Latest / Mythmakers / A Magical Blend: Writing Historical Fantasies...with Lucy Strange

Transcript

A Magical Blend: Writing Historical Fantasies...with Lucy Strange · Mythmakers

0:00
Hello and welcome to MythMakers. MythMakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy
0:13
creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Colting and
0:19
I'm an author and I also run the centre. Today I'm joined by a very good friend to us,
0:25
Lucy Strange, who not only does she help us all teach creative writing on our online fantasy
0:31
course, she's also an author and today we're going to be talking about writing historical
0:38
fantasies, that blend of the fantasy genre with historical fiction. So Lucy, why don't you
0:44
start by telling us a little bit about yourself and your journey to being an author?
0:49
Hi, hello, Julia. Hello everyone, lovely to be here. Well, I'm not really sure where to start.
0:57
I started at the beginning that I've always always been just a lover of stories and all sorts
1:03
of sorts of stories and when I started thinking about talking to you today and talking about
1:10
fantasy and I write particularly children's literature or fantasy magical realism, that kind of
1:19
that sort of thing but ended up kind of 9, 10 and up, that sort of thing. Anyway, I started
1:24
thinking about children's literature and how a lot of children's literature has fantasy in it
1:30
that we'd never even think of as describing as fantasy. I was thinking of the magic far away
1:34
tree and some of these sort of classic stories I used to read when I was little. Anyway, so
1:40
I always loved stories and never really thought of being a writer particularly mainly because
1:46
all the writers that I loved as a youngster were all dead. So I sort of thought, and I appreciate
1:53
this makes no sense whatsoever, that to be a writer you had to kind of be dead and somehow
1:58
exist only in the past and as a career option that I didn't really appeal. So I just read,
2:08
I just devoured books for a very, very long time. I trained as an actor, I studied in the English
2:14
university, then trained as an actor, worked as an actor for a few years, did some singing as well,
2:19
and then retrained as an secondary school English teacher, and then I did that for 15 years.
2:26
And so it's with hindsight now, now that I'm writing full-time professionally, I look back on
2:34
on all of those things that I did and I think actually it was always there, it was always about
2:38
stories, always about a love of stories, my teaching literature, being an actor, and being a performer
2:45
for me was always about loving the creativity of the rehearsal process and the dynamics between the
2:51
characters and the nuances and the language and all that sort of thing. I didn't actually enjoy
2:56
the performance aspect of it as much as I did the rehearsal. So then about 2014, I started writing,
3:05
2013, 2014, I started writing properly, having not really written much at all, apart from some
3:11
really bad poetry as a teenager, which I think is a right of passage for every. Yeah, necessary,
3:18
necessary thing to do it. So yes, I started writing, I started writing, I did a bit of journalism,
3:25
I started writing a blog, and I was living abroad at the time, I was living in the Middle East,
3:33
and I was really, really homesick. And I think I probably, on reflection, started writing as a way
3:42
of channeling a lot of these feelings that I was having a missing home, a sense of nostalgia,
3:47
and a sense of loss for something. And the first, I started writing what actually ended up being my
3:54
first book, Secret of Nightingale would, I entered the first few chapters in the competition and
4:01
got an agent through that, and then got my first publishing deal through that. But fantasy, I suppose,
4:09
is something that we often think of in terms of perhaps more escapist end of literature.
4:16
And so I think it's quite interesting that when I started writing, it was about escape,
4:23
it was about escaping where I was physically, geographically, and wanting to be somewhere else.
4:29
That's a really interesting theme, this idea of escaping, because I think there's also an
4:34
element of escaping to the past, when you go and pick up a straight historical book, that you
4:44
can spend time living back in an area that's already happened, you know the story, if you're sticking
4:50
to real history. So it's perhaps unfair to say that fantasy is the only escapist
4:58
genre, isn't it, because I think mind you, that you could say that making up a story in our
5:04
contemporary world is equally you're escaping your quotidian, your everyday existence.
5:14
It is funny how people say, you know, escape from escaping to fantasy, I think we just escape
5:19
into fiction. We do escape, we do absolutely. And I think one of the things that's true of fantasy
5:25
and that's true of historical stories as well, is that because we've got a bit of a remove
5:33
from our everyday world, it allows us to actually talk about a lot of things that are very, very
5:40
now and very, very relevant, but we've got that sort of that veil of fantasy or we've got that
5:46
distance because of the history that allows us to deal with things in a way that's a little
5:51
perhaps just a bit more gentle or subtle, rather than kind of hitting it head on with a race
5:57
of contemporary story. So tell us a little bit about your latest books, what they're about and
6:02
what subject matters you've covered. Well, it's often only when you talk about your books,
6:08
you realise what they're about. I don't know if you have that.
