Kate Forsyth's Blog, page 52
August 6, 2013
SPOTLIGHT: Best books set in Africa
I'm very happy to welcome Deanna Raybourn, author of
A SPEAR OF SUMMER GRASS
, to the blog to tell us her favourite books set in Africa.
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Huge bouquets of thanks to Kate for inviting me to come and hang out in her corner of the interwebs! I love playing the voyeur and getting a peek at other writers’ inspirations, so I thought I would offer a glimpse into the books that went into making A SPEAR OF SUMMER GRASS.
[image error]
For every book I write, I end up adding to my library—usually twenty or thirty books—but SPEAR was a cat of a different color. I bought 55 books, and that doesn’t even take into account all the material I collected from the library and internet! It was a luxury to immerse myself in the time and place I was writing about, and most of all, the people.
Here are my favorites:
THE TEMPTRESS by Paul Spicer. The subject of this biography is Alice de Janzé, an American heiress and one of the Happy Valley set. She was notorious for shooting her lover in a Paris train station—and being acquitted on the grounds that she was too lovely to have really intended to kill a man. Her lover, incidentally, survived and continued the relationship for some years after.
SAFARI by Bartle Bull. This is a BIG book—an epic coffee-table book that chronicles the history and practice of safari. It is frank and brutal and absolutely gripping.
ZARA’S TALES by Peter Beard. Renowned fashion photographer Peter Beard has lived in Africa for decades, documenting his life there in stunning images. His diaries are works of art, layered with blood, bones, feathers, beads, and the facsimiles of them sell for hundreds of dollars. This book is a smaller, more intimate effort written for his small daughter, but it is by no means a children’s book. Beard offers an unflinching look at the continent today and the aftereffects of colonial involvement in east Africa.
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WHITE MISCHIEF by James Fox. The definitive book on the Happy Valley set, it traces the rise of this hedonistic group and covers their decline with the murder of Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll. It introduces all of the major players in British East Africa/Kenya, and untangles their complicated and tempestuous relationships. It is the perfect prelude to any other reading on the Happy Valley. (I have this on my reading pile - I'm so looking forward to reading it!)
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SILENCE WILL SPEAK and THE LIVES OF BERYL MARKHAM by Errol Trzebinski. I have half a dozen books by Trzebinksi, but anything she has written is worth reading. The first is a biography of Denys Finch Hatton, lover of Karen Blixen and immortalized by Robert Redford in the film “Out of Africa”. His relationship with Blixen might be better known, but his affair with Markham was much more a meeting of equals. Daring and independent, Markham took life on her own terms and became an accomplished aviation pioneer. Reading their biographies together offers a complete picture of how their lives entwined.
[image error]
AFRICAN NIGHTS by Kuki Gallmann. Gallmann is a lyrical writer with prose that reads like poetry. The images she conjures are vivid and lasting, and any of her books on Africa make for delectable reading. Gallmann has suffered great tragedy and tremendous triumphs in her adopted land, and she does not shy away from describing both in breathtaking detail.
ISAK DINESEN: THE LIFE OF A STORYTELLER. Judith Thurman. A far better book than Dinesen’s OUT OF AFRICA. Isak Dinesen was the pen name of Karen Blixen, the Danish aristocrat who was a writer, a failed coffee grower, and lover of Denys Finch Hatton. An arch-fantasist, she was unlikeable but deeply interesting, and Thurman’s biography offers a far more comprehensive portrait of Blixen than her own writings.
OUT IN THE MIDDAY SUN by Elspeth Huxley. In trying to choose a single Huxley book, I might have just as well thrown a dart at the bookshelf to see where it stuck. Huxley wrote vividly about her family’s experiences as settlers in British East Africa, both before and after World War I. She wrote with a child’s eye for detail and color, and her descriptions of her mother’s care for the native Africans was a direct inspiration for my own main character’s medical treatment of the workers on her stepfather’s farm. Reading Huxley’s books in order, it’s possible to trace her development as it parallels that of the colony from the early days through the trials of growing pains and into maturity.
Now that I’ve chosen a handful of books to recommend, I’m feeling horribly guilty about all the ones I didn’t mention! The books on the Maasai, the histories of Kenya, the memoirs of settlers, the safari stories…the list is potentially endless and every omission feels like a failure.
I did post photographs of the research stacks on my blog, so if you’re curious, a quick skim of those should fill in the blanks. And I didn’t mention THE BOLTER by Frances Osborne because Lauren Willig carried the flag for that particularly helpful book. In a strange twist of fate, over drinks at the Yale Club a few years ago, Lauren and I discovered we were both writing books set in Africa in the 1920s with flappers and farms and repressed cousins named Dodo…
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(You can read my review of Lauren Willig's 1920s Kenya book THE ASHFORD AFFAIR here)
Any and all of these books are transportive—books that can take you on a journey. So grab a stack and settle in and prepare for an armchair safari!
Deanna's website
Deanna's blog
PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT – I LOVE TO KNOW WHAT YOU THINK
[image error]
Huge bouquets of thanks to Kate for inviting me to come and hang out in her corner of the interwebs! I love playing the voyeur and getting a peek at other writers’ inspirations, so I thought I would offer a glimpse into the books that went into making A SPEAR OF SUMMER GRASS.
[image error]
For every book I write, I end up adding to my library—usually twenty or thirty books—but SPEAR was a cat of a different color. I bought 55 books, and that doesn’t even take into account all the material I collected from the library and internet! It was a luxury to immerse myself in the time and place I was writing about, and most of all, the people.
Here are my favorites:
THE TEMPTRESS by Paul Spicer. The subject of this biography is Alice de Janzé, an American heiress and one of the Happy Valley set. She was notorious for shooting her lover in a Paris train station—and being acquitted on the grounds that she was too lovely to have really intended to kill a man. Her lover, incidentally, survived and continued the relationship for some years after.
SAFARI by Bartle Bull. This is a BIG book—an epic coffee-table book that chronicles the history and practice of safari. It is frank and brutal and absolutely gripping.
ZARA’S TALES by Peter Beard. Renowned fashion photographer Peter Beard has lived in Africa for decades, documenting his life there in stunning images. His diaries are works of art, layered with blood, bones, feathers, beads, and the facsimiles of them sell for hundreds of dollars. This book is a smaller, more intimate effort written for his small daughter, but it is by no means a children’s book. Beard offers an unflinching look at the continent today and the aftereffects of colonial involvement in east Africa.
[image error]
WHITE MISCHIEF by James Fox. The definitive book on the Happy Valley set, it traces the rise of this hedonistic group and covers their decline with the murder of Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll. It introduces all of the major players in British East Africa/Kenya, and untangles their complicated and tempestuous relationships. It is the perfect prelude to any other reading on the Happy Valley. (I have this on my reading pile - I'm so looking forward to reading it!)
[image error]
SILENCE WILL SPEAK and THE LIVES OF BERYL MARKHAM by Errol Trzebinski. I have half a dozen books by Trzebinksi, but anything she has written is worth reading. The first is a biography of Denys Finch Hatton, lover of Karen Blixen and immortalized by Robert Redford in the film “Out of Africa”. His relationship with Blixen might be better known, but his affair with Markham was much more a meeting of equals. Daring and independent, Markham took life on her own terms and became an accomplished aviation pioneer. Reading their biographies together offers a complete picture of how their lives entwined.
