Big 4 with Cels: Janni Lee Simner
Janni Lee Simner lives in the Arizona desert, where the plants really do know how to bite. She’s the author of three young adult fantasy novels: Bones of Faerie, Faerie Winter, and Thief Eyes. She’s also published four books for younger readers and more than more than 30 short stories, including one in the recent Welcome to Bordertown anthology.
1. Your first YA offering, the dark and twisted post-apocalyptic “Bones of Faerie” had me completely intoxicated and entranced by the world. “Faerie Winter” left me even more addicted. You’ve said one of the reasons you continue to write is to visit all the places haven’t got to in person –or haven’t figured out yet to get to, especially the magic ones. Has the idea of magic and mythical lands something you have always felt drawn to?
Thanks so much for the good words about Bones of Faerie and Faerie Winter! I really have always been drawn to magic. As a kid, I spent a lot of time looking for that doorway through the mist to someplace else–some other, more magical world than my own. It was a journey I took seriously enough that once I found fellow seekers-after-magic, we vowed to each other that if we ever found our way through to one of those places, we’d be sure to let each other know before we left this world, so that we could all get there. The desire to call back that feeling of magic that’s almost real enough and near enough to touch is one of the reasons I write.
2. You also have a third YA novel released, the contemporary fantasy “Thief Eyes” set in Iceland and teeming with magic and mystery. Can you tell us a little about what we can expect when we enter Haley’s world?
When I first visited Iceland, I became fascinated with the Icelandic sagas, especially as I walked through some of the same places their characters had walked a thousand years ago–something that gave me the shivery feeling that the past just might be breathing over my shoulder. Hallgerd from Njal’s Saga was especially intriguing to me. When she was a child, her uncle said she had the eyes of a thief; as an adult, she became infamous for refusing her husband two locks of her hair to restring his bow in battle. I wanted to understand Hallgerd better, so I wove her story into the present-day story of one of her descendants, Haley, who gets caught up in a spell Hallgerd casts.
Along the way there are shape-shifting polar bear boys, companionable arctic foxes, and dangerous ravens. (Well, okay, only one of each.) There’s also Iceland’s own moss-covered volcanic landscape, which is pretty magical to me all by itself, and which in Thief Eyes is in danger of pulling apart as the result of Hallgerd’s spell. Haley struggles to save both herself and that land as she tries to get free of the spell and find her way home again.
3. Not only do you write for the YA market, you’re also an accomplished Children’s author. Do you find that your style and process change significantly along with the intended audience?
I don’t, really. The ages of my protagonists change, and because of that their concerns change, but the process of writing the stories doesn’t. Mostly, I’m just telling the stories I most want to tell and writing them as well as I can, and while the audience changes, the storytelling and writing craft doesn’t.
4. Which of your fictional characters Burns Brightest in your mind and why?
Liza from the Faerie books, with her fears and her courage, her practical matter-of-factness in what to us would be an impractical world, her longing to protect those she cares for and her unwillingness to ever give up. I just turned in the third and final Faerie book from Liza’s point of view (working title, Faerie After), and I know that once I finish my editorial revisions, it’s going to be strange to let her go. I sold Bones of Faerie five years ago, but I started writing fragments if Liza’s story a decade before that. We’ve been through a lot together, and I’m going to miss her.
