There are nights that sleep descends on me
like a blanket coming down
and I stay in sleep so easily,
disturbed by not a sound.
But then there are the nights
with incidents my earplugs cannot mute
potty breaks and whining,
bed territory disputes.
Driftin’, dreamin’, dozin’,
snoozin’, snorin’, nappin’
Sleep never seems so crucial
until it doesn’t happen.
Erin Bow first grabbed my attention when someone handed me a copy of Plain Kate (click here to read my review). I picked it up and could not stop. Her writing is so beautiful and…. oh, sorry. I just woke up from a fangirl swoon. Here’s our interview! Check out her pole-dancing writing studio! Exclamation points are a side-effect of fangirl-dom!
BH: You have been BUSY since I last visited your website. What are all these projects you have going? Wait, that would take forever. Could you choose one new project to describe in a paragraph for us here?
EB: Hmm, it’s hard to pick! I guess most of my time is going into the first draft of my third novel, a dystopian for young adults called Children of Peace. Here’s the pitch:
A world battered by climate shift and war turns to an ancient method of keeping peace: the exchange of hostages. The Children of Peace – sons and daughters of kings and presidents and generals – are raised together in small, isolated schools called Prefectures. Under the tutelage of gentle, monkish artificial intelligences, they learn history and political theory, and are taught to gracefully accept what may well be their fate: to die if their countries declare war.
Greta Gustafsen Stuart, Duchess of Halifax and Crown Princess of the Pan-Polar Confederation, is the pride of Prefecture Four. Learned and disciplined, Greta is proud of her role in keeping the global peace — even though, with her country controlling two-thirds of the world’s most war-worthy resource — water — she has little chance of reaching adulthood alive.
BH: Okay, yeah, I want to read it. You probably don’t need a beta reader, but if you do… Moving on. Tell us a little about your path to publication.
EB: Oh, dear. The story of my path to publication makes people hate me, because I got so lucky.
I put a lot of research into agents, and landed the first one I queried, the one at the very tippy top of my list. She worked with me for a couple of years on Plain Kate (it took some time, but in my defense I had two babies in there) and then sent it out to this amazing list of editors, seven of them, I think. I not only got an offer right away, I got a bunch of offers (told you my agent was amazing), which ended up in an auction. I was and still am thrilled to be with Arthur Levine, of Arthur A. Levine Books at Scholastic. He’s a genius editor and a great cheerleader for the books he loves.
BH: I wouldn’t say your story makes me hate you. Much.
It has been months since I read Plain Kate, and I still keep going back to it when I want some inspiration for creating a great setting and mood combination. Did that mood come naturally to the writing of the book, or did you have to work at it? Please tell me you had to work at it.
EB: That mood comes courtesy of this 800-page volume of Russian fairytales I read just before starting Plain Kate. I soaked them in and they took me over, and the mood just came tumbling out.
But of course there’s work. A pet peeve of mine is historical fantasies where the world seems just a few inches deep, like a stage set. Pretty: but not workable. I think to really get a setting to work you have to know really nitty-gritty practical things. What the people eat, and where they get it? What do the tools of their trade look like? What are they afraid of when the lights go out? A good fantasy world needs an economy, an ecology, and a mythology.
Some of the things I needed to know for Plain Kate: How do you polish a carving without sand paper? How do you catch a chicken? Keep your feet dry in rainy weather? The research was truly endless, and I still feel as if it’s thin in places.
BH: You write both fiction and poetry, and some pretty great personal essays, too. How do you balance your different projects and the different parts of your brain that you get to tap into?
EB: I try to set aside blocks of time. Sometimes I, say, edit one book in the mornings and draft another in the afternoons. Sometimes I give myself three weeks or a month to finish such and such a chunk, and do little else. I try really hard not to switch back and forth between things. Starting is always the hardest part, and starting over and over again is frustration and a waste of energy. (And I do it all the time. I have the attention span of a goldfish that’s off its meds.)
