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| Taya Okerlund, Author HURRICANE COLTRANE |
Taya Okerlund
likes to “crash differences” in her writing, and is getting ready to release HURRICANE COLTRANE,
a new novel set in Hurricane, Utah, a real town with characters whose traits
she pulled from real people. She integrates several themes, including music,
family, friendship, polygamy, and the search for an unknown father. She has
written the book to be entertaining but hopes young readers “come away more
comfortable with themselves and more willing to let other people be different.”
Okerlund
currently lives on the San Francisco peninsula, although she has lived
throughout the United States, studied in Asia, and has “roots” in Utah. She is
working on her next novel—a comic thriller. She likes to spend time with her
husband and daughter, and enjoys visiting fabric stores.
Don't miss the excerpt following the interview, and the opportunity to pre-order the e-book version at a discount.
Q: Your novel
HURRICANE COLTRANE integrates several themes, including, music, family,
friendship, polygamy, the search for an unknown father. What inspired you to
integrate these into one story?
Taya Okerlund: I love Chaim
Potok’s The Chosen. The most crashing
differences are often couched between the closest neighbors. HURRICANE COLTRANE
is not a re-telling, but I took a minority American religion and crossed it
with its red-headed, oft-despised fundamentalist splinter group.
For
Robbie, I pitted a culturally impossible aspiration (music) against immovable
family loyalty.
I
have special sympathy for my narrating character, however. Merrill Hinton is
emotionally wounded by his mother’s secrecy and embattled by his peers’
judgment. His intrepid mind leads him into a world well beyond his depth and
into very deep water.
Q: Your title
cites Coltrane, a saxophonist, but your cover shows a photo of a trombone. Is
there a reason that you connected the two? How did you come up with the title?
Taya Okerlund: Merrill plays
the trombone. Robbie plays sax, though it’s when Robbie has “borrowed”
Merrill’s trombone that the two first meet. My publisher wanted to keep some
ambiguity as to the identity of the boy on the cover, because it is a dual
story arc.
Hurricane
is a real town. None of the setting is fictionalized. Since Robbie loves to
play jazz sax, I made him Hurricane’s own Coltrane. It felt kind of snappy and
my publisher likes it.
Q: How do you
help readers engage with your characters? Why do we care what happens to them?
Have you based them on real people? Are they heroes?
Taya Okerlund: They are types
of real people…portions of people. If you’d asked me whether this story was
autobiographical two months ago, I would have denied it flat. But then I was
thinking about this very question, and I realized Merrill’s cantankerousness is
pulled straight from a difficult period of my childhood. His intelligence more
closely resembles my husband. I had no idea I had drawn heavily from an awkward
period of my youth until just recently. So my narrating character is a
composite of me, and my husband.
I care about my
characters. They are the memes of my youth, and they stand for many of my
fondest hopes—real friendship, self-acceptance, and self-actualization. I think
other readers may care about the same things.
Q: How helpful
is the setting to tell your story? How important, for example, is the polygamy
community? Could you have told this story in another location, e.g., San
Francisco, or would it have been a different story?
Taya Okerlund: The Utah
desert was settled at a time inhospitable to life. Without a canal system on
par with the ancient Egyptians (no exaggeration) the community that eventually
thrived there could never have existed.
Those
were my people. They were great survivors, but often hard-bitten and cynical.
They were living on the rough fringe of the social fabric…a community of
exiles, and I’m not talking about polygamy. The polygamists still are, in fact,
exiles, but in a self-imposed way.
Southern
Utah is inhospitable, but its landscape is glorious. (If you’ve ever visited,
then you know what I mean.) I believe my characters are an outgrowth of that
landscape, both rough and yet rich at the same time.
This
piece of the country and the people who settled it are important to the story.
There are polygamist compounds in Texas and Canada, but this story is unique to
southern Utah.
Q: Did your
upbringing influence your writing? How?