6:13
I mean, you want to suddenly sound very sort of tidy enough about your thoughts, don't you?
6:21
My books are, they're not a series, they're all separate standalone stories,
6:27
but they do have a few things in common. So Secret Nightingale was my first one that's set in
6:34
1919, just after the First World War, it's very much a sort of historical story, but it's got a lot
6:40
of fairy tale in it. Our castle by the sea is my second book, that's probably the most historical
6:51
it's set in the beginning of the Second World War and in this one that there is a magical element
6:59
of an ancient myth about these standing stones on the cliff top here, that's our heroine, but
7:06
believes in this mystery, believes it's completely true. So all my stories set in the past,
7:11
all of them have got that bit of magic, that bit of fancy kind of bubbling away, beneath the
7:15
surface. It goes to Ghostwater is my third book, it's a gothic mystery story set in the late district
7:24
turn of the century, the year 1899 into 1900, and this one is probably my most sort of
7:32
classically influenced ones, there's a lot of bothering heights and jane and that sort of thing in
7:37
there. So my two most recent ones, these have come out within a few months of each other,
7:43
it's all been crazy, good crazy, but crazy here. So Sisters of the Lost Marsh, this came out in
7:50
November, it's the only book I've written that is set, it is set in the past, but it's a non-specific
7:57
past, it's it's it's got the feeling of it just sort of being perhaps a sort of a no-when,
8:04
but it's a it's a pre-industrial very isolated, very rural community and it's got that feeling of
8:11
a little bit of a fairy tale world about it, there's a lot of fantasy via kind of folklore,
8:17
it's that sort of feeling about Sisters of the Lost Marsh, ancient curses and superstitions,
8:24
that sort of thing. I might read you a little bit of this, actually, and then my most recent
8:31
book, The Mermaid in the Millpond, is probably my most straightforward combination of historical
8:37
and fantasy. So we have, this is an industrial revolution story, it's a novella really, it's
8:45
for a British published called Barrington Stoke, who writes stories specifically accessible for
8:51
people who got who are dyslexic, who struggle to get into books or reluctant readers, that sort of thing.
8:58
So they're, I think they're really cleverly designed by the way, not to make this a plug,
9:02
particularly for Barrington Stoke, but I do think they're amazing. So they're all on the
9:06
print-on-off white paper, there's lots of illustrations, throughout them, and the font, the
9:16
language edit, everything is really, really sort of carefully put together to make sure they're
9:20
really accessible. So it's set in England during the Industrial Revolution, and it's about a girl
9:27
called Bess, who escapes or thinks she's escaping from a London workhouse, around about the year
9:33
1800, and has been offered the prospect of being a pauper apprentice at a cotton mill in the Midlands,
9:42
and it is not what she thinks it will be, and essentially she's sort of signed up to kind of a
9:48
slavery working in this in this cotton mill. And to, to contain the youngsters who are enslaved
9:55
at the cotton mill, they're told this terrifying story that there's a bloodthirsty mermaid that lives
10:02
in the mill pond, and if they try to escape, she will get them. And it works as,
10:13
as I suppose as a metaphor, because it's about, it's very much about freedom,
10:19
and so, I don't want to give too much away, but we have Bess trapped in Slaived in the mill,
10:28
and then we have this mermaid character, and the ambiguity at first is it real, is it a myth,
10:35
is it just there to terrify the children, but the sense of a beautiful, powerful, fierce creature
10:43
being trapped, and the idea of a mermaid trapped in a mill pond is this small bit of water contained
10:51
by the weir that she, that she can't get out of. Sorry, go on, go on.
10:57
So that story made me think of a, a story which I suppose is now a historical fantasy,
11:04
though maybe it was contemporary at the time, is the Charles King Lee Water Babies, which if people
11:10
don't know, is a very intriguing Victorian story about a chimney sweep who gets turned into a water
11:18
baby. It's written by, from a sort of, it's a religious story, it has a lot of moral lessons.
11:23
There were two very scary people under the sea. Well, one scary, one nice, Mrs. Doors, you would be done
11:30
by, Mrs. Dunn by, as you did. The second one obviously punishes you, and the first one is all
11:37
cuddly. I remember vividly reading a version of this with, I think it was Lucy made, well,
11:44
illustrations. So illustrations are really part of that reading experience.