[image error]
AFRICAN NIGHTS by Kuki Gallmann. Gallmann is a lyrical writer with prose that reads like poetry. The images she conjures are vivid and lasting, and any of her books on Africa make for delectable reading. Gallmann has suffered great tragedy and tremendous triumphs in her adopted land, and she does not shy away from describing both in breathtaking detail.
ISAK DINESEN: THE LIFE OF A STORYTELLER. Judith Thurman. A far better book than Dinesen’s OUT OF AFRICA. Isak Dinesen was the pen name of Karen Blixen, the Danish aristocrat who was a writer, a failed coffee grower, and lover of Denys Finch Hatton. An arch-fantasist, she was unlikeable but deeply interesting, and Thurman’s biography offers a far more comprehensive portrait of Blixen than her own writings.
OUT IN THE MIDDAY SUN by Elspeth Huxley. In trying to choose a single Huxley book, I might have just as well thrown a dart at the bookshelf to see where it stuck. Huxley wrote vividly about her family’s experiences as settlers in British East Africa, both before and after World War I. She wrote with a child’s eye for detail and color, and her descriptions of her mother’s care for the native Africans was a direct inspiration for my own main character’s medical treatment of the workers on her stepfather’s farm. Reading Huxley’s books in order, it’s possible to trace her development as it parallels that of the colony from the early days through the trials of growing pains and into maturity.
Now that I’ve chosen a handful of books to recommend, I’m feeling horribly guilty about all the ones I didn’t mention! The books on the Maasai, the histories of Kenya, the memoirs of settlers, the safari stories…the list is potentially endless and every omission feels like a failure.
I did post photographs of the research stacks on my blog, so if you’re curious, a quick skim of those should fill in the blanks. And I didn’t mention THE BOLTER by Frances Osborne because Lauren Willig carried the flag for that particularly helpful book. In a strange twist of fate, over drinks at the Yale Club a few years ago, Lauren and I discovered we were both writing books set in Africa in the 1920s with flappers and farms and repressed cousins named Dodo…
[image error]
(You can read my review of Lauren Willig's 1920s Kenya book THE ASHFORD AFFAIR here)
Any and all of these books are transportive—books that can take you on a journey. So grab a stack and settle in and prepare for an armchair safari!
Deanna's website
Deanna's blog
PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT – I LOVE TO KNOW WHAT YOU THINK
August 4, 2013
BOOK REVIEW: A Spear of Summer Grass by Deanna Raybourn
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Title: A Spear of Summer Grass
Author: Deanna Raybourn
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Age Group & Genre: Historical Adventure/Romance for Adults
Reviewer: Kate Forsyth
The Blurb:
Paris, 1923
The daughter of a scandalous mother, Delilah Drummond is already notorious, even amongst Paris society. But her latest scandal is big enough to make even her oft-married mother blanch. Delilah is exiled to Kenya and her favorite stepfather's savannah manor house until gossip subsides.
Fairlight is the crumbling, sun-bleached skeleton of a faded African dream, a world where dissolute expats are bolstered by gin and jazz records, cigarettes and safaris. As mistress of this wasted estate, Delilah falls into the decadent pleasures of society.
Against the frivolity of her peers, Ryder White stands in sharp contrast. As foreign to Delilah as Africa, Ryder becomes her guide to the complex beauty of this unknown world. Giraffes, buffalo, lions and elephants roam the shores of Lake Wanyama amid swirls of red dust. Here, life is lush and teeming-yet fleeting and often cheap.
Amidst the wonders-and dangers-of Africa, Delilah awakes to a land out of all proportion: extremes of heat, darkness, beauty and joy that cut to her very heart. Only when this sacred place is profaned by bloodshed does Delilah discover what is truly worth fighting for-and what she can no longer live without.
What I Thought:
"Don't believe the stories you have heard about me. I have never killed anyone, and I have never stolen another woman's husband. Oh, if I find one lying around unattended, I might climb on, but I never took one that didn't want taking."
As soon as I read these opening lines, I sighed happily, knowing I was going to love this book. Deanna Raybourn is best known for her Lady Julia series of Victorian murder mysteries, and so A Spear of Summer Grass is a new departure for her.
Set during the Roaring 20s, it tells the story of the scandalous debutante Delilah Drummond who has caused one scandal too many and so is banished to Kenya. Her voice is pitch-perfect. She’s sassy, cynical, and smart, yet there is a touch of pathos and vulnerability about her which makes her a far more interesting character than you might expect. In Kenya, Delilah gets caught up in the social whirl of the white landowners, makes unexpected friends, takes a lover and falls in love (not with the same man), and finds herself accused of murder. An utterly brilliant book, and one of the most enjoyable reads of the year so far for me.
Deanna's website
Deanna's blog
PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT – I LOVE TO KNOW WHAT YOU THINK
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Title: A Spear of Summer Grass
Author: Deanna Raybourn
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Age Group & Genre: Historical Adventure/Romance for Adults
Reviewer: Kate Forsyth
The Blurb:
Paris, 1923
The daughter of a scandalous mother, Delilah Drummond is already notorious, even amongst Paris society. But her latest scandal is big enough to make even her oft-married mother blanch. Delilah is exiled to Kenya and her favorite stepfather's savannah manor house until gossip subsides.
Fairlight is the crumbling, sun-bleached skeleton of a faded African dream, a world where dissolute expats are bolstered by gin and jazz records, cigarettes and safaris. As mistress of this wasted estate, Delilah falls into the decadent pleasures of society.
Against the frivolity of her peers, Ryder White stands in sharp contrast. As foreign to Delilah as Africa, Ryder becomes her guide to the complex beauty of this unknown world. Giraffes, buffalo, lions and elephants roam the shores of Lake Wanyama amid swirls of red dust. Here, life is lush and teeming-yet fleeting and often cheap.
Amidst the wonders-and dangers-of Africa, Delilah awakes to a land out of all proportion: extremes of heat, darkness, beauty and joy that cut to her very heart. Only when this sacred place is profaned by bloodshed does Delilah discover what is truly worth fighting for-and what she can no longer live without.
What I Thought:
"Don't believe the stories you have heard about me. I have never killed anyone, and I have never stolen another woman's husband. Oh, if I find one lying around unattended, I might climb on, but I never took one that didn't want taking."
As soon as I read these opening lines, I sighed happily, knowing I was going to love this book. Deanna Raybourn is best known for her Lady Julia series of Victorian murder mysteries, and so A Spear of Summer Grass is a new departure for her.
Set during the Roaring 20s, it tells the story of the scandalous debutante Delilah Drummond who has caused one scandal too many and so is banished to Kenya. Her voice is pitch-perfect. She’s sassy, cynical, and smart, yet there is a touch of pathos and vulnerability about her which makes her a far more interesting character than you might expect. In Kenya, Delilah gets caught up in the social whirl of the white landowners, makes unexpected friends, takes a lover and falls in love (not with the same man), and finds herself accused of murder. An utterly brilliant book, and one of the most enjoyable reads of the year so far for me.
Deanna's website
Deanna's blog
PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT – I LOVE TO KNOW WHAT YOU THINK
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August 3, 2013
THE WILD GIRL - The story behind the Grimms fairy tales
The Story Behind the Grimm Brothers’ Fairy Tales
Once upon a time there were two brothers who lived in a small kingdom in the middle of a crazy patchwork of other small kingdoms, each with its own prince or archduke to rule it. Some of these kingdoms were so small the princes could fire at each other from their castle walls.
The two brothers – named Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm – were the eldest of a family of six, all boys except for the youngest who was a girl named Lotte.
