Katie Welch (3:28)

Like my best ideas for stories and for novels, it's a fusion of two really disparate ideas that came together and wouldn't come apart. I read the really big one, Catherine Schulz's Pulitzer Prize winning piece from the New Yorker on the imminent Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake that we're expecting out here. I'm in the Pacific Northwest and at the same time I was getting the sober myself and I was thinking a lot about sobriety and about reshaping my world. So there's this literal and metaphorical earth shaking events that seem unrelated. But I wondered what would happen if I took a person whose, whose life had been shaken to pieces and dropped her into a post earthquake scenario.

Holly Gady (4:22)

Okay, so I'm going to jump ahead with my answers because you mentioned my answers, my questions because you mentioned addiction. And addiction is such a difficult topic to talk about and write about. And while people recognize it, I think more people than ever recognize that it is a disease. There's still so much stigma around it and there's a lot of silence and not a lot of compassion. And for our listeners, I'm an addict too. I'm ten years still over. So I by the character of Del, I'm also a mother and I was an addict when I was still a mother, an active addict. So I would love to to hear about how you balanced this portrayal as Dell. And I'm, I don't know I'm going to use that term balance was Del is distinctly unbalanced. But I Think in a very intentional way. So. But I felt like it was when we're talking about how to, you know, hold all the complex and jagged and soft and vulnerable and tender parts of an addict, you did a really good job of portraying all of Del and all these complexities. And I consider that balanced. And that's what I'm talking about.

Katie Welch (5:32)

So I, I would love for you.

Holly Gady (5:34)

To talk about Dell and creating Dell. And this is a two part question. Talk a little bit about whether you like Del as the character.

Katie Welch (5:45)

Okay. Wow, that's.

Katie Welch (5:46)

That's an interesting facet. So Del is not me, but I am a recovered alcoholic. I'm in recovery. And so of course, that informed Dell. Dell came out of the maxim of when you have a problem or you're terrified of what an outcome might be. If you imagine the worst case scenario, nothing's going to be quite that bad. So I guess I feared losing my children and losing everything that I had. My, myself, my. My surroundings, my marriage, everything because of my addiction. And so to create Del, I imagine I had to imagine someone who that actually had happened to, you know, Del. Del has a glitch in her character that she's a little bit different psychologically than the norm. And I deliberately don't diagnose her in the book. I don't want to put a label on what's. What's exactly wrong with her, but she has a difficult time socially. She doesn't really connect with people easily. You can tell where this comes from because of her upbringing, but it doesn't make life easier for her, just that she knows that she's different. Yeah, she's got a lot of strikes against her when it comes to being an addict. She doesn't have a big support group. She doesn't have, um, she doesn't have anyone to have sound ideas off of. Um, I have a lot of sympathy for Del. And I'm just thinking about that. Excellent question of do I, do I particularly like Del? I'm not sure how I would feel about Del if I met her. Um, she's a frustrating person. She was a frustrating person to write about. Sometimes I would think, what would Del do in this situation? I'd think, oh, God, I know what she would do. And that's a, it's a bad idea. But I can tell that that's what she would do.

Holly Gady (7:39)

I, I love that. Yeah, I love that answer. My next question kind of bounces off that one just a tiny bit. And it's, you know, me bringing myself and my world into this book a bit. But I think that a lot of mothers who read this book and a lot of mothers who are active addicts, recovering addicts, whatever they want to identify as is how mothers always carry the brunt of familial expectations. And I, I'm really always interested whenever, when someone tells me they've read this book, I automatically ask them what they think of Del. And, you know, did you, did you judge her harshly for these decisions she made? Did you judge her at all? And what I find really fascinating is that, like, nobody seems to be pointing out that her, her, her husband, her partner, Prax, also just disappears and does something really silly and dumb and irresponsible. And nobody's judging him the same way. Even her children are not judging the father the same way for just not making a really great decision. I'm trying not to give a lot of stuff away. I, I really like for you to talk about that as not only the relationship between those two, but how it almost like, like you said earlier, it seems like so much is stacked against Del and just being a mother and those insane expectations are stacked against her too.

Katie Welch (9:05)

Yeah, I mean, you put your finger on it. Pax is not held to the same standard as Del is because she's the mother and he's the father. And that was deliberate. I mean, she. He leaves too, and he makes decisions that are not fantastic. Even his decision to. We find out that they've been living together for several years. She's been addicted to opiates. And their marriage isn't one of those hiatuses where they're not talking about the problem. And that's serving him in a certain. It's, you know, it's serving her because she doesn't have to address her problem. But it also serves him to a certain extent, too. And this is not to blame either, either character. It's just, you know, I did draw inspiration from real life. If it's easier not to address the problem, then maybe we don't. And, and women do hold themselves to a higher standard and are held to a higher standard when it comes to childcare and child rearing. And that's, that's just the way it is in, in recovery meetings that I went to. You know, people get up and they share their experience with, with getting sober. And often, you know, people talk about hitting their bottom.

