A Conversation with Kate Southwood

This splendid and profound debut novel is set in 1925 in fictional Marah, Illinois. Falling to Earth swirls its way into a violent tornado that leaves the town in total destruction – with the exception of one man, his business, and his family. The author’s story of the town’s reaction to his circumstances will stun you with its elegant prose, artful construction, and emotional investment. The conundrum regarding ethical choices friends and community make in a time of crisis will supply food  for thought long after you have read the last page.

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MaryAnne Kolton: Talk a bit about your childhood, please. Happy family? Books you loved? Who encouraged you to read?

Kate Southwood: I was an oddity from the start: an only child in an Irish Catholic neighborhood in Chicago, surrounded by classmates who had two, five, even ten siblings. There seemed to be an endless list of things isolating me, turning me inward: we lived a block away from Lake Michigan, but I wasn’t taught to swim; our home was the furthest away from our parish church and school of all of my friends, and so there was no one nearby to play with; and my parents divorced when I was ten, which was still highly unusual at the time.

My parents were both professional writers and they encouraged my reading. We often read together, my parents on the couch and me on the floor in front of them, each with our own book in one hand, rummaging with the other in a big shared bowl of popcorn. We did have a small television, but it was rarely turned on. My mother, always freezing, wrapped up in her big Irish sweater and the afghans my grandmother knitted and read book after book from the heavy canvas bag we carried to and from the public library every week. My father rarely went anywhere without a paperback in his pocket, something to pull out on the bus or the “L” or while stuck standing someplace in line.

The result of their example was that I read constantly, too. I was obsessed with Laura Ingalls Wilder and C. S. Lewis, both of which allowed me to escape city life, which for me then was dreary. I read novels, fairy tales, and mythology, and when I had exhausted my own shelves, I read my parents’ childhood books and borrowed stacks of books from the library. I was even able to read in bed at night without the customary flashlight, the Chicago streetlights outside my bedroom window were so strong. I started reading English history and Shakespeare’s plays while still in grade school, and somehow managed not to stop or to pretend that I didn’t read these things when I was inevitably taunted for it in the schoolyard.

I realize now in writing this that my parents and I rarely, if ever, discussed what we read with each other. When I finished something my father had already read that he’d thought I’d like, too, it was enough to exchange a look of pleased understanding with him; meeting his eyes, already smiling with childlike excitement was its own discussion. Reading for the three of us was solitary, and as necessary as breathing. So, a happy childhood? No, I was different and my peers never missed a chance to let me know it. But in my case the cliché was laughably true: an unhappy, largely solitary childhood spent reading turned out to be the perfect foundation for becoming a writer.

MK: What led you to write Falling to Earth?

KS: The idea came to me piecemeal, the first part coming as a total surprise while I was surfing the Internet. I would love to go back to that moment and see what it was I was Googling, because somehow (and I truly don’t know how) I landed on information about the Tri-State Tornado of 1925. I started reading out of curiosity and was staggered that I had never heard of the Tri-State before. I lived just a few hours north of the path of that storm in downstate Illinois for many years, and although I’ve thankfully never been through a tornado, I have hidden from my share of them passing nearby–afternoons when the sky turned green, the air got eerily still, and suddenly I was stuffing the cat in a pillowcase and heading for the basement with a battery-powered radio.

Initially, I read about the Tri-State out of sheer astonishment, but then found myself returning to the Internet to look at archival photos taken after the storm. I also read several survivor accounts and was saddened to think that the storm had disappeared from popular memory. I remember thinking, This would make a great story, and then sort of shelving the idea because I still had a preschooler at home and didn’t have enough time to write. But the idea wouldn’t leave me alone. Around the same time I read Ian McEwan’s Atonement and was just devastated by it. I kept coming back to the idea of preventable tragedy and found myself thinking about the tornado again. By the time my youngest daughter had started first grade, I was ready to start writing: I didn’t know everything about my story yet, but I knew that I wanted a preventable tragedy to follow the unavoidable disaster of the tornado itself, and so I settled on the Graves family who lose nothing in the storm, while all around them their neighbors and friends lose something, someone, or everything.

MK: In a New York Times review, it is said of Falling To Earth: “Southwood’s beautifully constructed novel, so psychologically acute, is a meditation on loss in every sense.” Is that what your book was meant to be?

KS: I would say absolutely yes to the psychology. I’m always interested in characters’ psychology in books and movies, in what they reveal about themselves when they speak, when they are silent, when they can’t stop themselves from looking in a certain direction. I didn’t make things easy for myself in terms of my characters’ psychology in this novel, but that was part of the fun; nut after difficult nut that had to be cracked precisely and carefully. As for the novel’s being a meditation on loss, that was perhaps less consciously planned, but equally inevitable. I moved to Oslo fifteen years ago to be with my Norwegian husband, and I’ve been homesick for the States every day of those fifteen years. Obviously, I remain in touch and visit when I can, but I’m separated from family and friends, from my country, and even from my language every day. Also, the older you get, the more you end up dealing with death. I’ve lost several close family members over the last several years, and I made free use of my own pain in writing about my characters’ losses.

