Thanks for stopping by for our Q & A with the author of A Thinking Woman's Guide To Real Magic, Emily Croy Barker!!
So sit back and relax with us and one lucky winner will win a finished copy of her new book!!
A Conversation with
Emily Croy Barker, author of
THE THINKING WOMAN’S GUIDE TO REAL MAGIC
Pamela Dorman
Books/Viking; on-sale August 5, 2013; 9780670023660; $27.95
Q. Which of the
characters in THE THINKING WOMAN’S GUIDE TO REAL MAGIC did you most enjoy writing?
A. Aruendiel, no question. He says exactly what he thinks,
and he doesn’t mind giving offense to anyone. Not something that most of us can
get away with in our daily lives.
Of course, Ilissa was also a lot of fun, too. Because she’s
also honest—Faitoren can’t tell lies—but at the same time, she’s thoroughly
deceitful.
Q. Are any parts of
this novel autobiographical?
A. You mean, is it about the time I stumbled into an
alternate world and started studying magic? Sadly, no.
There were things in my life that I deliberately borrowed
for the novel. The way Aruendiel talks about other magicians—I was thinking of
how my father, who was a painter, used to talk with his artist friends about
other artists, about who was doing good work and who wasn’t. My dad was the
kindest and most gentle person ever, but he was ruthless when it came to
criticizing bad art. It’s the idea that you have a calling that you have to
follow and you don’t sell out.
I gave Nora some of my interests—a penchant for memorizing bits
of poetry, a love of cooking—although she’s much better at both things than I
am. She’s also braver than me. You could never get me to go up a cliff like the
one at Maarikok, even with a levitation spell! And I let her take a path that I
considered but never took—going to grad school in English.
Q. Your heroine, Nora
Fischer, is swept away by magic into a kind of too good to be true
existence. Even though a part of her
knew it wasn’t right she stayed. Why would
she allow herself to be easily enchanted?
A. As Aruendiel himself would point out, Faitoren
enchantments are very hard to fight, because they give you something you want.
Nora was feeling bruised and defeated, and suddenly she had everything that she
thought she was missing.
I also think the kind of idealized femininity that Ilissa
offers Nora—being beautiful, being the belle of the ball, having this perfect
romantic love—is a very seductive thing, even for someone like Nora who has
read all the feminist theorists and has really chosen the life of the mind.
Maybe especially for someone like Nora.
Q. You have so many
literary references, John Donne, Miguel de Cervantes, William Carlos Williams, Alice
in Wonderland and Grimm’s Fairytales, but it’s Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice that Nora ends up
with as her only possession in the alternate world. What is the significance of this particular
book? Any personal connection to it?
A. Well, Pride and
Prejudice is so modern in many ways, although written and set in a
premodern time. So it seemed like a good match for A Thinking Woman’s Guide, where a contemporary woman is thrown into
a world where women are still second-class citizens, at best. And Pride and Prejudice reflects some of the
themes that I was interested in—an intelligent woman engaging with a man who
has both higher status and worse manners than she does—without being too
closely parallel to the plot of my story. Finally, I love Pride and Prejudice! And so do many other readers. So I hoped it
might resonate with those who read my novel.
Q. Words are a
powerful tool and language is a very important status symbol in Nora’s new
world. Women are uneducated and don’t speak to men the same way Nora does;
something she is repeatedly frustrated by.
How did you develop Ors, the language Nora must learn in order to
communicate?
A. Language reflects society, so as I thought about
Aruendiel’s world, I tried to imagine what sort of linguistic rules it would
have to help keep women in their place. And as anyone who has studied a foreign
language knows, there are all kinds of subtleties that you don’t pick up right
away. You can make blooper after blooper, sometimes for years. So Nora keeps
bumping up against things like the feminine verb endings, which she never
noticed until Aruendiel rather officiously points them out to her.
