December 23, 2025 • 45 mins
Enjoy this in-depth author interview with New York Times bestselling author Kathleen Kent. Kathleen opens up about her writing process, her journey from aspiring writer to published novelist, and the craft behind transforming family history into compelling historical fiction.
Kathleen's debut novel, The Heretic's Daughter, tells the story of her ancestor Martha Carrier, who was executed during the Salem Witch Trials on August 19, 1692. Martha was from Andover, the town with the most accused witches was blamed for a smallpox epidemic that killed 13 people. Even when her children were tortured into confessing against her, Martha refused to admit to crimes she didn't commit.
This episode offers invaluable insights for aspiring novelists and historical fiction writers, covering everything from research techniques to finding your voice as a writer. Whether you're working on your first novel or looking to deepen your craft, Kathleen's experience and teaching expertise provide practical guidance for writers at every level.
Kathleen Kent is a New York Times bestselling author and member of the Texas Institute of Letters. Her novels include:
The Heretic's Daughter (David J. Langum Sr. Award for American Historical Fiction, Will Rogers Medallion Award)
The Traitor's Wife
The Outcasts (American Library Association "Top Pick" for Historical Fiction)
The Dime, The Burn, and The Pledge (Edgar Award-nominated crime trilogy)
Black Wolf
Kathleen teaches writing workshops and has worked with Texas Writes to mentor aspiring authors.
Kathleen's journey from aspiring writer to published author
The writing process behind The Heretic's Daughter
Research techniques for historical fiction writers
How to balance historical accuracy with storytelling
Finding and developing your unique voice as a writer
Working with family history and sensitive historical material
Navigating the publishing process
Teaching writing and what aspiring novelists need to know
Transitioning between historical fiction and crime fiction genres
Martha Carrier's powerful story of resistance
The Andover witch trials and why this town had the most accusations
The 1690 smallpox epidemic and its connection to witch accusations
How children were tortured into testifying against their parents
Cotton Mather's role in documenting the trials
The legacy of Salem Witch Trials victims
historical fiction writing, Kathleen Kent, The Heretic's Daughter, writing process, aspiring novelists, Salem Witch Trials, Martha Carrier, Andover witch trials, writing advice, author interview, historical research, novel writing, writing workshops, craft of writing, historical fiction authors, publishing advice
#WritingCommunity #HistoricalFiction #AuthorInterview #WritingAdvice #KathleenKent #SalemWitchTrials #NovelWriting #WritingPodcast
Links
Purchase the novel: The Heretics Daughter by Kathleen Kent
Support our Podcast by purchasing books through our affiliate link to End Witch Hunts Bookshop
The Thing About Salem Patreon
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to the thing about witchhunts.
I'm Josh Hutchinson. And I'm Sarah Jack, we have a
great episode today with author Kathleen Kent.
Kathleen is a New York Times bestselling author who's written
The Heretic's Daughter, The Trader's Wife, The Outcast, and
her crime trilogy The Dime, the Burn and The Pledge, plus your
(00:23):
most recent novel, Black Wolf. She's won the David J Langcom
Senior Award for American historical fiction and the Will
Rogers Medallion Award. The Outcast was named an
American Library Association toppick for historical fiction.
Her crime trilogy was nominated for two Edgar Awards, and in
(00:44):
2020 she was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters for
her contribution to Texas literature.
She's also a writing teacher wholeads workshops for aspiring
novelists. The Heretics Daughter is a story
profoundly influenced by Kathleen's descent from accused
witch Martha Carrier, who was executed during the Salem Witch
(01:06):
Trials on August 19th, 1692. Our conversation with Kathleen
covers her writing process, how she learned of her Salem witch
Trials ancestry, and she gives incredible insights for aspiring
novelists. Martha was from Andover, which
was the town that had the most people accused of witchcraft
(01:28):
during the Salem Witch Trials in1690, a smallpox epidemic tore
through the town, killing thirteen people, seven of which
were Martha's own family members.
She was blamed. For the entire.
Epidemic she had just recently. Moved with her family from
Billerica and so the newcomers to town.
(01:50):
Were blamed for bringing smallpox.
With them, but during the. Witch trials the afflicted
people. Claimed to be visited by 13
ghosts who were screaming that they were killed.
Murdered by Martha Garrier. So in May 1692, during her
(02:11):
examination, she had a great moment where when they asked if
the devil came to her, she turned the question back to
them. Then things.
Got darker. Her four children were arrested
and two of her sons were tortured until they confessed
that their mother had made them witches.
The afflicted claimed that Martha Carrier was promised by
(02:35):
the devil to be the Queen of Hell, and Cotton Mather called
her a rampant head. These days she's remembered as a
strong, self reliant woman who refused to confess to something
that she didn't do. Welcome to the thing about witch
hunts podcast Kathleen Kent please tell us about yourself as
an. Author Thanks Sarah.
(02:56):
I came to writing relatively late in life.
Usually when you write out of college and you say you're going
to be a writer, people say you go young person, live your
dream. But if you are on the runway to
50, as I was when I started writing full time, people are
not quite so enthusiastic about it because they wonder where
(03:18):
you've been. And I spent 20 years after
college living and working in New York, first for the chairman
of the Commodity Exchange and then as a contractor for the
Department of Defense in the former Soviet Union.
So it was very far away from creative writing.
I wrote a lot of contracts, which is they want just the
(03:40):
facts, ma'am. So I wasn't doing really any
creative writing, but I took an early retirement in 2000.
I moved from New York to Texas, and I had wanted to be a writer.
It had been at the back of my mind, but I needed the time and
resources to do it. So when I moved to Texas, my son
(04:02):
was a few years old. In 2002, he started school.
And so I thought if I got to theend of my life and didn't try to
write the story that became The Heretics Daughter, I think I
would be full of regrets. So I didn't tell anybody but my
(04:23):
immediate family that that's what I was doing.
I spent five years doing research and traveling to New
England to write the story whichbecame The Heretics Daughter,
which is about my 9 times great grandmother Martha Carrier, who
was hanged as a witch in Salem in 1692.
(04:43):
So the way I came to the story was through my immediate family.
My maternal grandmother was the one that first told me the
story. So I had an idea that that's the
story that I wanted to tell. I took five years to write it
without really any expectation other than trying to get it
(05:05):
published and maybe sell a few copies, but it was a story very
close to my heart. Yeah.
I find your. Story so interesting because I
also I started college as an English major with an emphasis
on creative writing. I got concerned about the job
market so I switched to businessmanagement and got stuck in a
(05:27):
corporate finance job for the 12years I've started writing and
I'm aspiring to be published. Unlike skydiving, you don't
particularly want to pick up skydiving or downhill skiing
when you're 50. But as long as you can hold a
pen or pencil in your hand and hold a thought in your head, you
(05:47):
can write. And I think actually having the
ability to draw on a life's worth of experience, I think
makes you a better writer. It's a deeper well of resources
to draw on with your own personal experience.
So I'm all for people making thecourage to sit down and write
what they've long wanted to put down on the page.
(06:11):
The story of finding out about my 9 times great grandmother
started when I was very young. I grew up in Texas.
All of my dad's family was from Texas, but my mother had grown
up in a third generation farmhouse in Pennsylvania.
Her maiden name was Carrier and I didn't really know anything
(06:33):
about my maternal grandparents. So when I was 8 years old, we
took a road trip, my mother and I, to Pennsylvania and I was I
had the chance to meet my grandparents for the first time.
My grandmother Florence was a wonderful woman as she grew up
with older brothers in a farmingcommunity.
She rode wild horses. She was a dead shot with a rifle
(06:57):
and she smoked in public at a time and it was scandalous for
women to smoke in public. So it heard all these stories
about her. I was really looking forward to
meeting her. Eight years old sitting at the
family farm table, which was thetable itself was probably 150
years old. And I'm sitting there listening
kind of half heartedly to my mother and her mother talking
(07:20):
about the family business, catching up on relatives, some
of them long dead. And I didn't pay too much
attention to what they were talking about until my
grandmother Florence say something about an ancestor who
was hanged as a witch. And then that immediately caught
my attention because being 8 years old, I'd spent several
(07:42):
Halloweens dressing as a witch, so I knew what a witch was.
