Transcription of Christina Baker Kline for the show Love Maine Review 2014 #172
Lisa: Anybody who listens to the radio show on a regular basis knows what a big reader I am and one of my favorite things to do is to pick up a book, read it, find myself completely engaged, and then, get the chance to meet the person who wrote the book that had me spellbound for hours at a time.
Today, we have that individual with us today. This is Christina Baker Kline. She is a novelist, non-fiction writer and editor, who wrote the number one New York Times bestseller Orphan Train, as well as Bird in Hand, The Way Life Should Be, Desire Lines, and Sweet Water.
Christina lives with her family in Mont Clair new Jersey and spends summers on Mount Desert Island. Thanks so much for coming in and talking with us today.
Christina: Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here.
Lisa: This book is truly a great book. I really enjoyed it in part because of the writing. Obviously, the writing is great, but also, it’s such an interesting story, the Orphan Train. Tell people who are listening who may not have read before what this book is about.
Christina: My novel is about a 91-year old woman who lives in the coast of Maine. She’s a wealthy widow in a big old house and the 17-year-old girl who comes into her life who is a troubled goth part Penobscot Indian foster kid who’s had a really hard time a bit, steals a book from the library and has to do community service.
She comes to work for this old woman and her job is to help clean up the attic. Her attitude is that she just wants to get it over with because she thinks they have nothing in common and it’s just this old woman who has a lot of money and really doesn’t look anything like here, act anything like her either.
Over the course of the novel however, as she begins to unpack the boxes, she realized that this woman has a hidden past as an orphan train rider. Not only that, which I’ll explain in just a second, but they also come to understand that they have a lot more in common than they ever would have imagined in terms of the kind of childhood that they both share, so through their friendship, they discovered things about themselves that they never would have known.
The Orphan Trains are just kind of incredible piece for American history that’s been hidden in plain sight. Two hundred and fifty thousand children, perhaps more even, were sent from the East Coast to the Midwest. Over 75 years, it was the largest migration of children in our nation’s history from 1854 to 1929, and very few people know about it.
It was a labor program. The children were between the ages of 2 and 14 years old, and they were sent to the Midwest specifically indentured and contracted to work for farmers and other people who chose them.
Randomly, there was no screening process. They were just given to whoever showed up. They had to line up by height and they stood on platforms and people tested their muscles and their teeth, and made them run in place, and it really was, in some ways, resembled a slave auction. The children aged out at 18, but until then, they were sort of the property of the people who took them.
It’s a sort of chilling and surprising, I think, bit of our own past again that we don’t tend to know much about.
Lisa: The main character or one of the main characters in the book is actually a modern child who is being taking out of a family situation and put into a different family situation, so there is a parallel there with the older woman that she meets that is a train rider.
Christina: That’s right. I work with a lot of foster care organizations now since the book came out and there’s a foster child in it, but I also did a lot of research and I have friends who’ve taken in foster children, and I know that even though … Actually, I did a benefit the other night and a former foster child spoke.
He was so amazing and he was about 21. He came up to me at the end because I spoke as well and he said “The feeling … The situation of the train riders is a unique thing, but I have to tell you, reading your book, the feelings I had as a foster child are the same. The circumstances are different, but the feelings you have being displaced, being unwanted and unloved, and that you don’t have a home is exactly the same way it felt to me.”
When I wrote the book, I actually wasn’t calculated about the connections. I stumbled into their relationship having this residences. Instinctively, I felt that having this 91-year old woman, like many train riders, had never told her story, and I didn’t think that she would tell it to just anyone. I thought it would have to be someone who’s sort of on the social fringes maybe who wouldn’t be asking the normal questions or just politely wanting to know, but instead we’d have a motivation for asking.
That’s how I came up with the idea of Molly, this character, and there were many other reasons that I chose this, the Penobscot Indian angle and all of that stuff.
My mother was very involved with [inaudible 00:50:10]. She was a state legislator in Maine. I grew up in Maine. I was drawn to her, I think, unconsciously, understanding that there were connections, but as anybody who writes fiction knows, you often don’t know why you’re writing a story until you’re telling it.
The writing begets the revelations. It’s usually not the other way around that you calculate it, kind of figure out what the elements are and put them into a story. You often have to follow your instinct and trust that you’re being led somewhere that will be fruitful, and that’s what happened to me in this book. The connections between them only became obvious as I wrote my way into the story.
