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Kathy Watson is a chef and author. But she wasn't always. Before opening her two restaurants and writing her first books, she spent twenty years as a journalist and public relations executive. This is her debut novel.
In her previous life, she was press secretary to the Oregon State Senate Democrats, and director of communications for two state agencies. She served a brief (but disastrous) stint as press secretary to the mayor of Portland, Bud Clark. She was also editor-in-chief of Oregon Business magazine for six years. In 1998, she started a media relations firm with her husband and fellow writer, Stu Watson.
In 2004, she said goodbye all that and became the chef and owner of Viento in Bingen, Washington, and the acclaimed Nora's Table in Hood River, Oregon.
In addition to Orphans of the Living, she has written a memoir, Last Morning at Nora's Table and is at work on a second novel, A Place Far Down the River.
Her community activities include serving as a Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) for children.
Kathy attended the University of Oregon School of Journalism, but left one term shy of graduation to take her first newspaper job. Her son Max is an elementary school principle, and her daughter Annie owns a breakfast food cart.
She lives in Hood River, OR and runs and hikes the trails of the Columbia River Gorge with her dog, Satchel and husband, Stu.
Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite
Orphans of the Living by Kathy Watson centers on the Stovall family’s fractured struggle for survival and belonging across several decades and locations. Lula Stovall and her husband, Barney, move from Montana homesteading to Mississippi sharecropping, then to California farmland, battling poverty, racism, and family discord. Their children, especially Glen and Nora Mae, endure hardship and neglect—Glen growing up in an orphanage and the military, Nora Mae facing abuse and alienation at home. Barney’s efforts to organize sharecroppers and build a stable farm contrast with Lula’s emotional distance and the children’s search for identity and security. Glen’s return and Nora Mae’s eventual escape to the city highlight the family’s ongoing vacillation between abandonment and reconciliation. Watson presents their journeys through hardship, betrayal, resilience, and fractured family bonds against the socio-economic challenges of early 20th-century America.
Kathy Watson’s Orphans of the Living is a really well-written and comprehensive historical novel that reads like a true-to-life family saga of life and legacy against horrible racial injustice and economic hardship in the American South. Two of the most terrifying and heartbreaking moments are harnessed to tragedy; one in defense of livelihood and property, and another in retaliation with a brutal act of race-fueled vigilantism that inflicts guilt and carries with it immense generational trauma. Watson’s dialogue is era-appropriate, and through it, we get to know the characters and the landscape, which are rooted in the detailed depictions of things like plantation life, union efforts, and migration, all of which form a grounded sense of the era’s harsh realities. Overall, this is a thoughtful and deliberate piece of literary fiction on both individual and collective experiences when caught between survival, remorse, and hope. Very highly recommended.
