Interviewing Lorraine Wilson

Hellooo!!!

Just after Fantasycon I reviewed the excellent This Is Our Undoing by Lorraine Wilson a fantastic story crossing boundaries of thriller, science fiction and fantasy. Lorraine did an very impressive set of readings at Fantasycon and was kind enough to answer a few questions about th book – which y’all need!

Halloooo! Thank you so much for having me! It was a delight to meet you at FantasyCon and this interview is a very welcome break from editing!

How do you like to tempt people to read This Is Our Undoing?

Primarily with fox emojis! More seriously, by saying it’s my protest against powerlessness and is full of forests, vengeful children and deadly secrets. If you love stories that blend genres and explore our inner monsters then you might love this. Plus it has foxes, and who doesn’t love a fox?

What led to your choice of location the haunting Rila Mountains and its wildlife?

I’d stayed there shortly before the story started to form in my mind, and I’d loved the sense of vastness and unknowability there, so when I realised my story was going to be set in quite a dark, police state sort of world, I knew that the sheer wildness of the Rila Mountains would provide a really powerful contrast. In the book the world beyond the mountains is controlled, intolerant and hemmed in by walls both psychological and physical. Where-as in the mountains there’s a level at which it seems idyllic by comparison – it’s open and beautiful and untouched by the daily fears of State-controlled life … but that’s only part of it; the forest is also dark and full of dangers, and I was really drawn to the idea of the forest as this complex entity which could contain so many different truths at once. I think this echoes one of the themes in the book - that people hold both light and dark within them, which is why how you choose to act, even in the very small things, matters so much.

I’m lucky in that as well as spending time in Bulgaria, I’ve also worked in similar forests in Russia and Poland, so the feel and details of the setting were fairly familiar to me, as was the experience of being a researcher in that environment. That means I came to the story with a whole raft of nerdy information and real life encounters with wolves, bears etc, to help make the setting feel real to the reader!

Your story keeps up the tension all the way through that I was worried over your charcetrs all the way to the end! How do you like to maintain tension in a novel length tale?

Haha, excellent! *rubs hands together gleefully* Is there anything more lovely as a writer than to hear that you made your reader worry/cry/hide!?

But to answer the question … graphs! I’m a scientist, so perhaps it’s no surprise that I’m quite fond of any form of planning method that allows me to draw graphs. This novel was a bit of a nightmare to plot though – there were so many threads & secrets I needed to keep track of it felt a little like trying to knit with eels (which sounds both mean and slimy, doesn’t it?).

I think the trick with maintaining tension is to always be very aware of how much each character knows about what’s going on, and how much you’ve told/hinted to the reader. As long as none of those things ever match completely, you’ll always have a thread of tension present.

This story very much pieces the world it is part of together from clues rather than lengthy exposition. What led to that choice and how much of the world did you yourself have to know to make the story work as you wanted?

I think the writer always has to know far more about their world than makes it onto the page, right? It’s the classic iceberg metaphor. So I do have a fairly good idea of the state & functioning of the world beyond the story itself, and that came about largely because I built the world by looking at where we are now, and the direction we’ve been drifting over the last decade or so (both politically and environmentally), and scaring myself silly over what one potential end point might be. If you assume that we don’t do nearly enough to slow climate change and that the rise of the far right continues to accelerate (those two are inextricably linked, after all), then you end up with the world in This Is Our Undoing.

As for decided not to explain things too much … this is something that a few reviewers haven’t been fond of to be honest, but it was a choice that felt right for the book. I personally can happily do without having everything explained to me. I love the puzzle and discovery of constructing a world from little details and hints, so I guess I lean towards that style of writing too. But also, although there’s this big complex, unfamiliar world beyond the Rila Mountains, I never wanted that world to detract from the intensity and isolation of the mountain setting, so I didn’t want to draw the reader’s eye outward, if you see what I mean. For all that it’s a political, dystopian, thrillerish plot, the story always felt very intimate to me, very much about the internal battles we fight rather than the external ones, so that’s what I wanted the reader to focus on.

Also (this is a long answer to a simple question, isn’t it?), there are a lot of secrets in this novel, and a lot of the uncertainty the characters are navigating stems from their knowledge of the outside world being incomplete. I think setting your characters a moral dilemma becomes much more interesting if they don’t know everything they need to know. A lot of our big decisions are made in that same way, aren’t they? We have to choose pathways based on partial understanding, best guesses, instinct, so it felt true to life to make the reader do that a bit too!

What else can we look forward to you in the future and where can we find out more?

I’m absolutely delighted to share that my next novel, The Way The Light Bends, is coming out with Luna Press. Release date isn’t final yet, but I think it’ll be late 2022 – early 2023. You can read more about it on Luna’s blog here: https://www.lunapresspublishing.com/blog

It’s a very different book to This Is Our Undoing, in that it’s set in the present, in Scotland, and is much more fantastical than sci-fi-ish. Again though, it’s a story about belonging, and the wounds we carry and how they shape us. It revolves around two estranged sisters trying to navigate their grief for their brother and is threaded through with Scottish mythology. I actually wrote it before This Is Our Undoing, then hid it in a drawer for a while before I fell in love with it again, so it’s a joy to know it will be out in the world soon.

If there was one book (not your own) that you wish you could get everyone to read, what would it be?

I asked my daughter this question, hoping to cheat, but she refused to answer because she said it was ‘clearly an impossible decision’! So I have had a long think. There’s no point recommending the obvious authors like Ursula le Guin or N.K. Jemisin, because anyone half-way sensible has read them already. So instead I’ll go for Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, or if you’ve read that then Yvonne Battle-Felton’s Remembered. Both books are full of poetry and beauty, but are also powerful explorations of the heritage of trauma and the importance of kindness.

I cheated, did you notice?