Adventure to the Old West in “Outlawed”

When I started the novel that would become Outlawed, I didn’t 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 the 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 — about a group of separatists living in the woods of New Hampshire, where I’d once visited a Shaker dwelling — everything came out flat and boring. I couldn’t visualize the landscape, even though I’d been there. I kept writing pages and throwing pages away.

That’s when I started thinking about another group of people who lived apart from society: outlaws. And I started thinking about Westerns. 

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 they’re 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.

Outlawed came alive for me as soon as I moved it west. I’m from California, and Western settings have always come easier to me — where I’d struggled to picture lush Northeastern woodlands, suddenly I could see the red rocks and scrubland in my head. 

Having a specific genre to work with was helpful too. I’ve always been interested in genre fiction — the way genres like fantasy, mystery, or horror come with certain rules (almost like a villanelle or sestina), creating a challenge for the writer. But in the past, I’d mostly experimented with science fiction and dystopia. This was a chance to do something different.

After months of false starts, Outlawed began to come together: it’s an alternate history retelling of the story of Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and the Hole in the Wall Gang. It’s also the story of Ada, a young midwife who’s 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 didn’t 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 — after all, a big reason people enjoy genre fiction is because it’s entertaining. I wanted to play with the genre of the Western and tell an exciting, new story. 

Maybe one day I’ll write a novel set in the Northeast. Maybe I’ll even write about the Shakers. But for me, what worked this time around was to take what was familiar to me — the West, America, a genre I thought I knew — and look deep into it until it became strange.