With authors Michelle Miles and L. E. Sterling
AS PROMISED: Here is Part Two of an amazing conversation I had with fellow YA Fantasy author (and fellow RWA member) Michelle Miles. In this episode, Michelle and I talked a lot about my influences and writing. Hopefully that doesn’t bore you too much!
We hope you enjoy!
MM: I’m fascinated by the fact that you have a creative writing degree and you’re a PhD. That is incredible to me. I don’t have the fortitude for that. Tell me about your thesis on magical representation.
LE: Well, lifelong obsession with fantasy… And I was taking a class with this fantastic professor at McGill University (where I did my PhD) where we studied The Volcano Lover by Susan Sontag, which features a tarot reader. I did an essay on the tarot in that novel, and he was like, this is fabulous. You should do it for your PhD.
So I ended up focusing on postmodern literature, which often involves everything from the 17th century onward, because postmodernists really love to look at the past. For this thesis I studied everything from texts written in the 15th and 16th centuries—texts on automatons, for instance, and cabinets of curiosity—to the very end of postmodern literature, because it all ties together.
Each chapter examined a type of body, a type of representation that suggests the magical. I did chapters on magicians, for instance, and tarot readers, automatons, voodoo loas (spirits), freak bodies–like monstrous bodies. Witches fell under that chapter, because some of the witches in the books I read had filed their teeth into sharp points. I just loved it so much.
I had already published my first book and I was working on a second, which was an urban fantasy set in Montreal and in the underworld (a retelling of Pluto and Persephone’s story). And I just thought, okay, this is where I’m going, I found my path at last. And now I can use all of this PhD research in books!
MM: That is amazing. I also understand that you taught a vampire literature.
LE: Vampires are fascinating. A lot of the research I did for the freaks chapter of my thesis actually looked at vampire tales—like Elizabeth Bathory, who allegedly was a 16th century serial killer who bathed in young virgin’s blood. (Oh my gosh, readers are going to think I’m crazy.)
I started the course with the very first vampire story, which was a novella written by a doctor named John William Polidori. During the summer of 1816, which was called the “year of no summer” due to a volcanic eruption that year, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary Shelley, her cousin Claire and one Dr. John Polidori rented a chateau in the countryside. They challenged each other to write a story. Mary Shelley developed Frankenstein from this event, and John Polidori wrote the first vampire tale, called, “The Vampyre.”
MM: Wow, that is fascinating.
LE: From there, you have Bram Stoker, and Ann Rice. I also taught Twilight because I was obsessed with it. I taught Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a visual text. And it was the one class that I was certain all of my college students (including the male students) actually read the books, so I won that year.
MM: (Laughs). That’s great. And you’re getting those people into that genre, too. We need more fantasy readers! Tell me about your books. What are you writing?
I’m really big into action adventure. I have a lot of fight scenes in my books, and I hope I do justice to them.
LE: My first seven or eight books are all Young Adult. The first one was set in the eighties and the early two-thousands. After that, I made my break into fantasy with Pluto’s Gate. Then I published a three-book series with Entangled Teen, the True Born Trilogy. It’s set in a future where a global pandemic has segregated society, and there are these True Borns, who are born with genetic variations—genetic devolution with animal DNA—that protect them from this plague. This was all before our pandemic, of course! The books revolve around these twin girls who’s DNA might hold the secret to curing the plague. That’s what the whole series is about. The twins end up working with the True Borns, whose leader is Nolan Storm, a fantastical, demigod-like figure with antlers. There are also shifters. And romance!
MM: Those sounds fantastic.
LE: The next book,A Glamour of Blood, is a spinoff in the same world about a woman who is functionally blind, except that she can see true born genetic variations. Her best friend is a cat man, a True Born, and they’re on the run from the leader of the True Borns who is going to kill them, while at the same time they are on the hunt for some missing street children.
MM: What do you have coming up?
LE: In October, Entangled Teen is coming out with Starling’s Weave. It’s my first break into full-on “Romantasy.” It’s about a girl who grows up in a very cloistered mage society, but she has no magic. It’s a society on the verge of ecological collapse, because the magic that runs the world is failing. The heroine thinks she can save everything if she finds a story about a missing magical relic. The love interest in the book is a pirate who kidnaps her and forces her on his mission, which is actually turns out to be the same mission, in the end.
MM: Fun! Sounds fantastic.
LE: I hope so. Like you, I’m really big into action adventure. I have a lot of fight scenes in my books, and I hope I do justice to them.
MM: Those are hard! So, what was the very first fantasy book that you ever read that made you want to write fantasy?
LE: I believe it was Sherry S. Tepper’s Gate to Women’s Country. I bought it when I was eleven and still have the book. Oh—and all of Ann McCaffrey. How about you?
MM: I have a book that I read when I was a preteen called The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia A. McKillip. It was about a girl who lived in isolation, but she could converse with these fantastic creatures that surrounded her. It was just such a fascinating peek into this kind of isolated world with this woman who had magic and she could talk to these creatures. Like, she had a lion and all kinds of things. I still have it. My husband tracked down a first edition for me for Christmas one year.
LE: That’s amazing! And isn’t it funny that we both sort of did that, held on to those books.
L. E. Sterling 