Author Interview: Carolyn Turgeon

Carolyn Turgeon is the author of two novels: Rain Village, her first novel which was published in 2006 and her latest book, Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story, published earlier this year. Carolyn in now working on her third novel, Mermaid which she is kind enough to tell us a bit about... 

BCC: Hi Carolyn. Welcome to Book Chick City. Tell us about your latest book, Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story.

CT: Godmother is the story of Cinderella’s fairy godmother, Lil, now an old woman living in NYC. She works in a used bookstore in the West Village and lives in the garment district. She has beautiful white-feathered wings she has to conceal, and she’s always remembering her past, back when she was a fairy and everything was perfect and complete. The book is told in first person, and moves between flashbacks to Lil’s fairy life and what happened between her and Cinderella on the fateful night of the ball (Lil becomes jealous of Cinderella and goes to the ball in her place, and as a result is banished from the fairy world), and the present day, when as a result of various signs Lil feels she’s been given a chance to redeem herself and return home. 

BCC: Sounds great. I can't wait to read it! Where do you like to write?

CT: I write in a bunch of different places and can write just about anywhere. I’m not really living in one place (since quitting my job in NYC a year and a half ago, I’ve been doing a lot of travelling and staying in various places), so I can’t have a specific little nook where I do all my work, though if I did have one I would try to make it as glamorous as possible, filled with chaise lounges and spice-scented candles and all kinds of sparkly accoutrements. I do very much like writing in coffee shops, surrounded by people and with some kind of frothy coffee drink at my side. Anything to make writing less solitary and less tedious and dull!

BCC: I read on your website that you are writing your third novel, which is a retelling of the original little mermaid story. Can you tell us a bit more about it and when it's likely to be released?

CT: Yes! The book is called Mermaid and is a retelling of the original Hans Christian Andersen story, which is of course much, much darker than the Disney movie. In the Andersen story, the mermaid doesn’t get the prince, though she’s given up her tongue/voice and her tail in order to win his love. Instead the prince marries the princess, who only barely appears in the original story. Mermaid tells the story of this princess as well as of the mermaid—the book is in third person and flips between the two narratives—and the relationship and rivalry that develops between them. It’s set in the medieval world, so there are a lot of castles and kings and soldiers… I’m pretty excited. This is the first book I’ve been able to map out and figure out fully before writing it, and it’s exactly the kind of book I’d like to read. Lots of beautiful things, lots of twistedness… I do love me some Hans Christian Andersen!

BCC: It does sound good. Looking forward to it hitting the shelves. I have heard some authors only write while listening to certain music or their desk has to face the wall rather than the window. Do you have a ritual while writing?

CT: I don’t have any rituals, really. I write in all different places, I write on a laptop when I’m out and hook my laptop up to a monitor and keyboard when I’m in, and though I usually don’t listen to music, sometimes I’m in a certain mood and can just lose myself in some loud music and the page in front of me. But I’m sure that if I settle down and put together my glamorous, chaise-lounge-filled writing locale, I’ll make up some rituals quickly enough! Most likely involving candles and witchy things. Like I said, anything to convince myself that writing is more fun than it is!

BCC: What was it like to see your first novel on the shelf in a book shop?

CT: Actually, there was much more anxiety and trauma around it than I would have thought. It was lovely, of course, incredibly validating, but at the same time here was this book I had spent so many years working on (Rain Village really took years to write, mainly out of inefficiency and ignorance!), like this secret world that had until then existed only my head, now out there in the open, a product anyone could buy. It made me feel much more exposed and uncomfortable than I would have thought. But then I got used to it, and publishing Godmother was much more pleasant. It’s just part of what you’re doing, putting novels into the world: sharing yourself in ways that you might not share yourself otherwise. At least for me. So now I accept that as a more lovely, natural part of the process.

BCC: What do you like to do outside of writing?

CT: Well, I love reading, of course, and I love movies and the theater and art. I like watching Law and Order and dumb reality shows. I love taking road trips and travelling and having adventures and seeing friends and making new friends. This fall, for example, I’ve rented an apartment in Berlin, Germany, for three months, and I’m excited to learn that city and, from there, visit a friend in an old city in Bavaria and take a trip to London for the first time… I also bought an accordion a year ago, and I like bellydancing, and going to burlesque shows… This past weekend I visited the National Aviary in Pittsburgh, PA, and learned all about birds… Really, I’m usually up for anything and love learning and experiencing new things.

BCC: I love travelling too, it's so much fun visiting other countries. I hope you have a lovely time. I saw on your blog that you enjoy photography. This seems to be a common hobby amongst writers. Why do you think this is?

