Katherine Howe – Vanderbilt Legacy

Katherine Howe is a New York Times bestselling historian and novelist and together with American journalist and author Anderson Cooper she co-authored Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty. She talks about the project, how it came together, and her own bestselling fiction on this week’s Joys of Binge Reading. Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and today on Binge Reading Katherine Howe talks about working with Anderson to write one of the Washington Post‘s Notable Works of Nonfiction for 2021. We’ve got our usual free books offer. This week it’s a group of authors offering clean and wholesome holiday romance. You can check it out on The Joys of Binge Reading website for the links or subscribe to our newsletter so it lands in your mailbox with the links there ready for you to click. Don’t forget exclusive bonus content on Binge Reading on Patreon, including the Getting-to-Know-You Five Quickfire questions from Katherine on www.patreon.com/thejoysofbingereading. Where to find Katherine Howe: Website: http://www.katherinehowe.com Twitter: @katherinebhowe Instagram: @katherinebhowe Links for this episode: Alva Vanderbilt /Belmont/Vanderbilt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alva_BelmontSalem Witch trials: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-brief-history-of-the-salem-witch-trials-175162489/Edith Wharton: https://www.edithwharton.org/discover/edith-wharton/Edith Wharton novels:The Age of Innocence: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53835.The_Age_of_InnocenceThe House of Mirth: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17728.The_House_of_MirthEthan Frome: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5246.Ethan_Frome As usual all our links for this episode can be found on the website the Joys of Binge Reading.com What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to the show notes in The Joys of Binge Reading.com for important mentions. But now here’s Katherine. Introducing author Katherine Howe Jenny Wheeler: Hello there Katherine, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us. Katherine Howe – historian and novelist Katherine Howe: Thank you so much for having me, Jenny. I’m delighted to join you. Jenny Wheeler: You are a New York Times bestselling author of historical fiction in your own right, but recently you’ve also co-authored one of the prominent books of the year and that’s Anderson Cooper’s family story, Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty. Is this your first co-authoring project? Katherine Howe: It is. I did a little bit of co-authoring of a screenplay with another friend, and I’ve taught writing for many years, so I was accustomed to a collaborative approach to writing, but this is the first time it’s actually come to the world in book form. It was a really exciting project to do. Jenny Wheeler: How did it come about that you got enlisted for the project? Katherine Howe: We knew that Anderson was going to be working on a book and it was going to be a history book. Of course, he is a celebrated author in his own right. For your audience in New Zealand who might not know him as well as we do in the US, he is a broadcast journalist on CNN, which is one of our big cable news networks. He also does many other things. He does the New Year’s Eve ball drop in Times Square and things like that. He is a prominent person, and he had written a couple of memoirs. He did a memoir of his own, and he did a co-author project with his mother. Collaborating with Anderson Cooper His mother was Gloria Vanderbilt. So, he knew he wanted to do a history book, but I think he was looking for someone who had more experience writing history, because writing history is a little bit different from writing memoir. We were fortunate that our various representative put us in touch with each other. It was very exciting because we found in the course of preparatory conversations that we had similar ideas and dreams for what kind of book Vanderbilt could be. We were both much more interested in people and in social history and in lived experience than we were, for instance, in the history of business or the history of finance or things like that. There are other very fine histories of the Vanderbilt business enterprise, but we were interested in the history of Vanderbilt as individual people and what their stories were. It was a great project to work on together. Jenny Wheeler: You wanted to get inside their heads, is one way you’ve expressed it in other interviews. Was that a difficult thing to do? Was there plenty of information that you could draw on? Katherine Howe: No. It is always a little bit tricky to try to imagine yourself into the mind of someone living in a different moment in time. As a historical fiction author, that is something I do quite a lot. In a few instances, for some of our characters we look at in the book – I’ll say characters although they were, of course, real people – they did leave first person accounts of themselves. Looking at individuals in historical context But of course, people in