By Christine Rice

Karen Halvorsen Schreck’s fourth novel, Broken Ground, illuminates one of America’s darkest and best-kept Depression-era secrets: as we did with Native People prior to and in the wake of Manifest Destiny and to Americans of Japanese descent during World War II, American citizens of Mexican descent were forced into camps and, eventually, many were loaded onto trains and sent to Mexico.

When the book opens, Broken Ground’s unlikely protagonist, the young Ruth Warren, is struggling to survive after her husband and true love has died. In an attempt to rebuild her life, she accepts a scholarship to a teaching college in California. But Ruth ends up fleeing the college and eventually lands in one of California’s repatriation camps.

And while this is Ruth’s story, Halvorsen Schreck’s perceptive gaze sweeps the landscape – from Oklahoma to California – to uncover the disparity between privilege and poverty, power and marginalization and then pokes and prods at uncomfortable truths until we (and Ruth) understand the terror and tragedy of families being wrenched apart, children being orphaned, the broken promise of refuge in the land of the free.

And although this book is set in the 1930s, events feel disturbingly familiar.

Just the other day, USA Today named Broken Ground a “Must Read” and Publisher’s Weekly called Halvorsen Schreck’s previous historical novel, Sing for Me, “impressive…a well-wrought and edifying page-turner.” Karen’s young adult novel, While He Was Away, was a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award. She’s also the author of  Dream Journal which was a 2006 Young Adult BookSense Pick, and the award-winning children’s book Lucy’s Family Tree. Her short stories and articles have appeared in Literal Latté, Other Voices, Image, as well as other literary journals and magazines, and have received various awards, including a Pushcart Prize, an Illinois State Arts Council Grant, and in 2008, first prize awards for memoir and devotional magazine writing from the Evangelical Press Association.

Schreck captures the subtleties of the American South and West with such muscle–her detailed eye snagging every detail–that I felt as if I’d been dropped into another time and place. That’s why I was excited to catch up with Karen to discuss the evolution of Broken Ground.

CHRISTINE RICE: Broken Ground, set in East Texas, Oklahoma, and Los Angeles, tackles a number of important issues including repatriation of Mexican citizens during the 1930s, systematic racism, psychological and physical predatory abuse, among other issues.

Let’s talk, first, about repatriation. At your book launch, you talked about how you stumbled across the forced deportation of Mexican citizens and non-citizens during the 1930s. I lived in the Detroit area for a few years and distinctly remember someone telling me that, years before, the government forced American citizens of Mexican origin on a train car and sent them to Mexico. It seemed like a fable. Or a lie. And I could never verify it.

After I read Broken Ground, I Googled ‘repatriation’ and found the Los Repatriados website. There I read that, in the 1930s, the Mexican-American population in Detroit went from around 15,000 to 1,200 after repatriation.

Can you talk about how you ‘stumbled’ (I think that’s the way you described it at your book launch…maybe not) across repatriation of Mexican citizens in the United States during your initial research of Broken Ground?

And then…why or how did that ‘surprise’ stick? How did it become important to the overall narrative?

KAREN HALVORSEN SCHRECK: When I started writing Broken Ground, I knew nothing about the so-called Repatriation Program of the 1930s—which, to be specific, was the deportation without due process of one to two million people of Mexican heritage, 60% of whom were U.S. citizens (some of whom didn’t speak Spanish). I was researching California during this era, trying to locate alternative experiences to those that have become iconic due to the documentary work of Work Progress Administration photographers and the popularity of The Grapes of Wrath. Of course it was impossible to ignore the impact that Dust Bowl Refugees had on the state (nor did I want to ignore this; it’s always fascinated me). But I knew there were all kinds of reasons for displacement during the Great Depression, and all kinds of people displaced. I’d read about doctors and lawyers losing everything, bankers and business people too, and I was interested in integrating aspects of this experience into my novel.

