Auras and Dragons and Single Malt: Meeting Diana Wynne Jones in Edinburgh

I only met Diana Wynne Jones in person once, at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2003. I was fortunate enough to share several dinners with her over the course of a week or so, along with other authors and publishers, and also to drink whisky with her late one night in the hotel (I never drink whisky. I made an exception.). She told me then that she could see something akin to auras around people. I can’t remember what my aura was like, in terms of colour and so on, but I recall my relief when she pronounced it to be a positive and creative manifestation.

Before that Edinburgh book festival, I had known Diana for a long time through her work. Authors aren’t always what you expect, and sometimes they are very different from their books, and far less appealing. But Diana was more like one of her own characters than almost any other author I can think of, both kindly funny and sharp at the same time, apparently erratic but actually totally in control, and perhaps most importantly, full of the kind of mythic energy that made it very easy to believe that she could indeed see auras. And see dragons, though I can’t remember exactly where the dragons came in to the conversation, other than that she said some people were in fact dragons in disguise. Possibly metaphorical dragons, or indeed even “pull the leg of an Australian author” dragons. It’s very difficult to joke and be serious about mythical or spiritual things at the same time, but Diana could manage it.

I was prepared to be disappointed by the real Diana Wynne Jones, because I loved her books so much, and had done so since I was about 11 or 12 and read Power of Three, followed shortly thereafter by every single DWJ book I could get my hands on. But I wasn’t disappointed.

We didn’t really talk that much about her books, or writing at all, though I expressed my deep devotion to many of them. It is impossible to pick a favourite DWJ book, but as I said in my introduction to Fire and Hemlock, I do have a kind of inner circle of Diana’s books that I read and re-read, that include Fire and Hemlock, Archer’s Goon, Dogsbody, Eight Days of Luke, Charmed Life, Cart and Cwidder, Howl’s Moving Castle … actually, I re-read all of them, come to think about it.

I also told her that without her books, I might not have been a writer myself. They were a key part of the critical mass of reading that eventually made me want to write my own stories, and in particular to write children’s and Young Adult novels. I think they had a profound effect on many writers, particularly those of us who grew up in the 60s and 70s in the UK and Australia and other parts of the Commonwealth where British books were then the norm. It is always a bit of a surprise to me that her work is not acknowledged more widely, particularly when the influence is clear. It does not lessen a new creation to recognise that it buds from a branch that is itself part of a great tree of English literature that stretches back beyond the printed or written word to stories told around that new-fangled thing the campfire.

Stories to help make sense of the world, stories to keep back the dark.

Now for just those reasons I must go and find my copy of Dogsbody, make a cup of tea and read …

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Garth Nix (as he says above) wrote the introduction to the Firebird edition of Fire and Hemlock. His newest book, A Confusion of Princes, will be published in May.