As a visual artist and filmmaker, Cynthia Chatman has long told stories through images. Fiction gives her something different: the freedom to move inside a character’s mind and explore thoughts, memories, contradictions, and emotions that cannot always be seen from the outside. Writing allows her to remain with her characters longer and follow their inner lives in ways that painting and film do not.
 

Her current novels in progress are The Sapling and Miss Marlow Investigates.
 

The Sapling
 

Set in contemporary Washington, D.C., The Sapling follows a young man whose life changes dramatically as he begins discovering a world that had previously been denied him.
 

Miss Marlow Investigates
 

Miss Marlow Investigates is a darkly unconventional take on the traditional village mystery, where appearances and assumptions prove less reliable than they first seem.