So that really intrigued me. So I started talking to my
grandmother and asking her questions and she was really
quite knowledgeable about The Who, what, when and where of the
Salem witch trials. The Carrier family had very deep
roots in New England and she started telling me about my 9
(08:06):
times great grandmother Martha Carrier and the Carrier family
and that she had been hanged as a witch in 1692.
And I waited for a pause in the conversation to ask the question
I really wanted to ask her, which was was Martha Carrier
really a witch? There was a little pause and she
(08:28):
said hard, there are no such things as witches, just
ferocious women and that stuck with me.
That was like a bell going off in my head because certainly my
grandmother was the archetype for a ferocious woman.
She was very opinionated, she was very strong willed, she was
very courageous. She survived the Spanish flu,
(08:51):
she worked all of her life and she became, I think, a model for
me. And so I started asking
questions about Martha, about the family, and that began A
lifelong fascination with the Carrier family and the Salem
witch trials. And I realized very early on
(09:14):
that what happened in Salem had nothing to do with the
supernatural. It was a belief in the
supernatural, but it was a confluence of events.
It was a confluence of people who were terribly afraid of the
plague, smallpox, Indian raids. They were three months away from
starvation at any given time. Salem Village was a very
(09:36):
litigious place. When I started diving in and
doing research on the village itself, and they were constantly
suing each other. And they were not this starched,
upright Puritans that the Victorians LED us to believe.
They were closer to the Elizabethans.
They were haughty, body and wild.
(09:59):
They would sue each other at thedrop of a hat.
They gambled, they drank, they committed adultery.
And so I got a really good picture reading the town
documents. And of course, as you both know,
the court transcripts are extant.
They're held in the Peabody Essex Museum and in other
(10:20):
places, other universities. And so it gave me, once I became
very serious about writing and spent the five years researching
this project, it gave me a very strong scaffolding.
It gave me a very strong foundational story to build
factually. And then I could weave in the
(10:42):
guesswork of how these people felt as they went through life.
And it was a very harsh, very harsh existence, especially for
women. As far as I've been able to
tell, Martha Carrier was one of the few, if not the only woman
who when she was brought to trial, stood up to her accusers.
(11:04):
And when the magistrates, these very somber black robed
gentlemen, asked her during the trial if she'd ever seen the
devil, she said, the only devilsI have ever seen are those of
you sitting in judgment before me.
So at a time when women were to be seen and not heard, she was
(11:25):
quite ferocious, very courageous, because at the time
that she was brought to trial, she understood that the stakes
were very high and that she could, if she didn't admit to
being a witch, that she would most likely lose her life.
So that began many years of research into it.
(11:47):
And I was lucky in the sense that the story, the first story
that I chose to write, my first novel about, had a lot of paper
trail that I could follow. And I could read the actual
words of the accused, the people, the accusers, the people
being accused. And it gave me a very full
(12:10):
picture. And in the process of that, I
was able to at least summon in my imagination how these people
would have reacted during the trials in Salem.
The Carrier family, well, I justwant to say the storytelling is
(12:31):
definitely in your DNA. You talked about your mother and
her mother talking about family,and it really just comes through
in your storytelling. But one of the things that I
find intriguing about the carrier experience during the
Salem witch trials is there wereso many of them suffering
(12:54):
together with some of the other families, my ancestors, you
know, you had Rebecca Nurse and Mary Estee.
They were together somewhat, butthey were really experiencing
their own individual accusations.
People are coming at them from different angles a little bit.
But you had the children of the carriers.
(13:15):
It wasn't just Martha. And you really bring that
horrible experience to life, butthe beauty of the family bonds.
And I just really am amazed by your storytelling, and I'm so
glad that you made sure that story got out there.
Thanks, Sarah. I really appreciate it because
(13:36):
at its heart, it is a family story.
It's a story of family bonds. It's a story of the ultimate
sacrifice that Martha made for her family because at the time
that she was brought in, if you admitted to being a witch, So
the burden of proof was on the accused, not the accuser.
(13:56):
And like you said, one of the most poignant things about
Martha Carrier's family and there were many cases where
family members were accused along with the accused witch
husbands children. But I think what's so poignant
about the story is that four of her five children were arrested.
(14:19):
Her two older sons were torturedin order to compel her to admit
to being a witch. But as with In The Crucible, and
Miller wrote The Crucible as an examination of the McCarthy Red
Scare, the communist scare, it wasn't good enough to say I'm a
(14:41):
communist or I am a witch. Then you were pressured to admit
who were your Confederates, who of your neighbors and family
were witches along with you. So once you took that leap into
saying I am a witch, I am guilty, then the pressure
intensified for you to name other people in the community.
(15:04):
And Martha wouldn't do that. She wouldn't swear false witness
against herself, and she wouldn't bear false witness
against her neighbor. So they arrested her two older
sons, Richard and Andrew, who were about 17 and 15 or 16 at
the time they were brought into the court, and they refused to
(15:24):
testify against their own mother.
In the court transcripts. There's a break.
They're removed from the courthouse, and some time later
they're brought back and their story changed.
They said, yes, our mother is a witch and we would not have
known why they changed their story except for the fact that
(15:47):
John Proctor, who was jailed at the time, wrote to Governor
Phipps and said it is a shamefulthing that these boys, these two
carrier boys have been tortured because torture, strictly
speaking, was not allowed in thecolonies.
But they had a torture called the bow, which is where it's
(16:09):
sort of self strangulation. And if you didn't admit to your
guilt, you would die. You would strangle yourself.
So that's what happened to Richard and Andrew.
They were tortured. And they came back and they
said, yes, our mother is a witch.
They bring Martha back in and they say, now are you a witch?
(16:30):
And she says, no, I am not a witch.
She refused to admit to being it.
Then they bring in her two younger children, Tom Junior,
who I'm descended from, who was about 10 at the time, and Sarah
and Sarah. The real life Sarah was only
about 7 years old. She was probably the second
(16:52):
youngest child to be brought in and accused of being a witch.
The youngest one being Dorcas orDorothy Goode, who was four
years old. And she was arrested with her
mother and put in the Salem prison.
So I made Sarah for the purposesof narration.
I made Sarah Carrier a few yearsolder.
(17:15):
She's nine years old when the novel starts because I thought a
nine year old would be a more compelling narrator.
And The Heretic's Daughter is told from the point of view of
Sarah the daughter. Also, I picked 9 years of age
because in Puritan New England, 9 and 10 was childhood's end.
(17:36):
It was the age at which young girls and boys were sent away
from their home to learn a craft.
They were sent to either a master Carpenter or another
family, if you're a girl, to learn the responsibilities of
keeping a home. And so at 9, it is childhood's
(17:58):
end. So I thought that was a good
place to start the book. It was a very harsh life.
Many women died in childbirth. A lot of children weren't named
until they were a year old because the infant mortality
rate was so high. So they would wait to make sure
that the child lived past infancy and then they would name
(18:19):
the child. So in this backdrop, life was
hard enough. But the fact that Martha, even
though she knew that four of herfive children, the youngest
being Hannah, who was just a baby and was given to the Dane
family to take care of while shewas imprisoned, refused.
She refused to admit to a falsehood.
(18:42):
And that kind of courage was so exalting for me to think because
she knew that she that the end of that journey was going to be
death by hanging. And yet she stayed true.
And the fact that Thomas, her husband, who was in the public
records known before he became Thomas Carrier, was Thomas
(19:04):
Morgan, the Welshman. That's how he was registered in
the town records when she died. He never remarried.
He was in his 40s when he married Martha.
She was much younger than he was.
According to family legend, he fought in the English Civil War
for Cromwell and was one of the executioners of King Charles the
(19:24):
First of England. It was expected that a widower,
especially a widower with children and grandchildren,
would remarry, but once Martha died, he never remarried again.
He moved his family to Connecticut.
He started a blacksmith forge when he was in his 70s and was
quite a unique and remarkable person in his own right.