the past have no more perfect self-knowledge than we do in the present, and so one of the tasks of an engaging history is to look at an individual within their historical context and try to read in between the lines, so to speak – what it might feel like to live at a given moment in time. The book spans from the 17th century all the way up to the very recent past, so there are many generations of Vanderbilts in between. It was a fun challenge to try to think into all these different moments that we identify, the moments we wanted to explore. Jenny Wheeler: You didn’t attempt to do a timeline approach, but you did settle on certain key characters and key moments didn’t you? Katherine Howe: We did. You can’t really encapsulate one family in one book. There are too many people, there’s too much going on, there are too many different things. What we chose to do was pick a few very salient and resonant individuals from the family story, beginning with the very first Vanderbilt to arrive in the New World in 1660 or thereabouts and ending, of course, with Anderson’s very famous and celebrated mother who passed away while the book was being written. It was wonderful to be able to trace a few of these very specific people, and we found a few commonalities of experience over the generations that came as a bit of a surprise. I think people who read the book will be maybe amused by these certain echoes, repeating over different generations. A personal connection with Gilded Age Jenny Wheeler: You are an academic historian, and your area of specialty is early American History, so you had a very good basis from which to start work. But I think you did have some personal connection with the Vanderbilts through your mother’s work as well, didn’t you? Katherine Howe: That’s true. My name is Katherine Howe, and my mother is also named Katherine Howe. She retired a few years ago as a decorative arts curator. As a child, I would spend a lot of time with my mother, looking at pieces of furniture or traveling to different museums or meeting different people. My mother as often as not would be on her hands and knees under a table pointing out to me how it was put together. One of the biggest exhibitions of her career was in 1994. It was an exhibition on the Herter Brothers – Furniture and Interiors for a Gilded Age. It traveled to the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and it had a very exhaustive catalog that went with it. The Herter Brothers were the furniture and cabinet makers who were charged with creating some of the most opulent and over the top Vanderbilt interiors during the 1870s, 80s and 90s. As a teen, my introduction to the Vanderbilt legacy was through the grandiose opulence of their interiors. I had traveled to several of the Vanderbilt houses in Newport. I had seen a lot of reproductions of what the interiors had looked like, and so it was a very exciting prospect for me to be able to look at some of the individual people who had lived out their lives in this fabulous setting that I had been taught at an early age to appreciate. Gilded – Yes, but not ‘Golden ‘ Age Jenny Wheeler: It’s remarkable, some of the things in the book. Very simple things, like the amount of money they felt justified in spending on one ball, for example, is mind boggling. Katherine Howe: It is really staggering. I might go so far as to call it offensive. I enjoy the term The Gilded Age. The Gilded Age is a term that was coined by Mark Twain, the famous American humorist in the 19th century. I think an important point to remember about The Gilded Age is that it is very evidently not a golden age. Gilding is a description for when you overlay gold leaf over a cheaper, base material, usually wood. You take a plain object and make it look artificially sumptuous. I feel so much of American life and culture in the 1870s is encapsulated in that turn of phrase, The Gilded Age, because it was a time of simply mind-boggling disparities in wealth. You have the Vanderbilts at the very top and then you have labor issues at the other end. In a way, we haven’t seen anything like that wealth disparity until today. Jenny Wheeler: Yes, it’s interesting to reflect on that. What was the most challenging thing for you about the project? Katherine Howe: Definitely having it take place during COVID. Two things happened in the course of this book. I had a baby. That pushed the work on the book back a little bit. Anderson had a baby also around the same time, so there was that. Never Miss out! 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100%;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] [data-style="minimal"]{padding:40px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"]{margin-left:-5px;margin-right:-5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field,.