PORTLAND, Maine — It’s an annoying question that’s regularly posed to writers of fiction. Where do you get your ideas?
The late Harlan Ellison used to answer: “Schenectady.” Stephen King’s standard response goes broader: “Everywhere.”
Bill Roorbach, who divides his time in Maine between Farmington and Scarborough, knows where he got the spark of inspiration for his new novel "Beep."
"I was in residence as a writer at a biological research station in Costa Rica, where I meet these squirrel monkeys in the wild," he recalls. "They’re the cutest things."
Roorbach was trying to write an "important" novel about climate change. "But it just got so earnest," he said. "I was just pointing my finger at everything."
Then one night he had a dream. "I woke up and I wrote down on a Post-It note, 'I am Beep, monkey.'"
That turned out to be the opening line of the story of a monkey that travels from Costa Rica to the United States and changes the destiny of the world. It's now out in hardcover and as an audiobook narrated by Roorbach himself.
Recording the audio was something he enjoyed immensely, even though he found it exhausting. "I love it when the author’s reading the book," he said. "You get to hear how she or he is thinking."