William Alexander
About Author
William Alexander is an American writer and Adjunct Professor in Liberal Arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. His debut novel, Goblin Secrets, won the annual National Book Award for Young People's Literature. It features an orphaned boy who runs away to search for his lost brother in the magical city of Zombay.
Alexander studied theatre and folklore at Oberlin College and English at the University of Vermont. His writing influences include well-known fantasy and mystery authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Susan Cooper.
Further novels set in Zombay are planned, beginning with Ghoulish Song. Alexander says: "That place isn't done with me yet. The next Zombay book is about music and shadows. It runs parallel to this one, sharing a few scenes and characters but otherwise unfolding in different parts of the city. Zombay is a big place. Cities are always full of different stories unfolding at once."
Interview
GOBLIN SECRETS
Published by MUCH-IN-LITTLE
JULY 2013
Goblin Secrets, the debut novel of William Alexander, has already won the annual National Book Award for Young People's Literature and is now published in the UK. It is based in a magical town, Zombay, and follows the story of young Rownie as he searches for his brother who disappeared some months previously. When Rownie comes across a travelling band of actor goblins, his search takes on a new intensity.
Q: Can you tell us a bit more about your day job?
A: I teach composition and creative writing at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. I love it. Teaching isn't always the best day-job for an author - both draw from the same well but I find that forcing myself to articulate how writing works to my students also forces me to articulate it to myself. So that's useful. It's also fun. I enjoy having a captive audience. And most of my students are dedicated to some form of storytelling or illustration, comics, animation or film making, so it's rewarding to develop a sense of story that's useful to different sorts of artists.
Q: Can you describe yourself in three words?
A: "Muppet Show guest". Not that I ever have performed alongside Kermit, but "aspiring Muppet Show guest-star" is too long.
Let me try again. "Failed bedtime storyteller." I say "failed" because I used to read bedtime stories to my little sister, and "bedtime" never actually happened. We would both get caught up in the book and I'd just keep reading until dawn. We read Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising until the sun was rising. But now I that I tell bedtime stories to my own kids I'm a little more committed to their actual sleep, so hopefully this description no longer fits.
One more try: "theatrical story-geek." Sure, that works.
Q: Have you always written?
A: It feels that way now. I did write a ghost story set on a spaceship when I was eight years old. But it would be more truthful to say that I always intended to write, but I took my time getting around to it. And I set writing aside while studying and working in theatre, though all of that turned out to be useful later. I learned most of what I know about character creation, developing the shape and rhythm of a scene, and the taste of delicious language from studying theatre.
Q:If there was one thing or one moment that inspired Goblin Secrets, then what or when was it?
A: If I had to choose one moment, it would be crossing the Charles Bridge in Prague as a cliched American backpacker. I was eighteen. The buskers were out in force, covering the whole bridge with jangling music. Two masked performers stood in the middle. Neither one made any sound. They just moved in a way that their goblinish masks seemed to insist that they move.
Q: Can you tell us a bit more about your setting, the town Zombay, and why it's called that?
A: Zombay is a city split by a large and temperamental river, the way most cities were before we had highways. The two halves are very different. Northside is orderly, more privileged, and more powerful. Southside is a messier place where none of the streets move in straight lines and the rules are unclear. Only one bridge, the Fiddleway Bridge, holds the two halves together and makes the place a single city. The Fiddleway is a blend of the Charles Bridge in Prague, the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, and stories about old London Bridge.
The name Zombay isn't meant to reference zombies, though heartless people in the story do become a bit zombie-like, now that I think about it. The city just insisted on that name, and I saw it more clearly once I knew it was Zombay.
Q: There's a lot about 'wheels within wheels' in the story. Why do clockwork instruments and machinery play such a distinctive role in your story?
A: Because the clock tower in Prague is also a puppet stage, and the elegant way that clockwork fits together reminds me of the teamwork that can sometimes develop between actors in a play. Because we've been dreaming about mechanical beasts and people for very much longer than we've been making clocks, but gears and clockwork have become ur-machines in our heads and dreams. Because Zombay is a place where rational precision and messier, more associative sorts of thinking come into conflict and combine in odd ways. Because this is a good time to reconsider our relationship to machines, what we put into them, and what we take away from ourselves and the world by making them.
Q: You use the idea of things shifting their identity, children becoming goblins, adults becoming machinery, actors taking on their mask identity etc. Can you tell us a little more about the allegorical meanings behind this?
A: Identity is always fluid, but as adults we usually fool ourselves into thinking otherwise. Kids know better. They're still deciding who they might want to become, and trying on new possibilities. The more masks they find, the more material they'll be able to use to make themselves and decide who to be. This is still true of adults, but we're better at pretending that it isn't.
Q: How much attention to you pay to people's names in the story?
A: Lots. Too much. I could have written whole chapters in the time it took to name a single character. Some of the names have older significance, like Semele (the mother of the first actor in Greek myth). Others just sound right. Either way it took me too long to choose them.
Q: We loved the character Graba and wondered if she had changed or developed as you wrote her?
A: Yes. Absolutely. She's an urban sort of Baba Yaga. I took the chicken legs away from Baba Yaga's folkloric house and gave them to the witch herself instead. But Graba also took on her predecessor's ambiguities. Baba Yaga might help you, or she might eat you, and you'll never know which in advance.
Q: Do you have a favourite character, good or bad?
A: Not really! I do love Graba. And Thomas the goblin actor has such grumpy eloquence. I also love Essa's voice, and the various ways that Rownie learns who he wants to become So no, not really.
Q: Did any of the characters surprise you with the direction they took?
A: Graba. The rest of the cast behaved themselves, mostly, but she refused to be scripted. Graba does what Graba wants, and I was never really sure what she would do or say.
Q: Did you plan the story in advance or did the plot emerge as you wrote?
A: The plot emerged as I wrote. I struck off into the dark, bumped into the furniture, and changed directions several times before finally finishing the story I had started. It was fun but inefficient. Having a wonderful editor helps with that sort of thing.
Q: Will Zombay inspire more stories?
A: Absolutely. The place isn't done with me yet. But I have set Zombay aside for the moment. A few other stories need writing first.
Q: When and where do you do your writing?
A: I have a small desk in a small room where I go to hide and write. I used to teach in the evening after spending my whole day with my toddling son. He would nap for two to three hours every single afternoon, which was fantastic. I finished two novels during his naptime. Then he stopped napping, and I feared for my career. But now he's in preschool, so I still get two or three hours daily. Lately I've been writing in my favourite cafe as much as I do at home.
Q: What gets you through the day?
A: Coffee. The good stuff. Fairly traded and smoothly brewed. Chocolate helps, too.
Q: What are your two top writing tips for young people?
1) Read widely and wildly. Writing is just a very active kind of reading, and the more you read the better you'll be able to respond to what you read with your own stories.
2) Reward yourself for every accomplishment, large or small, because any external reward (like publication) will be too far in the future, and too uncertain, to serve as encouragement. Don't write for the possibility of future publication. Write for the bar of chocolate you keep in your desk, and eat it just as soon as you get to the end of the chapter.
Q: Where's your favourite escape?
A: Le Guin's Earthsea. I'm not much of a sailor on this side of the page, but I've travelled through that archipelago many times.
