When I started the novel that would becomeย Outlawed, I didnโt know what I was doing.
I had an idea about a group of people living apart from society, fending for themselves and abiding by their own rules. I was thinking a lot about theย Shakers, a Christian sect that practiced communal living and celibacy. Issues of fertility, infertility, and reproduction were on my mind a lot, perhaps not least because my husband and I were talking about having a child.
But when I sat down to write โย about a group of separatists living in the woods of New Hampshire, where Iโd once visited a Shaker dwelling โ everything came out flat and boring. I couldnโt visualize the landscape, even though Iโd been there. I kept writing pages and throwing pages away.
Thatโs when I started thinking about another group of people who lived apart from society: outlaws. And I started thinking about Westerns.ย
The Western has a reputation as a pretty dated genre, populated by white men shooting guns at one another (and racist depictions of Indigenous people, if theyโre depicted at all). But when I started reading more, I realized that not all Westerns are like that, and that there have always been writers who used the landscapes and tropes of the American West to tell a more complex story. I thought maybe I could do the same.
Outlawedย came alive for me as soon as I moved it west. Iโm from California, and Western settings have always come easier to me โ where Iโd struggled to picture lush Northeastern woodlands, suddenly I could see the red rocks and scrubland in my head.ย
Having a specific genre to work with was helpful too. Iโve always been interested in genre fiction โ the way genres like fantasy, mystery, or horror come with certain rules (almost like aย villanelleย orย sestina), creating a challenge for the writer. But in the past, Iโd mostly experimented with science fiction and dystopia. This was a chance to do something different.
After months of false starts,ย Outlawedย began to come together: itโs an alternate history retelling of the story of Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and theย Hole in the Wall Gang. Itโs also the story of Ada, a young midwife whoโs forced to leave her home and go on an adventure to find both safety and her true calling in life.
As I was writing the book, I wanted to deal with big themes: gender, sexuality, the history of childbirth in America. The more research I did, the more I understood the West as a place where, for some people, the regular rules didnโt apply. But it was also a space of colonialism, where freedom for some came at a cost to others. I was thinking about those tensions a lot as I wrote.
At the same time, I really wanted the book to be fun โ after all, a big reason people enjoy genre fiction is because itโs entertaining. I wanted to play with the genre of the Western and tell an exciting, new story.ย
Maybe one day Iโll write a novel set in the Northeast. Maybe Iโll even write about the Shakers. But for me, what worked this time around was to take what was familiar to me โ the West, America, a genre I thought I knew โ and look deep into it until it became strange.
