Interview with K.V. Johansen

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 talks to Paul about her forthcoming sword and sorcery book, Breath and Bone.

NoaF: For readers unfamiliar with you, can you briefly tell us about yourself and your work?

KVJ: I’m Canadian, living in New Brunswick on the east coast. I have Master’s degrees in English and in Medieval Studies. My first book, long ago in 1997, was a children’s secondary-world fantasy, very sword and sorcery, a quest to slay a dragon. Since then I’ve written something like 26 books for children, teens, and adults, including two non-fiction works on the history of children’s fantasy and, under the name Kris Jamison, a contemporary novel, Love/Rock/Compost, which no one has heard of but of which I’m very proud. Prior to Breath and Bone, my fantasy for adults has been the five-book epic fantasy series Gods of the Caravan Road, beginning with Blackdog and ending with The Last Road, and the high fantasy duology that begins with The Wolf and the Wild King and will be concluded in The Raven and the Harper.

NoaF: Can you give us a brief précis on Breath and Bone?

KVJ: The very short version is: two women (Hedge the swordswoman and Pony, a shapeshifting godling), who’ve been partners through long, long years and figure they’ve served their time in the suffering and heroing and changing the world department (what with leading a civil war, destroying the empire, and cutting off the emperor’s head), are pulled out of peaceful retirement when a girl recruits them to help rescue her twin brother, who’s gotten himself ensnared by a life-draining witch, an old enemy of theirs. And there’s a ghost.

NoaF: You've tackled epic fantasy, and fantasy similar to sword and sorcery, but what drew you to make this a sword and sorcery novel?

KVJ: I’d had the character of Hedge—the wandering warrior with a sort of trickster partner—kicking around for a while; she’s someone who was cut from an earlier and rather different version of The Wolf and the Wild King, actually. Her partner then was male, and a fox—he became quite a lot younger, and a child, and turned into the fox-girl Sage, so there was Hedge, all ready to wander into adventures, with no partner and no story. I was working on part two of The Wolf and the Wild King when a discussion about sword and sorcery gave me this sudden hunger for an old-fashioned adventure, lighter on politics and gods and dark grim torments of the soul.

“What I feel like reading,” I said to myself, “is something like Torrie, but for grown-ups.” Torrie is the oldest of the Old Things of the Wild Forest and the narrator of my several Torrie books, which are old-fashioned fantasy adventures for younger readers. (A lot of adults like them too!) Pony, the narrator of Breath and Bone, sprang more or less fully formed from that desire, and the plot of Breath and Bone just flowed out once Pony started talking, becoming a fresh adventure rooted in things she and Hedge thought long in the past. She’s old and wise and sometimes snarky, a bit of a trickster, not entirely reliable, a musician, a storyteller, a shapeshifter, and has a dark, damaged streak through her heart that breaks out from time to time. She and Hedge are both carrying a lot of scars, emotionally and psychologically, from the days of the empire. Their past, if you like, was epic fantasy—wars and politics, gods and horrors, victory achieved at great cost. Sword and sorcery is their retirement. They’re figures of legend in their world. People don’t expect to find them living in a cottage keeping ducks, with a sword buried under the floor.

NoaF: Geography and landscape are important in your books, and Breath and Bone is no exception. What inspired you for the landscapes we see in the book, from the lake all the way to the Under-Ice?

KVJ: I was thinking mostly of western Europe as the inspiration for this one, with Hedge and Pony living off in the northwestern corner of that, on the shores of a small lake, so I had in mind a sort of impressionistic sketch of a landscape that was inspired by Swallows and Amazons combined with Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (about the Cairngorms in Scotland) along with various of Rosemary Sutcliff’s books set in the Lake District of England after Rome left Britain. Hedge and Pony’s travels take them down through lowlands and forests, along the valley of a great north-flowing river, to a suspiciously Alps-like mountain range and the ruins of Under-Ice, so you can picture that landscape as journeying south and east across something not utterly unlike a much more sparsely populated western Europe with more woodland, where primeval forest and megafauna can still be found. The marshes, Arrany’s homeland, came from the idea of Doggerland being above water, and part of that being a vast low-lying area at the mouth of a great river. It’s a place I’d like to explore and develop further.

NoaF: Rosemary Sutcliff—now there's a name drop. I read The Eagle of the Ninth after the movie came out. How did Sutcliff influence your development of this world?

KVJ: Rosemary Sutcliff was an author I read repeatedly as a child, someone who had a big influence on my style and on my fascination with history. Some of her books set in Britain after the withdrawal of Rome are among my favourites, The Lantern Bearers and Dawn Wind in particular. It’s natural that, with Breath and Bone being set in a world after the fall of a great empire, I found a Sutcliff sort of flavour creeping into how I thought about it. Dawn Wind, especially, contributed a mood to the world; it’s a book about two orphaned young people after the Anglo-Saxon invasions have begun and their communities have been destroyed. Searching for a place they can be safe, they wander through the ruins of Roman towns long abandoned and come across small isolated farms still surviving. Pony’s world took on that sort of colour, though hers is a more peaceful time with no Germanic invasions. In Pony’s world, there are old imperial ruins that have been taken over and given new purpose; the imperial highways still exist, though no one is maintaining them and they are slowly being overgrown by moss and engulfed in forest; and there are a variety of small, mostly human tribal territories and kingdoms, towns run by hereditary chieftains or councils of clan elders, a few surviving cities or towns that have become new centres of trade and are growing into independent cities run by councils or guildmasters or powerful families, and in a couple of cases, by universities that survived. Pony’s is a world that has lost a lot of its population, too, which is the feeling you get in Dawn Wind (though that’s not necessarily the actual historical situation), that the whole of the characters’ known world is in ruins.