(19:47):
But I thought that the combination of Martha refusing
to admit to being a witch even while her children were tortured
and imprisoned, and the fact that Thomas never remarried
after her death, I thought were the makings, the emotional grit
and heart of the story and was very inspirational.
(20:10):
I have a question about your writing process.
Are you a plotter or a pancer? That's a very good question
because I think I'm a bit of both.
Like I said, fortunately I picked the right project for my
first novel because there was somuch in place.
I had a very strong scaffolding for the story by going to the
(20:32):
historical records. So as a first time novelist, I
had plotted things out pretty carefully, and then in between
the struts of the story, I filled in the emotional
motivation as I was moved to do that.
So I plotted out the story beginning, middle and end, and
(20:54):
then I was able to fill in, in amore organic way, the journey of
the story. I've written seven books to
date. Three are historical fiction, 3
is a contemporary crime novel, and then the last one is a spy
novel based in part on some of my experiences in the former
(21:15):
Soviet Union. So it's a little bit of both.
I will have an outline for the story, for the crime.
When I pivoted from writing historical fiction to crime,
there's a different pacing involved, and a very
accomplished crime writer kind of gave me the best advice.
(21:36):
He said write your beginning andthen write your end.
Know what the end is, and like arailroad track or an arrow, you
can shoot to that, and that willkeep you within the confines of
your story. So in that way, the three
contemporary crime novels were alittle bit different in terms of
the way it structured the story.But oftentimes, and I'm sure you
(22:01):
know this, Josh, that you will have an idea for a strong
character and somewhere in the story that character is not
doing what you had anticipated. It doesn't fit the story the way
you had plotted it. You realize in the course of
writing it, it's not authentic, it's not true to the character.
(22:23):
There's a lot of restructuring that goes on.
And some of that is, like you said, plotting, and some of it
is just letting the character grow organically.
And so I think it's a combination of both.
I really love that insight and I, of course, I have just
(22:43):
recently read The Heretic's Daughter, so I'm still thinking
about that world so much and Sarah and her character that
it's so interesting to hear about.
Like everything about you were able to develop your characters
and the story so balanced and compelling.
You're just really magnificent at that and it's wonderful.
(23:07):
So I really look forward to picking up some of your other
books you've had a lot of success writing, and I'm so
happy about that. In your writing process, what's
the most important thing that you want aspiring writers to
know about that process? This is a really good question
(23:27):
and this is really key to finishing a project.
And I've taught writing classes before when I lived in Texas,
I've taught quite a few writing classes.
And one of the things that they want to know is what is the
process? How do you get from beginning,
middle to end? And maybe it was my experience
(23:49):
of being in the business world, in the commercial marketplace,
is that you learn to tolerate a lot of tedium.
You learn to tolerate what I call the tyranny of the blank
page. Because there are many times,
you know, unlike Mozart, who supposedly had these brilliant
pieces of music fall on his shoulders entirely of a piece,
(24:14):
most people aren't like that. They have an idea.
They have a spark of an idea andit's developing that.
It takes discipline and being able to tolerate staring at a
blank screen because there were times in all of the books that
I've written that I spent days not knowing where to go with the
(24:35):
story. It just didn't feel right.
It didn't feel authentic. It wasn't resonating.
And usually I would tell the students, then walk away from
it, take a break, read something, watch something, take
a walk in the woods. Stephen King had a great
analogy. He called it the little men in
(24:57):
the basement. That subconsciously when you're
working on a project, the machinations of putting together
the story, it's still going on. You may not be fully aware of
it, but I would take a long drive or a long walk, and
freeing my conscious mind would allow the subconscious ideas to
(25:18):
bubble up and I'd have these Eureka moments.
And you can't often brute your way through a storyline.
Sometimes you have to get up, walk away, do something else.
But if it's something that you're emotionally attached to,
the story is meaningful to you, it will always come through.
(25:41):
Sometimes it takes time. There's some writers you know
that it takes years. Donna Tart takes 10 or 11 years
to finish a novel, and she goes through many iterations.
She goes through many changes, many drafts.
As they say, there's no such thing as writing, just good
rewriting. So it's encouraging burgeoning
(26:05):
writers not to get discouraged if they reach a roadblock
because you are going to reach aroadblock.
I would use that oftentimes to do more research if it was
historical fiction. I always start with the research
and then the ideas blossom out of that.
And when I need to, life has a way of interrupting.
If you have parents or children,things are going to happen and
(26:29):
you have to step away from it. But unlike a loaf of bread, your
story is not going to go stale. You just put it on reserve for a
while. And if it's a story that you
feel emotionally attached to, you can always come back to it
and begin anew. Begin afresh.
I'm curious, going back to your debut novel, there's so many
(26:53):
characters that you're developing at once.
Have you kept that pattern through your other stories?
Do your stories have a large amount of characters
participating? Yeah, mostly.
And they kind of appear in my imagination as the narration
proceeds, as the plot line. I'll think what would serve the
(27:18):
progression of the narrative, what character.
And sometimes the characters appear and I'll write about them
and they're not working. They're either too antagonistic.
They just don't fit the story. But you can put that aside and
you can cannibalize that later. If you're writing a series, that
(27:38):
character may not work for that book.
I have the three contemporary crime novels that I wrote.
They're all connected, but therewere some characters that I
thought about in the first book that I didn't bring back in
until the 3rd book. It's trusting the process that
(27:58):
nothing is written in stone, literally, and you can move
these characters in and out. Do they serve the process of the
story? Do they serve in contrast or in
collaboration with your main characters?
And it's just, it's learning to be very forgiving too of
(28:19):
yourself, not to be too hard on yourself.
Because the truth is in publishing, you're going to
write a story. And if you have a good editor,
they will oftentimes come to youand say, this is not working.
And that happens. But if you have a good
collaboration with an editor, itmakes you a better writer.
(28:40):
People will say, doesn't it bother you if an editor comes in
and they want to mess with your story, they want to finesse the
story. And I've always said no.
I always appreciate a discerning, critical in the best
possible way, reader. People will say, well, who
should be your first reader? First readers are often times
(29:02):
not your professional reader. They're people whom you trust.
They're friends or family members who are going to
reasonably offer some suggestions.
But they're going to be kind because, as you know, in a
family contract, in the small print, they have to, right?
They have to be kind to you. They don't want to squash your
blooming talent. So it's good to have a first
(29:25):
reader that's encouraging, especially when you're starting
out. But then when it comes time to
publishing, you want a really good discerning critical reader
who will say this is good, this is not so good, and offer
suggestions. And they're just suggestions
about how to make the story better.
(29:45):
And I've always appreciated, I've worked with some great
editors. The second novel in the trilogy,
in the crime trilogy, I had submitted it and one of the most
difficult periods of time was when the editor called me and he
said, I love the first half of this book.
I love it. I just think it's great.
(30:06):
The second-half, it's not working.
It's just not working. So I had to literally move away
the second-half of the second novel and rewrite it and how I
did. I had to shuffle things around.
I wrote on index cards each chapter summation, and like a
(30:27):
quilt, I moved these pieces around like a board game almost,
and so I could see visually whatwas working and what was not
working. So they're all these little
things again. I think it's good to accept the
fact that manuscript that you turn in that you say is finished
(30:48):
is not finished. It has to be perfected and
polished and finessed. And the trick is finding the
editor. It's like a good dance partner.
They follow your steps without interrupting the dance.
And that's always a good thing to have a good editor.
Can you tell us what a typical writing day?
(31:08):
Is like for you. Or do you sit down and write a
specific time of day? Do you have?
Any advice for other writers? On how to tackle the day, I
think everyone is different. Some people write well at night,
you know, that's when their creative juices flow.
I know some writers, one writer in particular, that would go to
(31:29):
sleep and then wake up with his hair on fire and that's when he
would write because that's when the floodgates opened.
It really is when you have the energy to sustain your
imagination. For me, that's the morning and
having a cup of coffee, going in, closing the door, turning
off the phone, writing in the morning and usually after about
(31:50):
3 or 4 hours. Rarely does it go more than that
because that's when I'm the sharpest and it's an enormous
amount of concentration and effort into creating the story.