MK: In stark contrast, a Kirkus reviewer states: “By the time Paul finally realizes that he can’t reverse the senseless scapegoating, it is too late: His family’s sheer politeness and unwillingness to confront their detractors or one another will be their undoing. Unfortunately, all the conflict avoidance saps the novel of forward momentum, not to mention that essential ingredient of drama: the struggle against fate.” Do you care to comment?

KS: The only possible answer is that book reviews are necessarily subjective, not everybody can like every book, and I never expected everyone to like this one.

MK: Within this story, there is a confounding, almost frustrating, inability of the protagonist to see clearly what is going on around him: “It seems I’ve done absolutely everything wrong. I hauled what wreckage I could out to the burns along side the rest of them. I hardly slept those first days. I just cut wood and cut wood for coffins, I thought that was what I was supposed to do. Cut wood because people needed it. Look them in the eye and do business with them and help them to keep their dignity. I was only trying to be mindful of their pride, and now they’ve got it figured as greed.” How did you come to this?

KS: Alongside the idea of preventable tragedy, I was also interested in using Greek tragedy as a framework. In classical Greek tragedy, the protagonist suffers a downfall, which is the result of a combination of outside circumstances and personal failing, or a tragic flaw. Obviously, the tornado is the outside event that changes everything for Paul Graves, but his flaw is more complicated than that.

Part of Paul’s inability or unwillingness to see what is truly going on is simply the result of inexperience. He’s only 33 years old at the time of the storm: old enough to have established himself as a businessman and family man worthy of the town’s respect, but still mostly naïve about the unpleasant sides of human nature.

It’s important to remember that Paul is a really good guy who is universally liked before the storm. He in turn likes to be liked—who doesn’t—and can’t believe that the town’s esteem has been taken away from him. Perhaps as a way of grappling with this loss, he tries to find meaning in having been spared, and decides that because he is a good man who happens to own a lumberyard, he’s the perfect candidate to help the town rebuild, thereby regaining the town’s esteem. In the end, his inexperience and goodness conspire against him, and he simply can’t see that waiting out the town’s collective temper tantrum is not enough.

MK: A certain luminous precision defines your voice, and a cadence, if you will, that show themselves particularly well in every descriptive passage: “Lavinia thinks it will likely snow. She’s regarded these very fields often enough in winter, but always from the inside. When there was outside work for her to do on the farm in winter, she’d always hurried along and done it and saved staring into the distance for the window over the kitchen sink. The white, sleeping fields reaching out endlessly from the house, the sleeves of her old, blue cardigan pushed up for work, the click of the vegetable peeler on the slick, white ball of potato in her hand, the coffee pot and her cup still left to wash. A glimpse of Homer from the window.” Is this effect studied or do you access it naturally?

KS: This is a very hard question to answer, actually. A sort of which came first, the chicken or the egg for writers. The short answer is that this is the way I always wanted to write when I was younger, and through years and years of reading good writing, paying attention to details around me, and working hard at my own writing, I can now do it. It’s a wonderful feeling to know that the way I always wanted to express myself is within my reach. If an image or a scene comes to me, I know that I will be able to render it on the page very precisely (to borrow your word) if I give it enough time and all of my attention.

MK: In your opinion, and without giving too much away, what role does Lavinia play in this tale.

KS: In the broadest terms, Lavinia represents the past, both of the Graves family and of Marah, the town they live in. When she recalls her grandfather’s stories, she serves as a link to the time the first white settlers came to Little Egypt in Southern Illinois. She also functions as a complement to Paul’s character in that they both misread the resentment growing around them and, for their individual reasons, believe that they’ve earned better treatment than they’re getting.

Lavinia also functions as a warning about the lure of the past. She realizes it too late, but she does come to understand the harm inherent in allowing the past to get a grip on you, in elevating the past as an idyllic time, and forgetting to live in the present.

MK: What are your writing habits like? A special time and place? Music or silence? Do you carry a notebook to jot ideas in or are you the type of writer who scribbles notes on paper napkins to incorporate later?

KS: My writing habits are dictated by my daughters’ school days. Once everyone has left the house, it’s just me and the laptop. I do need silence and I have a hard time writing if anyone else is home. I often listen to music, but that seems to function as part of the silence for me; a sort of white noise that I choose according to my mood.

