Heather McCoubrey: Author

My senior year of high school I moved back to Maine to live with my grandmother. The initial plan was for me to regain Maine residency so I could attend college there at the resident cost. She had a whole stack of National Geographic magazines and I remember there was an old-timey map inside one of the magazines so one rainy afternoon I opened it up. I don’t remember the year that map represented, but I do remember it was early in the 1900s. At about the same time we were learning about Pocahontas in history class. I learned that one of Pocahontas’s names was Matoaka and I loved it. Between learning this name and studying the National Geographic map, I had an idea for a story come to me.

Emily’s Choice was originally titled “Matoaka” and I had it take place in a town called Mosquero, New Mexico. I wrote most of the novel that year and then when, instead of college, I joined the Air Force the novel got put away and mostly forgotten for a couple of years. I was a year or two into the Air Force when I picked it up again. I made a few “long-distance phone calls” to random people I found in the phone book. I asked them questions about the town, asked them to describe it, and made a phone call to the town hall. The friendly person who took my call even sent me a tourism guide.

Mosquero is now a small village with approximately 100 people calling it home. It’s also the county seat for Harding County and is home to the county courthouse. At one time Mosquero was a water stop on the Dawson Railway, which was built around 1902, and ran from Tucumcari to Dawson. Mosquero itself was founded in 1908. For a long time farming and stock-raising was a major part of the community. It was also a shipping point along the railroad.

Fun fact: Mosquero translates to “swarm of flies” in Spanish supposedly from all the flies that were attracted to the carcasses of the bison that were hunted by the local tribes.

I took many liberties when using Mosquero as the setting for Emily’s Choice, but I think I captured the sense of community that the village is known for. For those of you who love to travel, Mosquero boasts a few B&Bs, a restaurant, a brewery, and a canyon. The residents of Mosquero are friendly and welcoming … and I hope someday I’m able to visit this little piece of New Mexico heaven, a piece I’ve only seen in pictures or via the Google street view.

I hope you enjoyed learning a little bit about Mosquero from Emily’s Choice!