11:49
Were you aware of the antecedents to your story when you wrote it, or is that something you found
11:54
out since? No, I think, I think having been a, you know, a bookworm and an English teacher,
12:03
I think all of this stuff is, and it's not always conscious, you're right, it's not always
12:06
consciously there, but it's all, it's all in there, isn't it? And it all, it all kind of comes
12:12
through. A lot of my books have got quite obvious, sort of, intertextuality, and, you know,
12:22
in the placings of those well-loved stories are very clearly there. So in Nightingale Wood,
12:27
for example, main character of the bookworm, and she talks about a lot of her favorite books,
12:31
the books she's reading, she's been doing little women, and that sort of thing. A lot of the books
12:36
and the fairy tales that are part of the story are, are flagged up within the story itself,
12:41
but it's not always obvious, it's not always obvious to us as we're writing, is it,
12:45
that the influences that we have. So I didn't think particularly of the water babies,
12:50
when I was, when I was writing this one, I did think of that there's a grip, one of the
12:56
less-known grim brothers, fairy tales, the nixie in the mill pond. And so that's something
13:05
that I was aware of. It's a very different sort of story, but it's the concept of this supernatural
13:09
creature in a very, that's supposed an industrial, or a very, every day sort of a place.
13:17
And also that, there's a very odd little poem, this is particularly this influenced
13:24
Sisters of the Lost Marsh, actually. Do you know, overheard on a salt marsh that
13:28
poem by Harold Monroe, with the, have a little goblin. I know it because you told us already on our
13:34
writing course about this poem. So it's so weird. It's so weird. So we have a little goblin
13:40
talking to a nip from begging for her glass beads, but the thing I love best about it is the title,
13:46
it's called Overheard on a Salt Marsh. So you just, and the whole poem is just the dialogue between,
13:52
between the goblin and the nip, but it's overheard. So then it implies, obviously, that the poet,
13:59
or the writer, someone was there, and they heard this. And it just, and then immediately it creates a
14:06
whole, a whole story, a whole possible story surrounding that. But anyway, an example of how
14:13
sometimes we're aware of our influences, and they, and they shape us, and they shape our work.
14:19
But sometimes they just, things just sort of seep through, don't they? And we, we definitely know it.
14:25
So you can have something like a mermaid in the mill pond, or a water baby, and each age,
14:31
the metaphorics, symbolic use of it, is very different. So you were talking about freedom,
14:37
and the sort of, yeah, captivity and cruelty. I suppose in a sense, anti-industrial revolution
14:44
conditions of work story. Yeah, yeah. The water babies did have a anti-chimney sweep
14:51
and forming the child layer. But it also had a very strong, sort of, baptismal, almost death
14:59
metaphor running through it. Yeah. There's a lot of a bit quiet, quite unpleasant stuff in it as well.
15:05
I think I did notice that as a child. I just kind of read it. But now I look at it and think,
15:09
oh dear, this is all a bit, yeah. Anyway, let the past be the past. We can't tidy it up.
15:16
But just thinking about this issue of writing historical fantasies, I would absolutely love
15:23
to hear you read some of your work. But we can have that as like story time a little bit
15:29
further on. But I wanted to ask you about what you admire in other people's historical fantasies.
15:36
I was just thinking of the ones that I've come across, sort of, were in my mind. There's things
15:43
like Outlander, which is page onto screen, and the discovery of witches, which has sort of
15:52
time travel aspect to it as well. And then there's, yeah, I've got to check. I've got the right,
15:59
is it, I always get this wrong. It's Jonathan Strange. Jonathan Strange, Mr. Narell.
16:04
No, I always get that wrong. That's a brilliant one, isn't it? So brilliant.
16:09
Because it's a sort of a, it's a, it's a, it's a different version of the world, we know, isn't it?
16:13
It's, it's a, it's exactly like the world, we know, except, except for the magic.
16:21
It's so clever. I've just read Piranasi, which is, I really want to read that.
16:27
Yeah, I prefer Piranasi. In though, it was a lot shorter, which helped, because I,
16:36
I found the long reads, you know, you have to really invest in a world. You have to commit me to do.
16:41
Yeah. Piranasi, I think is, it's sort of a step outside time, but it's in a historical place,
16:49
and it references historical events. So that's a very interesting use of historical fiction.