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Next door to the Grimm family lived a family of six girls and one boy named the Wilds. They lived side-by-side on the Marktgasse in the medieval quarter of a town named Cassel, famous for its palace set in vast gardens and forests.
Jakob and Wilhelm and their family were desperately poor. Their father had died, and the two elder brothers struggled to feed and clothe their siblings.
One day a mighty emperor called Napoleon decided he wished to rule the world. On his way to seize the thrones of the other great kings and emperors of the world, he took over the Grimm brothers’ small kingdom and mashed it together with many of its neighbours to create the Kingdom of Westphalia. He set his young brother Jérôme up as king. In his first week, Jérôme played leapfrog in his underwear with his courtiers through the empty halls of the palace, then spent a fortune ordering new furniture from Paris.
Life was very hard for the Grimms. Everything changed under French occupation – the laws of the land, the weights and measurements, even the language everyone must speak - and censors meant the newspapers only printed what Napoleon wanted people to know.
Partly as an act of defiance, and partly in the hope of making some money, the Grimms began to collect old stories from their neighbours and friends, with the aim of publishing a scholarly book.
The Wild girls who lived next door knew many stories, particularly Lotte’s best friend, the fifth daughter, who was named Dortchen. She told Wilhelm many tales, including ‘The Frog King’, ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘Six Swans’ and ‘Rumpelstiltskin’.
Wilhelm and Dortchen fell in love, but the Grimms were so poverty-stricken they could only afford one meal a day. Wilhelm’s and Dortchen’s only chance to marry was if the fairy tale collection was a success.
Unfortunately, the book was a failure. It was criticised for being too scholarly, too unsophisticated, and filled with too much sex (some of the stories were indeed ripe with sexual innuendo).
It was a time of war and terror and tyranny. Napoleon marched on Russia. The fields of Europe were burned black, and many hundreds of thousands of people died.
Wilhelm struggled on (his elder brother Jakob was now busy with other scholarly undertakings). He collected more tales, from Dortchen as well as from other storytellers, and he rewrote the stories to make them more palatable to a middle-class audience. He added such terms as ‘once upon a time’ and ‘happily ever after’, and made sure the princess did not take the frog into her bed anymore.
Slowly the war was won, and peace returned. Slowly the fairy tales began to sell. Slowly the Grimm brothers’ reputation grew. At last, thirteen years after they first fell in love, Wilhelm and Dortchen were able to marry. They lived together with Jakob happily until their deaths.
This is the story that I tell in my novel THE WILD GIRL - a story of love, war and fairy tales.
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PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT - I LOVE TO KNOW WHAT YOU THINK!
August 2, 2013
SPOTLIGHT - How grim were the Grimms' fairy tales?
Just how grim are the Grimm tales?
* In the 1812 version of the Grimm’s tale ‘Little Snow-White’, it is the heroine’s own jealous mother that wants her dead. She tells the huntsman to bring back her daughter’s lungs and liver, for her to eat. Wilhelm Grimm later changed the mother to a step-mother.
* The jealous queen was punished by Little Snow-White and her prince by being forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes till she died.
* In the original (1812) version of ‘The Frog King’, the princess does not kiss the frog to change him into a prince. Instead, she throws him as hard as she can against a wall.
* In ‘Aschenputtel’, the Grimm’s version of ‘Cinderella’, one wicked stepsister cuts off her toes to try and make the slipper fit and the other cuts off her heel. In the end, they have their eyes pecked out by pigeons.
* In a later edition (1857) of ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, the dwarf tears himself in two when the queen guesses his true name. This detail was added in by Wilhelm, quite possibly because he thought it was funny
* in one Grimm tale, ‘The Maiden Without Hands,’ a girl’s hands are chopped off by her own father
* The villain of ‘Fitcher’s Bird’ is a sorcerer that travels about the countryside, kidnapping girls and hacking them to pieces in a hidden room.
* In ‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’, a girl disguises herself in a coat made from the fur flayed from a thousand animals in order to escape the incestuous desires of her father
* in many cases, Wilhelm made the stories more violent – particularly the punishments for witches and evil step-mothers
Nonetheless, nearly all of the tales end happily, with the hero or heroine triumphing because of their courage, goodness, and wit.
My novel THE WILD GIRL tells the astonishing untold story of how the Grimm brothers came to collect their world-famous tales - and the young woman who was their most important source. Its a story of love, war and the redemptive power of storytelling.
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PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT - I LOVE TO KNOW WHAT YOU THINK!
August 1, 2013
INTERVIEW: Kate Forsyth author of THE WILD GIRL
This interview was originally published by SUNDAY LIFE Magazine in April 2013
SL: Explain your fascination with fairy tales
As language evolved, and symbols were created to express meaning, these tales began to be written down. People took the tales they had heard and retold them, transforming them into new tales. Then those tales were read – both silently and aloud – and told and retold again, constantly changing, constantly finding new forms. The printing press was invented, and the old stories were remade and retold again and again, like a shapeshifter constantly shedding its skin. Sometimes they were told for the entertainment of adults, sometimes for the enthrallment of children, sometimes to teach, sometimes to warn, sometimes to amuse. New technologies brought new ways to tell the tales – yet the vital metaphors and motifs still endure and shall as long as humans tell stories.
SL: Do you have any favourite retellings?
Kate: I love fairy tale retellings! I have a whole shelf of them in my library. It’s hard to pick only one so I’ll list my favourite seven:
The Glass Slipper by Eleanor Farjeon (published 1955)
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold by C.S. Lewis (published 1956)
The Stone Cage by Nicholas Stuart Gray (published 1963)
Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast by Robin McKinley (published 1978)
Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier (published 1999)
North Child by Edith Pattou (published 2003)
Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth (published 2012)
(Yes, I included my own novel – a retelling of Rapunzel - but then I do love it with all my heart.)
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SL: Will fairy tales endure? And why?
Kate: Oh yes, fairy tales shall endure – happily ever after. They’ll endure because they seem simple and fanciful, but are in fact very deep and very old and very true.
SL: Do new fairy tales emerge, or are they all derived from the same originals?
Kate: Jane Yolen says that stories are like cities; they are built on the stones and bones of the past. I think this is absolutely right. We can never escape our narrative past. It is encoded into our brains and our imaginations. We can all, however, create new stories, all of them as different from the old as a butterfly is from a caterpillar.
SL: Which is your favourite of all of them?
Kate: My all-time favourite fairy tales are ‘Rapunzel’, ‘Six Swans’, and ‘Beauty and the Beast’.
SL: What role do fairy tales play in our modern day society?
Kate: Fairy tales play the same role they have always played – they entertain and educate, while also disrupting the known world to make space for marvellous alternatives. Fairy tales teach us that anything may be possible if we just try hard enough, and encourage us to have courage and compassion and to trust in our own cleverness. What more beautiful and necessary life lesson can we learn?
SL: Why do we all still want to be in a fairy tale – swept up by a prince etc?
Kate: Fairy tales are stories of true love, triumph and transformation. They arise out of the deepest longings of the human heart, and offer us some hope that these dreams may one day come true. We need dreams, we need to imagine what kind of world we want, we need to have hope that goodness and love can triumph over evil and hatred. Fairy tales both console us and compel us; they give us a star-map for the future.
Please leave a comment - I love to know what you think!