Taya Okerlund: I don’t know if
it was my upbringing per se, but I was a solitary child, and not very clever
extemporaneously. I spent a lot of time in my head, often creating dialogues
where I could finally respond to people in ways I thought smart. It was
excellent author practice.
Q: Did you
write HURRICANE COLTRANE to deliver a message, educate, or just to entertain?
What do you expect a young reader to take away from it?
Taya Okerlund: Entertainment
was paramount. This isn’t a soap-box story. I wrote it to be a fun read and I
think I succeeded. But I didn’t disguise who I am. That can’t be helped and
shouldn’t be. I hope young readers come away more comfortable with themselves
and more willing to let other people be different. I hope they will be a little
easier on each other…that they give a pass to the really annoying boy or girl
who asks for trouble, and possibly deserves whatever she gets. This because we
all have rough edges, and the thing is to keep them exposed so we can wear them
down gradually.
Q: Does the
concept of “villain vs hero” apply to your story?
Taya Okerlund: Not especially.
There are no real villains here. None but misguided, sometimes horribly,
humanity.
Q: What was the
most difficult part about writing your story? How did you overcome the difficulty?
Taya Okerlund: I had a crisis
of confidence at one point during revisions. I pushed through it and pulled the
trigger with a smaller press. I do think it all came out well, but I’m still
going on faith.
Q: What’s next?
Taya Okerlund: I’m working on
a comic thriller. It's untitled, but
is about the daughter of a fallen Chinese Communist Party leader arrested for
corruption (hint: not really). The Chinese security service is chasing my
heroine now and she's got to outrun the service and survive on limited funds
until she turns eighteen and can claim the family fortune stashed in Swiss
vaults.
Q: Tell us
about Taya Okerlund. What do you like to do when you’re not writing?
Taya Okerlund: I like to spend
time with my husband and daughter, going to beautiful places in nature,
relaxing and be quiet.
I
like creative work…fabric stores--you should definitely go in after me if I get
lost in one. I used to like to travel, but I’m too tired now. I like short
weekend trips to Monterey, and food, if I could still eat it.
About Taya
Okerlund
“I grew up all
over the United States, and studied in East Asia, though my roots reach deep
into the southern Utah desert where most of my members still live. I currently
keep house on the San Francisco Peninsula with my story-adoring husband and
daughter who keep me busy and inspired.”
About HURRICANE COLTRANE
· Merrill
Hinton is a lightning rod in a town named for bad weather. He's an ace in math,
but not smart enough to put together the pieces of his puzzling life, especially
where finding his unknown father is concerned.
·
Musical genius Robbie Stubbs was born
in nearby polygamist compound Colorado City. He has the chops to become another
John Coltrane, but that will take running away from home, and into a firestorm
of controversy--the kind his friend Merrill knows best.
·
Merrill sets Robbie onto a course
that could rocket them both onto center stage, but being the focus of wide
public attention will create serious issues. Robbie's mother is not well, and
the shock of her son breaking the family rules like this may put her over the
edge.
Excerpt
Hurricane,
Utah, is the sticks. Not the deep sticks, like Virgin, a few miles up the
mesa—and believe me, we take it personally if you can’t tell the difference—but
it’s still the sticks. Hurricane will never be like Park City or other small
towns movie stars put on the map.
The
good thing about Hurricane is it’s on the road to somewhere. One of the seven
natural wonders of the world, in fact. If you’re visiting the North Rim of the
Grand Canyon, at some point you have to find yourself in Hurricane—not because
it’s your destination, but because your path lies through it.
For
me, Hurricane is a starting point, not a destination . . . hopefully. But for
Robbie Stubbs, Hurricane’s a mere pit stop. He is meant for the sticks even
less than I am. He is going somewhere, and I’m not talking about the Grand
Canyon. By the time I met him, he was already in trouble. But the road between
the sticks and somewhere is never easy-going.
Links
Pre-release sale of e-book! Click here
Twitter
address https://twitter.com/TOkerlund
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