T. A. Barron |
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T.A. Barron is the award-winning author of fantasy novels such as The Lost Years of Merlin epic—soon to be a major motion picture. He serves on a variety of environmental and educational boards including The Nature Conservancy and The Land and Water Fund of the Rockies, and is the founder of a national award for heroic children. Following a life-changing decision to leave a successful business career to write full-time in 1990, Barron has written seventeen books, but is happiest when on the mountain trails with his wife, Currie, and their five children.
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You've said that your goal in writing The Lost Years of Merlin books is to fill in the gap in Merlin lore where his youth should be. Keeping that in mind, how much of The Lost Years of Merlin epic is based on actual legends?
Merlin's story, you could say, is a kind of tapestry—a great, colorful, complex one. People have been weaving threads into it for almost 1500 years, starting with the oral tradition of the Celts hundreds of years before the first Merlin stories were written down in the Mabinogian around 1000 A.D. Trouble is, there's a gigantic hole in this tapestry. Most of Merlin's legends (whether told by Celtic bards or more modern writers) say nothing at all about what he was like as a young man—before he became the ancient, centuries-old wizard who mentors King Arthur. There is practically zilch in the ancient Celtic lore about this amazing character after his mysterious conception from a saintly mother and a demonic father, until he prophesies the sleeping dragons under King Vortigern's castle. In between lies a gap—a hole—of many years. That's what I'm trying to do in The Lost Year of Merlin books: fill in that hole. As you can see, that gives me a chance to add some new, original threads to Merlin's tapestry. But to really make it work, the threads I weave have to match with, and connect with, all the other threads that come before and after. So I've tried in every way I could to bring authentic Celtic and Druid lore into the books, while at the same time telling stories we haven't heard before. Here are three examples: When I imagined young Merlin washing ashore on page one of the first book, with no memory and no idea of his destiny, I knew he'd escaped from somewhere. Somewhere he'd need to find his way back to if he's ever going to learn his true identity. But where should that place be? I ended up picking the lost isle of Fincayra, which I found mentioned briefly in an old Celtic poem. The place was called "an island beneath the waves", which gave a hint of the subconscious, and "a bridge between mortal and immortal". Just the right kind of place, it seemed to me, for the greatest wizard of all times to come of age. As another example, I knew Merlin, as a wizard, would have second sight. But how did he get it? And what traumas shaped his ability to see deeper than the surface of things? I wound up making him create a terrible blaze that causes him to go completely blind. In the pain he suffers, and the magnitude of his challenge to see again, he gains a lot more than vision. And that's the way it is with Merlin: His greatest gains only come through his greatest losses. I'll add one more. Merlin, as a Druid, makes some of his biggest discoveries thanks to nature. The wilderness is his true home. (In that way he's a lot like me, which has made writing about him fun.) In the books, Merlin comes to speak with the spirits of trees and rivers and stones. He learns about his powers of transformation only by surviving a wild storm at the top of an old tree. And he finds he can learn more than he ever imagined by running with the wild deer. (That's also when he falls in love with a deer-woman named Hallia.)
You've traveled extensively—to Oxford, Asia, Africa, even the Arctic. How have your travels informed your writing? Did your time in the United Kingdom help you develop the setting of The Lost Years of Merlin?
There's nothing like travel to fuel the imagination. And vice versa: I've often dreamed about a place—say, Calcutta, or the Seychelle Islands—then made plans to go there. I've always had a raging case of wonderlust, which has led me to leap at any chances to travel. It's also given me a raging case of dysentery, which I contracted on the trail in Nepal, a full ten days' walk from the nearest medical help. The result of that little adventure was a real scare (I thought for sure I was going to die). Losing 40 pounds might sound like a great crash diet, but it wasn't much fun. That experience made an impact on me, raising the stakes about life in general, forcing me to ask some tough questions about life, death, and rebirth. I suppose you could say I'm still asking them in my novels. I loved Oxford. Again, I traveled often, to nearby places like Scotland—or faraway places like a rural Japanese village where I participated in a traditional roof thatching (as a lowly serf who beat the lice out of thatch while others prepared the complex Shinto ceremonies). During my years at Oxford, I learned a lot more about hiking trails in the Scottish Highlands than I did about history and philosophy. (Unfortunately, they weren't willing to give me any exams on what I knew best.) During my final year at Oxford, I discovered an ancient oak tree on a hill overlooking the city's gleaming spires. I used to sit under it, or even in its branches, watching foxes or clouds or whatever. It felt magical somehow, and I called it "Merlin's tree", though I had no idea that someday I'd be writing these stories about him. Spots like that definitely gave me a strong sense of "place" for the Lost Years of Merlin books. Since I am a big believer in the power of place—especially for fantasy and science fiction—this helps a lot. If you want to create a new world, you've got to start with a place. The world has to feel absolutely real, right down to the most secret smells and surprising textures. The grittier and realer the place, the better chance you have to make the whole story feel true.
