Q1. Daughter of Light and Shadows includes lots of Fairy lore, such as Faye's tips about leaving food to placate them and the fairy road that Rav's house is built on causing disturbances in the atmosphere and temperature. Did you do a lot of research into folk/fairy belief in Scotland?
Yes, I suppose I did. Some I knew already - like, in Iceland, where roads are diverted around faery mounds to appease the fae, which was something that fed into the faery road that cuts through Rav’s house - and some I learnt from reading. I can recommend The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies by Robert Kirk, which is the supposedly true record of a 17th century Scottish minister’s direct experience with the faery realms. Also great was Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies 500AD to the present by Simon Young and Ceri Houlbrook, which is a compilation/survey type of book and has a chapter on Scotland in particular. Another great book is The Chronicles of the Sidhe by Steve Blamires in which I learnt all about the faery writings of Fiona MacLeod, where we find the origin of the traditional four elemental faery cities: Murias, Falias, Finias and Gorias.
MacLeod was in fact a ‘channelled’ entity, a fae, that a Scottish writer called William Sharp was in contact with, and created a number of poems and writings under her name. So there is a deep history and reasonable amount of scholarship on the subject of faery realms in Scottish lore. Those faery cities as concepts for imagining and working with the elemental kingdoms (earth, air, fore and water) are used by other writers such as hedge witch Rae Beth. Plus, there’s a pretty big version of modern witchcraft which is specifically faery witchcraft, that is, a semi-ceremonial spiritual practice whose deities are the fae. So, reading about that has been very useful and interesting.
For anyone interested, there’s also a very detailed and modern survey of modern faery sightings from all over the world between 2014-2017 here, published in association with Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies 500AD to the present by Simon Young and Ceri Houlbrook: http://www.fairyist.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/The-Fairy-Census-2014-2017-1.pdf Before you dismiss the 500 records all as being from oddbods, have a read - no-one sounds mad and there is definite synergy of particular locations having high numbers of unconnected faery sightings. Fascinating reading considering that the 500 records included are only from people who would have found out about the survey, and were inclined enough to fill it in, over a three year period. Extrapolated over the history of humankind, and including people that were too frightened to talk about what they saw/thought it was evil/thought they themselves were evil for seeing it/thought they were mad/disbelieved the evidence of their own eyes, that’s a lot of faery sightings.I also love Brian Froud’s faerie oracle which has a very interesting book that comes with the deck: lots of faery types to learn about in there!
Q2. You are quite a spiritual person, how does that feed into your writing/creativity?
I suppose as anyone could surmise from my first answer, yes, a pagan spirituality is a big part of my life. Everything I write is in some way connected to my interest in witchcraft, in particular, but in general, death, reincarnation, magic and the occult. Writing is also a spiritual practice for me, in that I write sometimes in an open, channelled manner which allows me to connect with, say, deity and energy and ‘free-write’ or even use automatic writing at times. I also do a lot of shamanic journeying, a kind of meditative practice using a drumbeat, which is a very visionary type of experience and helps a lot for writing in terms of imagery. I also write using my own knowledge and experience: how I have experienced spellwork, how I’ve felt connecting to gods, my dreams, how healing feels when you doit, what tarot is like, etc etc.
Q3. Faye's story takes place in Scotland. Is Scotland a special place for you? How important is place and landscape to your writing?
I have a lot of family in Scotland and an ancestry there, so I have a historical connection with Ayrshire, though I set this book in Fife because I know it a bit better, and the coastal regions are very magical. Scotland is a deeply beautiful, resonant land, dense with magic, and so it was a pleasure to write a little bit about that. Land is very important to me, and I think of it as an extra character of its own when I write because setting is so vital for the context of the story. As a pagan, too, I’m always trying to get over to my readers my sense of delight and wonder in the natural world as well as a desire to protect and revere it as holy - as having sovereignty. Like our bodies do too.
And, also, something always about the real, direct, usable power that the land has we can use for our own empowerment, whether that be the now-scientifically-proven fact that our bodies connecting to the earth makes us more healthy (those articles on forest bathing and the benefits of walking barefoot on soil), the benefits of women understanding their menstrual cycles in relation to moon phases and that wisdom of women’s health, or how we can consciously draw power from the earth and the elements and direct it towards good outcomes for ourselves.
Q4. How easy or difficult has it been to switch gears from writing YA to writing for adults?
t’s been okay - much is the same. To be honest it’s quite nice to move away from the self-referential first person teen voice I wrote my first trilogy in - not that I didn’t enjoy it, but good for a change! And in the third person you can adopt a really nice cosy narrator voice that I enjoy.