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{margin:0 5px 15px 5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field{-webkit-flex:100 1 auto;-ms-flex:100 1 auto;flex:100 1 auto;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{-webkit-flex:1 1 auto;-ms-flex:1 1 auto;flex:1 1 auto;} Writing history in a pandemic Then just as I was starting to get organized and get back to writing, COVID hit. The thing about the history book is that you want to use a lot of archival sources. I had one epic day in the New York historical sites, two epic days in the New York Historical Society frantically scanning any document I could get my grubby mitts on before we fled out of town. Definitely archive access was a big challenge with this particular book, but in the end I’m very proud of what we were able to produce, partly through the involvement of many very dedicated librarians who were able to make resources available to us digitally that wouldn’t have been available under normal circumstances. Librarians are the unsung heroes of all writing, I think. Jenny Wheeler: I totally agree. Was there anything you discovered during your research for this book that surprised you? What was perhaps the most surprising thing to you about what you uncovered? Katherine Howe: One thing that had always puzzled me. There is a character who has two chapters all to herself and her name is Alva. Alva was born Alva Erskine Smith. She was from Mobile, Alabama in the Southern United States, from a Confederate slave holding family. For your listeners in New Zealand, the American Civil War took place from 1863 to 1855 and it was a war fought predominantly over the question of slavery. A southerner in New York society New York City is interesting because it was kind of on the cusp. While New York City is in the northeast and therefore was technically on the Union side of that argument, its sympathies and its culture were much more aligned with the South. In fact, in the 18th century, the proportion of people in New York City who owned slaves was more along the lines of what you would find in Charleston, South Carolina, than what you’d find in Boston, Massachusetts, for example. New York is an interesting case that way. So, Alva shows up in New York and long story short, she ends up being the person who breaks the Vanderbilts into The Gilded Age of high society. She married a grandson of Commodore Vanderbilt who was the founder of the fortune. The Vanderbilts had been considered new money by the Old Guard in New York City, even though they’d been around for a long time. Alva had this tremendous overweening ambition and she ended up throwing a ball. You were alluding to it earlier in our conversation. It was an expenditure of money that beggars the imagination, and it was out of ambition, totally, that broke the Vanderbilts onto the social stage. The thing that always puzzled me about Alva is she is clearly an indomitable person, a fascinating, often very problematic character, but in her later life, she has a second act I’d always found difficult to square with her first act. Her first act was as the original society Grande Dame. In her later years, Alva turned her attention and her organization and her fortune and her focus entirely to the question of women’s suffrage. Alva Vanderbilt’s 180 degree turn She became a very active and engaged suffrage advocator. She was one of the leaders and backers of a huge march of women through the streets of New York City in 1912. In fact, a couple of years ago, a national monument to the women’s party was established in Washington, DC, and it is named, in part, for Alva. At that point in her life, her last name was Belmont because she had divorced Vanderbilt and remarried a guy named Belmont. I can never quite figure out how that could be that same person. What about Alva made her both of those people? I don’t want to give too much away for those of your readers who might wish to read the book, but I feel like I’ve found the answer. It is a pretty interesting, problematic but nevertheless historiographically fascinating answer. It also speaks, I think, to the many complex ways in which broad historical currents can play out in the life of an individual person in ways that we don’t always realise. Jenny Wheeler: She spent the first half of her life madly trying to claw her way into society, and then the second half, almost thumbing her nose at conventional society and trying to re-make the rules in a way, didn’t she? Katherine Howe: Exactly. She did everything she could to get entrée and then only a couple of decades later it seems like she was doing everything she could to burn it all down. It was really fascinating to think about. Jenny Wheeler: She probably deserves a book in her own right. I’m sure there has been more than one. The Salem witch trial novels Katherine Howe: She has had a book or two, many of which are quite worthy reading, but I also enjoyed being able to put Alva in the broader context of the family. One of the things that also intrigued me about the Vanderbilts is Alva is an upstart southerner. Vanderbilt is a very Dutch name and of course New York was originally New Amsterdam. We think of it as being very Dutch. It was formerly a Dutch settlement on the east coast of what is now the United States. I really enjoyed uncovering many different instances in which a southerner, and a valid southerner, marries into this pseudo-Dutch family