Katherine Reay | Writers' Voices

National bestselling and award-winning author, Katherine Reay, joins us to talk about her 11th published book and newest historical novel, The Berlin Letters: A Cold War Novel. The story centers around Luisa Voekler, a CIA code breaker, who was separated from her father as a young child after the rise of the Berlin Wall, but travels back to East Berlin years later in hopes of freeing him from a German prison. According to Reay, “The Berlin Letters starts the day the wall goes up, that’s August 13th, 1961, and the action primarily takes place in that final week of the Berlin Wall, November 3rd to November 9th, and it ends that night in 1989…” As for what inspired her to write this story, Reay remarked, “There were two things that came simultaneously. Number one was the Berlin Wall, both as a character within the story and as the structure of the story, but the second was the Venona project and that was a top secret CIA code-breaking project that started in 1943 and it ran all the way to 1980 and when I read about this project, which was conducted primarily by women, women amazing at math who were breaking Soviet codes all those years, I thought to myself, ‘Hm, what if that didn’t stop in 1980? What if some CIA officer decided that there was more information to be gleaned from those old codes?’ and so that set up the idea of a code breaker, and the code breaker, Luisa Voekler, in my story, is working as part of Venona 2 and she stumbles across a code that reminds her of a childhood memory, and sends us back to her story and it becomes really a family love story of a bunch of spies, a bunch of codes, one side of the Berlin Wall and the other, and all that good stuff.”

Concerning her writing process, Reay prefers to write her stories chronologically to allow for the flow of emotions to build authentically. “If you write a book out of chronological order, you are depleting that, sort of, synergistic emotion building that is created within the story because you’re bringing different emotions on different days.” And for those who aim to become published writers in their future, Reay offers some encouraging words, “The writing wins and perseverance wins. Don’t let 41 rejections… that’s a big number, don’t let that stop you! My feeling about writing and about the publishing journey is, you cannot control the end. You can only control the journey and how you act on the journey. So keep your hopes up, keep your head high, enjoy the gift you’ve been given to write, and keep going.”