Eileen Kernaghan
An interview

Eileen Kernaghan was born in Grindrod, British Columbia, Canada, a small farming community.  At age five, her mother taught her to read and she immediately started writing stories.  When she was eight, she wrote a piece in which she borrowed more than heavily from "Alice in Wonderland."  Her teacher was so taken with her tale that he asked for a copy.  At a chance meeting thirty years later, during a writer's convention, the same teacher came up to her and told her he still had the copy. 

When she was twelve, she wrote a story about a boy trapper and a wolverine.  The Vancouver Sun newspaper bought it for twelve dollars and sixty-five cents.  Big money in those days.  Over the next twenty years she went to university, married and had three children.  When her last child entered kindergarten, she decided Wednesday morning, from ten to twelve, would be her writing time and she sat down and began writing again.

Ms. Kernaghan's works include the award-winning "Grey Isles" trilogy of which  Journey to Aprilioth,  (1980) won a silver medal for original paperback fiction from 'The West Coast Review of Books';  and "Songs from the Drowned Lands," (1983) which won the Canadian Science fiction and Fantasy Award.  The third book in the series, "The Sarsen Witch," was shortlisted for the same award.  She also co-authored "Walking After Midnight" (Berkley 1990), a nonfiction book on reincarnation, based on a documentary by a Vancouver filmmaker.  

Her book "Dance of the Snow Dragon" was published in 1995.  "The Snow Queen", her latest book, which was published in 2000, recently won the Aurora award for 2001, the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy award.

Rose and Thorn (R&T):   What genre did you start writing and why?

Eileen Kernaghan (EK):  I had been reading horror stories, which were very popular at that time.  I thought it seemed pretty easy, so I wrote one and it was really bad.  I couldn't sell that to anyone.  Then I wrote a mystery and nobody wanted to buy that one either.  Then I wrote a science fiction story, which was more like a novelette and it was really, really bad.  I'm so glad that nobody bought it.  Then I wrote another long science fiction story, but by this time I was getting better.  That one I sold to Galaxy, a newsstand science fiction magazine in the States, for two hundred and forty dollars.  The illustration for the story was on the cover of the magazine.  So, that was a major thrill.

R&T:  How did you get into writing science fiction?

EK:  I had always read science fiction and fantasy, so I was familiar with the genre.  I needed a topic and knew it would be fantasy, but also wanted it to be historical.  My husband suggested Stonehenge as, at that time, there wasn't much written about it.  I wrote a book called "Journey to Aprilioth," which takes place around 2,000 BC.   It is about a priest who is a descendant of scientists and sorcerers.  Their society  had been destroyed by a tidal wave.  Another catastrophe is about to wipe out the current society and it is up to my hero to travel to the Island of Aprilioth to find the life saving secret.  It is different from your usual fantasy quest story because I put what archaeologists theorized was the real world of 2,000 BC

R&T:  What did you do when you finished your novel?

EK:  I sent it to Del Rey and they didn't want it, so then I sent it to Ace, which was another big science fiction publisher in New York.  They asked to see it almost right away.  After I sent the whole manuscript I then waited for about nine months, when I received a letter saying they wanted to buy the book.

R&T:  So, after this success what did you do?

EK:  Ace liked to do a series of books, they like to build a reputation, a name.  I was already working on a second book, "Songs from the Drowned Lands."  Then I wrote a prequel to "Journey to Aprilioth."  I went back 300 years to tell the story of the original ancestors of the priest.  After that I wrote "The Sarsen Witch." I called them the Grey Isles Trilogy.  It was about this time the whole science fiction publishing field changed.  Instead of buying a book because they liked it, the publishers were more interested in what books the stores could sell.  Many science fiction careers came to a halt

R&T:  Which direction did your writing go in after this?

EK:  The publishers that did young adult books were very open to fantasy, so that was where I went.  I wrote "Dance of the Snow Dragon."  I sent it to Thistledown Press in Saskatchewan and they bought it.  And the second one, "The Snow Queen," (which just won the Aurora Award for 2001), they bought as well.  When you're working with a small literary press it's a different atmosphere altogether.  Small, friendly, they don't have big press runs, but they're just so nice to work with, you feel involved in the whole process.

R&T:  What is the title of the book you haven't published and what is it about?

EK:  It's called "Winter on the Plain of Ghosts."  It's set in l970 B.C.  It's about the prehistoric cities the Mohenjo-daro and Harappa on the Indus River.  They had a high civilization, which collapsed at that time, and nobody has ever figured out why.  One theory was the river changed course and another was that the Aryan horse people came down from the north and invaded them.  It's kind of an ecological book really.  What happens when your ecology, your whole environment changes?  I thought it was kind of topical when I wrote it.

R&T:  Do you have a new novel in progress?

