Hello!!

One of my favourite reads recently was Threading the Labyrinth by Tiffani Angus which I reviewed here a wonderful weaving mix of historical and weird fiction focused around a strange and unusual garden and the people who owned and worked the land. Tiffani very kindly agreed to answer a few questions on the book and their writing.

How do you like to define Threading the Labyrinth?

The easiest way to describe it—mainly to UK readers—is that it is Tom’s Midnight Garden or Children of Green Knowe but for adults. To non-UK readers who aren’t familiar with those books, I describe it as 400 years in a haunted garden told out of chronological order. It’s got a cross-genre quality, so will appeal to fantasy readers but also to historical fiction readers who tend to avoid fantasy as “too out there”: its magic has more to do with the nature of the garden as a place that holds on to time rather than the magic being a fully built system.

Usually fiction loves to focus on houses. What drew you to the garden?

When I was younger I loved the fantasy of the English garden—what I saw in glossy magazines of gardens with roses climbing everywhere and bees buzzing around lavender and a riot of color and green. I grew up in the desert, so an English garden was a fantasy land to me. As I started thinking about doing a PhD in Creative Writing, I originally thought to follow the house as it changed through the centuries and mirror the architecture styles and the philosophies behind them to the family’s situations. But early research showed me that the garden would change much more drastically than the house—basically because it’s easier to dig out a garden than it is to tear down and rebuild a house! Plus, gardens leave behind traces, so any garden is going to have evidence below it of the gardens that came before it—there are layers there. This makes gardens places of space and time. They’re TARDISes! I pitched this idea for my PhD proposal, and luckily it worked. As I started reading all of the fantasy fiction that is set in a garden, I realised that gardens often show up in kids’ books as time-travel devices but in adult books—the few that are out there—as the place where betrayal or adultery or even murder happen. That I was playing with something new—combining the kids’ book trope with adult themes and concerns—solidified the idea.

Was this a tale where the research into the history brought any surprises or ideas you had not expected?

The research was so much fun. I got to go to gardens all over the country, go to museums, interview people, read gardening books from the 16th and 17th centuries in the rare book room at the British Library. I collected information from everywhere and was surprised all the time—usually little things I found in passing. For example, Edmund was the name of the first gardener ever recorded in English history—he’s in the 13th century royal records—and it never dawned on me that I would come across this bit of info, that it was important. I named other characters after people in horticultural history, too, to strengthen that link between fiction and fact. I didn’t expect to end up researching Victorian photography and medicines (the questionable ones full of dangerous drugs!) or what Land Girls called wellies at the time or when the first clockwork birds existed. I also loved herblore, such as the belief that touching mistletoe would make a woman fertile, which I used in the book. And the records about 18th-century estate owners pulling down and moving villages and hamlets because they blocked the view and, in some cases, rebuilding them as ideal villages in which the residents had to dress up and play “quaint cottagers” for wealthy visitors was unexpected and, of course, also had to end up in the book.

I really liked the role of women that you fleshed out in the history of the garden; was this a deliberate choice?

Absolutely! Too often women have been written out of history, but we’ve always been here and we’ve always worked. We’ve all heard of Gertrude Jekyll, but there have been so many other women who have kept gardens, either to help feed their families or for pleasure. Gardening itself was even strictly gendered for a time, with women kept from fruit trees, which were deemed too important for them to be allowed to tend. That shunting of women to the side made me also want to focus on the workers rather than the owners. To center the women is why I had to create the entail that specified the estate pass down the female line, so that I could create generations of women with Toni at the end, who is an owner but definitely not a Lady and has a questionable heritage.

When I was doing research, I loved coming across details such as the names of the weeding women on the Hampton Court records from Henry VIII’s time (Joan Cookstole’s name is a combination of the names of two of them). Finding these little surprises helped me imagine their lives. Mary Hill and Aunt Madeline came directly from Julia Margaret Cameron and her photography in the 1860s. The Land Girls were an easy choice because they were there specifically to grow food and tend the farm animals. Thomas Hill (in the 1770s section) isn’t female, but having him come home from the colonies with a serious injury that emasculates him (for the time period) makes him similar in a sense to the women around him who don’t have much power in their situation. Plus, as you know from reading the book, he’s a bit different from everyone else full stop (no spoilers for those of you who haven’t read it yet!).

How have you found the move from short fiction to your first novel?

Funnily enough, I wrote a whole novel before I was ever able to write a successful short story (successful in the sense that it worked, not that it was published). I just didn’t understand the Russian-nesting-doll ness of a short story until I wrote something long and unwieldy. That novel, however, is trunked and likely will be forever, as is the way of first novels. After that I wrote a few short stories and got into workshops from them, and then returned to long-form. The past decade has been me writing both long and short fiction simultaneously. I love both equally, though I spend a lot of my time teaching creative writing students how to approach the complicated challenge of writing short fiction.

What are you working on at the moment?

I started a novel before I ever started Threading, which I wrote for my PhD (although the viva version of the novel is very different from the published version!). I have turned back to finishing that previous novel, about women during and after an apocalyptic event; who knows if it will ever see the light of day, either, considering people’s reading habits after C19. But I’m 75K along on it and am really excited to see how it ends. Plus, living through the pandemic has shown me in real time how people act during an actual apocalyptic-type event, and those behaviors have definitely informed some of the tweaks I have made to the characters. I think of it as Little House at the end of the world. I’ve also got a vague idea to gather the stories I’ve written and published about horticultural history and maybe write a couple more and put together a small collection. And the next novel after that is going to require a lot of research at places I can’t go to any time soon, so I suppose it’s good I have to finish the one I’m working on now to give us time to come out of lockdown. Maybe.

If there was one book (not your own) that you love to recommend to other people what would it be?

This past semester I developed and taught new module on the Creative Writing MA called Time & Narrative, and one book I chose was Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand. I just love this book—from the story about a folk-rock band’s members looking back to the “golden summer” they spent recording an album at a mysterious house deep in the English countryside in the early 70s, to the narrative structure of individual interviews, to the weirdness that is never fully explained. It’s historical fiction and a ghost story and contains a very weird house—a trifecta for me. It’s just one of those books that I wish I had written!