K. V. Johansen was born in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, where she developed her lifelong fascination with fantasy literature after reading The Lord of the Rings at the age of eight. Her interest in the history and languages of the Middle Ages led her to take a Master’s Degree in Medieval Studies at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and a second M.A. in English Literature at McMaster University, where she wrote her thesis on Layamon’s Brut, an Early Middle English epic poem. While spending most of her time writing, she retains her interest in medieval history and languages and is a member of the SFWA and the Writers’ Union of Canada. In 2014, she was an instructor at the Science Fiction Foundation’s Masterclass in Literary Criticism held in London. She is also the author of two works on the history of children’s fantasy literature, two short story collections, and a number of books for children and teens. Various of her books have been translated into French, Macedonian, and Danish.
Today she tells us about her Six Books
Six Books questions:
I'm currently reading RJ Barker's Gods of the Wyrdwood. I'm a bit behind, as the sequel to it has just come out and is sitting on my desk waiting, but although I started reading it quite some time ago, I had to set it aside for a while -- not due to anything to do with the book, really. It's been a rough year and RJ's a brilliant writer; his worlds are wildly fantastic and his characters are engaging while carrying a lot of shadows, people you really start to care about. I love his work, but when I'm stressed and exhausted myself, reading something where you're immersing yourself in a new, very unfamiliar world and in characters dealing with a lot of heavy stuff can take energy I just didn't have, and I wanted to enjoy my reading of the Wyrdwood. Now that I'm picking it up again, finding my way back into it, and am not quite so tired, I'm finding it utterly enthralling. Some aspects of the world are like a fever-dream half-remembered, strange and beautiful or strange and terrible, while the characters are always firmly rooted in their human nature, even when their actual humanity is debatable.
At the time of my writing this, a forthcoming book I'm waiting for eagerly is Karla's Choice, by Nick Harkaway (though I expect it'll be out, purchased, and read, before this interview is posted). I have a lot of favourite books, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People are among them. I first read LeCarré as a teen and those two had a big influence on me. Usually I don't like people writing other people's people, as it were, but Harkaway has the connection with this that, for me, gives it a feeling of more rightness, and since he's an excellent writer on his own merits in the sff field, I'm very interested to see what he does with Smiley.
3. Is there a book you're currently itching to re-read?
Last month I was rereading some of my Arthur Ransome collection and I had a great urge to reread We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea (published 1937, part of his Swallows and Amazons series and quite possibly the best of them all) but my only copy is a Puffin paperback from what I call the Bad Glue Era -- it's held together by being tied up with a piece of string. I decided to treat myself to a nice old hardcover copy, and wait to read that. Unfortunately the used and rare bookseller in the UK failed to seal the package, WDMTGTS fell out -- a first edition, though a later printing from the forties, and I am sick at the thought of that lost and tossed in some post office garbage can. I received an opened package in a plastic bag from the Royal Mail, with that book missing. The bookseller has a second copy (in worse shape, sadly) with which they're going to replace it, hopefully taping the package shut this time ... But meanwhile I am still itching to reread that one in particular. The Swallows -- John, Susan, Titty, and Roger Walker -- are spending some time with a young man on his yacht, Goblin, in harbour at the mouth of the River Orwell, but there's an accident while he's ashore, he ends up unconscious in hospital, and in fog and rising tide Goblin slips her anchor and they drift out into the North Sea. Once they realize what's happening, being sensible nautical children, they do all the right things to try to sail back, but between fog and shoals and storm they end up only able to go on, and cross to Flushing in the Netherlands, where -- because in stories some coincidence is allowed, due to narrativium -- their father is about to cross on his way back overland from a posting in Hong Kong. Not only is it a great adventure story, in which you really see the older two, John and Susan (who are probably about either side of thirteen in this one) coming into their own, having to stand in for the adults in a genuinely life and death situation, but it's one of the books from which I learnt most about sailing. You could read the part of The Last Road in which Moth sails alone and through storm back to the abandoned island homeland of her people as a tribute to We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea.
One that comes to mind is Patricia A. McKillip's Kingfisher, which I'm currently reading for the nth time. It's an amazing book, fascinating and beautiful, and written with such a deft, light hand. It's a fantasy with a modern setting, though not a real world one, woven around Chretien de Troyes' twelfth-century Romance Perceval and the Mabinogion. The landscape is that of the Oregon coast of the US and the technological level is, or was at the time of its publication in 2016, slightly near-future, seamlessly combined with a world of magic. For all the motorcycles and cellphones and high-tech weaponry, it's a story of questing knights and young people, men and women, finding themselves deep in myth and mysteries. It's also very much a book celebrating cooking! The way McKillip was able to weave all these elements together and tell a story at once so solid and satisfying, and at the same time so poetic and full of dappled shadows and things half-seen, is awe-inspiring and perfect. The feel of the book is like reading a poem, and yet it's full of well-rounded, down-to-earth characters getting to grips with things even when those things are strange and half-seen at best. I don't so much wish I'd written it -- no one but McKillip could have done that -- as I wish I could achieve something that could leave readers feeling how I feel when I'm reading it. McKillip, like Diana Wynne Jones, is a writer who leaves me in awe.