and changed its direction completely. I think it also gives it a different way of thinking about New York City and New York City society, and the connection between different regions in ways that I found unexpected. Jenny Wheeler: Turning now to your historical fiction, you have dealt with a very different period than the Vanderbilts. The Salem Witch Trials you’ve made a special study and interest, and you’ve had two very good fictional books around the whole idea of the Salem Witch Trials. Katherine Howe: Three actually. Jenny Wheeler: Sorry, three. Katherine Howe: Conversion is a young adult novel that also has a Salem theme. Jenny Wheeler: The most recent one that’s been published is The Daughters of Temperance Hobbs. It is the second installment in the story of your heroine, Connie. Tell us a bit about your interest in this period and the personal element as well as the academic element in it. Where the fascination with Salem began Katherine Howe: Over a decade ago I was in graduate school in Boston, and I was living in a very small town not very far from Salem. I was living in a house that was built in 1705. The date never impresses anybody in the United Kingdom, but in the United States it is unimaginably old. I found myself one afternoon thinking about the fact that I was sitting in a room where someone had passed through that space who had been present at the hangings at Salem, because the hangings at Salem were a massive spectacle in which people traveled from towns all over in order to come and watch, come and see, cheer, shout, things like that. It started me thinking about the fact that we have I think sometimes condescending attitudes towards the people who lived in the past, especially the distant past. 1600 mentally and intellectually is a very alien country from the one we live in today, regardless of which part of the world we’re living in. Salem, for your listeners who might not know, was the last gasp of the great wave of witch hunting that swept through Europe and then through the British Isles in the late middle ages and into the early modern period. Salem was very late. Salem happened in 1692. In that time, in a community of barely a few thousand people, 19 people were put to death by the State for having been witches. In Puritan New England, witchcraft was a capital crime. It was not an ecclesiastical crime, so they didn’t get burned at stake the way they were in the mainland of Europe. They were hanged by the neck as any other felon would have been. Never Miss out! 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100%;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] [data-style="minimal"]{padding:40px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"]{margin-left:-5px;margin-right:-5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field,.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{margin:0 5px 15px 5px;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-field{-webkit-flex:100 1 auto;-ms-flex:100 1 auto;flex:100 1 auto;}.formkit-form[data-uid="d471e51619"][min-width~="600"] .formkit-fields[data-stacked="false"] .formkit-submit{-webkit-flex:1 1 auto;-ms-flex:1 1 auto;flex:1 1 auto;} A world where witch trials were rational It was very interesting to me to think about the fact that everyone who was involved in those trials, whether they were the accused, the accusers, the judges, the magistrates, the theologians – every one of those people lived in an intellectual and religious landscape in which having a witch trial was a rational thing to do, in which witchcraft was believed to be real, in which it was assumed that the devil could go about in the world assuming the shape of other people. I found myself thinking, what does it feel like to live in that world? The organizing question in my first novel, which is called The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, was – if magic were real the way the Salem villagers believed it to be, who would do it and what would it look like and why would they do it? This book is kind of a magical realist novel. It’s not a fantasy, pointy hat, story like that. Its conception of magic is different. The story follows a graduate student. Like most people, my first novel is slightly autobiographical, about a grumpy brunette graduate student who discovers that one of the Salem witches might have been the real thing. That is where the intellectual roots of the story came from. The personal roots of that story came from the fact that my last name is Howe, like how are you, but with an ‘e’ on the end. A personal connection over generations I am descended many generations ago from one of the women who was hanged at Salem. Her name was Elizabeth Howe. So, I was interested too by the fact that most of the people who were put to death as witches in the early modern period were women, and they typically were women at middle age. They were usually targeted not because they had done anything, but because they were problematic people. Either they had anger or got physical when they got angry or they were quarrelsome or too poor or disagreeable. I was also very interested to