Welcome to Conversations with Fairy Whisperers, Katie! It’s exciting to have you as our guest today. Tell us about yourself, how did you become a writer?

It’s lovely to be here, Marquise! Thank you so much for having me! 

A little bit about myself: I was a classic homeschooled nerd who studied history in college and graduate school with the original intention of becoming a professor and researcher. Along the way, though, I became fascinated with the idea of taking the rich and complex historical stories I was learning about (World War II, the fall of the Hapsburg Empire, you name it) and turning them into fiction, something I had never attempted before. By the end of my Master’s degree, it became increasingly clear that I had no passion for academic writing and a lot of passion for the historical fiction I was busy hammering out on school vacations. I made the executive decision to pursue a career as a novelist instead of a PhD, and I couldn’t be happier with how that choice has turned out! 

The first story of yours I read was a retelling of “Rapunzel” included in an anthology of reimagined Grimm tales, which for me was one of the outstanding stories there. What fascinates you about fairy tales and how did you begin writing retellings of them?

Great question! Especially now that you know about my origins in the Historical Fiction genre. (And thank you for your praise of my Rapunzel retelling, I’m flattered!) 

So, fairy tales were really my main gateway to the concept of “fantasy” (i.e., magic in storytelling) as a child and teenager. With the exception of The Hobbit and The Chronicles of Narnia, I read very little of what could be considered actual Fantasy, and didn’t watch any Fantasy films or Fantasy TV shows, either. I had no interest in Lord of the Rings, for example. But I adored the Andrew Lang fairy tale collections for their old-fashioned Victorian language and gorgeous woodcut-style illustrations. Ever the History nerd, me!

In addition, even before my perusal of the Andrew Lang books, my brother and I had this huge, chunky, four-hundred-page anthology called An Illustrated Treasury of Fairy and Folk Tales by James Riordan. It was incredibly violent even by the standards of “older” folktales; I remember one story from Central Asia which literally [apologies for the gore] depicted the villainess skinning the heroine alive so she could wear her beautiful face à la Nicolas Cage in Face Off. But the book was lavishly illustrated, colorfully written, highly diverse—encompassing everything from Armenian to Aztec to African traditions!—and provided ample food for the imagination. It definitely did its job in sparking my lifelong interest in fairy and folk tales. I also think it gave my eventual works of Fantasy an idiosyncratic twist, inspired by the ofttimes strange and obscure forms of magic pervading these stories. 

As for how I became interested in retellings specifically: that would be the annual Rooglewood Press fairy tale retelling contests back in the 2010s! Sadly, this once proud cultural institution is no more, but at the time, it was a big deal in my corner of the internet. It was an especially big deal when my friend Rachel Kovaciny (you know her as the author of a historical “Beauty and the Beast” retelling, My Rock and My Refuge), won the 2016 contest and had her “Sleeping Beauty” story published in the Rooglewood anthology.  Inspired by her success, I entered the 2017 contest with a “Snow White” retelling which was . . . ahh . . . not very good. But I had a wonderful time and formed a close-knit group of author friends who have been a blessing to me ever since!

Do you have a favourite fairy tale? What aspects of it appeal to you personally, and why?

Yes! “The Boy Who Could Not Shudder” from the Brothers Grimm!  Growing up, my siblings and I adored this story for its unapologetic grotesquerie—“You shall go right straight back into your coffin!” and “Now I will strangle you!” were perpetually quoted around our house (alas, my poor parents). But as an adult, I continue to be drawn to this tale for its unexpectedly inclusive celebration of a hero who is too different to fit into normal society, but triumphs over the horrors that beset him by virtue of the same traits which once drew mockery. As someone who always struggled with understanding social norms and often felt like the odd one out, I find this story comforting. 

