Katrina Kittle's Touching Cross-Generational Pandemic Novel - 'Morning in This Broken World'

In Morning in This Broken World, novelist and creative writing instructor, Katrina Kittle, tells the story of Vivian Laurent, a 74-year-old recent widow, Luna, a 30-year-old single mother of two, and Luna’s two children, Wren and Cooper. Vivian is a resident at the nursing facility that Luna works at and where Luna cared for Vivian’s late husband before his death. After his passing, Vivian doesn’t want to continue living in the nursing home without her husband, but the idea of returning to the home she once shared with him is also unbearable. When Vivian learns that Luna and her family are being evicted from their apartment, she takes the opportunity to invite them to stay and live with her, right before the Covid-19 lockdown. As a result, “They become this, kind of, found family and it’s rocky at start but they really, truly become family and all four of them were kind of isolated and guarded before Covid. Each of them is wearing a sort of armor they built that they may not even be aware of. It’s only in this coming together and helping each other in these various ways that they’re able to shed that armor and emerge as their more authentic selves by the end of the story.” One of the themes of this book, which can also be found throughout all of Kittle’s novels, is the idea that people need one another and will work together to help each other out. “…People are in all these different boats and we have to look out for each other and they become like this pack, you know, this little tribe that takes care of each other and there’s other people also helping them out…”

The inspiration for the unique title came from one of Kittle’s favorite lines in a poem. “I love Mary Oliver, the poet, and this is a line from her poem, Invitation… the line says, ‘It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world,’ and I love that so much because the world is broken …all of these characters are facing some really hard times and some serious struggles, but it is a serious thing just to be here and that line has always meant a lot to me. I’m a two-time breast cancer survivor and… sometimes on the terrible days, like a day of car trouble, when I realize, this is it. This is it for this car and I’m going to need a new one, I have this thought of like, ‘I get to be here for this. I get to be here for the car trouble because that story could’ve gone a whole different way, right? I get to be here for the bad stuff and the good stuff’ …so that is what I was really, kind of, going for with these four coming together.”

For her readers who aspire to become authors, Kittle says persistence is the key. “You’re going to hear no a lot. There will be all kinds of obstacles thrown up in your path. There’s lots of rejection, and if this is something you want to do you just have to know those obstacles are coming, those no’s are coming, and just keep going. But if this is really what you want to do, you cannot let anything stop you.”