Bell Bridge Books

Walking the Story

By the time my debut historical novel, Keowee Valley, was published, I’d walked, hiked, trail run, swum, paddled, and climbed countless miles of rocks, roads, flatland and mountain trails, lakes and rivers in the foothills and mountains of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Some of this, I’d done as a child, because my family were outdoorsy types. Most, however, I’d done on my own: both as a camp counselor and backpacking guide in my teens and 20s, and on adventures with like-minded friends well into my 30s, the age I am now. Always, and until her death in 2015, I was joined by my faithful trail partner: my dog, Scout.

I go (and went) to the woods—and the forest, the lake, the mountaintop, the river—to “live deliberately,” much the same as Thoreau did in the mid-1800s (minus the wood-chopping). The “woods” bring me back to myself; there is no place I feel more authentic.

The heart of my historical novel, Keowee Valley, takes place in the woods—in the forests of the Southern Appalachians. In fact, nearly every scene in the wilderness sections of the novel occur in real spots: scenery in which I’ve hiked, rivers I’ve paddled (and fallen into), trails I’ve traversed, in all kinds of weather. It is a land I know intimately. I know it as well as the pages of my own heart.

Every time I write a story, place—or setting, as some like to call it—plays a vital role, as important as any character. Maybe it’s the Southern writer in me? Southern writers are such, of course, because of their place. Mostly, I think, it’s because I can’t separate from the land, and neither can my characters. After all, in Keowee Valley, Quinn falls head over heels in love with the dangerous, gorgeous, and wild Cherokee backcountry long before she ever lays eyes on the equally dangerous (and gorgeous, and wild) Jack Wolf.

Bio:

Katherine Scott Crawford is a novelist, newspaper columnist, college English teacher, hiker and mom who lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Her parenting and outdoor life column appears weekly in The Greenville News (South Carolina), and is often picked up by other newspapers across the country. She holds far too many degrees in English and writing, chases her children frequently through the Pisgah National Forest, and is currently at work (when she’s actually sitting down) on her next historical novel.

Pick up Keowee Valley by Katherine Scott Crawford today for just $1.99!

“A glorious debut from a gifted author.” – Adriana Trigiani, bestselling author of Big Stone Gap and The Shoemaker’s Wife

“Keowee Valley is a terrific first novel by Katherine Scott Crawford–a name that should be remembered. She has a lovely prose style, a great sense of both humor and history, and she tells about a time in South Carolina that I never even imagined.” –Pat Conroy, bestselling author of The Prince of Tides and South of Broad.

On the edge of the wilderness, her adventure began.

She journeyed into the wilderness to find a kidnapped relative. She stayed to build a new life filled with adventure, danger, and passion.
Spring, 1768. The Southern frontier is a treacherous wilderness inhabited by the powerful Cherokee people. In Charlestown, South Carolina, twenty-five-year-old Quincy MacFadden receives news from beyond the grave: her cousin, a man she’d believed long dead, is alive–held captive by the Shawnee Indians. Unmarried, bookish, and plagued by visions of the future, Quinn is a woman out of place . . . and this is the opportunity for which she’s been longing.
Determined to save two lives, her cousin’s and her own, Quinn travels the rugged Cherokee Path into the South Carolina Blue Ridge. But in order to rescue her cousin, Quinn must trust an enigmatic half-Cherokee tracker whose loyalties may lie elsewhere. As translator to the British army, Jack Wolf walks a perilous line between a King he hates and a homeland he loves.
When Jack is ordered to negotiate for Indian loyalty in the Revolution to come, the pair must decide: obey the Crown, or commit treason . . .

Oh, What Fun: Diving into an 18^th Century Christmas

by Katherine Scott Crawford

Christmastime in the eighteenth century: This was something I had to research in order to write the Christmas scenes in my historical novel, Keowee Valley, which opens in the year 1768.

