Vanessa Lillie says she’s “an impatient reader,” a trait that influences her writing: “I really like to create characters who are aggressively seeking justice, even when it puts their lives in danger.” This is a dead-on description of Syd Walker, the courageous protagonist of Lillie’s new novel. Blood Sisters follows Syd, a Cherokee woman and an archaeologist with the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, as she returns to her childhood home in Oklahoma. There, a bizarre crime demands her attention—a human skull has been found in a tree that once served as a meeting place for Syd, her sister and their close friend. Stranger still, the skull’s mouth contains a copy of Syd’s BIA identification card.
True to Lillie’s ideas about character-creation, Syd is a person of action, using her professional expertise and knowledge of her hometown’s power structure to uncover clues to crimes apparently targeting Native American women. Syd’s journey, set in 2008, is set against a carefully wrought backdrop, a part of Oklahoma heavily polluted by decades of lead mining—only the latest instance of government and corporate malpractice on land owned by indigenous people. Syd has domestic concerns, too—she’s ambivalent about her wife Mallory’s desire to have a child.
Partially inspired by real-life news events, the novel borrows biographical details from Lillie’s life. Like Syd, Lillie is Cherokee and grew up in Oklahoma. Speaking from her home in Rhode Island, Lillie answered a few questions about research, writing and the hugely popular audiobook she wrote with three other novelists.
Kevin Canfield: Let’s start with Syd Walker. How did she take shape as a character?
Vanessa Lillie: I wanted to put some of my own identity into the main character. Being Cherokee, being white-presenting Cherokee, being from Northeast Oklahoma—those are all things I wanted to really explore in a character. I’m also very cognizant of the history within the Cherokee community and other Native American communities in Oklahoma, and I felt like to write about that, it needed to be grounded in my own experience. I also wanted her to have something that I think I had myself in my early 20s, which is leaving home like a bat out of hell—just get me out of this town. I think when you’re in that mindset, you can miss the good things. I wanted to give Syd that chip on her shoulder.
KC: This is the first time you’ve written about a Cherokee main character?
VL: Yes, my second book (For the Best) was very particularly about a white woman, because that was an exploration of white female privilege. With this third book, it was important for me to get more into my heritage. I did my best to put truth in Blood Sisters, particularly on that Mother’s Day weekend in 2008. A tornado hit and destroyed the town and ruined the economic futures of a lot of people. There are also environmental injustice and Native American issues, both of which are underreported. I just want to be as accurate as possible, so when it’s shocking, it’s shocking in a way that’s true.
KC: You manage to bring up these issues without being didactic. I’m thinking of the strong scene in which Syd reflects on the fact that remains of Native Americans were held in museums until recently.
VL: Are held. Thousands of remains are still on shelves, especially in university systems because they’re legally protected. I don’t just know of everything in my books at all, so I started to dig in to the issue of what was taken and learned more about the laws that are in place to protect universities—even though these are established people’s remains and family members, and they belong to communities. The first instinct is always to be preachy and have four paragraphs of explanation, but I know that doesn’t work. Because this is in first person, she can kind of think about it in her own context. When you look at the characters in a scene, they’re each going to have their own distinct view of historical reality. And so you can kind of play within those spaces.
KC: The real-life pollution in the area is an important part of the book, and it gives us a real sense of where Syd grew up and maybe why she has, as you said, that chip on her shoulder.
VL: When you let capitalism take the wheel and have no regard for the people or the consequences, this is exactly what will happen. There are layers of injustice—to the white people who came for the mining jobs and bought these very poorly made homes, which is why when that tornado came in, they were like toothpicks. Also, that was Quapaw land, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs took that land because from them because it was valuable and profitable.
KC: Syd is an archeologist. Do you have any expertise in archeology and if not, how did you get it?
VL: I knew I wanted Syd to work for the BIA. My uncle worked his whole career for BIA, my brother works for BIA, so it’s an organization I’m familiar with. Also, the complexity of the history is very interesting to me. BIA was set up (in the 19th century) to be basically a controlling adversary in a lot of ways for the tribes that they manage, but of course there are many good people in the organization. But when Blood Sisters is set, in 2008, things were still a little adversarial. I asked my brother who I could talk to within the BIA to kind of develop a character. He connected me to an archaeologist. Listening to her talk about the way she viewed her job was important. She is someone who is there to support the culture, not to dig up artifacts—to understand what tribes need. For example, if power lines are going to be buried in tribal lands and that’s going to disrupt a plant ecosystem that has been integral to their medicines or ceremonies, her job is to step in there and to help support them, preserve what they need, make sure that the tribes themselves can keep as much of their history and tradition as possible.
KC: Can you tell me about your career path before your first novel, Little Voices?
VL: In my early 20s, which was like 20 years ago, I was working in DC in marketing and PR jobs, and I just had a real longing to be more creative. I absolutely kept my job, but I started getting serious about writing. Over the years, I had over 150 agent rejections and a couple (unpublished) books in the drawer. I finally wrote my debut after my son was born. I quit my job to raise my son, and then was also able to focus a little bit more on writing.
KC: At a certain point, I’ve read, you made some important adjustments in the way you work. What were those?
VL: I was not an organized writer. I loved the energy of sitting down and not knowing where I was going. But a book I worked on for over five years just didn’t go anywhere. Actually, National Novel Writing Month is what really changed how I wrote, because you have to write 1,333 words a day to hit your goal. That means I had to understand structure in a fundamentally different way. I still have a lot of moments of surprise in my process, but I really outline now. I think with mysteries and thrillers, it is just particularly important to hit those beats just right.
KC: And that gives you freedom within the framework.
VL: Absolutely. To me, there’s almost a little bit of a relief when it comes to structure, because sometimes you can feel that you’re not doing something right and you don’t know what it is. And then when I sit down and say, OK, here’s this turning point and this turning point and this turning point—oh God, this one happens within 20 pages. This gives you more freedom and confidence to diagnose what’s going on.
KC: There’s a scene in the book that reminded me how much a writer can do with one word. Syd is ambivalent about becoming a parent, and we learn this when she says of her wife Mallory, “She’s been trying to get pregnant for almost two years. Or, I guess, we’ve been trying to get pregnant.”
VL: I love italics. I think it’s not quite a wink at the reader, but it lets them know that this means something for a special reason. For me and I think a lot of people, that’s really identifiable and understandable—Syd loving her wife but being terrified about whether that’s the right choice for her.
KC: Young Rich Widows, which you cowrote with Kimberly Belle, Layne Fargo and Cate Holahan, was an audiobook exclusive that topped download charts for a while in 2022. Are the four of you writing a follow-up?
VL: Let’s just say that Young Rich Widows saved my creative sanity during the pandemic. I was able to work with three authors I love. We got together on weekly Zooms, and we shared chapters and we laughed and I was reminded, because I needed to be reminded, that writing can be fun and kind of good for the soul. Even if it hadn’t been successful, it really saved me creatively. It just so happened that us having the best time ever writing it really translated to readers who had a blast listening to them and their crazy adventure. The audio-only sequel, Desperate Deadly Widows, will be out in April.