think about the way that gendered expectations for behavior and comportment can sometimes have very fatal consequences, both in history and then today. Jenny Wheeler: You have pointed out that it’s shocking the way views so quickly changed. Within a decade of the last woman being tried, they made it not a capital crime anymore. That’s an incredibly short period for them to suddenly change their views on something so extreme. What was happening at that time? Katherine Howe: That’s partly true. There were a couple of apologies that were issued around 1710 for the hangings that took place, but I think it’s important to look at what form those apologies took. One of them came from one of the judges who was involved, Samuel Sewall, and one of them came from one of the accusing girls. Samuel Sewall, interestingly, after having experienced a series of what he called wonders and marvels, came to believe he was mistaken not because they had been wrong per se, but that the devil had tricked them. A change of view on the devil’s workings It’s not that he stopped believing the devil existed, that he stopped believing the devil acted in the world. He started to believe that they had all been fooled, very cunningly, by the devil, but he still believed that the devil had been running around loose in Salem. He just didn’t necessarily believe that it had taken the form in which they thought it had taken. Although there are a couple of instances of witch trials that take place after Salem, none are anything like on the same scale. Witchcraft remains against the law on the books until 1735. After 1735 it becomes illegal to present yourself as if you are a witch, so to offer charming services for a fee or divination services, or anything like that. What’s interesting to me about this is that it doesn’t suggest belief in witchcraft has changed that much. It’s just less threatening than it was. It doesn’t pose the kind of economic or social threat that it did in the 17th century. Arguably a reason for that could be that by the time we’re in the 1730s, we’re in what some historians have called the consumer revolution in the 18th century. It’s a little bit easier to get by in the 1730s than it is in the 1680s or the 1690s. People have a little bit more money. They have a little bit more comfort. They have better food. Life is a little bit lighter, a little easier. Vilifying those who are ‘different’ When life is a little bit easier, if your butter doesn’t come together, you don’t have to blame a witch for it and then see if you can have her punished. It’s easier to get butter. There’s less at stake in a way. In a funny way, I feel like belief in witchcraft doesn’t change that much. It’s meaning or the risk that it poses to community changes. Jenny Wheeler: Is there a tendency that’s ingrained in humans that’s even with us today in various different forms, to vilify people who might be different or hold different views from you? Is there something ingrained in the human character that we tend to do that? Katherine Howe: Tragically, I would say yes. Don’t you think? Jenny Wheeler: I do when I look around at what’s been happening even with COVID and some of the things people are choosing to believe about it. Katherine Howe: One of the great struggles of human existence is to celebrate our differences rather than be threatened by them – to acknowledge and learn from and even enjoy the full panoply of human life and experience instead of rushing to conclude that one mode is inferior to another mode or one person knows better than another person. It’s such a challenge. I wish I had a better answer for you but you see this pattern play out again and again and again, and it’s heartbreaking. Witch trials still fascinates today Jenny Wheeler: Possibly that’s one reason why the Salem Witch Trials have resonated in our contemporary culture. There have been movies and all sorts of things. It’s something that has remained fascinating to people, isn’t it? Katherine Howe: It definitely has. There are a few reasons why. I think it’s partly because it’s one of the few instances, at least in American history, where women are the center of the story. Women are the ones who are being accused. Women are the ones who are doing the refuting. At least from a history standpoint, it is unusual to have a vision of the lives of women. It is also unusual to have a vision of the lives of people who aren’t rich. Think about who is likely to leave a record of themselves in a historical record. We know a lot about kings, a lot about queens, a lot about fancy people, a lot about literary people, literate people. But most people who were living from 1680-1700, we don’t know who they were. We don’t know their names. They don’t leave a record of themselves except maybe a name on a tombstone. Sometimes not even that. Making the transition from academic historian to fiction And so one of the things I find interesting about that period is that it is an opportunity to think about average people, everyday life people. A lot of historical fiction has been written about royal people and court intrigue, and I have to say