Research

1. Before doing your research for this novel were you already interested in Andrew Wyeth’s artwork? Or did you pick the story and then start looking into his work?
2. What kind of research did you do on the painter and the painting?
3. How did you learn about Christina?
4. What especially surprised you in the course of your research?
5. In the back of “A Piece of the World,” you make it very clear that this is by no means a biography of Christina Olson, but instead just a fictionalized account of her life. That being said, how much of the story was true? Or rather, how much creative freedom did you take when presenting the life of Christina in your novel?
6. You grew up very close to where this story actually took place. Throughout the writing process, did you return home and travel out to any of these historical places to really get a feel for the environment Christina lived in?
7. As you were doing this research, was there any one character that you wish you could have spent a little more time on, but in the end you couldn’t because it’s not their story it’s Christina’s?
8. Some of the details in this book are really interesting, and really lovely. I enjoyed reading about her cooking and sewing. But there’s also a lot of stuff about farming and fishing and life in the early 20th century in rural Maine. How did you find out about those things?
9. And as you were researching this and trying to get to know how people lived at that time, what stood out for you? 
10. For more on Christina’s research: The Portland Press Herald, “The Work of Recreating ‘Christina’s World’” (ME) 8/2017

1. Before doing your research for this novel were you already interested in Andrew Wyeth’s artwork? Or did you pick the story and then start looking into his work?

I had grown up seeing that painting when I was young. It was also sort of widely popular when I was growing up. You know a lot of girls had it on their walls, it was a poster people had. It was just a well known image and I didn’t know much about Andrew Wyeth beyond that until I started going to museums and learning about him, about who he was and what the whole story was. So, I guess I would say I learned about the painting first.

2. What kind of research did you do on the painter and the painting?
   

I did a ton of research. I read art histories, biographies, nonfiction accounts of the Salem Witch Trials, seafaring journals, memoirs about living in Maine and living in the woods; visited museums and the Olson House; interviewed friends and family members and tour guides and curators; watched documentaries. I took pages and pages of notes, which I eventually turned into a 50-page single-spaced timeline that became my bible. I wrote the story chronologically, stopping along the way to do further research as necessary, but in the end I threaded the Wyeth story throughout the story of Christina Olson’s growing up years.I read lots of books about Wyeth, about Christina Olson. Wyeth’s biography by Richard Meryman is a great book. I loved it, partly because Wyeth is so eloquent describing how he felt about his subjects, especially Christina. How he felt about what she represented, about the feelings he was trying to evoke in his paintings of her and the house and of her family.
And then I interviewed a Wyeth relative and an Olson relative, tour guides for the Olson house, museum curators. I just lived in that space for a couple of years.

3. How did you learn about Christina?
   

I read everything I could get my hands on, I took tours of the house, I became friends with the tour guides, I interviewed, and was lucky to befriend, the chief curator at the Farnsworth house, and I interviewed members of the Wyeth family, and the Olson family, and people who knew them, and I really immersed myself in Christina’s real world.
Christina didn’t have any children, but her brothers, except Alvaro, the brother she lived with, did. I was fortunate enough to speak with Jean Brooks Olson, her niece, a lovely woman who wrote an incredible book that’s now out of print that’s about Christina Olson (“Christina Olson: Her World Beyond the Canvas,” by Olson and Deborah Dalfonso).
Many of the details that she described in a sentence or two I used as the basis for chapters. And so I felt very lucky not only to have access to that book and to have talked to her in person.
Christina’s nephew John, who by many accounts was her favorite, also wrote a book, a sort of autobiography, but a lot of it was about Christina (“John Olson: My story, as told to Christina Olson”). But probably my greatest resource was Richard Meryman’s biography of Andrew Wyeth (“Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life”).
I wanted to see if I could do this, even though it’s a first-person narration, by sticking to the facts almost entirely.