5. What's one book, which you read as a child or young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?
There are a lot of those! Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills, taken as one for this answer, are among them. (The concluding book about Merlin, The Last Enchantment, is excellent but didn't have as much of an impact on me as a child.) The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills are about Merlin as a child and young man in post-Roman Britain. They're part of the long tradition of the "historical" Arthurian matter rather than the Romance tradition -- if you're interested in that distinction, I'd direct you to my fellow CMS alumnus Richard Moll's book Before Malory: Reading Arthur in Later Medieval England. For me, Stewart's Merlin and Arthur remain the only true and definitive versions! When I wrote an Arthurian story myself ("The Inexorable Tide" in The Storyteller), I couldn't get away from some of her facts -- Merlin and Arthur as first cousins, for instance. Her narrative style, too, was an impressive example of how to handle the first person, though I was reading other first person narratives at the time, particularly John Buchan. Merlin's reflective approach, looking back on his own life, a conscious telling that catches up with itself partway through The Last Enchantment, has, I think, always made me aware of the constructed frame, present or not in the story, implicit in using the first person, so that I need to know who the audience within the book is, and at what point the character is telling any particular part of their story. It's not something unique to Stewart -- Treasure Island has a definite "now" from which Jim is looking back on his story, though in contrast Buchan doesn't usually do that, you're never told from what point in his life Hannay is narrating his adventures -- but it was through Mary Stewart's Merlin that I first became aware of that device and absorbed how it worked, and why you would choose do it. The setting, too, influenced me, that lingering post-Roman world of multiple languages and old buildings falling into ruin or being repurposed, the worship and rites of old gods and new mingling, that sense that there is a wider world beyond the horizon and that what happens there will spread ripples across the lands and years between.
The Wolf and the Wild King: snow, swordfights (Mairran, armed, on horseback = Ladyhawke vibes), and dragons.
To expand on that, my latest book is The Wolf and the Wild King, out from Crossroad Press's Mystique imprint. It's the first part of a duology, The Forest. For a long time, I had been wanting to write something that captured -- call it a particular mood, or maybe a mode, of fantasy, something elusive that I was missing in my current reading. I wanted that feeling of things unseen, of mystery, of ancient rites and remnants of older powers still there if only you know how to call on them, and forests and dragons and the intense mythic mood. I wanted a winter book that acknowledged the depth of winter and used it, not just a delicate southern set-dressing of snow. The Wolf and the Wild King is my attempt to capture some of that, writing about protagonists, Mairran and Lannesk, Nowa and Sage, who may have grown out of some ur-characters who've been with me a long, long time, but who are their own people now, and a pleasure to write. Mairran, who is wolf, raven, and the prince who serves as his mother executioner for ritual sacrifices, and Lannesk, the mute outlaw and musician, are younger than my usual adult main characters, being just twenty-one or so, warriors and musicians both, full of confusion and strong emotions -- mostly, in Mairran's case, anger that he's not admitting to but which is affecting everything he does; he's kind and savage, the latter not least to himself. To balance the intense mythic background, Mairran has a first-person narration that can, if not undercut the air of folkloric mystery and ancient legend, act as a foil to it. He's angry and snarky and hurting, and a lot of the time he pretends none of that is there in himself and he's just being a dutiful child, serving the Queen his mother and it's not strange at all that she's as old as her reign and has no name and no past. Lannesk's story unfolds a couple of centuries earlier, at a time before the Queen's rule, when the Forest is being invaded by dragon-kin led by sorcerer-priests whose magic is fuelled by human sacrifice; he and his brother are reprieved from death at the hands of their stepfather's cousin and slayer by their oath to follow two of the Immortals, the Wild King and the Grey Hunter, in fighting the invaders. Through battle and loss and death, Lannesk's story intersects with Mairran's. Nowa is Mairran's shield-companion, an older woman who's been with him since he was a boy. She was captain of a company of the Queen's road-wardens, then his tutor; now he calls her his keeper. She's constrained in what she can protect him from, but she's made it her personal mission to keep him sane and keep him from becoming the unthinking, uncaring knife that the Queen would have him. Sage is a girl of around fourteen, a Forest-dwelling outcast Mairran captures when she tries to rob his camp. She's also a fox, in an era when such Forest-blessings are so rare they've become the stuff of legend and fear. Being captured by the Queen's son, about whom little is known among the folk generally except that he's the priest of the solstice sacrifices and probably mad, is not Sage's idea of a rescue at first, even when the alternative seems to be dying in the winter Forest. All these characters are brought together around Mairran's quest to find a murderer, but that's not really the story at all -- it just takes Mairran quite a while to realize it.