One day I was letting one link take to me another, jumping from “All” to “Images,” and a black and white photograph caught my eye. It showed a crowd of people being herded through a train station. Their expressions were grim. The Holocaust. That’s what I thought. I must have searched the wrong decade, the wrong continent. But then I looked again and saw from the description that this photograph was indeed taken during the 1930s in California, and I read for the first the first time the words “Mexican Repatriation.” What struck me in that moment was the vagueness—I just couldn’t get a purchase on the term. So I shifted my search yet again, and “stumbled upon” (that’s honestly what it felt like, a visual stumbling) additional images: lines of folks boarding buses, crowded into freight cars, waiting along the side of the road beside broken down jalopies, standing in the middle of what looked to be nowhere, scant luggage gathering dust at their feet. Then the photographs shifted from black and white to color, and I began reading more recently published articles in which elderly people who had been deported as children shared their stories of dislocation and displacement, the related permanent loss of homes, businesses, possessions, and family members.

I was blown away. I asked myself the question I’ve been most often asked since I wrote Broken Ground: why don’t I know about this event? Why didn’t I learn about in some history class? It hit me hard. My kids are both Latino. To say that I’m concerned about profiling, immigration, deportation, and the current refugee crisis is putting it lightly.

I decided almost immediately that the Repatriation Program was going to be a big part of my novel. I didn’t imagine at the time the turn our current presidential campaign would take, or the fact that the rhetoric used by the Hoover administration at the outset of this particular wave of deportations would be compared to Republican rhetoric regarding deportation today (along with the xenophobia of the Nazi party). The timing of the book’s release is crazy. As recently as last fall, my editor said, “Well, we know Trump won’t be around next spring when Broken Ground comes out, but immigration is certainly turning into a hot issue.” And look where we are now. Alas.

CR: You seamlessly wove these big, weighty issues into the overall narrative. One was: America’s systematic marginalization of people of color. At one point, Ruth Warren rightly thinks that, a hundred years ago, whites would have been trespassing on Mexican territory.

It was a very powerful moment and yet the novel never felt judgmental. Were you conscious of veering that way? Or…how did you keep that balance between revelation and judgment?

KHS: If you read Broken Ground and don’t feel clobbered by a Message then I am a happy writer indeed. I work hard to strip away judgment in my work; I lose sleep over the fact that, given some of the material, I may have failed on several levels. If so, I would be sabotaging what Chekov calls the “technique” of fiction—the indirect nature of the art form, where no thesis or polemical statement need apply. I would have alienated readers like myself, whose opinions and understanding are most frequently transformed by storytelling, versus sermonizing. And I would have betrayed my characters by limiting their complexity and their capacity for change.

In fact, Ruth’s experiences are similar to my own, perhaps similar to yours. Over and over again, I initially don’t know much of anything about anything. (Take the Repatriation Program, for instance.) I have to learn. And I can’t learn only in theory. I have to hunker down and get in the thick of the thing—get hurt, get dirty, fall in love, screw up, say I’m sorry, accept forgiveness—all this and more in order to understand. If I judged my characters, or for that matter, other people who are somewhere else on the never-ending, twisting path of “figuring things out,” I would be a flagrant hypocrite.

When I teach writing, I always share this quote from Chekov, which is also language I turn to when I fear I might be getting preachy in my work. It’s a kind of touchstone quote for me and for many writers, I believe:

You abuse me for objectivity, calling it indifference to good and evil, lack of ideas and ideals, and so on. You would have me, when I describe horse thieves, say: ‘Stealing horses is an evil.’ But that has been known for ages without my saying so. Let the jury judge them; it’s my job simply to show what sort of people they are… You see, to depict horse thieves in 700 lines, I must all the time speak and think their tone and feel in their spirit.

Yeah. What he said.

CR: Ruth Warren is a Christian who actually lives a Christ-like existence. Faith informs this book in many ways. Ruth is compassionate, understanding, humble, hopeful, loving, gives to those less fortunate, open-minded.

She is troubled too – fighting a ‘black fog’ after Charlie’s death.

Can you tell me a little bit about how Ruth’s character developed?

KHS: From your initial description of Ruth, I’m concerned she comes across as a saint, someone I might want to baby-sit my kids, but with whom I would never want to sit down to have a beer. Glad you point out that she’s troubled, because she is that most definitely. As you point out, she’s fighting the black fog—her word for acute depression. And she’s initially oblivious to suffering other than her own. In fact, she’s ethnocentric: when she encounters the slogan “Real Jobs for Real Americans,” which was used to great effect by the Hoover administration in 1929 and perpetuated by those who implemented the deportations throughout the ‘30s, she’s all for it. In my opinion, Ruth’s most positive characteristic is her innate curiosity, her hunger for learning. It’s because she refuses to let her grief and racism smother her inquisitive nature that she fulfills any potential she may have.

