Ann Larabee is associate chairperson of the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University. She received a BA and MA in English from Bowling Green State University and a PhD in English, with distinction, from Binghamton University. She is mother of two children, Noah and Lissa, and grandmother of Maks Kie Mecher. When not reading to Maks, she spends most of her time pursuing her lifelong passion: writing. She is currently at work on the story of a group of Irish-American revolutionaries who planned to bomb London in the 1880’s.

Author’s statement:

I was born in 1957, in the year of Sputnik, on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio, where my parents had met. My father was a machinist who eventually worked his way into management at TRW, a defense contractor that built spy satellites and missile parts. My mother gave up a teaching career to raise a substantial Catholic family of six. Like many children of the 60’s, I grew up in the Cold War atmosphere of political tension and nuclear fear, and I often think that my interest in catastrophic events, especially ones involving big explosions, stems from the psychological stress of that time. Most writers feel that they don’t choose their subjects, but rather that their subjects choose them, and for mysterious reasons, I seem to have been chosen to explore dark events involving technology. Both of my books, Decade of Disaster and The Dynamite Fiend, are considerations of catastrophic violence brought on by human design.

It is amazing to me that I stumbled across the story of Alexander “Sandy” Keith, by wandering through history without much design or foresight. I had begun by studying the bomb making activities of very early terrorist organizations, in order to understand how such ideas are spread from person to person and group to group. But as I was researching the period, I found that I was much more fascinated by the human stories I’d discovered. The individuals involved in these activities often led intense lives, full of extreme events in the midst of personal and political turmoil. These are the stories I want to tell, because they help us understand violent impulses instilled by war, exile, and social disruption.

Though I am possessed of a rational, skeptical frame of mind, I still felt, while writing The Dynamite Fiend, that I was haunted especially by Sandy’s wife, Cecelia, who seemed to be lingering around me. Perhaps I felt that, of all my historical characters, Cecelia was the most sympathetic because of her youth and naivete in suddenly finding herself married to one of the most horrific criminals of the nineteenth century. Throughout my work, I am especially interested in the role of women, who are too often placed aside in tales of technological obsession, like mine. But to understand Sandy Keith, with his perverse idea of being a model husband and father, I had to understand Cecelia. And as I learned, it takes more than technology to make a bomber; it takes a family and a village.