31 Days of Halloween { author interview } Skyler White
Today we are joined by author Skyler White whose second book In Dreams Begin will be released on November 2nd. Skyler kindly took a few moments out of her busy schedule to chat with RAO Reviews about her new book (read my review of the book here). After reading the interview, if you have any questions for Skyler, feel free to leave them below.
Also, don’t forget we are giving away an autographed copy of In Dreams Begin here.
I would like to take the opportunity to thank you for allowing RAO Review to interview you once again.
My pleasure! You ask some of the most interesting questions in book bloggery, so I’m very happy to be back.
So let’s dive right into it: Why William Butler Yeats and Maud Gonne?
After the modern intellectualism of Dominic in and Falling, Fly, I was interested in good, old-fashioned romance. I wanted to create a hero who was romantic in all the classic ways: good-looking, brave, and devoted. And as I started trying to write that, I found myself struggling with what it would look like today. Can a modern man still go down on one knee, profess his undying love, and propose marriage to a woman he’s only seen once or twice? I couldn’t make it work. It either felt like parody or innocence, and I didn’t want to write YA.
So I started reading the Romantics, but they, of course, didn’t feel modern enough. Yeats was closer to me in time than Byron, but still had the optimism and total lack of irony I was looking for. You can see, particularly in his work before the First World War, a sort of self-confidence in humanity and a belief that the world was perfectible, the idea that science could prove the existence of the soul and that all the mysteries of god and man could yield their secrets and respond to our improvements. I found that very attractive, and I was excited about putting a modern woman against that kind of man. And at first that was all I was looking for in research, “that kind of man.” I had no intention, initially, of writing real people into the story. I’m not crazy, really. And research is hard. I was planning to write a turn-of-the-century Irish poet based loosely on Yeats who could fall in love with a modern woman moving backward in time through some time-travel device or portal.
But. But the more I read about Yeats, the more I was becoming attracted to him specifically – to his height and his wire-frame glasses, to his poetry, but also to his biography. I was intrigued by his thirty years of fruitless love for Maud Gonne. He proposed to her and to her daughter. He wrote about her as a woman, as a symbol, and as a supernatural being. And I couldn’t stop wondering what was going on with that. He, after all, wasn’t crazy either. He was at odds with Maud’s politics, the two of them were rarely in the same country, and neither of them was much interested in changing to meet another person’s needs. He liked quiet, she travelled with over a dozen animals. He loved the Irish countryside. She adored Paris. This was never going to work. And he knew as much. But she was an amazing woman – she worked for Irish independence but not women’s suffrage, claimed to be part faery, bore two children to a married French revolutionary, and married a man who was subsequently shot by firing squad for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising. She was six feet tall, famed for her beauty, pro-violence, and psychic. If I was going to write a book set in the literary circles of Victorian Ireland, she was going to have to at least make a cameo. She was just too cool not to include.
There’s some very interesting parallels between you, Laura Armstrong and Maud Gonne (shared birthday, name, and I believe you even worked in advertising like Laura). Intentional?
Oh yes. That was the final straw. I was already half in love with Yeats, and determined to find a place for Maud in the book when I came across the tidbit of her birth date. She and I were both born on the winter solstice exactly a hundred years apart. I’d already run across the Yeats quote that’s on the back cover “Every passionate man is linked with another age, historical or imaginary, where alone he finds images that rouse his energy,” and I’d never really been happy with the portal/time machine device anyway. I started to toy with the idea that perhaps, if two woman had a connection in time, like their birthdates, and the time of one was the era to which she was linked in the way Yeats mentions, then might that not connect them somehow? But how? I already knew that both Maud and Will were involved in the occult, she intermittently and he throughout his life, and that the two of them even talked about the marriage they had “on the spiritual plane.” And that’s where the idea of the modern woman being channeled into Maud’s body began.
That idea opened up a lot of others. What would it be like to inhabit a different body? Would time move differently in the past and present? What would be in the modern woman’s present? And how much of it would she remember in the past? And those questions got me even more excited. That Yeats’s first love’s name was Laura, which is my given name, and that his first lover was named Olivia, which is the female lead from my first book, was all just gravy.
All the pieces just lined up. Yeats was too wonderful not to write as himself. Maud’s life was full of actual events that were too bizarre not to include. The fiction made sense of the facts. Their mutual engagement with the occult provided a means to move spirits through time, as did Maud’s belief in her faery heritage, and the more of Yeats’s poetry I read, the more he seemed to be hinting at a secret very much like this one. Also, importantly, it gave me space to ask some questions that were becoming relevant from my own, personal, modern life about the nature of love and fidelity. And finally, it was that I was falling in love with the poet. And if a writer can’t get a little wish-fulfillment for all the agony, than what are we in it for? Read more
First, I would like to take the opportunity to thank you for allowing RAO Reviews to interview you.
Olivia, vampire and fallen angel of desire, is hopeless…and damned. Since the fall from Eden, she has hungered for love, but fed only on desire. Dominic O’Shaughnessy is a neuroscientist plagued by impossible visions. When his research and her despair collide at L’Otel Mathillide—a subterranean hell of beauty, demons, and dreams—rationalist and angel unite in a clash of desire and damnation that threatens to destroy them both.
