Interview With Author Ophelia Wolf

A someone who loves inverted tropes, I was excited to hear about Ophelia Wolf’s Gods & Angels series. As I chatted with her, I got to hear not only about how her theatrical background influences her writing, but how writing about grief and trauma can bring both catharsis and emotional honesty to a story.

Author Ophelia Wolf

What is the premise of Gods & Angels?

In one sentence: In a world in which creatures beyond human imagination pull all the strings in the shadows, an orphan who’s spent her entire life fending for herself must reconcile her trauma and learn to truly grieve and let go before she can trust herself enough to embrace her own power and join the ranks she was always destined for. I set out to write a fantasy trilogy with inverted tropes, only to find a surprising through-line of grief and growth in the story.

What inspired this story?

I had a very vivid dream about a creature from another planet that had defied orders and come to Earth to save humanity; in retaliation, its kind had punished it with a lifelong sentence on Earth and looks that would inspire horror in human hearts. I kept thinking about this dream during long pandemic nannying shifts at the playground, and a plot started forming in my head. Two weeks after I first sat down to start writing, my directing mentor unexpectedly died of Covid complications. The grief over his death seeped right into the story.

What really took me by surprise though were the changes in the main character from book one to book two. I wrote Gods & Angels at a time in my life when I was attempting and failing to get sober. Looking back, it’s very obvious to me that all the existential pain associated with that journey, as well as the traumatic experiences I couldn’t move on from, made it into the book. Hell & Earth, on the other hand, was mostly written in my second year of sobriety, and I found that Lyla had undergone similar changes and growing pains between tomes as I had. So while the trilogy is not a tale of addiction, it is definitely a story about emotional sobriety.

You have a strong theatrical background, including directing operas. Have these experiences influenced your writing?

I learned a lot about plot structure and how to sustain suspense from my work in theater and film. But most of all, it taught me that audiences and readers want to feel and empathize. We crack open books and buy tickets to shows because we want to feel connected by being reminded of our common humanity: we want someone else to show us those universal experiences we can all identify with, so we can feel a little less alone for just a few hours.

What does your research process look like?

Most of my writing doesn’t happen at my desk. It happens in the in-between places and moments: when I go for walks to empty my mind, when I sit in Los Angeles traffic, when I quiet my mind just enough to shut out the world’s buzz so I can hear those other frequencies. I firmly believe that artists do not come up with stories and characters; they exist somewhere out there in the ether, and all we can do is hope to tune into the right frequency. I feel like Lyla and all my other characters have lives of their own in some parallel universe. My work is to retell their story as truthfully as I can. It’s sort of like making a long-distance phone call and hoping the connection is good enough for them to tell me what’s already happened to them. By the time I sit down to write, I already have it all in my head and just need to make sure I type the right words in the right order.

As for the real-world locations in the trilogy, all of them are actual places I have visited (with very few embellishments), but I occasionally need to research a thing or two online to fact-check myself!

What are you working on now?

I’m working on the final installment of the trilogy. The working title is Past & Future. I wrote half of the first draft before noticing some major structural issues. Then I went back, rewrote that first half, and I’m now working on the first draft of the second half. It might just be that I’m having trouble letting go because I know that, once I get to those last few chapters, I’ll have to let Lyla go for good…

What is the best place to get your books?

At the moment, Amazon. But they’re available a little bit everywhere online. 

Gods & Angels Link

Hell & Earth Link

What’s the best place to follow you?

My Website is a good place for author updates as well as information on my theater and film work. There’s also a link there to subscribe to my newsletter.

And my Instagram handle is gods_and_angels_book.