16:54
It's interesting. It's talking about time, time travel, and times that, because two,
17:00
two of the books, I would say, some sort of the realm of classic children's fantasy, historical fantasy
17:07
that have influenced me would be Moon Dial, Helen Cresswell. I don't know if you know that.
17:12
It's a lovely, very odd, about a girl, a sort of critical point in her life. I think her mother
17:21
is in a coma or something. She's staying with an aunt. Always staying with an aunt.
17:24
I'm used to that. I'm used to that. You're the responsible aunt, so you don't care where you go,
17:29
and what you get up to. Staying with an aunt, and I think there's the grounds of a
17:34
stately home, and there's a sort of, well, she thinks it's a sun dial, but it's not a sun
17:39
dial, it's a Moon Dial, and the Moon Dial has the power to transport her back in time, and she's
17:44
there in this stately home, as it was in its hay day, and she meets a child who's a servant there,
17:50
that's me. I was just going to say the other one, the other one is Thomas Midnight's
17:57
Quentin, and both of them have this sense of, I suppose that classic feeling to it, and because
18:07
of the time slip, it is somehow timeless as well. The modern day could be any time, and it doesn't
18:14
matter where, if that's the 1960s or now. Thomas Midnight's garden is lovely, isn't it? So that
18:23
for people who don't know, it's about a boy staying, he's been quarantined, hasn't he? He's been
18:29
chicken poxle measles, or something like that, and he's staying in his flat. He's been sent away
18:35
because his brother has it. Oh, that's it, I think that's it, yeah, so he's staying his way.
18:40
Yeah, so again, he's staying with an aunt and uncle, I think, on the end of the flat.
18:46
And it's a bigger house that's been converted, right? It was a grand house that's now flats,
18:51
and there's a little old lady who lives in the flat upstairs, and she's quite, she's a bit
18:54
mysterious, isn't she? And then he can't sleep, and every night, and he starts creeping out into
19:04
the garden, creeping outside, and it's unclear whether it's sleepwalking or, or if it's actually
19:09
happening, and I love that ambiguity, by the way, it's something I'll come back to in a minute,
19:15
because playing with ambiguity, and is this real? Is it happening? Is it a dream? Is it a story
19:21
within the story? That kind of thing, that's something I really love playing with in my work.
19:24
So we're not sure what's happening, and he goes out, and instead of that little scrubby yard
19:31
outside the back of the flats, it's transformed his beautiful gardens of the grand house that it
19:36
once was, and he meets this little girl there, and they become friends, and the lovely, lovely twist
19:45
of the story at the end, we find out that the girl... You're spoiling the end! That doesn't everyone know,
19:51
well, shall I not say? No, no, you're allowed to say. I think that's a lot of enough. It's been out for a
19:56
long time. So the little girl he meets and becomes friends with is actually the past self of
20:03
the old lady who lives in the flat upstairs, and it's all about her childhood and growing up in a
20:08
house, and of course the lovely ambiguity is then, well, who's the ghost here? Is it him? Is he the ghost
20:17
in her past? Or is she the ghost in his present? And it's really... Yeah, it's really magical,
20:25
and brilliant, brilliant concept, isn't it? It's Philip Appears, Philip Appears, yeah, and
20:30
Deemings Island's Helen Cresswell, yeah. The detail in that, which I love in Tollsbynight
20:35
Garden, is the clock strikes 13, which is just a so simple idea, but that's what I remember,
20:42
the clock strikes 13, and then the world sort of melts and becomes this other... That's it, yeah,
20:47
that's it. Very powerful. Yeah, it's lovely. So good. I was going to ask you, you mentioned earlier that
20:55
doing a historical... doing fantasy, but doing historical fantasies allows us to deal with subjects
21:01
in a sort of sideways look at them. What subjects are... we've mentioned the industrial revolution,
21:08
but in the Sisters of the Lost Marsh, for example, what subjects are you dealing with there?
21:13
Well, there's a strong kind of feminist theme in Sisters of the Lost Marsh, so the girls
21:19
grow up in a very, very superstitious society. It's society ruled by superstition in their village,
21:27
reading and writing, as seen as a sort of witchcraft, so people are very, very suspicious of you.
21:31
So they have to keep it secret that their grandma has taught them to read and write, and she has
21:35
this secret library hidden away in her room in the house, in the farmhouse. And then they live
21:40
with her and their father, who's a very unpleasant, embittered sort of a character, and we sort of
21:47
find out a bit more about his backstory later on, but one of the superstitions in this community that
21:52
they've grown up with is the curse of six daughters. And it goes like this, be sure the first girl
21:59
marries well a second in the home to dwell. A third maid can do little harm if set to work upon the
22:04
farm, four and five must both be wed, or six will bury you, stone dead.
