Kate Oliver: On Partnership, Social Media, Trauma, and Working in Tiny Spaces
I first met Kate Oliver, author of The Modern Caravan: Stories of Love, Beauty, and Adventure on the Open Road, as she stood in my tiny home with a camera. She was photographing the Airstream I’d built out with my husband, Marc, for her book, fresh off the road with her wife and kid. They were camped down the road in Carolina Beach State Park and we sat around our outdoor table one night, sharing stories about tiny living and renovation horror stories. They were with us a few short days before continuing their trip.
Since then, we’ve become writing partners, passing work back and forth as her book journeyed into the world. Her book is out now but we spoke the week before – in that liminal space when all the writing work is done and it’s all waiting, marketing, and wondering. We spoke about writing in tiny spaces, social media, influencing, partnership in life and love, and trauma.
Laura Guidry: You've worked on this book for a very long time. How does this moment feel to you as a writer?
Kate Oliver: Oh gosh, I don't know. I wrote the proposal for this book over four years ago now. I was a very different person then. I think that a lot of us were very different people before the pandemic. So much has happened in my personal life too. It’s so strange…when you work on something for four years, you kind of start to feel like it's not real in a way, even though you're doing the work. Even though I have a tangible representation of the thing that I've been working on for four years - I have the book in my hands - there's still part of me that's thinking, my God, maybe it's not going to come out next week after all and this is all not real.
LG My home is featured in the book and when I was reading your book, it was funny. That's our origin story of our friendship. We met because of the internet, which was very hilarious and MySpace of us.
KO I was obsessed with what you and Marc were doing in your Airstream. Most Airstream designs have become rather cookie-cutter. You were approaching the design in such an original way, which isn’t easy to do in a tiny space.
LG Thank you! I remember that time of life of renovating as such an odd time. And when I was reading your book, it really brought back this incredible sense of nostalgia which is hilarious because I just really hated renovating. So many people that are featured in the book were also people that we followed and looked to for inspiration.
KO I read it through the book once. I don't know if I'll read it again. I read it through once right after getting my copy and as you know, I stayed in contact or became friends with so many people in the book, and almost everyone I wrote about has had some sort of massive life shift or change since I finished the final manuscript.
LG What really also drew me in as I was reading, was the dismantling of the idea of rugged individualism, the idea of a road trip, going out on your own. What really resonated was the importance of relationships and community throughout each profile. In one of the profiles, you write, "Partnership should be this way: When we can't go on the other holds us up until we can stand again.”
KO Yes. That’s from Tracy and James's story. Tracy was disheartened with the renovation. It had been dragging on, and she wasn’t seeing progress. I think they were in that period where it's you're doing a lot of little things that don't feel like they're adding up to anything - I know it well, after doing this professionally for so long now. And so James went out every day without her, working on the renovation until it got to a point where she could feel good about it again. I remember this very distinctly from when I was interviewing them. That’s love. I heard recently that partnerships should not be fifty-fifty. We don’t have to divide tasks right down the middle, and when it’s difficult for one partner (for any reason) the other can step in. This is why we have partners. There have been so many times where either my wife or I have been in a season where we need the other person to step in and hold things up for a little while.
My wife is working two jobs, and she's been doing that for two years now. On my side of things, I'm running the business, I'm working on promoting this book, I'm working on my next book. So…two full-time jobs too, but I’m always working from home, so I’m handling everything in our house, right? I do the grocery shopping, the meal planning, and everything with our kid’s school. I keep our calendar and keep things moving. Each of us has a role, and sometimes it feels like one of us is doing more than the other, but it’s not a contest. When Tracy said that, it reminded me of times where people have criticized the way that we run our business or the way that we run our lives. Not understanding that each of us brings something to the table, and that doesn't necessarily mean that the work is going to be split right down the middle at all times. Sometimes it means that the work is going to land a little heavier on one person when the other person is going through something hard. It was just such a critical thing for Tracy to say about what true partnership really looks like.
LG Let’s talk about relationships on the road, in that nomadic space.
KO Living as nomads is interesting because we find relationships in ways that we don't in what I call “stationary life.” For example, this morning I went to a yoga class and had conversations with my yoga teacher. I have new friends here that I see from time to time here in our town, but there isn’t any rush. I am getting to know them slowly. Nomadic relationships are unique - we meet online and talk via Instagram, but if we actually get to meet in person, we tend to get right into the deep stuff. Our time is compressed. We’ll maybe get a few days together before moving on down the road.