I always carry a small notebook, but generally prefer to just duke it out with the laptop—I find that ideas can sometimes be spoiled if I write them down before they’re fully formed. The most important ingredients for me are time and solitude. After that comes persistence. There’s no point in having a time and a place to write if you don’t show up.

MK: Are you working on a new novel?  Any hints as to subject?

KS: I am working on a new novel—the main character is a widow at the end of her life, giving her marriage a good hard look and asking herself about the life she created when, as a young woman, she made a choice between two proposals of marriage: one from an arrogant, passionate man, and one from a tender, safe man.

An Interview with Deborah Crombie

A Texas woman with a British soul, Deb Crombie, deftly weaves wonderfully tangled webs of mystery around Duncan Kincaid and Gemma James. Both are employed by the London Police and find themselves solving one complex crime after another while becoming hopelessly personally involved. In The Sound Of Broken Glass, Gemma is challenged by the salacious death of a respected London barrister in a seedy hotel in Crystal Palace. An unsavory accident or murder?

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MaryAnne Kolton: When you were little, what did you dream of being when you grew up?

Deborah Crombie: Such fun to think about this, MaryAnne.

I think the very first thing I wanted to be was a cowgirl. I have photos (somewhere—the childhood album is missing . . .) of me at six in my cowgirl outfit, complete with six-shooter. Then a horse trainer and breeder—I was horse mad. King of the Wind, the Black Stallion books—loved them!

And then came the “ologists.” My grandmother, who lived with us, was a retired schoolteacher. She had a subscription to National Geographic and we read every issue together, cover to cover. I had a rock collection and wanted to be a geologist, then an archeologist, a paleontologist, a marine biologist, a zoologist, a botanist . . . you get the picture. I think “world explorer” figured in there somewhere. And I wanted to climb Mount Everest.

Later, I started college as a history major, finished with a degree in biology. The one thing I never imagined I would do was write novels.

(And Charles Darwin is still my hero.)

MAK: Do you see these childhood dreams resonating in your writing in some way?

DC: Obviously, I liked learning new things, and that’s certainly carried over into the books. Not only do I tend to research new geographical areas, but most books throw me into new subjects, such as rowing in No Mark Upon Her and rock guitar in The Sound Of Broken Glass. You could say that writing satisfies my magpie instincts.

But even more than that, I see the thread of curiosity, and I think that curiosity—about people and places and life in general—must be the driving force of the novelist. We are, most of us, the elephant’s children. We always want to know WHY.

MAK: You’ve said you have felt that the UK is your “real” home for most of your life. So many Americans are Anglophiles to some degree. How did this feeling you have come about?

DC: This is hardest question to answer, and I’m not sure I’ve become any better at it over the years. I no longer trust what is actual memory and what I’ve spliced in, trying to find some logic in my own life. . . . Did it really start with A.A. Milne? I still have my treasured first editions, so perhaps that is true. I’m sure there were other children’s books, and then there were Tolkien and CS Lewis, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, and on to Sayers and Christie, Mary Stewart and Josephine Tey, Dick Francis and James Herriott. But it was more than stories—there was always landscape, even in my dreams as a child.

I’ve said this often, but it remains a lodestone in my perception of my life: I didn’t actually visit England until I graduated from college (my parents took me as a graduation gift.) And on that first bus ride between Gatwick Airport and London, I looked out at the rolling hills and fields and red rooftops of Surrey, and felt I had come home. That feeling was profound, heart-deep, and has never gone away.

MAK: There is such a sense of interiority about your characterizations. It tends to give the reader permission to care a great deal about Gemma and Duncan. How do you do that?

DC: Some of it is instinctive, I think. I heard Duncan’s voice in my head so clearly before I ever began to write him, and that’s how many scenes and characters begin for me — with a line of thought or a line of dialogue.

Then there is that perpetual writer’s curiosity. Even as a child I looked in the windows of houses in the evenings, wondering about the families that lived there — What were their names? Did they have pets? What did they eat for dinner? What did they talk about? So I think this fascination with detail carried over into — or perhaps spurred — my writing. And these details do tell the reader things about the characters.

And the third thing—I’m viewpoint obsessive. I never, never write omniscient viewpoint. I never shift viewpoint within a scene. And I always try to make it very clear at the beginning of a scene whose head we are inhabiting. I think this gives the readers a very strong sense of identification with the characters—and of course we are in Duncan’s and Gemma’s viewpoints most often.

MAK: Are you more like Duncan or Gemma and in what ways?

In the beginning I would easily have said Duncan. I understood how he thought and how he reacted to things. And although I very deliberately made Gemma’s personal situation one that I understood very well—a young woman trying to meet her responsibilities as a mother AND get ahead in a job that she cares passionately about—I saw her as much more assertive than me, and perhaps more emotionally open.

