Kathryn Lasky is the author of the new novel A Slant of Light, the third in her mystery series featuring artist Georgia O'Keeffe. She also has written more than 100 books for children and young adults. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Q: Why did you decide to write a mystery series featuring Georgia O’Keeffe as the sleuth?
A: It’s an odd story and an ironic one. I’d never particularly liked Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings. I took a lot of art history, and when I graduated from college, my mom took me to New York as a graduation gift, and got tickets to a Georgia O’Keeffe exhibit at the Met. I said, thanks, but I never liked her. My mom was horrified—she wanted a rebate on my college education! I went to the exhibit, and fell in love with the paintings.
About 15 years ago, I wrote Georgia Rises, a picture book for kids, which was a day in her life—she got up, went to the rooftop, drove into the desert, came back, had dinner, went to bed. Several years later, I thought it would be interesting to write a mystery with her as a character. I was disenchanted with children’s books—you have to be what you’re writing about. And her life is so interesting!
Q: What inspired the plot of A Slant of Light?
A: It’s the curse of the indigenous kids’ schools, a haunting thing in our history that had gone on for 100 years. It started in the 1870s and finally in the 1970s they were investigated. There was a podcast about them, and I thought, this was really horrendous. It would make a good thread in the mystery.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: The research never ends. I set the books in the 1930s, which has always been very interesting to me. It’s when my mom and dad were coming of age. I look at the 1930s as an undiscovered period of growth and power of women. Everything changed somehow in the ‘50s, when they were buying avocado-colored refrigerators.
My mom’s family lost all their money and had to move out of their beautiful house. She became a social worker in Indiana—she picked up children who had been abandoned by their families and took them to orphanages. My mother paid for my aunt’s tuition at Wellesley—how my mom afforded that, I don’t know. They were so adventurous.
I was raised in the ‘50s. My mom was great, she was one of the first women on the board of Planned Parenthood. But there wasn’t the zing of the ‘30s.
For the research, I looked at America Firsters starting in the first book. I had just about finished the book and found out there really was a network of Americans with sympathies toward Hitler, which led to the largest arrest of spies in this country. Despite all my research, I hadn’t come across that. I planted a lot in the first book. My mother-in-law went to Smith and had nothing good to say about Anne Lindbergh.
Q: What do you see as the right balance between the historical O’Keeffe and your own version of her?
A: She was coming into her own in the ‘30s. She didn’t have the mystique around her that she does now. People are trying to read sexual stuff into her paintings—it is there, you can’t deny it, but she did in her interviews. I knew her marriage to [Alfred] Stieglitz was not exactly ideal and he cheated on her all the time. How would she react? She accommodated these facts in some way.
My next question was, in a book, would I want to show her so accommodating, or maybe she’d have a fling of her own—which I think she did. I tried to make it more positive, trying to balance the two men in her life.
Q: Will you continue the series?
A: I hope so. I’m a little lost with what to do with children’s books these days. I’d like to continue—she had a long life, and there’s plenty to write about. She’s such an engaging person to write about.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Kathryn Lasky.
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