My interview with Amy Stewart for The Oregonian
By Jeff Baker | For The Oregonian/OregonLive
Amy Stewart made a couple of big changes in recent years. The first came in 2015, when she switched to crime fiction after writing six popular books about botany and the natural world. The second came last year, when she and her husband, Scott Brown, moved to Portland from Eureka, Calif.
Both moves are paying off. Stewart's plant-based audience remains solid and her four novels featuring police detective Constance Kopp and her sisters, Norma and Fleurette, are a delightful combination of historical research and storytelling. The latest, "Miss Kopp Just Won't Quit" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26, 320 pages), finds New Jersey's first woman deputy sheriff in a quandary during the crucial election year of 1916. The series is in development at Amazon Studios.
The transition to Portland has been just as smooth. Stewart and Brown bought a house in Portland after Stewart taught at Portland State University and did a writer-in-residence session at Tin House. They've been walking everywhere, and Stewart enjoyed a quick stroll across Northwest Portland to Barista in the Pearl District, where she answered a few questions. Questions and answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: Why the move to Portland?
A: Eureka's great - we lived there for 17 years and we still own a bookstore (Eureka Books) there. I was just so ready to live in a big city again and to have a good airport. All the pleasures of a big city. I think before I got my Oregon driver's license I already had a membership to the Portland Art Museum, a library card and a membership to the Japanese Garden.
Q: What's been the best thing about it?
A: No. 1 for me is walkability. I don't think I've driven our car once. Our car could have been stolen weeks ago and I wouldn't know it. When we were looking for a place to live, every place I found, my husband would say, "How far a walk is that to Powell's?"
Q: How has your writing routine changed?
A: Not all that much. Writing is a solitary activity and I'm just there in my office doing my work. I was a little worried about leaving the attic space in Eureka where I'd written every single book except the first one. I wondered whether there was some mojo in these rafters that I'd be leaving behind but I have a great little office space at home and so far it's going well.
Q: All of your books, going back to the plant books and now the Kopp series, are research-driven. Do you have to go back to New York and New Jersey for research trips?
A: Yes. Interestingly enough, when I was doing the first Kopp Sisters book I was teaching at Portland State and did a lot of research online at the PSU library, but yes, now I go back there because so many old newspapers are on microfilm in library basements. There were a half-dozen newspapers covering the Kopp sisters, and I'm writing about a 15-year period in their lives.
Q: Are you having fun with this series?
A: Oh yeah. The great thing about these books is they're different from one another. This is not a cookie-cutter mystery series where it's, "Oh, here we go again. Another body needs to turn up to make it work." I've switched point of view; some of these books have been in the third person so I can be in the heads of these other characters. They're different stylistically, the events are different, the pace is different.
Q: Are you a crime fiction fan?
A: Yeah, I love P.D. James, I read all of the Agatha Christie books as soon as I was old enough. I love classic crime fiction, but I didn't want the point of these books to be "Who did it?" or "Where is the missing girl?" I love Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins novels, and what I love about them is they're the story of a black man in South Central L.A., starting in the late '40s, trying to figure out how to live in this world. ... Whether he finds the missing girl is never the reason why I read those books. I thought about Easy Rawlins a lot when I was writing these novels because it's that idea. Here are three women trying to make it at a time when they're not citizens. ... Life for them is very precarious.