22:10
So Willer and her and her five sisters have grown up. Sorry, I shouldn't laugh, it sounds very grim.
22:17
It is grim, but it goes at a less than poems or worth it.
22:24
All that morbid love poetry. So yes, so they've grown up under the shadow of this curse, and
22:29
with the father who fears and despises his own daughters because of this curse, which he absolutely
22:36
believes in. And it's about this idea of within this bubble of a fantasy version of our world.
22:50
It's about identity and for young people being able to choose who they are and who they want
22:56
to be and what they do with themselves, what they do with their lives.
23:00
There's, and obviously not just girls here, but there is a feminist theme in there as well,
23:07
the idea of girls being property of the father and to be married off.
23:15
And a lot of, I suppose, yeah, but Willer describes it as her choices have already been chosen.
23:24
And, you know, I think it depends on where we're talking about in the world today,
23:32
within some parts of the world, within some cultures, these things are still horribly relevant.
23:37
But even for the children, I thought I was a teacher before, before I took full time writing,
23:45
but even for those children who we would think of as growing up relatively free from these
23:49
sorts of things, the pressures on them are still extraordinary and pressures not just from families
23:55
and parents from society and from these days, in these days, social media, all these sorts of
24:01
things. So it's about, it's a big picture and it's about having the confidence to find out
24:10
who you are and to choose and to make your own choices. It's kind of at the heart of that one.
24:15
Yeah, I think that one of the ways of understanding our present is to look for patterns of
24:20
behaviour that were similar in the past. So one of the ones on social media that strike me is
24:26
is actually from Jane Austen, you know, when Lydia elopes and it's like a scandal, it's like one
24:33
faux pas means that she's out. The family is disgraced and it reminds me of those things on social
24:41
media where you do one posting that's a bit cruel or something comes up in the past or you did one
24:48
unwise gesture or whatever it is and that's that's it. You can't get it canceled. Yeah, so
24:57
we need to find an intelligent way of dealing with the fact that we are flawed human beings,
25:02
we make mistakes and unwise choices. The hashing up for Lydia is not quite as factory because she
25:08
ends up trying to marry her. Well, she, you know, you don't think she's going to have a very happy
25:13
marriage, but it seems very similar to what happens when someone's reputation has really been
25:21
gone through the ringer and yeah, yeah, no, they're definitely are completely different examples
25:27
coming from different set of social understandings and, you know, yeah, but they have a very similar
25:33
and that's what I think history helps us see. Yeah, I think so. I was just going to actually
25:38
it made me think of what you were saying about history. My second book outcastle by the sea
25:44
is about what happened to the enemy aliens as we called them, so about 80,000 or so people from
25:52
Germany and Austria and Italy as well who'd come to the UK as refugees to be safe, vast majority
26:01
or refugees. At the beginning of the Second World War and we locked them up in
26:06
internment camps because Churchill famously said collar the lot because there was there was
26:13
there was history, people were terrified of spies and all of this sort of thing, but
26:20
there was a immense amount of fear, anger, hatred, prejudice that was tangled up in
26:30
the ways in which these people were treated. And that was something when I sort of do my research
26:38
for this book, this book was very much around, very much around Brexit time here in the UK when
26:47
I was working on this book and it just, I was, you know, I was so appalled by the amount of fear
26:53
and anger and I was seeing in the media and that sort of thing. So it was
26:58
talking about the ways in which we view each other, the ways in which we talk about people from
27:08
other countries or from other cultures within our own families to our children, in the media,
27:15
in politics and in times of conflict as well and how easy it seems to be for people to become
27:26
the enemy, for an entire nation of people to become the enemy, rather than being able to sort of
27:34
view individuals as individuals. And I was just really interested in how, you know, how can we find
27:40
compassion here, how can we find this ability to judge an individual as an individual and not
27:47
as part of this huge hated homogenous kind of mass. So I was dealing with some issues that
27:56
were really quite, quite powerfully felt at the time, but yeah, through the lens of this
28:05
historical story. So you mentioned you'd like to read us a little bit.
28:12
Have you chosen a passage that you'd like us to listen to?
28:17
As we are very fantasy, I thought I would read to you the tale of the marsh king that's in
28:33
Sisters of the Lost Marsh. So the girl's mother died, but she was able to read and write and
28:42
she has left her daughters a collection of stories that she's written, sort of fairy tales to do with
28:51
the Lost Marsh where they all live. And this is the story of the marsh king.
