Interview with Eileen Kernaghan, Author

In the midst of a night of sleeplessness, it struck me that I wanted to ask my friend Eileen Kernaghan a few questions about her writing life and current project, it having been a long time since I'd last done this. So I tapped together some questions and sent them her way, and she has kindly consented to indulge me on this.

Eileen is one of my favourite writers. She doesn't produce floods of books, nor are they great door-stoppers. They are beautifully written, thoughtful, magical adventure stories, each one evoking a time and place that fascinate, peopled with characters I could happily befriend--or avoid at any cost.

Enjoy!


🌿 Can you tell our readers a little about yourself and your career in the literary arts?

I grew up in a small farming town where outside of haying season there was very little to do but read books, and in time that led to writing my own stories.  I launched my literary career when I was twelve, when I sold a story to the children’s page of the Vancouver Sun. Publication came with an illustration and a modest payment, my classmates and my parents were impressed, and though my next attempt at fiction was politely declined, there was really no looking back. For the next couple of years I turned to journalism as the local correspondent for the Enderby Commoner, which according to its masthead covered the (North Okanagan) valley like the dew.

There followed a long hiatus, during which I finished high school, went to UBC, earned a teaching certificate, got married, and had three children. I started writing again when the kids were in elementary school and I had mornings to myself.  I produced a couple of quite unpublishable stories, and then I sold a somewhat better one to Galaxy magazine [1]. My name and an illustration for the story were on the front cover.  Success! But when my next attempts at short fiction went nowhere, I decided to write a book.  My fantasy novel Journey to Aprilioth and the two that followed, Songs from the Drowned Lands and The Sarsen Witch, (making up the Drowned Lands trilogy) were published in the eighties by Ace Books.  However, my next novel, Winter on the Plain of Ghosts, failed to find a home with New York publishers, and eventually I self-published it [2].  (Thanks to modern technology it’s still out there, available from Amazon as paperback and e-book.)

At about the same time, though few Canadian publishers were doing adult speculative fiction, there was a growing Canadian market for YA fantasy.  My next book was a YA, set in eighteenth Bhutan and it sold to Thistledown, a Canadian literary press. To date Thistledown has published Dance of the Snow Dragon, followed by Wild Talent (fin de siècle London and Paris) and Sophie, in Shadow  (India under the Raj).

Along the way, I’ve co-written a writers guide -- now long out-dated; the book version of a documentary film, some short stories and poems, and a poetry collection, Tales from the Holograph Woods.

🌿 Are you working on any writing projects at the moment?

I’m working on the third book in the family story that began with Wild Talent.This one is set in Paris of the 1920’s, and it’s the story of Alex, the younger daughter. 

🌿 I've read frequently that writers need to create an outline to their stories before writing them. Is that how you approach your writing? Why do you organize it in this way? If you create outlines of any sort, how much time would you say the outline for this book took, how complete is it, and how much is it likely to change?

I should create an outline. It would be nice to have an outline. But I tend more to the jumping off a cliff without a parachute approach to plotting.  I have a central character and I have a time and a place.  I start out by researching the period for the sake of the plot. Then as a rule the research starts to shape the plot, and takes it to places I was not expecting. As an example, here’s what happened when I was writing The Alchemist’s Daughter, set in Elizabethan England. I started out by reading a great deal about sixteenth century alchemy, which in turn led me to stories of unsuccessful alchemists who, having promised gold they couldn’t deliver, were very likely to be tortured and executed. That gave me my basic plot – how the daughter of a very unsuccessful alchemist set out to save her father from a foolish promise to the Queen.

It also led me to read about Dr. John Dee, the Elizabethan alchemist who was rumoured to have discovered the philosophers’ stone and buried it at Glastonbury. That fit nicely into the story  and set my heroine, Sidonie Quince, on the road to Glastonbury.

🌿 What effect does that have on you, not knowing ahead of time how it is all going to go? Do you love it? Does it drive you to distraction?

I wouldn’t say I love it. But neither does it drive me to distraction.  I take a lot of time to write my books, and usually something – perhaps some bit of research—will turn up.  There’s a certain excitement in wondering how the whole thing will turn out.

🌿 I have read all of your novels, and one of my favourite aspects of them is the fascinating elements you draw from history and weave into your story. Without giving too much away, are there any social movements or characters from history or other intriguing things that you are particularly enjoying exploring for this book?

Yes. Russian exiles in the Paris of the 1920’s; the search for immortality; inherited wild talents.

