Feathered Quill Book Reviews

 #AuthorInterview with William Overstreet

Today, Feathered Quill reviewer Diana Coyle is talking with William Overstreet, author of Halley's Gathering.

FQ: One of the first things I do when I read a book by an author I’m unfamiliar with is read the author’s bio to get to know them better. Would you please tell us a few things about yourself so that new readers, like myself, can learn about you?

OVERSTREET: I certainly understand the curiosity—I do the same thing, checking out a new author’s bio—but, personally, I’d rather be as anonymous as possible. So I’ll meet you half way. I was born in Troy, NY, grew up in various towns in the Hudson Valley, and went off to college at Cornell University. I also have degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Binghamton University. After that, I always earned my living as a nonfiction writer, mostly in the area of international politics but, for a time, specializing in medical technology. I’m married, we have twins (girl and boy), and live in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts.

FQ: Can you please tell our readers a brief synopsis of your book, Halley’s Gathering, and what specifically makes your book unique?

OVERSTREET: The quickest synopsis I can give is from the back cover:

New Mexico Territory. 1910. Julia Halley, unlikely owner of the Many Springs Canyon Trading Post on the Navajo Reservation, has attracted a small but devoted circle of friends—her “gathering”—both Anglo and Navajo, all with their own stories to tell. Among them, a Southern doctor who opened a free reservation clinic after the Spanish-American War. A Navajo woman, also a healer, who survived the Long Walk of the 1860s. A self-taught photographer and former Franciscan brother. A young surveyor drawn to the Southwest by a fascination with the ancient Anasazi ruins. And living deep in the canyon, Clement Yazzie, half Navajo and half Hopi, whose ruthless reputation conceals a shadowy legacy, and Johanna Yazzie, his enigmatic younger sister, mute since birth.

HALLEY’S GATHERING. A sweeping tale of a new century. When the dawn of the modern is supplanting the violence and isolation of the Old West, but also endangering the Navajo way of life. Where the magnetic Julia Halley struggles against the dictates of polite society to follow her own uncompromising path. Where the controversial explorer Richard Wetherill and the celebrated photographer Edward S. Curtis are among the notable names who play a part. And where, coincidentally, the return of Halley’s Comet is just over the horizon.

It’s unique in the combination of setting and time, the Southwest USA, and more specifically the Navajo Reservation, from roughly 1898 to 1911, a time when the Old West was fading and the Modern was arriving, with all the attendant conflicts and adjustments.

I need to say a bit more about the magnificent Navajo Nation, where I lived for four years. It’s vast, the size of West Virginia, and much of it is sparsely populated. As a result, you can easily find yourself in a landscape that has been virtually untouched by the modern world. (Of course I’m not referring to areas that have been strip mined for coal, and so forth.) For that reason, I had no difficulty describing it as it might have been in 1910.

I think Halley’s Gathering is also rather unique in that I decided from the very beginning to give all of the main characters their full stories, from childhood on, and to provide each with a unique explanation for why they end up at Julia Halley’s trading post. If you’re going to have eight or nine main characters, you’d better make sure they stand on their own.

FQ: I loved how well-written and detailed Halley’s Gathering was and how you wrapped the storyline around characters living during the early 1900’s. In doing so, you wrote in exceptional detail how different it was to be living during this period of time. What made you want to create a storyline specifically set back in the 1900’s?

OVERSTREET: I’ve always loved Westerns—not so much the typical genre Western, though there’s certainly an art to it, but the outliers: Frank Norris’s The Octopus, Willa Cather’s frontier novels, Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. And I have to throw in such classics as The Ox Bow Incident, The Searchers, Shane, Warlock, Butcher’s Crossing, and of course Lonesome Dove, which is the quintessential myth-maker. But I didn’t want to repeat what had already been done so well. The trigger, for me, was that change from the Old West to the Modern.

FQ: What made you decide to have Julia Halley run the Many Springs Canyon Trading Post as an independent owner, which was a rarity for women to do during that time?

OVERSTREET: That was the center around which everything else revolves. Julia had to be more than just unique. (I’m pretty sure I’m safe in saying that in fact no woman of that period ran a Southwest trading post on her own.) She had to be somewhat isolated from the daily pressures of Anglo (white) “civilization,” and she had to be charismatic enough to attract a small circle of devoted friends who were willing to go far out of their way to gather around her.

FQ: Are there any future novels in the works? If so, can you tell us any information about them?

OVERSTREET: Yes. The one I’m closest to finishing takes place at the end of World War II. Totally different time and place, obviously, and with no overlap.

FQ: Where do you look upon for inspiration for what you write?

OVERSTREET: What attracts me is something that hasn’t been written about before. I don’t mean that in a pretentious way. I like to find some actual event, some circumstances that haven’t been fictionalized before. I try to be very careful to anchor what I’m writing in fact. Sometimes I find connections almost at random. In Halley’s Gathering, for example, Julia’s last name was originally Haley, for no special reason. I had already decided on 1910 as the central year because I wanted to tell some of the story of the explorer and trader Richard Wetherill, which has a dramatic conclusion in that year, but well into the writing, I learned that Halley’s Comet had returned in 1910. Several things fell into place at that point, including the central episode when I bring all of the principal characters together in a mountain meadow to view the comet.

FQ: Please tell us what is your writing routine like?

OVERSTREET: I don’t really have one. I do lots of research before beginning, but that continues through the process. I write illegible (to anyone but me, but also sometimes to me) bits on paper as they occur to me, and revise and revise and revise, and I do a lot of writing in my head, working ideas over and over. At some point I sit down at the computer. I don’t necessarily start at the beginning of the story. Most of the actual putting of words on the screen happens in the afternoon or evening, very rarely in the morning.

FQ: To wrap up our interview, is there anything you would like to add to tell our readers?

OVERSTREET: Read the book. Pass it on or recommend it if you like it. It’s out there now, and I’m completely inessential.