Tales from the Oakenwyld

Ever since my first novel was published, readers have been asking where I got my inspiration for Knife and the other inhabitants of the Oakenwyld. There are a hundred different answers to that, from Cicely Mary Barker’s Flower Fairies to Madeline L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet and Richard Adams’ Watership Down; I could also mention some of the quirkier sources, like a children’s TV show called Tales from the Riverbank and Steven Spielberg’s movie Hook. But ultimately, as C.S. Lewis said about The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, “it all began with a picture.” Flower FairiesA Swiftly Tilting Planet Watership Down; Tales from the Riverbank Hook. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe,As a teenager I loved to draw, and one day I sketched a fierce, dragonfly-winged female faery throwing a dagger. I called her Knife—and immediately knew there must be more to her story. I imagined the faery queen sending her to assassinate an unsuspecting human, who I sensed had some kind of disability, and Paul’s character sprang from that seedling. The faeries’ lack of magic, the insidious schemes of the Empress, and the battle for the Oak came later, like the sequel trilogy about Ivy and the piskeys of Cornwall (which I would never have dreamed of if my publisher hadn’t asked for another faery book after Arrow, but which I’m now very glad I wrote). ArrowYet even as the tales of Knife and her successors—Linden, Rhosmari, and Ivy—flourished, so did a number of story ideas that didn’t fit into those books. They weren’t big enough to be novels, and they involved older characters who didn’t fit my usual YA protagonist model at all. I couldn’t think how to tell those stories in a way that would appeal to my existing readers, so for years I just didn’t. I had other projects to write. Eventually, however, I took a sabbatical to help care for a sick family member, and finally felt free to explore those long-neglected tales. I wrote the first draft of Thorn’s novella, put it on pause while I wrote Torch and sold it to a publisher, then came back to write the other two stories in this collection. Torch As expected, though, these tales are different from the series that inspired them, both in tone and in content. One is written in second person, a POV rarely found in fantasy. Readers of Torch know that Thorn is both married and pregnant in that novel; her story tells how she got there. And anyone subscribed to my newsletter has met Beatrice McCormick, even if they only read her narrative to find out what happened to Paul and Knife. TorchMy hope is that these previously untold tales from the Oakenwyld will satisfy readers without diminishing their enjoyment of the original novels. However, Thorn’s story in particular includes content which may be more forthright (like Thorn herself) than all of my readers would like. So I think that novella best suited to a grown-up audience, even though the details are sparse and indeed tame compared to a lot of modern YA. In short, if you were the right age to have read Knife when it first came out in 2009 (or even the reprinted edition in 2015), you are the right age to read these stories now. Thank you for still loving and wanting more of these characters, long after other readers have forgotten or moved on. KnifeI’ve added further comments on my inspirations and writing process for each story at the end of the collection, as well as some cut scenes from early drafts of the faery books. Feel free to read or skip those as you please.