29:01
And it's a story that takes on great significance for Willa, our main character in the story.
29:06
And there's, I was talking about ambiguity in how we're not sure is the story real, is the story
29:12
kind of seeping into our characters world. So we've got, I won't give it, I'm so tempted
29:23
to tell you things, but I won't. I'll just share with you the story of the marsh king.
29:27
So Willa's reading this story to her three younger sisters, the triplets,
29:32
late one night and she has to read it in secret, obviously, so her father doesn't hear.
29:37
Just one story, I said, and you've all got to lie still as stone and close your eyes.
29:42
Six bright eyes snapped shut. Beware the dangers of the marsh, my darlings, I read,
29:48
tilting the book into the candlelight so I could make out mamas faded twisty letters.
29:53
Beware the Maya, do not lose your way and never let fear be your guide.
29:58
Darcy nodded very seriously, her eyes shut tight. Many winters ago, an evil sprite roamed these
30:05
marshes. He lured folk out into the Maya with his willow the whisper lantern. The marsh folk were
30:10
afraid of him, afraid that he would use his false blame to ensnare the souls of their loved ones
30:15
and to steal their livestock. The evil sprite fed upon their fear, he grew fat and gleeful,
30:21
he used folks' fears to control them and the more frightened they were the stronger he became.
30:27
He built himself a strange little castle on the Maya, he made himself a crown of bones
30:31
and he called himself the marsh king. There were only two people who did not fear the marsh king,
30:37
two sisters called Gloria and Githa Greenwood. They wrote the marsh king down in a book,
30:42
all the wicked things he did and all his cruel tricks too as a warning to others.
30:46
The marsh king found out about the book and it was the first time he had ever known fear himself.
30:52
He was afraid folk would hunt him down with torches and docks so he used his dark magic.
30:58
He spread whispers that writing was witchcraft, that the Greenwood sisters were witches. He stirred up
31:04
fear and suspicion until the villagers turned against the Greenwoods and burnt their farmhouse down.
31:10
The book was destroyed in the blaze and Gloria Greenwood was killed.
31:15
But the marsh king didn't stop there, he conjured curses and jinxes so that folk were too frightened
31:20
to rise up against him. He whipped up superstitions which blew like dandelion seeds all over the
31:25
lost marsh and took root wherever they fell. Fear flourished. Folk became afraid of everything,
31:30
afraid of books and cleverness, magpies and black cats, blood moons and even their own daughters.
31:37
And in this way the marsh king ruled over people who were mere shadows of themselves,
31:42
frightened and cowed. He drugged them like sheep and he drugged them like cattle and they did not
31:47
question their own misery. Young Githa Greenwood was broken with grief after her sister's death.
31:53
Folk called her the sun-dead soul. What sun-dead willa? Sun-dead means she felt torn apart,
31:59
ripped down the middle. She would sit night and day by her sister's grave up on the hill,
32:04
gazing out towards the shadowy Maya. Months passed. May blossomed and the corn grew tall,
32:10
hay swayed in the meadows ripe for siding. The days lengthened towards mid-summer like a dog
32:16
stretching in the afternoon sun and the marshes shone like gold. On the night of the mid-summer moon,
32:22
Githa Greenwood set out onto the Maya heading straight towards the light of a mysterious
32:27
lantern that flickered there. But Githa had a lantern of her own. She took out her little tin tinderbox
32:33
and struck a bright, bright flame. Then all alone she walked into the darkness.
32:39
And she was never seen again. Oh, did the marsh king get her? Perhaps, but listen,
32:45
the marsh king was never seen again either, and it wasn't long before his castle crundled down into
32:51
the Maya. Dead then, said Deedy. Good, nodded Dolly. Defeated, perhaps, but not dead, whispered
32:59
Grammy's voice from the doorway. A magical being is not as easy to destroy as all that,
33:04
especially one as cruel and coming as the marsh king.
33:10
Thank you. Imagine the round of applause from those.
33:13
I'm imagining. I'm imagining. Yeah. Thank you. So in a way, you're writing
33:22
in a sitting in a position because you're using myths and legends, which is quite close to a
33:27
straightforward historical fantasy, because historical novel, because of course our lives are woven
33:33
in with story and people and families have stories and the rest of it. So do you see a difference
33:41
between writing a sort of straightforward historical novel and historical fantasy, or do you
33:47
not even think about those terms when you start writing? I don't think, I don't think, I don't
33:53
really think in genre terms, I think, because I mean, there's so much blurring between between
34:00
them anyway, isn't there? So I suppose this story has got more fantasy in it through folklore.
