Karen Wills

Since I’ve been looking back on fiction’s personal influences, I’d do well to consider novels involving religion. My thriller, Remarkable Silence, is a “what if” story concerning an archaeological discovery that upends the core histories of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

What led me to write it? I’ll have to acknowledge several novels and their influence. The first is Jan de Hartog’s 1972 historical work, The Peaceable Kingdom, a somewhat fictionalized account of the beginnings of the religious Society of Friends, also known as Quakers. The novel has nobility to it, even as its characters remained flawed human beings. Their spirituality, shown as the Quaker belief that we accomplish much when we “go for that of God” in any fellow human being, and truly live by good works, appealed to me as an idealistic young adult. I did, for a time, attend Friends meetings.

However, to stay with me, a novel also has to provide a line or two that I’ll remember and use at times that call for wisdom to help myself and/or others. In de Hartog’s book, a young woman is raped on shipboard sailing to America. She is isolated in her despair until an older woman who appears in control of her own productive life, embraces the girl and whispers, “It happened to me, too.” How often since reading that scene, have I realized its basic truth – that comfort can be given in so many situations – divorce, setbacks, grief – by opening the door to communication simply by saying, “It happened to me, too.” Inspiring and practical, de Hartog’s, The Peaceable Kingdom, started me on a long spiritual odyssey.

What novel has inspired and informed your spiritual life?

I’ve always been drawn to historical novels, but lately have been asking myself why.

Maybe it all started with an innate love of all things western. Do we read first the history of places we love, or does the reading foster love of place? Stories of covered wagon trains, the heartbreaks and triumphs of pioneers on the Oregon Trail captivated me. I remember long summer afternoons practically inhaling my grandpa’s Zane Grey and Louis L’amour paperbacks. In time I discovered Ole Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth about North Dakota homesteaders, Willa Cather’s My Antonia, and the incomparable Wallace Stegner’s Big Rock Candy Mountain, and Angle of Repose.

Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove reawakened my love of reading historical novels set in the West. I’ve come full circle now, having moved back to my native Montana. Part of the experience of coming home has been reading nonfiction about Glacier National Park. Once, years ago, my mother remarked, “Someone should write a novel about the inholders.” Bang! Thanks, Mom. I’ve been obsessively researching and writing rough drafts of that novel off and on ever since. Inholders were the hearty souls who’d already settled in what became Glacier National Park in 1910. They were flawed, bigger-than-life human beings, who worked harder and played harder than most of us can ever imagine.

Maybe my love of reading and writing historical novels stems from both love of place and admiration for our courageous and independent forbears. They do spark to the imagination.

Why do you think historical novels have such appeal?

Young adults now read a genre I missed in my teens — paranormal fiction. I just can’t recall having the choice of such books, except Frankenstein. Poe’s characters were insane, but human. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow turned out to be about a pumpkin. Around campfires, we told of the sweet hearts necking in the car who hear of an escaped, one-armed serial killer. They drive back to town quickly only to find his hook caught in the driver’s door handle. Creepy, yes. Paranormal, no.

As a teacher, I found my science-based self caught off guard by the mystical aspects of Native American culture. Instructing Lakota kids in the difference between fact and opinion (The former can be proved.), I made up a list of statements including, “Ghosts are real.” An uproar ensued when I insisted that could only be opinion. To that class, ghosts were real and provable.

I taught Eskimo teens in Wales, Alaska, where a shaman tradition existed along with stories of tricksters and shape shifters. Inupiaq youth tended to love paranormal stories, especially those touching their culture. Of course, most teens veer toward coming of age and love stories.

I just finished Amarok, by Angela Townsend. It’s paranormal fiction set in Alaska. Townsend’s sense of place is spot on. I relived the beauty and the life-threatening cold. The protagonist is a modern girl with big issues who runs from an abusive stepfather into an even greater calamity. There is one worse off than she, a young man from long ago turned into a wolf by a hate-filled shaman. The girl and boy form a bond that offers escape from brutality and their own undeserved guilt and shame. It’s a magical read full of adventure, villains, heroism, and mystery. Magic has a place in all our imaginations. I hope Townsend provides us with a sequel soon.

What paranormal stories have fed your imagination?

The older I got, the more I read age appropriate books. Somewhere in the fourth to sixth grade, I discovered The Box Car Children. It was my first real book where children left on their own have to solve their own problems, something with which I had no experience. I admired their courage and determination to put up a front and stay together.

Their independence paled when I received a box from my Aunt Lucille that contained a copy of Michael O’Halleran. An orphan, he not only took care of himself by being a newsboy, he took in the fragile and bedridden little girl, Lily Peaches. He had to carry her in a basket. Michael heroically cared for Lily until two adults came along who wanted them both, and Lily had the longed-for operation that enabled her to climb out of that basket for good. A tear jerker? You bet, but the sheer pathos and romance made me love it.

Gene Stratton Porter’s Keeper of the Bees came next. Peopled by old fashioned Americans, they simply self sacrificed, husbanded the earth, worked hard and loved easily, with lust way down the line.

But I digress. Kiddy lit included The Bobbsey Twins series, The Honeybunch series, Nancy Drew, and the Hardy Boys. Maybe readers now love the Maisie Dobbs books because they are somehow reminiscent of childhood series. It’s reassuring to visit a friend every so often.

