Turning archaeology into novels

WORLAND – People think of Wyoming and they think of cowboys and horses, seldom do they think of famous people. But Wyoming with its western charm has been the catalyst for many famous people. Michael and Kathleen Gear, archaeologists/ authors are two of those people. The couple came to Wyoming for their separate careers, fell in love with not only the rugged beauty of Wyoming but with each other.

Michael and Kathleen Gear each came to Wyoming for different reasons. “I’m a fourth-generation Colorado kid that realized that through some mistake of fortune I had been born just south of paradise, but I got here real quickly,” Michael Gear said.

“I was actually born in California and I was working on my PhD (Doctor of Philosophy) in American Indian history at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) and my area of study was the Arapaho so I moved to Wyoming in 1980 to work on my PhD work,” Kathleen Gear said.

Both Michael and Kathleen were archaeologist before they turned to combining their passion for archaeology and writing. “We were both archaeologists before we started writing books. I was a federal government archaeologist for the U.S. Department of the Interior and Mike was working for a private research company,” Kathleen Gear stated.

The couple met at an archaeology convention in Laramie in 1981. “She stepped on my hat,” Michael Gear said. “You’re the one who had it on the floor,” Kathleen Gear said. “I was raised that you take your hat off in a restaurant. My mother wacked me in the head any time I tried to get away with that when I was a kid and even to this day I simply cannot have a hat on in restaurant, a meeting or in an office,” Michael Gear added.

Michael Gear started his writing career in 1978. “I read a western novel in which a fella brought a bunch of steers up from Texas and at the end of the book, in the epilogue all the steers were calving. So that set me off and I threw the book across the room and said that I can do better than that and having nothing else to do for a while because it was winter and we couldn’t do field work. I just put a piece of paper in the typewriter and started working. Oh my God I had fun,” Michael Gear said.

“Mike has written 14 novels by himself, well 15 as his latest book will be published in September,” Kathleen Gear added.

Kathleen began her writing career in 1987 and has written 10 novels by herself and over 100 nonfiction publications. “It’s one of those things where you spend a lot of your life digging square holes in the ground and trying to imagine who the people were; who were sitting there using the artifacts that you are digging up and as you try to image, you are actually writing the story in your head. Who they were, what kind of despair and joy that they had in their lives, what their children were doing, what they were afraid of, what they loved and it’s just a short step for us to move from imagining that while sitting on an archaeological site to just writing it down in a novel,” Kathleen Gear said.

The couple has written over 35 novels together, the most famous being their “People” series and working together takes a lot of patience, understanding and acceptance of criticism. “We get up every morning and we talk about plots and where the characters are going to go, at least where we think that they are going to go, they always change the story somewhere in the middle. Then at night we read what the other has written, make editorial comments and then the next day we start revisions on it. So it’s a lot of dialogue that goes on about the story and we edit each other heavily,” Kathleen Gear stated.

“Everything that you liked in those books, was done by Kathleen. Anything that you thought was kind of tacky was done by me,” Michael Gear joked.

Each year the couple works with the Thermopolis Chamber of Commerce bringing the ‘People of the Earth’ days to the community. The couple’s third book was ‘People of the Earth’ and was located at the Thermopolis Hot Springs. During the event there is a re-enacting of a scene from the book and participants are also able to learn about the area, archaeology and see things through an archaeologist’s eyes.