🌿 What is the role of the supernatural in your books--if indeed it serves the same purpose in each of them?

In my recent books the supernatural exists not so much in the external world as in the unusual talents the characters possess. I think of them as traditional historical novels with a touch of the strange and inexplicable.

🌿 You have a very respectable collection of books, stories, and poems under your belt, in addition to the nonfiction writing you have sometimes done. Can you give readers a sense of how you go from the initial spark to a complete tale?

The initial spark is usually an interest in, a curiosity about, a particular time and place.  Some research about that era usually suggests a main character, and how that character might interact with the society.  And from that comes the plot. For instance, I chose to write about Bhutan (Dance of the Snow Dragon) because a friend was very impressed with a performance by the Bhutanese Royal Dancers when they came to Vancouver, and she suggested that Bhutan would be a fascinating setting for a book. So I started researching. 

🌿 Have these explorations in subject, history, theme, and craft affected your life in any ways that you might not have expected?

I suppose a deeper knowledge of earlier times and other places than I could ever have gained in school or university.  

  

🌿 Do you find any value in belonging to writing groups, even though you are by now an accomplished writer? What do they offer you? What about teaching writing? Does this support your own writing in any way?

I managed to finish my first novel, Journey to Aprilioth, because I was determined to bring a chapter for critiquing to every Burnaby Writers Society meeting. The feedback from the small writing group to which I’ve belonged for many years has been immensely helpful.  And I wouldn’t feel right about teaching writing if I were not writing myself.

🌿 Where can readers find you and your books? Will you be doing any readings or participating in panels, and so on in the coming months?

You can find my books in libraries, at amazon and at lots of other online sites. All but the earliest ones are now available as e-books. You will likely find me at the 2020 Creative Ink festival https://www.creativeinkfestival.com/.

For more of Eileen and her writing:

Eileen's books for sale, new and used, via Bookfinder.com

Eileen Kernaghan's blog

Eileen Kernaghan's website (with samples from her novels)

Bibliography

Strange Horizons Interview 

Challenging Destiny Interview

Eileen Kernaghan at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

Thanks so much, Eileen, for taking the time to answer these questions. I'm very much looking forward to the third novel in the Wild Talent/Sophie, In Shadow series, so I won't pester you any more and will let you get back to work.

[1] "Starcult" by Eileen Kernaghan, Galaxy volume 32 number 3 (1971). (All text and images preserved at the Internet Archive. Read Eileen's story there!

[2] It has always baffled me that this novel didn't find a publisher. It may possibly be my favourite.

“Winter on the Plain of Ghosts” by Eileen Kernaghan

A few years ago I read the one and only self-published novel by award-winning writer (Sounds great, doesn't it? Well, it's true. But that doesn't necessarily mean you will ever have heard of her), Eileen Kernaghan.

Winter on the Plain of Ghosts: a Novel of Mohenjo-Daro. The book is set in the Indus Valley, so long ago that all we know of the culture that existed there is what we can divine from a set of clay seals (pictured above and below). Kernaghan does a wonderful job of filling in the world and peopling it with compelling characters.

I have no idea why, of all her lyrical and thoughtful adult and young adult novels, this one failed to find a publisher. After ten years of bouncing it around Kernaghan caved in to her husband's nagging and put it out herself under the imprint Flying Monkey Press.

I am so glad he did keep bugging her. Left to her own devices, would she have thought it was just a lousy novel and gone on to the next beautiful gem? I don't know. What I do know is that I had (for me) a rare experience when reading this book: that of spending the day, while off doing other things, thinking with great pleasure about the writing—the words themselves and the places they were taking me—and anticipating somewhat impatiently when I would get to be home again with feet up and Winter on the Plain of Ghosts on my lap.

It has stayed with me as a precious read, but a faded memory, one I don't pull out too often. Recently I glanced at the book again and read the poem that opens it, a poem that is collected with her other delicious speculative offerings in Tales from the Holograph Woods. It reminded me of how much I'd enjoyed the book, and how annoyed I am that so few people have had the chance to enjoy it as I have. So I thought I would introduce you to it and urge you, if you like what you see, to get a copy, read it, pass it around, and let the world know how much you enjoy this novel and this inestimable writer's work.

Mohenjo-daro

The salt earth is bleached

and brittle as old bone, in winter

on the plain of ghosts.

Shrill and thin down the grey

millennia, the spirit voices

cry on the parched wind.

Language of a dead land―

the wind’s riddles:

insistent and insinuating

whisper of pale grasses,

tongueless as corpses the slow

suck and hiss

of the river’s mouths

and age-deep in the dust

of empty water-courses

the cryptic dialect

of broken stones.