I’m also partial to one of the tales I read in Riordan’s Illustrated Treasury of Fairy and Folk Tales, called “Lord of the Winds.”  This folktale comes from the Nenet people of Siberia and follows the fairly standard pattern of a young girl who sets out to seek some god or monster with the intention of becoming his wife. In “Lord of the Winds,” she marries the god of winter to save her people from a terrible snowstorm. Child-me thought this was very romantic, and I still think it has beautiful imagery and themes of sacrifice. Plus, I love winter survival stories (cough, my new book Wild Hunt, cough . . .) 

Interesting! I would love to see you retell that folktale one day. In your opinion, what makes a retelling stand out? What do you consider the joys and challenges of writing in this specific subgenre?

So, this question is a complex one because to my mind, it has several layers. When I’m reading, good retellings stand out to me by how thoroughly they can reinvent the story in the context of their own story world, yet still keep the original tale recognizable as a coherent whole. I’m not necessarily wedded to any single character or message or theme of the original, but I want to be able to look at the whole retelling and go “yes, I still recognized X tale, but it felt completely natural and well-integrated into this new world.” I read an amazing Sleeping Beauty retelling (a short story in the 2016 Rooglewood collection) called “Out of the Tomb” by Ashley Stangl. It was Science Fiction about a female tomb raider who accidentally wakes a sleeping prince from some kind of stasis pod and has a whole redemption arc. It perfectly illustrated for me what a great retelling should be: recognizable, cohesive, but still transformed and fresh and new. 

When I’m writing, on the other hand . . . Well, the truth is, I don’t write strict fairy tale retellings anymore. I was only able to pull it off once (that Rapunzel story you liked!), and it was excruciatingly difficult to force my brain into that mold. I’ve realized I’m just not good at creating a story that fits a prearranged pattern and is trying to imitate something else closely enough to be clearly recognizable. Instead, I write stories that I consider inspired by fairy tales and folktales. For example, my latest novel, Wild Hunt, is partly inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.” Many aspects of the plot and characters are wildly different from anything that appears in “The Snow Queen”—such as the titular Wild Hunt!—but there is still a villainous goddess/queen figure with supernatural snow and ice powers who wants to steal the young male hero away from the girl that loves him. My heroine goes on an epic journey to find the boy and restore him to himself, giving him back his heart and soul, and that’s very Snow Queen-coded.   

In your opinion, what fairy tale is the most complicated to reinvent, and why?

Probably “Cinderella.” In fact, I once wrote a blog post about what I dubbed “The Cinderella Problem,” how to give Cinderella greater agency when the original fairy tale relies on her having very little. She’s stuck in her abusive family’s household, and her happy ending is . . . no longer being stuck in her family’s house. While escaping abuse is certainly a common theme in fairy tales, most fairy tale protagonists have a greater degree of mobility, often voluntarily leaving home to seek their fortunes elsewhere. By contrast, Cinderella’s story is so heavily associated with “being trapped” that even the 2015 Disney live-action film couldn’t seem to think beyond that scenario, instead coming up with frankly nonsensical reasons why their mature adult Cinderella still needed to be trapped by her stepmother. Hence, the Cinderella Problem. 

Shout-out to Rook di Goo by Jenni Sauer for brilliantly solving this problem, however! Her Cinderella is a jaded ex-soldier on the run from an evil government, and that’s just the beginning . . .

After your short stories, you’ve embarked in a new writing endeavour entitled The Nightmare Saga, a series with three installments so far that could be described as embracing Folkloric Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, and Weird Western. How did you come across the idea for these books, and what can you tell us about its creative process?

That’s a fantastic description of my books—thank you, Marquise! Folkloric Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, and Weird Western. So, there are a couple of layers to your question of how the series originated. I can say, first of all, that I started with the idea for Book One, Water Horse, rather than the idea for a whole series, although plans for a series blossomed fairly quickly from that point. The concept for Water Horse came to me in a burst of inspiration as I finished reading The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater in the summer of 2017. Scorpio Races is a beautiful, lyrically written YA novel about mysterious “water horses” who emerge from the ocean to be caught and tamed and ridden in a ritual horse race. This book, like so much of Stiefvater’s work, is based on traditional Celtic legends, but it was my first time being introduced to this particular legend; and it ignited in my brain like wildfire. I remember lying on the rug in my parents’ living room on an incredibly hot summer day and going, “Well, obviously, the logical thing to do is to write a Western novel about these magic horses.” 

