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You Will Believe: An Interview with Author Carolyn Turgeon

             Carolyn Turgeon leads, as she will tell you herself with a wink, an excessively awesome, exceedingly glamorous life.  She splits her time between New York City and State College, Pennsylvania – when she’s not renting an apartment in Berlin, teaching in Alaska, or sailing to Europe on the QM2 with a dashing man.

When the acclaimed author of Godmother isn’t writing, she relishes belly dancing, playing the accordion and toasting the ghosts of writers past with pink cocktails at the Algonquin Hotel, a notorious watering hole for creative and literary types.  It’s where the famed “Viscious Circle” as it was called -- Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and others -- hobnobbed around what was more commonly known as the Algonquin Round Table. Despite all this rich, cultural swaddling, Turgeon wonders if she may have missed her calling as an Eskimo seal dancer, or maybe a musk ox herder, two career options she discovered during her time teaching in University of Alaska Anchorage's MFA in Creative Writing program.

Turgeon’s calling as a writer seems to be as fantastical and as successful as some of her novels. Her acclaimed first novel, Rain Village, was followed swiftly by Godmother, which also garnered stellar reviews. Her third novel, Mermaid, is based on the fairy-tale classic, and will be released in March 2011.

Meeting her, like reading her books, is believing. Turgeon dresses in a playful, elegant style, not unlike you might imagine of the characters in her novels – black, flowing outfits paired with striped stockings and dainty high-heeled ankle boots. Her tattoos are bold and colorful, and her demeanor in front of a classroom of graduate students is light-hearted, with decidedly non-academic phrases sprinkled into her talks, like gorgeous, glitter and just sayin’.

Don’t let that sparkle-dust and self-deprecating humor fool you – Turgeon is a serious practitioner of her craft. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Penn State, a master’s from UCLA, and spends the better part of each day working, typing away on her laptop, wherever she may be.  Rain Village took ten years to write and publish; all the while, she doggedly kept notes on the criticism she got in writers’ workshops, re-wrote it completely several times, and persevered. With each of her novels and despite major revisions, she has remained true to her stories, never fearing their dark sides, bravely navigating the treacherous gauntlet of editors and publishers and agents determined to change them. She accomplished this with good humor and remarkable tenacity, by trusting friends and key professionals who commented on her drafts and, ultimately, her own good instincts.

“Remember,” she tells her students, “publishers are just regular people who want to be ravaged. The first lines of a story must be seductive,” she adds, brushing her jet-black hair with its stylish white streak away from her face, then rolling her eyes to emphasize what she sees as a critical point. “I mean that in the best way. A great story must seduce you into wanting to read all of it. My goal is to tell a story that completely transports the reader to another world.”

            Given the ‘fairy-tale’ nature of her second and third novels, it’s easy to see one way to accomplish that. Initially drawn to re-tell the classic “Cinderella” story because she thought it would be easier and fun after the struggle she had launching her first book, Rain Village, Turgeon relished the glamorous aspect, too. ”I wanted to create something beautiful and glittering and lush and sad and thought Cinderella was the perfect tale to work with. My initial idea was to tell it straight, as a fairy-tale set in a long-ago past, but with all the weird, dark psychology filled out in gorgeous detail. It evolved into something else, of course, and not so easy to write, either.”

            During a recent lecture at UAA's summer MFA writers' residency, she gave some tips for adapting classic tales into new forms of literature, noting that there is a long, illustrious canon of these kinds of works – including Wide Sargasso Sea (re-imagining Bronte’s madwoman in the attic); Starcrossed (young adult trilogy of Helen of Troy set in high school); Gregory Maguire’s runaway hit novels, including Wicked; and “mash-ups” like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith, a story that twists Jane Austen (who is credited as ‘co-author’) into modern horror “genre.”

Some classify Turgeon’s work as “urban fantasy,” but she thinks it falls into the fairy-tale realm. “To me, ‘urban fantasy’ is more a publishing term that means your book is packaged and sold in a certain way. My advice is to follow your vision and do it as well as possible.”

            Following her vision, it turns out, is key to how she re-envisions well-known tales and gives them new life. “The most obvious technique,” she says, “is to take a minor, overlooked character, like the fairy godmother from Cinderella or the princess from The Little Mermaid, and write from this different, unexpected point of view. In both Godmother and Mermaid, I tell the “real” story, too, a story that differs in major ways from the original. Any retelling needs a twist, to make the old story seem brand new.”

            That takes a certain amount of instinct on her part, but also gets figured out in the process of writing and editing, she notes, as she explains how aspects of the novel developed and the decisions she made along the way.