Katie Welch (10:18)

What was the worst, the very worst.

Katie Welch (10:19)

The nadir of your. When your addiction, when you realize that you absolutely had to get sober or die. And the bottom, for a woman, if.

Katie Welch (10:29)

She has had children, a Woman with.

Katie Welch (10:31)

Children is almost always related to those children.

Katie Welch (10:34)

She lost her children.

Holly Gady (10:35)

Is normal.

Katie Welch (10:36)

Is a common thing that gets women into recovery because they want those children back desperately. And it's not the same for men. They get up and it's something else.

Katie Welch (10:49)

That crashed a car or lost all.

Katie Welch (10:50)

Their money or that mean there's a million things. But, yeah, when it comes to Del, she loses her children. And even that. I mean, that's the horrifying thing to me is that she wouldn't have gone back and gone and been with her children. She was just so incredibly damaged psychologically that it, you know, I don't want.

Katie Welch (11:13)

To give away too much either, but, yeah, there you go.

Holly Gady (11:17)

That is a great answer, and I love it because, yeah, that would be. That's enough for so many women, but it's not enough for Del. And that really forces us to be okay. Like, we might have compassion for addicts who are women whose children help them or that the existence of their children prompts them to get sober, but with Del, that's not even enough. And that's really fascinating for me. And I. I'm with you. Like, I love Del as a character. I find her irrevocably sympathetic, but I don't know if I want to know her. I think she'd be a lot to handle. But I like. I like her on the page, and I like her in my mind. My next question for you is about world building, because I love the world building here. What were some considerations that you kept in mind while when creating this world that has survived a climate catastrophe? Because what's really interesting for me, and I love this decision, and I'm assuming it was a conscious decision, is that you don't really talk about it, about what's happening in the rest of the world. It's really just what's happening around Del. And to me, that makes perfect sense because, you know, she's like a black hole, like, I don't know, a neutron star. Everything's just collapsing into her. So, like, what's happening in Japan probably wouldn't be top of her mind. Everything's kind of rooted directly around her in the hyperlocal, or at the very least, the regional.

Katie Welch (12:39)

And.

Holly Gady (12:39)

And so I'd really love for you to speak to these decisions.

Katie Welch (12:42)

Sure.

Katie Welch (12:43)

Yeah.

Katie Welch (12:44)

The. The earthquake has knocked out cell phone communication, and that's convenient, for sure. So I. I was able to have Del not connected to the rest of the world, so she couldn't possibly know how the earthquake was affecting, you know, whether it was A global or, you know, what other climate things were happening. She was really forced to be.

Katie Welch (13:05)

Forced.

Katie Welch (13:06)

To only deal with her immediate environment. It's too bad we don't do this more. I mean, because she's not considering the entire planet and she's not trying to encompass in her mind everything that. Everything that's wrong with the planet, you know, physically, geographically, and with all the people. She just really can only see right in front of her. So she does notice more. She talks to the animals, she's. She sees her surroundings more. She's far more in touch with nature. It was not. It was a conscious decision, but also in order to build that world. This is a little bit grim, but this is happening around us right now. A lot of the physical problems that are happening in British Columbia, not the tsunami or the earthquake per se, but the. These atmospheric rivers. Right now in British Columbia, the snow is almost completely melted.

Katie Welch (14:04)

It is far too hot.

Katie Welch (14:06)

There's climate change is here and it's happening now. And I didn't have to do a.

Katie Welch (14:10)

Lot of research to look around and.

Katie Welch (14:11)

Say, okay, there's already really bad repercussions.

Holly Gady (14:14)

Yeah, thank you. I mean, I found it just to be so wonderful. I mean, not climate change, obviously, but the way that as a reader I had to sit with repercussions happening. But it felt like I wasn't drowning in some way too heavy apocalyptic tale because there's just a really great story. And then we have also. I mean, I think that sometimes we need to be waterboarded with this stuff. Not sometimes. I'd say more often than not, people need to wake up. But one of the things that was really interesting, got me so invested in this story is this opening. So we're gonna talk about the elephant stuff. Seal in the room. And it's on elephant seal.

Katie Welch (14:58)

It is a seal.

