Orphan Train

reveal—intentionally or not—about who they are. I’m intrigued by the spaces between
     words, the silences that conceal long-kept secrets, the elisions that belie surface
     appearance.
    My own background is partly Irish, and so I decided that I wanted to write about an
     Irish girl who has kept silent about the circumstances that led her to the orphan
     train. I wanted to write about how traumatic events beyond our control can shape and
     define our lives. “People who cross the threshold between the known world and that
     place where the impossible does happen discover the problem of how to convey that
     experience,” Kathryn Harrison writes. Over the course of this novel, my central character,
     Vivian, moves from shame about her past to acceptance, eventually coming to terms
     with what she’s been through. In the process, she learns about the regenerative power
     of reclaiming—and telling—her own life story.
    Like my four previous novels, Orphan Train wrestles with questions of cultural identity and family history. But I knew right
     away that this was a bigger story and would require extensive research. The vast canvas
     appealed to me immensely. I was eager to broaden my scope.
    RR: Did you go to the Midwest to see any of the sites you describe here?
    CBK: I’ve been going to Minnesota and North Dakota for decades. I know Minneapolis fairly
     well and feel a great affinity for the region. My husband’s family has a lake home
     near Park Rapids, Minnesota, and I’ve spent a lot of time there. Several of the small
     towns I describe in this novel are invented, as is Spruce Harbor, Maine, the setting
     for the present-day story. (Spruce Harbor is also the setting for another of my novels, The Way Life Should Be .) Planting an imaginary town in a real landscape gives me freedom as a writer to
     invent as I go.
    RR: What sort of research did you do for the book, and did you interview people who were
     connected to the train? What was that like?
    CBK: After finding articles online from the New York Times and other newspapers, I read hundreds of first-person testimonials from train riders,
     orphan-train reunion groups, and historical archives. That research led me to the
     New York Public Library, where I found a trove of original contemporaneous materials.
     I devoured nonfiction histories, children’s novels, and picture books, and conducted
     research at the New York Tenement Museum and Ellis Island. I also traveled to County
     Galway in Ireland to research my character’s Irish background.
    In the course of writing this book I attended train riders’ reunions in New York and
     Minnesota, and interviewed train riders and their descendants. There aren’t many train
     riders left; those who remain are all over ninety years old. I was struck by how eager
     they were to tell their stories, to each other and to me. In talking to them and reading
     their oral histories, I found that they tended not to dwell on the considerable hardships
     they’d faced; instead, they focused on how grateful they were for their children,
     grandchildren, and communities—for lives that wouldn’t have been possible if they
     hadn’t been on those trains. I realized that in fiction I could do something that
     is difficult to do in real life: I could dwell on the stark details of the experience
     without needing to create a narrative of redemption.
    RR: What was the most surprising thing that came out of the research? What was it that
     you hadn’t expected?
    CBK: For decades, many train riders believed that the train they rode on was the only
     one. They didn’t know that they were part of a massive seventy-five-year social experiment.
     It wasn’t until their own children and grandchildren got involved and started asking
     questions (there are more than two million descendants, according to some estimates)
     that they met other train riders and began sharing their stories.
    RR: You have two teenage girls as main characters, and though they are widely separated
     by time and circumstances, they share some things. Could you talk about that?
    CBK: When you write novels, you go on instinct much of the time. As I began writing about
     Molly, a seventeen-year-old Penobscot Indian foster child, believe it or not, I didn’t
     immediately notice parallels to Vivian, a wealthy ninety-one-year-old widow. But as
     I wrote my way into the narrative I could see that in addition to some biographical
     parallels—both