At this point, I already knew I wanted to write about immigrants and immigrant cultures (more on that in a minute), so from there, it was a natural step to envisioning an entire series about different forms of “transplanted” magic in the Wild West: from shapeshifting Irish horses to Chinese dragons to Germanic ghost armies, and so on. Writing each book involves researching the folklore of a particular culture, zeroing in on a monster (or other mythological creature) I want to highlight, and brainstorming ways to both make it my own and make it fit into the existing world of my story. I try to be faithful to the spirit of these legends as I understand them, but I also do a certain amount of modifying. In Water Horse, for example, the carnivorous magic horses are shown to eat the heart and liver of their victims and leave the rest of the corpse untouched. In case you can’t tell, that’s not in the original!  I made that up!  (Mainly because I wanted an easy way to differentiate them from “normal” predators in the eyes of the cowboys who would be tracking them.)

You are a historian by profession, and that means expecting higher standards for stories set in the past. How do you balance the need for historical accuracy with Fantasy worldbuilding in your books?

I research until I’m tired of it, and then deflect all other quibbles with “there was a dragon on the cover.”

Kidding! Sort of. My philosophy for these books is they need to be historically plausible rather than historically accurate, since we are dealing with events that fundamentally did not happen (the infusion of magic and magical creatures into the American West), but at the same time, I very much want the readers to feel the story could have happened. And you’re absolutely right, I have a master’s degree in History and I want to honor that existing history as much as possible. So I put a lot of effort into getting the real-world details right according to the real historical environment of the West, like the Cantonese-speaking organized crime syndicates in Black Dragon, which were indeed a powerful force in Western cities. Similarly, in Wild Hunt, when Esther speaks about her people, the Volga German Mennonites, fleeing from place to place to avoid war and violence until they finally settled in Nebraska, she is referring to the real historical fact that the Volga Germans were fleeing military conscription in imperial Russia and that’s why they came to America. Meanwhile, Rhoda Ann is able to study at the University of Nebraska because women were beginning to break into higher education during this time period (early 1900s); the character Jimmy Shanahan is a “muckraking” reporter of the type who commonly exposed abuses and attacked corrupt institutions during the Progressive Era. And so on. 

Ultimately, however, there is still a dragon on the cover, so if readers are looking for the strictest possible standards for historical accuracy in all things . . . they should probably look elsewhere than The Nightmare Saga. 

I think I’m going to borrow your “dragon on the cover” expression myself! It’s similar to the counterargument we had in the ASOIAF fandom about Fantasy vs Historicity. And speaking of historical periods, the American West—or rather fiction set in the Wild West—is how I came to learn about the existence of the US as a yet-unschooled small child, from reading my father’s Westerns, one of his favourite genres. I imagine my experience isn’t unusual, as you can easily find non-American fans of the US West and film/book Westerns in Asia and also in Europe. As an American, what attracted you to the Wild West?

Definitely the sense of adventure: the sense that the Wild West was a place where “anything could happen,” even if that was never completely true in real life. As Ben Wyatt from Parks and Rec would say, “it’s about the mystique.” 

Interestingly, the first Western story I fell in love with was not a classic cowboy Western at all. It was the Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder—often stereotyped as very girly, very domestic, very bildungsroman-set-in-the-Victorian-era, right? And yet, because the story took place in the West and the author was very attuned to that Western cultural mystique, there was a relentless undercurrent of adventure running through it all. You simply never knew what would happen next, whether it would be a lethal blizzard or a payday riot by angry railroad workers. Definitely a formative tale for me. 

