Featured Interview With Avery Teoda
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I write contemporary fantasy. I hesitate to call it urban fantasy because it doesn’t really fit that mold; the setting is contemporary, in a world the reader would recognize, but it’s also woven through with mythology and magic. I’ve always been fascinated with world mythologies and how those mythologies are reflections of the cultures they came from. That definitely shows up in my writing.
Likewise, the cultures I came from are reflected in my writing. I was born in Southern California, but I spent my formative years in the Arkansas Ozarks. I got out as soon as I could, and I’ve lived on both coasts as well as several points in between. I eventually landed in Seattle, where I am now with my partner and four cats. It’s a completely different world, but one that fits me better.
But in spite of wandering around my entire adult life, the Ozarks left their mark on me, for better and for worse. I often end up weaving both into my writing. I started writing my Twisted Tree books, which are set in the Ozarks, just as I was getting ready to move out of the region. I guess I was looking for a way to write an homage to the place that helped raise me. I wouldn’t say they’re “local flavor” books, but there’s definitely tastes of the region and the culture. Plus Hungarian mythology and magical horses.
I drew a lot of inspiration from the people I grew up with, not in the sense that the characters are direct analogs of people I knew, but that the people in the book COULD have been people I knew. In spite of all this fantastic magic happening, and a million different worlds, I wanted to write characters with personalities and behavior grounded in reality. The best thing I could think to do is ground them in MY reality. I jokingly call my book “rednecks and magic,” which is true, but it’s also really just about people who were molded, for better and for worse, by the places and people who raised them, just like I was. …Plus mythology and magical horses.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I actually didn’t enjoy reading when I was little. I distinctly remember fighting with my grandmother over reading for 15 whole minutes for school when I was seven or eight. Then we moved halfway across the country, from California to the Ozarks. I was already a shy kid, and the complete culture shock made me replace socialization with books. I can definitely point to that as the thing that most influenced my desire to read. From then on, I kept getting in trouble for reading books when I was supposed to be doing other schoolwork.
I guess I started writing more in earnest around that time, too. I’d written stories ever since I was six or so, but when I was in fifth grade, I entered and won a story contest at school. I’ve written pretty steadily since then. I’ve never been very good at writing short stories or poetry; my short stories have always turned into novels, and let’s not talk about the 7th-grade poetry.
When I was in college, I discovered the wonder of a giant research library, and for the better part of two years, I roamed the stacks for obscure information about the topic I was writing about. I was writing a historical fantasy novel at the time, so I dug through books to learn as much as I could about the period. The novel never really went anywhere, but I learned two extremely valuable lessons: 1) research skills and 2) a different perspective on history. The book was set just before the American Revolution in the colonies. We Americans are always told the war was about independence and freedom from oppression, but the books I was reading offered me a more nuanced view of that period. Since then, I’ve been fascinated by those alternate narratives and I’ve tried to capture them in my writing in various ways. I guess that’s actually why I write contemporary speculative fiction: spec fic is all about the alternate realities and alternate narratives.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
As you might have guessed from the previous question, I’m a research nerd. I read nonfiction the most, and often in the service of the book I’m writing. I love learning new and different things that I didn’t even know I wanted to know. (I just started reading Carl Sagan’s Cosmos…amazing stuff.)
When I do read fiction, it has to be really good, nuanced fiction with a lot of depth. When I was growing up, I read lots of animal books: every Redwall book I could get my hands on, The Wild Road by Gabriel King, Watership Down, and the Clan of the Cave Bear series. (Yeah, I thought they were animal books. I was wrong.) Books like the Dragons series by Patricia Wrede and the Chronicles of Prydain were my main exposures to epic fantasy. I’d say they’re sort of atypical epic fantasy in some ways, and I’m sure they led me to write atypical fantasy.
Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel/Naamah series and Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials are my favorites, and I kind of want to be them when I grow up. Garth Nix’s Abhorsen series also had a pretty heavy influence on me. But there are other books that have influenced me, too. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is my absolute favorite book. A lot of my style as well as my desire to take a nuanced, in-depth look at a family or a tight-knit group of people comes from that book.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
The book I just finished is called The Lost Are Like This, which is a sequel to my first one, The Wicked Instead. The series is written in conjunction with Tiger Gray’s No Deadly Thing. Eventually the two series will merge into a co-written series.
My half of the series follows two brothers from the Ozarks, Cary and Lindsay, who were raised in a religious cult compound. They escape after Cary is paralyzed in a hunting accident. Later, they come to realize they’re descended from a line of very powerful magic users called táltosk. They have the ability to travel along the World Tree, on which rests innumerable different worlds. The World Tree is in danger of becoming corrupted. Its collapse would destroy every sentient world, and Cary and Lindsay are told that they’re princes, descended from a line of extraordinarily powerful táltosk, who are supposed to be the ones who have to heal the Tree. The first book is about the brothers’ fight to break away from their old life, which continues to haunt them, and begin learning about their new one as táltosk.
They start to learn they can’t trust just anybody, but they have to trust themselves, something they’ve never been taught to do. They get magical horses and cool powers, but it’s really about that journey.
The second book picks up where the first leaves off. Cary and Lindsay have begun their new life, and now they have to take charge of it. They’re suddenly saddled with all of these new powers and responsibilities, but dealing with that isn’t easy, especially when things keep crumbling around them. Where they had to learn to trust themselves in the first book, now they have to figure out how to trust other people, searching out allies in their fight against their enemy, who is a familiar face from the first book. Their enemy stole something that’s of vital importance to the World Tree; Cary and Lindsay have to figure out how to get it back even as their own world is in danger of falling apart.
Cary and Lindsay aren’t, I don’t think, your typical fantasy heroes. They’re literally farm boys who grew up without education and in isolation from most of the real world, so they’re pretty ignorant of a lot of things, like how to handle themselves in difficult situations. Despite them being adults (29 and 30 at the beginning of the first book), these books are really their coming-of-age story. They screw a lot of things up, but they always keep trying. Their growth comes in fits and starts sometimes, because whose doesn’t? I didn’t really want to write protagonists who were ready for grand, sweeping, heroic actions right away. These are people who are stumbling through, not always sure where they’re going, but really motivated to NOT stay where they are. I prefer the kind of protagonist who simply does what they have to do; they may not like it, but when it comes down to it, they’ll do it. That, I think, is where heroism is: doing what you have to do even though it could all turn out terrible.
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