that has never held any interest for me because I don’t really care about those people. They have enough attention, don’t they? Jenny Wheeler: Yes, sure. Turning from your specific books to your wider career, how did you make the transition from academic historian to fiction writer? What was the catalyst for you to do that? Katherine Howe: As I say, I was in graduate school. I was pursuing a doctorate, and I had this idea for the first novel, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. I was fortunate that I was close friends with a friend who’s a novelist who encouraged me and said, you should try it. Why don’t you write it down? Why don’t you see what happens, see how it feels? I was trying to work on it at the same time as I was working on my dissertation which is the big book you’re supposed to write at the end of a Humanities doctorate. Never Miss out! 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And frankly, I’m better at it also. Long story short, I was very fortunate that the book found a publisher pretty easily and managed to be a bestseller and resonate with a lot of people. So, I left graduate school and haven’t looked back. It is such a gift to be able to talk about history with readers, and engaged readers, in a way that is fun and interesting and not didactic or anything like that, but to be able to explore stories that are interesting with people who want to read them. I feel incredibly blessed, for lack of a better word, to be able to do this job. Jenny Wheeler: Turning to Katherine as reader, because we are starting to come to the end of our time together. We have called this podcast The Joys of Binge Reading and it does focus on popular fiction books that are reaching into people’s lives. I imagine that quite a lot of your reading is probably non-fiction and academic, but what do you like to read for your personal pleasure and entertainment? Katherine Howe: It’s true that the vast majority of my reading is with an eye towards research. I’m reading a book right now that, unfortunately, I can’t discuss with you because it’s for the next project I’m working on for Anderson and we haven’t announced the subject of that yet, so I’m going to keep it under my hat. What Katherine reads for pleasure From a fiction perspective, especially for those of your listeners who are interested in the Gilded Age or intrigued by the Gilded Age, I have devoured all of the old New York novels by Edith Wharton. Edith Wharton was the first American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Probably the best known of those novels is The Age of Innocence. Many people, when they read it, don’t realize it is actually historical fiction. It’s set in 1870. She wrote it in 1920. It is very much about the passing away of this world, of the New York of The Gilded Age. Edith Wharton herself is from the Jones family. Her original maiden name was Edith Newbold Jones and if you’ve ever heard the phrase, “keeping up with the Joneses”, the Jones family of Edith Wharton fame is the Jones family that coined that term, so she is writing about a world that she knows intimately well. I think I reread The Age of Innocence every year. The Custom of the Country is her other novel of ruthless marriage, market politics, and New York of the 1900s. The other one is The House of Mirth which is also set in the Gilded Age and is about a woman who ends up struggling to keep a toehold in society, the society into which she was born. Wharton has such a perfect eye for interiors, for detail and for dialogue. Not all of her perspectives have aged particularly well. On HBO right now there is a Julian Fellowes series called The Gilded Age that’s airing. It’s fun. And if you end up reading Vanderbilt and enjoy it, you couldn’t do better than to supplement it with some Edith Wharton. If Katherine Howe was doing it again… Jenny Wheeler: That sounds great. Circling around and looking back down your literary life, if you were going to do it all over again, is there anything you would change? Katherine Howe: I spent a number of years working on a novel that ultimately failed. It didn’t come together and it’s in a drawer and it belongs there. But at the same time, I can’t regret the time I spent on it because some ideas it gave me are going to appear in a novel I’ve just completed. Perhaps it’s fair to say that I wish I had been writer enough to make that novel work, but I feel like I encountered the limits of my ability with that novel. I couldn’t make it work. It was not workable. I am mourning that novel a little bit because there are some characters in it that I really liked and some turns of phrase that I really liked and so forth. But that’s not really a regret, is it? That’s more of a heartbreak, heartache perhaps? Jenny Wheeler: It sounds like it was your apprenticeship in a way. Katherine Howe: Well, it would have been if it had been my first novel, but it wasn’t. It was one that I wrote a couple of years ago. Most writers I know have at least one book in the drawer that belongs there. Nonetheless, it was a worthwhile experience. I’m very grateful to have had the career