Interviewing Jelena Dunato

Hellooooo!!

Last week I reviewed the excellent Dark Woods, Deep Water by Jelena Dunato a stunning fantasy novel mixing history, magic and Slavic folklore into something truly special with compelling characters in a very intelligent story. I was delighted to have the chance to ask Jelena a few questions about this book - which i strongly recommend!

How do you like to booktempt people to read Dark Woods, Deep Water?

Dark Woods, Deep Water started as an image and a feeling. The image was a desolate castle in a snowy forest, the feeling was a deep, hollow yearning, an inevitable sense of loss. I wanted to write a story about mistakes, about bad choices made in good faith, about people brought together by misfortune. It had three narrators from the beginning, an elaborate structure that brought them together, and Death at its core.

So if you want a dark, Gothic tale set in a cold, brutal world inspired by Slavic folklore, where gods play with the destinies of humans, you’ll like this book.

Before we reach the castle, we have a lot of focus on our three main characters. A lot of books may have started with the meeting up of people first - what led you to the focus on the backstory?

Because it’s not really the backstory. You may believe that the castle is the central point of the story, but that’s not true, not if you ask me. The castle is merely the final payback, the last piece that connects the puzzle, the inevitable end.

DWDW is a character-driven story, a story about wrong decisions, tragic mistakes and divine curses. Such a story must give enough room to its characters to live and breathe before it locks them together. Every one of them gets a warning, and makes a decision. Ida sees Morana twice, first in the puppet show and then in the bathtub, and still chooses to go with Gair, and later with Criscer and his men. Amron knows his mission is rigged from the start, and that he and Telani should just go home, and yet he sets out hoping that he will somehow pull through by the skin of his teeth, as he has done before. Elisya is a silly product of patriarchy and bad education, but even she’s aware of the dangers when she chooses to elope. Their paths are combinations of inevitable circumstances and wrong decisions, and without understanding that, the context of the castle would mean little to the readers.

How did you find the voices for the characters? With multiple points of view how did you find them working together to tell a bigger story?

The thing about Dark Woods, Deep Water is that - although it looks like three stories woven together - it is actually one story. It’s the story of Morana’s curse, and in the broader context the story of the Amrian dynasty and their fraught relationship with the gods. Hence the 40-year span and the scope of the story, following the characters across the kingdom, introducing the world’s history, geography, politics, beliefs, traditions and so forth.

My writing fairy godmother’s blessing is that I rarely have to build characters - they usually appear fully formed in my head. I am also a very visual thinker, so I can immediately see them and hear them. For me, writing sometimes feels like an attempt to transcribe the film playing in my mind. Of course, that doesn’t mean I don’t have to calibrate the voices and adjust them to tell the story.

I see Ida and Elisya as two sides of the same coin - two young women trapped in a cold and brutal mediaeval world, struggling to find a place of safety. They are both based on fantasy archetypes - the cunning rogue and the naive lady - but I worked hard not to take any of their traits for granted.

Ida is the character readers seem to like the most - she is resourceful, sharp and clever. She is quite ruthless and her decisions are sometimes morally questionable, but she is also a person who can tell right from wrong and who will try to be good if the circumstances allow it. But above all, she is a survivor. When I was writing her, I told myself - I am going to write a character who never gives up, who fights her way to the top of the heap no matter what - and because of that, she was immensely fun to write.

Elisya gets a lot of hate for being spoiled and privileged, which I think is unfair. She is a victim of the system as much as Ida, just born at the opposite end of the hierarchy. All those fairy tales that fill her head, they’re just a form of escapism for a powerless, neglected girl pushed around by a perennially angry father. Just like Ida, she gets abused and sold, but unlike her, Elisya has never learnt to cope with it, because she was raised to become a passive ornament. In that sense, I think her transformation in the end, small as it may be in the context of the story, is massive for her.

