Author of THE APPEARANCE OF ANNIE VAN SINDEREN

Q: THE APPEARANCE OF ANNIE VAN SINDEREN is set in NYC, both present day and with glimpses at 1825. Why did you choose this region of the country to tell this story?

A: New York City is a figure of myth and magic for many people, and I am no exception. I went to college in New York, and so it’s the place where I went to try to figure out who I wanted to be. I think New York has served that role from its inception. New York is a city of new arrivals, and of people passing through. I like to imagine that the city carries traces of all the people who were drawn there, or forced to go there, or dreamed of going there. And I’m not the only one – the Hudson River valley has been rich in ghost lore, almost from the very beginning. Ghosts can be both frightening and reassuring – they both represent our fear of the unknown, while also reassuring us that others have gone before us. In ANNIE VAN I wanted to imagine what would happen if a remnant of New York’s past were suddenly confronted with New York’s present.

Q: This novel masterfully blends the historical with the supernatural and does so in a contemporary setting. What draws you to this kind of story?

A: Thank you! I love thinking about all the different layers of time that overlap over a given place. Some spaces, like old New England towns, let you see those layers. But other places – like New York City – prefer to keep their layers secret. I like to imagine what it would be like if we could draw the curtain of the present back just long enough to get a glimpse of what was there before. Also, our understanding of how the world works changes according to our historical moment. What one time considers supernatural another time considers real. Fiction is a wonderful way of exploring different mindsets.

Q: What were some of the more surprising things you learned while researching this book?

A: It’s always a shock to realize how quickly New York grew in the nineteenth century. There was a time when the intersection of First and Bowery was the far northern reaches of the city. I also got to learn a lot about the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which totally changed New York and much of the western expansion of the United States. When the canal was finished they fired a cannonade the full length of the waterway, from Buffalo all the way to Manhattan. It must have been spectacular, when it happened. I discovered that Seneca Village was a completely self-contained community of free black people and Irish immigrants when it was flattened under Central Park near what is now the Upper West Side. And I was really surprised to learn how long New York has been saturated with ghost stories. We’re a young country, and yet we’re stalked by our past whether we know it or not.

Q: Are any of the characters inspired by real-life people? If so, how did you discover them?

A: For the most part, the characters are all fictional. Annie gets her first name from a story about a servant named Anna Dorothea Swarts who was dragged to death after being tied to a horse by her master in the 1760s. By the 1820s she had morphed into a well-known ghost legend, of a woman dragged by her hair screaming behind a horse. That evolution illustrates one of the ways that history and folklore can become intertwined. Her last name was picked from the Social Register, because it was Dutch and because it brings to mind “cinders,” a play on words that Maddie uses in her graffiti art. The other characters – Wes, Tyler, Maddie, Eastlin, Herschel – are all figures of my imagination. But the interior of Wes and Eastlin’s shared dorm room is completely based on my own New York City freshman year dorm. Cinderblocks!

Q: The book is full of film references as Wes is an aspiring filmmaker at NYU. Are the films of particular significance to you? Why was it important to incorporate them into the story?

A: Most of us have never been to New York City, and yet all of us feel as though we know New York City because we experience it on film. I was really interested in the idea that a city can be haunted by these different versions of itself, portrayed and preserved in media. In a funny way we’re doing the same thing as individual people, creating these social media versions of ourselves that are related to, yet not identical to, our “real” selves. I also wanted to think about how media and memory intersect, or overwrite each other. Finally, I liked the idea of creating a character who goes from being a watcher to being a doer. Wes begins the story not entirely sure of who he is, and he copes with that uncertainty by filming other people. In many respects ANNIE VAN is a coming of age story about how to learn to fashion the people we want to be.

Q: Art plays an important role in all of your fiction. Can you speak a bit about the art that appears in this book and its significance?

A: I started my professional life as an art historian, and so I’ve found that details of artwork and material culture feature large in my fictional imagination. Art is one language for communicating ideas, and portraiture can be particularly compelling because it illustrates how individual people want themselves to be seen. Seeing and not seeing, or seeing and not understanding what is seen, are big themes in ANNIE VAN SINDEREN. At a certain moment in the story the kids look at a family portrait of Annie and her parents, and learn an important clue. But in addition to the clue they also learn how Annie’s parents thought of themselves, and what kind of message about themselves they wanted to send. The cameo that Herschel gives Annie serves as an important link across time and space. Many of us imbue everyday objects with special meaning and significance, and that’s true for my characters too.

Q: What’s next for you?

A: I’m hard at work on a new novel, which will be set in the world of pirates and corsairs on an obscure island in the Gulf of Mexico in the 1810s. The novel will explore the fictional story of the real-life mistress of Jean Laffite, an infamous French smuggler who fled New Orleans after the War of 1812 and set up an illegal pirate enclave on Galveston. They faced Karankawa attacks, a hurricane, and the US Navy, and the island has been dogged by rumors of buried treasure ever since. There’s going to be some magic too.Curious readers can watch me brainstorm here: https://www.pinterest.com/katherinebhowe/galvez-grand/