Lisa: As a result of the success of Orphan Train, you’re being asked to do many events, lots of community reads, and it seems as though this has really touched people in a big way. Why do you think that that’s true?
Christina: I thought about that a lot because this is my fifth novel and honestly, I like them all. The other ones have done pretty well, but nothing on the scale of this novel which will soon have sold a million copies.
It’s a completely different experience and honestly, it feels like a fluke to me and I feel above lucky to experience it and a little overwhelmed. I do think that … Believe me, I’ve thought about this a lot because when I was writing the book and I and my publisher had no idea.
In fact, I remember at one point they said, “Well, we’re not sure that you’re going to” … After I’d finished it, “that you’re going to hit the demographics because you’ve got this odd 17 year old and then this cranky to 91 year olds and who’s going to read about those people? We don’t know.”
It kind of unfolded slowly, and in fact, the book has been out for over a year and it climbed the bestseller list slowly and then it just hung on, so it’s been a kind of slow built.
I think the truth is that a lot of people are interested in this story about America that they didn’t know. I’ve a lot of men who come to events and write me who say they never have read any of my books and thought that they were women’s books, and that now, with this historical angle, they’re interested in it. There’s that aspect.
I think a lot of people are wondering how to handle displaced children in our society. There’s a lot of talk about the foster care system and how to improve it and make it better. I think there’s that part of the story.
I also think probably that the connection between generations is something that a lot of people are interested and then thinking about as people live longer. I have a lot of mother and daughter book clubs who come up to me every events. I have grandmothers and granddaughters reading the story together. There is something too about that connection between these unlikely friends that have, as I believe, struck a cord.
I’m not sure. Do you have any other thoughts on that? Those are the ones that come to mind for me.
Lisa: I think that you probably have hit it. I mean, when I read this book, after I was done with it, I gave it to my 18-year-old and I also have a 13-year old daughter, and I said, “You really need to read this book,” because there was something about it. I think I felt the same thing.
I’m not in a mother-daughter book club and she and I don’t always read the same books, but there was something about it, I think, that the bond between the two women in the book and it was sort of a family bond even though the 91-year old and the 17-year old weren’t actually related.
Christina: Yeah, exactly. I think I’ve heard that a lot. A lot of parents say it was so wonderful to talk to my girl or boy or children about what it really was like to be a child in that period because they have no idea, and we … They said, these people come up to me at readings often say we have a sort of fairly comfortable life and they just didn’t know that children have not always lived this way.
The idea that children were considered labor and that there was no such thing as childhood is shocking to people especially children who have never really heard about that before. By children, I mean, teens really. I would say 13 … I have a number of 13-year olds who have communicated with me who read the book, I would say most readers started around 14 it seems, 14, 15, because there are a few scenes in the book that are a little disturbing although not particularly graphic.
Lisa: Christina, what can we look forward to from you in the future?
Christina: My next novel is inspired by the painting “Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth and it’s actually her story, certain in the first person and she tells the story of what she’s doing in that field and what she’s looking at, and what has to do with her very interesting real life story.
I’ve been working with several tour guides at the White House in Cushing, Maine. I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on, and I’ve discovered that her story, her ancestry, how they got to Cushing and how she ended up there, and what her passions were and how they manifested themselves is so interesting that you almost don’t need to write a novel about it, but I am, but I am writing a novel. I’m using as much as I can from her real life.
Lisa: I look forward to that and I know that people who are listening also will look forward to it. Also, anybody who has not yet read Orphan Train, I highly recommend it. How do people find out about your work, Christina?
Christina: Actually, on my website which is just my name dot com, christinabakerkline.com, or my Facebook author page which is my public page, I have events. If people want to catch up with me in the summer, I will be doing some events with Ayelet Waldman who has a new novel called Love and Treasure in Maine. I’ll be doing that.
Also, on my website, I have a tab called “Book Clubs” and it has tons of information about the non-fiction aspect of Orphan Train and I also answered the top 10 questions that people tend to ask.
Lisa: We are so pleased that you were able to come into our studio, talk with us today. For people who know the show, we … You may know that we schedule people far in advance and we actually just accidentally called you up and got you to come in at the last minute, so we’re really privileged to have you here.
We’ve been speaking with Christina Baker Kline, novelist, nonfiction writer and editor, and author of the No.1 New York Time’s Bestseller, Orphan Train. Thanks so much for coming in.
Christina: Thank you for having me.