Many of your books have won awards and recommendations for adults as well as children. Is there a specific age group you aim for when you write? What sort of responses do you get from adult readers?
One reviewer told me recently he thought my books were "for people age 9 to 99." I think that's probably off base (I mean, what about those 100-year-olds?). Actually, he pretty much got it right. The truth is, I don't write books for any particular age group. I just write books. Books that I would like to read myself. For whatever reason, people out there like to try to pigeonhole writers. Last year, one radio interviewer in Ohio asked me with exasperation: "What kind of writer are you? Are you a science fiction writer, a nature writer, a fantasy writer, a young adult writer, or a spiritual writer?" I answered with one word—Yes. Stories don't come in neat little packages. If they did, they'd be totally boring. A good story, I think, needs a lot of elements, and I love it when these elements show some surprising connections. For example, when I wrote a novel called The Ancient One, I started out with an idea of a great redwood tree that was also a time tunnel. That led me (and my hero, a gal named Kate Gordon) to discover the secret of a lost Indian tribe, the threat to a modern logging town, the power of a magical touchstone, and the truth about what lay at the bottom of the deepest lake in North America. That's just the beginning. So the fact that my books appeal to adults as well as kids doesn't surprise me. (I get about half my letters from each group.) The real question is not a reader's age or demographic profile, but whether he or she likes to imagine new worlds and explore risky terrain—both on the land and in the ideas underlying a book.
You've said that your books celebrate true heroes, rather than celebrities the media continuously cover. Do you think the media can be a negative influence?
You bet. Here's the difference: A celebrity is just somebody who has gotten our attention for a few seconds or a few years. It doesn't matter why—it could have been something destructive or just plain idiotic. Whatever, it's no big deal. A hero, though, has nothing to do with publicity. A real hero, the kind I like to write about, must face down a terrible problem (usually inside himself as well as outside)—and not only survive, but truly prevail. It never comes easy. Real heroism takes real hardship, real suffering. Much of today's media is negative, telling us what we can't be or do. That's one reason we never watch television in our house. All we use the box for is to show videos and sometimes sports events. To me, the most offensive stuff on television is the heavy commercialism. We are bombarded by Madison Avenue all the time in our society. The message boils down to "you are what you wear or what you own," not who you really are. On top of that, the whole notion of describing people as "consumers" irritates me. It's part of this perverse psychology. I don't want to be a consumer! I'd rather be a producer, a creator—someone who makes choices that matter somehow.
You were once the chair of the company that imports Swiss Army Knives into the U. S. and Canada. Why did you switch careers to become a writer?
Look, the only two constants in my crazily varied life have been my love for nature and my passion for writing. Sometimes they both come together, either in the settings for my novels or in my books about wilderness treks in the Rockies. So when I was involved in running a business, a venture capital firm that bought the Swiss Army company, I couldn't help dreaming up stories all the time. (And believe me, the characters I met gave me some good material for novels.) In those years I often woke up at 3 or 4 a.m. to write for a few hours before heading off to a business meeting. I got used to writing in the back of taxis, planes, or meetings that ran on too long. Finally, I had to make a choice. Should I follow my passions or stay with that safe salary? That's when my strong sense of mortality helped: I just kept feeling life was slipping by too fast. So I had the great fun of walking into my partners' meeting one day and announcing I was going to resign as president of the firm to move back to Colorado and write books in my attic. They thought I was completely nuts. And probably I am. But I'm also a whole lot happier, even when I'm struggling to write and nothing is happening—a frequent occurrence. I'm living my passion.
You have a large family and you live on a farm. How do you find time to write?
It's difficult sometimes. No, impossible. But I try to be as disciplined as I can. Sometimes I get to write for twelve hours in a day, because nobody had the flu or a soccer match or a bad dream. And sometimes I'm lucky to get twelve minutes. I've learned, though, that even when I'm not actually working at my desk, my subconscious is chewing away on a story. It's hard to tell what may spring from that process, but I've come to trust in it. Still, it can be intensely frustrating when I'm trying to write and the kids (or the kids with the goats, as happened last week) invade my work space. I leave my door closed, but unlocked, so the kids can visit any time. But I try to make it clear this is my work space, so I tell them they can stay as long as they are reading quietly or creating something on their own. With the older kids (ages 12, 10, and 8), this usually buys me a fair amount of time. With the little tykes (ages 5 and 3), I'm lucky to get five milliseconds before I'm down on the floor with them—or shouting for help. The best part about having the kids around is they keep me honest. No falseness, no pretense, survives very long around this pack of coyote cubs. Candor is what they're about. They're also full of freshness and wonder—and also humor. That's what I appreciate most about them. One thing I've learned about writing: Even if you have all the time in the world, and no kids or goats to distract you, it's still often a struggle. The horizons keep receding, so as good as you might get, you can always get better. That's part of writing's allure—and agony.
