Lucie asked Cat Winters:

I am from Portland, Oregon and loved recognizing it in your books! How did you research what it was like in 1900 in Portland, for "The Cure for Dreaming"?

Cat Winters I love hearing from Portlanders who enjoyed seeing the city represented in the novel! I used various research methods to learn what life was like in 1900 Portland. Thankfully, organizations such as the Oregon Historical Society and the University of Oregon Libraries have preserved countless historical documents that can be easily read both online and at research archives, so I spent a great deal of time sorting through photos and papers from the past. I also read through scanned copies of The Oregonian from the specific dates used in the novel, which was EXTREMELY helpful in researching daily life in the city during that moment in time. Being a local, I traveled through the city and photographed the historical sites that still exist, as well as the tiny fragments of reminders of long-gone sites (such as the Portland Hotel, which formally stood at the site of Pioneer Square). I also read various books about the city, including Portland: People, Politics, and Power, 1851-2000, by Jewel Lansing, and Wicked Portland: The Wild and Lusty Underworld of a Frontier Seaport Town, by Finn J.D. John. To learn about the local suffrage movement in the late 1800s, I pored over Yours for Liberty: Selections from Abigail Scott Duniway's Suffrage Newspaper, edited by Jean M. Ward and Elaine A. Maveety.

You can catch a little bit more about my research on a recent episode of Oregon Art Beat that aired in October: http://www.opb.org/television/program....

Thanks for asking!

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