We chat with author Sarah Pekkanen about The Women In White, which combines a decades-old mystery with spine-tingling paranormal elements in this twisty novel of the seen and unseen.
Hi, Sarah! What was the inspiration for The Women in White?
My brilliant editor, Jen Enderlin, called me one day to tell me she’d just seen a social media reel about parapsychology experiments that took place at Duke University in the 1960s. We were both electrified, instantly knowing this could turn into a book. I dug into research, which I love to do, and discovered Duke had a renowned Parapsychology Laboratory that conducted hundreds of thousands of experiments designed to measure the psychic abilities of volunteers. Within a week, I’d booked a trip to explore the archives, which are now held at the Rhine Research Center in Durham, NC. The center generously welcomed me in (and even let me test my own psychic ability). From there, my imagination went wild – creating a purely fictional scientist who grew obsessed with harnessing the gifts of four exceptional young women, all of whom disappeared on the same day in 1964 after volunteering for the experiments.
My book opens when Riley Bell – who thinks her intuition is broken following a devastating divorce – takes a job as a caretaker for one of these women. Chapters alternate between present day and 1964, revealing the women’s stories along with Riley’s quest to stop the person who is now attempting to resurrect those old experiments.
What was the most surprising thing you learned while researching this book?
How parapsychology gripped the imagination of so many reputable organizations, driving a ferocious and well-financed effort to understand and harness the untapped abilities of the mind. Many of my chapters begin with true anecdotes and statistics, pulled from newspapers and official documents, detailing the ways parapsychology has been studied by universities, governments across the world – and even an Apollo 14 astronaut who conducted experiments in space, unbeknownst to NASA. You’d think law enforcement would be skeptical of psychics, but one stat in my book details how a woman has assisted police in more than 4,000 investigations. And UVA’s school of medicine is currently compiling a database of children from around the world who have described apparent recollections of a previous life, including some astonishing cases.
Before you started writing books, what did you do for a living?
I was a journalist for newspapers including The Baltimore Sun, which was a perfect training ground for a novelist. I learned to write quickly – if you don’t consistently meet your deadlines at a paper, you’ll be out of a job. It also shaped my view that writing is a craft, not an art. Sentences can be tweaked; scenes can be pruned and re-written. But if you don’t get that initial draft out, you’ll just stare at a blank page all day. Working in daily journalism taught me to write even on days when I’m feeling uninspired, and I’m grateful. If I were waiting around waiting for a muse, I wouldn’t be very productive. Another way daily journalism contributed to my career as a novelist is by giving me a comfort level with shifting conditions. I can write in a very noisy place (because newsrooms are pretty chaotic), but I can also write in silence. Some novelists need to work in the same place every single day, but I can and do write anywhere, and I attribute this to my early training.
Tell us more about your passion for rescue animals and your non-profit India Street Paws.
It’s kind of a crazy story. A few years ago, I was scrolling through social media and saw a video of a group of people risking their safety to save a dog that had fallen into a deep well in Gujarat. I ended up corresponding with the founder of RRSA India, who was one of the people at the well. He told me the organization was in a desperate situation: They couldn’t afford the land they were leasing for the shelter, and might have to shut it down. Naturally, when one meets a stranger on the Internet from another country who is desperate for money, one immediately buys a plane ticket to that country to try to help, so that’s what I did. 😉 I spent a week in India working at the shelter, doing everything from catching street dogs, and helping vaccinate them, to assisting with minor medical procedures, to interacting with creatures including a baby owl, wild monkeys, and a goat that is convinced he is a dog since he lives with them in the shelter. When I saw the incredible work being done by the shelter – they treat 4,000 animals per year – I knew I had to help. I formed a company called India Street Paws, received 501c3 approval from the IRS, and began fund-raising to help buy some land for the shelter. Right now, we’ve obtained a huge plot of land and are in the process of building a permanent sanctuary, and I still go to India at least once a year.
What advice can you give aspiring novelists?
Write in tiny pockets of time. You don’t need a beachfront retreat and complete silence for a week to start your book. In fact, I believe the opposite. Such settings can provide too much pressure for a novelist. I keep notebooks and pens everywhere – in my nightstand drawer, in the minivan console, and in my purse. I lugged my laptop to Chuck E. Cheese and wrote part of my debut novel there while my kids played nearby (since I came up in newsrooms, the howls and shouts of Chuck E. Cheese were a familiar soundtrack to my writing.) If you can manage one page a day, you’ll have a draft of your novel in a year. The surprising benefit to being super-busy is that you don’t spend a lot of time second-guessing your writing. If you know you have twenty minutes to write, you’ll likely turn on the gas and fling some words onto the page. And if you’re an aspiring or published thriller writer, you need to join International Thriller Writers, which is devoted to helping writers at all stages of their careers.