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SL: Explain your fascination with fairy tales
Kate: I first began to read fairy tales as a little girl in hospital, after suffering a savage dog attack when I was little more than a baby. As a result of my injuries, I was in and out of hospital for most of my childhood. Everyone who visited me knew that they had to bring me books - they were my only shield against fear and pain and loneliness. My mother gave me a beautiful, red-leather edition of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales when I was about seven. I read that book to absolute rags. The stories in it both bewitched and troubled me. They were so full of beauty and mystery and danger. I felt as if they spoke to me on some deep and secret level, like something heard in a dream and only half-remembered after waking. I loved the whole atmosphere of the fairy tale world – this was a place where anything could happen, a place where girls could defeat witches and frogs could turn into princes and bones could sing to accuse their murderers. I’ve been trying to recreate that sense of wonder and strangeness in my own writing ever since.
Me when I was about 7
SL: Where does this book take us?
Kate: ‘The Wild Girl’ tells the true, untold love story of Wilhelm Grimm and Dortchen Wild, the young woman who told him many of the world’s most famous stories. Dortchen grew up next door to the Grimm family in Hessen-Cassel, a small German kingdom that was one of the first to fall to Napoleon. It was a time of war and tyranny and terror, when the collecting of a few old half-forgotten tales was all the young Grimm brothers could do to resist the cultural dominance of the French. Dortchen told Wilhelm such well-known tales as ‘Hansel & Gretel’, ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, ‘Six Swans’, ‘The Frog King’, ‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’, ‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’, ‘The Singing Bone’, and many, many more. They fell in love but were forbidden to marry, and had many obstacles to overcome before they could at last be together. It’s a very beautiful, dark and dramatic story, a true-life fairy-tale.
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SL: Why are we still so fascinated by fairy tales? Why do they continue to resonate with us?
Kate: I think it's because fairy tales operate on more than one level. On the surface, they are magical adventures filled with wonder, enchantment, beauty, romance, danger, and the consolation of a happy ending. On a deeper level, however, they are serious dramas that reflect, symbolically and metaphorically, problems and pitfalls that are can be very real in people’s inner lives. They offer a stage where the reader can act out universal fears and desires, and so resolve deep, subconscious tensions that they are, perhaps, not even aware of.
SL: What is your understanding of how they have evolved over 200 years?
Kate: Once upon a time, our ancestors used to crouch about the fire in their cave, telling tales of heroes and monsters and quests and enchantments in an attempt to keep the terror of the night at bay. The tales they told taught the young about the dangers of the perilous world in which they lived, and gave them some clues as to how to survive it.
As language evolved, and symbols were created to express meaning, these tales began to be written down. People took the tales they had heard and retold them, transforming them into new tales. Then those tales were read – both silently and aloud – and told and retold again, constantly changing, constantly finding new forms. The printing press was invented, and the old stories were remade and retold again and again, like a shapeshifter constantly shedding its skin. Sometimes they were told for the entertainment of adults, sometimes for the enthrallment of children, sometimes to teach, sometimes to warn, sometimes to amuse. New technologies brought new ways to tell the tales – yet the vital metaphors and motifs still endure and shall as long as humans tell stories.
SL: Do you have any favourite retellings?
Kate: I love fairy tale retellings! I have a whole shelf of them in my library. It’s hard to pick only one so I’ll list my favourite seven:
The Glass Slipper by Eleanor Farjeon (published 1955)
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold by C.S. Lewis (published 1956)
The Stone Cage by Nicholas Stuart Gray (published 1963)
Beauty: A Retelling of the Story of Beauty and the Beast by Robin McKinley (published 1978)
Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier (published 1999)
North Child by Edith Pattou (published 2003)
Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth (published 2012)
(Yes, I included my own novel – a retelling of Rapunzel - but then I do love it with all my heart.)
SL: Will fairy tales endure? And why?
Kate: Oh yes, fairy tales shall endure – happily ever after. They’ll endure because they seem simple and fanciful, but are in fact very deep and very old and very true.
SL: Do new fairy tales emerge, or are they all derived from the same originals?
Kate: Jane Yolen says that stories are like cities; they are built on the stones and bones of the past. I think this is absolutely right. We can never escape our narrative past. It is encoded into our brains and our imaginations. We can all, however, create new stories, all of them as different from the old as a butterfly is from a caterpillar.
SL: Which is your favourite of all of them?
Kate: My all-time favourite fairy tales are ‘Rapunzel’, ‘Six Swans’, and ‘Beauty and the Beast’.
SL: What role do fairy tales play in our modern day society?
Kate: Fairy tales play the same role they have always played – they entertain and educate, while also disrupting the known world to make space for marvellous alternatives. Fairy tales teach us that anything may be possible if we just try hard enough, and encourage us to have courage and compassion and to trust in our own cleverness. What more beautiful and necessary life lesson can we learn?
SL: Why do we all still want to be in a fairy tale – swept up by a prince etc?
Kate: Fairy tales are stories of true love, triumph and transformation. They arise out of the deepest longings of the human heart, and offer us some hope that these dreams may one day come true. We need dreams, we need to imagine what kind of world we want, we need to have hope that goodness and love can triumph over evil and hatred. Fairy tales both console us and compel us; they give us a star-map for the future.
Please leave a comment - I love to know what you think!
[image error][image error] [image error]
July 31, 2013
RECIPE: Dortchen Wild's damson plum jam cake
Last week I went to talk to a Book Club in Sydney that had read and loved my novel THE WILD GIRL. One of the club had cooked the damson plum jam cake that Dortchen Wild cooks for Wilhelm Grimm's birthday (the recipe was included in the Book Club reading notes in Australia - its an adaption from an old German recipe).
I cooked this cake a lot when I was writing THE WILD GIRL, but I had forgotten just how good it is. I thought I'd share the recipe with you all.
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The picture of Damson Plum Jam comes from First Look, then Cook
Dortchen’s Recipe for Damson Plum Jam Cake
Ingredients:
2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1 teaspoon allspice
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
1 cup caster sugar
1/3 cup canola oil
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 cup dried cranberries
1 cup chopped walnuts
1 cup damson plum jam
Method:
Preheat oven to 350C. Grease and line a loaf pan. In a large bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon and salt. Beat the eggs and sugar until combined. Add the canola oil. Slowly beat in the flour mixture. Stir in the buttermilk. With a spatula fold in the cranberries and walnuts. Swirl in the jam in three to four strokes. Pour into the loaf pan and bake for 50 minutes or until a cake testor comes out clean. Allow to cool in the pan for 25 minutes, then turn it out onto a rack. Allow to cool for 5 minutes or so, then serve warm. This cake lasts a week well covered.
I cooked this cake a lot when I was writing THE WILD GIRL, but I had forgotten just how good it is. I thought I'd share the recipe with you all.
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The picture of Damson Plum Jam comes from First Look, then Cook
Dortchen’s Recipe for Damson Plum Jam Cake
Ingredients:
2 cups all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1 teaspoon allspice
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon salt
2 large eggs
1 cup caster sugar
1/3 cup canola oil
1/2 cup buttermilk
1 cup dried cranberries
1 cup chopped walnuts
1 cup damson plum jam
Method:
Preheat oven to 350C. Grease and line a loaf pan. In a large bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, baking soda, nutmeg, allspice, cinnamon and salt. Beat the eggs and sugar until combined. Add the canola oil. Slowly beat in the flour mixture. Stir in the buttermilk. With a spatula fold in the cranberries and walnuts. Swirl in the jam in three to four strokes. Pour into the loaf pan and bake for 50 minutes or until a cake testor comes out clean. Allow to cool in the pan for 25 minutes, then turn it out onto a rack. Allow to cool for 5 minutes or so, then serve warm. This cake lasts a week well covered.