It's like playing 4 dimensional chess because you're moving so
many pieces around, you're moving characters, you're moving
plot. And so, you know, that's when I
(32:13):
feel the most energetic is in the morning.
I have a very good friend named Joe Lansdale, who's a wonderful
writer. He's written so many, so many
great novels, mostly about Texasand about the Old West.
He only writes two or three hours a day, but he's incredibly
prolific because he said after two or three hours, he runs out
(32:34):
of steam, and then he's working against his own imagination at
that point. So if your peak time is two or
three hours, then that's what you should do.
When you feel like you're havingto, when it's work, when it's
really work, then that's the time to step away, maybe come
back to it or maybe wait till the next day.
(32:55):
So I'll write 3 or 4 hours and that's my peak.
And then I'll do maybe go away and do more research or read
somebody else's work. That's inspiring to me.
That is just how I work. That's wonderful.
And what's the name of the crimeseries?
Oh, it's called the Detective Betty Riz Crime series, and
(33:16):
there are three. It's The Dime, the Burn and the
Pledge. And if they're all three
connected, but you can read eachone as a standalone.
That's the key to writing a goodseries is that you could pick up
any one of the books and be filled in with what happened
previously without being too cumbersome about it.
(33:36):
Going back to Mars, that being aferocious woman, I worked in the
Commodity Exchange for 10 years and I worked for the Department
of Defense for close to 10 yearsas a contractor in the former
Soviet Union, in Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Many, many times I was the only woman in the room.
I got very used to pushing back against the status quo and
(34:00):
against the opinions of primarily men.
So that built my ferocious, my ferocity muscles, if you will.
So I love the idea of strong, competent women who push back
against the system, so to speak.The series came from a short
(34:22):
story that I wrote. I was challenged to write a
Crime Story for an anthology called Dallas Noir.
And Betty Rizik just kind of appeared like Venus from the
Sea. And I thought what I wanted to
do a police officer and what could I do, that was the most
the most contrary, the most rebellious character.
(34:44):
Betty Rizik is a cop from New York.
She comes from a family of cops.She's moved with her girlfriend
to Texas. She's 6 feet tall, red headed
and a lesbian. And I thought what could be more
contrary than that, especially in a Texas law enforcement
agency. So I started there and
(35:07):
everything that she did and as she evolved was in a position
was in resistance to the status quo and she had to fight for her
agency. So I was able to kind of
challenge my own personal challenges into that character,
which was very satisfying. I think I confused a lot of my
(35:27):
historical fiction readers because they were used to
reading about 17th century New England or as in the outcasts,
Texas after the American Civil War.
But I gained a whole new, I guess, readership from that
people that love crime stories. And I think part of the success
(35:47):
was that she was so different. She wasn't this hard nosed, hard
shelled gumshoe. And I picked Dallas because
crime series, often LA, Chicago,New York, these are the playing
grounds of the gumshoes of yore.So I wanted to take a city.
Dallas has been was voted many years as being one of the most
(36:11):
beautiful skylines. Dallas is a very wealthy city.
It has as many plastic surgeons as Los Angeles.
They spend more money on lawn care than they do in Bel Air.
It's a very pretty city on the surface, but below the surface
are some very ugly things, the drug trade, sex trafficking
(36:33):
trick. So I wanted to get, I wanted to
kind of expose and breakthrough this pretty facade of Dallas.
And it was really fun. It was really a fun series to
write because of Betty. She was a force of nature and to
take on Dallas and to expose some of the things that didn't
(36:53):
appear on Page 1 and The Dallas Morning News.
What do you hope that people take away from the experience of
reading one of your? Books.
I hope that the readers take away inspiration from the
strong, especially strong femalecharacters.
You know, they say nice women don't make history.
(37:15):
And I love books with strong female characters.
I love strong male characters too, but having an emphasis on a
strong female character I hope is inspirational.
I hope that it is provocative because some of the best fiction
pokes the bear and I really enjoy that.
(37:37):
And for me it was a way to, well, the first couple of novels
was a love letter to my family, and that's Isabel.
Allende said we must write aboutthings that must not be
forgotten. And that's especially true, I
think, with historical fiction. We write to revisit what we were
(37:58):
like hundreds of years ago. And really we haven't changed in
2000 years. Technologically we have, which
has changed our neurology somewhat, but emotionally we're
exactly the same. And I think making that
connection to the past, we've learned from the mistakes of the
past, hopefully, and we can showa mirror to present day.
(38:22):
And I think you know what you'redoing, Josh and Sarah, is really
important in terms of talking about the idea of the witch has
been a long time, many hundreds of years, many thousands of
years, An object of ridicule, anobject of fear, an object of
(38:43):
perient sexuality. And it's this desire for women
to reclaim their agency, to reclaim their power, which I
think is so important and which today we're having to struggle,
unfortunately, we're having to struggle diligently to make sure
that we don't lose any more ground.
(39:03):
And I think that reading about stories, fiction, and again,
Isabella Yende said that fiction, writing fiction brings
the truth to the lies we're writing.
There's a greater truth that cancome forward to that.
And I'm dismayed at this. I'm 72.
(39:24):
I mean, I'm, I've lived a long life.
I've had different careers. And I am very dismayed by the
acceptance of the diminishment of women and the loss of
autonomy and the loss of the voice.
And I hope that through my characters, it can give a voice
(39:45):
to women that would ordinarily be silenced.
And there's that song. I'm my mother's savage daughter.
I won't cut my hair. I will not silence my voice.
So I think through what we read,whether it's fiction or
nonfiction. I especially want to portray
(40:10):
women as courageous, like Marthawas.
She was so courageous. She never admitted to being a
witch. She stood fast in her own truth
and lost her life because of it.And is she has been an
inspiration for me my entire life.
And so that's what I hope that the readership takes away from
these stories. Do you fake female authors right
(40:33):
now feel pushed back from editors or publishers or critics
when they give such power to their characters and stories?
The publishing world right now is really in disarray.
I published my book, the first book, Heretic's Daughter, in
(40:53):
2008, and it was a year or two later when Amazon came on the
scene and completely upended thetraditional publishing process.
Now, the old boys club, right? It's not necessarily a bad thing
that that was upended because wedidn't have the voices of women,
especially in crime fiction, We didn't have the voices of people
(41:15):
of color, Indigenous, black, Latino.
And this upheaval allowed open the door for more diverse voices
to shine through. However, with the loss of
sources that you could go to, I mean you could go to the New
York Times or the Chicago Tribune and read reviews of
(41:36):
books and go, oh, that sounds like a good book that has been
completely disrupted. So you have to go a lot of times
by word of mouth. Book clubs are really good
source for that. I think the two categories that
sell the best, that are marketedthe best are why a fantasy
(41:57):
fiction, which is great, which is really good because a lot of
young people are reading books, this Game of Thrones type of the
Fourth Wing and that type of stuff, which is great, and then
romance. So I don't write strictly in
either of those categories. So I've kind of taken a break
from novel writing. I've pivoted to screen writing
(42:20):
and I've written several screenplays, one of which, the
most recent of which is being considered by several production
companies. It's a ghost story, takes place
on a remote Scottish island. It's a woman's revenge story,
the tinge of the supernatural. So the themes are still there.
I've just switched to a different platform.
(42:40):
I think people, we're living in very difficult times.
People's ability to concentrate.I know people, very good friends
of mine who have been avid readers say I just, I can't
concentrate. So I watch Netflix or I watch
movies, or I watch things that are more of a visual nature.
So just as a writer, I've pivoted to that.
(43:03):
That's not to say that I won't go back to novel writing, but
it's been difficult for conventional novelists to sell
their product. I had to put it in those terms,
but that's how the marketing team looks at it, to sell their
books to legacy publishers. Now there are a lot of
(43:25):
independent publishers, smaller publishers that are good, but
it's really hard. It's like yelling into the wind.
How do you find a foothold in that?
And it comes back to you write because you love it.
You write because you love the story, you love the characters,
and you can't not write about it.
