decide to escape the cold of Madison and rekindle their own chilly relationship by wintering in Palm Springs.
They move into a quirky condo community, living in a unit owned by Basil, Kim’s gay ex-husband, who currently resides in the Dutch Antilles. Kim makes new friends and adapts quickly, but Grant struggles to find his place until he takes up hiking with hunky neighbor Hobie. On the day he disappears, Grant ditches Hobie before they can hike the Cedar Springs Trail together. But is Grant, indeed, lost? Or, after leaving and returning to Kim multiple times in the past, has he finally left her for good?
The Snowbirds flits back and forth in time, merging backstory and anxious search-and-rescue updates with a colorful cast of spectacularly named secondary characters, including Grant and Kim’s daughters Dort and March and Palm Springs socialites Van Dyke and Melody Underwood.
Couple relationships preoccupy Clancy in the novel. It’s interesting to imagine, she says, how it’s easier for unmarried couples to “leave that relationship if they need to.”
“I think there is some sort of assessment that happens in late mid-life. You look at the person that you’re with and you realize the reasons that you stay together aren’t the reasons that you got together in the first place,” she continues. “So I thought that would be a fun thing to play with in the book.”
Clancy, 56, is married to a man named John, whom she thanks in the book’s acknowledgements “for making it so difficult for me to imagine a relationship in crisis.”
The Clancys bought a condo in Palm Springs early in the pandemic, and they still spend at least a couple months of the year there. Which makes them snowbirds, too.
“The challenge with Palm Springs is that it’s not a place I'm intimately familiar with, but I can write about how I experience it as a snowbird, and that's what my characters do — what they glean from their initial experience and by spending extended time there,” Clancy says. She still immersed herself in research — frequenting the Palm Springs Historical Society, hiking with local guides, and more.
Based on her time there, she also realized that the Southern California city and Wisconsin’s capital city aren’t as disparate as they might seem.
“One thing that’s surprising is how many people from Madison go to Palm Springs in the winter,” Clancy says, recalling an event she did for her previous novel, Shoulder Season, at the Palm Springs Public Library, where snowbirding Madisonians who knew she lives here showed up. “Palm Springs culture is very much Midwestern and Canadian, because many people come from the north to spend time there. The people in a place dictate the culture of a place, to a certain degree. Whenever you’re at any kind of social event in Palm Springs and ask people where they’re from, they will inevitably start telling horror stories about winter.”
The Snowbirds will be the first book Clancy can support with a tour. The Second Home, her tender debut about family loss, betrayal and forgiveness, was released in June 2020 in the thick of the pandemic. Its follow-up, the rollicking Shoulder Season, set largely in East Troy and Lake Geneva at the Playboy Club-Hotel, hit shelves a year later when many public gathering restrictions were still in place. But this time, she’ll be reading at the Central Library in an event for the Wisconsin Book Festival on Feb. 5, in conversation with Madison novelist Chloe Benjamin. She’ll also read at the Palm Springs Readers’ Festival and has several other dates scheduled in California, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri and back in Wisconsin.
“The most rewarding thing about writing a book is being able to connect with readers,” Clancy says. “Being able to do that now is so great.”