July 30, 2013
SPOTLIGHT: Sources of the Grimms' fairy tales
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Everyone has heard of the Grimm brothers.
Everyone has read some, at least, of their famous fairy tales.
What few people know, however, is who originally told the stories to the Grimm brothers. The names of the original tellers has been lost to all but those fairy tale scholars that have painstakingly pieced together clues taken from the brother’s notes and diaries to name the sources of the some of the world’s best loved fairy tales.
For example, ‘Aschenputtel’, (better known today as Cinderella), was told by an old woman in a poorhouse in the small medieval town of Marburg where Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm went to university. Her name is thought to be Frau Creuzer.
‘Hansel and Gretel’ was told to Wilhelm in the house of the local apothecary, Herr Wild, which was next door to where the Grimm brothers lived. It was most probably told by Herr Wild’s second youngest daughter, Dortchen. She most certainly provided the famous rhymes, usually translated into English as ‘Little mouse, little mouse, who is nibbling at my house?’ with the children replying, ‘it’s the wind so wild, the heavenly child.’
‘Little Red Cap’ was told by Jeannette and Marie Hassenpflug, young women in their late teens and early 20s, who also told ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ and ‘Brier Rose’ (better known as ‘Sleeping Beauty’), as well as many others. Their brother Louis married the Grimm brothers’ younger sister, Lotte.
‘The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes’ (sometimes called ‘Twelve Dancing Princesses’) was told to Wilhelm Grimm by Jenny von Droste-Hülstoff, the niece of a university friend. She had a warm and tender friendship with Wilhelm, so that many thought they might marry, but the wedding never came to pass.
‘The Bremen Town Musicians’ was told to Wilhelm by Jenny’s aunts, the sisters of Werner von Haxthausen, who studied law with the Grimms at Marburg University.
‘The Goose Girl’ was told to the Grimm brothers’ by Dorothea Viehmann, a poor old woman, widow to an innkeeper, who came to the Grimms’ house selling vegetables and butter.
‘Snow White’ was originally thought to have been told by the Wild family’s housekeeper, Marie Müller, better known as Old Marie. Now many scholars believe it was told by Marie Hassenpflug instead (though the Grimms had not yet met the Hassenpflugs when this story was first recorded). It is likely that a number of different variants were told by different tellers, and that the Grimm brothers blended the best elements of them together.
‘The Twelve Brothers’ was told by Julia and Charlotte Ramus, daughters of the local pastor
‘Rumpetstilskin’ was told to Wilhelm by his next door neighbour, Dortchen Wild. She also told him ‘Six Swans’, ‘The Frog King’, ‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’, ‘Sweetheart Roland’, ‘Mother Holle’, ‘The Three Little Men in the Wood’. ‘The Singing Bone’, ‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’, and ‘The Singing, Springing Lark’.
In fact, she told almost one quarter of the Grimm brothers’ first collection of fairy tales.
Dortchen and Wilhelm fell in love during the collection of the fairy tales, but were unable to marry for many years thanks to her father's disapproval and the Grimm brothers’ poverty. It was not until a small collection, chosen especially for children, was published that the tales at last became popular and the two star-crossed lovers were at last able to marry.
I tell the story of their star-crossed love in my novel THE WILD GIRL:
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Please leave a comment - I love to know what you think!
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July 29, 2013
SEVEN FASCINATING THINGS about the Grimm Brothers
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Seven Fascinating Facts about the Grimms & their Fairy Tales
1. the last witch executed in Europe died only three years before Jakob Grimm was born
2. Although the Brothers Grimm are famous for their collection of old tales, it was actually the younger brother, Wilhelm, who did most of the work, particularly after the first edition was published in 1812.
3. The brothers transcribed all their stories with a quill dipped in ink. Paper was scarce during the Napoleonic Wars, and so they wrote on both sides of the paper and then turned it sideways to write crossways across the page.
4. In 1810, they sent a copy of their manuscript to a poet friend, Clemens Brentano, who had promised to help them find a publisher. Brentano lost the manuscript, which was not found until the early 1920s. Wilhelm had to rewrite the whole collection by hand.
5. Their youngest brother Ludwig was a talented artist who illustrated the first Children’s Edition of their tales, published in 1825. It was this book which became an international bestseller.
6. The Grimm brothers published many other books apart from fairy tales, including writings on linguistics, folklore, and the beginning of the first detailed German dictionary. This was not finished until 120 years after their deaths.
7. the Grimm brothers were rebels who were eventually fired from their jobs at the University of Gottingen for protesting the abolition of the constitution by the King of Hanover.
The story of how the Grimm brothers came to discover their world-famous fairy tales - and the beautiful young woman who told them many of the tales - inspired my novel THE WILD GIRL.
[image error] [image error]
Please leave a comment - I love to know what you think!
Seven Fascinating Facts about the Grimms & their Fairy Tales
1. the last witch executed in Europe died only three years before Jakob Grimm was born
2. Although the Brothers Grimm are famous for their collection of old tales, it was actually the younger brother, Wilhelm, who did most of the work, particularly after the first edition was published in 1812.
3. The brothers transcribed all their stories with a quill dipped in ink. Paper was scarce during the Napoleonic Wars, and so they wrote on both sides of the paper and then turned it sideways to write crossways across the page.
4. In 1810, they sent a copy of their manuscript to a poet friend, Clemens Brentano, who had promised to help them find a publisher. Brentano lost the manuscript, which was not found until the early 1920s. Wilhelm had to rewrite the whole collection by hand.
5. Their youngest brother Ludwig was a talented artist who illustrated the first Children’s Edition of their tales, published in 1825. It was this book which became an international bestseller.
6. The Grimm brothers published many other books apart from fairy tales, including writings on linguistics, folklore, and the beginning of the first detailed German dictionary. This was not finished until 120 years after their deaths.
7. the Grimm brothers were rebels who were eventually fired from their jobs at the University of Gottingen for protesting the abolition of the constitution by the King of Hanover.
The story of how the Grimm brothers came to discover their world-famous fairy tales - and the beautiful young woman who told them many of the tales - inspired my novel THE WILD GIRL.
[image error] [image error]
Please leave a comment - I love to know what you think!
July 28, 2013
THE STORY BEHIND THE WILD GIRL
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THE STORY BEHIND THE WRITING OF THE WILD GIRL
I stumbled across the story of Wilhelm Grimm and Dortchen Wild quite by accident one day.
I was busy researching the sources of ‘Rapunzel’, one of the Grimm brothers’ best known fairy tales, for my novel I stumbled across the story of Wilhelm Grimm and Dortchen Wild quite by accident one day.
I was busy researching the sources of ‘Rapunzel’, one of the Grimm brothers’ best known fairy tales, for my novel Bitter Greens which I was then writing.
I had bought a book called Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales by the US writer and academic, Dr Valerie Paradiž, little knowing that I had just changed the course of my own life.
Clever Maids debunks the myth that the Grimm brothers travelled the German countryside, collecting stories from old shepherds tending their flocks, and elderly peasant women rocking by the fire, their fingers busy with their knitting. Instead, it revealed, most of the stories were told to the Grimm brothers by their friends and neighbours - young, middle-class women.
One of these young women was Dortchen Wild. She grew up next door to the Grimms in the small medieval market square of Hessen-Cassel. She was just 19 years old when she began telling Wilhelm the stories she knew – tales that are now known the world over, tales like ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, ‘The Frog King’, and ‘Six Swans’.
