Kathleen Kent: David Leeson
Kathleen Kent, the author of New York Times best-seller “The Heretic’s Daughter,” moved to East Dallas in 2000 after 20 years of living in New York, where she worked in finance. She recently finished her third book, “The Outcasts,” which is set in Texas in the 1870s.
How did you start writing?
I lived in New York for 20 years, working in finance — had nothing to do with writing. I went there after college to work. I was a history major at the University of Texas in Austin. I wanted to be a writer, but I had ‘that talk’ with my dad. He said, ‘That’s good, but how are you going to make a living? You know, you could always write on the side.’ So after college I went to New York and worked for 10 years with commodity exchange and 10 years as a contractor for the department of defense. So for those 20 years, I was working in a commercial field and just writing on the side. And then I was approaching 50, and I thought, ‘You know, if I don’t take the opportunity to try it now, it’s going to pass me by, it’ll never happen, and I’ll really regret it.’ So we moved to Dallas in 2000, and that’s when I started writing the first book [‘The Heretic’s Daughter’], and it took off.
I wanted to write ‘The Heretic’s Daughter’ for a long time because they were family stories that I had grown up with. I decided if I ever had the opportunity to really write, that would be my first project. So when we moved here, I just quit my job and started working on it. It took me about five years to do it because I was learning a craft. Plus, I had to do a lot of research, and my son was in school, so there were a lot of interruptions.
So your first two books are placed in 17th-century New England. Why did you deviate from that setting with the third book?
After spending seven or eight years researching and writing about that, I really wanted to write about something different. When it came time to write the third book, I thought, ‘OK, I grew up in Texas. I’m a Texan. I grew up with Texas myths and legends. I live here. I was influenced by Western-themed authors like J. Frank Dobie and Louis L’Amour and, later, Cormac McCarthy. Those were the writers that I think really influenced me.’ So I had this sort of ‘eureka’ moment that that was what I wanted to do. It just made sense for me, and I’ve been really thrilled with how it’s been received.
How’s that?
Up until now, most of my readership has been women, but what’s great is with this book most of the reviews have been from male reviewers. It’s really satisfying, because I wasn’t thinking I was writing for a female or a male audience. It just so happened that I had some really strong female characters in the first two books, and it would make sense that women would read it and related to that. But it is satisfying knowing that I have a growing male readership, and that they get involved in the plot.
How did you come up with the idea for the book?
It was actually through my brother, who’s an amateur historian and Civil War buff. I was talking with him about wanting to do something with Texas history. What’s interesting to me is the time after the Civil War when everything is swept away and people have to re-create themselves, basically from scratch. I thought that would be a really interesting time. Those few years following the Civil War haven’t been written about much. Mostly when people write with Western themes, they write about the 1880s because that’s when you get John Wesley Hardin and Deadwood, the better-known villains and heroes, so I wanted to pick a time that hadn’t been written about much. My brother told me there’s a legend of pirate’s gold in Middle Bayou, which is southeast of Houston. He said according to legend Jean Lafitte the pirate, who was chased from Galveston, had chests of gold that he buried and intended to come back and get. Well, he disappeared; nobody really knows what happened to him, and supposedly that gold is still there. People have been looking for that gold for 150 years. They’ve dug up property from New Orleans to south of Galveston trying to find it. So I thought, that’s a really good premise for a story — greed being a great motivator. So I went with my brother through Middle Bayou, and it’s very kind of brushy, dense undergrowth. It’s swampy, and I was wearing snake boots, and I was thinking to myself, ‘Why would anyone want to come here, except for gold?’ So it kind of gave me the basis of the story, and then it grew from there.
What was one of the craziest things you did in the name of research?
One of the historians took my brother and I into Middle Bayou once because he asked me if I wanted to see an alligator up close, because we’d seen poisonous snakes and wild boar in there. I said sure, so he packed some raw hamburger meat, and I’ve got a picture of him just a few feet away from about a 12-foot-long gator that crawled out of the bayou, and he’s feeding it raw hamburger meat. So that’s probably the craziest thing that I did, got up-close and personal to the wild side of the Middle Bayou.