But on the terraces below the citadel

a flute plays

and ghosts rise in their shining bones

bedecked with jade and lapis lazuli.

Above the luminous pools white birds drift

long-stemmed as water lilies

and terrible in their stripes

behind the broken walls the tigers walk

among the glamorous trees.

This gives you a sense of Eileen Kernaghan's wordcraft and imagination. But let's give you a little of the novel itself. I shall indulge myself by adding a fair dollop of it below. Before we go, I'll add these links, and then leave you in Ms. Kernaghan's capable hands.

To read the review on the Historical Novel Society website, click here.
To order either the print edition or the e-book of Winter on the Plain of Ghosts, click here.
To order Tales from the Holograph Woods, click here.

Winter on the Plain of Ghosts:

A Novel of Mohenjo-Daro

PROLOGUE

            this morning, when I visited the warehouse, Akalla was breaking the seal on a chest full of luxury goods — among them some jars of unguent imported from the western deserts of Meluhha. I took one home with me and opened it in the privacy of my bedchamber. Released from its stone container, the rich, oily perfume awoke a rush of memories.

            Once again I breathed the fragrance of oleander, growing high up in a desolate hill pass. I heard the throbbing of the skin drums, the wistful music of the reed-pipes; and the shrill voice of the desert wind, crying across the parched, dun-coloured plain. But underneath the scent of spice and sun and flowers there was a hint of something darker, muskier — a cloying, sweet-sour odour of the swamp. And there rose in my mind's eye a vision of the great Meluhhan capitals, those once noble cities of the plains. I saw them crouched behind their crumbling walls like enormous stricken animals, choking on their own poisoned breath.

            Already it is the month of Nisan. The floodwaters are rising, and another year is almost over. I have lived long; have, I believed, sinned no worse than other men; have suffered much, and have received many blessings from the gods. It is, at this moment, as though I am standing on a high terrace, from which it is possible to look down upon my life's beginning, and on its end.

            And so, in this city of Ur, in the reign of the great king Rim-Sin of Larsa, I, the merchant-captain Rujik, set down my history — having instructed my storekeeper to lay in a great quantity of clay.

Wholly Alive in This Short, Exquisite Life: Seven Poems I Love

Written, once again, for the edX Art of Poetry course I'm doing. This week we gathered seven poems that mean something to us and wrote about them. It was a wonderful experience--a lot of work for one sitting but to see how they all folded together was a blessing.

1. Sugarskulli: “Ode to Boyhood” (USA)
2. Eileen Kernaghan: “Mohenjo-daro: a poem” (Canada)
3. Seamus Heaney: “A Sofa in the the Forties” (Ireland)
4. Julian of Norwich: “I it am” (England)
5. Togiram (Emile Célestin-Mégie): “M’ap Ekri Youn Powèm/I’m Writing a Poem” (Haiti)
6. Thich Nhat Hanh : “Please Call Me By My True Names” (Vietnam)
7. Mirabai: “The Plums Tasted” (India)

Sugarskulli is Alex Barr (b. 1998, USA), a sixteen-year-old transgendered girl. She says she’s not a poet, but “Ode to Boyhood” shook me as good poetry can when it strikes a personal chord.

She tells about a girl who’s a boy inside, and the clash with family expectations, fellow students, self.

A pink dress, hanging in the/

closet with/

chains in the pearl necklace./

Weight /

Weight, and the color of shame./

Cement/

blocks in the shape of high heeled shoes,/

a mother who makes too many tomboy jokes./

“That’s my girl,” she says “You’re just like your/

dad.” The role of the daughter never fit./

More than just clothes are in that closet.

Recently, a young man I know (now a young woman I know) dove into self-harm, shutting inward, grief. In my youth, I rejected the stereotypes of girlhood—if this was what we were allowed, I wanted out. Then later, the uneasy awareness that though men are cute—so are women. Say that out loud in 1970? Puhleeze.

I could write yards about this, but I won’t, only that Sugarskulli’s pain hits close to home. Her last stanza is one line:

Dysphoria is the ugliest poet.                     

http://allpoetry.com/Sugarskulli

Eileen Kernaghan’s (b.1939, Canada) “Mohenjo-daro” introduces her beautifully written novel about the Indus Valley, Winter on the Plain of Ghosts. I find Kernaghan’s writing absolutely magical, whether in prose or poem; here I’m swept off to a long-dead yet vibrantly once-living place.