They fell in love, but were forbidden to marry. It would take another thirteen years of war, death, famine and heartbreak until, at last, the two were free to marry and build a life together.
I knew as soon as I read about Dortchen Wild that I had to write a novel based on her life.
I didn’t realise what a challenge this would be!
The world knows very little about the Wild family – unlike the Grimms, who have been researched exhaustively.
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We know – thanks to Dr Paradiž - that Dortchen had five sisters and one brother, and that she grew up in a rambling old house above her father’s apothecary shop. We know that her father was a stern man who had a famous garden in which he grew many plants for use in his remedies.
We also know that Dortchen had a childhood crush on Wilhelm which she confessed in a letter to Lotte Grimm, his younger sister.
We know that they met in 1805 and married in 1825.
It was not much to weave a tale with.
So began a long, arduous research process that hit setback after setback.
I wrote to Dr Paradiž asking if she had any further research that may be of use to me. She told me that she had moved house, and thrown every single bit of work she had done on Clever Maids into the garbage bin.
I hired a German translator to help me with research on the ground in Germany. He was hit by a car, and spent months in rehabilitation.
I found a German academic who specialised in Grimm research. He promised to find out what I needed to know and email me back within the week. I never heard from him again. I think he died. Or changed his email address to avoid my increasingly anxious queries.
Gradually I began to piece together the key details of Dortchen’s life. I found mentions of her in footnotes and in academic essays. I read her birth records and realised that the official date of her birth was wrong by three years.
I realised that the kingdom of Hessen-Cassel was one of the first to fall to Napoleon’s Grand Army, and – not knowing a thing about Napoleon – set about discovering everything I could about him. I identified which stories she had told Wilhelm, and when, and then I read them over and over again, wondering about the girl who could tell such beautiful and frightening tales. I puzzled over the darkness at the heart of many of her stories. I imagined her telling them to Wilhelm, these stories of thwarted desire and abandonment and silenced women. I imagined how Dortchen and Wilhelm might have begun to fall in love. I thought very deeply about what stories are really for – why do we tell them, why do we want to hear them, what power do they hold?
One day, searching blindly through the internet for more background on the Wild family, I stumbled across a blog by a German cartoonist and artist named Irmgard Peters. With the help of Google Translate, I read a story she had posted about a small white cot that had been passed down through her family for generations. Dortchen Wild and her sisters had slept in that cot as young children, when they were first told the stories that later became the backbone of the Grimm brother’s fairy tale collection.
I wrote to Frau Peters in high excitement. She wrote back to me and confirmed that she was the descendant of Rudolf Wild, Dortchen’s older brother. Over the next few years she shared with me many snippets of family lore, sent me photos of family portraits, and translated many German texts for me, including Wilhelm’s unpublished diary.
With her help, I was able to uncover many aspects of Dortchen and Wilhelm’s romance that nobody had ever known before … and so was able to bring this life one of the great untold love stories of history …
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Please leave a comment - I love to know what you think!
This blog was originally written for the Random House Australia Blog on 2 April 2013
[image error][image error][image error]
THE STORY BEHIND THE WRITING OF THE WILD GIRL
I stumbled across the story of Wilhelm Grimm and Dortchen Wild quite by accident one day.
I was busy researching the sources of ‘Rapunzel’, one of the Grimm brothers’ best known fairy tales, for my novel I stumbled across the story of Wilhelm Grimm and Dortchen Wild quite by accident one day.
I was busy researching the sources of ‘Rapunzel’, one of the Grimm brothers’ best known fairy tales, for my novel Bitter Greens which I was then writing.
I had bought a book called Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales by the US writer and academic, Dr Valerie Paradiž, little knowing that I had just changed the course of my own life.
Clever Maids debunks the myth that the Grimm brothers travelled the German countryside, collecting stories from old shepherds tending their flocks, and elderly peasant women rocking by the fire, their fingers busy with their knitting. Instead, it revealed, most of the stories were told to the Grimm brothers by their friends and neighbours - young, middle-class women.
One of these young women was Dortchen Wild. She grew up next door to the Grimms in the small medieval market square of Hessen-Cassel. She was just 19 years old when she began telling Wilhelm the stories she knew – tales that are now known the world over, tales like ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, ‘The Frog King’, and ‘Six Swans’.
They fell in love, but were forbidden to marry. It would take another thirteen years of war, death, famine and heartbreak until, at last, the two were free to marry and build a life together.
I knew as soon as I read about Dortchen Wild that I had to write a novel based on her life.
I didn’t realise what a challenge this would be!
The world knows very little about the Wild family – unlike the Grimms, who have been researched exhaustively.
[image error]
We know – thanks to Dr Paradiž - that Dortchen had five sisters and one brother, and that she grew up in a rambling old house above her father’s apothecary shop. We know that her father was a stern man who had a famous garden in which he grew many plants for use in his remedies.
We also know that Dortchen had a childhood crush on Wilhelm which she confessed in a letter to Lotte Grimm, his younger sister.
We know that they met in 1805 and married in 1825.
It was not much to weave a tale with.
So began a long, arduous research process that hit setback after setback.
I wrote to Dr Paradiž asking if she had any further research that may be of use to me. She told me that she had moved house, and thrown every single bit of work she had done on Clever Maids into the garbage bin.
I hired a German translator to help me with research on the ground in Germany. He was hit by a car, and spent months in rehabilitation.
I found a German academic who specialised in Grimm research. He promised to find out what I needed to know and email me back within the week. I never heard from him again. I think he died. Or changed his email address to avoid my increasingly anxious queries.
Gradually I began to piece together the key details of Dortchen’s life. I found mentions of her in footnotes and in academic essays. I read her birth records and realised that the official date of her birth was wrong by three years.
I realised that the kingdom of Hessen-Cassel was one of the first to fall to Napoleon’s Grand Army, and – not knowing a thing about Napoleon – set about discovering everything I could about him. I identified which stories she had told Wilhelm, and when, and then I read them over and over again, wondering about the girl who could tell such beautiful and frightening tales. I puzzled over the darkness at the heart of many of her stories. I imagined her telling them to Wilhelm, these stories of thwarted desire and abandonment and silenced women. I imagined how Dortchen and Wilhelm might have begun to fall in love. I thought very deeply about what stories are really for – why do we tell them, why do we want to hear them, what power do they hold?
One day, searching blindly through the internet for more background on the Wild family, I stumbled across a blog by a German cartoonist and artist named Irmgard Peters. With the help of Google Translate, I read a story she had posted about a small white cot that had been passed down through her family for generations. Dortchen Wild and her sisters had slept in that cot as young children, when they were first told the stories that later became the backbone of the Grimm brother’s fairy tale collection.
I wrote to Frau Peters in high excitement. She wrote back to me and confirmed that she was the descendant of Rudolf Wild, Dortchen’s older brother. Over the next few years she shared with me many snippets of family lore, sent me photos of family portraits, and translated many German texts for me, including Wilhelm’s unpublished diary.
With her help, I was able to uncover many aspects of Dortchen and Wilhelm’s romance that nobody had ever known before … and so was able to bring this life one of the great untold love stories of history …
[image error]
Please leave a comment - I love to know what you think!
This blog was originally written for the Random House Australia Blog on 2 April 2013
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July 25, 2013
INTERVIEW: Patrice Kindl, author of KEEPING THE CASTLE
Today I'd like to welcome Patrice Kindl, author of the utterly charming KEEPING THE CASTLE to my blog.
Are you a daydreamer too?
