Austin-based novelist Karen Olsson’s background as a journalist (as writer-at-large for Texas Monthly and an editor of the late Texas Observer) has enriched her fiction since the beginning of her career.
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Waterloo, her first novel, offers a sophisticated, perspective on the political scene in a state capital not unlike Austin. Her sharply observed characters are bigger-than-lifelike, at once realistic and comical. There’s political reporter Nick Lasseter, who “avoided designated press areas, media sign-in tables, question-and-answer periods. He’d never been keen on joining that particular club, and as a writer for a barely respectable publication, he wasn’t quite the club’s cup of tea either.” And Beverly Flintic, a newly elected conservative state assemblywoman, who muses, “After the better part of a year in office, the protocols of the place still eluded her; the longer she was here the more coded everything seemed. There was a surface layer of information, the loose soil and carrot tops they fed to the reporters, and a second layer of wormier stuff you became privy to according to your position, and then beneath that were more strata and gopher holes and decommissioned sewers full of trivia, histories, grudges, petty paybacks she didn’t know how deep.” Waterloo was a runner-up for the 2006 PEN/Hemingway award for first novel; it’s still timely twenty years later.
Her second novel, All the Houses (2015), sets a splintered father-daughter relationship against the backdrop of the Iran-Contra scandal, with a layered portrait of Washingtonian political and foreign policy shenanigans that would delight admirers of the Netflix series The Diplomat. “Here were both the grand mystery of government and its little human movers, with their travel mugs,” Olsson writes, “so small compared to the massive buildings.”
Dear Thorns, her new novel, tucks South Texas history and development (the setting isn’t far from Elon Musk’s SpaceX headquarters), the oil and gas industries, border immigration issues, species loss, and an idiosyncratic ranching-heir artist into a nuanced story of a biologist who finds herself drawn to a much younger intern in a wildlife refuge that harbors ocelots. All with Olsson’s inimitable observations and insights. Dear Thorns will be featured November 15 at the Texas Book Festival.
What inspired this novel? I asked Olsson. “Almost twenty years ago, reporting a magazine story in the Rio Grande Valley, I stopped by the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge near Alamo, Texas,” she explained. “A photo display in the lobby introduced me to the ocelot, a wild cat I hadn’t known about previously. Ocelots are beautiful creatures, and one picture, taken at night by a motion-sensitive camera, stopped me in my tracks.
“This novel didn’t begin with the ocelot, though. I had been hanging out with some journalist friends who’d reported on violence near the border, and I wondered about the toll that their work was taking on them. The questions I had—about the personal impact of witnessing destruction—migrated away from gang violence and took root in a quieter realm. I began to think about a woman who was living alone, working in a place far from where she grew up, and carrying this kind of burden. She wasn’t an ocelot biologist in the earliest draft pages, but at some point I remembered the ocelot pictures from Santa Ana, and that became her vocation.
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Jane Ciabattari: How did you settle on the title?
Karen Olsson: The book takes place in the brush country of South Texas, where the characteristic wildlife habitat is called Tamaulipan mezquital or Tamaulipan thornscrub. At first I couldn’t resist the word “thornscrub”—that was the title. Eventually I altered it, to evoke my main character’s fondness for her environment, hostile as it sometimes is.
It’s hard to articulate an overall approach. Generally I try to keep prospecting, keep writing pages, and see what comes out.
JC: Lora, your narrator, is a forty-something ocelot biologist who works at a refuge in South Texas. After seven years there she’s used to living alone, with interns nearby and occasional volunteers. In your opening passages, you write, “Lora, for one, had set aside the idea of close companionship…She was proudly independent. Still, wasn’t there some sunken root in her, burrowing and splitting and looking for water?” What was your approach to giving voice to her sense of loneliness, her unfulfilled desire, her despair over the possibility that ocelots might become extinct?
KO: It’s hard to articulate an overall approach. Generally I try to keep prospecting, keep writing pages, and see what comes out. Although the book is written in close third person, in this particular passage, I wanted to establish a separate and more knowing narrator who can talk about Lora from a distance.
