Stephen Harrigan, Novelist and Screenwriter

His Latest Novel, Challenger Park, about Life as a Mommy Astronaut

Published in the April 2006 issue of The Good Life magazine

Open the door to author Stephen Harrigan's office and you stand face-to-face with a cardboard cutout of Chewbacca. Steve smiles and says, "My youngest daughter gave me that because she is a Star Wars freak." After I get past the wookie guarding the door, I see tree branches waving in the morning sun through two skylights that brighten Harrigan's enviably airy workspace. A Macintosh computer sits on a lightly littered, metal office desk that is more functional than fashionable. A decade of bound magazine back-issues from Harrigan's years as a staff writer and senior editor at Texas Monthly, sits on a built-in shelf along the back wall.

These days, Harrigan makes a busy day-job out of writing screenplays. In his spare time he writes books, like The New York Times best-seller Gates of the Alamo. His new novel, Challenger Park, comes out this month. It's about a female astronaut who balances her dangerous career with her duties to her children.

Much like the astronauts in Challenger Park, on the surface, Harrigan's life is calm, but at times his work puts him in danger. Some of Harrigan's real-life adventures include watching open-heart surgery and diving in underwater caves, such as the one he wrote about in Jacob's Well, a critically acclaimed novel published in 1984 about an underwater cave beneath Wimberley's Cypress Creek that has claimed the lives of at least eight divers. While writing an article about igloos, Harrigan traveled thirty miles across a frozen sea and was almost killed in a runaway dog sled.

Safe at home in his office, Harrigan is a creature of habit, focused on his work that often involves three projects in a single day.

Lawrence "Larry" Wright, Harrigan's friend and fellow writer, says, "Steve is a meat-and-potatoes man. He doesn't like anything fussy about his food. He will not put salad dressing on his salad. He just likes lettuce and tomatoes. The holidays throw him off because the mail doesn't come. The regular rhythms of life are disturbed. So every holiday Steve will complain. Fourth of July or Martin Luther King Day, he gets grumpy. All of Steve's turbulence and adventurousness is transferred to his writing."

Harrigan says, "At first I dawdle around for a long time trying to figure out ways to approach a project. Then it may take me three weeks to write a page. But toward the end, I'll have gathered all this force and knowledge about the characters and about what's going to happen, and I'll just blitz through it."

Wright says, "Steve's style is luminous. It has this inner light that so few writers ever achieve. He's always got one foot in the wild and that always informs his characters. And whether it's a woman going into space or himself going diving, he is always retreating into nature."

Whether writing novels or made-for-TV movies, Harrigan blends the exhaustive research of a journalist (his office abounds with boxes full of research materials for screenplays and novels in various stages of progress) with the sensual writing style of a poet, drawing heavily from a childhood spent mostly in Texas.

He was born Michael Stephen McLaughlin in Oklahoma City in 1948, only a few months after his father-a World War II fighter pilot who, after the war, became a test pilot and instructor for the US Air Force-died in a plane crash. When his mother remarried, he was adopted by his stepfather, Tom Harrigan, and his name was changed to Stephen Harrigan. Then the family moved to Abilene, Texas.

"Even in 1953, Abilene was kind of a frontier town," he says. "You rode your bike everywhere. There were all these plains and hills, and (it was) pretty much undeveloped. You could walk around and find arrowheads and there was a sense of mystery everywhere."

In 1959, the family moved to Corpus Christi.

"All of a sudden, there was this ocean, he says. "For one thing the water was limitless, and for another the water was impenetrable, in that it was murky. A couple of times I saw dolphins and I didn't know what they were. This was in 1959, before National Geographic TV shows. There was no Flipper, no universal fascination with dolphins and whales. They just sort of rolled out of the water with their dorsal fins." For Harrigan, the experience kicked off a lifetime fascination with the ocean.

As a young adult, Harrigan studied English at the University of Texas at Austin. After receiving a degree in 1971, he continued with studies in the graduate English program.

"I thought that to be a writer I had to go to graduate school and the more education I had the better. I thought that graduate school would be about the joy of reading literature, but I quickly discovered that it was about theory and dissecting literary works in a way that made no sense to me at all."

After a few semesters, Harrigan dropped out of graduate school and took up yard work. Then, while mowing a lawn one day, he realized that he could make more money writing magazine articles.

"My goal was to somehow pay my bills and be able to write," he says. He started freelancing for Rolling Stone, The Atlantic Monthly and others.

William "Bill" Broyles Jr., founding editor of Texas Monthly, describes the first time he met Harrigan: "Steve had a lawn-cutting company and while he was cutting my yard we started talking about writing. I asked him to do something for Texas Monthly and he did and it was so good that not too much later he gave up his yard business."

Sue Ellen Line and Stephen Harrigan were married in 1975, about the time he was hired as a staff writer at Texas Monthly.

"We agreed early on that I would take on a full-time job so that she could stay home with the kids," Harrigan says.

While on assignment for the magazine, Harrigan went out on the ocean with a dolphin-catching operation to capture live animals for the Searama Oceanareum, a now-defunct tourist attraction in Galveston. The experience cemented the idea for Harrigan's first novel, Aransas, about a dolphin trainer who falls in love with the creatures he is supposed to train and the woman who wants to return them to the wild. Harrigan received the prestigious Dobie Paisano Fellowship to complete Aransas and it was published in 1980.

He moved up to become a senior editor at Texas Monthly. During his time at the magazine Harrigan wrote enough articles to publish in two collections, A Natural State (1988) and Comanche Midnight (1995). Harrigan also picked up screenwriting.

From journalist to screenwriter

William "Bill" Wittliff, the Austin screenwriter who had penned The Black Stallion (1979) Honeysuckle Rose (1980), Raggedy Man (1981) and Barbarosa (1982), nominated Harrigan and Wright to attend the Sundance Screenwriters Lab.

"It was a shotgun marriage," Wright says. "Two weeks before the deadline it occurred to us that we were supposed to have a script that we were going to be working on. (The one we wrote) was based mainly on some journalism that we had done. So the script was about one of the twelve moonwalkers who decides to get back into the program and falls in love with a new woman astronaut. Not only had we not written a movie script before, but we had never seen one. I forget how we got a script. We took a ruler and measured the tab settings and tried to get that right. Then we sent it into Sundance and (producer, director and actor) Sydney Pollack happened to be one of the judges and he liked the script, so he bought it. He had just made Tootsie and he was the most important man in Hollywood at that time. But he decided to make Out of Africa instead of our movie."

Harrigan says, "The title of the script Larry and I wrote was originally Moonwalker. But, after Michael Jackson made a video with that title, it was changed to Ocean of Storms."

The upshot of this experience was that Harrigan and Wright joined the growing ranks of authors who figured out that they could write Hollywood scripts while living in Austin. For the next few years, Harrigan and Wright continued to compose screenplays that never got produced.

A major turning point in Harrigan's screenwriting career came in 1992 when HBO produced his script for The Last of His Tribe, an award-winning made-for-TV movie, starring Jon Voight and Graham Greene.

Wright says, "Steve wrote (The Last of His Tribe) and later I wrote a script called The Siege (1998). So we both went into the movie industry separately but we started out together."

Harrigan left Texas Monthly in 1992 on the heels of his success with The Last of His Tribe to focus on screenwriting and novels. Since then he's been much in demand.

"Most of these movies are assignments. People come to me and say, 'Will you write this or that movie.' And then I write the movie and hope they make it."

While Harrigan gets most screenwriting assignments from Hollywood, some screenplays spring from his own ideas.

"I was reading Little House on the Prairie to our youngest daughter once, and was struck by how much more real and gritty it must have been than the famous TV series. The idea was to tell the story behind the Little House books, and what really happened to Laura Ingalls Wilder and her husband Almanzo (Wilder), and their parents. We tried to take a clearer look at the historic reality of the story. It was a more hardscrabble version than the Little House series. And it's funny because the first Laura Ingalls Wilder movie that I wrote (Beyond the Prairie, produced in 2000) twenty-three million people saw that movie at one time. And yet, I've never met anybody who's ever seen it. It's odd. The TV movie world is like everybody's stepchild. But, I've made a good living at it and have had fun doing it, and it enables me to write books as well."

In 2005, the Hallmark Channel aired The Colt. Set during the American Civil War, The Colt is about a cavalry trooper whose mare gives birth in the middle of a battle. The trooper fights to keep both the mare and the colt alive. Based on a short story by the Nobel Prize winning Russian writer Mikhail Sholokhov, Harrigan's adaptation was nominated for the Writer's Guild of America Award.

Writing books

While Harrigan loves composing teleplays, his passion is writing novels.

"What's great about movies and what's irritating about movies is that it's a group effort. So, it's fun to talk to people about the script and wrangle with producers and studio executives about what needs to be done and what has to be done. And finally when a movie comes out, you are only one of about one hundred and fifty people who had a hand in it; but when a book comes out, it's basically yours. You made all the decisions. If it's good or bad it's your fault or to your credit and your name is on it and nobody else's. You're in control, whereas with movies, you're just not. A crucial scene might get cut because some actor flubbed a line or didn't show up to work that day and the movie makes no sense. And that happens time and time again. But if a book makes no sense it's because you screwed up. It wasn't just some accident that occurred on the set or in the editing room."

Writing novels puts all the responsibility on the writer. That imposes a different kind of challenge.

"In some ways you have to go through all the same steps you would go through with a crossword puzzle. You have to think and ponder and research. But at the end when you finish it's not exactly ever done because you're trying to create or recreate a world, and make characters out of thin air. You know you're creating an illusion in the reader's mind, and no matter how good a job you do, you know you are barely just getting away with it."

'Gates of the Alamo'

Harrigan's fascination with the Alamo started with a childhood visit to the mission, but he didn't get to write a novel about it until thirty years later. Working nights, weekends and early mornings, Harrigan finished Gates of the Alamo in eight years. The first two years were spent entirely on research, and Harrigan continued to look up details to fill in the blanks even as he was writing the book. Eventually Gates of the Alamo landed on The New York Times hardback fiction best-seller list for one week and received great reviews.

'Challenger Park'

While Gates of the Alamo was an idea Harrigan carried around in his head for most of his life, the inspiration for Challenger Park was more recent.

"I was visiting in (the) Clear Lake (area near Houston) and went to watch my niece play soccer. My sister pointed out a woman on the sidelines who was cheering for her own daughter and whispered to me, 'She just got back from space.'

"I remember looking at that woman, that astronaut, and being transfixed by the utter normality of the life she was living here on earth. I guess I'd always imagined astronauts as unapproachable superheroes, and here was this soccer mom who just completely shattered that particular stereotype. And the more I thought about her, and the strange tensions between family and career that must rule her life, the more I realized there was a compelling story here."

To write Challenger Park, Harrigan made frequent trips to NASA for research on the technical aspects of flying in space. He also interviewed four female astronauts.

"So I asked them questions like, 'Do you worry about your children? How do you explain this to your children? Do you have second thoughts about going into space? Do you get scared at liftoff? What's your day like? What's your childcare like?' I just wanted to confirm that I was on the right track."

"I've struggled my entire career to juggle my family and my work, both logistically and emotionally. I've had to travel a good bit. On occasion I've had to do things that were not completely safe. And you ask yourself really hard questions about, 'How is this affecting my family? What are my responsibilities to them, what are my responsibilities to myself as a writer?'"

"Obviously my wife and children are more important to me than anything. But in every part of the workplace-and I think it's certainly true for women-whether you should allow parenthood to destroy your own dreams and ambitions…is that good for your children? I think not. It's always sort of this fluid relationship between your own responsibilities and your own ambitions, and you just have to keep examining that."

How did Harrigan so successfully climb into the mind of a working mother?

"Having three daughters and a wife, I feel like I understand women just by virtue of having lived in an estrogen-rich environment. I still don't know about clothes. I have to call people and ask what she would be wearing. But, the issues that women deal with are not foreign to me. There is still a much clearer (career) path for me (as a man). I'm hoping that will change, but it's harder to be a working mother than it is to be a working father."

One of the people Harrigan calls in a pinch is author Elizabeth Crook.

She says, "The way we usually work is that Steve shows me his drafts as he writes them, and I will point out anything that doesn't ring true. He's got three daughters and lots of female friends, so he is very clued-in. Every now and then I would say, 'Wait a minute, her response would be different from what you have.' But it's so rare because he's very astute from the woman's point of view."

Seconding that opinion is Katy Flato of San Antonio. She had been Harrigan's assistant at Texas Monthly. Now she is a member of the National Advisory Board of Gemini Ink, a San Antonio-based nonprofit organization that nurtures writers and readers and builds community through literature and the related arts. Flato says, "I think his female lead character in Gates of the Alamo is a terrific role model in a book full of big male characters. She is the one I actually think shines through the most."

Crook also praises Harrigan's ability to bring his fictional characters to life.

"He knows how to write beautifully as far as the language, but he also understands human motives and that allows him to create these wonderful characters who behave like real people," Crook says. "He doesn't pass judgment on them. They are not prototypes and they are never cliché. You know these characters from the moment you are introduced to them."

Next up for Harrigan

Challenger Park hits the bookstores this month and Harrigan is already at work on a few new projects. Working with Bill Broyles, Harrigan just cowrote a feature film adaptation of Conn Iggulden's best-selling Emperor novels about Julius Caesar. This could be the breakthrough project that allows Harrigan-after more than thirteen years of getting his scripts produced on television-to see his work on the big screens of mainstream theatres.

Harrigan says, "Bill was my editor at Texas Monthly years and years ago, and we're old friends. Bill wrote a number of high-profile screenplays like Cast Away, Apollo 13 and Jarhead. And he had been approached by this production company, Spitfire (Pictures), to adapt the first of these novels. He asked me if I would be interested in doing it with him."

Broyles says, "I knew we wouldn't have any of the usual writer hang-ups, that we'd both just be focused on what made the script good, no matter who came up with the good stuff-and it was usually him. It was just like back in the Texas Monthly days, except this time Steve got to edit me!"

Harrigan and Broyles are hoping that, over time, three movies will be made from their collaboration on the Emperor project.

Harrigan is also producing a movie of his own.

"A movie producer friend of mine named Eric Williams (producer of Tommy Lee Jones' latest movie, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada) convinced me that I should write a script based on my first novel, Aransas., And we are trying to produce it ourselves because we'd like to maintain control of it. It involves dolphins. I don't want to catch any wild dolphins. I don't want to exploit any wild dolphins that are in captivity. I want to do it in a way that I feel like I have a clean conscience about it."

What is it like to adapt a novel that he wrote more than twenty-five years ago?

"I went back and read the book, which was an extremely painful but fascinating meeting of my old self and my new self. The senior guy wanted to kick the younger guy in the rear. I could have sat him down and said, 'The story is moving too slowly. You haven't really thought about what the story is about or given any real attention to the characters.' There were scenes that were so talky and static that I couldn't wait to transform into something cinematic."

Harrigan says that it felt good to see how much progress he's made as a writer but he was embarrassed to know how much he had to learn at the point when his first novel was published.

"I'm sure twenty-five years from now I'll look back on Challenger Park or Gates of the Alamo and be horrified, but I'll want to keep chugging ahead. As a writer, everything that you've learned and created in the past is like a big wave gathering sand and force. Every once in a while it's good to look back and see what the cumulative components of that wave are."

Works by Stephen Harrigan

Novels

Challenger Park (2006) - Lucy Kincheloe is caught between her dream of flying in space and the horror of possibly leaving her children without a mother. When her husband's floundering career at NASA threatens Lucy's ambitions, their marriage begins to fall apart. Challenger Park addresses the often overlooked struggle of women to balance career with family life.

Gates of the Alamo (2000) - When a young boy's pregnant girlfriend commits suicide, he runs away. His mother, an innkeeper, and a botanist named McGowan follow after the boy and all three find themselves trapped in the Alamo during the 1836 battle. A New York Times best-seller, Harrigan's well-researched and lively fictionalized account cuts through the Alamo myth while paying homage to the Texas mystique.

Jacob's Well (1984) - This is a haunting tale of scuba diving in the underwater cave hidden in the bottom of a sinkhole in Wimberley, Texas. Jacob's Well was cited as one of the year's best books by The Washington Post and The Dallas Morning News.

Aransas (1980) - Jeff Dowling returns to his hometown of Aransas, a small fishing village on the Texas Gulf Coast. While trying to train a pair of dolphins that are supposed to become tourist attractions, Jeff falls in love with the creatures he is trying to train and the woman who wants to return them to the wild. Aransas was listed by The New York Times as a notable book of 1980.

Nonfiction books

Comanche Midnight (1995) - This is a collection of some of Harrigan's best articles and essays that first appeared in Texas Monthly. The title work deals with the difficulties of American Indian life and modern-day attempts to maintain a dying cultural heritage. Harrigan says that the essays in the book, "address my old preoccupations with worlds that have vanished, communication that is sealed off, and perceptions that are out of reach..."

Water and Light: A Diver's Journey to a Coral Reef (1992) - This is an account of scuba diving off the coast of Grand Turk Island, which lies in the vicinity of Cuba and Haiti. Captivating depictions of sea turtles, polyps, stingrays and the beauty on the coral reef inspire readers to take up scuba diving.

A Natural State (1988) - Harrigan's first collection of articles originally published in Texas Monthly depict the scrubby landscape of the Lone Star State, what we love and hate about living here, and why we stay.

Teleplays

The Colt (2005) - Set during the American Civil War, The Colt follows a Union cavalryman whose mare gives birth on the battlefield, and his struggle to keep the mare and colt alive. Based on an adaptation of a short story by the 1965 Nobel Prize winning author Mikhail Sholokhov, Harrigan's adaptation of The Colt was nominated for a Writers Guild of America award in 2005.

Widow on the Hill (2005) - Inspired by a true story that appeared in Vanity Fair, Widow on the Hill is about a beautiful woman who marries an older man. When her husband dies of suspicious causes, she finds herself one of the wealthiest landowners in the region.

King of Texas (2002) - When a cattle baron divides his land among his three daughters, he finds himself rejected. Staring Patrick Stewart and Marcia Gay Harden, King of Texas is a retelling of William Shakespeare's King Lear set in 1842.

Beyond the Prairie, Part 2: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2002) - After losing their home in a fire, Wilder moves to Missouri with her husband Almanzo Wilder and daughter Rose, where they settle and build a house. Almanzo falls ill, leaving Laura to work the land alone until a widowed farmer comes along.

Murder on the Orient Express (2001) - Agatha Christie's masterpiece moves forward to the twenty-first century. After solving a case in Istanbul, Hercule Poirot heads back to London aboard the Orient Express. When a landslide blocks the train tracks and a dead man is discovered in his compartment, Poirot, played by Alfred Molina, searches for the murderer with the help of his laptop computer and other high-tech gizmos.

Take Me Home: The John Denver Story (2000) - The son of an Air Force officer and flight instructor, John spent his teens learning to play the guitar and write songs, without the encouragement of his father. Adopting the name "Denver" for the city in Colorado that he loved so much, he moves to California to pursue his dreams as a musician. The famous musician was played by Chad Lowe.

Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2000) - Laura Ingalls lives on the prairie in South Dakota where she eventually meets her future husband, Almanzo Wilder. After a crop is lost to hail, their son dies and their home burns down, the Wilders make some difficult choices about how to move on with their lives. Based on the true story behind the life of author Laura Ingalls Wilder, Harrigan presents a more hardscrabble version of the inspiration behind the Little House books.

Cleopatra (1999) - After her younger brother seizes the throne of Egypt, Cleopatra lives in exile until Julius Caesar arrives. Seducing Caesar results in Cleopatra's return to power and the birth of a son, but things go awry when they travel to Rome for a visit. Caesar's wife and followers treat Cleopatra as a vanquished harlot. When the Roman Senate assassinates Caesar, Marc Antony and Octavian divide up the Roman Empire, with Antony taking Egypt and eventually Cleopatra. Harrigan's adaptation is based on the novel The Memoirs of Cleopatra by Margaret George.

The O.J. Simpson Story (1995) - This film covers the life of the star NFL running back and Heisman Trophy winner leading up to the infamous murder trial for his ex-wife, Nicole Simpson. While the film doesn't necessarily say that O.J. was guilty or innocent, it does tell the story of the influences that might have led him astray.

The Last of His Tribe (1992) - Ishi, the last remaining survivor of the Yahi Indian tribe, stumbles onto a farm where a doctor takes him in and attempts to teach him how to live among white people. In spite of new friendships and prosperity, Ishi never overcomes the loss of his family, his tribe, and his culture. HBO's The Last of His Tribe stars Jon Voight and Graham Greene.

- Written with material drawn from publisher's copy, Publishers Weekly and IMDB.com.