A: I had always loved Russian fairy tales, going back to childhood. After I graduated from high school, I deferred university enrollment for a year to study Russian at the Pushkin Institute in Moscow. When I returned to the States, I became a Russian major at Middlebury College. In my third year, I returned to Moscow for further study as part of my degree. So I had a pretty extensive background in Russian by the time I graduated from college.
After graduation, I moved to Hawaii, where I worked on a farm. I didn’t mean to stay in Hawaii long, just to figure out what I wanted to do in life. But farm work is not always the most exciting (I was picking coffee and macadamia nuts) and so to entertain myself, I started writing a book.
My background in Russian made it natural to want to write a book set in Russia, and since I love fairy-tale adaptations, I knew I wanted to write a novel based on a fairy tale. Also, oddly enough, a Russian family was living on the farm next to mine. They had a five-year-old daughter named Vasilisa. She was an amazing kid, so brave and fierce and kind. When I met her, I said to myself, that kid could be in a book. So Vasya became my young heroine. All the other elements just came together and my book was born.
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A: Fairy tales are amazing because they are our oldest stories: the ones everyone knows, in one form or another. But at the same time, fairy tales can be endlessly strange and mutable. They are both familiar and capable of surprising us, comforting and sinister. This dual nature gives the writer room to play with archetypes, with endings, with the audience’s expectations.
Fairy tales are such a useful tool for a writer. They are also just fun. Storytelling in its purest form.
There are a lot of fairy tales that I love, including Morozko, the fairy tale that opens The Bear and the Nightingale. Another favourite would be the Russian fairy tale called Marya Morevna. Mostly because it contains bird-princes, AND a warrior queen AND an evil sorcerer AND Baba Yaga AND magic horses. Like pretty much everything that is amazing.
A: The title can be taken both literally and figuratively. The literal nightingale is Vasya’s horse, Solovey (Solovey means nightingale in Russian). He is a minor character in this book, but just wait… However, on a deeper level, I think The Bear and the Nightingale is a book about oppositions—order and chaos, new and old, duty and freedom etc, and I like to think that the title speaks to that as well.
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A: Vasya is the character I love the most, and it was fun tracing the arc of her growth in this novel. But I would say the character I most enjoyed writing was Konstantin. Trying to figure out his worldview was fun, and also I love his mix of talent and charisma and piety and arrogance and cruelty. Writing his fall into evil was also a challenge, one that I enjoyed.
A: From early on, I knew that I wanted to hew to the fairy tale archetype of the wicked stepmother, but since I was writing a novel, I knew I needed to give the stepmother a reason for being wicked, and also to create some kind of connection between her and Vasya besides pure antagonism. So, reflecting that it is people who are similar that often hate each other the worst, I decided to give the stepmother the same supernatural gift as Vasilisa, but without the inner strength to accept it. This created an interesting sort of tension between them, one that I felt made them both more believable.
A: Well, without giving too much away, I can say that the second book in the trilogy is called The Girl in the Tower and takes place largely in the medieval city of Moscow. It is a bit more political than BEAR, and much tighter in time frame. The whole book, start to finish, only covers about six weeks. It plays with themes and characters from a different set of fairy tales than BEAR. You will see Vasilisa facing a whole new set of challenges in this book, and in the one that follows. I hope you will come along for the ride!
A: The Passage, by Justin Cronin. I have been on a strangely apocalyptic reading kick this season. I’ve read The Stand by Stephen King, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel and now I’m diving into The Passage trilogy. I think I might try doing more themed reading in future, because I am really enjoying being able to compare different writers’ approaches to the same topic.
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A: Barack Obama, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Hilary Mantel, and Agatha Christie. I’m not sure what we’d read. The Iliad maybe? Something old and grand that we’ve probably all already read, but that merits rereading We’d talk about human nature, and politics, and history and make bad (or perhaps amazing) jokes.We’d meet in a castle in the south of France or in a house by the beach in Hawaii with all the windows open.
A: I’d take my boxed set of The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett and try to pass it off as one book. I love those books so much. Every time I pick one of them up, I both thrill to the drama and learn something about being a writer at the same time.
