Jennifer Chiaverini writes what she sews: quilts.

After graduating from Thousand Oaks High School in 1987, Chiaverini (née Neidenbach) earned college degrees in English and literature, got married and moved to Wisconsin.

Somewhere along the way, she started quilting. Then she started writing about quilting or, more specifically, about the common threads of friendship, history and occasional controversy that run through the time-honored art form.

"I wanted to write stories that would set quilting and quilters free from stereotypes," she said during a phone call from a book-tour stop in Philadelphia. "People think of quilters as patient grandmothers. I'm here to say that quilters come from all generations and backgrounds and quite a few of us are not what you would call patient."

Published in 1999 by Simon & Schuster, Chiaverini's first novel, "The Quilter's Apprentice," details the events leading to the transformation of an ancestral home, Elm Creek Manor in Pennsylvania, into a retreat for quilters.

Eight years and 10 books later, Chiaverini is returning to her own roots. And she's bringing the Elm Creek Quilts novel series along for the journey.

On Sunday, Chiaverini will visit the Grant R. Brimhall Library in Thousand Oaks to read from "The Quilter's Homecoming," the latest installment in the nonchronological series. The novel's title is especially appropriate: Not only did Chiaverini work at the library when she was a teenager, but the book itself is set in the Conejo Valley, where her mother, Jerry Neidenbach, still lives.

Never mind that Chiaverini attempts to disguise the region by bestowing upon it the fictional name of Arboles Valley. References to the Norwegian Grade and to the lion farm that locals will recognize as the precursor to Jungleland give her away.

"People who aren't from around there will just think I made that stuff up," Chiaverini said with a laugh.

Spanning the years between 1875 and the early 1930s, "Quilter's Homecoming" opens with the Elm Creek Manor nuptials of a young couple named Elizabeth and Henry. It then details their trip west to claim the 120-acre cattle ranch Henry has purchased, sight unseen, in the Arboles Valley.

Hardships follow, and as she gets to know neighbors with names like Diaz and Jorgensen, Elizabeth uncovers dark secrets that have been woven into the fabric of the community and into the heirloom quilts she finds hidden away in a trunk.

Landmark decision

Despite such goings-on, Chiaverini's books are neither romances nor mysteries, she said. "Contemporary" and "historical" are more accurate category descriptions.

An example of the latter, "The Quilter's Homecoming" began taking shape one day several years ago when Chiaverini visited the Grand Union Hotel, also known as the Stagecoach Inn Museum in Newbury Park.

A tour of the grounds included a peek inside the Newbury House, a replica of a pioneer home built in the 1870s. There, draped across a bed, was a quilt so unusual that it stopped Chiaverini in her tracks.

Docents would not allow her to take photographs of it, Chiaverini said, so she drew a picture instead. (A museum spokeswoman said the use of flash photography is discouraged indoors because bright light may damage vintage textiles.)

Nor was she permitted to touch the quilt, even though, "as a quilter, I was dying to look for some embroidery or a patch or anything else that might identify who made the quilt," Chiaverini said.

Instead, she focused on the way 12 triangles cut from different fabrics had been stitched together to form a series of hexagons, and how those hexagons reminded her of wagon wheels.

"It made me think of all the wagon wheels that rumbled over the Norwegian Grade," she said. "It made me think of all the different people who settled there. The quilt just stayed with me, encouraging me to write a book set in this area."

In truth, the idea for such a book may have started to form much earlier, when Chiaverini was a high school student and working at the library. A co-worker saw longtime Conejo Valley resident Patricia Allen walking nearby, and described her as an expert on local history.

"That just threw me," Chiaverini said. "I was 16 at the time, and Thousand Oaks seemed so new and bright and shiny to me that the fact that it had a history was fascinating.

"I was surrounded by all these people who had great stories about the area's past, and I really started listening to them," she added. "Just working at the library became such a wonderful part of my education. I don't think the people there realized they were as much my teachers as the ones I had at Thousand Oaks High School."

Words of advice

Write what you know. That's what Chiaverini's professors told her as she worked toward a degree in English at the University of Notre Dame and again as she earned her masters degree in English language and literature at the University of Chicago. And it was the advice she gave her own students when she taught writing as an adjunct professor at Pennsylvania State University from 1992 to 1997.

So when Chiaverini began working on a novel of her own, it was only natural that she focus on quilting, which she had only just taken up a few years earlier.

"I had two audiences in mind. The first included my quilter friends, whom I thought might enjoy reading about contemporary women like themselves overcoming obstacles in their lives by taking strength from their own moral courage and from the support of faithful friends," she said.

"But I also intended to write for nonquilters, to give them some insight into the quilting world. I wanted them to take away from my books a greater understanding of how quilting is a wonderful creative outlet that can draw you into a wider community of talented, welcoming quilters who support and encourage one another."

The trick was to make the descriptions of the quilts featured in the plot lines specific enough to ring true with quilters, but not so specific as to turn off the nonquilters in the bunch.

It helps that Chiaveriini saves the truly technical stuff for the quilt-pattern books she writes as companions to her novels. The third such book, "More Elm Creek Quilts," will contain patterns for quilts that play important roles in five of her novels, including "The Quilter's Homecoming," when it is published next spring

Watercolor-style illustrations of the quilts in "Quilter's Homecoming" are included in the novel's end papers. But the pattern book will include photographs of completed quilts a fact that required Chiaverini to call on some outside help to get them completed in time for the deadline.

Her sister, Heather Neidenbach, a teacher at La Reina High School in Thousand Oaks, stitched Road to Triumph Ranch, the quilt Chiaverini based on the Stagecoach Inn quilt. Hired hands pieced together Arboles Valley Star, one of the quilts discovered in a trunk. And readers banded together with help from Chiaverini's Web site and the postal system to turn a quilt called Chimneys and Cornerstones into a group project.

"I never knew what the mailbox would bring from one day to the next," Chiaverini said of the quilt blocks sent to her by readers living as far away as the Netherlands and as close by as Ohio.

"We may have used the Internet to do it, but working together on a quilt is a tradition that is as old as quilting itself," she said.