Interviewing Lorraine Wilson

Hellooo!

Last month I had the pleasure of reading the novel We Are All Ghosts In The Forest by Lorraine Wilson a future-based piece of fantasy that also tackles real-world issues such as climate change and immigration. I loved it. It is lyrical, inventive and thoughtful so I was delighted to invite Lorraine back to the blog to discuss the book and a few other things!

Hi lovely Womble! I’m so delighted to be back on your blog!

How do you like to booktempt people into reading We Are All Ghosts In The Forest?

Mostly by creeping up behind them and whispering ‘Ghoooost caaat’ until they run away?

(Interviewer’s note my kind of booktempting)

Or, in case my publicity team are reading this, by saying it is a not-really-dystopia set in a future where the internet has broken and the world is haunted by digital ghosts. It follows a hedgewitch whose life is knocked off course by a silent boy and the trouble he brings in his wake. It’s a story about found family and sentient forests, about how we carry our traumas and how we might set them down, and about how cool bees are.

We don’t tend to think of the future being magical, but you’ve explored this a few times in your work what is the attraction for you in this mix?

I think it stems from my fascination for folklore as an essential part of us as individuals and societies. Myth, religion, superstition, fabulism and everything else that crams under that broad folkloric umbrella are always there in the mix whatever point in human history you care to look at. And they tell us so much about our humanity – our mores, our fears, our aspirations, our values – as well as about the world that society inhabits – its dangers, its resources, its mysteries. To my mind there is no better starting point to understanding a society and that society’s relationship with its world, than to listen to the stories it tells its children.

So, given all that, why wouldn’t folklore exist in our futures?

It absolutely will, and it will evolve as our society and environment change too, which is something that intrigues me so much to be honest – what fairytales will evolve on a generation ship, what ghost stories in a drowned city, what gods in a simulation?

Those questions are intrinsically fun to play with, but they’re also just the flip side of the coin asking who we will be in the future. When we’re under pressure as individuals or societies, we often default to superstition or faith to shape or justify our behaviours. So, looking at the folklore, the spaces within a person’s story where the magic creeps in, tells you so much about the stresses that person is under and how they will react to that.

I don’t know, it’s just oodles of fun to be honest. And I think bringing the fantastical into futuristic settings also loosens the limitations that genre expectations can impose, so you have this whole new landscape to explore as a writer.

For Katerina doing the right thing no matter the cost, even to her own community/home is the big dilemma she must face was this a theme you wanted to explore?

Yes, to a degree. I think Katerina is a fiercely good person who, perhaps unconsciously, sees her goodness as a weakness that’s going to get her hurt. So, she’s in conflict with herself more than anything else – fighting her own fears so she can stay true to her moral compass whilst also shoring up the walls around herself. Her main theme, for me, was of learning to trust herself, and thereby learn to trust in the relationships she has forged. So, when she’s doing the hard, risky things, she’s doing them full of fear not of the repercussions to her home, which she thinks she’s weighed up very logically, but of having her own mistrust proven right. Or wrong. Both are equally terrifying.

Which kind of links into the theme you mention - of how we (as individuals and collectively) react when we’re afraid. Both Katerina and the people in her community react in less than brilliant ways sometimes, and you can understand those instinctive self-defensive reflexes, but that doesn’t always make them the right choice to make. I wanted to explore that a little too, because it’s something that lies at the heart of so many societal issues right now – the question of whether we choose to listen to our humanity or to our fear-driven instincts.

What drew you to the idea of a digital ghost? Their origin in the story is kept a mystery what led to that choice?

I do keep the mechanistic origins of the digital ghosts a mystery, which I knew would annoy some readers (sorry folks). Part of that choice was because, well, there is no mechanism for the internet suddenly vanishing in a puff of ghosts! That’s not something I can science my way out of, so I don’t plan on trying! But part of the decision to not cover that aspect of the world’s history was because I really didn’t want this book to turn into a story focussed on the apocalypse, you know? I didn’t want it to be about the disaster or the dystopia, or really the wider world at all. I wanted it to be about normal people trying to build lives for themselves from the wreckage, and perhaps succeeding.

(I have had to dig into this ghostly backstory a little more in my next book… I guess I couldn’t avoid it forever)

As for where the idea for digital ghosts came from – I realised in retrospect that they have very clear emotional roots in me watching my child’s loneliness through the pandemic lockdowns. Watching her life, her education and friendships and world, reduced to pixels on a screen. I think our internet age is, in a way, making digital ghosts of us all. We will (probably, apocalypses notwithstanding) be survived by thousands, tens of thousands, of digital echoes of ourselves. And that thought is a bit eerie really.

Several novels now into your career have you noticed changes in how you approach writing a story?

Actually, the writing of this book marked a bit of a tide change for me. Before writing Ghosts I was quite an intense planner. Not to the same extent as some, but I definitely leaned pretty heavily into setting, characters, internal arcs, external waypoints, themes etc being more or less laid out before I started drafting.

This book – begun as it was in random brain-fried bursts in between homeschooling – was not planned. I didn’t know anything about the story when I started writing – all I had was the opening sentence and an image of the road into the village. I didn’t know there were going to be digital ghosts until I wrote one into the opening page. I didn’t know Stefan was non-verbal until it became obvious in the first chapter.

That … is not how I have continued to write! With the mental space to be a little less chaotic, I have done more prep for the books I’ve written since. But I am much less completionist about that planning, and more ‘eh, this feels right. I guess I’ll find out’. It’s a more organic process, and also feels like I am trusting myself more. Which is a nice place to be in. Being more secure with my voice and process has also made me braver at pushing my writing in new and (hopefully) exciting ways, which is something I’m really enjoying at the moment.

What else can we look forward to from you in the future and where can we find out more in this weird world of social media?

I have The Salt Oracle coming out in November. It is set in the same digital ghosts world as We Are All Ghosts In The Forest, but is another stand alone. It’s a kind-of Dark Academia, murder mystery set on a floating college fortress in the Baltic Sea, where a researcher investigating her mentor’s death must confront the corrupted heart of the institution she – and thousands of others – depends on.

And I am mostly on Bluesky these days - @rainewilson.bsky.social, although I also have a blog/newsletter at https://lorrainewilson.substack.com

What great books have you read recently?

Oooh, in the last few weeks I’ve loved:  Asunder by Kerstin Hall – a vibrant, clever story of monstrous gods and the people caught in their snares. I really enjoyed the way Blood Over Bright Haven by M.L. Wang explored colonialism, prejudice and justice in a really interesting set up. Makiia Lucier’s Year Of The Reaper was a strangely gentle story considering it was about plague, trauma and a crazed murderer! And I found Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Conner an interesting, resonant read too.