CR: I was just talking to a friend the other day about how, years ago, there were no words to adequately describe sexual harassment, abuse, predatory harassment, spousal abuse, etc. Even rape was defined as an assault by an ‘unknown’ criminal…never by an acquaintance. There was no language to accuse someone and so attacks were difficult to label, to explain, to prosecute. Without giving too much away, Ruth is physically attacked by a person of authority.

Afterwards, she thinks:

You brought this on yourself. That’s what some might say. It’s your fault. You acted a certain way, or dressed a certain way, or said a certain thing, some might say–Thomas might say. You’re a young, naive, needy woman–a lost and lonely widow. He’s a handsome, older man, a powerful man who was your mentor and employer and held your future in his hands.

It all comes back to: You brought this on yourself.”

 And really this attitude is only now changing.

Was that development surprising to you? Or had you known all along that attack would be part of Ruth’s story? That it could ruin her initial dream?

KHS: This plot turn took me completely by surprise. It came out of the writing—or rather, the rewriting—not any research or planning on my part. I was scrabbling along one day, knocking out words, trying to meet a deadline, and all of a sudden, the character that I thought was going to be a mentor and a light went dark. Why did this happen? Well, for one thing, I’ve been around the academic bend a few times. I’ve heard stories about women who’ve been around that bend decades before me. And I think it’s too often overlooked—the abuse of power that can happen between professor and student. The intensity of the relationship can go south for all kinds of reasons, particularly when, as you put it, we had no idea how to talk about it. And I didn’t want Ruth to have a man to thank for her advancement. There was that, too, that caused me to allow this development in the plot to go to print.

CR: Where did the initial idea for the story come from?

KHS: Ruth is based on my mother, who was born in Oklahoma, lived through the 1930s there, lost her first husband when she was a very young woman, escaped her oppressive upbringing, moved to California for college, and struggled with depression all her life. My mom was a reserved woman who became ill when I was ten years old and died when I was fourteen. I never got to know her well. But I did hear stories about her from my relatives, and this one—the fact that she overcame so much to reinvent herself—inspired me enough to work its way into the novel.

CR: This is your fourth novel, fifth book. You have written two YA novels and two adult novels and one book for younger readers. Tell me a little bit about your writing history. When did you start writing? When did you first think, ‘Yeah. I could be a writer.’ What setbacks have you encountered?

KHS: I was that only child of two older working parents who read incessantly and, when she wasn’t reading, enacted stories in her bedroom and backyard. I was that girl who wrote about horses and unicorns, and started a journal in an orange notebook, a la Harriet the Spy. The young woman who took a Creative Writing class in college and never looked back. That person. The one who went on to graduate school and knocked out story after story and novel after novel and didn’t give up even though 95% of the work came back with a standard rejection letter.

Then along came my daughter, a baby, and me also always juggling teaching and freelance writing gigs, and my writing took on more urgency because it was so hard to find time to do it. The first thing I wrote when she came home was a children’s book because children—my child in particular—was so much on my mind. And so it went from there: me writing as I was able what I felt the most compelled to write. I haven’t had the most intentional of careers, in fact my progress has been circuitous, some might say random. But I’ve kept going. Tenacity. It’s all about tenacity for me.

CR: Can you talk about the process of diving into your writing process…do you choose the book (to write) or does the book choose you?

KHS: A writing professor once told me to “write where the pressure is.” What that means is up for interpretation, I know. But I took it to mean what weighs upon me. Takes a while figuring that out. Takes a lot of quiet and wandering around on the page and in the house and outside, a lot of false starts that are more feed-the-fire than false, I guess. Once I’ve come up with some ideas I talked to a few trusted readers—my husband, my agent, a small group of writers with whom I meet. Talking with them helps me figure out if an idea has the potential to be realized. But it’s only through the drafting that I really know. And through the drafting the idea can reveal another side of itself so that the expected narrative changes dramatically, as happened with this novel.

CR: I was captivated by the ease with which you dropped me, as a reader, into the 1930s. You balanced important details about time and place without letting, what must have been a great deal of research, slow the narrative movement. Can you talk about your approach to research and how you blend it so effortlessly into the narrative.

