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The New Northwestern A C O N V E R S AT I O N W I T H N O V E L I S T A N D J O U R N A L I S T STEPHANIE CLIFFORD ’96 By Daneet Steffens ’82
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SARAH BODE-CLARK
tephanie Clifford ’96 upends the American Western, shifting focus from cowboys and outlaws to country music and the pioneering women of the Pacific Northwest, in her latest novel, The Farewell Tour. The book traces protagonist Lillian Waters’ life as a musician over a five-decade span — from Depression-era Washington state through the early days of the Nashville music scene and into the 1980s. Clifford intertwines emotive scenes from Waters’ younger days with her professional career, offering readers evocative details of growing up on a dusty farm, World War II Tacoma, and climbs up (and slides down) the country music ladder. This story is worlds away from Clifford’s terrific 2015 debut novel, Everybody Rise, a contemporary take on Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, but the two books share elements of Clifford’s voice, tone and approach as a writer. What comes across clearly in Clifford’s work, as well as in conversation, is a palpable presence of compassion, empathy and a willingness to listen — all traits she has honed during her decades-long career as an award-winning investigative journalist. Clifford first developed a love of reporting as a student reporter for The Exonian. After being on staff at The New York Times, she now writes long-form investigations about criminal justice and business for publications such as The Times, The Economist and Elle. We caught up with her in between deadlines. Did Farewell Tour have a particular starting point?
Two, actually. I was reading a lot of classics about the American West — The Grapes of Wrath and Wallace Stegner and Willa Cather — and I was getting increasingly mad about not seeing the Northwest represented. I’m from Seattle, and when these writers talked about the West, they left out a huge chunk of it which has a very different geography, feel and ethos. I wanted to write a Northwest novel, a Northwestern, not in terms of saloons and shootouts, but in terms of examining the land, grappling with how the place forms people. I also noticed that the women characters were always stuck inside — cooking, cleaning, baking — and it didn’t reflect the Northwest women I knew, the fierce women of my grandmother’s generation. I wanted to get some of that particular grit of a Northwest woman into my book, place it at the center.
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