Of course, there were also comic books and the funnies: Little Orphan Annie, the kid who could see without eyeballs, was my favorite (another orphan, albeit a lucky one). The Lone Ranger, Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy, L’il Abner and others.

And the animal stories: My Friend Flicka and Green Grass of Wyoming, both by Mary O’Hara, fed my love of westerns. Black Beauty broke my heart.

Orphans and animals, who could resist them. They almost always made for the best, most spell binding stories a kid could want.

What was your favorite series, animal story, or comic book character when you were in gradeschool?

In my third grade year, the Tracy’s, family friends next door, gave me a lovely copy of Little Women. That book changed my life for good (although at times I’ve questioned just how good). Little Women made me want to be a writer. Jo March became my doppelganger, my heroine, my inspiration. If I couldn’t be her, I wanted her for the sister I didn’t have.

I loved the other three as well: womanly Meg, tragic Beth, artistic and vain Amy. But, Jo’s passion and imagination became rooted within me. Jo knew how to live even as she stumbled through trouble (the Civil War no less) and loss. I read all the rest, too: Eight Cousins, Little Men, Rose in Bloom, and the short stories. Louisa May Alcott and her creations made me want to write.

The first result turned out to be a Halloween story about a black cat that jumped into a jack o’ lantern. The cat’s bright eyes kept the jack o’ lantern aglow for the poor little girl who had carved it. I believe a little candle I’d received, a jack o’ lantern with a black kitten curled on top, inspired the story. I wrote it out and showed it to Mom and Dad. Ideal (or I thought at the time) critics who only praised. That decided me. I was, and would always be, like Jo March, a writer.

Did any book read in childhood influence you to choose your way of life?

As a toddler, I listened to Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes, nonsense verses, and the stories Dad made up as he lay beside me for a while at bedtime, legs crossed, one arm across his eyes, spinning them out as they occurred to him.

Mom and Dad were avid readers. I still own their first editions of The Robe, Quo Vadis, The Harvester by Gene Stratton Porter, and A White Bird Flying by Bess Streeter Aldrich (another book about a girl who grows up to be a writer). They had books in the house for themselves after they tucked us in at night in those softly quiet evenings before television. In their wartime correspondence, they wrote about books and movies, along with shortages, and their yearning for each other. Dad, of course, saw more movies on base or shipboard, than Mom.

Although Little Jack Horner sat in a corner eating his Christmas pie and Jack and Jill went up that hill before I knew I had a memory, the first book that I know shaped my love of literature was Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. I read it while recovering from some minor second grade illness. Mom and Dad shone with pride, but all I cared about was the magical story: Tom canoodling Joe Harper to whitewash Aunt Polly’s fence; the awkward puppy love Tom felt for Becky Thatcher; the weird idea of swinging a dead cat, or visitng a graveyard at night; and, the terror of being stalked in the cave by Injun Joe. Too soon for feminist awareness, I applauded Tom’s protective stalwartness where Becky was concerned.

It kept me turning the pages and picturing the world Twain created. Images abounded in my stuffed up little head. It marked an early experience, and an addictive one, that of being both lost and at home, all at once, in somebody else’s world.

Huckleberry Finn followed in short order, as books by favorite authors often do. The second Twain book, the grand adventure on the Mississippi, took me captive as I absorbed, through a story, a character’s growth. That growth, of course, contributed to my own as a young, but thinking, human being.

And that, along with the entertainment factor, is probably the thing that hooked me once and forever on reading. I slipped into the skin of a mischievous orphan boy who shone naughty, remorseful, brave, and resourceful in 1839-40 Missouri. I knew what it would be like because I’d been there. I understood Jim’s desperation, his sore need to be free. I didn’t quite understand Huck’s dilemma in whether to help Jim, but that would come through the generous words of others.

“What’s in a name?” Juliet, you might well ask.

My life has been unduly influenced by books — words that comprise them, even names of the characters who appear in them — since before my birth. The Second World War staggered to its close as Mom (expecting me) waited it out with her toddler son in her parents’ little company house on the Big West Oil Field in the plains of Montana. Dad served in the Navy, at that time stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. I have their correspondence, saved all these years in a faded red and grey shoebox.

Dad referred to me, the anticipated, as Ophelia. Mom told me later they had also discussed Willowa. Willowa Wills would have been bad enough, but throw in a lifetime of fighting being overweight, and it would have been cruel. After I arrived with an astounding shock of bright red hair, Mom briefly considered Penny.

But, she read a book.

The title and author are lost in time. The important thing is the main character’s name happened to be Karen. Mom liked the sound of it. Of all those names, with apologies to Shakespeare, I’m happy with the one I’ve been handed.

That first foray with words launched a lifetime love affair with books and their influence. Ophelia, Willowa, and Penny. Who knows what would have become of a girl with one of those names? Ophelia might have gone mad as her namesake. Willowa might have developed an eating disorder, and Penny might have been unable to cope when the red turned white. Karen has flirted with various disasters, but is still standing.

Hello gentle reader. My son used to tell me I should write a memoir since I’ve been a woman of my times. And the times were unsettled. However, I want to mix in how my life has been affected and guided by books read by others, as well as me, during my life.