An Interview with Francesca Forrest
What does noblebright fantasy mean to you? Why is it important?
Noblebright is about the indomitability of the human spirit, about our dandelion nature, which can push through concrete and put out a golden flower. Instead of “everything sucks, and then you die,” Noblebright says there may be suckiness, and there will be death, but there will also be song, piercing you with joy, and it’ll be when and where you least expect it—by the side of the highway, on the fire escape four floors up, in the airport restroom. Stories that acknowledge that breathtaking truth are noblebright stories.
How did you start writing?
I started by making loops and swirls on a piece of paper and holding it up for my parents to admire. “Look! I’m writing a story!” My dad is a writer, so it always existed in my imagination as a possible thing to do. I love that in our current world, it’s possible to be a writer in many different ways—you can write fanfiction, or write for a personal fanbase on your website/patreon, or self-publish whole novels, or do a combination of self-publishing and traditional publishing, or just go the traditional route. There are so many ways to reach out to readers.
What are some of your favorite books/authors? Why?
It’s weird: I have favorite books from childhood—things by C.S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, Lloyd Alexander, and Zilpha Keatley Snyder, for instance—but when it gets to books or authors I’ve enjoyed as an adult, it’s hard to pick favorites. In speculative fiction, a story that’s lingered in my mind is G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen. I was also blown away by Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Time—talk about big imagination. It’s not speculative fiction, but a novel I’m still vibrating from is Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera.
Please tell us about your world and your characters.
Pen Pal is set in fictional locations in our world—a floating community off the US Gulf coast and a tiny, unnamed Southeast Asian nation. Strange chance, or maybe destiny, bring Em, a twelve-year-old girl from the floating community, into a pen pal relationship with Kaya, a political prisoner in the Southeast Asian country. They both seem powerless, but appearances are deceiving, especially when a friendly crow and the spirit of a volcano are involved.
Do you have any works in progress? Tell us about them!
A new day job is eating up way more of my time than I expected, but I am slowly, slowly working on what I think of as a hopeful postapocalyptic novel in which saving the world isn’t so much about a place as about people. When you’re helping each other survive, when you’re building families and relationships, you’re saving the world.
Where can we find you online?
I blog at asakiyume.dreamwidth.org—though these days I only post on weekends (that day job…)—and I’m on Twitter as @morinotsuma. I also sometimes throw a picture up on Instagram (asakiyume1007).
An Interview with Kate Stradling
What does noblebright fantasy mean to you? Why is it important?
For me, noblebright is foundational fantasy. The term is recent, but the concept goes back to the start of the genre, highlighting that people are inherently good and that they work for the betterment of their world.
It’s easy, when faced with real-life difficulties—social, political, environmental, etc.—to get discouraged and feel like everything is futile. NobleBright stories combat that by speaking to the power of the individual. They reinforce patterns of strength and self-sacrifice and remind us that we can each create change for good, even if only in small ways.
How did you start writing?
I’ve been writing since I was thirteen, but with zero ambition. It was a personal escape. I didn’t admit it to anyone for a decade, and I was always going to quit. However, “I’ll stop once I finish high school” turned into “…once I start college,” which turned into “…once I graduate,” and then “…once I finish my MA.” The summer I was supposed to spend researching my thesis, I wrote a fantasy novel instead, and when I had to set that aside unfinished in the fall, it nagged at me. I loved my discipline (English language/linguistics), but after my thesis defense, when I told my committee chair about the novel waiting in the wings, she said, “Get out of academia”—in the nicest, most encouraging way possible.
So for the first time in my life, at twenty-seven, I considered becoming a writer. I let myself view my stories not just as some side activity I did to pass the time, but as work that had value in its own right. Even then, I always assumed I’d take the Emily Dickinson path: toss a couple token items out into the world and then stuff everything else into my desk drawers for my family to find after I was dead. Still not sure how I strayed so far from that model, but it’s been a fun ride.
What are some of your favorite books/authors? Why?
A lot of my favorites are female and British: Diana Wynne Jones, Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer, Jane Austen, and Fanny Burney. They’re all authors I can come to years after the fact and still enjoy their books as much as the first time I read them.
Burney’s Evelina is my all-time favorite classic. It’s chock full of tropes—a perfect heroine, a noble hero, a tragic backstory that stands as a roadblock between them, etc.—but it’s funny and sincere. Evelina, for all her physical perfections, actually behaves like a sixteen-year-old launched into society without a clue. She makes mistakes. She offends people. She gets caught up in unsavory situations and stuck with unsavory company. Her best friend’s dad and her grandmother are at each other’s throats in the most horrifyingly hilarious ways. And the payoff at the end, when her tragic backstory gets its due resolution, is just cathartic. It hits all my buttons for a satisfying read.
Please tell us about your world and your characters.
Brine and Bone takes place in the seaside kingdom of Corenden, in a world where humans and fairies once intermingled but don’t any more. Magic is not well understood, and those who have it get extensive training to cope with it, with the expectation that they’ll use it to help others—so, a sort of servant caste.
The heroine, Magdalena of Ondile, is the only daughter of a Grand Duke, but she lived in the royal court of Corenden as a child. As an empath, she treads the boundary between nobility and magician, and she’s fairly cynical because of it.
The hero, Prince Finnian, is the darling of the kingdom. He puts on a charming face, but he’s got a slippery side to him. He knows how to manipulate people to get his way. Luckily he’s not malicious about it.
Do you have any works in progress? Tell us about them!
I have too many to keep track of. Right now my primary WIP is a sequel to my portal fantasy Namesake (2017). The full story arc is
too long for one book, though, so it will be two, tentatively titled Goddess and Eidolon.
Where can we find you online?
I blog about writing, language, and literary tropes on katestradling.com. You can also find me on Twitter and Instagram, @katestradling, and on my critique group’s site, novelthree.com.