I say “had to,” but really—it was a blast! I’m a research hound and a history nut, and to top it off, Christmas happens to be my favorite time of year. Diving into the details of a Christmas nearly 250 years past was a job for which I’ll happily volunteer any day of the week.

But it wasn’t easy. For one, Keowee Valley is set in the American colonies during a time of great upheaval—the American Revolution is brewing—and not only that, the particular Christmas I was writing about takes place on the Southern frontier, in the then-wilderness of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The woman hosting the Christmas festivities—my protagonist, 25 year-old Quinn MacFadden—is a bit of a conundrum: she’s a quick-tempered bluestocking who rides a horse like a man, speaks a couple of long-dead languages, takes off into the back-country in search of her kidnapped cousin, barters for land from the Cherokee Indians and builds a settlement which functions as an egalitarian community, and is (at this point in the story) falling in rather complicated love with a mysterious half-Cherokee, half-Irish tracker with conundrums of his own.

While we know a bit of the Christmas traditions of the American colonists during this time, most of that comes from the diaries of people living in towns and cities like Savannah, Charleston, Wilmington, Philadelphia and New York. During a time of war, everything is thrown off kilter, even the holidays. And in the wild Carolina back-country, where Quinn lives with a handful of settlers, her faithful horse, and her Cherokee neighbors, we don’t really know what went on this time of year. We can assume folks of European descent celebrated much like they did wherever they were originally from. Perhaps they sang songs, made a special meal, lit precious candles, and spent time with family. After all, throughout history people have always attempted to hold on to tradition, no matter where they are when Christmastime rolls around.

For Quinn, this means the giving of simple, carefully-chosen gifts for the settlers with whom she shares her wild new home: people who were once strangers, and whom she has come to love.

There’s the leather gloves for a freed slave, a corncob pipe for a disgraced English lord, a tea kettle for a hard-working couple and a wood flute for their young sons. But it’s the two gifts Quinn receives in the middle of the deep, cold, holy night—one, the gift of a saved life, and two, a rather perfect surprise from a man who’s swiftly becoming much more than a stranger—that make it a very merry Christmas indeed.

Pick up KEOWEE VALLEY by Katherine Scott Crawford for just $1.99 through December 31st!

Writing as a Mom

by Katherine Scott Crawford 

This month, everything is starting to bloom in my tiny town in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Heck, the trees began budding in February—early for us—and the daffodils are just beginning to show their sunny heads. Even the chickens in my neighbor’s chicken coop seem to be clucking more frequently, and with a bit of sass.

Yep, everything is blooming. Including my belly.

Well, that’s putting it kindly. I’m in my third trimester of pregnancy, and I currently resemble your basic ocean liner. From the front, from far away, if I’m wearing all black and you squint when you look at me, I still appear pretty normal. But then I turn sideways—slowly, very slowly—and the fog horns blow. I need one of those beepers moving vans have, to warn folks when I’m backing up. 

When I was pregnant with my first child, now three and a half years old, I couldn’t count the number of people who told me, “Oh, you’ll be so inspired by pregnancy and motherhood. Think of all you’ll have to write about!”

And while I’m certain this will, at some point, be the case, for the most part it’s been hogwash.

For some reason, when I’m “with child,” my body blooms and my brain power wilts. That baby just sucks up all my creative juices (and my reason) like one of those expensive and super-powered Dyson vacuum cleaners. You know, the kind that can take down dog hair. 

I’m quickly discovering why many of my favorite writers, especially women, published their first novels in their mid-forties and beyond: their kids were grown.

Just as no one really tells you when you become pregnant about how your backside will start to look like—as Olympia Dukakis so eloquently put it in Steel Magnolias—“two pigs fightin’ under a blanket,” no one tells you that pregnancy and new motherhood can zap your creative juices. That you’ll be so exhausted you’ll fall asleep by 9 p.m.

That when you’re sitting in the rocking chair in your child’s bedroom, and you bend over to pick up a book off the floor, you’ll topple over like a felled tree. Oh, wait. Maybe that’s just me.