Holly Gady (14:58)

There's two seals that we meet in the beginning. And I mean, this is such a wonderful, wacky, delightfully weird and powerful conceit of animals being able to talk. And where did this come from? I have to know.

Katie Welch (15:13)

I mean, I am very lucky in that I've been. I was a tree planter for years and I am sometimes on Cortez island, which is an incredible place to be in touch with wildlife. And, And I'm. I do think that animals are communicating with us. So we, we're held human beings believe that we are the pinnacle of.

Katie Welch (15:33)

Of.

Katie Welch (15:34)

I don't want to say creation, but you know, that we're the absolute top of the peep and, and all the Other animals just sort of exist around us and we do all these wonderful things with our brains and build cities and do all these things and we're not making the planet better. And that supposed smart, being the smartest animal is leading us where, I mean, look around, you know, it's leading us into complete destruction. And the more if we listen to animals, I think they are communicating with us and the more we listen to them, the better off we'd be. During the pandemic there was, it became a bit of an ironic meme, but the nature is healing. You know, hashtag nature is healing. Look, there's deer at the intersections and the dolphins are back swinging, swimming where they used to be. And then the pandemic ended and I guess nature's not healing anymore, you know, like we've got all the quid. I really think that we need to listen to the animals and, and talk to them and communicate with them more. And of course, you know, telepathic communication with them, direct one to one communication is likely not going to happen. But what if that's where that began? And also Dell doesn't communicate well with humans. So I felt like maybe the only living creature that she could talk to.

Katie Welch (16:50)

Would be an animal.

Holly Gady (16:52)

And the animals, especially the seals, like they all have very distinct voices and ways of communication. The seals are quite funny and a little bit ruthless and I really love that. So at this point I was wondering if you'd give our audience here on NBN a little amuse boosh of your book and read to us from it.

Katie Welch (17:14)

Absolutely. I will read a short chapter called Ghost Forest.

Katie Welch (17:18)

So I borrowed, because this is a quest, Del. After the earthquake, she needs to get.

Katie Welch (17:24)

Back to her family on Vancouver island.

Katie Welch (17:27)

Her family of origin. And she has to do it by foot and by horseback because the roads have been destroyed. So because it's a quest, I borrowed.

Katie Welch (17:34)

Loosely borrowed the structure of the Odyssey.

Katie Welch (17:37)

So we start, we begin in the middle of the story and then go back to the beginning. So this is sort of the middle midpoint chronologically of the story. Del is in a forest. The earthquake has happened. She's trying to get home, but she's stuck in Lighthouse park and she's alone.

Katie Welch (17:55)

Camped on a beach here.

Katie Welch (17:57)

So Ghost Forest, perched above my beachside camp, a raven called miserably in the mist.

Katie Welch (18:05)

Ocean sounds lent urgency to my full bladder.

Katie Welch (18:07)

Thin, light, vaporous atmosphere.

Katie Welch (18:10)

What time was it? What day was it? I had slept soundly after my swim. I was thirsty and my clammy sleeping bag adhered to stiff limbs wasn't keeping me warm. I shoved my feet into boots, lurched to a tree, and squatted. The trees in Lighthouse park were dying, trunks ringed with rusty leaves, branches rot rimmed and leafless after the earthquake. Salt water had replaced fresh underground. I was camped in a ghost forest. Household items, a rusted toaster and a basketball hoop lay scattered in the clearing, furred with moss. At my last camping spot, the only human detritus had been my own. But Stone Lake was far away, over mountains to the east and tucked above a landlocked plateau. It had been home for three years until this spring. Raaa. The raven croaked, and my brain translated food. The bird hopped closer, black eyes glittering, blunt beak a threat. Go away, I said, but with faint talon scratches, the raven sidled toward my backpack. Pulse of wing beats and a second raven joined the first. I groped for a branch, tossed the missile, and missed. The ravens were after my supplies and a survival instinct bared its teeth. I scrabbled in soggy leaf litter and hurled a palm sized rock, rock, rock. Two ravens flapped away in white fog. Manx, my dog, was the first animal I heard speak after the earthquake. I wrote it off as a drug induced hallucination, but when my pills ran out, Manx kept talking. He never said much. Coyotes were annoyingly loquacious, cougars pithy and inscrutable, horses gentle and direct. Ravens knew only one food, but they seemed intelligent. I suspected they could say much more and chose not to. I did some forward bends and twists, then packed a pocket knife, aluminum pot.

Katie Welch (20:03)

Water bottle, and lighter into a nylon bag, sealed my backpack, and wedged it.