KHS: That effortless blending? It was actually a bleeding nightmare. I’ve never been on such a tight deadline to finish a book on the heels of a previous book, and I never ever have realized a whole new aspect of a story as I was under that deadline, and researched so deeply even as I was in the thick of draft and revision. In fact, I was still researching in final edits. There was so much I needed to learn about the Mexican Repatriation Program, and it was challenging to find credible information.

If there was anything effortless about this process, it’s due to the fact that my father, who was born in 1917, had a terrific memory (until he didn’t at all, late in life) and was a wonderful storyteller. He gave me a great gift in giving me his stories, which he told me when I was a little girl, usually around the table after dinner, and which included such vivid details that it’s easy for me to conjure them up and time travel, so to speak, even now.

CR: I appreciated the strong women characters (and friendships) you developed on the page. Ruth is befriended and saved, to an extent, by her mother, Miss Berger, Helen, Florence Windberry (great name & character), Alice, and Silvia.

It always interests me how women characters are developed. In popular culture, women’s relationships are too often portrayed as one-dimensional–catty…or worse.

Of course, there are thousands of novels in which women characters more genuinely developed, where they reflect the broad scope of relationships between women.

Can you comment on how those relationships developed in Broken Ground?

KHS: Well, the relationships among women on the page got better with each rewrite, that’s for sure. It took a few drafts, but then I realized they were the ones who were going to be most crucial to Ruth’s growth. She started out relying solely on a man and caring too much what men thought or didn’t think of her. It was a problem.

I don’t have sisters. My mom wasn’t around for very long. And because I wasn’t surrounded by women or girls in intimate, vulnerable ways as I was growing up—as I imagine you’re more likely to be when you have sisters or women relatives around you all the time, sharing rooms and secrets—female friendships have always been rather mysterious to me, a kind of distant and much-desired continent that I had to learn how to approach; I longed for, and desperately needed, citizenship there. Now my female friends are a kind of family to me. Like Ruth, I don’t know how I would have kept on keeping on without them.

CR: Was Kirk Camp a real camp? Or did you base it off a real camp?

KHS: Kirk Camp was a collage of various places I read about, but was most deeply influenced by Hicksville, an actual camp located in this area at this time. I encourage you to read about Hicksville if you haven’t already. It was an amazing place—all but self-sufficient, rich in culture and community.

CR: There’s a heartbreaking scene in the last half of the book where Ruth tells the story of “Rapunzel” to a group of children living in a Government-sponsored camp.

This is not what I intended to happen when I chose to share this tale. I wanted to give the story to the children as a reward and, if possible, teach them a few things, simple things, classic things–about beginning and middle and end, plants and towers and adventurous escapes. I didn’t want the children to become frightened, which, from the looks on their faces, many of them are. They’re comparing government actions and authorities to evil spells and witches. What will they remember from this storytelling time, and what will they tell their parents? Will they have nightmares tonight because of me?

You used an economical form to crystallize what was at stake for the people in that camp. At any moment, families could be divided, children left parentless.

I’m curious about how that scene came to be? Did you read The Brothers Grimm to your children?

KHS: I read The Brothers Grimm as a child, and the tales of Hans Christian Andersen and Andrew Lang, too. I love those stories. I hated those stories. They fueled my imagination. They fueled my nightmares. They always crop up in my writing.

True confessions: when I tried to read The Brothers Grimm to my daughter, and we came to a really gruesome scene—I think it was the lopping off of a step-sister’s toes in Cinderella—she didn’t want to hear another word, and I didn’t press another one upon her. I figured she’d encounter the tales soon enough, and she did. There was so much other good children’s literature to read that she actually enjoyed, and we went for that. And you know, The Brothers Grimm is not technically children’s literature. So there’s that. But he Brother’s Grimm seemed like the kind of book Ruth would be able to get her hands on, given her time and place, and so it worked its way out of my head and into Broken Ground.

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Karen Halvorsen Schreck is the author of the historical novels Broken Ground (Simon & Schuster, May 2016), called a “masterfully written . . . must-read” by USA Today, and Sing For Me, along with two novels for young adults and a book for children. Her short stories, interviews, and essays have appeared in magazines and journals including The Rumpus, Belt, and Image. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize and an Illinois State Arts Council Grant, Karen received her doctorate in English and Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She lives with her husband, the photographer Greg Halvorsen Schreck, and their two children in Wheaton, Illinois. You can sign up for Karen’s newsletter at the link below.

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