Postcard For Reader

Final Friday Interview: Clare B. Dunkle

Today I have the honor of welcoming Clare B. Dunkle back to WORD! She stopped by this past October and participated in Book Spooks and she's back again for an interview!

I just finished her werewolf novel By These Ten Bones and really liked it - review should be up next week. This is what it's about...

A mysterious young man has come to a small Highland town. His talent for wood carving soon wins the admiration of Maddie, the weaver’s daughter. Fascinated by the silent carver, she sets out to gain his trust. But there is an evil presence in the carver’s life that cannot be controlled, and Maddie watches her town fall under a shadow. One by one, people begin to die. Caught in the middle, Maddie must decide what matters most to her—and what price she is willing to pay to keep it.

But click read more to read the interview! We talk about Harry Potter, British ghosts, and dragons...

N: Welcome to WORD, Clare! What inspired you to write By These Ten Bones?
CBD: I had just read J.K. Rowling’s The Prisoner of Azkaban. Professor Lupin’s sad plight stayed in my memory, and I turned to the folklore of Europe to learn more about traditional werewolves. They tugged at my heartstrings even more, and I began to wonder whether there might be a cure for werewolves—a drastic cure to handle a drastic disease.

N: I love Lupin! Now, By These Ten Bones reminds me a lot of Little Red Riding Hood and one of your other novels, House of Dead Maids, is a prequel to Wuthering Heights. Do you have a favorite classic tale that you would like to write about - or just reread over and over again?
CBD: I’ve been fascinated since early childhood by the Persephone story and the stories of the fall of Troy. I like stories that don’t provide easy answers. Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty didn’t have to do anything; they just stood around while someone else worked all the magic and then lived “happily ever after.” What does that even mean? It sounds boring to me. But Persephone and the women of Troy—they faced real hardships. They had to leave their homes for a completely different country, a different lifestyle, probably a different language, and certainly different customs and foods. There’s adventure in that. There’s heartache too. And there’s a tremendous amount to learn in order to adjust.

The older I got, the more I realized that the moral dilemmas in those stories that really can’t be solved. Oh, sure, the men are in the wrong; I could always see that. But what about the women? Should a woman hauled off as a captive to Greece attempt to rebel day-in day-out for years, even if it results in her early death? Or should she learn her new culture and try to find a way to take advantage of that knowledge instead? What would you or I do if we were taken away from our country and had to live among strangers for year after year ... decades ... the rest of our lives? There’s just nothing easy about it, no “happily ever after.” And that’s why it fascinates me.

Of course, I’ve already written about those classic tales. My Hollow Kingdom Trilogy is all about the dilemmas of Persephone, and a short story on my website is too. I wrote that story because I got tired of hearing my daughters say that Marak, my ugly Hollow Kingdom Trilogy protagonist, was dreamy, so I set out to create the most unappealing Beast a “Beauty and the Beast” story could have. He looks ugly, he feels ugly, and he sounds ugly!

I still return to Persephone sometimes, in the form of that short story on the web. For some reason, it still has a hold over me, and I reread it whenever I’m depressed.

N: I love all the Greek women in stories; they're fascinating. You lived in Germany for seven years. Did you visit anyplace fantastical?
CBD: Oooh, I sure did! We went all over Europe and saw amazing things. You can find pictures of some of them here as well as under a couple of the website book sections. (The By These Ten Bones section has European photos, and so does The House Of Dead Maids section.)

But my favorite place we went was Brodsworth Hall in England. The pictures on the web don’t do it justice, and neither does this one, but here goes:

Brodsworth Hall was a gorgeous home in the 1860’s, but over time, the family lost their fortune and had to dismiss the servants one by one. By the time their house became a museum in the 1980’s, it was a leaky mess. The floors were warped, the old furniture was cracked, and the lovely gilt wallpaper was blotched and tarnished. So, rather than try to renovate it all, they simply stopped the decay and left it as is: original furniture standing where it has stood for over a hundred years, and old, water-damaged pictures hanging where they’ve hung since the 1880’s. You can see at every glance that it was once the vibrant home of a big family—the pet cemetery is still there, for instance—and the whole place feels lovely, wistful, sad, and just the least little bit spooky.

It has a ghost, too. One of the museum docents I spoke to had seen her herself. The ghost is a young woman who died unexpectedly there in the 1880’s, and she always looks startled and a little frightened, as if she’s trying to figure out who these people are who are tramping through her home. No one’s ever afraid of her, though. The docent said that when the staff see her, they address her by name, respectfully, and then she vanishes.

N: I kind of want to meet her.You have a kitty cat named Lucy! Has she done anything crazy lately? (Cats tend to.)
CBD: Everything that cat does is crazy! I’ll be the first to admit that Lucy is an evil cat. She’s my favorite, but it’s hard to understand why I love her so much. She’s a souvenir of Germany because the neighborhood we lived in had this tribe of feral cats living in it, generations of cats, who looked just like Lucy does. They were superb at roughing it, and they had the most aggressive personalities of any cats I’ve ever known. You couldn’t touch them, but you couldn’t scare them away, either. I had to keep my cats indoors for their own protection!

One day the meanest, toughest of those cats abandoned her kittens, and Lucy was the result. I had to bottle-raise her, which means that Lucy didn’t learn the difference between cats and humans. If I pet her, she turns away angrily and starts washing herself. She thinks her “mom” is criticizing her hygiene. And she WILL NOT sit in a lap even for a second. If she’s feeling very happy and loving, she’ll sit right next to me, almost but not quite touching.

It’s very frustrating to own an untouchable cat! I taught Lucy to kiss me on the lips so I wouldn’t feel quite so rejected, and she has to roll over to earn her dinner (as all my animals do except the snake) just so she won’t forget who’s in charge.

N: I think you need to teach it to the snake. What do you think of the new cover of By These Ten Bones versus the old cover? I ADORE the new one.
CBD: You know, I don’t think I’ve had a bad cover yet. I loved the old cover because it gave me a portrait of Paul—a very accurate portrait, I might add. It was fun for me to see in the real world what someone who had started out in my daydreams. But I do think they did a fantastic job with the new cover. I particularly love the title font—very unusual and beautiful.

N: What's your top piece of advice for young writers?
CBD: Go to college! And don’t just go to any college, either. Go to the best one you can afford. I know it’s tough, but if you plan for it, you can make it happen. I had to. My parents could have sent me to the state school across town, but I wanted to go to a better school than that, so I worked hard in high school to earn the scholarships I would need. The education I got working as hard as I could in high school was just as important as the education I got in college, believe it or not, and both have been vital to my career.

N: What's your favorite scent? Vanilla, cinnamon - you get the drift.
CBD: Cookies in the oven. It doesn’t really matter what kind, but sugar cookies make a kitchen smell the best.

N: There is a DRAGON terrorizing your town. What do you do to stop it?
CBD: Blimey! I don’t think I do. I’m heading for my solid concrete dragon shelter with the eight barrels of purified water and a thirty-day supply of canned goods!

Clare will be stopping by at In Bed With Books in a few days; be sure to check it out!