Katie Welch (20:07)

Inside a teepee of mossy logs. The forest was a translucent dream world. Tendrils of mist drifted like phantasms. I slipped down to the beach, shrouded in fog, sheltered behind a bleached tree stump, I started a fire. While the pot of water heated, I waded to the rocks and used the pocket knife to pry mussels from their moorings. I loaded them into the nylon bag. Bivalves lacked mouths and brains. They couldn't protest their murder. Dive bombed by seagulls demanding a share of the feast, I collected rubbery lengths of kelp and returned to my campfire. I boiled the food and devoured it, sucked grainy meat from thin purple shells and chewed salty seaweed. My diet was anything I could hunt or harvest grasshoppers, worms, rabbits, squirrels, berries, lily bulbs, dandelions, plantain, chickweed, mushrooms, burdock, and beetles.

Katie Welch (21:00)

If I managed to die, it would.

Katie Welch (21:02)

Not be from starvation. A quarter hour later, sharp gastric pain radiated to my chest. My eyes watered and I brushed them with my three digit left hand. I cringed at the memory of slicing necrotic flesh from my own body. Then lay down on the sand. What had I been thinking about? Oh, horses.

Holly Gady (21:21)

Thank you so much, Katie. I think this is a good time for me to bring in one of my favorite characters who is Chang, who comes out of nowhere. And I didn't realize how desperately I felt like he needed to be there until we were introduced to him. And I would love for you to tell our listeners a little bit about Chang and maybe how his post catastrophe world is. It's similar to Dell's, but it's also very different. Sure.

Katie Welch (21:49)

So Chung, he lived in Richmond and so that's much closer to the epicenter of the earthquake and he literally did lose everyone. So he finds himself alone. And so he is a parallel situation. Adele's, in a way his is worse, but he has resilience and he has a lot of qualities which Dell doesn't have that allow him to, without giving too much away, that'll allow him to be more self reliant and get along.

Katie Welch (22:24)

Better after the earthquake.

Katie Welch (22:26)

So when those two come together, Chung's whole mo after the earthquake is when he comes to terms with what he's lost. He just wants to help other people. And when Del comes across him, she can't really understand why he would help her.

Katie Welch (22:45)

And really it is that simple.

Katie Welch (22:48)

He's being kind because being kind makes him feel better. Because it does. And it's not a complicated thing. But it does take Del the whole book to learn this from Chung. And she's very lucky that she, that.

Katie Welch (23:04)

She ran across him.

Katie Welch (23:05)

He's a sailor, kids love him. He, he just wants to help people.

Katie Welch (23:12)

So he's a great foil for Del, I think.

Katie Welch (23:14)

And yeah, he's a, hopefully a little bit of a bomb for Del's personality is that when Chung comes into the story it's like, okay, I can like this person.

Holly Gady (23:24)

Chung is very likable, that's for sure. And, and this leads to a really interesting question, at least I think it's an interesting question. Not just because I came up with it, but it's also, it's more importantly, I think it's a book, a question the book asks that your novel asks of readers. And that is what is, who deserves grace? What is grace and what constitutes redemption? Because I would say, I would argue there is redemption in this book, but it is not the redemption that perhaps people would see seek out Or. Or what that people would. Readers would seek when they start the book for Dell. And that made it feel very true to life for me. And I would.

Katie Welch (24:09)

If.

Holly Gady (24:09)

If you have thoughts about this redemption and grace embodied in your book, I. I'd really love to hear your thoughts on the redemption narrative.

Katie Welch (24:19)

Okay, well, I'm going to tiptoe a little bit around the nuts and bolts because it is so tied in with the final scene and the conclusion of the story. But, I mean, the title of the novel comes from a very short poem.

Katie Welch (24:35)

That I was given.

Katie Welch (24:36)

My ex husband and I were given on our wedding day by a BC poet named Ted Poole. And the poem is eight words long.

Katie Welch (24:43)

It's.

Katie Welch (24:43)

The ladder to heaven has only one rung. And that rung, it was given to me on my wedding day.

Katie Welch (24:49)

That rung is love.

Katie Welch (24:50)

And the whole book is working towards that. It doesn't talk about love. Dell doesn't. It's. I don't think the word even occurs in the. In the entire Manus.

Katie Welch (25:03)

In the entire book until the end. The redemption.

Katie Welch (25:06)

The only redemption that you get is the. The knowing that moving forward, Del is.

Katie Welch (25:11)

On a better path.

Katie Welch (25:12)

And I can't tell you exactly what that looks like, but it's. She almost doesn't get there. And without giving him anything away, I can't tell you.

Holly Gady (25:21)

It's a nice teaser there.

