Seattle author Kit Bakke wrote Miss Alcott’s E-mail (2006), a series of imagined conversations between the author and Louisa May Alcott. (Louisa May Alcott was more than a novelist, she led a life of advocacy for social reforms, as an abolitionist, a women’s rights activist, and a hospital worker.)
In the novel, Kit Bakke writes to Alcott about life as a baby boomer, filling in the deceased Alcott (1832-1888) on the progress of the women’s rights movement into the 21st century. Alcott “replies” via material Bakke culled from Alcott’s journals and letters. The book is extensively researched and full of information about 19th-century life among the Transcendentalist crowd (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Peabody, Henry David Thoreau) in Concord, Massachusetts.
This past week, I had the privilege of hearing Kit Bakke speak at the Whidbey Island residency (Whidbey MFA) on interviewing people for oral histories, and the permutations of truth in fiction and nonfiction. Afterward, I went up to introduce myself.
“I’ve heard you speak about six times now,” I said. “You might say I’m a Kit Bakke groupie.”
“I wish,” she said, laughing.
But it’s true, I am. These days, Bakke advocates for literacy and helps support writers as a founding member of the Seattle 7 Writers, a group actively supporting literacy in the Northwest. She’s also working on collecting oral histories, and recommended a couple of great sites:
Oral History Association
H-Oralhist
The Washington State Heritage Center Legacy Project
StoryCorps