Interviewing Jo M Thomas
Helloooo!!
This past week I’ve been very entertained by two novellas The Knight's Daughter and Isle of Ravens both by Jo M Thomas. These are tales based around medieval folklore with retellings of famous characters such as King Arthur and Robin Hood thrown in for good measure. Throw in on top some humour, historical explanations, and some great social commentary they are well worth your time. Jo kindly agreed to answer a few questions about the Greenwood series and the latest novella.
How would you booktempt The Isle of Ravens?
I tend to put Isle of Ravens forward as a fairy tale, with a few others thrown in for good measure, and some snark. I think we can safely say I’m not a great marketer.
I have three slightly more specialised pitches depending on people’s interests:
1. It’s a fairy tale about stories and how they change depending on who is telling them and when.
2. It’s a fairy tale about European wind storms.
3. It’s Bisclavret and the story of Ker-Ys put together and forced to kiss.
What drew you towards this tale and setting?
I should start this answer with a confession for those who aren’t aware or haven’t spotted it. What I call my Greenwood tales—so that’s The Knight’s Daughter, Isle of Ravens and eventually The Dragon Queen—are all actually new constructions using bits of old stories stitched together in a new way. It’s a conceit and hopefully a bit of an Easter egg type joke for those who know their folklore in-depth but that is more to do with the style of the story rather than “Why this one?” so let’s get back to that for the rest of this answer.
I grew up in what used to be Humberside and, although I’ve only been once, Spurn Point was a big talking point, no pun intended. It’s a stretch of land that’s doomed to be lost to the sea, particularly having discovered that it’s expensive trying to hold the power of the sea back for any long stretches of time. A bit of wondering around in the history of it and the chaos that ensued from some of the large winter storms in the medieval era gave me a thing I wanted to capture in a fairy tale situation.
Of course, like the Titanic, the big event isn’t really a story in itself, and a bit more digging gave me the little nugget that the story of Ys was likely associated with similar events gave me a bit of a plot. About the time I was thinking about it, I’d just finished reading a translation of the Lays collected by Marie de France, which gave me Bisclavret and… there between the two of them was the plot to go with my setting.
Both the Knight’s Daughter and Isle of Ravens explore the uses of storytelling. What fascinates you about their use?
People tend to search for patterns, to force life into a narrative. I find things like how easy it is for any of us to make a false memory or add additional bits to a memory, simply due to the fact that when we remember we tell ourselves a story fascinating. We’re all fairly unreliable narrators unless we’re specifically trained not to be.
So I guess my Greenwood tales are a study in how unreliable a narrator I am, as well as all of the characters that tell the stories within the main story. Everyone has some kind of agenda, even if it’s only entertaining and sharing an idea. (Spoiler: in my case, I’m also being too clever for my own good.)
How have you researched the older tales referenced?
I have been entirely unacademic and I apologise for not including references but they would have ended up about as long as the rest of the novella even with the Wikipedia references taken out. I haven’t so far used a story I’ve never read or heard before as a tale within a tale but I usually end up browsing t’Internet for several different versions of a story and maybe two or three summaries. I read them through several times over several days, shut down the tabs and start typing. They don’t always stay true to the usual tellings of the story because, of course, I have a character’s narrative to fit to and there’s been one instance of making up something that better suits their needs out of two or three other tales. The Hamlet / Amleth retelling for The Knight’s Daughter, which started life as a distaff Hamlet itself, is probably the one I struggled most on and ended up going back to reread the research copies several times. I hope I didn’t land too close to them but Hamlet’s a tough one to make your own.
You have a lot of fun with your narrator’s footnotes – what led to that approach?
That would be that conceit thing again. Because these stories were “newly discovered”, I wanted to tell them with the wide-eyed wonder of an Ivanhoe or even the thing-slapping of a 1950s Errol Flynn movie and the notes actually started out as notes to myself. I think I got about three footnotes in and I started to wonder if I should keep them as they’re a great outlet for muttering about what’s going on.
Obviously, in the vein of being too clever for my own good, they’re also a great way of showing off my homework, too, as a lot of them are reminders about similar historical situations or likely sources of anachronisms. I edited things a little, obviously, but I tried to keep the footnotes in a different tone to the text, so we could say I tried for two further characters, the narrator and the editor.
Retellings of old stories has been a long tradition? Why do so many storytellers do it?
I suppose the best way to start answering this is to say that it’s a relatively new thing to be hung up on originality of story and doing something completely new. Typically, storytellers, writers, whoever, used to take another story and add a little bit extra on that made it theirs. Traditions accrete. So the Robin Hood we’re familiar with has had bits added and taken away as times and audiences have changed. It’s hard to say how much of what we consider the standard telling someone from previous centuries would recognise as their Robin. A blatant example within my lifetime being the addition of the Moorish merry man, which started in the eighties tv series.
I think part of why people do this is because there is a comfort in familiarity. It’s a way of having a two-way relationship with the audience, I suppose, to know that you all have a fair idea were you’re going and what you’re going to get out of it. Much the same as the way we tend to gravitate to genre, even if only as a shorthand for what the audience likes to consume. Provided you have the room to put your own voice to it, your own little bit of spin on it, it’s just as much the storyteller’s own as if they’d come up with something totally original. And truly original is very hard to do because we’ve had thousands if not tens of thousands of years telling stories. We’re all influenced by what has gone before and reference it.
This is a very long-winded way of saying I like mashing several ideas together and seeing what comes out.
What else can we look forward to you and where can we find out more?
The Other Side Books has accepted a third Greenwood book that was written about the same time as The Knight’s Daughter and Isle of Ravens, in principle at least. It needs a bit more spit and polish and, given the pressures of micro-publishing, it may be a couple of years before it appears. The title at the moment is The Dragon Queen but this is subject to change.
Fox Spirit Books has a collection of short stories coming out soon. The title will probably involve dogs and wolves as it relates to my Elkie Bernstein series, but stars Alex and Conn.
I have a number of things looking for homes and hopefully I will have news on them in the not too distant future. Announcements go up on my website (www.joureymouse.net) as well as my social media. Obviously, social media can actually be very easy to miss as I’m not one to shout about something several times a day. I told you I was bad at marketing, right?
And I have some short stories and such available on my Buy Me A Coffee page (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/JoMThomas) if anyone wants a fix right away.
If there was one book (not your own) that you wish you could everyone to read what would it be and why?
I love a lot of classics but I’m going to be a very bad booktempter here and say that for most of them, I actually recommend going and watching the adaptations before reading. The books generally take longer and I think we lose a lot with distance from historical context making them hard to get into. But there are loads of newer books that are beautiful and heart-wrenching and just the sort of thing one should read, so I still have a recommendation in that my current favourite short story collection is still Cat Hellison’s Learning How To Drown.
