Spokane author who lived in Puerto Rico centers book there with a Coeur d’Alene twist

Kathryn Robinson set out to write a mystery tied to a place she knows well, the El Yunque National Rainforest.

Living 40 years in Puerto Rico, she hiked often in that rainforest. El Yunque captivated her, and she wove it into her new book, “Under the Tree Ferns,” released June 16.

While it’s fiction, the novel has passages that feel like a memoir, Robinson said. Referenced within the book’s title, the tree ferns grow abundantly in El Yunque. Their “trunks” are bundles of elongated roots.

“It’s magical when the fog comes in, and you’ve got those trees that are stunted; it seems like the enchanted stories of your childhood,” said Robinson, 76, who moved with her husband to Spokane in 2013.

“To me, there was always such a magic to that forest. Then, I got to know it so well.”

Her book begins during 1942 with the death of an American woman in the heart of El Yunque. Eduardo Colón, then a teenage boy, finds the body. He later searches for answers to what happened to her.

Robinson places another character, Pamela Palmer, living decades later in Coeur d’Alene. Palmer had spent time in Puerto Rico and knows her grand aunt died there under mysterious circumstances.

Across different time periods, the story involves amateur sleuthing, cross-cultural impacts, history, a family scandal and eventual answers changing the lives of Colón and Palmer.

The island settings are well-trodden by Robinson, who moved to Puerto Rico in 1974.Born in New Jersey, Robinson got her master’s degree at the University of Arizona in teaching English as a second language. She then was hired by the University of Puerto Rico as a teacher.

Earlier in Tucson, Robinson had started regularly hiking. She continued the hobby in Puerto Rico, although people then generally didn’t hike on the island. She had to adjust to the humidity and jungle.

She started the book around 1997, but then was focused on other work. On the island, she also met and married her husband John Harmon, who worked at a radar radio observatory. They raised two daughters in Puerto Rico.

Around teaching, Robinson always wanted to write, at first dabbling in fiction and poetry.

“In college, I got interested in writing short stories and poetry, but they weren’t very good,” Robinson said. “I then got an opportunity to write features for the San Juan Star.”

Through the university, she met Alastair Reid, a poet who wrote for the New Yorker, who was staying in Puerto Rico for the winter. He convinced Robinson to write the newspaper’s features to gain experience.

She combined those freelance articles with treks around the island to write about its out-of-the-way places for the San Juan Star’s Sunday magazine. The articles led to Robinson’s first book, “The Other Puerto Rico,” in 1984.

“I just hiked to all these different places, and that was part of that book, ‘The Other Puerto Rico,’ ” she added. “There were caves you could explore, mountains, coastal areas, jungle. It’s an amazingly varied place for a small island.”

Around that time, Gourmet Magazine published an article on Puerto Rico, and it mentioned “The Other Puerto Rico” as “almost a cult classic,” she said.

“That book got me known. Then, I began to work with different magazines.”

After 10 years of teaching, she left her university job and focused solely on being a freelance writer.

She also released the nonfiction book, “Dwarfs Reign: A Tropical Rain Forest in Puerto Rico,” in 1997. The original concept was a hiking book but it morphed into an overall look into the forest with history, geology, plants, animals, rainfall and forest management, she said.

But Robinson never gave up on writing fiction. She and her husband decided to retire in Spokane, because he had spent a short time here in his youth, and at the time, his father lived in Colville.

“Under the Tree Ferns” took more shape by 2014, after she joined a local writers critique group. She chose the Coeur d’Alene setting because of a Christmas time visit.

“The first year I was here, one of my daughters visited, and I was fascinated by the Coeur d’Alene Resort and its million and half lights at Christmas time,” Robinson said. “I’m a sucker for Christmas lights.

“As we walked along all of the Christmas lights, I looked out and the water was gray. There were these shadows of trees. I thought, if I squint, these trees are palm trees and coconut palms, and this is the ocean. There are the sparkling lights of homes. I was back in Puerto Rico.

“It’s such a big lake that you can almost feel like you’re looking out at the ocean. The temperature was about 50 degrees colder, but you kind of had the feel.”

She finished the book closer to 2016, but only recently found a publisher in She Writes Press.

Within the writers group, which disbanded after the COVID-19 pandemic, Robinson began other fiction projects. She hopes to release a second book, “The Snow Globe,” also featuring Pamela Palmer. It doesn’t yet have a publishing timeframe.

She was awarded a Suncoast Chapter Emmy in 2010 for writing a documentary on the rainforest. Robinson also won a 2019 Spokesman-Review Outdoor Writing Contest for “The Vanishing Lake.”

But “Under the Tree Ferns” met her goal to be a fiction book writer. It’s available online for $17.99, including Amazon and Simon & Schuster, and at local book stores, such as Auntie’s, Jupiter’s Eye and Kindred & Co. in Post Falls.

“For many years, I had put the book down,” Robinson said. “It was so strange to pick it up again. I’d never write a memoir, but as I reread this, I see how many details there are of myself and my life in Puerto Rico.

“It was like a love affair with the island that I layered in with the characters,” Robinson said. “None of the characters are real, but inevitably, you put some of yourself into it by fleshing out those details.”