What are your favorite obscure fairy tales? I'm just now finishing a companion novel to Tides that focuses on lore about male selkies, and I have plans for a Vaudeville-era "Snow White and Rose Red" and a reimagining of Jane Eyre in the near future, if all goes well! I'm also the story editor at Parabola magazine, and I get to write about fairy tales for them a whole lot, which is great. I'd love to be primarily a fairy tale reteller in my writing career. Will you delve into more types of classic stories in future novels? You've written about both fairy tale lore and selkie lore now.
I've intentionally left a few things open-ended, in hopes that I'll be able to write a sequel (or two, or. As I said above, I'd thought it would just be a short story for a college project, and I felt as if I should move on to other things! But even though it started out at a mere 10 pages and is now exactly 300, I'm still not done. I don't usually write in first person, and in many ways Nick and I aren't that alike, but I've always felt that I know her well and can hear her voice clearly, if that makes sense.įor a long time, the hardest part was admitting that the story had to keep getting longer. The easiest part was writing in Nick's voice-she's the narrator and my Cinderella.
What was the easiest part about writing MECHANICA? The hardest? She believed in my writing career when I wasn't sure if I believed in it myself, and in that sense, she's definitely my fairy godmother. Mechanica is dedicated to that advisor, Betsey Harries. So Mechanica started as just one short story among a dozen or so in my independent project collection, but with my advisor's encouragement, it quickly grew from there.
I loved the whole aesthetic, and I'd been having conversations with my advisor about the machinations of fairy tale narratives: the way they're so perfectly, beautifully constructed, but at the same time can be claustrophobic, especially all those very narrow and specific definitions of happily-ever-after.Ĭinderella seemed to lend itself particularly well to a steampunk retelling: there's already clockwork there, in the all-important midnight clock, and the story itself is one of the most archetypal, tight, and 'perfect' of them all. It was pretty much my ideal lifestyle (and still is!).Īt the same time, my best friend was doing some research into steampunk for a set design class. My last semester of college consisted of one poetry class and a weekly meeting with my project advisor (we usually met over sushi), plus a bunch of writing time in the library. Way back in the spring of 2009, I was a junior at Smith College in Massachusetts, and I got approval to spend most of my senior year working on a book-length collection of fairy tale retellings.
Welcome, Betsy! What inspired you to write a steampunk version of Cinderella?
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