We had the pleasure of Amy Harmon joining us in The Behind the Pages Goodreads group for a spoiler free Q & A. We asked her about Where the Lost Wander. “ epic and haunting love story set on the Oregon Trail, a family and their unlikely protector find their way through peril, uncertainty, and loss.“ I am excited to share some of it with you all today!
Brenda: Hi Amy! Let’s get started right away with the idea for the story. You have a personal connection to the story and the characters. Can you tell us about that?
Amy: My husband and I both enjoy genealogy, and the real John Lowry, the main male character in my story, is his ancestor. We didn’t know much about him beyond the fact that his mother was Pawnee Indian. There was some question about whether his father was Cheyenne, but we know that it was a white man (a man also named John Lowry) who married his Pawnee mother and raised him in Missouri until the young John Lowry headed out west to make a future for himself. According to family history, he was “pale” enough to pass as a white man and because he’d been raised by one, he was able to live in a white man’s world pretty successfully. Little is known beyond bare facts, but it gave me somewhere to start.
Brenda: Hi Amy! Let’s get started right away with the idea for the story. You have a personal connection to the story and the characters. Can you tell us about that?
Amy: My husband and I both enjoy genealogy, and the real John Lowry, the main male character in my story, is his ancestor. We didn’t know much about him beyond the fact that his mother was Pawnee Indian. There was some question about whether his father was Cheyenne, but we know that it was a white man (a man also named John Lowry) who married his Pawnee mother and raised him in Missouri until the young John Lowry headed out west to make a future for himself. According to family history, he was “pale” enough to pass as a white man and because he’d been raised by one, he was able to live in a white man’s world pretty successfully. Little is known beyond bare facts, but it gave me somewhere to start.
