Got Haggis? by Alan Gratz

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Whenever I talk about Something Wicked being set at a Scottish highland festival, I'm often surprised at how many people don't know such things exist. I grew up with one held annually in nearby Gatlinburg, Tennessee, so I was used to seeing pictures of log-tossing, kilt-wearing Scotsmen once a year on the evening news.

I attended three highland festivals during the writing of Something Wicked, each time walking around as though viewing the games through the eyes of my snarky, sarcastic teenage detective Horatio Wilkes. Scottish highland festivals celebrate the culture and heritage of Scots-Irish immigrants, and I found lots of great material among the festival-goers who wore kilts, played bagpipes, danced flings, and ate traditional Scottish fare like meat bridies. (And, yes, haggis.)

As a part of my research, I wanted to see if Horatio had any Scottish blood in him--so I went to one of the many genealogy tents that stand ready to find even the most tenuous connection to your name in their books of clans and septs. "Your name?" the woman behind the desk said.

"Um--Horatio. Horatio Wilkes," I told her. It had been one thing to walk around in Horatio's Converse high tops all weekend long, but it was another thing entirely to actually pretend to be him with someone else.

I irrationally expected the woman to somehow intuit that I was lying to her and call me on it, but she took the name in stride and went to work in her clan history books. "Wilkes" wasn't a proper Scottish clan name, it turned out, but "Wilkie," an acceptable stand-in, was a "sept" of another clan. A "sept" is essentially a family with its own unique name that falls under the umbrella of a more powerful, overarching clan. Burns is a sept of Campbell, for example, as the Burns clan swore its allegiance to the Campbells.

"Wilkie," the woman told me, was a sept of Macduff.

If you're familiar with Shakespeare's Macbeth, you can understand that there was perhaps no more perfect clan for Horatio to belong to. As the Scots say, I plotzed.

Giddy with ideas about how to weave this clan connection into the book, I dashed off to the Macduff clan tent where, compounding my deception, I signed up for information to be sent to Horatio Wilkes, at my address.
Then it was off to a sunny spot where I could watch two-hundred and fifty pound men hurl telephone pole-sized logs end over end and start scribbling down all my ideas in my notebook.
Tomorrow, the music of Something Wicked...

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Alan Gratz, Something Wicked, young adult fiction, Macbeth, mystery,books, Penguin Books