I wanted, with Hedge’s and Pony’s travels, to show that their world was recovering, that something new for both humans and vhalgods was growing out of the ruins of the old—a ruin caused in part by their own actions, though the tyranny of the vhalgod emperor was itself a cause of ruin and misery and needed to be ended. Hedge and her brother were among the great captains in the civil war. There’s a background of places run by warlords or terrorized by bandits, of towns and villages that were destroyed in the civil war or have fallen into ruin after in all the chaos—there’s been a long period of lawlessness, banditry, disease, famine, the changing of trade routes. Set against that, however, are places like their own Smithsford, a village that’s grown up around them, because of them; there are also places run by universities that have survived the fall, settlements and single farms where people are making new lives and new communities for themselves, tribes and kingdoms and village councils weaving new networks of trade and mutual support.

Sutcliff created a post-Roman world that hits with a great emotional impact, and that emotion—it’s captured in the Old English poem The Ruin, actually, which is ironic as of course that was written by the people who were the invaders in Dawn Wind—is what coloured my thinking about Pony’s world: a landscape holding the bones of the past, something new growing out of that while the faint memories of the old still wrap around you. Ghedhaynor isn’t meant to be Rome, and Pony’s world isn’t meant to be post-Roman Britain, but if you want to put it in wine-tasting terms, there are underlying hints of Sutcliff’s interpretation of that world in its flavour.

NoaF: Information control and what the characters tell us, or each other, is unusually prominent in this book. What prompted you to make the characters, especially Arrany, so… twisty in that regard?

KVJ: Blame Pony—she’s the twisty one!

Writing a story told in the first person is always a challenge, and for one where it’s being told after the fact and not as a stream of consciousness unfolding as it happens (which can feel a bit artificial because how are you the reader then privy to this flow of thought?), the writer always has to choose what to have the narrator tell and when to have them tell it, and there has to be some justification within the story for what’s revealed and what’s for a time withheld or outright concealed. In Breath and Bone, there’s a framing narrative, an implied audience within the book, the “you” whom Pony is addressing.

You have to remember that everything you learn about Arrany, twisty though she may be, or even Hedge, is coming through Pony. She’s a minstrel, an entertainer. This is very much a story told by a storyteller, so even though she’s casting it into the first person, it’s not some window into her mind; it’s a very carefully controlled narrative shaped to keep her audience listening (and throwing a few coins into that awful squashy hat or buying her another mug of heather beer). She’s creating herself as a character within her own story, which every first-person narrator does, but she’s being very deliberate and open about it, as when she tells you about a very terrible and traumatic thing in her past, “Oh, I didn’t tell you this before because I didn’t want to talk about it, but now you need to know so you can understand why I reacted to such-and-such the way I did.” She tells you what she wants you to know when she wants you to know it, and, when telling other people’s parts of the story, she could be telling you what she believed she knew at that time, or what that person wanted at that point to present to the world as their own story, rather than what she may have found out later—unless she has decided it’s important to do otherwise, to give you a forewarning of something because that’s the more dramatic choice. You’re being made a part of the story, a participating part of the audience at that fireside, by her way of telling it; you-that-audience are startled or shocked at an action of hers, so she reveals more about herself than maybe she meant to, in trying to explain it; your anticipation delights her, shapes what she withholds or reveals next. Pony loves a good tale and she loves to tell one. She’s going to keep utter control of her narrative to set you up for the best journey she can give you.

NoaF: The vhalgods and vhalbairns (such wonderful use of language in this book) promise a whole possible host of stories in this landscape. And this novel really does feel thorny in the sense that there are others stories seemingly lurking everywhere in the landscape. Have any other stories niggled at you as you wrote this one?

KVJ: There are definitely more stories in this world. Just thinking of one seems to make others grow out of it, like branches from a vine, climbing and wandering over the map. Of course there are stories in the past, darker stories from the days of Pony’s captivity and the civil war, which she might allude to, but in this time, generations later, just this one story of Pony and Hedge and Jinn travelling south to the mountains with Arrany spun off at least two more in my mind. My Torrie books for children were like that: each was a standalone, but writing each one gave me an idea for another. Pony is very like Torrie in that regard: she goes wandering and tells stories; every story reminds her of another. It’s a format for a series that I think works really well for adult sword and sorcery. There’s so much past in this world and a big map to explore, so many things left mysterious, or broken and only roughly healed, or completely unfinished, after the fall of the empire, that Hedge and Pony can go on wandering through it and tangling themselves up in adventures for some time to come. And of course, as a vhalgod and a wild godling, they have a more than human lifespan to do that in. Breath and Bone is a standalone, but at the end, they're not heading home despite having finished the story off nicely and dealt with all the problems they set out to deal with; they've decided there's something they need to look into south of the mountains. Goodbrother Bessamy back home in Smithsford will have to go on looking after Hedge's flock of laying-ducks for another season.

NoaF: Thank you so much for answering these questions. Where can readers find you and find out more about you? (might as well get this question out of the way now)

KVJ: My website is at https://www.kvj.ca and I’m on Bluesky as @kvjohansen.bsky.social.

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin