Interview With Kristin Bair O’Keeffe, Author of Thirsty

Post written by Christa Avampato. You can follow Christa on Twitter.

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We’re thrilled to feature an interview with Kristin Bair O’Keeffe, one of our fabulous TJCC contributors, whose novel Thirsty, will be released on October 1, 2009.

Tuesday, September 15, is Kristin’s Amazon Spike Day! If your curiosity is peeked, you can buy Thirsty on September 15 at Amazon.com. You can also read an excerpt from Thirsty here.

Kristin’s debut novel Thirsty (Swallow Press, Oct 2009) tells the story of one woman’s unusual journey through an abusive marriage, against the backdrop of a Pittsburgh steel community at the turn of the twentieth century.

Her work has been published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Poets & Writers Magazine, San Diego Family Magazine, The Baltimore Review, The Gettysburg Review, and many other publications. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago and has been teaching writing for almost fifteen years.

Christa: What inspired you to write Thirsty?

Kristin: As a writer, I’m deeply affected by place so I’m not surprised that Thirsty, the town, came to me first. I grew up in Pittsburgh’s steel-making milieu. My maternal grandparents lived in Clairton, Pennsylvania, and my grandfather worked in U.S. Steel’s Clairton Works.

This was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and steel was everything in Pittsburgh. We talked about steel over dinner. My sisters and I chanted, “Rotten eggs, rotten eggs,” every time we took the twenty-five-minute drive from our house to our grandparents’ house and got close enough to smell the mills on the Monongahela River. And from my grandparents’ back porch, we watched flames and big puffs of steam rise from the smokestacks.

Later, in the 1980s, we witnessed the demise of the steel industry.

Not long after I saw the town of Thirsty clearly in my head, Klara began to appear. Right away I saw the awful marriage she was in. I’m especially sensitive to women in abusive situations, and when I began to see Klara both as a young girl and an old woman, I knew I was going to be writing a story with a long arc.

Christa: Tell us about the process of writing Thirsty.

Kristin: I wrote the first scene of Thirsty during my first semester of graduate school in 1992. (I got an MFA in creative writing from Columbia College Chicago.) Once that scene was on the page, I became obsessed with Klara’s story. I got up every morning at 5:00 or so, hunkered down in my little writing nook, and wrote like crazy. Then I’d haul a week’s worth of work into my writing workshops at Columbia, get feedback and much-needed support, and head home for more writing.

By the time I finished grad school in 1996, I had a full draft. I worked on it off and on for another three years or so, then launched myself into the process of finding a publisher.

Christa: How did you find your publisher?

Kristin: I took a circuitous, scenic route to publication. It took sixteen years from the day I wrote the first scene to the day I got the email from David Sanders at Swallow Press that said, yep, we want to publish this book.

I’m a big believer in right time, right place. I always knew Thirsty would find its home; I just didn’t know when or where.

Christa: What are you working on now?

Kristin: I’m working on two big projects right now: a memoir about my path to love, marriage, and mamahood (definitely not the usual path) and a second novel (still a secret). And, as always, I have a lot of smaller projects going: my column about fiction writing for the ezine Writers on the Rise, essays about living in China.

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Kristin lives in Shanghai, China, with her husband and daughter. If you’d like to learn more about Thirsty, visit www.thirstythenovel.com and www.kristinbairokeeffe.com.

Tagged as: Book Reviews, Christa Avampato, Interviews, Writing