Local author Kathryn Craft is scheduled to speak about her first novel, The Art of Falling, at the Java Good Day Cafe in East Greenville, on Sunday, March 2.
Craft explained that she learned of the event hosted at the cafe through a friend who mentioned that the owner, Ann Campbell, has a great love of books. According to Craft, Campbell previously worked at Harleysville Books before she started the cafe. What she wanted to do with the cafe was to host people who love books.
‘I have so many questions that I’m eager to talk to people about this topic that I’ve never discussed with anybody before,’ said Craft. ‘So this will be one of those opportunities to see how people perceive the book.’
Craft said that she has spoken about the book before, but this will be one of the first club discussions she will start pertaining to the book.
‘It sounded like a really fun, intimate affair, she said. ‘I love the sort of book where you come at an issue from a bunch of different perspectives.’
She has lot of enthusiasm for the event. ‘This has always been planned as book club type book, and I can’t wait to start discussing it with people,’ she said.
She moved to Boyertown in 1982 when she married her first husband, who owned a farmhouse in Bechtelsville. They lived there for 27 years, with their two children. After the suicide standoff at the farm a few years later, Craft did not want to move away, for the sake of her kids.
‘My kids were eight and ten at the time, and it seemed really important to me not to add to their stress by packing up our entire house and staging our house as if no tragedy had happened there,’ said Craft. ‘I felt more philosophically like I wanted to show them that their lives didn’t end, our lives didn’t end, my husband’s life ended.’
After both her kids grew up and left, she realized that she was able to move from the farmhouse, which she described as an anchor. Craft and her second husband Dave, left in 2010 and moved to Doylestown.
Craft explains that she always enjoyed writing. ‘I did a lot of writing,’ she said. ‘Continued that in college, and continued that in grad school.’ Once she finished grad school, Craft was dancing in a company that was putting on a show at the 19th Street theater in Allentown, Nolan Dance Theatre. She got her start in writing when she applied for a dance critic position at the Morning Call, and was there for 19 years. ‘I didn’t know I was interested in it as a career, but I always did writing.’
Her first novel, The Art of Falling, took her eight years total in development, from when she started the novel to when it was able to get agent representation for publication, and is going to a second publishing. She now has another contract with Sourcebooks for a second novel that she is currently working on. It will be a novelization of the suicide stand off that occurred at the farm.
‘Even though I loved novels when I was little, I never thought I’d write one,’ she said.
While her second book will veer onto a different topic than her first book, Craft explains that both her novels have the same message. ‘To get through anything, you have to scrabble to find hope,’ she said. ‘That’s what I’m hoping to get across.’
