Bestselling historical novelists team up as co-authors on ‘The Phoenix Crown’

Courtesy of HarperCollins

Authors Janie Chang and Kate Quinn, with their book "The Phoenix Crown."

Courtesy of HarperCollins

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Authors Janie Chang and Kate Quinn, with their book "The Phoenix Crown."

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By Pam Kragen | [email protected] | The San Diego Union-Tribune

UPDATED: February 12, 2024 at 5:23 PM PST

Seven years ago, bestselling novelists Kate Quinn and Janie Chang met at a historical fiction writers conference in Portand, then embarked on a t book tour a few months later.

From that road trip experience came a close friendship. And from that friendship came “The Phoenix Crown,” a novel they co-authored that arrives in bookstores Tuesday, the same day they’ll be speaking at events in Coronado and Rancho Santa Fe.

“The Phoenix Crown” begins in San Francisco, just days before the city’s devastating 1906 earthquake, and focuses on four very different female friends. Gemma is an opera singer down on her luck; Suling is a seamstress from Chinatown being forced into an arranged marriage; Nellie is a bohemian painter and Gemma’s best friend, who has gone missing; and the real-life historical figure, Alice Eastwood, a Canadian American botanist who built the plant collection at San Francisco’s California Academy of Sciences.

Quinn (author of “The Diamond Eye”) and Chang (“The Porcelain Moon”) talked about their new novel in an email interview a couple of weeks ago.

Q: What cities do you call home?

Janie Chang: Last year, we moved from Vancouver to the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia, which is a beachy kind of summer holiday destination north of Vancouver and accessible only by ferry. We love the “only by ferry” part. It’s rather rural, and there’s a strong sense of community and the water is a 5-minute walk away, which is good because when I’m deep into the writing my husband will pop his head in the door and say “Go take a walk. You haven’t been outside all day.”

Kate Quinn: I’m currently splitting my time between the Spring Valley area of San Diego, and the Seattle area of Washington. My husband is active-duty Navy and got an unexpected transfer to Washington a couple of years ago, so I’ve been spending lots of my time with him in the Pacific Northwest — which was fortuitous because I’ve been close enough to Janie, during the writing of “The Phoenix Crown,” to meet up for writing and outlining sessions.

Q: What sparked and sustained your friendship?

Quinn and Chang: That three-city book tour (which we undertook with our mutual friend, Canadian historical fiction author Jennifer Robson) was the trip where absolutely everything that could go wrong went wrong, yet we all got so much laughter and hilarity (and so many stories!) out of the experience, that it was absolutely worth it. We are history nerds who can laugh when things go haywire, and that more than anything else told us we could write a book together and still be friends by the end of it — which was our primary goal when we got started.

Q: What drew each of you to become historical fiction novelists?

Chang: I’ve always been a book lover and would read pretty much anything people put in front of me. We had a neighbor who read a lot of historical fiction and science fiction, and she would her books on to me, so those are still my two favorite genres. And yes, historical fiction is the gateway drug to history — every time I read a historical novel, I look up non-fiction s of that era or that person. It’s so exciting to uncover little-known chapters of history and I think historical novelists enjoy bringing new perspectives to readers.

Quinn: My mother was a librarian with a degree in ancient and medieval history, so I grew up hearing stories from the past in the same casual way that my friends grew up with Saturday morning cartoons. As soon as I began writing stories of my own (very young; I wrote my first story age 7) it seemed entirely natural to gravitate toward the past.

Q: How did you come up with the idea for “The Phoenix Crown”?

Quinn: I’d long been fascinated with the San Francisco earthquake as a setting for a story (so much drama), and the more I looked into it, the more I was certain it needed a Chinatown heroine. San Francisco’s Chinatown was completely destroyed during the post-earthquake fires, and the Chinese community was such a vibrant, central part of the city’s history, yet I wasn’t reading a lot of fiction that focused on them more than tangentially during the earthquake. So I called Janie up, crossing my fingers that she would find the history interesting.

