Q&A With Katherine Crawford 

I’m delighted to do this Q&A with author and columnist Katherine Crawford. Katherine has written the novels Keowee Valley & coming out this month The Miniaturists Assistant!

Q:  Katherine, would you like to give a brief description of each of your books beginning with The Miniaturists Assistant?

A: Sure! The Miniaturist’s Assistant is the story of Gamble Vance, an art conservator in historic Charleston, South Carolina, who unearths a familiar face in a 200-year-old miniature portrait and realizes she’s lived more than one life. She fights to stay true to herself as she races to reconcile her complicated past, solve an art mystery, and save the people she loves across two different lifetimes. It’s a romantic and brainy timeslip novel that will appeal especially to fans of Deborah Harkness and Diana Gabaldon. 

My first novel, Keowee Valley, is a historical adventure set in the pre-Revolutionary Carolinas. It follows 25-year-old Quincy MacFadden from colonial Charleston into the wild Carolina backcountry on a race to rescue a beloved cousin, who has been kidnapped, by using her dowry money. But her cousin’s kidnapping is also an opportunity for the bookish Quinn to make a life all her own, away from Charleston and her grandfather’s all-seeing eyes. As she defies her grandfather and even colonial law, she makes a home among the Cherokee—but to save her cousin, must learn to trust an enigmatic half-Cherokee tracker named Jack Wolf. 

Q: Where did the idea for The Miniaturists Assistant come from?

A: One hot summer night, my husband and I wandered down an old Charleston alley. I’d been percolating on history, my imagination going like gangbusters—as it does every time, I’m in Charleston—and I had a vision of a young girl in a Regency-era dress, standing at the end of the alley, and begging me to “Come back.” 

Later, on that same trip, I wandered into The Gibbes Museum of Art: into their Miniature Portraits exhibit. Hours later I stumbled out in a writerly fog, my mind full of how I could put the girl and the art together. 

Q: If you were to write a sequel to The Miniaturists Assistant what would the characters be doing right now? 

A: Oh, what a fun question! Which does involve some spoilers, so if you haven’t read the novel yet, come back to this one. 😉 

Gamble and Tolliver would be working at the Smithsonian and living in Washington, D.C. with their young daughter, Cooper. Gamble might be pregnant again. And they’d be avoiding all old alleyways. 

Q: What lessons & emotions do you hope readers learn and feel once they read The Miniaturists Assistant?

A: I hope that readers of The Miniaturist’s Assistant feel transported: that they’ve been taken on a wonderful adventure into a world they may not know much about. I hope they fall in love with Gamble, Tolliver, Daniel, Honor, and the rest—that these characters feel like folks they could meet on the street, or in the grocery store. I hope they fall in love with 1804 and 2004 Charleston and have a real sensory experience of this incomparable place. 

As for any lessons, I don’t have an agenda in that way. But I do hope that readers come away with the sense that all our stories are shared stories—and that history, and time, is fluid, porous, and mysterious. 

Q: Can you reveal any details about the next book you are writing right now?

A: All I can say is that I’m writing another dual timeline historical novel, this one based on the lives of real and imagined women who confounded cultural and social mores. 

Q: How do you juggle being a columnist and an author? What advice would you give for anyone wanting to do both? Would it be fair to say being a column writer helped with writing books?

A: I was a weekly newspaper columnist for 5 years, and while writing it I also worked as an adjunct college professor, was earning a graduate degree, and parenting young children (my kids were around 5 and 1 when I began writing it). Writing in such a short form, and in such a different voice than I write my novels, was a whole lot of fun—and a bit of a reprieve from my other work. I felt like my column readers were friends; that I was sharing my thoughts and opinions in the way I’d do around the dinner table or on the playground. Hundreds of readers would write me emails about the column, which I loved. It was so gratifying to know that it reached people somehow. 

And it absolutely helped with writing books! Writing the newspaper column taught me to be concise (when necessary), to be clear, to work on a tight deadline, and to learn how to bring my thoughts or my story full circle in a way that hopefully left readers feeling satisfied. I loved it. 

Q: Does Hollywood have the rights to your work?

A: Not yet, as far as I know. But that’s a question for my literary agent.