Katie Welch (25:22)

It's a nice teaser. How many more times do I have to say you need to read the book to know about it?

Holly Gady (25:28)

Yeah, I mean, I was intending, and I'm hoping it would be a provocative question for our listeners because again, I think even me, like, I'm such a, you know, enlightened person, but I really wasn't expecting a specific narrative. I get. But I appreciated that. I felt like the. Where this book goes and how it gets you there was so surprising to me. It wasn't what I expected at all. And I was kind of, like, ashamed of myself at the end to find that I'd been expecting something else because it's less. It's truer to life. I find where this book ends and not as predictable, at least within traditional narrative arcs that we're used to seeing. I think it's predictable if you've ever, like, lived your life or, you know, you might be like, wow, things don't end up the way you think they will. Life isn't a, you know, a Hollywood movie or something. And we don't always get tidy, pat endings. So I really, really appreciate it. The nuance and complexity that he brought to the Characters and the narrative and how beautifully it was written. And my penultimate question for you is actually about your writing style, which I felt is. Was so deeply rooted in the actual earth. Like I felt like, oh my gosh, I'm actually growing scales of stone reading this. I can smell dirt. I was thinking about laying down under a tree and that's smell of pine close to the. Close to the ground. I obviously. I obviously live in the country, but I do live in the country, so I'm surrounded by this stuff all the time. It's been chick, chickadee, chatter and stuff like that. Like, I really just felt so close to the earth. And I was thinking, is Katie a poet? Is this why this is happening? Or is it just your wonderful lyrical style in general?

Katie Welch (27:25)

Oh, well, thank you very much, but that's lovely.

Katie Welch (27:28)

Ah, it's just. I'm not a poet, actually. I don't. I've tried to write poetry and discovered through those efforts that I don't think I'm a poet, I'm a novelist. But it is important to me that the scenes. Scenes are evocative in the way that you describe. So that's very gratifying.

Katie Welch (27:45)

Thank you.

Katie Welch (27:46)

To hear that, that, that worked. I'm. I had a long time to work on this.

Holly Gady (27:52)

It.

Katie Welch (27:53)

It took a really long time. And I just wasn't satisfied with the physical scenes unless they were evocative of.

Katie Welch (27:59)

What I actually meant.

Katie Welch (28:00)

And fortunately, I did have. I have had the opportunity. I mean, I've been lucky enough to have the opportunity to be in a lot of these places, on a beach in Vancouver, on a plateau in the interior on Vancouver Island. You know, not living in all those places, but.

Katie Welch (28:16)

Well, yeah, I guess I've been in tree planting camps in all those places.

Katie Welch (28:19)

So I have been out in the wilderness and I just would close my eyes. This was some advice I got from another writer at the Banff center and just pretend that I was there and. And write down everything that occurred to.

Katie Welch (28:32)

Me about what that experience was like and then try to work that into the description of the place.

Holly Gady (28:38)

Well, it's gorgeous. And I think one of the ways that your book changed. I don't know if it changed the way I think I'm all already pretty climate conscience as it is. But I think it reinforced and reinvigorated the way I think insofar as how important it is just to go outside and roll in a. Roll around the grass like a dog and be like, remember how close we are to everything around us and unplug a little bit and, or a lot and appreciate what's around us enough to actually care about it being gone. So it was a really beautiful reminder of that. And it was funny at times, sad at times. It was just everything. My final question for you, Katie, is what are you working on now?

Katie Welch (29:26)

I am working on a novel set in a tree planting camp.

Katie Welch (29:31)

It's a mystery set in a tree planting camp. And again, there is something scientific that.

Katie Welch (29:37)

Has happened or a bending of the laws of science as we know them.

Katie Welch (29:42)

And something unexpected.

Katie Welch (29:45)

Happens.

Katie Welch (29:46)

And these characters, it's very convoluted way that a large cast of characters come together and then and all of them wind up dealing with this bizarre turn of events there.

Katie Welch (30:00)

How's that?

Holly Gady (30:02)

I love it. I love a touch of the speculative, a little smidge of it. And that's how it felt in this book too, too. I mean, I realize there's talking animals and that's pretty speculative, but it didn't feel speculative. I mean, it was and it definitely is, but it just felt natural, which, you know, is the best compliment I can, I can get it. It was really beautifully done. So, Katie, thank you so much for joining me today to talk about your brilliant book. I hope everyone listening reads it, Ladder to Heaven, which was released in 2025 with the excellent Walzack and Wynn publisher. Katie, I hope to have you back to talk about about your next book.

Katie Welch (30:36)

Thank you so much for having me on the show, Holly. I really appreciate it.