You tend to include ethnicities that aren’t normally portrayed in Westerns. Those I grew up with all had Anglo-Saxon whites—I remember being shocked that the largest US ethnicity was German—and the only “diversity” were Native Americans. The typical cowboys-and-indians plots. But Westerns written by American authors are so different to the ones my father had, yours has all sorts of ethnic groups with their own folklore. How did you decide to write them facing their own “immigrant” magic and fantastical creatures instead of “indigenous” magic and fantasy creatures?

Oh, I knew I wanted to write about immigrants before I knew I wanted to write Westerns. My Master’s degree focused on American immigration history in the late 1800s and early 1900s, because that’s when the bulk of my family immigrated from Europe. The branch we’re closest to arrived from Lithuania around 1910, fleeing the same Russian imperial policies which Esther’s family would have escaped, funnily enough. My great-great-grandmother was seventeen and alone when she ran from the Russian soldiers to “illegally” cross the border. With a family saga like that, I didn’t have much choice but to write about immigration.  

But I had other sources of inspiration for a story set in the West featuring immigrants, too. Louis L’Amour, my favorite classic Western author, often showed a surprising amount of cultural range in the characters he included, from Irish to Welsh to French to Mexican. Meanwhile, Willa Cather was famous for her novels about the Western plains that explored a variety of immigrant and otherwise non-WASP cultures. O Pioneers!, which I read as a teenager, portrays an entire smorgasbord of European immigrant groups in a Nebraska farming community, as well as the tensions and conflicts between them (which eventually lead to adultery and murder, but we don’t need to talk about that right now). 

I will say, indigenous magic and the way it clashes with immigrant magic will be a feature of the later books in The Nightmare Saga; but as of right now, my lips are sealed as to how…

Glad to hear that! Another characteristic of your Westerns, that you could say applies to the rest of your writing—is the protagonism of women. The large role of women in the Wild West is another significant difference with those I was familiar with. My dad’s Westerns didn’t tell me female US Marshals existed in the West! Did you choose all your protagonists have key roles on purpose as a counter to this overlooking of women in the West, or is it just that you love your female characters be strong in general regardless of setting and genre?

A bit of both! I love strong women at all times in all settings, so I was always going to feature them heavily in my novels, regardless of genre. But I also felt the dearth of female protagonists in the classic Western adventure novels I enjoyed. I mean, I love Louis L’Amour, and L’Amour did a better job incorporating smart and capable women (in non-prostitute roles, I should add) than most, but his books are still very male-heavy. 

Now, some of the authors I’ve mentioned who wrote stories about women in the West which heavily influenced me—Willa Cather and Laura Ingalls Wilder—are often categorized as authors of “prairie fiction,” rather than true Westerns. Why, you ask, since their books still take place in the West? Partly it’s the lack of cowboys, but it also has to do with tone and theme. These books are viewed as more sedate, more domestic, and more focused on self-sacrifice than the traditional cowboy tale. I’m not sure this distinction isn’t a bit misogynistic (we all know what women’s stories are like, boooooring), but I wanted to take the female-centric focus and family themes of so-called “prairie fiction” and mix them with the Wild West adventure tropes I loved. We can have a marriage of convenience or a girl who wants to save her sister from a mental asylum, and we can also have train fights and back-alley gunplay and magic horses! Why choose! 

Many authors who started their careers writing retellings later abandon fairy tale retellings for other genres, and with your knowledge of American history, you could easily move on to, for example, mainstream Historical Fiction and Western. Do you see this happening in your career?

It’s definitely possible! My first attempts at novel-writing were Historical Fiction, and I’ve had nonmagical Western ideas kicking around forever. At the same time, I struggle to focus on plots that lack magic to give them that extra bit of zest. Injecting Fantasy elements into a story always seems to wake my brain up. 

Do you ever see yourself writing an original fairy tale as opposed to a retelling of one?

This one’s more unlikely. I think I would struggle to write the particular kind of Fantasy which would feel strongly enough identifiable with the traditional fairy-tale atmosphere to be recognized as an “original fairy tale,” if that makes sense. Hans Christian Andersen was able to do it by adhering to a specific aesthetic, with mermaids and princesses and evil queens in their palaces, right? That’s not really me.     

