Goodreads asked Steve Olson:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Steve Olson I grew up in Washington State, in a small town about 100 miles downwind from Mount St. Helens, but I went east for college and stayed there when I met my future wife in the back of an English class (though I was a physics major). I stayed on the East Coast until 2009, when my wife, a lifelong easterner, took a job in Seattle. When we moved to the Pacific Northwest, I decided to write about the most dramatic thing that has ever happened in my home state, and the eruption of Mount St. Helens was the obvious choice.

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