CT: And I love photography, yes! Last fall I sat in on an introduction to dark room photography class at Penn State (when I could) and I loved it, the magic of watching an image slowly appear on paper. I would like one day to have a little house with a dark room in the basement. For me part of the appeal is that it’s so much simpler than writing, in some ways. I mean a perfect photograph can be beautiful and haunting and sad and strange… contain all the feelings I might spend pages and pages attempting to create. But I think there’s more to it than this, the appeal of photography for writers, but I’m not sure what it is. I’d like to one day put together a book of photos and writing, and there’s something about that, the combination of words and images and the lack of a clear, structured narrative, that I find appealing. Of course, there is also the fact that writing a book takes so, so long, and is so solitary and tedious, and a photo is something that gives you an almost instant result. Very satisfying!

BCC: Is there a particular author that influenced your writing?

CT: I think several writers did. Certainly Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And in college and graduate school I studied Italian literature, and I know I owe a debt to Boccaccio and all those wonderful old stories, as well as to Giovanni Verga, an early 20th century Sicilian writer I especially love. I also have to say that I’ve loved the singers Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, and Jonathan Richman since I was a teenager; their writing and sensibilities have influenced me as much as anything. As have films like Wings of Desire, which in some ways was at the heart of Rain Village and Godmother.

BCC: How do you research your novels?

CT: Well, for Rain Village I did the most research, since my character Tessa slowly learns the trapeze and then joins an old-time travelling side show and circus. I’ve never been on the trapeze and didn’t want to try it, but I read a few books and also interviewed the president of the Trapeze School of New York, who was incredibly helpful. I also read several books on old circuses, and visited museums in Baraboo, Wisconsin; Sarasota, Florida; and Bridgeport, Connecticut. Those are three of the main circus towns in the U.S., places where the Ringing Brothers and P.T. Barnum lived.

 

I didn’t do a whole lot of research for Godmother, as I recall, though I did little things like visit the Pierre Hotel or the Frick when I knew I wanted to set scenes in those places. But for Mermaid, I’ve been reading plenty about life in medieval castles and medieval convents. The book’s not really set in a specific country and isn’t based on a specific history, but I want the castles (the prince’s and the princess’s) and the convent (where the princess is in hiding at the beginning of the book) to feel as real and authentic as possible, especially since they’re being contrasted to the magical underwater world of the mermaid.

 

And then for other projects… The dark room class was in part for this suspense book I’m writing about an aspiring photographer in New York who lives a double life. I learned a bit about old-time processes for that, like about wet plate collodion, which a photographer I know demonstrated for me. (That’s a book I’m nearly finished with but put aside for Mermaid.) I’m also collecting a bunch of books on falcons and medieval falconry for a future children’s book project, and may visit a falconer, a friend of a friend, in England this fall. I’m also visiting an old castle-filled Bavarian city my friend lives in, where I may well set that book. Another partly written novel I have on the back burner is historical, set in the very specific time and place of 1280s Florence, and for that I have piles and piles of books and have made a couple of trips to Italy to see some specific places and get a general feel for the city. 

I know. You must feel very sorry for me!

BCC: Oh we do, such a hard life... Who are your favourite authors?

CT: I love Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Angela Carter, Joanne Harris, Alice Hoffman, Francesca Lia Block—all those lush, magical writers—and I’m also a huge fan of Patricia Highsmith, who’s so brilliant at creating a sense of elegant, creeping dread. I also love Scott Heim, Daniell Woodrell, Natsuo Kirino, Raymond Chandler…

BBC: There's quite a few authors in that list I haven't heard of, will definitely check some out! Lastly, What are you currently reading?

CT: Right now I’m reading Sarah Dunant’s new book, Sacred Hearts, about a 16th century Italian convent. Next I’m reading Kathryn Hulme’s The Nun’s Story, which became a movie with Audrey Hepburn. Both are for pleasure as well as research for the novel I’m writing now, which takes place partly in a convent… And I have a ton of other books on my shelf I can’t wait to read, once I finish! I’m especially excited to read The Sugar Queen and In the Woods. And I recently bought a Flannery O’Connor anthology… I’ve never read her, and can’t wait!

BCC: Thank you Carolyn. It's been a pleasure to have you and thank you for taking the time to answer my questions.

If you would like to find out more about Carolyn and her books then visit or website www.carolynturgeon.com or check out her blog HERE 

If you want to buy any of the books then click the images above and they will take you straight to Amazon UK.