How did you decide to organize the material the way you did?
JK: Originally, the format began with the quote from the actual memoir, Fifteen Thousand Miles by Stage. But in revisions, at the wise suggestion of my extraordinary editor, Andrea Doering, I put those quotes at the end. I hoped that the reader would see what Carrie hadn’t been able to say in the memoir by reading what I’d written. This change meant I had to write journal entries to begin each chapter to allow readers to know where in time and space that chapter began in Carrie’s mind but without giving too much away. Carrie’s musings about her life—the main text of Everything She Didn’t Say—sometimes resulted in my choosing different quoted passages at the end. It was complicated, but Carrie kept teaching me more things even in the revision stage. Covering forty years of her life with only twenty years covered in her memoir was also a challenge that I hope I met.
Did writing your own memoir help or hinder you in writing this novel?
JK: My memoir, Homestead, was my first published book in 1991. It was about following your heart even when the world around you thinks you’ve gone off the deep end. We left suburbia and professional jobs and moved to 160 acres known as Starvation Point in the wilds of Oregon in the 1980s, one hundred years after Carrie’s memoir was written. I had decided in the beginning that I would not complain or whine in my memoir despite the trials and tribulations of building a life at the end of eleven miles of dirt road, seven miles from our mailbox. So I appreciated at some level Carrie’s always “staying in the happy lane.” But I would have preferred more insights from her trials, more epiphanies that others might learn from. I also understood her reluctance to share the pain. It made me sensitive to what poet Emily Dickinson meant when she wrote, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” There was also my sister’s startling stories about how her audiotape offered landscape details in a happy tone while burying the difficulties she faced in relationships on her journey. I wanted always to be authentic but also didn’t want to harm others in my writing of them. I share that desire with Carrie.
You’ve written many novels based on the lives of real historical women. What appeals to you about them and how did Carrie fit into that?
JK: I’ve long been drawn to biographies and the rich experiences of women who went before us, both the ordinary and the better known. But finding detailed material about historical women is very difficult. I can locate information about their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons, but little of them. This paucity of detail about women led Virginia Woolf to write that “women’s history must be invented . . . both uncovered and made up.” That’s what I do, uncover and make up. But there is always an unanswered question that puts me onto a particular woman. Sixty-six-year-old Tabitha Moffat Brown (This Road We Traveled) being named the Mother of Oregon after she headed west on the Oregon Trail intrigued me. How did that happen? For Carrie, I wanted to know what it would have been like to travel all those miles by stage, but more, what did she have to give up? And why didn’t she talk about it? What might she have said if it had been her memoir and not a story about the West?
You offered the ability to name a character as a fund-raising item. How do you incorporate such names?
JK: It actually adds to the challenge of creating characters that for some are as real as the historical ones. Of course, they are all fiction. In this novel, I was able to incorporate three, and the historical documents gave rise to where I might place them in the plot. There were really those two twins, unnamed in Carrie’s memoir but very important, as this was one of the few times when Carrie’s deep longing comes through. Adding a friend named Hester to the Presbyterian women seemed a natural fit too. It’s my belief that the Caldwell community gave Carrie her greatest joys and perhaps greatest sorrows. Besides, it’s a way for my stories to bring a little generosity to nonprofit organizations I see as doing good things.
What can we expect in a Jane Kirkpatrick novel?
JK: Let’s see. No profanity. I like to challenge myself to see if I can create the emotions that might bring a character to swear without doing so. No sex, though passion. I have an agreement with my characters: I won’t reveal any of their sexual idiosyncrasies and then they agree not to reveal any of mine! I spend a lot of time choosing the epigrams in the front because I think that’s the first chance I have to tell a reader what I think the story is about. But it’s also the last chance, because once a reader reads the book, they’ll decide what it’s about. And finally, I weave four threads of a story: landscapes, relationships, spirituality, and work. All these threads are critical to the text for me. I also want to leave readers feeling hopeful.
Do you have any particular strategies that help you write a book a year?
JK: I follow a practice taken from a book called Structuring Your Novel by Robert Meredith and John Fitzgerald that asks me to answer three questions before I start: (1) What is my intention? (What’s this story about?) (2) What is my attitude? (What do I feel deeply about?) And (3) What is my purpose in writing this story? (How do I hope a reader might be changed?) I may take many pages to write the answers but try to get it down to three sentences each. I post them at the top of my computer so when I get lost or start to listen to Harpies telling me that writing this book was a terrible idea, I can look up and see what I thought at the time this story was about, what I cared about, and what’s my purpose. That way I can keep going.
Where do you live? And have you traveled to the places Carrie traveled to?
JK: I live in Central Oregon now, near Bend, the site of the fateful short line that ultimately was Robert’s greatest challenge. I have traveled to a great many of the places Carrie shared in her memoir. I think Yellowstone as Carrie saw it would have been grand indeed.
How many books have you written and what is your favorite?
JK: Carrie’s story is my thirty-first, and my favorite is the one I’m working on now.
Jane Kirkpatrick is the New York Times and CBA bestselling author of more than 30 books, including All She Left Behind, The Memory Weaver, This Road We Traveled, and A Sweetness to the Soul, which won the prestigious Wrangler Award from the Western Heritage Center. Her works have been finalists for the Christy Award, Spur Award, Oregon Book Award, and Reader’s Choice awards, and have won the WILLA Literary Award, the Carol Award for Historical Fiction, and the 2016 Will Rogers Medallion Award. Jane lives in Central Oregon with her husband, Jerry. Learn more at www.jkbooks.com.
Also by Jane Kirkpatrick
All She Left Behind
This Road We Traveled
The Memory Weaver
A Light in the Wilderness
One Glorious Ambition
The Daughter’s Walk
Where Lilacs Still Bloom
A Mending at the Edge
A Tendering in the Storm
A Clearing in the Wild
Barcelona Calling
An Absence So Great
A Flickering Light
A Land of Sheltered Promise
Hold Tight the Thread
Every Fixed Star
A Name of Her Own
What Once We Loved
No Eye Can See
All Together in One Place
Mystic Sweet Communion
A Gathering of Finches
Love to Water My Soul
A Sweetness to the Soul
NOVELLAS
Sincerely Yours
Log Cabin Christmas
American Dream
NONFICTION
Promises of Hope for Difficult Times
Aurora: An American Experience in Quilt, Community and Craft
A Simple Gift of Comfort
Homestead
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Jane Kirkpatrick, Everything She Didn't Say
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