Mary Foxe asked Cat Winters:

What was the strangest/hardest thing you have had to research for a book?

Cat Winters Ooh, that's a good one, Mary. It's also a really hard one to answer because I've come across so many strange things in my research, from the bizarre real-life stories of early-twentieth-century seance hoaxes, to a 1923 magazine article about using the shape of movie stars' noses to learn about their personalities, to the "Fittest Family" contests at county fairs during the height of the eugenics movement in the early 1900s. By far, though, I think my research into Victorian dentistry for THE CURE FOR DREAMING proved to be the strangest. My favorite dentistry tidbit was the horrific use of leeches to relieve inflamed gums, a practice used up until WWI. Most terrifying of all was the fact that the dentist couldn't just slap a leech on a patient's gums; he or she would need to tip a tube holding the leech toward the patient's mouth, and both patient and dentist would stay painfully still until the leech wiggled its way out and (hopefully) attached itself to the right place. It made me understand one of the many reasons why people feared dentists in those days.

The emotionally hardest thing I had to research is a tie between investigating gunshot wounds for IN THE SHADOW OF BLACKBIRDS and researching the Klan's takeover of Oregon in the 1920s for my upcoming YA novel, THE STEEP AND THORNY WAY.

In terms of what was the most difficult thing to find, I'd say it was the frustration I initially felt in trying to figure out how to drive a WWI ambulance. My protagonist in THE UNINVITED, Ivy Rowan, does so, and it took me a while to find out what type of vehicles were used to build the ambulances. When I learned that many U.S. ambulances were created out of Model T trucks, I then needed to figure how to drive a Model T. Thankfully, I eventually found YouTube videos in which historic car collectors gave slow, step-by-step instructions for the entire process, including naming all of the levers and other controls in the car. It was the next best thing to actually driving a WWI ambulance, and since most of those don't exist anymore, I made do with what I had.

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