(43:45):
So it it really has to be a loveletter to whatever story you're
committed to. Thank you so much for everything
you've shared with us today. I really appreciate the time
that you've spent with me and asking the questions about not
only about the story, like The Heretic's Daughter, but the
(44:06):
process of writing. I think we need artists now more
than ever. Commercializing that art is a
whole other topic, but we need artists.
We need music, we need plays, weneed books.
We need things that uplift and inspire people because I think,
(44:26):
you know, as a student of history, this too shall pass.
What's happening presently is going to, it's cycling through.
I like to think of it as an extinction burst.
Things heat up when the star is imploding.
And I think it's the art that helps carry us through dark
(44:48):
times. It's the art that helps remind
us that we are a very small speck and that things do come in
cycles. And it's also a way, it's a
fellowship, you know, being withother writers, being with
readers who appreciate things and are in conversation about
those books or about art makes us feel we're not alone in the
(45:11):
dark. There are other people like us,
and it gives us the courage to carry on.
Thank you for joining us for this Author Talk episode of The
Thing About Witch Hunts. What an inspired episode for
writers. If you've been working on a
writing project, this is your cue to keep up the great work.
(45:32):
I know this episode inspired me to do some writing and keep
pushing to that finish. Line and I hope.
It's done the same for you. For more information on our
guest, visit kathleenkent.com. And have a great today and a
beautiful tomorrow and happy holidays and a heck.
(45:56):
Of a new year.
Welcome to the thing about witchhunts.
I'm Josh Hutchinson. And I'm Sarah Jack, we have a
great episode today with author Kathleen Kent.
Kathleen is a New York Times bestselling author who's written
The Heretic's Daughter, The Trader's Wife, The Outcast, and
her crime trilogy The Dime, the Burn and The Pledge, plus your
(00:23):
most recent novel, Black Wolf. She's won the David J Langcom
Senior Award for American historical fiction and the Will
Rogers Medallion Award. The Outcast was named an
American Library Association toppick for historical fiction.
Her crime trilogy was nominated for two Edgar Awards, and in
(00:44):
2020 she was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters for
her contribution to Texas literature.
She's also a writing teacher wholeads workshops for aspiring
novelists. The Heretics Daughter is a story
profoundly influenced by Kathleen's descent from accused
witch Martha Carrier, who was executed during the Salem Witch
(01:06):
Trials on August 19th, 1692. Our conversation with Kathleen
covers her writing process, how she learned of her Salem witch
Trials ancestry, and she gives incredible insights for aspiring
novelists. Martha was from Andover, which
was the town that had the most people accused of witchcraft
(01:28):
during the Salem Witch Trials in1690, a smallpox epidemic tore
through the town, killing thirteen people, seven of which
were Martha's own family members.
She was blamed. For the entire.
Epidemic she had just recently. Moved with her family from
Billerica and so the newcomers to town.
(01:50):
Were blamed for bringing smallpox.
With them, but during the. Witch trials the afflicted
people. Claimed to be visited by 13
ghosts who were screaming that they were killed.
Murdered by Martha Garrier. So in May 1692, during her
(02:11):
examination, she had a great moment where when they asked if
the devil came to her, she turned the question back to
them. Then things.
Got darker. Her four children were arrested
and two of her sons were tortured until they confessed
that their mother had made them witches.
The afflicted claimed that Martha Carrier was promised by
(02:35):
the devil to be the Queen of Hell, and Cotton Mather called
her a rampant head. These days she's remembered as a
strong, self reliant woman who refused to confess to something
that she didn't do. Welcome to the thing about witch
hunts podcast Kathleen Kent please tell us about yourself as
an. Author Thanks Sarah.
(02:56):
I came to writing relatively late in life.
Usually when you write out of college and you say you're going
to be a writer, people say you go young person, live your
dream. But if you are on the runway to
50, as I was when I started writing full time, people are
not quite so enthusiastic about it because they wonder where
(03:18):
you've been. And I spent 20 years after
college living and working in New York, first for the chairman
of the Commodity Exchange and then as a contractor for the
Department of Defense in the former Soviet Union.
So it was very far away from creative writing.
I wrote a lot of contracts, which is they want just the
(03:40):
facts, ma'am. So I wasn't doing really any
creative writing, but I took an early retirement in 2000.
I moved from New York to Texas, and I had wanted to be a writer.
It had been at the back of my mind, but I needed the time and
resources to do it. So when I moved to Texas, my son
(04:02):
was a few years old. In 2002, he started school.
And so I thought if I got to theend of my life and didn't try to
write the story that became The Heretics Daughter, I think I
would be full of regrets. So I didn't tell anybody but my
(04:23):
immediate family that that's what I was doing.
I spent five years doing research and traveling to New
England to write the story whichbecame The Heretics Daughter,
which is about my 9 times great grandmother Martha Carrier, who
was hanged as a witch in Salem in 1692.
(04:43):
So the way I came to the story was through my immediate family.
My maternal grandmother was the one that first told me the
story. So I had an idea that that's the
story that I wanted to tell. I took five years to write it
without really any expectation other than trying to get it
(05:05):
published and maybe sell a few copies, but it was a story very
close to my heart. Yeah.
I find your. Story so interesting because I
also I started college as an English major with an emphasis
on creative writing. I got concerned about the job
market so I switched to businessmanagement and got stuck in a
(05:27):
corporate finance job for the 12years I've started writing and
I'm aspiring to be published. Unlike skydiving, you don't
particularly want to pick up skydiving or downhill skiing
when you're 50. But as long as you can hold a
pen or pencil in your hand and hold a thought in your head, you
(05:47):
can write. And I think actually having the
ability to draw on a life's worth of experience, I think
makes you a better writer. It's a deeper well of resources
to draw on with your own personal experience.
So I'm all for people making thecourage to sit down and write
what they've long wanted to put down on the page.
(06:11):
The story of finding out about my 9 times great grandmother
started when I was very young. I grew up in Texas.
All of my dad's family was from Texas, but my mother had grown
up in a third generation farmhouse in Pennsylvania.
Her maiden name was Carrier and I didn't really know anything
(06:33):
about my maternal grandparents. So when I was 8 years old, we
took a road trip, my mother and I, to Pennsylvania and I was I
had the chance to meet my grandparents for the first time.
My grandmother Florence was a wonderful woman as she grew up
with older brothers in a farmingcommunity.
She rode wild horses. She was a dead shot with a rifle
(06:57):
and she smoked in public at a time and it was scandalous for
women to smoke in public. So it heard all these stories
about her. I was really looking forward to
meeting her. Eight years old sitting at the
family farm table, which was thetable itself was probably 150
years old. And I'm sitting there listening
kind of half heartedly to my mother and her mother talking
(07:20):
about the family business, catching up on relatives, some
of them long dead. And I didn't pay too much
attention to what they were talking about until my
grandmother Florence say something about an ancestor who
was hanged as a witch. And then that immediately caught
my attention because being 8 years old, I'd spent several
(07:42):
Halloweens dressing as a witch, so I knew what a witch was.
So that really intrigued me. So I started talking to my
grandmother and asking her questions and she was really
quite knowledgeable about The Who, what, when and where of the
Salem witch trials. The Carrier family had very deep
roots in New England and she started telling me about my 9
(08:06):
times great grandmother Martha Carrier and the Carrier family
and that she had been hanged as a witch in 1692.
And I waited for a pause in the conversation to ask the question
I really wanted to ask her, which was was Martha Carrier
really a witch? There was a little pause and she
(08:28):
said hard, there are no such things as witches, just
ferocious women and that stuck with me.
That was like a bell going off in my head because certainly my
grandmother was the archetype for a ferocious woman.
She was very opinionated, she was very strong willed, she was
very courageous. She survived the Spanish flu,
(08:51):
she worked all of her life and she became, I think, a model for
me. And so I started asking
questions about Martha, about the family, and that began A
lifelong fascination with the Carrier family and the Salem
witch trials. And I realized very early on
(09:14):
that what happened in Salem had nothing to do with the
supernatural. It was a belief in the
supernatural, but it was a confluence of events.
