Interview with Kathleen Morris
This month, we profile award-winning western and historical fiction author, Kathleen Morris. Kay has written a series of standalone historical westerns that take place in or near the Arizona desert that she calls home.
15) Kay, there’s a strong element of feminism and female empowerment in your western historical fiction. So how do you know where to draw the line delineating what’s authentic from what’s anachronistic or do you care about such distinctions?
I believe that strong independent women have been around since the dawn of time. It’s the society and the restrictions put upon them, whether it’s physical, cultural or religious, that have kept many of them from their fullest potential. I write about women that defy those odds and build their lives by meeting challenges. Maybe because I have met and dealt with my challenges, I like to write about other women who’ve done the same, although their lives are much more colorful and dangerous than mine. That’s what imagination is for. So, I don’t draw that line because for me, and I believe firmly for those in the past, it’s just not there.
14) Was there really a sex trafficking ring like Angel’s Refuge in the 19th century American southwest?
Not that I’m aware of, but there could have been. I have little faith in some people’s better angels and that’s held true through time, certainly. I came to the idea for Fallen Child through a friend whose great-uncle ran an orphanage in southern Arizona, where quite a few of the children had been travelers on one of the Orphan Trains. The Orphan Trains were started when benevolent religious societies in the big East Coast cities rounded up street urchins and what they thought were orphans, and put them on a train heading west, stopping across the country to have the children adopted into families who had shown interest. Sometimes this didn’t work out very well, although some have said it did. I have doubts.
13) According to your blog, something similar happened to us when we were in 5th grade: You sold your first detective stories and I sold my first comic books. Our first royalties! Do you think that contributed to your becoming a professional novelist later in life?
Absolutely, although life got in the way for some time. I got a bit more sophisticated than Nancy Drew but those books were inspirational, even though I thought Nancy was sort of a wimp. I wanted to make my heroines tougher, but you can only go so far in fifth grade. True for you as well, I think.
12) Plotter, pantser or plantser?
Yeah, we talked about this and you know I don’t like labels. I get an idea, a glimmer, and then I think about it for a while, sometimes do a little research, and then start in. About three chapters in, I take a breath and figure out where it’s going to eventually go, sort of Margaret Atwood style.
11) Unlike any of my subjects, you write standalones. Have you ever been tempted to turn any of them into a series?
Yes. The Transformation of Chastity James is ripe for that, as is The Wind at Her Back. Under consideration for sure.
10) Late last month, you’d launched a novel that I was privileged to beta read earlier this year entitled Risk. Can you tell the readers a bit about this excellent story?
I’m very happy you liked it. It’s about two Nashville musicians whose dream is to be the next Civil Wars on a hard-scrabble tour that find a backpack full of a million dollars in cash in a diner. Of course, they take it. It doesn’t take long for them to realize that another much more deadly couple lost it and wants it back. A cat and mouse chase begins through the West. To make things worse, the money was part of a cartel drug deal gone wrong, and the cartel leader is after the original thieves just as the fleeing thieves are after the musicians.
I think everybody at one time or another has wondered what they’d do if they found a bag full of a lot of money and no one around to see them take it, so I wrote my version and had a lot of fun with it. I chose musicians on tour especially because I have some familiarity with the music business and how difficult it can be.
9) Most of your novels take place in the 19th century American Southwest. Have you ever given any thought to writing a crossover featuring two of your standalone characters?
Yes, already have, in fact. A character in Chastity James becomes a major character in The Wind at Her Back, and I have additional plans for the charming Mr. Julius DeMonte.
8) The Lily of the West is partly about Big Nose Kate Haroney, the lover of Doc Holliday. How difficult or easy was it for you to do research on her life?
I first discovered her grave in Prescott, Arizona, and of course we’ve all seen a character in all the movies about the Earps and the OK Corral, where she plays a minor part. I thought she had a story that might be worth investigating and it certainly was. Kate was something special, and I wanted to tell her story in the way I thought she’d want it to be told. Much of her life was here in Arizona, and I spent many days in places she’d lived and in dusty historical archives ferreting out more.
I also discovered people had written so much utter trash about her that I had to sift through rubbish in my quest for truth, including those who purport themselves to be “historians”. That is an issue when writing about the so-called “Wild West”, I’ve found.
7) Describe your typical writing day, if there’s any such thing. Do you set daily or weekly word goals and do you draft in a notebook or laptop or both?
I don’t set goals because they annoy me, frankly. I’m rather ornery and don’t like anyone setting parameters for me, even myself. I write on a desk computer for the most part, unless I’m traveling, and then I take a laptop. There hasn’t been much traveling lately. I usually get all tasks done in the morning and then start writing in the afternoon, and sometimes it goes on into the night.
6) Risk showed that you have a great talent for writing smart, savvy contemporary thrillers. So, what’s the attraction of writing historical fiction?
Thank you. I really enjoyed writing Risk, because I love thrillers, they’re like a box of chocolates for me, but I began writing seriously again when I quit my job and took a leap of faith, because I’d been spending time at a friend’s ranch in southeastern Arizona and Kate started me on the historical fiction path. I became so familiar with so much of the territory and characters from this era that I continued to put that to use. That said, my mentor/most revered writer is Dorothy Dunnett, whose historical novels are, in my opinion, works of art in the craft of writing. UC Berkeley used to have a class devoted to her. I will never achieve her level of excellence but it’s good to have a pie in the sky goal.
5) Have any of your multiple career paths informed or influenced your work as a novelist?
Sadly, no, they only let me know what I didn’t want to be doing, but doing it because it provided me with a good income because I was very good at it. Throughout most of them, I was always careful to be sure I had my own office and a computer screen that never faced the door, because I was often doing class prep for my writing classes, or copywriting or editing for my side business. In my defense, most administrative jobs can be accomplished in four hours or less of a working day, as the pandemic has most definitely illustrated.
4) Considering that you grew up in frigid northern Michigan, how did you come to discover the American Southwest and what attraction does it hold for you besides the warm weather?
My sister-in-law went to Arizona State University, and was nuts about the Southwest, so we started investigating. Another leap of faith, sold our house and moved to Phoenix. We got lucky because what’s not to love about having your own horses, beautiful weather, friendly people and all this history to explore? Since then I’ve lived all over the West, from here to Seattle, and I pretty much like all of it. Still, I’m a desert rat and it always pulls me back in. Open skies, mountains, fewer people and less congestion.
3) What led you to create Fiona Shanahan, the heroine in The Wind at Her Back?
I spent some time in Ireland in 2018 and fell in love with the place. I particularly loved the small villages, sometimes with nothing more than a pub, a couple of shops and a few houses, but nearly always with a church and a graveyard, and an abbey or a castle not far away. Then I went to Cobh, or Cork, and thought about the immigrants who left from there, during An Gorta Mor, the great hunger, and what would’ve happened to them.
2) Is there a female subject from the Old West that you’d like to write about but haven’t?
Oh yes. In fact, I’m writing about her right now, my next book. I can’t say her name, but you’ll know soon. I’m very lucky because I’m getting a lot of support and information from her family.
1) So, what’s next for Kay Morris?
Always the next book, of course. Then, I’m thinking about a series with a character who seems to be immortal, as he keeps showing up from one century to the next. He is not, emphatically, a vampire, a werewolf or anything pop romance horror. He simply has an amazing bloodline and a very strong will.
Thank you, Robert, for your interest in me and my work, and allowing me to do this interview with you. I greatly appreciate it.
If you’re interested in learning more about Ms. Morris’ work, then follow the links below.
posted by jurassicpork @ Monday, August 29, 2022
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