Katherine Howe

Katherine Howe's latest novel is The Appearance of Annie van Sinderen.

From her Q & A at MissHeard magazine:

Hello Katherine! Thanks for taking the time to talk with us! Please tell our readers a little bit about yourself and your newest novel.

It’s my pleasure! Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m a novelist who writes historical fiction with a slight magical twist, often about witches or ghosts or spookyish things like that. My newest novel, THE APPEARANCE OF ANNIE VAN SINDEREN, is a contemporary ghost story that never uses the word “ghost.” It’s about a 19 year old boy named Wes who goes to NYU for a summer film program. While there he meets a mysterious girl named Annie. She has strange hipster hair, and strange hipster clothes, and Wes can’t really figure her out. Then at the end of Part I she shows up in his locked dorm room in the middle of the night shaking him awake and begging him for help.

The Appearance of Annie Van Sinderen is special to me because it blends two narratives- a contemporary teenage boy, and a girl from the past. Do you have to do anything special to write from these greatly different perspectives?

Thank you. I don’t know what this says about my mental health (or lack thereof), but I find it fairly easy to move between different characters’ points of view. In a way I find historical perspectives easier to imagine than contemporary ones, because the constraints on the historical point of view are...[read on]

Writers Read: Katherine Howe (February 2013).

--Marshal Zeringue