A Conversation with Kristin Cashore
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On April 2, 2016, Kristin Cashore served as the keynote speaker for "Truth, Memory, and Power," the fifth biennial conference on Children's Literature in English, Education, and Library Science at Kansas State University. Following her talk on "Breaking Characters and Healing Them Again: The Fiction Writer's Perspective on Working with Trauma," Cashore sat down with Karin Westman and Corinne Matthews to discuss her work.
I was re-reading Marie Rutkotski's books in anticipation of the most recent one coming out, thanks to your tip on the blog to read the first, and in her author's note for Winner's Curse, she acknowledges texts that kept her company while writing. I wondered which books were keeping you company during the writing of the Graceling trilogy.
Well, I have a better memory of the books that were keeping me company with the writing of Graceling and Fire than with Bitterblue, and I wonder if that's just because Bitterblue went on for so long. With Bitterblue, I more remember the music that was keeping me company.
With Graceling, without a doubt, the books of Tamora Pierce and Robin McKinley. Tamora Pierce's use of birth control was a big influence. With Fire, I read the book Kristin Lavrensdatter—do you know that book? It's a book by Sigrid Undset, a Norwegian author. It's from the early twentieth century, but it takes place during the Middle Ages, and it's just this epic thousand-page long story of this woman and her life. There's a more recent translation by Tiina Nunnally that's so beautiful, and I was reading that book during Fire. It really evoked a mood and a lot of the sort of poetic language that I was aiming for, to the extent that there are a couple places in my notebook where I accidentally call Fire "Kristin." Which would be embarrassing if people thought I was confusing her with me, because that's my name too! But actually, it was Kristin Lavrensdatter. I was identifying [End Page 90] Fire with this other woman. Their stories are completely different, but I think maybe their pain is similar. And also the writer Mary Stewart, who writes a lot of adventure novels of women in the mid-twentieth century going off on their own, always with a romance element. I think those books were also keeping me company during the writing of Fire.
And then music for Bitterblue.
Yes. There's a song by Patty Griffin called "Cold as It Gets" that I would listen to over and over again, because it felt like Bitterblue's song.
And I did read in another interview in the context of mysteries, and of mysteries being a favorite, that Dorothy Sayers was a favorite—
Yes.
—which caught my eye because J. K. Rowling also lists Sayers as being important—
Oh, no kidding!
And there's a character in Bitterblue—
Death, whose name is pronounced to rhyme with "teeth," but is spelled "death." That name came from Sayers, because Lord Peter Wimsey's full name is Peter Death Bredon Wimsey. And in one of the Sayers mysteries, Murder Must Advertise, Lord Peter is working undercover in an ad agency and goes by the name "Death Bredon." We were actually talking about this at lunch, because Joe Sutliff Sanders was asking me, why did you give this character this name where the reader has to keep reminding themselves that it isn't the word "death?" And yes, I probably should have thought about that more. But I was under the influence of Lord Peter, and it just seemed like the right name for that character.
After reading that interview, and re-reading Graceling, I was thinking about some of the scenes between Harriet and Peter, like in Gaudy Night, where they have to figure out how to physically protect themselves, and Peter is helping Harriet learn strategies. It made me think of Po and Katsa in terms of their engagement and...