Social media is the backbone of the modern-day nomadic movement. Nomadism has been around as long as humans have been around, but now nomads can connect anytime, anywhere. When you hear a modern-day nomad refer to their travel community, they’re likely referring to the people they talk with online.
LG You talk about like social media as a part of like the new nomad. You know, we've all seen #vanlife.
KO When we got on the road that hashtag did not exist. Living nomadically was not yet a movement or a trend. The Instagram travel community was very tiny, it was really just a few other families who were posting and sharing about their life on the road. There weren't thousands of families on the road like there are today because it was still pretty taboo. The “living in a van down by the river” stereotype still had a negative connotation. The Instagram travel community was something we wanted to be a part of - community was something we were really searching for in our lives. After getting on the road, we wanted to be around others who were out there with us. There were a lot of “normal” people in our lives who didn’t like or understand what we were doing, and we longed for that camaraderie and understanding. We also looked to the road life veterans for their expertise and advice. You know, no matter where we live, we hang out with people that might get us, or at least an aspect of us. Though road life has become highly glamourized and popular in the last eight years and there are now a lot more people on the road, it is still considered somewhat fringe. There can be a lot of judgment of living nomadically. So, we look for one another. And some of my best friendships, including the one I have with you, was born out of that shared interest.
LG It’s so funny because it stemmed from social media. An odd part of your story is that you gained an arguably large following on social. So many writers are told, ‘Oh, you need to have massive platform to sell your book.’ You're this kind of weird bird, where you are a writer whohad been engaging with the internet for a long time and gained an accidental following. I'm curious how you view social media as a part of your writing journey and your story.
KO I really love that question. Well, first, the landscape of social media is changing rapidly. I was actually just reading an article this morning about how a lot of really large scale influencers are leaving Instagram. Truth be told, I don't really want to be there a lot of the time. I feel like my time is best spent elsewhere…except for the tiny fact that I have a book and business to keep promoting. My entire livelihood depends on me reaching an audience and the audience happens to be tuning into Instagram. Yes, there are ways to branch out, like starting a newsletter or whatever - but Instagram has made it so we kind of have to be there, which is frustrating, right?
I got my first Instagram account when my daughter was two, in 2012. I was a single mother, raising my kid alone -I had gotten a marketing job by the skin of my teeth because I don't have a college degree. I was given an iPhone 3 for that job, which was wild to me, because I couldn't afford a smartphone otherwise. There was this app that I could download called Instagram, and I loved the idea of posting photos to share with family and friends. I started a private account and still have it to this day. It has nine followers. And that's where that's where my Instagram journey started.
However, in 2014, when my wife and I decided we wanted to live on the road, we were really struggling to find other people living nomadically. We knew they existed because of a few listed in Lloyd Kahn’s book, Tiny Homes, Simple Shelter (our Bible). There were some email addresses listed in the book that you could contact for information, but I would email them and get no response. So I decided to start Googling, but was coming up fairly empty-handed. There were only a few websites and blogs about how to live on the road.
I didn't have any social media at that time other than that private Instagram account. I’d quit Facebook. I didn't use Twitter. I was simply not a social media person. Yet I was thinking it would be really nice for our friends and family to see what we were doing, because we were getting a lot of “why would you give up your house in your life to go and do this?” I wanted them to be able to see our story unfolding in real time. Within a day of setting up an Instagram account, I had found a few people who were already living on the road. One couple happened to be coming through our city the following day to set up their pop-up shop, and we went and met them.
Ultimately, I started an Instagram account for the storytelling, and stayed for the community. I chronicled our eighteen-month journey to get on the road, from selling our house to the nitty-gritty of our first Airstream renovation. I later shared some of my photography work too, which helped me get some freelance work that paid for most of our Airstream renovation. By the time we hit the road, we’d amassed about fifteen-thousand followers. We were a lesbian couple, raising a kid, and going after an impossible dream. We worked our asses off, and I think that inspired other people. I shared pretty candidly about the process, but back then, Instagram captions were like a line, right?
