Reprinted from Green Man Review.
Though common now in the online world of book matters, full-length interviews with fantasy writers are rare in the printed world. And certainly collected interviews in an affordable and well-crafted book are even rarer! So it is with great pleasure that I can say The Wand in the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy is well-worth your time!
The interviews were mostly done by phone (!) but several were conducted by email which is how we do them here at Green Man if we can’t get the writer to visit us for an interview in the Green Man pub or in the Robert Graves Memorial reading Room. Many, many of the questions asked by Marcus concern the writers’ own childhoods as Marcus asks most of of the writers interviewed to describe their childhoods, including childhood experiences with books and libraries, and folks who influenced them as writers. A common element for all them is the authors’ relationship, both as a reader and as a writer, with J. R. R. Tolkien’s trilogy. Some authors mention the books as major influences on their own works — Susan Cooper, who took a class with him, says it influenced her Dark is Rising series, while Diana Wynne Jones recounts how awful she was as a University lecturer, Madeleine L’Engle devoured all three LoTR volumes in as many days ! Other writers, including Tamora Pierce and Philip Pullman, note that their books offer a vision that at least in part or wholly rejects both the style and content of what Tolkien did!
In total, Marcus interviewed with 13 fantasy luminaries, including Philip Pullman, Ursula LeGuin, Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper, Nancy Farmer, Brian Jacques, Garth Nix, Tamora Pierce, and Jane Yolen. Almost of the writers I had read and knew from having read other material about them, but only one that I hadn’t heard of at all — Franny Billingsley. Wikipedia explains very nicely why this is so. Except for her, these are writers who have produced many, many books doing their careers. Best interviews here? The older writers in general are more interesting than the newer writers, so I’d pick Alexander, Cooper, LeGuin, and Yolen as the best interviews. Each has been writing long enough that both process and product are things which they can easily (and without being self-conscious) talk about. Nix and Pullman in particular come across to this reader as a bit too aware of their place as literary icons. Perhaps a bit of mortality is good for a writer. . . .
Oh, there are neat other touches in The Wand in the Word: Conversations with Writers of Fantasy. There are the usual author photographs — nice, but startling there. (The childhood photos neither add to nor detract from the interviews.) What is cool are the interviews that contain photographs of the spaces where a given writer works. We get looks at where Cooper, Nix, Pratchett (a technophile with three computer screens!), and Yolen create their amazing works, and the manuscript pages, many with editing marks by the writers, that give a glimpse into their writing processes. Cool!
The Wand in the Word is highly recommended for anyone wanting to know these authors better. Certainly a copy should be in any library that has an extensive collection of Young Adult fiction.
(Candlewick, 2006)
Comments