And what about retelling a Classic? You read and critique lots of them, has one of the Classics ever tempted you to write your own version of it?

At the risk of sounding terribly, terribly elitist . . . I generally object to retellings of Classic novels. Why? A novel is not like a fairy tale or folktale; it’s not a brief story rich in symbolism but light on characterization and internal monologue, handed down by generations of anonymous storytellers, ready to be fleshed out by new voices. Instead, a novel is a whole book full of someone’s thoughts—the main character’s thoughts, yes, but above all, the author’s. It is the direct product of our modern understanding of individualism and subjectivity. It is therefore meant to be absorbed and wrestled with in its individual, subjective form. There is no substitute for reading Jane Austen . . . even if you hate Jane Austen. 

This isn’t to say I’ve never enjoyed a book that was inspired by a Classic novel, because I certainly have. But too often, I see Classics retellings placing themselves above the original in some way, or treating the original novel like a basic story “pattern” they can rework any way they please. To me, this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what novels do and why they’re important. Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy are not archetypal blank slates you can project your own ideal personality onto. They are characters, created by an author who had things to say. Listen to what she had to say. (Please.) 

Now, do botched fairy tale retellings whose authors consider themselves superior to the original exist, too? Absolutely! We’ve all seen them! But I think fairy tale retellings still have a better chance of being good and meaningful than Classics retellings do.

If there was a Hall of Fame for retold fairy tales, which would you consider the best retold stories books and why are they worthy of inclusion in said Hall of Fame?

Since I know this is a “Beauty and the Beast” blog first and foremost, I’ll mention Rachel Kovaciny’s retelling My Rock and My Refuge, which is not my favorite type of historical romance, but still extremely clever in the way it incorporates “Beauty and the Beast” elements into the entirely fresh setting of a Colorado mining town. Also, the heroine is a baker with strong opinions about the proper way to make bread, which endeared her to me. 

Any Hall of Fame for retold stories should include the Cinderella tale Rook di Goo by Jenni Sauer.  I’m a sucker for a good Science Fiction retelling, largely because fresh settings and storyworlds are so important to me (please, please do not give me yet another generic European-coded kingdom), and Rook di Goo does this brilliantly, imagining Cinderella as a weary veteran in a war-torn galaxy desperate to escape her “evil stepmother,” the army that forced her to serve. When she stumbles on a roguish crew of possible smugglers looking for an extra hand on their spaceship, her luck finally begins to turn…

(You might be wondering if all this is a bit weakly linked to the original Cinderella story, so allow me to assure you there is also a ball, a prince, and a very special pair of shoes involved.)

I’m intrigued now and will definitely check that author out. When it comes to authors, is there an author who you view as a role model for your own writing?

You’ve probably gotten an inkling by now that there are many, many authors I take inspiration from . . . and you’re absolutely correct, there are! But if I absolutely had to choose one single, solitary author for my role model, it would be Maggie Stiefvater, author of such Fantasy gems as The Raven Cycle, The Scorpio Races, and All the Crooked Saints. Stiefvater introduced me to a highly specific type of Fantasy I would still argue she does better than almost anyone: the incorporation of magical elements into our mundane world. Above all, this is what I learned from her books, and what I want readers to take away from my books: a sense that the legends could be true. Magic and monsters and heroes could exist in our ordinary lives. While I enjoy a good High Fantasy saga with its own complex world as much as the next speculative fiction nerd, I’m never as impressed by the achievement of creating a “separate world” for magic to thrive in as I am by the authors who can show magic thriving right here. I want to smell it when I step outside my front door. I want to see the footprints of the faeries in my backyard. I want to believe that Arthur is coming back. Great Fantasy writers, for me, are the ones who help me glimpse that supernatural vision, and Maggie Stiefvater is one of the greatest.   

Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us, Katie! We will continue to keep an eye on your future books.

Thank you so much, Marquise!  It’s been a marvelous pleasure!