What led you to give the world yet another set of “boarding school magic” stories?
Well, as for writing about schools, I guess that’s largely a matter of “write what you know”: one friend who read Rough Magicke commented that I seemed to have a loose grasp of the difference between fiction and autobiography. And like any teacher, I have had students do odd things, over the years—I remember one group a long time back who quite seriously wanted me to teach them magic, as if there really were such a thing. So there is occasionally some material to draw on.
In the fictional world, my view of magic as something that could go hand in hand with religion (specifically with Christianity) was shaped by Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni novels, which began to appear when I was still in high school, and it also resembles the magic of Judith Tarr’s Hound and Falcon trilogy and her book about Pope Sylvester, Ars Magica, though those came out after I’d started thinking about Annandale. But all of those stories are set in medieval worlds, and though I am a medievalist by training, I wanted to read more about magic in the everyday contemporary world, sort of in the fashion of Charles Williams—so that’s what I tried to write, and I was very pleased when, in response to a request for a back of the book blurb for Rough Magicke, my friend Tom Shippey picked up on that. He wrote “An occult thriller, scary, learned, and charitable in the true tradition of Charles Williams and his fellow Inklings,” which is certainly over-generous, but does see exactly what I was trying to do.
Professor Shippey called the book “learned,” and your narrator is, like you, an English teacher: does that mean the stories are full of symbolism and hidden meanings?
Not deliberately, anyway, no. Some people have said that the characters have unrealistically big vocabularies and make allusions to an awful lot of books and movies, and, if that’s true, it might come from my own background. But I like to think these kids are just smart, and maybe even witty some of the time.
Your Annandale and its school are pretty clearly based on your hometown of Culver and the Culver Academies. Why did you change the names?
Surprisingly, for such a little place, there have been a lot of novels written about the town of Culver and the Academies under their real names, but when I was starting, I wasn’t sure the school would necessarily welcome another one. But then, too, one of our local books is a legitimate national bestseller from back in 1905, The House of a Thousand Candles, by Meredith Nicholson, and Nicholson calls his village “Annandale”: so I thought it would be fun to take over that idea for my own purposes.
Well, as for writing about schools, I guess that’s largely a matter of “write what you know”: one friend who read Rough Magicke commented that I seemed to have a loose grasp of the difference between fiction and autobiography. And like any teacher, I have had students do odd things, over the years—I remember one group a long time back who quite seriously wanted me to teach them magic, as if there really were such a thing. So there is occasionally some material to draw on.
In the fictional world, my view of magic as something that could go hand in hand with religion (specifically with Christianity) was shaped by Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni novels, which began to appear when I was still in high school, and it also resembles the magic of Judith Tarr’s Hound and Falcon trilogy and her book about Pope Sylvester, Ars Magica, though those came out after I’d started thinking about Annandale. But all of those stories are set in medieval worlds, and though I am a medievalist by training, I wanted to read more about magic in the everyday contemporary world, sort of in the fashion of Charles Williams—so that’s what I tried to write, and I was very pleased when, in response to a request for a back of the book blurb for Rough Magicke, my friend Tom Shippey picked up on that. He wrote “An occult thriller, scary, learned, and charitable in the true tradition of Charles Williams and his fellow Inklings,” which is certainly over-generous, but does see exactly what I was trying to do.
Professor Shippey called the book “learned,” and your narrator is, like you, an English teacher: does that mean the stories are full of symbolism and hidden meanings?
Not deliberately, anyway, no. Some people have said that the characters have unrealistically big vocabularies and make allusions to an awful lot of books and movies, and, if that’s true, it might come from my own background. But I like to think these kids are just smart, and maybe even witty some of the time.
Your Annandale and its school are pretty clearly based on your hometown of Culver and the Culver Academies. Why did you change the names?
Surprisingly, for such a little place, there have been a lot of novels written about the town of Culver and the Academies under their real names, but when I was starting, I wasn’t sure the school would necessarily welcome another one. But then, too, one of our local books is a legitimate national bestseller from back in 1905, The House of a Thousand Candles, by Meredith Nicholson, and Nicholson calls his village “Annandale”: so I thought it would be fun to take over that idea for my own purposes.