Q5. You make reference to the Scottish witch trials, Faye campaigns for a memorial to all the women who were condemned including her ancestor Grainne. Do you think you will write about this historical period at some point?
I don’t intend to, no. Partly because there’s so much on the subject I don’t know what I could bring to it that would be new, partly because it’s so dark and I wouldn’t want to spend a lot of headspace there. I referred to it in Daughter of Light and Shadows because I wanted to explore the theme of ancestral healing for Faye - her ancestor was murdered at a witch trial, and she and all her grandmothers after that point have felt it. Faye manages to heal that line, going back generations, helped by the magic of a faery queen. In shamanic traditions, when we have healing, it’s seen as healing us but also healing the seven generations before, and the generations yet to come, which is such a powerful concept. I’ve had healing of this kind and I can only say how profound it was.
Faye reclaims her power, no longer feeling that she shouldn’t take up space, that she’s afraid of being noticed, of standing out because of the power she has. In many ways this is the struggle of women now: survivors of sexual intimidation and rape, a trauma related to being shamed for being a woman, are being brave and taking that power back. Even when we, as women, are not personally victims of rape, we have the experiences of intimidation, fear, harassment and horror connected to being a woman from the generations of women before us, woven into our ancestral DNA. That’s a lot of healing that needs to be done, and a lot of women are starting to do that now.
The commemoration of those experiences - the public acceptance and apology for atrocities such as the witch trials, which are burned into many womens’ souls - is important, just as it’s important that we listen to and believe victims of abuse. A memorial says we see you, we hear you, we are sorry.
There is an almost complete lack of proper remembrance sites for witch trials, perhaps because people still don’t really understand what happened in those years. They haven’t connected the facts that these were ‘ordinary’ people who may or may not have been practising some form of folk magic or medicine, an indigenous practice if so, or, more likely, were poor and a nuisance, or the victim of a neighbour’s ill will (arguably, when it comes to the ‘evil eye’, the accusers were the powerful witches, not the victims).
I wonder whether the lack of witch trial memorials in the UK is due to a continuing false belief about the ‘evil’ and indeed supernatural nature of witches, coupled with a desire on the part of the establishment (church and state) to avoid questions such as if these people weren’t supernatural entities, why were they persecuted? And perhaps therefore what does that say about the continuing fear by both church and state of magic and folk magic traditions? It feels as though, if memorials became more of a thing (which they should be, out of basic decency if nothing else) more people would start seeing that magical practices have been suppressed in many countries by patriarchal religions, corporations and governments, because they know that when people practice empowering traditional magical practices, whatever they may be, they get a little rowdy.
Q6. Who are the writers who inspire and influence you?
So many! All writers are such book nerds of course. I love Ursula Le Guin, the mother of fantasy. I love Margaret Atwood, a complete genius in every way; I’ve read everything she’s written multiple times. I am a big fan of Marge Piercy, Orwell and AS Byatt. I love Neil Gaiman. Starhawk, definitely. I adored Mary Stewart’s Arthurian books, Stephen King, the occult novels of Dion Fortune and Stewart Farrar have been a big influence on me, Game of Thrones, Alice Hoffman, tons of poetry from Eliot to Tennyson to Mina Loy to Yeats. I have an MA in avant garde and experimental poetics and write in that genre too, and I love contemporary artists using text like Sophie Calle, Marina Abramovic, Jenny Holzer, Guerilla Girls, that kind of thing. For short stories I love Kelly Link, Susan Irvine, Flannery O’Connor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Deborah Kay Davis, Nicola Barker, so many, I can’t think of them all! Lots of scifi/speculative fiction too, counterculture things, you name it really.
I read a lot of music biography too - my favourite recently was Just Kids by Patti Smith and Moby’s autobiography with Faber, and a LOT of nonfiction both around what I’m writing for research, but also for general spiritual interest, so books about specific gods and goddesses, other cultures’ spiritual practices, tarot, astrology, places of interest.
Q7. Are you a writer who carefully plans out your work or do you simply start writing and see what happens?
Mostly the latter, though I have to be less devil-may-care now as I’m on tighter deadlines! Detailed planning fills me with dread and I have to say I do rely on the arrival of an out of the blue idea to save a plot, which happens more than you’d think. Plus, I do a lot of the writing in the editing.
Thank you so much Anna for answering all my questions. Daughter of Light and Shadows is out now in e-book, paperback and audio-book from Bookoutre The e-book is only 99p on Amazon Uk or $1.30 on Amazon.com
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