Kris McLaughlin: Writing Katharine Drexel

Hearing the Sounds

This article is written by TMB contributor Charles Reamsnyder.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Kris McLaughlin about Saint Katharine Drexel. McLaughlin, who has written many series for The Saints, spoke to me about the unique challenges and victories in writing St. Katharine Drexel’s story. As always, she begins her process with intense research. “I love doing research on every Saint I write about,” she says, “and I keep researching until I begin ‘hearing’ them speak.” This is something that McLaughlin said was one of her favorite experiences while writing. “I woke up hearing fireworks exploding and Katharine calling out excitedly to her family as she watched them from her bedroom window.” These epiphany moments are key to McLaughin’s writing process.

Practice Makes Perfect

A Struggle that comes with intense study, however, is just how many scenes there are to portray. One of the more prevalent challenges McLaughlin faced was finding what stories to portray and the best way to do so. Along with this was the fact that she had to write keeping in mind that there would be no visual storytelling to help the audience. “Since my writing experience before working with The Saints was in teleplays and screenplays, [a challenge] was figuring out a way to portray Katharine's story with only words and sounds and no images.” While there are challenges to work like this, apparent struggles can lead to breakthroughs. This is exactly what happened to McLaughlin.

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Reading Material

Before writing the script, McLaughlin had little knowledge of the life of Saint Katharine Drexel. However, the experience of writing helped her discover a new favorite Saint. “I read six books on Katharine Drexel before beginning to write her story... I like to read a lot of books, as there's always new information in every one of them, and after reading a lot about a particular saint, I get a kind of synoptic view of their life.” For anyone who wishes to read more on Saint Katharine, McLaughlin suggests The Life of Katharine Drexel by Katharine Burton and Katharine Drexel: The Riches to Rags Life Story of an American Catholic Saint by Cheryl Hughes.

Lessons Learned

McLaughlin believes the virtues that Katharine Drexel lived will especially resonate with listeners, as if directly from St. Katharine’s lips. “Katharine's chief desire was to do whatever God wanted her to do, regardless of her own preferences or choices… Since Katharine was a very dynamic personality, her words and actions guided the story so much that sometimes it was as if she was telling it to me - and I was merely her transcriber.”

Listen to our brand new series, Katharine Drexel, this Monday at thesaintspodcast.com! You can read more about Kris McLaughlin here.