Interview With Author Kathleen Schwab

Queenswood is new fantasy set in medieval Ireland and features a young woman dedicated to creating illuminated manuscripts and the crown prince of Faerie who must find a human girl to become his queen. I got to speak with author Kathleen Schwab about how she created this world, what research she did, and her path to publication.

Author Kathleen Schwab

What is Queenswood about?

Queenswood takes place in 12^th century Ireland, with settings including the human world and several faerie courts. The heroine is a well-born human girl who grows increasingly disillusioned with her family’s values and decides that she wants a different life: to dedicate herself to an abbey and create illuminated manuscripts for the rest of her life. The hero is the crown prince of Faerie, who is increasingly uncomfortable with the demands of court life, especially when he discovers he must find a human girl to become his queen.

Queenswood is a coming-of-age story, about young people learning what the world is asking of them and trying to balance that with their emerging identities.

What about this time period and setting appealed to you?

I think the medieval world offers great storytelling opportunities because it includes so many archetypes: the mage, the queen, the warrior, the trickster. Stories set among royalty have tensions built in. Add family relationships and marriage decisions and the stakes are high. Then the interiority of modern novel writing adds depth and complexity to the stories we’ve been hearing all our lives. Writing the medieval world with modern techniques is a great mix.

How did you research this book?

The medieval novels of Sigrid Undset were a huge inspiration. Her father was an archeologist, and so she grew up surrounded by the implements of daily medieval lifer. Her novels are very immersive, and I read them over and over. Undset’s work is historical fiction, so for Queenswood I needed to add fantasy elements, and I studied folklore, with books like The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies by Robert Kirk, written in the late 1600s, and The People of the Sea by David Thomson, written in the 1950s. Both are written by people who gathered folklore directly from traditional storytellers and include stories by those who claimed personal contact with the fae. I also picked up a number of books about Irish history and read the chapter on the medieval age. Some of these were just by chance – among books about to be pulped by the local library I found a 1949 history of the Plantagenets titled The Conquering Family, with a rich chapter on the Norman invasions of Ireland. Also. I was very fortunate to find a 1925 book about Bodiam Castle. The author, Lord Curzon of Kedleston, owned and excavated Bodiam in the early 20^th century, and the book is full of his descriptions and his thoughts about what life must have been like during the castle’s glory days. Older books like these can carry the flavor of the pre-modern world. 

What can readers expect to find in Queenswood?

Readers can expect a fully realized historical setting,

What is the key to writing magical historical fiction?

My opinion is that the more fully developed and anchored to a real time and place a setting is, the more the fantasy elements can feel real and organic. This is especially true for the medieval world, where people accepted the existence of magic and the Otherworld, and everyone knew you had to keep a good watch on your baby or the faeries might steal her right out of the cradle.

I think the writer needs to have an approach to magical elements to keep them consistent. I decided that since my faeries are nature spirits, they would draw their power from whatever part of the natural world they belonged to. To give this shape, I read books about the natural world like Finding the Mother Tree, I Speak for the Trees, and Underland.

What was your process to publication?

It was prodigious! I watched YouTube and listened to podcasts to learn all I could about the publishing industry while I was writing Queenswood. Once the manuscript was ready, I began learning the formula for a query letter, which felt like a whole education in itself. Pitching agents took me a year, and I sent queries to over 80. Of those, 12 asked for full manuscripts, and one offered representation. Connor Smith of Hesperides Literary represents me. He sold Queenswood to Blackstone Publishing in three months.

Where can readers order Queenswood?

Queenswood is available on many platforms: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the Blackstone Publishing site, Audible, and Bookshop.org. Local bookstores can also order Queenswood.

Where can readers find you?

My Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/writerkmschwab/

My website: http://authorkathleenschwab.squarespace.com/