Q&A with Katie O'Rourke

 

 

Katie O'Rourke is the author of the new novels Unclaimed Baggage and Reclaimed Baggage. She lives in Tucson.

 

Q: What inspired you to write Unclaimed Baggage and Reclaimed Baggage, and what do you see as the relationship between the two books?

A: My most recent book, Reclaimed Baggage, was 20 years in the making. I wrote Unclaimed Baggage many years ago and while I was in the query process, an agent told me she’d be interested in the story of Jenna’s mother.

 

This surprised and confused me. Unclaimed Baggage is Jenna’s story. She’s the likeable heroine overcoming challenges that are, for the most part, created by her mother, Barbara.

 

I had conceived of Barbara as the villain, which might have been true from Jenna’s limited perspective, but gets a whole lot more complicated when you step back and look at the broader picture. It took me years of living to see the shades of gray in that picture.

Also, when I was in my 20s, I couldn’t imagine writing from the mother’s perspective. It took me nearly 20 years to write Reclaimed Baggage, to understand how to explain why Barbara did what she did, and how she changed.

Q: How did you create your characters Jenna, Barbara, and Stewart?

A: Every story I write is autobiographical in some way. The details may come from something I’ve experienced or witnessed.

 

I imagine my process as taking all the details, throwing them in a blender and creating something different from the ingredients. Only people who know me really well will recognize where the details come from. And it’s only after they’ve been through the blender that they take on meaning.

 

Q: Did you know how the novels would end before you started writing them, or did you make many changes along the way?

A: I never know how a story ends when it starts. I may know some of the major events and I’ll have a skeletal outline a few chapters ahead, but everything is changeable. Lisa is a character from Reclaimed Baggage who I hadn’t conceived of when I started writing, and she ends up playing a big role in what happens in the book.

 

Q: What do you think the books say about family dynamics?

A: Family love is complicated. You can have a deeply loving relationship with someone who has caused you deep pain and this is a life lesson most of us only get through the kind of forgiveness only granted to family.

Q: What are you working on now? Will you return to these characters?

A: All the books I write take place in the same universe, which means all of the characters live in the same world, and there's an opportunity to revisit the past. Or pop up in the future.

Ben from Monsoon Season shows up years later in Finding Charlie. A main character from A Long Thaw is a peripheral character in Blood & Water. No one’s story is ever really over.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: I haven’t started writing anything yet, but I have ideas percolating.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb