Following in Your Father’s Footsteps... When Your Father is Tony Hillerman

Matt here. Thanks for being part of the Campside community. Today we’re sharing the latest episode of Origin Stories, a conversation with Anne Hillerman.

For most of her career, Anne had no intention of becoming a novelist. She was a journalist and nonfiction writer, covering everything from restaurants and travel to the landscapes and cultural history of the American Southwest.

Fiction was her father’s territory.

Tony Hillerman, the legendary mystery novelist, had spent decades chronicling life on the Navajo Nation through his beloved detectives Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. But after Tony died in 2008, Anne began to realize how much she missed not only her father, but the fictional world he’d created— and especially one character, Bernadette Manuelito, a young Navajo police officer who had spent years on the margins of his books, never quite getting the chance to solve a mystery herself.

So Anne decided to try something she’d never imagined doing: write a novel.

The result was Spider Woman’s Daughter, published in 2013, which put Bernie at the center of the story and launched an enormously successful second chapter for the Hillerman mysteries.

On this episode of Origin Stories, Anne joins host and Campside co-founder Matthew Shaer to talk about inheriting her father’s fictional universe, learning the mechanics of mystery writing, and finding her own voice in a world already familiar to millions of readers.

She shares some helpfully grounded, practical advice for writers and other creatives. For example: Give yourself permission to write a terrible first draft. Aim for a thousand words a day. And protect your mornings from email intrusions!

But our favorite part of the episode is Anne’s recounting of the nerve-racking experience of handing her first manuscript to her mother, who had been one of Tony Hillerman’s most trusted readers (spoiler alert: it went pretty dang well).

This is an Origin Stories interview, where we get very smart writers, reporters and TV & movie people to explain how their most beloved works were created.

The people I’ve spoken with have their own systems, habits, anxieties, tricks, and (occasionally) deeply strange methods for getting from a first glimmer of… something, to a masterpiece.

If you’ve listened to the show before, thank you. And if you’re new to it, there’s plenty to catch up on.