34:10
But a lot of my stories, it's more teetering on the brink of a magical realism where we have that
34:16
sense of it. And I think this is something that history gives us actually, which is one of the things
34:20
I love about using a historical setting, because it makes it feel really real, really concrete
34:27
and really real. If we're, you know, if we've got the story set within the Second World War,
34:30
set within the Industrial Revolution, it gives us this context, it gives us this,
34:35
like a kind of a backdrop on a stage, it makes us feel safe, we know where we are with this,
34:40
we know a little bit about this time. And that I think makes it all the more fun when you bring in
34:47
this element of the supernatural, this element of fantasy. And I think it just creates that
34:55
eerieness and that moment in which we get that sort of shimmering between reality and fantasy.
35:04
And I think it makes it all the more powerful. Actually, someone, another writer I wanted to
35:09
mention particularly, it's Frances Harding. Oh, of course. Yeah, the Lightry. The Lightry.
35:15
And Cuckoo song and these stories which have used very, very real feeling historical settings.
35:22
And then she takes it, I would say, further into the fantasy world than I do.
35:31
But I never forget reading, I think Cuckoo song was the first one I've heard that I read.
35:36
And I didn't really know what to expect. And I was just reading it and I had that,
35:42
that brilliant moment when I realised it was like a genre shift. And it was just like someone
35:47
kind of whipping the, whipping the rug out from beneath your feet and just everything. And I think
35:52
like, you know, when you get those moments in which we actually exclaim out loud, I was just,
35:57
wow, what? And it was amazing. And I think she does that absolutely, absolutely brilliantly.
36:06
I think the Jonathan Strange and Mr. Nora was like that. It was another book which had a sort of
36:13
you may be able to find other books beforehand, but suddenly there was other books like it that came
36:17
on afterwards. Yeah. Or remind us of things that have already existed. Night Circus, who's that by
36:29
Erin Morganson? Yes. Yeah, between us. Between us, we've got a Google brain. I've
36:37
recently, having sort of picked it up in an Oxfam shop, I think. It was on my to read list. And I
36:43
think I was surprised by quite how historically based it was as an element of sort of, is it
36:51
that the film about the two contending magicians, the prestige, I think it's called?
36:55
Well, it's an element of that. Which I hadn't realised from the way it was packaged in the
37:02
front cover. So if anyone else out there hasn't got around to it, I would highly recommend it. It's
37:06
a really great read. Very much enjoyed it. Yeah. Another one I thought of was the miniaturist.
37:13
Yes. Which is another book I really, really enjoyed. Although, I've really, really wanted,
37:19
I've really wanted an answer with one of those books where the supernatural element of it is
37:29
just left. And you're... Do you know, it's a bit naughty, really, but my definition between a
37:36
literary novel and everything else is, literary novels don't give you answers. No, I support well.
37:41
Having these open-ended, slightly opaque. Yeah, I'm fine, fine. I kind of, I quite like to know
37:49
the answer, too. I'm just, that's a bit of a joke. That's not the only form of literary novel,
37:55
but it does, I've just read a historical novel by a gentleman called Andrew Miller,
38:01
called, and now he shall be entirely free, which equally ends completely ambiguous. You don't know
38:09
if they die, you don't know if they, they, they escape. And it's obviously on purpose and it's
38:14
patterned, but I was thinking, hmm, I want to know, you know, and I'm, you first, you have to make
38:21
up your own ending. Yeah. But I think, I do think, there's a point at which I just go,
38:27
no, that is just cowardly. Come on. Come on, you mean Cooper. We've gone Cooper. Actually,
38:36
do you know, Sarah Waters, Little Stranger? I haven't read it, but I've read quite a lot of
38:41
Sarah Waters, but not that one. I think she's fantastic and great at twists and so on. And
38:46
Little Stranger is, um, it's a ghost story, really. It's a ghost story, and it's about, um,
38:53
she, there's a almost kind of plausible sort of scientific explanation for the, for the ghost
39:00
within, within it. And it's, and it's a story that ends, and you, I think on first reading,
39:06
I thought, but what, but how, but what happened? And, and it felt like it was all kind of,
39:13
you know, just hanging open at the end. And then going back, going back to it afterwards,
39:18
and I could see, like you talked about the patterning, and it's there, it's all there,
39:21
all the answers are there in, in, in the story. But that's a, that's a brilliantly, brilliantly
39:27
written historical, historical ghost, ghost story slash fantasy. The turn of the screws
39:34
a bit like that as well, isn't it? It has that element of ambiguity about the,
39:40
the, the status of the ghosts and, and who, yeah, when they're coming from, and what,
39:45
yeah, making it, making it seem like logical, I think, because the thing is, it makes sense.
