Featured Interview With Suzanna J. Linton
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
The short answer to where I was raised is: the swamps near Holly Hill, South Carolina. I say it like that because we moved around a bit and it’s an extremely rural area. We never did live in the town limits of anywhere, just close enough to a particular town to have its name on our address, but Holly Hill was a town we were never that far from. And it was fun living out in the “deep country”. I learned to not be afraid of the dark and creepy places!
Now, I live in Florence, SC and the only noteworthy things about it are the university and the fact that people pass it on their way to Myrtle Beach. And just like I grew up, I live on the outskirts of town with my husband and our dogs, cat, and Betta fish. I really enjoy the quiet and being close to nature.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I was very little. My mother taught me how to read before I started preschool, which the teachers didn’t like because they had their own method of teaching kids to read. They taught children to recognize whole words, whereas my mother taught me phonetics. So, what ended up happening was the kids would be presented a new word, which they would stare at blankly until the teacher told them what it was, and there I was, in the back, waving my hand because “Momma taught me what sound ‘ch’ makes!” (It also didn’t help that I was left-handed, which would not do in the superstitious backwoods.)
At any rate, I remember being all of five and trailing behind my mother with her copy of THE SECRET GARDEN, asking her about every word because the Yorkshire accent made zero sense and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I eventually gave up on that particular book but not books in general.
And when you read a lot and have a very active imagination, along with being fed a diet of folktales, fisherman’s tales, and ghost stories, it’s not long before it all bubbles over. I first started writing poetry and moved on to writing little novels by the time I was ten.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I adore Dean Koontz because of his way of weaving philosophy into his work without feeling preachy. Robin McKinley is amazing because her characters are so real and down to earth. I swear, I keep expecting to meet Sunshine whenever I go into a bakery/coffee shop. Charles de Lint’s writing is gorgeous. He weaves Native American and European myths into something that defies explanation. You call it urban fantasy because you have to call it something, but it’s so lyrical and so beautifully woven together that it feels more like an unknown side of our world brought to life. These are the authors that inspire me. I also tend to stick with fantasy but I don’t mind the occasional mystery and thriller.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
My latest book is WILLOWS OF FATE. My writing method begins with an idea, as most books begin. I let it stew for a while in my mind, dreaming about it on and off for however long it takes. When it comes ‘to term’, that’s when I start writing it out. WILLOWS first came into my mind in high school.
You hear stories about people who see ghosts or past events that happened in a particular place. But, what if a girl walks into a room and instead of a ghost, she sees a knight holding a bloody sword? Or, she sees a baby dragon gnawing on a cow’s leg bone? And how would that affect that girl, especially if she also had a traumatic event in her past? And then, right when she thinks she has it together, what if the beings she’s been seeing suddenly start to speak to her? “Come with us because you’re in danger. You have something very important. If you don’t come with us, life for you is going to get so much worse.”
I sat with that story for years before I finally wrote it. When I did, Desdemona was ready to leap out onto the page. I wrote the story in a matter of months. I think the editing took longer than the actual writing!
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