Oh, of course. I know that daydreaming is a part of the creative process, but I cannot help but wish I did it less and wrote more. That said, I think that some kinds of daydreaming are more productive than others. We all tell ourselves ‘wishful thinking’ stories, which are more self-indulgent than creative. We see ourselves (or our fictional alter egos) winning awards, wielding superpowers, loved and admired by all who know us. A tipoff that this is the kind of story you are telling, either in your head or on paper or onscreen, is that the story peters out after the scene where everyone stands around marveling at the accomplishments and all-around awesomeness of your protagonist. There’s nothing wrong with amusing yourself with this kind of story, but I suspect it rarely leads to anything. Real stories, ones that others will want to share, require that you make your protagonist miserable, at least for a while.
Have you always wanted to be a writer?
As a child and young woman I never thought it a feasible goal. I did not know any writers and assumed they were a far too exalted group for me to join. I did not begin writing seriously until I was in my late thirties – early forties. But oh, of course I did! It’s funny, now that I think of it, but when I was young I thought it more feasible to become an actress (I studied theater in New York City and appeared in a few productions and commercials) than a writer. So far as I am concerned, my entire theatrical career was an attempt to participate in the world of Story on what I thought of as the lower level of acting out stories rather than creating them.
Tell me a little about yourself – where were you born, where do you live, what do you like to do?
I was born in upstate New York and, after a few excursions in adolescence and young adulthood, have remained here all my life. I live in a small rural village an hour away from Albany, NY. I am very happily married (36 years) to a perfectly lovely man, and have one son, who works for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Other than lots and lots of books, my life has been filled with animals. We have, among other things, been foster parents in the Helping Hands Monkey Helpers program: .
For eleven years we raised and trained monkeys to be aides to be quadriplegics. At present we have Bree, a Panama Amazon parrot with an impressive vocabulary and a taste for 1950s rock ‘n’ roll, and two Cavalier King Charles spaniels named Dante and Trevor. When I am not writing, my husband and I are busy doting upon these family members.
How did you get the first flash of inspiration for KEEPING THE CASTLE?
I was reading yet another historical novel in which the heroine is dead set against marriage and instead launches upon a career which was both dangerous and highly improbable for a woman of her time. Oh, I like those books too, and I fully understand the impulse to rewrite history, but I rebelled. I conceived of a heroine whose sole aim is respectable (and profitable) matrimony.
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How extensively do you plan your novels?
Zero. Zip. Zilch. I am what is known as an extreme plunger. I just start writing and keep on going until I get to the end. Sometimes I go back and fix things that no longer make sense with the flow of the plot, and sometimes I think, “Well I don’t want her to end up with him,” but I have no idea how I am going to end the story, or how I will find my way there, until I am there. If you have ever had the experience of groping your way through a junk shop packed with furniture at midnight during a power outage, cursing and barking your shins on various sharp and impervious objects, you have some idea of my creative process. I do not recommend it.
Do you ever use dreams as a source of inspiration?
My first novel, OWL IN LOVE, was entirely based upon a dream. I consider that moments when you are half awake and half asleep are very fruitful for ideas. I always keep a notebook and pen by my bed.
Did you make any astonishing serendipitous discoveries while writing this book?
Actually, I have just finished writing the sequel to KEEPING THE CASTLE, so that’s the one I’m thinking of right now. Did you know the origin of the shopping mall? There was a lawn game, called “Pall Mall” or “Paille Maille.” It was a precursor of croquet and very popular with the wealthy. To play you needed a closely mown strip of lawn which was known as a “mall” and many major cities in England and the Continent had them. When the game fell out of favor shops were erected along the edges of the mall. Hence the first shopping malls. Also, the National Mall, that long lawn leading from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. Also, Pall Mall Cigarettes, which were presumably appropriating the perceived classiness of Pall Mall in London.
I use backboards to comic effect in A SCHOOL FOR BRIDES, but they were actually rather horrible, or could be. Supposedly intended to improve posture, they were all too often actually a way to render young girls and women docile and easily controlled. The device had the effect of immobilizing the torso, arms, neck and head. Whole schools of girls could be chained to benches or to each other. Young women could be forced to live in them for years, sleeping (or, more likely, not sleeping) in them as well. Ugh!
Where do you write, and when?
Where I am right now, in a Mission Oak armchair. The Mission Oak part is important because these chairs, part of the Arts and Crafts movement, have wide, flat, wooden arms. I can place my laptop computer half on the arm and half on the adjoining table without fear of disaster. It is also possible to have a dog or parrot on my lap and keep working – in years gone by I had to train an inquisitive monkey not to help with the typing.
When? In the early stages of writing a book – when I will clean, redecorate, wash cages, or reorganize the pantry in order to avoid creative work – as little as possible. In the later stages near the end, from about 9:00 A.M. until 5:00 P.M. and then again from 6:30 until 9:00 P.M. And then I wake up in the night and make notes for the next day’s work. So it varies.
What is your favourite part of writing?
Oh, near the end, when I am working like a pack mule. The first three chapters are miserable, when you don’t know if it is going anywhere or not.
What do you do when you get blocked?
Decide that I am stupid, untalented, washed up and utterly worthless as a human being. I also tend to brood on all the other careers I would have been hopeless at. Couldn’t have driven a truck, would have been a horrible teacher, too weak to be a garbage collector or pro wrestler, no charisma for politics, etc., etc.
How do you keep your well of inspiration full?
I have never yet found a creative artist who knows the answer to this question. They may have various stock replies: the contemplation of nature, reading in many fields, solitude, the work of other artists, collecting comic valentines, working on their model train layout, or whatever. But the truth is: nobody knows.
Do you have any rituals that help you to write?
Turning on the computer. Oh, and guilt.
Who are ten of your favourite writers?
William Shakespeare (Yeah, I know, but he really is pretty good)
Jane Austen (Of course)
T.H. White
Margaret Mahy
Diana Wynne Jones
Those are my favorite-favorites. After that it gets too hard to rank them all.
(I love all these writers too, Patrice - you have great reading tastes!)
(my favourite Diana Wynne Jones book)
What do you consider to be good writing?
Language that conveys the idea or mood the author intends to convey. Okay, that’s not very helpful, but after that it all just boils down to personal preferences. For instance, I strongly prefer a sense of humor, of playfulness, even in writing about serious subjects. And the kind of writing associated with Ernest Hemmingway doesn’t do a thing for me. It reminds me of Danish Modern furniture; yes, I can see that it is handsome and I don’t want it in my house. That doesn’t mean you may not love it; you have my blessing and I hope you will be very happy together. It’s just not for me.
I like the occasional adverb.
What is your advice for someone dreaming of being a writer too?
The usual: read a lot, write a lot. Everybody has to start somewhere. Don’t wait as long as I did to get serious.
What are you working on now?
I just finished writing A SCHOOL FOR BRIDES, which is a sequel to KEEPING THE CASTLE. Althea from CASTLE is married and about to give birth, as is her step-sister Charity, now the Baroness. Prudence Winthrop has joined forces with her friend Clara Hopkins and Miss Hopkins’ cousin to form a Ladies’ Academy, or finishing school, in Lesser Hoo. Matrimony and mayhem result. There are stolen necklaces, secret admirers, a sinister governess, astronomical observations and a dog named Wolfie, among many, many other things.
(It sounds wonderful, and shall be on my reading list!)
Please leave a comment - I love to know what you think!
Here is Patrice's website: www.patricekindl.com/
YOU CAN BUY HER BOOK HERE:
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Are you a daydreamer too?
