Kathy Watson is the author of the new novel Orphans of the Living. She has worked as a public relations executive, a journalist, a chef, and a restaurant owner. She lives in Hood River, Oregon.
Q: How much was Orphans of the Living inspired by your own family history?
A: The inspiration was 100 percent my mother's family. Of course, that doesn't make it biography. I knew the basic arc of my mother's life, and a great deal about the people who inhabited it, but much of it is fiction.
In her amazing collection of short stories, The Unforeseen: Stories, Molly Gloss writes that a scientist's journal was "the skeleton of facts dressed in the clothes of complete sentences." I had the skeleton of facts, and clothed them in flesh, bone, love, longing, conflict, pain, redemption.
Q: How did you research the novel, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: I mostly stumbled around like Columbo in a raincoat. I really had no idea what I would find.
I started at Ancestry.com, just getting a timeline for the birth, death, and significant events that left a trail, such as when the male members of her family responded to the draft in WWI and WWII, or in census data. I spent a lot of time at Newspapers.com.
Whenever I was tempted to use an idiom, I researched to make sure the term was in use at the time. When I wanted to know what Glen's army uniform looked like, or what he would have been issued to wear while on a run, I researched.
I visited (virtually) state archives and special library collections of football memorabilia. I read the board meeting minutes of orphanages in Montana. I researched how acreage was dispersed through the Homesteader's Act. I tracked down the history of California merchant ships.
I read nonfiction historical accounts of the era such as The Worst Hard Time, Timothy Egan's book on the dust bowl and Great Depression, and Hard Times by Studs Terkel, among others. And this is only a short list.
What surprised me? Things I learned that confirmed the bits and pieces my mother told me about.
When she said, "My father heard you could make money growing strawberries in Mississippi," I was skeptical. How would a man farming (or starving, actually ) in Montana hear of such a thing? And then I found a poster in an archive of Mississippi history advertising exactly that.
I posited in the novel that he saw it hanging on the wall of the feed store, and took it home. I quote directly from the poster in the novel.
Q: The writer Jane Kirkpatrick said of the book, “Each voice is unique, memorable, and invites us to the Southwest and West of Steinbeck and Barbara Kingsolver.” What do you think of those comparisons?
A: I'm flattered, obviously. They are both extraordinary authors who have had a lot of influence on me.
When I was in elementary school, I frequently rode my bike down to the little stone house that served as the library in Soquel, California. The librarian there guided my reading choices for years, and took me through most of Steinbeck, starting with The Red Pony.
She gave me East of Eden when I was 10. That was probably the biggest literary mind-blowing experience of my life. All these people living these lives I could not imagine, only 30 miles away from me!
And I've followed, and read, everything of Kingsolver's since The Bean Trees.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: The origins of our own national struggles today have roots in earlier times. It's easy to think of poverty, lack of education, inequality, our wars, from revolution, to civil, and onward, as things that happened to "them." But they are truly happening to us today: generational national trauma, if you will.
So I hope readers take away a more profound feeling of connection with who their grandparents and parents were on this continent, and how they were buffeted, fed, perhaps, unrealistic notions of wealth accumulation, by people who used them for their own gain.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I'm doing a thorough rewrite of a memoir that is in essence a sequel to Orphans of the Living. It will be coming out with She Writes Press in Spring of 2027.
And I'm about halfway through writing a third book, a novel, set in the near future, a political thriller. In fact, I'm out in Idaho right now on the Nez Perce reservation, doing some research for it.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Yes! My book launch for Orphans of the Living will be Sept. 30 at the Hood River County Library, with Waucoma Books, our wonderful indie bookstore.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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