Chang: I saw an opportunity to write a Chinese female character in a way that showed the restricted lives of Chinese in the U.S.A. during the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The early 1900s turned out to be a good time for creating an interesting character because by then, some of the first U.S.-born Chinese were growing up and trying to straddle two cultures and succeed in two societies.

Q: Why did you choose the 1906 San Francisco earthquake as your setting?

Quinn and Chang: Any disaster story at its core involves a countdown to the disaster — which is why we used a literal countdown clock at the head of our chapters, so the reader (if not the oblivious characters) knows what is coming. We knew we wanted to introduce several very different women, throw them together just before the earthquake with a number of different personal and professional dilemmas, and then have the earthquake upend every one of their careful plans … but we also wanted to explore the aftermath of a disaster too, where people have to pick their lives up and go on. So the book’s central mystery doesn’t wind up in San Francisco, but halfway around the world and five years later, when a series of telegrams draws all the women to Paris to face an enemy one final time.

Q: What elements of your own personalities did you infuse into these characters?

Quinn: My heroine Gemma is an opera singer, and I also trained as an opera singer — it’s what I went to college for, and I even have a very similar voice to Gemma’s (a high lyric soprano suited to Mozart, Handel and the lighter Italians). I’ve always wanted to use my musical background for a novel, and finally I got the chance, because the night before the earthquake, San Francisco put on all its finest feathers for the social event of the season, which was a performance of Bizet’s “Carmen” at the Grand Opera House starring none other than Enrico Caruso. So I got a real kick out of writing an opera singer who sings opposite him at that famous performance, using my own knowledge of what it means to be a singer to round out her character.

Chang: It was a time when women had very few career options, and within Chinatown, women had even fewer choices. Yet Suling has been educated at mission schools, is fluently bilingual, and knows there’s more to life than what her traditional community expects. Nothing so extreme as Suling’s situation, but my parents were quite traditional and had definite ideas about what I should do with my life. So in a way, I didn’t have to imagine too hard to understand Suling’s dilemma. That’s probably true of all immigrant children.

Q: What were the most interesting things you learned in your research?

Chang: I found it really interesting that the Chinatown you now see in San Francisco was essentially a theme park. After the fire, Chinatown’s community leaders saw an opportunity to rebuild to bring in tourism, and by doing so, engage with the White population in a positive way and combat racism. They hired an American architect who designed buildings that were rather fanciful, drawing on the “exotic” notions Westerners had of China. This proved such a success that San Francisco’s Chinatown became the template for Chinatowns all over the world.

Quinn: We still mourn all the historical tidbits that we didn’t have the room to include in this book. It’s such a rich time period, we could easily have made “The Phoenix Crown” twice as long.

Q: How did you construct this book together while living 1,000 miles apart?

Chang and Quinn: We wrote alternating chapters/viewpoints, and mapped our stories out by timeline in a Google spreadsheet so we always knew how much time was covered in each chapter, and what basic events would be covered. As soon as we finished a chapter, we’d throw it right up into a shared Google drive so the other could read the latest progress and use it to dovetail into their own work. We’re both a little less strict with outlining in our own work, but we knew this would be the best way, working together, to keep on track.

Q: As established writers, you each have an authorial voice. How did you find your collective voice?

A: Can we say again how much we love spreadsheets? With each chapter plotted out row by row, each of us knew how the action in the other person’s chapter started and ended and that made it possible to dovetail our chapters seamlessly. Additionally, we planned from the beginning on two heroines, each of us penning one heroine That way, if the voices sounded different, it didn’t matter because our two heroines are themselves very different. So trying to find a collective voice wasn’t really a concern; just a pleasant surprise when we found it.

Q: Any chance of a second collaboration?

Chang and Quinn: Who knows? We had so much fun on this one, after all. Never say never!

“The Phoenix Crown” by Kate Quinn and Janie Chang (Harper Collins, 2024; 400 pages)