Today we’d like to introduce you to Kathryn Lane.
Kathryn, we’d love to hear your story and how you got to where you are today both personally and as an artist.
Thank you for inviting me to talk with you about my creative endeavors. I started writing almost at the age where most authors are receiving lifetime achievement awards for their work! Before becoming an author, I had been a painter in oils and then I had a two decade long corporate career. Let me share where I am today – I am overjoyed with a very special recognition – I’ve just been honored with the First Place Award in the Action & Adventure category of “Latino Books into Movies”.
I took the long road to becoming an author. And I credit my unique background as the impetus to write. Let me explain. I see the world through the prism of my experiences growing up in a small-town in northern Mexico, a bilingual and bi-cultural community about 150 miles south of the Texas-New Mexico border where English and Spanish were equally spoken. Although it was a ranching and farming area, it was quite diverse. American immigrants came from Utah and settled there to develop apple and peach orchards, Chinese immigrants arrived from Asia to engage in cattle ranching, and Mennonites moved from Canada to operate dairy farms and cheese factories.
And of course, there were the local Mexican families like my own. I learned my English at a bi-lingual school run by the Mormons. The school took us on field trips to central and southern Mexico. These trips taught us about the richness of the Mexican culture. We visited colonial towns, toured archaeological sites and learned about ancient civilizations such as the Maya and the Aztecs. Our trips were complemented by stops at museums covering history, art, and archaeology. As I look back to my childhood, I realize how the various cultures around me and the broad education I received influenced my desire to travel and experience new journeys in life. And writing has now become my major journey!
Paramount to my early life was my love of art, particularly oil painting. I received a Fine Arts degree at the University of New Mexico (UNM), but reality set in when I could not earn a living at painting, so I enrolled in the MBA program at UNM, became a CPA, and I went on to a career in international finance with Johnson & Johnson. My finance career took me to over ninety countries. When I took an early retirement from corporate life, I intended to return to the arts. Yet I decided my extensive travels gave me more to write about than to paint. So, I enrolled in a couple of creative writing courses in Houston, Texas. I needed these courses since the writing I’d done up to this point were strategic plans and business memoranda!
Despite the business world I inhabited during my corporate years, fictional characters and their stories bounced around in my brain and were especially active during my travels to various cities around the world. Unfortunately, I never wrote down any of those stories. I kept them confined to my head! At the time I thought something was wrong with me and I did not want people to think I was crazy!
We’d love to hear more about your art. What do you do you do and why and what do you hope others will take away from your work?
I write mystery thrillers and short stories. My Nikki Garcia Thriller Series has two novels published and I’m writing the third one, due out in September 2019. The first one, Waking Up in Medellin, won “Best Fiction Book of the Year-2017” at the Killer Nashville International Mystery Writers’ Conference. It’s a story set in an international finance background similar to the world I knew early in my finance career. It is pure fiction even though the protagonist is female and people who know I had a corporate career think Nikki is my alter ego. Writers often write about what they know. Just as John Grisham is an attorney who writes about lawyers, I set my first novel in a world I understood. I have ventured away from using the world of finance. I still set stories in international locations, locations I love so I can travel there for research purposes!
For Coyote Zone, the novel which just won the “Latino Books into Movies” Action & Adventure Award centers around Nikki Garcia who has become a private investigator out of Miami, Florida. So, Nikki’s career is growing. She is on vacation in Mexico when she is hired by a woman in San Miguel de Allende to locate her missing ten-year-old daughter. My inspiration in writing Coyote Zone was to bring awareness of the severity of human trafficking and specifically sex trafficking of minors. It’s a dark topic, yet the novel is not dark. As a thriller it is meant to entertain and keep you turning the pages as you sit on the edge of your seat.
My short story collection, Backyard Volcano and Other Mysteries of the Heart, was named “Best Short Story Collection-2018” by Killer Nashville. I was not only thrilled, I was amazed since I never expected two of my books to win two years in a row. I feel so very honored! Most of Backyard’s stories are about Texans. A few of the stories take place on both sides of the border with Texans going to Mexico, such as the protagonist of Backyard Volcano, Patricia, who inspired by her grandmother’s stories about the Paricutin volcano in Mexico, becomes a volcanologist. She is sent to Mexico to study active volcanoes in the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt. While there, she visits her grandmother’s home town with its “backyard volcano”. While visiting the Paricutin, she learns the family secrets which caused her grandmother to emigrate to Texas.
It is every author’s hope that readers will enjoy his or her work. I hope readers will love my characters, feel entertained by the mystery or suspense, and also feel they’ve learned a little about foreign cultures and locations.
What do you know now that you wished you had learned earlier?
All disciplines in the arts are difficult for earning a living, but the arts are also one of the most satisfying endeavors one can engage in! I wish I had follow my heart sooner. I’ve slowly learned that being an artist of any type requires not only creating the work, but also marketing the finished product. An author must create compelling stories, market and promote the book through public appearances as well as through on-line media, and build a fan base. For readers to know your book is out there, they must hear about it. It’s the same for painters and sculptors – people must know about your work.
For me, nothing is more thrilling than being at a location, such as the Texas Book Festival, and having total strangers approach me to tell me how much they enjoyed my books and want to know when the next one will be published.
My best advice to artists and writers: Keep at it!!
Do you have any events or exhibitions coming up? Where would one go to see more of your work? How can people support you and your artwork?
Both of my publishers are small, so the best place to purchase my books is on Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords, and other on-line vendors. Of course, they can go to my website to get familiar with my work: https://www.kathryn-lane.com/
I have done over one hundred PowerPoint presentations and talks in the last two years. I speak at private events, such as book clubs, university reunions, and groups such as the American Association of University Women. In January 2019, I will be doing a large event at Glade Gallery in The Woodlands, just north of Houston, and I will also speak at The Woodlands Rotary Club. I also talk at selected book stores. For my engagements, a reader can go to the events page of my website.
If organizations or book clubs in the Dallas area want to inquire about the possibility of having me visit their book club or their organization, they can contact me through my website or directly at my email. [email protected]. I not only speak about my inspiration for writing, I also discuss the research I do and the locations/cultures I visit. For the past year, I’ve been doing a lot of presentations on my research on human trafficking.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.kathryn-lane.com/
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kathrynlaneauthor/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kathrynlanewriter/
- Twitter: @kathrynlanebook
Image Credit:
Mindy Harmon, Photographer for “official” head shot of Kathryn Lane in black sweater with beige trim.
Getting in touch: VoyageDallas is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