39:52
And, and the woman in black, the, the more, um, the, yeah, Susan Hill, I'm not sorry,
39:58
Susan it. So that's, that's, perhaps I will come back to ghost stories in a, a future
40:04
event, because I think the whole question of what you do with the supernatural in,
40:09
if that sort is a fascinating, um, subject bigger than I think perhaps we've got time for now.
40:15
But, um, thinking about historical fantasy, and we always end where in all the fantasy worlds is
40:23
the best place to be something. Um, and because you've written a story about a mermaid in a mil pond,
40:31
I thought I'd ask you, Lucy, if you had the choice again to any of these fantasy worlds to be a mermaid,
40:37
where would you choose to go? Any of the fantasy worlds we've talked about today?
40:43
Any, any, not just ones we talked about today, any of them.
40:50
I've got, some I wouldn't want to go to, which are far too polluted and sort of, yeah,
40:55
the last one of the mermaid. Yeah, it was only the first one that sprang to mind was Nania,
41:00
but I'd be freezing, wouldn't it? They do have mermaids in Nania.
41:05
Um, on the void, on the void of the dawn treader as the, as they go further west, it becomes a bit
41:12
like the Indian Ocean. It's like crystal blue water. Yeah, Lucy looks over the side and sees the
41:17
mermaid people down below. So, and the water's sweet. So I think that's probably okay. Yeah,
41:22
okay, yeah, we'll go with that. So the bit that's not that's not cursed with the eternal winter,
41:26
we'll go, yeah. Yeah, it's after the spell broken. We never got the answers to whether or not
41:30
rest of Nania was under, you like the bits that aren't Nania, the, the other, but they under the
41:36
same spell. That's all affected. I'll have to ask an expert. I'll find out. I think for me,
41:43
I know the one that I wouldn't want to be in it, which is Netherlands, because the mermaid and
41:48
that always annoyed me, because they're, they're written to be a bit jealous and there's a crocodile
41:56
as well. And there's a crocodile. So it seems quite a small place as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
42:03
I definitely wouldn't want to be in the mill pond. That's, that's for sure. That's out. So I think,
42:08
I think the best place to be a mermaid for me would be to be in the world of what's that marvel,
42:17
Aquaman, it's DC, Aquaman. Yeah. We get cool, cool outfits. We've got a couple of lovers
42:24
swimming around. Yeah, it's actually one of the funniest films if you, if you add start analysing
42:31
it, the right at the end of Aquaman, his Nicole Kidman, his mother sort of suddenly appears and
42:37
after a big battle, she suddenly appears in a very posh frock and everyone else has been slugging
42:41
it out. There's some, there's some moments which are unintentionally funny and Julie Ann
42:45
Bruce appears as a great sea monster, you know. Amazing. This sounds like a test, I'm going to have
42:50
to watch it. It's going to be just for the comedy value as well as the vastness of the world,
42:58
I think. Yeah. Be a mermaid in the world of Aquaman. Yeah, okay. I was just thinking,
43:02
actually, Game of Thrones, the kind of, what's the Mediterranean, is it King's Landings?
43:07
Is that the Mediterraneany bit in Game of Thrones? I think that's sort of, yeah, somewhere,
43:11
I mean, basically, I'm just going somewhere warm. It's fairly suicidal to enter the world
43:18
of Game of Thrones. Yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah, not really. It wouldn't end well. We've become
43:23
tired by some ghastly people from somewhere, or dragons or something. Yeah. Anyway, sorry,
43:30
we've, but these are fun little tangents to think about and it's from these kind of tangents
43:34
from where next idea has come from, so who knows? Who knows? I think your Caribbean mermaid story
43:40
is on the way. Thanks very much for being of this Lucy and thank you, everyone, for listening.
43:47
Thank you, thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to MythMaker's podcast,
43:54
brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. Visit OxfordCenterForFantasy.org to join
44:01
in the fun. Find out about our online courses in person stays in Oxford, plus visit our shop
44:08
for great gifts. Tell a friend and subscribe wherever you find your favourite podcasts worldwide.