I also try to keep writing business out of my office: I do submissions and interviews and blogs and things after the kids go to bed. My office is dedicated to the writing part of writing. I don’t have a phone or wifi. (Recently some wifi has started leaking in. I’m considering copper mesh. See: goldfish, meds.) When I’m in my office, I write. When I’m not, I don’t.
BH: What does your workspace look like?
EB: I rented an office half a year ago – and with the exception of marrying my husband, it is the best choice I ever made. The space is somewhat .. unusual. (Note: if the photos aren’t visible, you can click here to see Erin’s Office on Flickr.)
(Click on the images to make them bigger; enlarging them here was making them too blurry.)
People think I’m kidding when I say I work in a pole dancing studio, but I’m not. My office is their spare room. It can only be reached by crossing the dance floor — check those poles! It’s cheap because I can’t use it at night, when the dance floor is, um, busy. And it’s fun because when I need to clear my head I can swing around a little.
I furnished my office with a hodgepodge of things that were either free or cheap – but it doesn’t feel makeshift. It feels cozy and practical, like a yurt. In this picture you can see the little loveseat (curbsourced) for curling up, a chair (Salvation army, recovered) handy for pulling up to the loveseat for coffee with friends, and of course a big desk (Goodwill) with lots of room for bulletin boards. You can see the picture boards here for Sorrow’s Knot (upper left) and Children of Peace (lower right).
My office is a highly ritualized space – and I refuse to feel silly about that. I often find one needs to coax oneself closer to inspiration, the way a church coaxes one closer to God. So my office is furnished with ritual objects and relics.
Here, you can see the objarka my editor sent me when bidding on Plain Kate, beside Plain Kate’s NYT review; a doorway shrine; a hand-cast pewter cat given by a good friend and some fiddly stones; the timer of short naps and the glass bird of holding when you want to start over; the tin angel celebrating the finish of my second novel, Sorrow’s Knot; the wall of things that mean stuff to me, including the porcelain birds that were my great grandmother’s, a map of Tenochtitlan, a bundle of grass from the monastery where I wrote my first book of poetry, a 1942 advertisement for a Waterman “Commando” fountain pen, and a reproduction of the original cover of A Room of One’s Own.
BH: Your office has inspired me. I am now working on converting our converted garage guest room into my writing studio. Must find a great big pole.
What is your favorite book on the craft of writing?
EB: Mary Oliver’s Rules for the Dance, on meter in poetry. It is basic – you don’t have to go into being able to scan, which is good, because I have dreadful trouble with scanning. But it is also bottomlessly good, and I could read it over and over, just to soak it up. I read that book, and Heaney’s Beowulf, and somehow decided that what the world really needed was a children’s version of Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight in 200 rhymed quatrains, beginning with a beheading and turning on an illicit kiss. I can’t imagine why I can’t get that published.
BH: (I have difficulty with scanning, too. Glad to hear I’m not alone in this.) What is the best writing advice anyone has given you?
EB: Ribe Tuchus – keep your butt in the chair. Sit still.
My biggest enemy, as you’ve probably guessed by now, is inertia: the reistance to starting. But if I promise myself I’ll just Ribe Tuchus for ten minutes, keep my hand moving across the page – often that’s all it takes to stop hating myself and wanting to get a job in a bank.
Every day I have to figure that out again. (Goldfish.) Ribe Tuchus, Ribe Tuchus, Ribe Tuchus.
BH: Thank you, Erin, for taking the time! For more on Erin and her writing, you can visit her (very awesome website) at erinbow.com She’s also on twitter as @erinbowbooks
Why, oh why did the Internet eat my book review?
I shall have to start again, but I warn you, I’m not quite as excited to do this a second time.
The set-up: Lennie’s used to following her older sister, Bailey, around. Bailey has all the experiences with boys and doesn’t seem afraid to live. Then Bailey dies, and Lennie doesn’t know where she fits in the world anymore.
Main character’s goal: The goal changes, but without giving too much away I can say that at one point Lennie’s goal is to ignore one boy – the boy who lets her feel her grief for her sister’s death without getting swallowed up by it, and pursue the second boy – the one who is all light and happiness and helps her feel that she’s moving on from Bailey’s death.