JC: The refuge that is your location, just above the border with Mexico, is an isolated land of thornscrub—“low, thorny trees and bushes like mesquite, huisache, and Texas ebony.” It is based on Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge in South Texas, home to a small population of ocelots. How did your research shape the refuge where Lora lives and works?
KO: I visited Laguna Atascosa for a couple days in early 2020, just before the pandemic, and learned a ton from the ocelot biologist there. After that, I stayed away, so that the refuge of the novel wouldn’t overlap too closely with the actual refuge. The novel’s refuge is physically similar, and I’ve tried to accurately reproduce what I learned about ocelots and ocelot monitoring. (Granted, I’m sure there are things I didn’t get quite right.) But the refuge in the novel has fewer people working on it than the actual refuge does, and Lora isn’t based on the biologist who was working down there at the time. I did worry that people down there might think she is. For the record, I never suspected that any staff-intern romances were afoot at the real-world Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge.
JC: How did you learn so much about ocelots? Did you see any ocelots in the course of writing this novel?
KO: Ocelots are nocturnal and elusive, that’s one thing that compelled me about them. Even the people who work with them can’t normally see them, and I was really drawn to that, to the idea of chasing after something unseen. In addition to visiting Laguna Atascosa, I read what I could about ocelots, and I tried to see an ocelot at the San Antonio zoo, but on the day I visited, the ocelot enclosure was under renovation and no one could tell me where the animals had gone in the meantime. Finally I saw an ocelot at the Mexico City zoo. It was beautiful, and then again it’s a more programmatic experience to see any animal in a zoo, as opposed to in the wild.
JC: Circumstances at the refuge put Lora into close proximity to Ben, the new intern. What were the biggest challenges in writing about this older woman/younger man relationship?
KO: Although I wrote an early draft from Ben’s point of view, once I was writing from Lora’s perspective, it was tricky to make Ben a full-fledged character, given that Lora doesn’t necessarily see him all that fully.
I was really drawn to that, to the idea of chasing after something unseen.
JC: The new director of the refuge, Greg, seems more excited to welcome hunters to the refuge than to come see a new ocelot found in one of the traps Lora manages. He wants Lora to dump the floppy discs of archives (she insists upon finding a place to save their contents). They seem at odds from the beginning. Is this a relatively common divisiveness in this field?
KO: Generally speaking there are “wildlife management” professionals, who look at ranching and hunting and wildlife conservation through a more economic lens, and conservationists, who want to preserve animals and their habitats. A version of that conflict plays out between Greg and Lora, though Greg wasn’t written to represent wildlife management people as a whole. He’s a comic character, seen mostly through Lora’s eyes, and she never really gives him a fair shake. In reality, both groups have important roles to play in conservation.
JC: What do you think might be most helpful in saving the ocelot from extinction?
KO: Ocelots also exist in Central and South America. They are endangered everywhere, but the population in the US, which consists of two small groups in South Texas, is especially at risk. As with other wildlife, ocelots are in trouble because we’ve destroyed so much of their habitat, and the best way to help them would be to expand their habitat. This can be done through reforestation and by connecting existing sections of habitat that are separated by, say, highways. A lot of work has already been done in Texas to build wildlife crossings in the form of highway underpasses, which may help reduce road deaths.
A project called Recover Texas Ocelots is just getting off the ground, and its aim is to breed more ocelots and introduce them on a ranch to the west of the current ocelot populations. If all goes well with that project, we might actually see the number of U.S. ocelots grow.
JC: Have any novels or nonfiction works inspired you in the course of writing Dear Thorns?
KO: The Peregrine by JA Baker, The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy by Michael McCarthy (shout out to New York Review Books for publishing both of those,) The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen, and the novels of Willa Cather.
JC: What are you working on now/next?
KO: It’s too early in the process for me to say.
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Dear Thorns by Karen Olsson is available from Astra House Publishing.
