Falling to Earth

A Conversation with Kate Southwood, Author of Falling to Earth

Your novel begins with the historic Tri-State Tornado of 1925, but the story that follows is fiction. What was your inspiration?

Inspiration came from a few sources, actually. First, and quite accidentally, I stumbled across information about the Tri-State Tornado online one day. It stopped me cold because I grew up in the Midwest and had somehow never heard of it. It was a massive storm that resulted in over 700 deaths—it's still on the books as the worst tornado in US history—and yet I had never heard of it. After reading survivors' accounts of the storm online and looking at archival photos, I remember thinking that it would make a really powerful story. After that, I left the idea to simmer somewhere in the back of my head for a while.

Not long afterwards, I read Ian McEwan's Atonement I was absolutely devastated by the story and found myself thinking about the idea of preventable tragedy, which led me back to the tornado. That was the point of no return for me—knowing that I wanted to find a preventable tragedy in the aftermath of a natural disaster. Little by little, I settled on the idea of one family who lose nothing in the storm, but suffer tragedy later through a series of events related to it.

My last and perhaps least obvious source of inspiration is my life as an expatriate. I live in Norway with my husband and two daughters but have never stopped being homesick for the States. I suppose spending two years writing this book was, in my mind, a convoluted yet viable way of spending time with Midwesterners in the Midwest.

Your novel is strikingly visual. What was it like to evoke a time and place that existed before you were born?

That was no chore at all. I have a particular fascination for the first half of the twentieth century, so the fact that the book had to be set in 1925 because of the date of the tornado was a plus. The research was riveting—I had to look up everything from Model T transmissions, to when the squeegee was invented, to late 19th century funerary practices. More importantly, though, if the novel seems visual, it's the result of the way I think.

I read somewhere once that certain people see colors when they listen to music, that different notes are unfailingly represented by different colors in their minds. Other people, like me, see their memories and the things they imagine as if they are happening, like watching a movie. I was completely surprised to learn that seeing what you're thinking was not universal, but I understood that given a choice between seeing colors or seeing pictures, my particular quirk was the better fit for a writer.

I rarely write anything before I've seen it in my head, and I've often felt as if I'm literally standing just behind my characters in a room while they're talking, or walking beside them on the sidewalk, seeing exactly what they see as they see it. Once the novel was finished, the effect was exactly like memory; as if the characters and the town were real people and places I'd known, rather than my own inventions.

The three central characters of the novel—the adult members of the Graves family—are fairly different from one another. Were there any particular challenges in writing from their different perspectives?

These three characters—Paul Graves, his wife Mae, and his mother Lavinia—gave me both the sexes and two generations to work with, so I had to pay close attention to things like speech patterns for each as well as the way men and women would have lived their lives in the 1920s. Remembering that each character is in orbit around the family home helped. Paul, as a man and a business owner, would have had the larger and more varied orbit, while his wife and mother would have stayed closer to home, running the household and caring for the children. There is also a good deal of overlap among the characters, which simplified things for me. They have lived on the same basic patch of earth all their lives, so they're formed by the same cultural influences and have similar values.

Going back to the business of thinking visually, I knew very clearly what each one of them looked like in my mind, I knew what their voices sounded like, and those things helped me to establish them as characters. Aspects of their personalities are partly borrowed from people I've known, and partly invented. I had very little trouble writing from Paul's and Lavinia's perspectives—I suppose I always kept in mind the things I had in common with them: Paul, like me, has young children, and Lavinia, although she is a generation older than I am, is a woman and a parent, as well.

Mae, on the other hand, gave me quite a lot of trouble. I thought at first that that was strange because, on paper, she and I had the most in common, and then I realized that it was precisely because she is so much like me that she was giving me trouble. I suppose I just embraced that fact rather than try to distance myself from it, and that helped me to find Mae's particular voice.

Why do you bring Little Homer back in the epilogue?

Little Homer is my favorite of all the characters. I originally intended to frame the novel entirely around his being invited back to Marah as an old man to speak at a memorial ceremony marking an important anniversary of the storm and for the narrative to come from his memories, but I abandoned that fairly quickly in favor of the present tense narrative told mostly from adult perspectives. Still, Little Homer stood out for me and demanded an important place in the story. I always knew that, of all the family, he would have the closest and most important connection to his mother, Mae, and that made me interested to find out what happened to him, and how it all played out in his life.

In the end, I decided to keep things simple and just have him travel to see the old house because he is keeping a promise to himself. He doesn't remember specifically that his grandmother, Lavinia, put the idea in his head, and it doesn't matter. He's 85 years old and he knows this is his last chance to come back and see the house that his father built, he's put a flower in his lapel because he remembers that his mother loved flowers, and he's standing there, leaning on his cane, because he knows that visiting the house is the only real way he has to visit his mother. I see him there on that street corner very clearly.

What's the most interesting thing about novels for you as a reader?

Psychology, always psychology. I don't think writers can know what characters will do next until they understand what they're not doing and what they did before. When I read, I'm always trying to figure out what a character is really thinking, despite what he or she is doing or saying at the moment. What is hidden or repressed, what is exaggerated, what have they not yet admitted to themselves? What does each character want, what's in it for them? What is the nugget of truth they will never ever speak aloud? It's a game for me, really, and I think it's great fun.

The three great writer/psychologists who always jump out at me first are Jane Austen and Charlotte and Emily Bront ë. Jane Austen drives me a little crazy in that she never deals with life after the wedding, but she is at least wickedly funny on the way to the wedding, and seems to have enjoyed throwing lots of very different people with very different agendas together in rooms to see what would happen. The Bront ës, on the other hand, are very dark but really unparalleled as observers of human behavior.

Who have you discovered lately?

I've just read two books by Andrew Miller, Pure and Ingenious Pain [A Spring 1997 Discover Great New Writers Selection. -Ed.]. I don't often read historical fiction, and I was truly impressed by the immediacy of these stories. Both books are set in the 18th century, and in his hands it felt effortless and entirely plausible. It didn't seem so much that he had successfully recreated 18th century France and England as that he used a unique combination of logic and daring to make it seem that we and the stories simply were there.

I took my time and savored both books. I was tempted to gobble them like they were boxes of chocolates, but the stories and Miller's gorgeous, startling language dazzled me, and I read slowly. That's the best compliment I can pay any writer.