EK:  Just started one.  I'm up to about Chapter nine.  It's set in Elizabethan England, the summer of l587, and the magic I'm writing about is alchemy, because the Elizabethan period was one of the turning points between magic and science.  It's a fascinating period to write about.

R&T:  Do you have a title?

EK:  It's called "The Alchemist's Daughter."  In my three young adult's novels I realize that I have completely different settings, time periods and themes.  But there is a connection-each one is a system of magic.  "The Snow Dragon's" magic was Tibetan Buddhist.  "The Snow Queen" is about northern shamanism, and "The Alchemist's Daughter" is about Renaissance alchemy.

R&T:  We are wondering about your interest in the Tibetan culture and where that came from?

EK:  I was searching for a setting.  I knew nothing about Tibetan Buddhism and my friend, Mary Choo, had just seen the Bhutanese ritual dancers at the Asian Pacific Festival in Vancouver, B.C.  She was just absolutely blown away by this performance and she said, "If you're looking for a story do one on the Bhutan."   It was a great suggestion.  Bhutan still has practically a pure Tibetan Buddhist culture.  I started reading about the traditional Buddhist belief in the hidden city of Shambhala, the magical city, somewhere beyond the snow peaks.  It is associated with James Hilton's Shangri-La.  What I did was base the second half of the book on the Tibetan legends of the search for Shambhala, which gave me a framework for the plot.

R&T:  How did you get into writing poetry?

EK:  That was in my twenties.  I had written very badly rhymed poetry when I was in high school.  I was picking up poetry magazines and I thought, gee, I could do that.  I started imitating, not the rhymed metrical poetry I had been doing before, but free verse.  The first poems I had published were in a small Canadian magazine, Northern Journey.  At the same time I was writing my novels I was writing poetry, very often based on the research I was doing.

R&T:  Have you ever taken any poetry writing classes or read any books on how to write poetry?  Do you have any books you could recommend to anyone wanting to try their hand at it?

EK:  I've never actually read books on writing poetry or taken any courses.  I've read an awful lot of poetry, rather than any specific book on the art of writing.  My advice would be just to read a great deal of poetry, of all kinds.

R&T:  Could you mention any authors that new poets should read?

EK:  I read a great deal of Ezra Pound especially his translations from the Chinese and from Provencal.  I love their simplicity and the imagery.  I read T.S. Eliot.  He and Pound changed the whole course in English poetry.  They took it from the Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth romantic tradition into what is know as modern poetry.  Anyone wanting to write poetry should get themselves a good anthology of English and American Poetry of the 20th Century.  I think it's the best way to learn.  Too many people, particularly older people brought up in school with the romantic poets are still trying to write in that tradition.  And you can't get it published now because it is just so dated.  You can still write rhymed poetry, but it has to speak in a contemporary voice.

R&T:  Could you mention any contemporary poets we should read?

EK: Rather than mention any poet in particular, I would recommend the university and college literary magazines, which each institution puts out.  Or go to a bookstore that carries these magazines and you'll probably find a poet that absolutely resonates with you and you'll think this is what I want to do.  But, it would be very difficult to name just one poet.  Today's poets are working in so many different directions.  You have street poets, performance poets, whose stuff doesn't look like anything on the written page.   You also have court poets where the emphasis is on the structure and the artifice of the use of language.

R&T:  Do you have a favourite of your own poems?

EK:  Yes.  I like "The Robber Maiden," because it is the inspiration of the book, "The Snow Queen."

R&T:  Do you have any one thing that you think is the most important in a poem?  Is it imagery, rhyme or any particular technique?

EK:  It's how all those things work together.  I don't think any one thing is more important than the other is.  It's a synthesis.  The imagery, the thought behind it.  The rhythm, the imaginative use of language, the freshness of the thought, the originality of it.  The thought that the poet is seeing something that we are aware of but really never thought of.  Or is seeing it in some new way or expressing it in some new way.

R&T:  Do you have a favourite poet?

EK:  Yes.  A poet I love to read is Gwendolyn MacEwan.  A contemporary Canadian poet.  Unfortunately, she's dead now.  Wonderful, strange, mystical  poetry.

R&T:  Could you walk us through how you write a poem from conception to completion?

EK:  To take a broad view, when I write a poem, it's like taking a huge block of stone or marble and I keep chipping away at it, chipping away until I finally get to the nugget that's in the middle.  Because I write three, four or five times as much as I finish up with.  The extra stuff, the extraneous stuff I have to sort of put it all down on paper.  Sometimes I start with an idea or a single line or an image and I really have to depend on my unconscious to produce for me, because it's not like writing a novel, it's not like writing prose where you go through a logical process.  It's very intuitive.  It's a germ of an idea, almost like clustering, where one idea comes from another and it attached itself to it and you get this great sort of disorganized unformed disc.  And, then, somewhere in there I know there has to be a poem.  I have to start paring and paring away until I get down to what I want to say.  Which means removing adjectives, removing adverbs, removing everything that doesn't directly relate.  Basically, that's it.  Just whittling down.  A lot of my poetry comes from something I've been researching, something I've been writing about and I want to express it in a different form.  I want to express it in poetry rather than in prose.

