Orphan Train

William Baker, Catherine Baker-Pitts, Marina Budhos, Anne Burt, Deb Ellis, Alice Elliott
     Dark, Louise DeSalvo, Bonnie Friedman, Clara Baker Lester, Pamela Redmond Satran,
     and John Veague. My husband, David, read the manuscript with a keen eye and a generous
     heart. Penny Windle Kline briefed me on adoption protocols and provided crucial resources.
     Master Sergeant Jeffrey Bingham and his uncle Bruce Bingham, a retired brigadier general
     in the U.S. Army, offered fact checking for the World War II sections of the novel.
     Bunny McBride, Donna Loring, Robyn Richardson, and Brian Nolan read sections relevant
     to their expertise. Hayden, Will, and Eli, my sons, gently corrected any errant teen-speak.
     My agent, Beth Vesel, was in her remarkable way both mentor and friend. And my editor
     at Morrow, Katherine Nintzel—in addition to her usual good sense and intelligent advice—suggested
     a structural change at the eleventh hour that transformed the narrative.
    This book would not exist without the train riders themselves. Having been privileged
     to meet six of them (all between the ages of ninety and one hundred) and read hundreds
     of their first-person narratives, I am filled with admiration for their courage, fortitude,
     and perspective on this strange and little-known episode in our nation’s history.

About the author
    Meet Christina Baker Kline

    Karin Diana
    CHRISTINA BAKER KLINE is a novelist, nonfiction writer, and editor. In addition to Orphan Train, her novels include Bird in Hand, The Way Life Should Be, Desire Lines, and Sweet Water.
    Kline also commissioned and edited two widely praised collections of original essays
     on the first year of parenthood and raising young children, Child of Mine and Room to Grow. She coauthored a book on feminist mothers and daughters, The Conversation Begins, with her mother, Christina L. Baker, and she coedited About Face: Women Write About What They See When They Look in the Mirror with Anne Burt.
    Kline grew up in Maine, England, and Tennessee, and has spent a lot of time in Minnesota
     and North Dakota, where her husband grew up. She is a graduate of Yale, Cambridge,
     and the University of Virginia, where she was a Hoyns Fellow in Fiction Writing. She
     has taught creative writing and literature at Fordham and Yale, among other places,
     and is a recent recipient of a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation fellowship. She lives
     in Montclair, New Jersey, with her family.

About the book
    Christina Baker Kline Talks with Roxana Robinson
    ROXANA ROBINSON is the author of Cost— named by the Washington Post as one of the five best fiction books of 2008—as well as three earlier novels, three
     short story collections, and the biography Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. Four of these publications were New York Times Notable Books. Robinson’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories , the New York Times, and elsewhere. She was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library and has
     received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony,
     and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. Her novel Sparta is forthcoming.
    RR: Could you talk about how this book started? What gave you the idea for it?
    CBK: About a decade ago, while visiting my in-laws in North Dakota, I came across a nonfiction
     book printed by the Fort Seward Historical Society called Century of Stories: Jamestown and Stutsman County, 1883–1983 . In it was an article titled “They called it ‘Orphan Train’—and it proved there was
     a home for many children on the prairie.” My husband’s grandfather Frank Robertson
     and his siblings featured prominently in the story. This was news to me—I’d never
     heard of the orphan trains. In the course of researching this family lore, I found
     out that although orphan trains did, in fact, stop in Jamestown, North Dakota, and
     orphans from those trains were adopted there, the Robertson clan came from Missouri.
     But my interest was piqued, and I knew I wanted to learn more about this little-known
     period in American history.
    RR: What was it that was most compelling to you about the idea of an orphan train?
    CBK: I think I was drawn to the orphan train story in part because two of my own grandparents
     were orphans who spoke little about their early lives. As a novelist, I’ve always
     been fascinated with how people tell the stories of their lives and what those stories