I was also inspired by how Tolkien, who was a philologist,
essentially began imagining Middle-Earth by inventing various Elvish names. He
wrote poems about these characters and, eventually, fiction. I thought, wow,
what a powerful tool to create a believable fantasy universe, to develop some
kind of logical linguistic framework that underlies your story.
Q. You’re a
journalist by trade. What was it like, switching to fiction? Where do you
write? Do you set hours or just put pen to paper when inspiration strikes?
A. It took me a while to feel comfortable writing fiction.
It’s a different kind of narration. Suddenly, after years of having to be
super-careful about collecting facts and double-checking them, I could make everything
up. That felt wonderful! But what exactly do you include, what do you leave
out? Beginning writers are always told, “Show, don’t tell.” Well, in fact
there’s a lot you have to simply tell, or you’ll write twenty pages and your character
will still be finishing breakfast.
The journalistic skill that I found most useful in writing
fiction was simply the ability to sit in front of the computer and write. Even
if you’re just trying to write, even if what you’re writing isn’t great at the
moment or if all you have to show after three hours is three sentences. And
then to do it again the next day. It doesn’t matter if you have to rewrite it
all over again—because you’ll find something that’s worth keeping, or you’ll
learn what not to do. The important thing
is to keep going.
Usually I write at home on my laptop—sometimes on the train
when I travel. I write best during the day. If I try to write at night, I’m
usually too tired to get very far. Or occasionally I’ve had the opposite
problem—I get really into it and then suddenly it’s way past my bedtime and I’m
useless the next day. So starting out, I wrote for a couple of hours every
weekend. Then it became every spare moment of every weekend. I still owe huge
apologies to so many of my friends for turning down all their lovely
invitations to go to museums, parties, movies, et cetera, over the past seven
years.
Q. Who would be in
your dream book club? Where would you meet and what would you talk about?
A. Henry James, Charlotte Brontë, Scott Fitzgerald, Mary
McCarthy, Zadie Smith, and couple of my friends. We’d meet at Florian’s in the
Piazza San Marco every third Tuesday in the month—this is a dream, right?—and talk about whatever I happen to be reading
at the moment. I imagine it would be a lively group.
Q. Are you a fan of
other fantasy novels?
A. Yes, although I certainly haven’t read everything that’s
out there. I tend to like the denser, more literary kind of fantasy. Unlike
Nora, I love Tolkien. Also Neil Gaiman, Susanna Clarke, Alice Hoffman, Margaret
Atwood, Ursula LeGuin, and Kelly Link. Kate Atkinson is best known now for her
Jackson Brodie mysteries, but I’m really glad that I didn’t read her Human Croquet until after I wrote The Thinking Woman’s Guide, because in
some ways that’s the book I wanted to write.
Q. Your writing is loaded with references from history, literature, and
fantasy. What sort of reader did you envision for this series?
A. I tried to write the kind of novel I would want to read,
so I guess in that sense I wrote it for myself. And as the book took shape and
it became clearer that I would actually finish a draft at some point, I decided
I would send it first to one of my oldest friends to see if she thought it was
any good. She and I grew up watching Star Trek and Monty Python, reading Sherlock Holmes and The Black Stallion and Jane
Eyre, and doing the ultimate in geekdom—taking Latin—so I trusted her
judgment. She liked it, so that encouraged me to keep revising.
Beyond that, I was thinking that it might appeal to some of
the adults who loved Harry Potter but who wanted more of a adult perspective
and a strong female character at the center of the novel.
Q. The Thinking Woman’s Guide To
Real Magic ends on a cliffhanger. Can you hint at what’s next for Nora and
Aruendiel?
A. I’m pretty sure that Nora will find her way back to
Aruendiel’s world. The two of them really need to talk and to be straight with
each other, don’t you agree? And of course she has a lot more to learn about
magic—and how to use it properly.
Thank you so much for hanging out with us here at the wastelands today!
And now for the givesaway...
One lucky US winner will win a finished copy of The Thinking Woman's Guide To Real Magic!
This giveaway is hosted my Penguin Publishing and is open to US residents only.
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