Interview with Anne Ursu, author of The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy

I was really excited this week to be joined by Anne Ursu, author of The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy, for an interview over Zoom! 

 

The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy has a very feminist message about what can happen when men gain too much control in a society. I was wondering what inspired you to write a fantasy book with this theme, since most feminism you see in literature is realistic fiction or historical.

Anne: After the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, I was really kind of unable to think about anything else. I was between books and I realized that I couldn’t work on anything that wasn’t processing my feelings about those hearings, and about everything that happened, and other conversations about #MeToo. And so I was sitting with it for months, and at the same time thinking about… I always like writing about monsters, because they’re cool, right, and the somehow I had this phrase pop into my head: “the headmaster’s monster.” And from that I spun out this world about some sort of boarding school where there’s some kind of monster, and it somehow is about the patriarchy and gaslighting. I write fantasy, so that’s sort of where my brain goes, but I also think it’s just a wonderful way to talk about systems, to build societies from the ground up and to look at our world through a different lens. So it’s both the language I speak but it’s also, to me, a really good way of talking about power.

Watching [the hearings], something similar happened when I was in high school, and it was with Clarence Thomas who’s now on the court as well. And it basically played out in the exact same way. So watching this happen thirty years apart and knowing exactly how it was gonna play out was kind of horrifying and devastating. And so the way that the stories were told, and the way that power worked, and the way that what this woman had gone through was just shunted aside, was something that I wanted to write about and I needed to deal with.

Yeah, definitely. So my next question is, what drew you to the world of Illyria as a setting for a book about power and the patriarchy, and what connections did you see between the theme of your book and the setting?

Anne: So this is my second high fantasy, secondary world fantasy. And when I started to write my first one I realized that the world building was going to be tough for me because I don’t pay a lot of attention to the outside world, I’m very much in my head. And so in order to make a world that felt coherent, I needed to base it on something. So for my first book, The Real Boy, I decided it would be as if it were set in the eastern Mediterranean in 1675; so then I could do what the climate was, and what all the resource were, and what the technology was, and that helped me a lot. 

 

So when I started to write this one, I wanted to think about what is the world going to be? And I am Romanian, my grandpa came over from Romania to escape the draft in 1916, and I realized as I was figuring this out, why do I always think of Western Europe, why not Eastern Europe? That would give me a chance to explore that heritage, and that allowed some of the embroidery language to come out: that came through the research into Romania, and that’s sort of why Illyria is the way it is. So all the names are Eastern European in some way, and the folk songs have a Romanian feel, so that was where that came from. But I also wanted it to be very specifically patriarchal and resonant, so the way the society structures echoes in the high society of England, and the way women’s behavior is sort of controlled--you know, you’re supposed to be a lady and you need to have manners, and it’s about your comportment and your conversation. So for that, I tried to invest in the idea of what women’s uses and what their value is, and how their behavior is controlled. I took some inspiration from Jane Austen’s books and also guides to girls’ behavior and comportment and reading about girls’ boarding schools and girls’ finishing schools.

 

My next question is about all the little mysteries that there are in the book. There’s obviously the big mystery about what the sorcerers are hiding about the Dread, and then there are little mysteries about Marya’s classmates and their backstories. So I was wondering how you chose to incorporate the mystery aspect into the book.

Anne: I knew setting out that there was going to be some kind of big lie. I didn’t exactly know what it was when I started planning it, but there was going to be some kind of story or master narrative that everybody believed that maintained the patriarchy and that would eventually be exposed through the book, so that there would be some kind of central mystery. But in doing that, realizing that that sort of big lie and that story, it affects everything: it affects the way people present themselves and want to talk about themselves. So for Elana, she doesn’t want to admit she’s a sorcerer’s daughter because she carries that anger and that shame from the way her family treats her and regards her. And really for all of them, one of the things I was thinking about when I was drawing the other characters is how they all react to the shame of being labeled “troubled,” and how they write the stories that they are themselves troubled. For some of them that meant keeping things very quiet. 

 

And also just in general mysteries make for good reading, and there were inherently going to be a lot of questions in the book that Marya needed to solve in order to get her onto the  big mystery. The problem in crafting a mystery like this is there’s no dead body, so Marya doesn’t know there’s a mystery to solve. So how are you going to throw the dead body in front of her? And that took a lot of crafting of questions that were going to sort of fall into her lap.