Over time, longform captions became more popular. As a writer, I was really excited. Photos only told the prettiest parts of my life. Instagram longform captions became my way of sharing my truth, my writing, and my heart with the world. In that way, it gave me the courage to even write a book proposal because I thought, my god, people are responding to my writing. Around the same time, I started my company, The Modern Caravan, which ultimately became the subject of my first book.
LG You’ve always been a writer. Cheryl Strayed wrote, ‘I didn't write Wild because I took a hike; I wrote Wild because I'm a writer. By which I mean until I had something to say about the experience, I didn't have any reason to write about it.’ You didn't write your book because you were an influencer who's into Airstreams. You wrote this book because you are a writer.
KO Let’s clarify that I was not an influencer as we know that word to mean now. Were others inspired by my wife and I’s story and work? Yes. But I was not getting paid to be on Instagram. I was sharing a story, and later I was running an Airstream renovation business where most of the hours worked were doing hard, physical labor that the camera, and thus the public, never saw. I know that we inspired many, but we weren’t getting paid for that. Sharing on Instagram was always about storytelling and community first, and later, it became a place to market the work that my wife and I were doing for The Modern Caravan.
I have been a writer since I was a little kid writing short stories on yellow legal pads I’d snag from my grandma’s file cabinet. Yet there were many times in my life that I didn’t think I could actually become a published author. When we began traveling, I knew pretty much right away that I’d want to write a memoir about it, but knew that I wasn’t going to be able to write that until my travel days were behind me. Little did I know that I’d travel for four years, with a big ol’ intermission in the middle of all of it. I started writing my book proposal for this book in early February 2018, when I was still living on the road and a year into running my business. I was ready to write a book, and the subject matter was right in front of me. I wanted to write a book about (and for) the travel community that I was a part of, and focus on the homes that we were building out for ourselves, and why those - and the design - matters so much.
Being able to share my writing on Instagram and receive such positive responses really encouraged me to get serious about my writing. There were so many incredible humans writing to me and saying such beautiful things: I came out because of you sharing your story, I came to this realization that I need to sell all of my shit and go travel and find myself. I realized that my writing can help people. By putting my art into the world, I can be of service to others. The people that lifted me up restored my confidence, time and again. This book is for them.
LG You photographed the book too. How did that impact your writing and why was it important for you to be the one to photograph the book?
KO I had a vision for the way I wanted this book to feel and look. I knew my community intimately, who they were and what they wanted to see. It was really important to me to have a hand in the art direction and my agent really advocated for that when negotiating my contract. I wanted the book to feel like me and by extension, my life and the work that my wife and I have done together. I wanted readers to feel like they had a part of me with them.
By photographing the spaces myself, I could feel and experience the space. I needed to understand what it felt like to put my body inside of it, to move around, to understand the angles. Then and only then could I write about it.
LG I think it's interesting for the reader to know, you physically traveled in your own airstream to these places on this epic road trip with your wife and child and your animals. You went to every single place to photograph the book and meet the individuals that are in the book. Why was being on the road while writing the book important to you?
KO This is a two-part answer for me. First, I'd always intended to write the book from the road, because I wrote the proposal from the road. At the time, my wife and I traveled to our renovation jobs and lived and worked on site with them. When I wrote the proposal, I didn't intend to stop traveling. We're already rolling down the road, so let’s keep rolling and meet with all these amazing people. Additionally, the business was built on the idea that there were always going to be two Airstreams side by side - much like a nomadic meet-up - ours and the one we were working on. We were living our dream and we were building out somebody else's dream. If you look at the logo, designed by Cassie Medema of New Over, there are two intersecting Airstreams with the doors flung open. The Airstreams also form two hearts to represent our love and passion for the work and our clients. So I continued that same concept while writing the book.
And then the second part - you know that my wife and I went through a series of great ordeals on the road and through our business in 2018. I allude to it in the book. I don't go into it in depth because it's not the book for that, and I’m still very much healing. We went through a great ordeal where we faced violence and abuse on the road from two different men, all within a two-and-a-half-month period. At the end of 2018, we didn't know that we wanted to be on the road anymore - we felt unsafe. We felt so defeated. It felt like everything we had been working for and giving our all to was gone.