My reaction: I thought the love triangle was done exceptionally well, and the characters were incredible, larger-than-life people. Even Bailey, who died before the story begins, is full and flawed and fabulous. The writing itself was lyrical, and I wondered how much of it was the author trying to be artistic and how much was truly Lennie’s voice. However, that was my writerly self wondering, and my readerly self kept saying, “Shut up and just enjoy the prose, you know you like it.”
Of interest to writers: The poems throughout – poems Lennie scribbles on whatever available writing surface there is, and are described as found in various places, like under a rock, or in the margins of Wuthering Heights, well, I enjoyed them and all, but then when I got to the end and ***mild spoiler alert here*** they actually had a purpose in the story line (even if it was a small purpose), I was impressed.
Bottom line: Read it for the beauty of the language, or the deliciousness of Lennie’s conflict, or the roundness of the characters…but just read it.
Reminds me of: Into the Wild Nerd Yonder by Julie Halpern.
A copy of this book landed in my lap (thanks Mary!) and I devoured it.
Kate lives in (what sounds like) Russia in an era of magic and superstition. Her problem: her village has begun to think she is a witch. Yes, she is a carver (skill with a knife is a sign of a witch), she has different-colored eyes (ooh), and she has a cat friend who follows her everywhere (yup, definitely a witch). A mysterious man cruelly helps the witch rumors along, then convinces Kate to leave town, but not before trading her some survival necessities for…her shadow.
Beyond “did I like it?” (because I really, really did), do I think Plain Kate works? Overall, yes. Through the course of the novel I got to know Kate very well, from her love of wood-carving to her fears: of losing her shadow, of being kicked out of the Roamers’ caravan, of being alone. Knowing the character intimately is one of the best ways to get a reader to care.
As far as supporting cast – that is also very strong. My favorite supporting character was Kate’s sidekick, Taggle. A cat. I will say no more about him except you should read this book if for no other reason than to meet Taggle.
What worked best in the book, and what I will be re-reading this book to study, is how the setting and tone work together to create this beautiful, spooky mood. The lyrical prose (you know how I’m always raving about that) is also out of this world…unsurprising as Bow has also published a book of poems.
The beginning felt a little slow to me, but this could be because I was in such a rush to start reading that I didn’t give myself a good chunk of time to get immersed. Once I’d invested a half hour of reading time, I couldn’t put Plain Kate down.
To visit Erin Bow’s website, click here. If you visit, be prepared to forget whatever else you had planned. I found an absorbing essay on her “Odds and Ends” page and stayed up late to read the whole thing.
Although I read this a couple of months ago, it has stayed with me. The Underneath is so beautifully written, how can it not stay with you? On the surface it is the story of a mother cat, her two kittens, and an old (abused) hound dog who is chained up to a porch in a Louisiana bayou. But it’s also about a mythical snake creature, a family of Native Americans living over a century ago, and the cruel man who is the undeserving owner of the hound.
The “underneath” is the space below the porch, the safe place the mother cat finds to raise her two kittens. Only one curious, adventurous kitten sets into a motion a heart-wrenching story of (a whole bunch of sad stuff) (but ultimately) (redeeming) love.
It’s another one of those books that makes me “feel.” And you know how I feel about those. Highest compliments and praise to the author, but then I need to read some blood-sucking vampire action (with a good dose of either humor or melodrama – both is best) to reaffirm my hope in the world. Sad, isn’t it?
Actually, no, that’s not really true, other than the highest compliments and praise to the author.
**very mild spoiler**
Because this story does reaffirm one’s hope in the world. Maybe not in the middle of the book. The middle has tears, and they are NOT tears of happiness. But hope and love come through in the end, which is more than I can say for Feed. Stupid [ed. Artistic, mind-blowing] book that it is.
But back to my book review. I highly recommend The Underneath. Beautiful, poetic prose and interwoven stories crossing time but all arriving at a single, redemptive space, make the story worth a few tears.
To learn more about Kathi Appelt, visit her website by clicking here.
Beth Hull 