Marie Brennan is a novelist, folklorist, and martial artist. The author of several works of fiction including the Doppelgänger duology, The Lady Trent series, and over forty short stories, Brennan has a writing style that evokes the reports of mythic lost worlds during The Age of Discovery. She’s been featured in Io9 and Tor, and her first book in the Lady Trent series A Natural History of Dragons, was recently nominated for the 2014 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel.

The Custodian: One of the many things that I love about the Lady Trent series is that you’re able to come up with these complex scientific taxonomies for everyone’s favourite mythical reptile, the dragon. Were there any pre-modern bestiaries or modern zoological works that were particularly influential on you?

Marie Brennan: No specific titles, but things like that have certainly influenced me. Some of the dragon types are directly based on folklore; others are inspired by real-world animals. The savannah snakes in The Tropic of Serpents, for example, derive many of their behaviours from cheetahs. Because the dragons Isabella studies are natural animals, rather than supernatural creatures, I want them to fit into their environments as plausibly as I can manage, which means paying attention to how such things work in real life.

C: When I look at Wuxia movies or even contemporary anime like The Legend of Korra, I’m mesmerised by the fluid choreography and the grace of the martial artists. Can you say that your practice of martial arts has given you a better awareness and ability to describe the body and physical action in literary terms?

M: Oh, definitely — but it started well before I began studying martial arts. I was a ballet dancer from the age of five until I was eighteen, and while the differences between dance and karate are too many to count, both of them teach you to pay close attention to the movement of your body on a very fine-grained scale. Putting that in words is still a challenge, though, because knowing what to do and knowing how to convey it in a clear and engaging manner are different skills entirely. It’s a challenge I enjoy, though, to the point where I’ve written an entire ebook (Writing Fight Scenes — does what it says on the tin) on how to get from one to the other.

C: Do you also find inspiration for your stories in illustrations or other types of art? Any favourite pieces or artists worth mentioning?

M: I enjoy visual art, especially good photography, and sometimes it feeds into a story by one route or another. The waterfall island in The Tropic of Serpents came about because I saw a fabulous photo of Iguazu Falls and promptly said ‘this is going in the book’. I didn’t even know what I was going to do with it; I just knew it was too fantastic not to include.

Most of the time, though, what inspires me is music. Some of my short stories are retellings of English folksongs; another was inspired by the Eagles’ song Hotel California. I had an Igauzu Falls-type experience with the track ‘Death Is the Road to Awe’ from the score to The Fountain: one day when I was listening to it, my subconscious decided that was how the book With Fate Conspire was going to end. I didn’t know yet what the end of the book was even going to be; I just knew I wanted to try and replicate that kind of mood.

C: I see one of your forthcoming tales focuses on Teresa Avila, one of the most vocal and spell-binding mystics to have ever lived. There’s also a gorgeous sculpture of her by the Baroque artist Bernini. What brought her to your attention?

M: My husband came across an interesting piece of trivia: the night Teresa of Ávila died is the night Catholic Europe transitioned from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, ‘skipping’ ten days in the process. For years I had the vague notion I should make a short story out of that, but it didn’t become a reality until I was invited to contribute to the anthology Shared Nightmares. Then I started reading her theological works and discovered how deeply disturbing sixteenth-century mystical Catholic theology could be! When she says things like ‘God hurts me in order to demonstrate the depth of his love for me’, it isn’t hard to make the short story fit the ‘nightmare’ part of the anthology’s theme.

C:When working on a vast subject, it’s easy to procrastinate and make the research the only project. Naturally, this kind of thing can be an easy pitfall for doctoral students as well as novelists. Have you mastered any preventative or evasive techniques for this?

M: I think the key is to recognize that there is never a point at which you will be ‘done’ with the research. When I wrote Midnight Never Come, which was my first attempt at heavily-researched historical fantasy, I was still doing research after the first draft was complete. When you have enough that the story begins taking shape in your mind, start writing; what you write will help you figure out what you still need to know, and what you can let go of.

C: Were there any specific professors, academic advisors, or university experiences which pushed you to seek a career as a full time writer?

M: Pushed me? Not remotely: I didn’t even talk publicly about the fact that I was writing novels until I was in grad school. I felt guilty about leaving my Ph.D. unfinished to write full-time, though, and I did have a couple of professors — Anya Royce in anthropology and Henry Glassie in folklore — who basically gave me a friendly boot out the door. They were both extremely supportive of my academic work, but they also felt there was nothing wrong with laying that aside to pursue a different kind of success, and did a lot to keep me from tearing myself up over making the switch.

C: The idea that certain things are ‘uncharted’ or ‘enchanted’—I think—is a belief worth preserving. What ‘uncharted territories’—geographically or within the history of ideas—are most intriguing to you?

M: There are whole swaths of the world, geographically and historically, that are . . . not uncharted, perhaps, but insufficiently charted. We still tell far more stories about western Europe than other kinds of places, more stories about rich straight white guys than other kinds of people. There’s an ethical argument to be made about why those stories are worth telling, but that makes it seem like writing about them is equivalent to eating your veggies. In truth, it’s just the opposite: this stuff is *candy* to me, full of delicious flavor. Reading and writing about the unexplored bits gives you the pleasure of discovery, the encounter with something unexpected and awesome. My list of places and times I find interesting is kind of a random assortment: pre-colonial Mesoamerica, feudal Japan, Mediterranean antiquity, half a dozen more. But it’s also about the people who don’t make it into the history books, the women and the lower-class people and the immigrants, many of whom did fascinating things you may not have heard about before.

C: Are there any plans to adapt any of your works into other mediums such as graphic novels or films?

M: None yet! I’d be delighted to see it happen, though.

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