They joys of motherhood, and yes—even sometimes pregnancy—are at times too many to count. My lips are beautifully full these days. If the rest of me didn’t look like a beach ball, they’d be pretty hot. And that baby movement across the belly, the roll and tumble of a sweet new life, is beyond cool.

As for my writing mojo? That powerful magic that appears when all my creative cylinders are firing? Well, heck. It’s taking a 9 month siesta. And if this new baby is anything like my first child, that siesta might stretch into a whole year. But I’m okay with this. Or at least I’m learning to deal with it.

Why? Because I know the mojo will be back, and will appear at the oddest of times. Kind of like all those lovely blooms popping up in my town … evidence of an early Spring.  

Keowee Valley is $1.99 today at Amazon and Apple.

Katherine Scott Crawford was born and raised in the blue hills of the South Carolina Upcountry, the history and setting of which inspired Keowee Valley. Winner of a North Carolina Arts Award, she is a former newspaper reporter and outdoor educator, a college English teacher, and an avid hiker. She lives with her family in the mountains of Western North Carolina, where she tries to resist the siren call of her passport as she works on her next novel. Visit her at: www.katherinescottcrawford.com.

AND SO I DID  by Katherine Scott Crawford

Actress. Army Airborne Ranger. Rock star. Writer.

These were the career paths I debated as a 10 year-old tomboy growing up     in the South Carolina Upcountry.  And though it took me until age 16 to shake the acting bug, it was really at 10—after one summer gulping down the entire Anne of Green Gables series by L.M. Montgomery, and then precociously plowing through Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides—that I knew, beyond all else: I wanted to write.

There was no clap of thunder, no voice from above. The realization was a warmth in the pit of my belly, spreading out through my appendages—scraped knees and gangly arms, even into the white-blonde ends of my pig-tails. I think I’d known it all along.

I completed my first novel in a spiral notebook beneath my desk in 9^th grade Biology. As an undergraduate English major at Clemson University, I started, but never finished, several others, and God bless my roommates for reading them. Before graduating, I’d tacked on a double major (Speech & Communications Studies), and come close to a third in History. These very different academic pursuits satisfied the distinct aspects of my personality—the introverted writer, and the extroverted girl who knew how to have a really, really good time.

So many things have shaped who I am as a writer, but none quite so much as the place where I grew up. The South Carolina Upcountry is a land of rolling foothills and blue mountains, of giant man-made lakes and wildwater rivers. The further you venture west, toward the Blue Ridge, the easier it is to look out over forest and mountain and think on just how close you are to the wild.

This was my playground. My family owns a lake house in Oconee County, South Carolina, situated on a lake that bumps right up to the Sumter National Forest. Every nearby mountain top, stream and road has a Cherokee Indian name. I grew up camping, hiking and river paddling throughout the ancient boundaries of the Cherokee nation, completely entranced by its beauty and seemingly lost history. I knew, one day, I’d write about it.

After stints as a camp counselor, outdoor/ experiential educator, backpacking guide, and newspaper reporter, I headed to the coast to earn a Master’s degree in English from a joint program between the College of Charleston and The Citadel. I lived on a sea island, studied in Italy, and raised a black lab puppy who’s still one of the great loves of my life. But something in the mountains called me back.

I was a college English instructor on a newlywed budget when the spark of my novel, Keowee Valley, came to me. I’d just forked over money my husband and I didn’t really have to attend a writers’ conference, and was debating over which of my many unfinished novel excerpts I’d send in to be critiqued. Sitting at my desk with the conference packet in hand, I couldn’t shake from my mind the image of a young woman in 18^th century dress, looking out over the land where my family’s lake house sits now. Only there was no lake, just an untouched river valley, with mountains ringing it like a great blue crown. Her story, the land’s story: That was what I really wanted to write about, had always wanted to write about.

And so I did.