Hello.
This is Jean Marie Ward for BuzzyMag.com.
With me
today is beloved fantasy author Delia Sherman
whose latest novel, "The
Freedom Maze," is a 2011 Norton Award nominee.
Congratulations, Delia, and good luck tonight.
Delia Sherman: Thank you.
JMW: I understand "The Freedom Maze" was born
in a dream.
What was
the dream about, and how much of it made its
way to the finished novel?
Delia Sherman: Well, the dream was.
. . I was in Maine, which is not where I live,
for a year with my partner, who was teaching.
I was very homesick for
Massachusetts and for that entire world.
I dreamt I was back in my old
house and I was looking out at my garden,
except that I was in the window
seat of my study and looking out at the garden,
except it wasn't my garden,
it was a maze.
It was definitely a garden that I had not
planted and it was
definitely not a Massachusetts garden.
I was reading a book, as I said, in the window
seat and I don't remember
what book it was, but it was a fascinating
story and it was writing itself
as I was reading.
There was a figure of some sort that was laughing
at me.
It was one of those kind of non-narrative,
conceptual, flitting around the
edges dreams.
When I woke up, it stuck with me, unlike most
dreams of mine which
completely disappear the minute I get out
of bed.
What I retained the most
clearly was the image of the maze.
That's really the only thing.
The image
of Sophie sitting in the window seat in her
grandmother's house looking out
over this growing plantation and seeing a
maze, both in its current growing
state, and then there's one scene where she
looks back in time and sees it.
She also sees another garden, a completely
different garden in slave
quarters, and this, that and the other thing,
which were not in the dream,
but that central image I knew I needed to
write about.
It took me many
years to figure out how to do it.
JMW: Sometimes things do grow slowly in the
brain while what Jenifer
Crusie calls the girls in the basement are
working on it.
Delia Sherman: Yeah.
JMW: The novel ultimately wound up being in
Louisiana instead of
Massachusetts, right?
Delia Sherman: Yes.
JMW: How did the transposition come about?
How did the maze go from
being in Massachusetts to Louisiana?
Delia Sherman: Well, it was definitely not
a Massachusetts garden that I was
looking at.
It was not.
When I first started writing this novel, this
was in 1987, so I
am dealing with memories that are very much
blunted by time.
I think I
started to think about a girl in Massachusetts
seeing this thing in a dream
that was in another place and I thought secondary
world.
From all of the
books that I had read growing up, there are
a lot of things, like "Tom's
Midnight Garden," where you look out and you
see another time, another
place.
Finally, I realized that it was a Southern
garden and there were some
things that I wanted to say about family,
about the Civil War--well, not
the Civil War so much because it's not a novel
about the War, itself, it's
more about the causes of the Civil War and
the society that gave birth to
the Civil War.
Both my mother's and my father's families
are Southern, but mother's had
roots in Louisiana and I had spent time there
and I had been traveling
there.
It all accrued into like a snowball of story.
You can't tell when
you made a single decision, but it just became
clear to me that eventually
I was going to.
. . Eventually I found myself writing this
thing set in
Louisiana.
JMW: Your activist book, as you call it.
Did the Louisiana setting
affect the identity of the creature, the trickster
figure that leads Sophie
into the maze?
Delia Sherman: It did, but not entirely consciously.
I do not usually work by pure
inspiration; I work by deduction and a series
of decisions that I find
myself making over time.
But when I needed a magical creature and I
knew
because I was riffing off of E. Nesbit and
Edwin Eager, that I wanted a
magical creature like the [Samiad] or one
of the other creatures that pops
up, the Natterjack, in "The Time Garden."
I was writing along and I knew it was time
for this magical creature to
show up.
Literally, it just came out my pen.
I had no idea where it came
from.
I had not thought about it.
I had not considered it.
It was one of
those moments where you're writing along and
you're back brain goes, "Here,
I've made some decisions in your absence.
Would you like them?"
It's those magic moments that really make
writing so much fun.
It doesn't
happen nearly as often as I would like it
to.
JMW: I think it's not giving away anything
of the plot to say that
Sophie starts the Freedom Maze in the 1960s.
Delia Sherman: Yes.
JMW: What is it about the 1960s you find so
appealing?
Sophie starts
out there.
It's the era of your "New York Between" Books,
"Changeling" and
"The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen."
What about the period is so
fascinating for you?
Delia Sherman: There are actually three answers
to that.
The first one has to do
with "Freedom Maze," and it is more that in
1860 the Civil War started.
In
1960, although there had been incidents in
the Civil Rights Movement, they
certainly came to a head in 1960.
There was a great deal that happened in
1960 in the Civil Rights Movement.
Therefore, 1960, 1860, there was no
decision to be made.
The secondary thing is that I didn't have
to do as much research because I
was a little younger than Sophie at that time,
but that's when I grew up.
That is when I became a conscious thinking
human being, in the '60s.
I was
not yet a teenager, but I was a child in a
world that I was beginning to.
.
.
I grew up in the '50s, but up until you're
9 or 10 or 11, unless your
parents are very connected to the outer world,
which mine were not, you
don't really know very much.
This is just your little world, and when you
first start to realize there's a world out
there and there are people who
aren't you and they have different lives and
they have different ways of
thinking, I think that's really when you start
becoming a human being, in
that particular way.
That's my era; I am a child of the '60s.
The '70s, to
me, were simply an outgrowth of the '60s and
graduate school.
JMW: Oh, hell on earth when you lose the ability
to read for
pleasure.
Delia Sherman: Exactly.
So the '60s really was my era.
"New York Between" is a
timeless place.
I think of Neef as having been stolen.
She's a modern
child.
Because none of the book actually takes place
in the New York that
we live in, she could come from anywhere.
What "New York Between" does is
that it takes all the legends about New York
and it makes them real.
It's
not only the folklore that the immigrants
from years past have brought with
them when they have come from other shores
and this is where that folklore
lives.
It is also Damon Runyon's New York.
I really do have to write a "New York Between"
story about the Village
because it gets like beatniks, the gangs.
It hasn't even.
. . There are
some parts of it that are a little '60s, but
it is not the Village that we
are now.
It's all the legends about the Village.
That's what "New York
Between" is.
They still have the Old Metropolitan Opera
in "New York
Between" and they still have the old Rockefeller
Center where the Rockettes
are constantly playing.
It didn't used to be two shows a year, it
was all
the time.
You could always go to the Rockefeller Center,
and that was where
the big blockbuster movies played when I was
growing up.
It is the New York I grew up in, which was
magical, and it is also this
timeless place where all these things, these
legends that I read about all
my life, have come to [inaudible 09:30].