            “Initially, I was hesitant to describe the fairy world because I thought it would be unbearably corny.”

In fact, the early draft of Godmother that sold to her publisher, Three Rivers, had very little of the fairy world in it; in that version the flashbacks to Lil’s fairy past dealt only with her interactions with Cinderella and the prince. “My editor at Three Rivers, and then my editor at the UK press Headline, which swooped in and bought the book at the last minute, both pushed me to add vivid material about the fairy world. It’s hard, building a world like that and establishing rules for it, while making it as un-Disney as possible.” In other words, creating an ending doesn’t always ring with ‘happily-ever-after.’

In Turgeon’s Godmother, subtitled, “The Secret Cinderella Story,” she whips in an element of surprise by juxtaposing the story of the exiled fairy godmother named Lil – now living in a contemporary New York setting and working at a bookstore – with flashbacks to her life in the underwater fairy-world. “I had started Godmother as a straight fairy-tale. Only later did it occur to me to place Lil in modern-day New York City. I knew something had to have gone wrong for her to be in the human world, and that her present life would be filled with longing and regret and loss – emotions I am especially fond of writing. So it wasn’t difficult to imagine Lil both as a regretful old woman and a young, powerful fairy longing for new experiences.” 

What proved more challenging was fitting it all together. “At first, the flashbacks to the fairy world were tiny scenes that I meant to scatter throughout the book,” Turgeon says. “But as it developed, I realized that the fairy story – what went wrong the night of the ball, what it was that put Lil in her current position – was as important as the present-day story. It took a long time and a lot of writing for me to see what both stories were and how well they worked in tandem, with both leading up to the night of a ball.

As readers discover the reasons behind why Lil was driven out from that perfect world, they are drawn into this compelling tale and eventually shown glimpses of a vastly different reality. Rather than a fallen fairy, Lil may be seen as a woman trying to cope with guilt over the death of her younger sister.

When asked if she had been deliberately ambiguous, Turgeon replies, “I set up a couple of different interpretations of the novel, but I don’t know how important it is that I intended to do that… As a reader, I guess I am usually curious about authorial intent only when I can’t figure out what the author intended…. I think my own intent is obvious, but then I might be slightly biased…”

Making it realistic while also surrealistic took some finesse with small clues dropped along the way.

“It was tricky getting those details in, since the book is told from Lil’s point of view and this information comes from other characters. I wanted to give the least amount of information possible while still providing one viable, real-world explanation for the events in the book.”

Another instinctive decision that goes into writing a novel is the all-important point-of-view. Henry James disparaged, "the romantic privilege of the 'first person'" but in writing both Rain Village and Godmother that privilege was apropos. For her third novel, Turgeon is taking a path of discovery, switching to third-person for Mermaid. “I was amazed at how freeing it was!” she says. “Now I love third person.

“With Godmother,  I chose to narrate from the fairy godmother’s perspective—back when I was just going to tell Cinderella as a straight fairy-tale—so that she could tell her own story while also having a somewhat omniscient perspective over the rest of the characters. The first scene I wrote was of her flying over the kingdom, describing everything from a bird’s eye view. At some point in the writing, I realized I wanted there to be a question—an open question—about whether or not what Lil was telling you was true. First person narration is the perfect means for creating an unreliable narrator.”

One of the trademarks of Turgeon’s tale-weaving is the lively pace of her stories, which are enhanced by interwoven plots in both Godmother and Mermaid. Mermaid was the first book she plotted out before writing it, but, she notes, it didn’t come naturally. “I was able to do that because of all the trial-and-error, figuring-it-out-as-I-went work I did on Godmother.”

Likewise, writing the all-important ending was more an evolutionary process than a eureka moment. In Godmother, she notes, “I had no idea how it would end until a year or two into the writing. I had to just write and write and let the story emerge. Once I realized how the book should end, I focused on making that idea work well—not only working and reworking the ending, but revising the rest of the book to lead into that ending most effectively.”

Along the way, she had to continuously negotiate with agents and editors who had ideas – not to mention criticisms – she had to evaluate for what she could use, and leave the rest behind. In other words, trust your instincts, believe in yourself – and work like crazy to make it perfect.

Carolyn Turgeon is hard at work (and play) on a new novel which, she says, “You’ll just have to read to believe….”

NOTE: The authors of this piece are students in Jo-Ann Mapson’s fiction class at the University of Alaska Anchorage MFA in Creative Writing program, who worked collaboratively on posing the questions and editing the answers.  They are members of the MFA graduating classes of 2013, 2012 and 2011, with special thanks to Toni Todd, Lisa Scerbak and Heather Lende for final composition and editing.