Telani and Amron are a double act, where Telani gets the voice, for reasons that become obvious towards the end, but also because I deliberately left Amron voiceless. His life is the backbone of the story: he is constantly spoken of, interpreted, and used. He is the prince in the puppet play, he’s the warrior, the legend, the king’s fixer, Orsiana’s prophesied child, Raden’s bloodthirsty villain and Elisya’s knight in shining armour. He is the projection of a hero. And yet, the only wish he plainly articulates throughout the story is to go home. Telani is his wingman, helping him carry this immense burden, the most perceptive of the narrators, and my personal favourite. You may call him passive only if you believe the people quietly and competently holding things together in the background are passive.

Telani and Amron feel very close to me because they are two exhausted people in their late thirties who get the difficult job done because it must be done and there’s no one else to do it. All frippery has been burnt away from them, there’s only duty, the right thing to do. However, this is a M/M relationship, and I’m a woman, so this is something beyond the scope of my personal experience. I had a challenging job calibrating it, depicting two people who know each other better than many married couples, who accept each other’s flaws, and like - or even love - each other, but are still very much separated by their respective positions in the society and their personal preferences.

In the end, when all the characters are brought together, I think we get a very unlikely cast whose strengths as well as flaws turn out to be essential for the outcome of the story. Every one of them has an important role to play and in facing Morana, they also face their fears and the consequences of their actions.

This story uses Slavic folklore as a source. What elements did you enjoy playing with and adding your own spin on?

Firstly, the geography of a Slavic story. My book is set in an imaginary version of the Eastern Adriatic, so there's harbour towns and olive groves and gentle hills and sunshine. But as the story progresses, it moves into the more symbolic, more characteristic Slavic landscape: the dark forest, the snow, the cold. It signals to the reader that we're now in the territory of myths and legends and that everything the reader - and the characters - believed to be true is now gone. In Slavic mythology (and in many others) forests are mythical places inhabited by strange and often hostile creatures. To this motif, I added another one: the sacred grove, as an ancient ritual place situated by the body of water, sometimes associated with the cult of the dead, which I put in the castle as the main sacrificial site.

We don’t know much about Slavic gods. There’s no written canon, just a handful of legends and fairy tales, leaving plenty of room for imagination. Morana (Marzanna, Morena, Mara), the most important deity in the story, is the goddess of death and winter, which gave me a very nice excuse to include a snowstorm in my story. Also, in ancient times, the beginning of spring was celebrated by drowning an effigy of Morana in a lake or pond, and this idea of ponds and drowning - combined with the sacred groves - gave me a solid base to build her cult in the book.

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

I currently don’t have an agent or a publishing deal, so nothing is fixed and I’m back in the submitting/querying wasteland, trying to sell my work. I have a novella, set in the same world, which I am currently trying to sell. I’m also writing a sequel to DWDW, which I hoped would be finished by now, but life got in the way. I have a family and a demanding full-time job, so with everything I had to do to launch DWDW, I had very little time for writing. But I love the story so far and I promise you it will be a good one.

You can always find me on social media and on jelenadunato.com.

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

You do understand this is an impossible question, right? 

(Impossible and evil - yes that’s me)

There are so many books which I think everyone should read, but since we’re talking about speculative fiction and, more precisely, Slavic speculative fiction, I’m going to suggest Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. It is an old book, published in 1967, and probably known to every Slavic reader, but I realised many English-speaking readers haven’t read it. And they should read it because it’s a masterpiece. It’s very hard to categorise it, for it is truly sui generis, but it blends together fantasy and farce, romance and grotesque, religion and satirical portrayal of writers and communism. It precisely dissects a very specific time and place (Moscow in 1930’s) and at the same time tells the timeless story of Pontius Pilate. It has Satan as one of the main characters, and star-crossed lovers, and some of the best descriptions of regret and longing I’ve ever read. It’s a beautiful, clever, funny, heartbreaking book and I devoutly recommend it.