It was a confluence of people who were terribly afraid of the
plague, smallpox, Indian raids. They were three months away from
starvation at any given time. Salem Village was a very
(09:36):
litigious place. When I started diving in and
doing research on the village itself, and they were constantly
suing each other. And they were not this starched,
upright Puritans that the Victorians LED us to believe.
They were closer to the Elizabethans.
They were haughty, body and wild.
(09:59):
They would sue each other at thedrop of a hat.
They gambled, they drank, they committed adultery.
And so I got a really good picture reading the town
documents. And of course, as you both know,
the court transcripts are extant.
They're held in the Peabody Essex Museum and in other
(10:20):
places, other universities. And so it gave me, once I became
very serious about writing and spent the five years researching
this project, it gave me a very strong scaffolding.
It gave me a very strong foundational story to build
factually. And then I could weave in the
(10:42):
guesswork of how these people felt as they went through life.
And it was a very harsh, very harsh existence, especially for
women. As far as I've been able to
tell, Martha Carrier was one of the few, if not the only woman
who when she was brought to trial, stood up to her accusers.
(11:04):
And when the magistrates, these very somber black robed
gentlemen, asked her during the trial if she'd ever seen the
devil, she said, the only devilsI have ever seen are those of
you sitting in judgment before me.
So at a time when women were to be seen and not heard, she was
(11:25):
quite ferocious, very courageous, because at the time
that she was brought to trial, she understood that the stakes
were very high and that she could, if she didn't admit to
being a witch, that she would most likely lose her life.
So that began many years of research into it.
(11:47):
And I was lucky in the sense that the story, the first story
that I chose to write, my first novel about, had a lot of paper
trail that I could follow. And I could read the actual
words of the accused, the people, the accusers, the people
being accused. And it gave me a very full
(12:10):
picture. And in the process of that, I
was able to at least summon in my imagination how these people
would have reacted during the trials in Salem.
The Carrier family, well, I justwant to say the storytelling is
(12:31):
definitely in your DNA. You talked about your mother and
her mother talking about family,and it really just comes through
in your storytelling. But one of the things that I
find intriguing about the carrier experience during the
Salem witch trials is there wereso many of them suffering
(12:54):
together with some of the other families, my ancestors, you
know, you had Rebecca Nurse and Mary Estee.
They were together somewhat, butthey were really experiencing
their own individual accusations.
People are coming at them from different angles a little bit.
But you had the children of the carriers.
(13:15):
It wasn't just Martha. And you really bring that
horrible experience to life, butthe beauty of the family bonds.
And I just really am amazed by your storytelling, and I'm so
glad that you made sure that story got out there.
Thanks, Sarah. I really appreciate it because
(13:36):
at its heart, it is a family story.
It's a story of family bonds. It's a story of the ultimate
sacrifice that Martha made for her family because at the time
that she was brought in, if you admitted to being a witch, So
the burden of proof was on the accused, not the accuser.
(13:56):
And like you said, one of the most poignant things about
Martha Carrier's family and there were many cases where
family members were accused along with the accused witch
husbands children. But I think what's so poignant
about the story is that four of her five children were arrested.
(14:19):
Her two older sons were torturedin order to compel her to admit
to being a witch. But as with In The Crucible, and
Miller wrote The Crucible as an examination of the McCarthy Red
Scare, the communist scare, it wasn't good enough to say I'm a
(14:41):
communist or I am a witch. Then you were pressured to admit
who were your Confederates, who of your neighbors and family
were witches along with you. So once you took that leap into
saying I am a witch, I am guilty, then the pressure
intensified for you to name other people in the community.
(15:04):
And Martha wouldn't do that. She wouldn't swear false witness
against herself, and she wouldn't bear false witness
against her neighbor. So they arrested her two older
sons, Richard and Andrew, who were about 17 and 15 or 16 at
the time they were brought into the court, and they refused to
(15:24):
testify against their own mother.
In the court transcripts. There's a break.
They're removed from the courthouse, and some time later
they're brought back and their story changed.
They said, yes, our mother is a witch and we would not have
known why they changed their story except for the fact that
(15:47):
John Proctor, who was jailed at the time, wrote to Governor
Phipps and said it is a shamefulthing that these boys, these two
carrier boys have been tortured because torture, strictly
speaking, was not allowed in thecolonies.
But they had a torture called the bow, which is where it's
(16:09):
sort of self strangulation. And if you didn't admit to your
guilt, you would die. You would strangle yourself.
So that's what happened to Richard and Andrew.
They were tortured. And they came back and they
said, yes, our mother is a witch.
They bring Martha back in and they say, now are you a witch?
(16:30):
And she says, no, I am not a witch.
She refused to admit to being it.
Then they bring in her two younger children, Tom Junior,
who I'm descended from, who was about 10 at the time, and Sarah
and Sarah. The real life Sarah was only
about 7 years old. She was probably the second
(16:52):
youngest child to be brought in and accused of being a witch.
The youngest one being Dorcas orDorothy Goode, who was four
years old. And she was arrested with her
mother and put in the Salem prison.
So I made Sarah for the purposesof narration.
I made Sarah Carrier a few yearsolder.
(17:15):
She's nine years old when the novel starts because I thought a
nine year old would be a more compelling narrator.
And The Heretic's Daughter is told from the point of view of
Sarah the daughter. Also, I picked 9 years of age
because in Puritan New England, 9 and 10 was childhood's end.
(17:36):
It was the age at which young girls and boys were sent away
from their home to learn a craft.
They were sent to either a master Carpenter or another
family, if you're a girl, to learn the responsibilities of
keeping a home. And so at 9, it is childhood's
(17:58):
end. So I thought that was a good
place to start the book. It was a very harsh life.
Many women died in childbirth. A lot of children weren't named
until they were a year old because the infant mortality
rate was so high. So they would wait to make sure
that the child lived past infancy and then they would name
(18:19):
the child. So in this backdrop, life was
hard enough. But the fact that Martha, even
though she knew that four of herfive children, the youngest
being Hannah, who was just a baby and was given to the Dane
family to take care of while shewas imprisoned, refused.
She refused to admit to a falsehood.
(18:42):
And that kind of courage was so exalting for me to think because
she knew that she that the end of that journey was going to be
death by hanging. And yet she stayed true.
And the fact that Thomas, her husband, who was in the public
records known before he became Thomas Carrier, was Thomas
(19:04):
Morgan, the Welshman. That's how he was registered in
the town records when she died. He never remarried.
He was in his 40s when he married Martha.
She was much younger than he was.
According to family legend, he fought in the English Civil War
for Cromwell and was one of the executioners of King Charles the
(19:24):
First of England. It was expected that a widower,
especially a widower with children and grandchildren,
would remarry, but once Martha died, he never remarried again.
He moved his family to Connecticut.
He started a blacksmith forge when he was in his 70s and was
quite a unique and remarkable person in his own right.
(19:47):
But I thought that the combination of Martha refusing
to admit to being a witch even while her children were tortured
and imprisoned, and the fact that Thomas never remarried
after her death, I thought were the makings, the emotional grit
and heart of the story and was very inspirational.
(20:10):
I have a question about your writing process.
Are you a plotter or a pancer? That's a very good question
because I think I'm a bit of both.
Like I said, fortunately I picked the right project for my
first novel because there was somuch in place.
I had a very strong scaffolding for the story by going to the
(20:32):
historical records. So as a first time novelist, I
had plotted things out pretty carefully, and then in between
the struts of the story, I filled in the emotional
motivation as I was moved to do that.
So I plotted out the story beginning, middle and end, and
(20:54):
then I was able to fill in, in amore organic way, the journey of
the story. I've written seven books to
date. Three are historical fiction, 3
is a contemporary crime novel, and then the last one is a spy
novel based in part on some of my experiences in the former
(21:15):
Soviet Union. So it's a little bit of both.
I will have an outline for the story, for the crime.
When I pivoted from writing historical fiction to crime,
there's a different pacing involved, and a very
accomplished crime writer kind of gave me the best advice.
(21:36):
He said write your beginning andthen write your end.
Know what the end is, and like arailroad track or an arrow, you
can shoot to that, and that willkeep you within the confines of
your story. So in that way, the three
contemporary crime novels were alittle bit different in terms of
the way it structured the story.But oftentimes, and I'm sure you
(22:01):
know this, Josh, that you will have an idea for a strong
character and somewhere in the story that character is not
doing what you had anticipated. It doesn't fit the story the way
you had plotted it. You realize in the course of
writing it, it's not authentic, it's not true to the character.
(22:23):
There's a lot of restructuring that goes on.
And some of that is, like you said, plotting, and some of it
is just letting the character grow organically.
And so I think it's a combination of both.
I really love that insight and I, of course, I have just
(22:43):
recently read The Heretic's Daughter, so I'm still thinking
about that world so much and Sarah and her character that
it's so interesting to hear about.
Like everything about you were able to develop your characters
and the story so balanced and compelling.
You're just really magnificent at that and it's wonderful.
(23:07):
So I really look forward to picking up some of your other
books you've had a lot of success writing, and I'm so
happy about that. In your writing process, what's
the most important thing that you want aspiring writers to
know about that process? This is a really good question
(23:27):
and this is really key to finishing a project.
And I've taught writing classes before when I lived in Texas,
I've taught quite a few writing classes.
And one of the things that they want to know is what is the
process? How do you get from beginning,
middle to end? And maybe it was my experience
(23:49):
of being in the business world, in the commercial marketplace,
is that you learn to tolerate a lot of tedium.
You learn to tolerate what I call the tyranny of the blank
page. Because there are many times,
you know, unlike Mozart, who supposedly had these brilliant
pieces of music fall on his shoulders entirely of a piece,
(24:14):
most people aren't like that. They have an idea.
They have a spark of an idea andit's developing that.
It takes discipline and being able to tolerate staring at a
blank screen because there were times in all of the books that
I've written that I spent days not knowing where to go with the
(24:35):
story. It just didn't feel right.
It didn't feel authentic. It wasn't resonating.
And usually I would tell the students, then walk away from
it, take a break, read something, watch something, take
a walk in the woods. Stephen King had a great
analogy. He called it the little men in
(24:57):
the basement. That subconsciously when you're
working on a project, the machinations of putting together
the story, it's still going on. You may not be fully aware of
it, but I would take a long drive or a long walk, and
freeing my conscious mind would allow the subconscious ideas to
(25:18):
bubble up and I'd have these Eureka moments.
And you can't often brute your way through a storyline.
Sometimes you have to get up, walk away, do something else.
But if it's something that you're emotionally attached to,
the story is meaningful to you, it will always come through.
(25:41):
Sometimes it takes time. There's some writers you know
that it takes years. Donna Tart takes 10 or 11 years
to finish a novel, and she goes through many iterations.
She goes through many changes, many drafts.
As they say, there's no such thing as writing, just good
rewriting. So it's encouraging burgeoning
(26:05):
writers not to get discouraged if they reach a roadblock
because you are going to reach aroadblock.
I would use that oftentimes to do more research if it was
historical fiction. I always start with the research
and then the ideas blossom out of that.
And when I need to, life has a way of interrupting.
If you have parents or children,things are going to happen and
(26:29):
you have to step away from it. But unlike a loaf of bread, your
story is not going to go stale. You just put it on reserve for a
while. And if it's a story that you
feel emotionally attached to, you can always come back to it
and begin anew. Begin afresh.
I'm curious, going back to your debut novel, there's so many
(26:53):
characters that you're developing at once.
Have you kept that pattern through your other stories?
Do your stories have a large amount of characters
participating? Yeah, mostly.
And they kind of appear in my imagination as the narration
proceeds, as the plot line. I'll think what would serve the
(27:18):
progression of the narrative, what character.
And sometimes the characters appear and I'll write about them
and they're not working. They're either too antagonistic.
They just don't fit the story. But you can put that aside and
you can cannibalize that later. If you're writing a series, that
(27:38):
character may not work for that book.
I have the three contemporary crime novels that I wrote.
They're all connected, but therewere some characters that I
thought about in the first book that I didn't bring back in
until the 3rd book. It's trusting the process that
(27:58):
nothing is written in stone, literally, and you can move
these characters in and out. Do they serve the process of the
story? Do they serve in contrast or in
collaboration with your main characters?
And it's just, it's learning to be very forgiving too of
(28:19):
yourself, not to be too hard on yourself.
Because the truth is in publishing, you're going to
write a story. And if you have a good editor,
they will oftentimes come to youand say, this is not working.
And that happens. But if you have a good
collaboration with an editor, itmakes you a better writer.
(28:40):
People will say, doesn't it bother you if an editor comes in
and they want to mess with your story, they want to finesse the
story. And I've always said no.
I always appreciate a discerning, critical in the best
possible way, reader. People will say, well, who
should be your first reader? First readers are often times
(29:02):
not your professional reader. They're people whom you trust.
They're friends or family members who are going to
reasonably offer some suggestions.
But they're going to be kind because, as you know, in a
family contract, in the small print, they have to, right?
They have to be kind to you. They don't want to squash your
blooming talent. So it's good to have a first
(29:25):
reader that's encouraging, especially when you're starting
out. But then when it comes time to
publishing, you want a really good discerning critical reader
who will say this is good, this is not so good, and offer
suggestions. And they're just suggestions
about how to make the story better.
(29:45):
And I've always appreciated, I've worked with some great
editors. The second novel in the trilogy,
in the crime trilogy, I had submitted it and one of the most
difficult periods of time was when the editor called me and he
said, I love the first half of this book.
I love it. I just think it's great.
(30:06):
The second-half, it's not working.
It's just not working. So I had to literally move away
the second-half of the second novel and rewrite it and how I
did. I had to shuffle things around.
I wrote on index cards each chapter summation, and like a
(30:27):
quilt, I moved these pieces around like a board game almost,
and so I could see visually whatwas working and what was not
working. So they're all these little
things again. I think it's good to accept the
fact that manuscript that you turn in that you say is finished
(30:48):
is not finished. It has to be perfected and
polished and finessed. And the trick is finding the
editor. It's like a good dance partner.
They follow your steps without interrupting the dance.
And that's always a good thing to have a good editor.
Can you tell us what a typical writing day?
(31:08):
Is like for you. Or do you sit down and write a
specific time of day? Do you have?
Any advice for other writers? On how to tackle the day, I
think everyone is different. Some people write well at night,
you know, that's when their creative juices flow.
I know some writers, one writer in particular, that would go to
(31:29):
sleep and then wake up with his hair on fire and that's when he
would write because that's when the floodgates opened.
It really is when you have the energy to sustain your
imagination. For me, that's the morning and
having a cup of coffee, going in, closing the door, turning
off the phone, writing in the morning and usually after about
(31:50):
3 or 4 hours. Rarely does it go more than that
because that's when I'm the sharpest and it's an enormous
amount of concentration and effort into creating the story.
It's like playing 4 dimensional chess because you're moving so
many pieces around, you're moving characters, you're moving
plot. And so, you know, that's when I
(32:13):
feel the most energetic is in the morning.
I have a very good friend named Joe Lansdale, who's a wonderful
writer. He's written so many, so many
great novels, mostly about Texasand about the Old West.
He only writes two or three hours a day, but he's incredibly
prolific because he said after two or three hours, he runs out
(32:34):
of steam, and then he's working against his own imagination at
that point. So if your peak time is two or
three hours, then that's what you should do.
When you feel like you're havingto, when it's work, when it's
really work, then that's the time to step away, maybe come
back to it or maybe wait till the next day.
(32:55):
So I'll write 3 or 4 hours and that's my peak.
And then I'll do maybe go away and do more research or read
somebody else's work. That's inspiring to me.
That is just how I work. That's wonderful.
And what's the name of the crimeseries?
Oh, it's called the Detective Betty Riz Crime series, and
(33:16):
there are three. It's The Dime, the Burn and the
Pledge. And if they're all three
connected, but you can read eachone as a standalone.
That's the key to writing a goodseries is that you could pick up
any one of the books and be filled in with what happened
previously without being too cumbersome about it.
(33:36):
Going back to Mars, that being aferocious woman, I worked in the
Commodity Exchange for 10 years and I worked for the Department
of Defense for close to 10 yearsas a contractor in the former
Soviet Union, in Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Many, many times I was the only woman in the room.
I got very used to pushing back against the status quo and
(34:00):
against the opinions of primarily men.
So that built my ferocious, my ferocity muscles, if you will.
So I love the idea of strong, competent women who push back
against the system, so to speak.The series came from a short
(34:22):
story that I wrote. I was challenged to write a
Crime Story for an anthology called Dallas Noir.
And Betty Rizik just kind of appeared like Venus from the
Sea. And I thought what I wanted to
do a police officer and what could I do, that was the most
the most contrary, the most rebellious character.
(34:44):
Betty Rizik is a cop from New York.
She comes from a family of cops.She's moved with her girlfriend
to Texas. She's 6 feet tall, red headed
and a lesbian. And I thought what could be more
contrary than that, especially in a Texas law enforcement
agency. So I started there and
(35:07):
everything that she did and as she evolved was in a position
was in resistance to the status quo and she had to fight for her
agency. So I was able to kind of
challenge my own personal challenges into that character,
which was very satisfying. I think I confused a lot of my
(35:27):
historical fiction readers because they were used to
reading about 17th century New England or as in the outcasts,
Texas after the American Civil War.
But I gained a whole new, I guess, readership from that
people that love crime stories. And I think part of the success
(35:47):
was that she was so different. She wasn't this hard nosed, hard
shelled gumshoe. And I picked Dallas because
crime series, often LA, Chicago,New York, these are the playing
grounds of the gumshoes of yore.So I wanted to take a city.
Dallas has been was voted many years as being one of the most
(36:11):
beautiful skylines. Dallas is a very wealthy city.
It has as many plastic surgeons as Los Angeles.
They spend more money on lawn care than they do in Bel Air.
It's a very pretty city on the surface, but below the surface
are some very ugly things, the drug trade, sex trafficking
(36:33):
trick. So I wanted to get, I wanted to
kind of expose and breakthrough this pretty facade of Dallas.
And it was really fun. It was really a fun series to
write because of Betty. She was a force of nature and to
take on Dallas and to expose some of the things that didn't
(36:53):
appear on Page 1 and The Dallas Morning News.
What do you hope that people take away from the experience of
reading one of your? Books.
I hope that the readers take away inspiration from the
strong, especially strong femalecharacters.
You know, they say nice women don't make history.
(37:15):
And I love books with strong female characters.
I love strong male characters too, but having an emphasis on a
strong female character I hope is inspirational.
I hope that it is provocative because some of the best fiction
pokes the bear and I really enjoy that.
(37:37):
And for me it was a way to, well, the first couple of novels
was a love letter to my family, and that's Isabel.
Allende said we must write aboutthings that must not be
forgotten. And that's especially true, I
think, with historical fiction. We write to revisit what we were
(37:58):
like hundreds of years ago. And really we haven't changed in
2000 years. Technologically we have, which
has changed our neurology somewhat, but emotionally we're
exactly the same. And I think making that
connection to the past, we've learned from the mistakes of the
past, hopefully, and we can showa mirror to present day.
(38:22):
And I think you know what you'redoing, Josh and Sarah, is really
important in terms of talking about the idea of the witch has
been a long time, many hundreds of years, many thousands of
years, An object of ridicule, anobject of fear, an object of
(38:43):
perient sexuality. And it's this desire for women
to reclaim their agency, to reclaim their power, which I
think is so important and which today we're having to struggle,
unfortunately, we're having to struggle diligently to make sure
that we don't lose any more ground.
(39:03):
And I think that reading about stories, fiction, and again,
Isabella Yende said that fiction, writing fiction brings
the truth to the lies we're writing.
There's a greater truth that cancome forward to that.
And I'm dismayed at this. I'm 72.
(39:24):
I mean, I'm, I've lived a long life.
I've had different careers. And I am very dismayed by the
acceptance of the diminishment of women and the loss of
autonomy and the loss of the voice.
And I hope that through my characters, it can give a voice
(39:45):
to women that would ordinarily be silenced.
And there's that song. I'm my mother's savage daughter.
I won't cut my hair. I will not silence my voice.
So I think through what we read,whether it's fiction or
nonfiction. I especially want to portray
(40:10):
women as courageous, like Marthawas.
She was so courageous. She never admitted to being a
witch. She stood fast in her own truth
and lost her life because of it.And is she has been an
inspiration for me my entire life.
And so that's what I hope that the readership takes away from
these stories. Do you fake female authors right
(40:33):
now feel pushed back from editors or publishers or critics
when they give such power to their characters and stories?
The publishing world right now is really in disarray.
I published my book, the first book, Heretic's Daughter, in
(40:53):
2008, and it was a year or two later when Amazon came on the
scene and completely upended thetraditional publishing process.
Now, the old boys club, right? It's not necessarily a bad thing
that that was upended because wedidn't have the voices of women,
especially in crime fiction, We didn't have the voices of people
(41:15):
of color, Indigenous, black, Latino.
And this upheaval allowed open the door for more diverse voices
to shine through. However, with the loss of
sources that you could go to, I mean you could go to the New
York Times or the Chicago Tribune and read reviews of
(41:36):
books and go, oh, that sounds like a good book that has been
completely disrupted. So you have to go a lot of times
by word of mouth. Book clubs are really good
source for that. I think the two categories that
sell the best, that are marketedthe best are why a fantasy
(41:57):
fiction, which is great, which is really good because a lot of
young people are reading books, this Game of Thrones type of the
Fourth Wing and that type of stuff, which is great, and then
romance. So I don't write strictly in
either of those categories. So I've kind of taken a break
from novel writing. I've pivoted to screen writing
(42:20):
and I've written several screenplays, one of which, the
most recent of which is being considered by several production
companies. It's a ghost story, takes place
on a remote Scottish island. It's a woman's revenge story,
the tinge of the supernatural. So the themes are still there.
I've just switched to a different platform.
(42:40):
I think people, we're living in very difficult times.
People's ability to concentrate.I know people, very good friends
of mine who have been avid readers say I just, I can't
concentrate. So I watch Netflix or I watch
movies, or I watch things that are more of a visual nature.
So just as a writer, I've pivoted to that.
(43:03):
That's not to say that I won't go back to novel writing, but
it's been difficult for conventional novelists to sell
their product. I had to put it in those terms,
but that's how the marketing team looks at it, to sell their
books to legacy publishers. Now there are a lot of
(43:25):
independent publishers, smaller publishers that are good, but
it's really hard. It's like yelling into the wind.
How do you find a foothold in that?
And it comes back to you write because you love it.
You write because you love the story, you love the characters,
and you can't not write about it.
(43:45):
So it it really has to be a loveletter to whatever story you're
committed to. Thank you so much for everything
you've shared with us today. I really appreciate the time
that you've spent with me and asking the questions about not
only about the story, like The Heretic's Daughter, but the
(44:06):
process of writing. I think we need artists now more
than ever. Commercializing that art is a
whole other topic, but we need artists.
We need music, we need plays, weneed books.
We need things that uplift and inspire people because I think,
(44:26):
you know, as a student of history, this too shall pass.
What's happening presently is going to, it's cycling through.
I like to think of it as an extinction burst.
Things heat up when the star is imploding.
And I think it's the art that helps carry us through dark
(44:48):
times. It's the art that helps remind
us that we are a very small speck and that things do come in
cycles. And it's also a way, it's a
fellowship, you know, being withother writers, being with
readers who appreciate things and are in conversation about
those books or about art makes us feel we're not alone in the
(45:11):
dark. There are other people like us,
and it gives us the courage to carry on.
Thank you for joining us for this Author Talk episode of The
Thing About Witch Hunts. What an inspired episode for
writers. If you've been working on a
writing project, this is your cue to keep up the great work.
(45:32):
I know this episode inspired me to do some writing and keep
pushing to that finish. Line and I hope.
It's done the same for you. For more information on our
guest, visit kathleenkent.com. And have a great today and a
beautiful tomorrow and happy holidays and a heck.
(45:56):
Of a new year.
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