Oh, of course. I know that daydreaming is a part of the creative process, but I cannot help but wish I did it less and wrote more. That said, I think that some kinds of daydreaming are more productive than others. We all tell ourselves ‘wishful thinking’ stories, which are more self-indulgent than creative. We see ourselves (or our fictional alter egos) winning awards, wielding superpowers, loved and admired by all who know us. A tipoff that this is the kind of story you are telling, either in your head or on paper or onscreen, is that the story peters out after the scene where everyone stands around marveling at the accomplishments and all-around awesomeness of your protagonist. There’s nothing wrong with amusing yourself with this kind of story, but I suspect it rarely leads to anything. Real stories, ones that others will want to share, require that you make your protagonist miserable, at least for a while.
Have you always wanted to be a writer?
As a child and young woman I never thought it a feasible goal. I did not know any writers and assumed they were a far too exalted group for me to join. I did not begin writing seriously until I was in my late thirties – early forties. But oh, of course I did! It’s funny, now that I think of it, but when I was young I thought it more feasible to become an actress (I studied theater in New York City and appeared in a few productions and commercials) than a writer. So far as I am concerned, my entire theatrical career was an attempt to participate in the world of Story on what I thought of as the lower level of acting out stories rather than creating them.
Tell me a little about yourself – where were you born, where do you live, what do you like to do?
I was born in upstate New York and, after a few excursions in adolescence and young adulthood, have remained here all my life. I live in a small rural village an hour away from Albany, NY. I am very happily married (36 years) to a perfectly lovely man, and have one son, who works for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Other than lots and lots of books, my life has been filled with animals. We have, among other things, been foster parents in the Helping Hands Monkey Helpers program: .
For eleven years we raised and trained monkeys to be aides to be quadriplegics. At present we have Bree, a Panama Amazon parrot with an impressive vocabulary and a taste for 1950s rock ‘n’ roll, and two Cavalier King Charles spaniels named Dante and Trevor. When I am not writing, my husband and I are busy doting upon these family members.
How did you get the first flash of inspiration for KEEPING THE CASTLE?
I was reading yet another historical novel in which the heroine is dead set against marriage and instead launches upon a career which was both dangerous and highly improbable for a woman of her time. Oh, I like those books too, and I fully understand the impulse to rewrite history, but I rebelled. I conceived of a heroine whose sole aim is respectable (and profitable) matrimony.
[image error]
How extensively do you plan your novels?
Zero. Zip. Zilch. I am what is known as an extreme plunger. I just start writing and keep on going until I get to the end. Sometimes I go back and fix things that no longer make sense with the flow of the plot, and sometimes I think, “Well I don’t want her to end up with him,” but I have no idea how I am going to end the story, or how I will find my way there, until I am there. If you have ever had the experience of groping your way through a junk shop packed with furniture at midnight during a power outage, cursing and barking your shins on various sharp and impervious objects, you have some idea of my creative process. I do not recommend it.
Do you ever use dreams as a source of inspiration?
My first novel, OWL IN LOVE, was entirely based upon a dream. I consider that moments when you are half awake and half asleep are very fruitful for ideas. I always keep a notebook and pen by my bed.
Did you make any astonishing serendipitous discoveries while writing this book?
Actually, I have just finished writing the sequel to KEEPING THE CASTLE, so that’s the one I’m thinking of right now. Did you know the origin of the shopping mall? There was a lawn game, called “Pall Mall” or “Paille Maille.” It was a precursor of croquet and very popular with the wealthy. To play you needed a closely mown strip of lawn which was known as a “mall” and many major cities in England and the Continent had them. When the game fell out of favor shops were erected along the edges of the mall. Hence the first shopping malls. Also, the National Mall, that long lawn leading from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. Also, Pall Mall Cigarettes, which were presumably appropriating the perceived classiness of Pall Mall in London.
I use backboards to comic effect in A SCHOOL FOR BRIDES, but they were actually rather horrible, or could be. Supposedly intended to improve posture, they were all too often actually a way to render young girls and women docile and easily controlled. The device had the effect of immobilizing the torso, arms, neck and head. Whole schools of girls could be chained to benches or to each other. Young women could be forced to live in them for years, sleeping (or, more likely, not sleeping) in them as well. Ugh!
Where do you write, and when?
Where I am right now, in a Mission Oak armchair. The Mission Oak part is important because these chairs, part of the Arts and Crafts movement, have wide, flat, wooden arms. I can place my laptop computer half on the arm and half on the adjoining table without fear of disaster. It is also possible to have a dog or parrot on my lap and keep working – in years gone by I had to train an inquisitive monkey not to help with the typing.
When? In the early stages of writing a book – when I will clean, redecorate, wash cages, or reorganize the pantry in order to avoid creative work – as little as possible. In the later stages near the end, from about 9:00 A.M. until 5:00 P.M. and then again from 6:30 until 9:00 P.M. And then I wake up in the night and make notes for the next day’s work. So it varies.
What is your favourite part of writing?
Oh, near the end, when I am working like a pack mule. The first three chapters are miserable, when you don’t know if it is going anywhere or not.
What do you do when you get blocked?
Decide that I am stupid, untalented, washed up and utterly worthless as a human being. I also tend to brood on all the other careers I would have been hopeless at. Couldn’t have driven a truck, would have been a horrible teacher, too weak to be a garbage collector or pro wrestler, no charisma for politics, etc., etc.
How do you keep your well of inspiration full?
I have never yet found a creative artist who knows the answer to this question. They may have various stock replies: the contemplation of nature, reading in many fields, solitude, the work of other artists, collecting comic valentines, working on their model train layout, or whatever. But the truth is: nobody knows.
Do you have any rituals that help you to write?
Turning on the computer. Oh, and guilt.
Who are ten of your favourite writers?
William Shakespeare (Yeah, I know, but he really is pretty good)
Jane Austen (Of course)
T.H. White
Margaret Mahy
Diana Wynne Jones
Those are my favorite-favorites. After that it gets too hard to rank them all.
(I love all these writers too, Patrice - you have great reading tastes!)
(my favourite Diana Wynne Jones book)
What do you consider to be good writing?
Language that conveys the idea or mood the author intends to convey. Okay, that’s not very helpful, but after that it all just boils down to personal preferences. For instance, I strongly prefer a sense of humor, of playfulness, even in writing about serious subjects. And the kind of writing associated with Ernest Hemmingway doesn’t do a thing for me. It reminds me of Danish Modern furniture; yes, I can see that it is handsome and I don’t want it in my house. That doesn’t mean you may not love it; you have my blessing and I hope you will be very happy together. It’s just not for me.
I like the occasional adverb.
What is your advice for someone dreaming of being a writer too?
The usual: read a lot, write a lot. Everybody has to start somewhere. Don’t wait as long as I did to get serious.
What are you working on now?
I just finished writing A SCHOOL FOR BRIDES, which is a sequel to KEEPING THE CASTLE. Althea from CASTLE is married and about to give birth, as is her step-sister Charity, now the Baroness. Prudence Winthrop has joined forces with her friend Clara Hopkins and Miss Hopkins’ cousin to form a Ladies’ Academy, or finishing school, in Lesser Hoo. Matrimony and mayhem result. There are stolen necklaces, secret admirers, a sinister governess, astronomical observations and a dog named Wolfie, among many, many other things.
(It sounds wonderful, and shall be on my reading list!)
Please leave a comment - I love to know what you think!
Here is Patrice's website: www.patricekindl.com/
YOU CAN BUY HER BOOK HERE:
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