R&T:  Is this difficult for you to go from one form of writing to another?

EK:  It is difficult for me to go quickly from one to the other.  I can sit down cold at the computer and start to write a novel. But with a poem I have to be reading poetry, thinking about it.  I have to be in poetry mode.   Then I do a lot of poems, but if I'm working on a novel I produce practically none.

R&T:  You are currently one fifth of a poetry group called "Quintet," which has  published their own book, and given many public readings along the West Coast of Vancouver, B.C.  How did this come about?

EK:  Well, it came out of poetry exercises.

R&T:  When?

EK:  About four years ago.  Two of the writers, Sue Nevill and Clelie Riche, decided they needed some motivation to write poetry again, so they decided on a weekly exercise.  They decided that each week one of them would come up with a theme. They would each write a poem around that theme then they would critique each other's work.  Next I was invited to join, then Pam Galloway and then Jean Mallinson.   We went through a very productive prolific period for awhile, writing a poem every week.  Everyone just about wrote on every topic.  And we amassed all this material, so then we started doing readings.  Then, of course, we thought why don't we put together a manuscript.  So that was quite a process.  Well, we had to go through all this material and assess which was good enough for a book.  It's a good thing we are all friends, because we actually had to use a point system and vote to get enough for a manuscript.  So, then we sent it off to a publisher in Victoria, B.C. who accepted it.  We really spent a lot of time on the editing process it was really a good experience, now we're trying it again.

R&T:  One last question about your novel "The Snow Queen."  The cover is exquisite.  Could you explain how you came by this picture?

EK:  Thistledown, the editors, bless their hearts, asked if I had any ideas on what I'd like to see on the cover.  I said, "Yes, I would like something in the style of the turn of the century illustrator Charles Robinson."  I gave them two or three examples, just to give them the idea of what I was talking about.  One I sent was Charles Robinson's "The Russian Princess," an illustration for Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince and Other Stories." Thistledown liked it so much they decided to us it as the cover.  Because everyone concerned has been dead for more than fifty years it should be in the public domain, but nonetheless we contacted the original English publisher, Duckworth Ltd., for permission, which they kindly granted.

R&T:  Now, not only do you write novels and poetry and you've taught and raised a family, you also conduct a writing group in Port Moody, B.C.  How long have you been doing this?

EK:  The group has been there about thirty years.  We have one member that has been there that long, but I've been conducting it for about the past ten years.  I also conduct one at the Shadbolt Centre, in Burnaby, B.C.

R&T:  You are also involved with the Burnaby Writer's Society's newsletter.

EK:  Yes, I do it.  I'm the editor.  I take everything everybody gives me and put it all together.  It lists markets, resources.  Anyone can subscribe to it.  The address is: Burnaby Writer's Society, 6584 Deer Lake Avenue, Burnaby, B.C. V5G 3T7. Membership/subscription $30 ($20 sr/st/unwaged)  Sample issue for SASE.  Info:  444-1228 or lonewolf@portal.ca

R&T:  Have you ever had writer's block and if so how do you handle it?

EK:  I find switching from the computer to paper and pen often works.  So does a long walk.  I've also tried turning off the computer monitor and just letting the words pour out any old way, completely unedited, in the hope that my subconscious will decide to take over.  If I get bogged down in the novel I'll try working on another part of the book.  Sometimes, I'll put the whole thing on hold for awhile and do some research.  Research often generates ideas that get me going again.

R&T:  What does the writing life mean to you?

EK:  It's something that I've always done, since I was old enough to hold a pencil, and I can't imagine not doing it.  I suppose there was a time when I imagined it might bring me fame and fortune, but I don't worry about that much any more.  Just the satisfaction of writing the best book or the best poem I'm capable of writing is enough.

R&T:  Do you have anything you'd like to tell our readers?

EK:  Two things, actually.  First, don't be discouraged if you don't publish your story or poem on the first try or your tenth for that matter.  Like any other artist or craftsperson, you have to hone your skills.  You learn to write, by writing.  And rewriting.  And rewriting.  And by sending things out and getting them rejected. And the second thing is, don't even think about giving up your day job.

Read Eileen Kernaghan's short story, The Watley Man, in this issue of The Rose & Thorn.

Sandra Merz, of Port Coquitlam, B.C.,  is a free-lance writer who has published short stories, articles, poems and is currently writing her first novel.  She is also a Jr. Editor for The Rose and Thorn.