Hi girlz! A few weeks ago I attended the Washington State
Book Awards Ceremony at Richard Hugo House in Seattle. I’m delighted to
announce that Katherine Schlick Noe’s
Something
to Hold won in the middle grade/young adult category—and was also named a
Notable Social Studies Trade Book. I covered her launch party
here,
and it was a joy to see her book get the attention it deserves.
Something to Hold is
historical fiction based on Katherine’s experience growing up on the Warm
Springs Indian Reservation. It’s a warm, provocative, poetic look at a time and
place that many of us could never imagine except through stories like
Katherine’s. Below, she answers a few questions about writing from real life:
What was it like
living on an Indian reservation?
For as long as I can remember, other non-Indians have asked
this question. It’s always been
hard to explain. Like all of
the foundational, complex questions of our lives, there are many answers. They finally began to solidify
when I started to write Something to Hold.
This work of fiction is inspired by my memories of living on
the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in central Oregon in the 1960’s. Like Kitty’s dad, mine was a forester
with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
He and my mother left Iowa in 1950 to take a job on the Colville Indian
Reservation in north-central Washington state. They didn’t know then that they would spend the rest of
their lives working with and living among Indian people. My brothers and I were born on the
Colville Reservation, and we moved every four years, living near Washington, DC
and on the Warm Springs and Yakama Reservations.
The years at Warm Springs were pivotal for me, as they are
for all children between the ages of seven and eleven. Something
to Hold is grounded in universals.
We all long to find a place to belong, to make friends, to feel
connected and rooted. The book also
explores a unique perspective of a non-Indian outsider’s growing awareness of
prejudice, including her own.
My writing began with one memory: In the fifth grade at Warm
Springs, a classmate I both feared and admired refused to read out loud, and
our white teacher took her out into the hall, shook her, and left her
there. Reading out loud, one
paragraph at a time, was a normal practice in every school I had attended. I hated it – so boring to listen to
other bored kids read something boring – but I would never have refused. I couldn’t understand why my classmate
would defy this teacher, who allowed
no disobedience of any kind, in this way. That event had a profound impact on me and
is one reason that I eventually became a teacher. No child should be humiliated that way.
That event is also what moved me to write about living at
Warm Springs. Having wrestled with the memory for over 30 years, I did what we
encourage young writers to do -- started listing all that I could remember
about it. Then I began to tell the story. I was writing in order to make
sense for myself, to understand why she would dare to do something I would
never have had the nerve to consider. But, of course, I couldn’t remember
everything, and that’s when the fiction took over.
As Something to Hold
took shape, I had a chance to meet my classmate again. Both of us now grown, we visited over
our class photo, talking about how life had turned out. It was clear that hers had been filled
with hardship, so different from my own.
When I asked her about the event that had affected me so deeply, she
looked me in the eye and said, “It never happened.” I knew in that moment that this was not my story to tell. So
I took that episode apart, changed the details but kept intact the power and
fear and strength of will – all of the emotions that were so influential for me
-- and gave them to my two antagonists, Raymond and Jewel. In the chapter “The Capital of Vermont,” Raymond and Jewel stand up to their
teacher and triumph over humiliation.
And Kitty learns something powerful about speaking out for justice.
Many of the events in
Something
to Hold are based in truth.
The only way I could begin was to build Kitty’s story around my memories:
a Bible-quoting teacher, the death of a
child, a boy who fell through the ceiling of my classroom while working in the
school attic, how razor blades horribly derailed an art project.
I created a series of episodes tethered
loosely to reality – and then slowly wove in the characters.
This image guided me: A basket maker begins with a tangle of warps
and wefts, a mess of strings held in her hand. Carefully, intentionally, and
sometimes magically, she weaves them together into something beautiful, powerful,
and enduring – just as a writer weaves with words.
My goal was to create a
tapestry of characters that manage to find their own way and also to help each
other live with courage and hope – especially when it’s a struggle to do
so. I hope young readers will
identify with Kitty, Raymond, Jewel, and Pinky and the ways in which they reach
across a chasm of difference to connect with one another. I have my classmate to thank for
getting me started.
