Sonal: Please tell us about yourself - where did you grow up, study and how long you have been writing?

Katrina: I was born in Geneseo, Illinois but I've lived in Ohio, near Dayton, since I was in first grade. And I think I've always told stories, even before I could write. I used to draw these long, complicated comic-like drawings that told continuing stories. I remember spending hours on those. And then once I did learn to write, I always kept journals and wrote stories. Reading and writing were considered very valuable things in our household. My father is a voracious reader. We tease him about being a "chain reader"--he actually gets nervous if he's nearing the end of a book and he doesn't know what he'll read next! There's a line from Michael Chabon's novel, Wonder Boys, describing a character as "a junkie for the written word" and that describes my dad perfectly. My sister and I often wrote stories as gifts for each other and our parents for holidays and birthdays.

As far as formally studying creative writing, I didn't do that until I was out of college. But I think a life spent reading was good training all along. I read everything--the classics to trash and everything in between. I went to Ohio University in Athens, Ohio and I was a theatre major for two years, then an English major in an Honors Tutorial program. I did a lot of writing, but it wasn't creative writing (although you could argue that all writing is creative), it was academic writing, analyzing the work of other writers. But that was good training, too.

After college, I taught high school English and theatre for five years, and that's when I wanted to write a novel and got serious about working on Travelling Light. I thought I would get into an MFA program in Creative Writing and that would give me the push I needed and the validation as a writer I was hoping for. But I didn't get in to any of the programs I applied for. It was pretty devastating. Looking back, now I see that it's quite right that I didn't get accepted--the writing samples I sent were awful. And, in a way, it was a blessing in disguise because it raised the bar for myself. It made me choose to go for it by myself and made me much more committed than I would have been otherwise. I started going to all the writers conferences and workshops I could find and afford, and started reading every book about the craft of writing I could get my hands on. I started writing and kept at it and got a little bit obsessed. It was very difficult to make much progress while teaching English in a public high school--all those papers to grade! There was never time and energy to devote to the book. I eventually resigned from teaching and sought other work that would allow me more freedom and flexibility to write in the morning.

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Sonal: Also, a little about the origins of Travelling Light--
a. how did the idea come to you?
b. how different was the initial idea from the completed book?
c. what was your inspiration for the characters
d. were there any interesting events that influenced the writing of the book?

Katrina: I'd known for many years that I'd wanted to write a story that dealt with AIDS. I think AIDS touched my life much earlier than many of my peers. I studied ballet for a time--although I was never as good as the protagonist in Travelling Light--(that's the fun of fiction; you can change things like that) and had friends who were in a professional ballet company. The artistic director of the Dayton Ballet, Stuart Sebastian, was the first person I ever met who had AIDS. And it was difficult to reconcile what I saw with my own eyes to be true, and what I read in the media at the time about AIDS. This was in the early 80's. Here was this talented, giving, generous man, a great teacher, an inspiration, a mentor to many of my friends, dying this horrible, obscene death that I knew no one deserved, and the media basically saying "Oh, these people get what they deserve. They should be shunned. They don't deserve our compassion." In essence, in much of the early media--because of the communities who were hit the hardest in the early days of the disease--gay men and IV drug users and inner city minorities--the message seemed to me to be a very uncharitable "good riddance."

So here I was in high school, trying to reconcile this. And it stayed with me. Early in college, I was a theatre major. A dear friend of mine, a talented actor a few years ahead of me, moved to California after graduation and lost touch with the rest of us. We found out years after the fact, that he had died of AIDS. And when he'd told his family, it was one of those classic, tragic examples of when he told his family he had AIDS, he was telling them for the first time that he was gay. They completely rejected him. They refused to let him come home. And so, my friend died, in a strange place, alone, with no friends or family with him. An AIDS service organization helped take care of him.

Well, when I heard this news I was devastated. But I didn't want to just sit around whining about what a horrible fate had befallen my friend. That wouldn't do him any good. It was too late to help him, but maybe I could help someone else. So I contacted the local AIDS service organization, thinking if there were people like my friend in my area, maybe I could be involved in a buddy program or something. By this time I was teaching high school English and theatre near Dayton OH, and the organization, The AIDS Foundation Miami Valley was very interested in the fact that I was a teacher. Rather than getting me involved in the buddy program, they trained me for their speakers' bureau and I started doing AIDS education for them. And it was about this time that I realized I wanted to tell this story. That this was something I felt passionately about.

I'd begun to start playing with the idea of writing this novel. I started keeping character files, writing family biographies of the characters who occurred to me. I had some scenes that came to me and I'd jot them down. Disjointed scenes. I didn't know how the story began. I didn't know how it would end. But it was emerging, and I started to record it on paper.

