Land, how it shapes us and how we shape it, will be the connective tissue at a dual author event on Saturday when novelist Kathy Watson and journalist/professor Brent Walth team up for a reading and conversation at Tsunami Books.

Watson will read from Orphans of the Living, a work of fiction that follows her family’s 20th-century quest for home and redemption. While the people and their travails are real, Watson used her imagination to fill in the blanks and the dialogue in a story that begins in the late 1800s.

“Many characters in the book are real people, but I made up things about them,” she says. Some things she did know. “My grandfather Barney was possessed with the notion that land is what makes a man, a man, what gives him control and agency. He dragged the family around the West like bumpkins on a cheap carnival ride,” she adds.

 “These were poor people caught up in the notion of manifest destiny and Western expansion and they were pummeled by it.”

Her book sits well within the tradition of Western writers such as Wallace Stegner and John Steinbeck. What marks that tradition is how landscape shapes a narrative in a way less common among Eastern and Southern writers, where often character dominates, she says.

Watson is a longtime journalist whose career includes time as editor-in-chief at Oregon Business magazine.

Walth, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and University of Oregon journalism professor, will also read from Fire at Eden’s Gate, his well-respected biography of Gov. Tom McCall, whose environmental vision and leadership from 1967 to 1975 continue to impact the state.

McCall, a Republican, is the reason Oregon cities have discussions about where and how they grow. He’s the reason almost all of our beaches are open to the public, the reason we return glass bottles for recycling, the reason the Willamette River is no longer the cesspool it once was. McCall wasn’t the only one with these ideas in Oregon, but his leadership helped not only the state but a nation, inspired by the state’s innovations.

“No one used the term ‘sustainability’ back then,” Walth says.

So how did these two come to be co-presenting? It turns out, they go back a ways. In the mid-‘80s, when Walth was a Register-Guard reporter covering Salem politics, he met Watson, who was press secretary for the state senate Democratic caucus. When she learned Walth was working on a McCall biography, she offered to help with the research.

The state archives contained well over 300 boxes of files full of documents and letters from the McCall administration. The boxes were organized by year and alphabetized, but nobody knew what was in them until Watson and Walth indexed the contents.

They have remained friends ever since.

Between them, Watson and Walth cover a lot of ground and expect the conversation to roam.

While quality journalism has suffered over the past decade, both see a resurgence, particularly in Eugene.

Walth notes the new kid on the block — digital-only news service Lookout Eugene-Springfield. But there’s more, including local TV news. “A resurgence at The Register-Guard, the ongoing vitality and spirit of the Eugene Weekly and the community voice of KLCC,” he says. “Four really active news organizations both competing and complementing each other. It’s making a real difference.”

The book publishing world is also undergoing changes, with small publishers and self-publishing gaining ground. It gives writers and readers more opportunities to find each other.

Regardless of where the conversation goes, expect Walth to bring it back around to Watson’s book.

“Kathy has written a powerful and important novel that comes straight from the heart,” he says. “It’s a book that really deserves our attention.”

Authors Kathy Watson and Brent Walth are at Tsunami Books, 2585 Willamette Street, 2 pm Saturday, March 14. Susan Palmer is a Eugene freelance journalist. For more of her writing, visit SusanPalmer.org.