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Q: You are not of Native American descent. Yet the narrator of Set Me Free, Cal, is a middle-aged Native American man; a significant number of the novel's characters are Native American; and in the book you created an entire Native American tribe, the Neige Courante. How did Cal and the Neige Courante come about? Why do you feel qualified to speak from a Native American point of view?

MB-W: After I finished my first book, The Effects of Light, I knew I would write about Oregon again, this time, invoking the land east of the Cascades, a wild, rambling, dry desert. I grew up in Oregon, where terrible wrongs were perpetuated against Native Americans—Celilo Falls was drowned, salmon rights were denied, people were forced onto reservations. In writing about that area, I knew I'd be addressing those issues.

Meanwhile, a voice started showing up in my work: a cynical, arrogant, sexy, tender monologue emerged from a character I came to call Cal. I didn't know his name, but I definitely knew him, and he was Native American. Non-negotiable. As a Caucasian woman in her late twenties living in New York, I naturally wondered whether I was "allowed" to write Cal. Ultimately, his voice was too persistent, too compelling, for me to permit my apprehensions to stifle him.

Then there was the element of Ponderosa Academy. Elliot Barrow, the founder of the academy, believes that in educating children he sees as "disadvantaged," he will make a significant impact on the world. Through this fictional framework, I wanted to explore a very real situation: what happens when a well-intentioned white man seeks to help a group of people very different from him, with their own rich culture and traditions?

As these different elements overlapped, this novel started to shape itself. In order for Set Me Free to work, I knew that it had to include a people who had a significant, beautiful and ancient belief system; who had been let down by the US government; and who were particular to the eastern Oregon high desert. I did research on the Native American groups living in that area, I traveled out to the west coast, and I had a set of conversations with one of my closest friends, who is Native American herself. Ultimately, I decided the best way I could be respectful to the myriad and complex realities of Native Americans was to create a fictional tribe and a fictional reservation. This enabled me to explore the traditions and cultures of Native peoples, while at the same time not claim to represent, or speak for, any one group.

Above all else, Set Me Free is about the birth of a family—about the ways that people are related to each other by the shared trials of being human. The Native American characters in the novel—Cal, in particular—are, first and foremost, human.

Q: Set Me Free has many references to The Tempest, starting right from the book's title, the last three words of Shakespeare's play. How, and why, did the conversation between these two texts emerge?

MB-W: I've known about The Tempest for as long as I can remember; I'm named after the daughter of Prospero, the wizard at the center of the play. I acted in my first Shakespeare play when I was ten, and regularly read and performed him in my teens. I have no doubt that this early, steady education in structure and character had a significant impact in making me a novelist. When elements of The Tempest began to show up—totally unconsciously—in early drafts of Set Me Free, I wasn't terribly surprised.

At the center of my novel are two father/daughter relationships: that of Elliot and Amelia, and of Nat and Willa. Both relationships are unique, but each borrows a metaphorical element from the Prospero/Miranda relationship in The Tempest: a father who isolates his daughter to protect her from the terrible realities of the world. The island is real in The Tempest, but in Elliot's case, the island is Ponderosa Academy, and in Nat's case, it's the Volvo he's hauled Willa around in for the duration of her childhood. There's a beautiful inevitably to a father trying to protect his daughter by caging her; eventually, she's going to break free, and see for herself what the world is really like.

Shakespeare describes Caliban as a "savage and deformed slave"; he is a native of the island that Prospero has commandeered as his own. Prospero and Miranda despise, insult, and enslave Caliban, yet Shakespeare puts the most beautiful words in the play into Caliban's mouth. There are unmistakable parallels between Prospero's enslavement of Caliban, and what happened to this country's aboriginal peoples at the hands of European settlers. I was drawn to the idea of exploring this reality in a modern setting.

Set Me Free is divided into five acts, each titled with a line from the corresponding act of The Tempest. I was very conscious of dramatic form as I constructed the book's scaffolding. The denouement at the end of Set Me Free is Shakespearean in scope; although it does not borrow from The Tempest, it definitely invokes Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors. I love how Shakespeare can get away with these huge, unlikely, reveals. I wanted to create a situation in which such a revelation—hidden in front of the reader the whole time—could still resonate. I wanted to see if that was achievable in a modern piece of writing.

Q: The legacy of 1960s radicalism is very present in this novel. What interests you about that time?

MB-W: When I started working on Set Me Free, I was thinking about my parents' generation. They believed that they could change the world by simply doing something. With that belief, they ended a war, fought for equal rights for African-Americans, women, etc. My generation doesn't seem to have that same conviction in the power of their actions. I wanted to contrast these two generations by presenting both sides of the coin. On one hand, there's Astrid and her collusion in terrorism; Elliot and his continuing legacy of lefty "good works"; Helen and her choice to leave behind the activism of her twenties; Nat, who is too obsessed with his own sins to engage in politics; Cal, too young to be a part of any of the significant political event of the sixties or seventies, but angry nonetheless; and Jasper, Cal's father, who doesn't practice what he preaches.

On the other hand, there are the kids—Elliot's daughter Amelia; Nat's daughter, Willa; two Neige Courante students, Lydia and Victor; and two kids from Portland, Sadie and Wes. This younger generation—my generation—is facing a complex world our parents never imagined, rife with the benefits and vagaries of globalism, the lost promise of racial and economic equality, and questions of sexual identity and definition. In Set Me Free, the legacy of 1960s radicalism comes crashing into this new, complicated world. I loved imagining the outcome of this confluence.