Yeah, I really love how all the other girls’ backstories were balanced, because sometimes if there are a lot of different characters with complicated stories it can be overwhelming. But I feel like it was just really well balanced and I got to know all of the characters really well.

Oh, I’m so glad! There were actually in the first draft two more girls, and I was like “too many girls, I have to cut them.” They all had to develop throughout the writing, because starting, it was all Marya’s story and they felt really indistinct. And it’s just something that happens to me in revision, that you can bring the characters out more and think about them more. And it really was sitting down and figuring out in the second draft how they are all responding to shame that helped to bring them out. That and giving them distinct hairstyles. 

 

My next question’s a little more general. I think I would describe a lot of your books, like Breadcrumbs and The Real Boy, as fairy tales for a modern audience. Did you read a lot of fairy tales as a child, and what about them inspires you?

Anne: I did. I had a series of books that my dad had when he was a kid, so they were probably from the 30’s or 40’s. They were these bound collections and kids’ classics: Treasure Island and Peter Pan, but there were also Grimm’s fairy tales and Anderson’s fairy tales. And I had those volumes and I just read them again and again and again, and I can’t tell you what exactly appealed to me except that they were great stories and they’re just in my blood. I didn’t read a ton of fantasy as a kid, there wasn’t as much; I loved A Wrinkle in Time and The Phantom Tollbooth, but there wasn’t as much as there is right now. But the fairy tales, I kind of ate them. So much of I the way that I think about stories is informed by inhaling fairy tales when I was a kid. With Breadcrumbs, I was really stuck and I didn’t know what to write, and I had a friend say “read some fairy tales!” And I’d never read the Snow Queen before, so that was actively going to look to fairy tales for inspiration. So it’s always there for me.

I feel like kids these days don’t really read fairy tales as much, and the books that were inspired by fairy tales are like our fairy tales nowadays, which I think is really cool.

That is really interesting, yeah. I mean there’s so much out there. You know Kelly Barnhill, we actually grew up in the same library, she’s from Minneapolis and she’s my friend, but we were literally at the same library on Saturday mornings as kids and didn’t know each other. But she grew up on them too, so it’s all still in the blood, right, you’ll still know this. And that’s the great thing about fairy tales and folk tales: that there’s this collective well of stories that reside within us whether or not we’ve read the tale ourselves.

My next question is, I know probably a lot of people ask you this, but are you working on any other writing projects?

I am starting now, I’m on chapter seven of…I’m trying to write a book that’s set in a contemporary world about magic. So it’s actually a ghost story, but I’m writing about a girl who’s getting a chronic illness, and there’s this process of trying to get a diagnosis and not being able to, and at the same time there’s going to be some kind of ghost or monster, and I haven’t figured that out yet--but I have had chronic illness in my life and I’ve always been trying to come up with a way to write about it. And I finally realized, oh, that’s horror, you have these things coming at you and you don’t know why, all of a sudden out of the blue, that’s horror. So that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m just in the first draft, I’m trying to get it done in the next couple of months. And there’s so much work to do after that, to figure it out, and again I don’t really know where it’s going or what the monster is, but that’s what I’m working on right now.

Anne's book recommendations:

• A Wish in the Dark by Christina Soontornvat
• Orphan Island by Laurel Snyder
• Ophie's Ghosts by Justina Ireland
• The Girl and the Ghost by Hanna Alkaf
• Root Magic by Eden Royce
• Just South of Home by Karen Strong
• Eden's Everdark (September 2022) by Karen Strong
• Hollow Chest by Brita Sandstrom

 

A huge thank you to Anne Ursu for joining me to talk about feminism, fantasy, and fairy tales! Go read her books! 🤗 

 

Anne Ursu is the author of acclaimed novels The Lost Girl, Breadcrumbs, and The Real Boy, which was longlisted for the National Book Award. The recipient of the McKnight Fellowship in Children’s Literature, Anne is also a member of the faculty at Hamline University’s MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults. She lives in Minneapolis with her family and an ever-growing number of cats.