I have had so far, and I would feel immensely privileged as long as I get to keep having it. What Katherine Howe is working on Jenny Wheeler: Great. You mentioned, tantalizingly, a book you’ve just finished and another project you are starting on. Can you tell us a little bit about what the next 12 months as a writer looks like for you? Katherine Howe: I’ve just completed a draft of a novel. I’m in the process of revising it. Next I will be showing it to a couple of very trusted friends who will give me their honest opinions. For any writers who are listening, surely you will agree that the most important thing to have is early readers will tell you the truth. Then that will get turned over to my editor who will start whipping it into shape with her editorial eye. I’m hoping she will enjoy what I have to show her. While that’s happening, I’ll begin a lot of archive time for the next coauthored project that Anderson and I are planning to do. I’ll be working on that. I have just agreed to do an edited volume for Penguin Classics on Pirates, a Penguin Book of Pirates, so I will be enjoying putting together some primary sources for that into a reader. I did a Penguin Book of Witches for them a number of years ago. That was a lot of fun. So it’s shaping up to be a busy 12 months. Jenny Wheeler: The one you’ve just finished are giving to friends to read or early readers – that’s not a Salem one? It’s a different time period. The end of the years of ‘Golden Piracy’ Katherine Howe: It is a different time period. It is. The title is still a little bit in flux, but I’m describing it as Gone Girl meets Treasure Island. It is a pirate story. It starts in Boston in 1726 and is based on some actual historical research and historical documents. It’s about a girl who through a series of unfortunate events has to go pirating in the last waning days of the golden age of piracy. I’ve had a lot of fun with it. It has some unexpected elements. I hope that it also will have enough pirate-y things that people who enjoy pirate-y things will enjoy it. Jenny Wheeler: Is there any magic realism aspect to that one? Katherine Howe: It’s more straight historical fiction, although it’s never entirely a straightforward story with me. There’s a bit of a framing device as well. I don’t want us to reveal too much, but there’s an open question as to how real what we are seeing is, put it that way. Jenny Wheeler: The book that you’re doing for Penguin, did you say Paris or Pirates? Katherine Howe: Pirates. The Penguin Book of Pirates, so it is going to dovetail rather nicely with the novel that’s just been finished. Jenny Wheeler: When is that one likely to come out? Katherine Howe: We’ll have to see. Probably not for a little bit, maybe next year. It’s going to depend on what the publisher has in mind. They gave me some extra time with it because of COVID and childcare questions, and then I finished it sooner than I thought so I’m not sure what the schedule is going to look like, but hopefully next year. Find Katherine Howe online Jenny Wheeler: Do you enjoy hearing from readers and where can they find you online? Katherine Howe: Of course. I’m on all the major social media outlets. You can find my author page on Facebook where I’m Katherine Howe. You can find me on Twitter, where I’m @Katherine B. Howe with my middle initial. You can find me on Instagram and see pictures of the toddler @Katherine B. Howe, and I also have a website which is www.katherinehowe.com. Jenny Wheeler: Wonderful. We will have all of those links in the show notes that get published with this episode for people to find, so there will be a place where they can go. Thank you so much, Katherine. It’s been great talking. Katherine Howe: Thank you, Jenny. It was such a pleasure visiting with you. You might also enjoy Joanna Schupe’s Gilded Age romance If you enjoyed hearing about Katherine Howe’s work  you might also enjoy Joanna Schupe’s Gilded Age romance series. HEAR JOANNA SCHUPE Next week on The Joys of Binge Reading Next week on The Joys of Binge Reading, historical romance from bestselling and award-winning author Laura Frantz. It is 1755 – she loves the 18th century – and the threat of war with France looms over colonial York, Virginia. A Virginia chocolatier and a privateering sea captain collide once more, after a failed love affair a decade before. That’s on Binge Reading next week. Thanks To Our Technical Support: The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with wonderful technical help from Dan Cotton at DC Audio Services. Dan is an experienced sound and video engineer who’s ready and available to help you with your next project… Seek him out at [email protected] or Phone + 64 – 21979539. He’s fast, takes pride in getting it right, and lovely to work with. Our voice overs are done by Abe Raffills, and Abe’s another gem. He got 20 years of experience on both sides of the camera/microphone as a cameraman/director and also voice artist and television presenter. Abe’s vocal delivery is both light hearted and warm and he is super easy to work with no matter the job. You’ll find him at [email protected]