DC: But the characters have grown into themselves, sometimes in ways that surprised me. Duncan turned out to be the more willing to take emotional risks, while it was Gemma who was reluctant to make a commitment. It’s a journey of discovery these days. And interestingly, the character that I identify with most strongly might be Kit.

MAK: It might be helpful here to give a brief background summary of the story of Gemma and Duncan. Then tell a bit about why you identify so strongly with Kit?

DC: Duncan and Gemma began the series as professional partners. I set out with the idea that I wanted to write characters that experience growth and change, whose lives evolve. Even so, I think it was as much a surprise to me as it was to them when Duncan and Gemma’s
relationship moved into the realm of the personal. That’s a very dry way of saying they fell in love . . . but that’s what happened, as it does in real life, no matter how inconvenient.

Kit, who came to Duncan when he was eleven, is now fourteen, and he is so like me when I was that age. (I should say here that I was never a very “girly” girl.) Kit wants to be a biologist. He loves animals. He likes to collect bits and pieces of things, rocks and plants and insects, as did I. Kit is a noticer, very aware of atmosphere and other people’s emotions. He also has a tendency to feel responsible for other people’s safety and emotional well-being, which can be a dangerous trait. And Kit is a dreamer. He sees stories in things, and in people. Who knows—he might even grow up to be a writer…

(Gemma) “Did you ever see any indication that Mr. Arnott was into anything . . . kinky?”

“Vincent?” Kershaw looked astonished. “Kinky? I’d say you couldn’t have found anyone more sexually straight ahead than Vincent.” . . . Kershaw went on, thoughtfully, “I never thought he liked women.”

You mean he liked men?” asked Gemma, wondering if they’d got the whole scenario wrong.

No. I mean he didn’t like women. . . . I learned years ago that he would never make a real effort to defend a woman. It was as if he made an automatic assumption of guilt.

—from The Sound Of Broken Glass

MAK: Your fans are quite anxious to read your newest book, The Sound Of Broken Glass, if their Internet posts are any indication of their loyalty to you and love of Gemma and Duncan. I don’t want to talk too much about the book itself so as not to give away any tense-making plot maneuvers. But I am wondering how far ahead you are plotting when you are writing the book you are working on? One book, two?

DC: I’m usually thinking at least two books ahead with Duncan, Gemma, and their family’s continuing story arc. And with the particulars stories for each novel, sometimes farther back than that. I introduced Andy Monahan, the character who is the focus of The Sound Of Broken Glass, three books ago, in WHERE MEMORIES LIE. He had a walk-on part as a witness to a murder, and I found I couldn’t get his voice out of my head. I gave him very brief cameos in the next two books, and a personal connection to Duncan and Gemma, knowing I wanted to devote a
book to his story.

MAK: Melody is another character that seems to have found a place in your heart and is gaining more page space.

DC: Ah, Melody. One of the most fun things about writing a long-running series is the evolution of characters. When Gemma took that promotion to detective inspector and could no long work with Duncan, I knew they would both need new partners. Melody showed up in the first few books as a bit of an eager-beaver, always bringing Gemma coffee. She still likes to bring Gemma coffee, but she’s a detective sergeant now, and she’s turned out to be a very complex and interesting character with an unexpected background (no spoilers!) She’s a mass of contradictions, very sure of herself in some ways and lacking confidence in others.

Melody’s rather prickly friendship with Doug Cullen, Duncan’s sergeant, is now one of the driving story arcs of the series for me. Neither of them is quite sure who they are, but in trying to build a relationship they learn things about themselves as well as each other.

MAK: In addition to your excellent characterizations, which make the reader want to check in with Gemma and Duncan on a regular basis, the novels also contain a splendid sense of place. How much time do you actually spend in the UK gathering details?

DC: I usually go to England (most often London) a couple of times a year, for about three weeks at a time. That’s about as long as I can manage to be away from home without complete domestic chaos!

I usually stay in a flat in London, most often in Notting Hill. That’s the best way to really get the flow and rhythm of my characters’ lives, and I especially love being on Duncan and Gemma’s “patch.”

MAK: What are your feelings about touring and all the promotional work that’s required in today’s very competitive world of selling books?

DC: It’s a necessity except for the very top of the list authors — and perhaps even for them. In a way, it’s nothing new. Authors have always had to sell themselves. I organized my own book tours with other writer friends in the early days. But the social networking certainly takes up more time than anything we did in the past. On the downside, that’s time that could be spent writing. On the upside, it keeps you connected with readers and the reading community in a way never before possible. And it’s fun. You can’t do everything and I think each author has to find the niche that suits them. I’m better at Facebook than Twitter, for instance.

As for touring, I love it. It’s such fun to meet and visit with readers. And the best thing about touring — making connections with the booksellers, hasn’t changed.