Your writing is very involved in issues—how we treat nature, how to recognize our own potential, how we relate to the world outside of ourselves. Is it ever hard to balance telling a story with exploring an issue? Does a story ever lead you in a direction you hadn't planned to go, making it harder to explore certain issues?
Yes! For starters, I care about issues a lot—like what we are doing to the land and air and water we need to survive. Saving the planet isn't just a slogan for me. It's real, powerfully real. That's why I spend a lot of time doing volunteer work for environmental organizations like The Wilderness Society, where I've been on the board for almost twenty years. There is always a tension between a story and the underlying idea, especially if it's an idea you feel passionately about. But the story must come first. No exceptions. If the issue starts taking over, then the story becomes teachy and preachy and isn't worth anything. The good news is that, if your story (especially the main character, the place, and the suspense or mystery that drives the plot) feels real and true, then your underlying ideas can give the book more weight. If the story stays primary, the ideas will deepen the whole experience—both for the reader and the writer Here's one example: In The Lost Years of Merlin, when that boy washes ashore in the opening scene, he grows a tremendous amount to get to the level of the great wizard he will be in the last scene of Book Five. He only gets there because of the gifts—the magic—he finds in himself. Now, I've felt washed ashore many times in my life. And I'm hoping that Merlin's struggles will feel real enough to people that his eventual triumph will also feel real. Maybe even a source of inspiration.
You've received a lot of critical acclaim from such varied sources as The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Madeleine L'Engle, and Lloyd Alexander. Is the acclaim ever intimidating? Is the attention people give to your work always helpful, or does it sometimes make it difficult to keep writing?
Sure, praise is always nice—especially from someone you respect. (And that's how I feel about Madeleine and Lloyd, to be sure.) After allowing myself a moment of satisfaction, though, I try hard not to think about it too much, to keep my focus on whatever I'm writing. Otherwise it's very easy to get distracted. Or, even worse, to start writing for somebody else's expectations, not your own. The only people I really listen to while I'm writing are my characters. Often they will tell me what they really want, or what a certain scene is really about, which may be totally different from what my original outline said. In those cases, you simply must follow your characters. You ignore them at your peril. Sometimes I think of a novel as a trek. To start with, I draft a sort of aerial photograph—a map—of the terrain of the quest. That tells me the approximate beginning and ending, as well as a bit about the dangerous marshes or inspiring peaks in between. Then, having made my map, I intentionally lose it. I parachute down to the ground and start wandering around aimlessly on the terrain for a while. That's when I usually get surprised: Those marshes might actually be a new form of life evolving; those handsome peaks could really be a mirage, or a death trap. And it's often the characters themselves who will show me the way through the obstacles.
At one point you built your own mountain cabin. Why? And what was involved?
Ever since growing up in the mountains of Colorado, I've wanted to live in the kind of alpine meadow where I like to camp. It took quite a while to find a place where it could happen—an alpine meadow at just over 10,000 feet—but it's been a wonderful place to write (and also play with my kids). The cabin also makes it simple to take off for day hikes—or longer ones. A few years ago, I took a month-long trek in the nearby Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness, using the cabin as base camp where I could restock my food or warm up after a 30-hour blizzard. (The warming up took another 30 hours.) My journal from that trek ended up as a book called To Walk In Wilderness. One of the toughest problems in building the cabin was minimizing the energy required. (No powerlines anywhere in this neighborhood.) We took advantage of the abundant solar energy, running most of the power tools off some solar panels dropped in the middle of the meadow. We needed a portable generator for some things, of course, like sanding down the joints of the logs—but most of what we needed came straight from the sun. Part of what the cabin is about is just plain simplifying. And feeling humbled by nature. Getting out of my head and all the nonsense that seems so important sometimes, and simply being. One thing I do every summer up there is to raise some caterpillars who metamorphose into butterflies after a few weeks. Nothing I'll ever write will be half as astonishing as that act of transformation—not traveling back in time in The Ancient One, or to another galaxy in Heartlight, or to the isle of Fincayra in The Lost Years of Merlin. And that's healthy for me to remember.
Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Just this: I'm often asked why I like so much to write quest novels in the science fiction or fantasy genres. The fact is, those are the kinds of stories I like to read. If science fiction is well done, it's an unforgettable journey, to someplace we've never been before that also feels like we've always been there. Someplace where an individual has to struggle with some very personal issues and also some great overarching issues. The mythic quest embraces all of these qualities, even though they might at first appear to be opposites. I guess that's the key. Science fiction and fantasy allow us to bend all the rules, so long as they still feel convincingly true. That way the journey to somewhere else can also be a journey deep inside ourselves. And, at the same time, a good old-fashioned page turner.
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