Well, in teaching high school, I would occasionally have the opportunity to talk to my own students about AIDS education. In my homeroom, I took it upon myself to make kids aware of Ohio AIDS Awareness week. Most of my students were of the mind that AIDS would never touch them, that they didn't know "those kinds" of people, that this was not a problem that meant anything to them or to Dayton, Ohio. So I was passing out statistics of the number of AIDS deaths in our county. Now this was 1991, so the numbers are much different now, but at the time the number of deaths was 301.

And this girl looked at that number and said, "301? Well, that's not very many." And it was like getting slugged in the stomach. Because after working at the AIDS Foundation the difference, to me, between that 300 and that lonely little "and 1" was a face and a name, the sound of a voice, laughter, the children who'd been orphaned, the family grieving. And here was this sophomore girl shrugging off 301 lives as "not very many."

And I realized that to her, they were just numbers. But it was so disturbing to me. And the next day, I found a quote I put up on my board--which is another thing the protagonist of the book does--the quote of the day. And the quote was a Joseph Stalin quote: A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths merely a statistic.

So I kept that quote nearby, too, and knew that my goal was to put a human face on AIDS. But, in a way, that had already been done. We'd had movies like Philadelphia. And there were several beautiful AIDS novels and memoirs already in existence. But as I read everything I could get my hands on, I realized that all those works had something in common: they were all told from a gay male perspective. I found very few other works that were AIDS stories from a different viewpoint. Well I knew the gay male perspective was going to be a barrier to many people like my former students.

And that's when I decided that the main character could be the sister. There's another quote, a motto, in AIDS education, that says, You don't have to be infected to be affected. Just as my own life had been touched by AIDS, so could this main character's. And so the character of Summer became my port of entry into an AIDS story. She could be a character people like my former students could relate to.

I also wanted to write a book that would still be interesting to people who had no problem with gay characters or gay relationships, so my goal became to reach both those audiences. The novel went through many, many different drafts. At one time it was a short story in third person that is now a middle chapter of the novel (the hayloft flashback where Summer discovers Todd is gay). The first draft of the whole novel was in third person and had everyone's entire life story in it. For a time, it was Todd's story, in first person. For a time, the book was broken into these patchwork monologues of all the characters talking about Todd after his death. Everything changed when I decided the story belonged to Summer.

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Sonal: Will we see any of the characters from Travelling Light in future books? [Jacob maybe :)]

Katrina: Ahh . . . everyone loves Jacob! As of right now, I don't plan to have any of the characters return in future books. I have two other story ideas for future novels that are commandeering all the space in my brain right now and they don't include anyone from the Traveling Light cast. I do love these characters, and there was great sadness in letting them go and saying "this book is as finished as I'm capable of finishing it," but I don't think I'd ever bring them back. But the fact that so many people ask--that they continue to think about the characters when the novel is over--is thrilling to me.

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Sonal: What was the purpose of this book
a. just a writing exercise
b. a healing experiment
c. a message; to incease awareness

Katrina: I think I probably OVERanswered this question with question#2. The only thing I'd add is that the answer is probably closer to C. than anything, but that the most important thing to me was to tell a good story. I don't believe a novel is the right forum for a "message." I started with an issue I was passionate about, but then the story had to absorb the message, not carry it.

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Sonal: Your next book sounds very very interesting . . . I read a description that said it was about, "animal communication as a parallel to human communication, lots of hidden agendas, little white lies, two-faced statements, and the intracacies of body language" . . . Do tell us more. Also, do you have some sort of psychology background . . . or is it just plain and simple good observation of humans? :)

Katrina: Uh-oh. I've been found out. No, I don't have a psychology background, but I think the theatre background helps immensely in this second novel.

This novel, Two Truths and a Lie, is really about communication and truth. The main story line involves an actress who has become a habitual liar because the one remarkable thing in her life that was true no one would ever believe. Now she lies at the slightest provocation and the novel begins at a point where her lies threaten to avalanche. The mysterious death of a dear friend, the divorce of her parents, her increasingly serious drinking problem, and the strain of deceiving her husband with her greatest lie ever all finally collide.

The animal communication makes a great parallel. Animals do lie--the dog that acts as if you "forgot" to feed it, the bird that pretends to be injured to lead predators from her nest--but only humans lie about emotions. A dog can't pretend he's happy to see you if he's not, or vice versa. For all our advanced language skills and knowledge, we humans often do a poor job of communicating with each other . . . and with ourselves. Two Truths and a Lie becomes about the emotional truths we keep even from ourselves.

It's scheduled for a June 2001 release.

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