During all of this, I get a call from Chronicle, saying that they want to publish my book. I'm in this really dark time and still being abused. The violence and abuse took place on a job site and lasted for months afterward. There was a part of me that was like, I can't go write a book right now. This is what I’ve been working for, but I can't. I'm so broken, I'm so defeated, I'm so traumatized. I couldn't go anywhere without having a panic attack. My body was stuck in freeze mode, but I knew that I could not let this be my story. I’d worked too long and too hard, not just for the book, but for my life. In the literary world, writing a book proposal and having a book deal in less than a year doesn't just happen. That’s unheard of, you know? So I knew that this wasn’t something I could say no to, even if I was terrified. It felt like hope. A gift from the Universe. An answer.
Getting back on the road to write the book became a healing journey. It became a reclaiming of who I am and who my wife is and what our story really is. There were a lot of really awful and untrue things written on the internet about my wife and I at that time. We were able to reclaim our story and really begin our healing process. We did another renovation and we called it Hope, and during the renovation, every day before I would go to work, I was up, I was out, I was meditating, I was doing yoga. I was doing everything I could to heal. And as soon as we finished that renovation, we took off. I wasn't just out there writing a book. I was out there healing.
LG You are a gay woman working in an underrepresented space. How does that impact your work – both writing a lifestyle book and working in Airstream renovations?
KO It definitely impacted our work in a negative way. At times, we have been treated like we're not even human. We simply don’t have as much privilege in the work that we do. When we first got on the road, the road life community wasn’t very diverse at all. Thank goodness we're actually starting to see that change. The LGBTQ community is growing, the BIPOC community on the road is growing. Noami Grevemburg, who is in my book, founded Diversify Van Life and co-hosts the podcast Nomad at the Intersections. Things are shifting, even if the predominant narrative of #vanlife is still a straight, white cisgender couple.
LG People love to think about the open road when traveling – how vast and expansive and dream it is but in reality, you're living in under 200 square feet with like your wife and child. I’m curious how having to work in a confined space impacted your creative work and process.
KO It took a little bit more intention. I couldn't just go to another room, shut the door, and have privacy. I'm a very highly sensitive person. Noise really distracts me. Movement distracts me. My attention span can be pretty all over the place. When I've got a deadline for something, it's pretty easy for me to buckle down and get to work, but it's a little harder when I don't have one. Specifically in a small space and on the road, I had to be very intentional about my days. I knew that I was going to need a great stretch of time to write while not moving from place to place. The research was broken into two parts: the east leg and the west leg. We went out east first and then we took a seven week break at my wife's family's summer cottage in Canada, where I was able to write.
Then we did the western leg. My wife asked me where I wanted to write the book, and I replied that I wanted to write it in Joshua Tree. There is a place there that has a lot of meaning for me. We stayed out there for like two months and I finished the majority of the writing there. I wrote the final pages and did the final edits in Arizona as we headed back east. Every day, I would sit at the table with those big noise canceling headphones and write all day. I just had to be really intentional about slowing down and being still to get those longer stretches of writing in. That doesn't mean that I wasn't writing throughout the entire process. I was interviewing. I was taking notes. Yet the bulk of the writing happened when I was in stillness.
LG What should we expect next from you?
KO I've been working on a memoir for the last year. I mentioned earlier that I wanted to write a memoir, but I knew that my time on the road had to come to a close first. Some healing needed to happen as well. Now I'm in that space and I've been working actively on healing. I’m finally feeling better, more aware, more in touch with myself. We've been living in a house for the last year and a half. About a year ago, I started compiling everything, all of my writings, my journals, little notes that I've scribbled in. It's not easy! I don't think any memoir ever is, and writing it is very different from what I’ve written for this first book.
I will say that this book, even though it's in the lifestyle and travel genres, is more than that. It’s presented to the world as such because books have to be sold and marketed a certain way, but it's so much more than that when you open the pages.
Writing this new book is taking a lot of time. Once again, I'm having to find that intention. Even though I'm in a house and I've got all this room and a dedicated writing space, I still have to find that same intention and stillness that I found on the road. That hasn't changed. And so, yeah, I've been working on the memoir. I don't know when I'll be done and I'm not rushing it. It will be finished when it’s finished.
Kate Oliver is a designer, writer, and photographer. She lived on the road with her wife and daughter for four years in a vintage Airstream, and is now renovating a small house and studio in the woods. She and her wife are the founders of The Modern Caravan, a company that builds and inspires caravan renovations. Together, they have converted many caravans into beautiful, functional rolling homes.