4. What especially surprised you in the course of your research?
   

There were a number of things about Christina’s choices that were surprising to me. I didn’t realize she never spoke to her best friend again, that she sabotaged her brother’s only chance at having a lifelong partner. She was stifled. She was a brilliant girl, but was taken out of school at 12. I think she had quite a lot of anger. In a bigger sense, the novel is about women in history who were silenced by domestic chores and weren’t able to flourish.
I was trying not to be overt, but I wanted to show this person was distorted in some ways. Stymied. That felt very sad to me, but it’s the story of many people; she’s not alone in this. An interviewer said the book is a Rorschach test; depending on where you come from you respond very differently. I spoke before an audience in an affluent suburb of a big West-Coast city, and one woman said Christina was very depressing, wasn’t it a downer to write about someone like this? Another woman said, I’m from Maine—a lot of people there are like this!
I felt she had three great loves in her life—her brother Alvaro, a wonderful person; her one-time suitor Walton, a terrible person; and Andrew Wyeth, who saw her for who she was. With Wyeth, I felt he was able to relate to her on a level nobody else could. He said, If you had ended up with Walton, you would have had a conventional life but we wouldn’t be having this conversation now. With Wyeth, she was able to achieve autonomy. I saw it as a happy ending…

5. In the back of “A Piece of the World,” you make it very clear that this is by no means a biography of Christina Olson, but instead just a fictionalized account of her life. That being said, how much of the story was true? Or rather, how much creative freedom did you take when presenting the life of Christina in your novel?
   

I set myself the task that as much as possible the story would be factually accurate. It’s an internal story, first person narration, so of course I channeled her—I was not really inside of her head in real life. I made that up. But, the facts of the story are pretty true. And as much  as possible I worked with them. I wasn’t making up a lot. Well, I mean I was making up a lot but there are certain people in her life that wrote about her, like her niece Jean Olson. [She wrote] kind of a biography about her and it’s very very short. So Jean Olson might have two lines about something and then I turn that into a whole chapter… But, the reason I did it was really that there are a lot of people still alive who were in the book. The story of Christina Olson… a lot of people will only know her personal story because I wrote it. So, I wanted people to feel like they were really getting the facts of what her life was like.

6. You grew up very close to where this story actually took place. Throughout the writing process, did you return home and travel out to any of these historical places to really get a feel for the environment Christina lived in?
   

Oh for sure! I grew up in Maine about an hour and a half from where the house is. I went back to the house and I got to know these tour guides who work there, two in particular, that were really helpful. I [went] there and this woman, this tour guide, took me aside and slipped me her card and said I have all of this information if you want to talk further. And I did. I reached out to her right away and we became really good friends. This other tour guide also reached out and so we became friends. The two of them introduced me to other people, like family members, who could help me and things like that. I interviewed a lot of people and in some ways I treated it like a nonfiction book even though I think when you read it, it is clearly not a nonfiction book. You know, it’s a novel—it’s this woman’s personal story. It would be impossible to write nonfiction unless you were actually her in that way. As time went on, I felt this responsibility to try to be accurate because when you finish this novel you are left with this impression of this women and I wanted it to be kind of accurate.

7. As you were doing this research, was there any one character that you wish you could have spent a little more time on, but in the end you couldn’t because it’s not their story it’s Christina’s?
   

That is the best question ever because I wrote specifically this at the beginning [of the novel] about the Salem Witch Trials and about her father stranded on ice. We decided to cut it because it wasn’t quite her story. I wrote it at the very beginning because I was just getting into it. So that section is actually going to be published on…LitHub (an online newsletter that gets sent to your inbox)… [as] a short story. But, that story that whole crazy background about the Salem Witch Trials and her father…I could have written a whole book about her father. [His] coming over and what it was like to be this Swedish sailor who didn’t speak English. He was pretty calculating actually to look up at that house on the hill and decide that’s my ticket. He definitely had a plan.

8. Some of the details in this book are really interesting, and really lovely. I enjoyed reading about her cooking and sewing. But there’s also a lot of stuff about farming and fishing and life in the early 20th century in rural Maine. How did you find out about those things?
   

I had done some of the research for Orphan Train, but I read some of the books that were published in Maine; one called “Old Maine Woman,” and then there was a follow up to that one. One’s called “We Took to the Woods” (by Louise Dickinson Rich), about a family that just went off into this house, in sort of the present day, who lived the way Christina lived. My friend John Veague taught me a lot about fishing – he fished as a child the way Alvaro fishes with his father, with handmade hooks, and handmade lures and everything.