Poured Over Double Shot: Katherine Arden and Yangsze Choo

By Jenna Seery / February 24, 2024 at 6:00 am

Two historical novels with elements of fantasy and folklore will bring readers from the battlefields of World War One to the last years of the Qing Dynasty in China.

Katherine Arden’s The Warm Hands of Ghosts shows the terrors of war and the unsettling and fantastical things that can appear in its shadow. Arden joins us to talk about her extensive research, classical allusions in her writing and more with guest host, Jenna Seery.

The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo bridges the mystical and the familiar with an expansive story featuring a detective and mysterious and sly (yet alluring) fox spirits. Choo talked with us about writing in this setting, cultural influences on her work, connections to nature and more with host, Miwa Messer.

We end this episode with a TBR Topoff from booksellers, Marc and Mary.

Featured Books (Episode):
The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden
The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo
The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Paradise Lost by John Milton
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo
The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo
The Great Reclamation by Rachel Heng

Featured Books (TBR Topoff):
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu

Full Episode Transcript
Jenna Seery
I’m Jenna Seery, a bookseller and associate producer of Poured Over and today I am so excited to be talking with Katherine Arden. I’m sure all of you remember the Winternight Trilogy, The Bear and the Nightingale and the lot, some incredible historical fantasy, then moving on to the Small Spaces series for young readers, and back into the world of the adult fiction with The Warm Hands of Ghosts. I am so excited to talk about this book.

Katherine Arden
Thank you so much for having me on. Jenna, I am super excited to talk about it too.

So I always like to start with the authors sort of describing the book in their own words, because I can talk about it. But I think it always is a little bit more fun to hear you describe the book for us?

Absolutely. So, The Warm Hands of Ghosts is a historical fantasy, or maybe you’d call it historical fiction with like a speculative twist. It is set in the final the final years of World War One. So the end of 1917 and the beginning of 1918. The main character is a Canadian field nurse who was wounded at the frontlines in Belgium during the war and is evacuated home to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where a sort of disaster occurs. And following this disaster, she gets a word that her brother has been killed in action. But something about this doesn’t seem right to her. And so she returned to the frontlines to find out what happened to him. That’s kind of the premise that gets the book rolling. It came out of my fascination with the time period and my desire to kind of think through ideas and concepts from that period in a book form.

So I guess I was wondering how we started in this time period, you have a really distinct very different historical period that you’ve touched on in your Winternight trilogy, and then moved to contemporary for Small Spaces. And now we’re here in World War One. So how did we get to this point?

Oh, that’s a great question. I think, to a certain extent, I’m kind of a magpie, I see what catches my eye and chase it. I’ve always loved places in history where the fantastical can be made to seem plausible. My first books that medieval Russia really fit that bill, because it was a time that feels so remote. And so so many gaps in historical record, gives you space to put fantasy and in the case of World War One, it was a time that was so strange, even to people living through it, that it was also a place where the fantastical could be slipped into history in a way that I felt was plausible. The thing that started the book for me was I saw a picture a well known picture, it’s of a German cavalry officer on a horse holding a spear like kind of a knight errant figure. But he’s wearing a gas mask. It’s a very surreal picture. It’s kind of knight errant. It’s kind of techno horror. It’s very strange. And if you dig into the history of World War One, you find all kinds of these strange juxtapositions, you find like cavalry charging tanks, experimental suits of armor versus artillery guns that could shoot 50 miles, but you can’t talk to the guy in the next trench because there’s no radios, messenger pigeons, dogs with first aid kits on their backs that go into wounded men. It’s a very strange time period, when the 19th century sort of hit the 20th, very violently, and everything is is chaotic. And it feels very surreal. The word I’ve used often in describing this period for me is steampunk. Because it’s this like, very, very strange mix of modernity, and not right. And I found it fascinating. And what I wanted to catch in this book, the warm hands of ghosts is a sense of that world and flux and transitions are well, it’s very surreal, even to its people who are living through it. So that was kind of the first inspiration for the novel.

It is one of those time periods that seems like it can’t all be happening at the same time with when you’ve got sort of these bombings and, you know, automatic weapons, but you’ve also still got soldiers with bayonets who are running up and doing frontlines sort of like attacks in that way. It’s so it doesn’t seem like both of those things should be happening at the same time. There was so much change. It was very strange.

I mean, if you think about what the Wright brothers flew in what 1907 And then in 1914, they’re bringing up reconnaissance planes to fly the battlefield and then someone has the right idea of like bringing up a pistol and shooting at the guy who’s flying the opposite side. And then within like two years you have like machine guns mounted on planes and aerial combat like it’s happening so fast and you start the war with no trucks only trains your fastest like individual sort of like units are on horseback, right and the Warsaw the invention of the tank the first like large scale use of Trucks, like it just it was a massive change in a very short timeframe, which is very disorienting.

You see sort of the advent of chemical warfare, you see this trench warfare, which is so brutal and so horrific and yet, it was also this time where there’s these, you know, 1000s and 1000s. And 1000s of young men out on the frontlines looking for their glory and looking for, you know, this pride of country and yet, the reality of what that was,

I mean, I do think the glory faded quickly. I think it’s kind of the very assess ever since All Quiet on the Western Frontthat’s been kind of a thesis of most World War One books is like disillusionment. It’s very, very valid. It’s an important piece, but I kind of wanted to find a new kind of note in, in that history, just this is so multifaceted. One thing I noticed in in kind of building my book is that so many authors like to frame this war in apocalyptic terms. In part because very basically the war years map well onto the biblical book of Revelation, right, the four horsemen, death, check, famine, check, plague, there was the flu pandemic 1918, which killed many people war, obviously, it was just a time that felt like the apocalypse. And that was kind of my way into fantasy, right? Because many authors before me had described the war in these kind of giant, apocalyptic terms. And in thinking of the war along those lines. I remember this sort of one quote from the biblical book of Revelation, which goes, and the Prophet said, I saw a new heaven and a new earth are the old ones had passed away. And so the question I felt myself volleying back was, did you see a new hell, too, because that seems like you’re missing part of the trio. Where’s the new underworld? And it’s funny, because I think we did a little bit because the 20th century ushered in to these earthly hell escapes, like the Battle of Passchendaele during World War One. Famously I wasn’t addressed in during World War Two, Hiroshima, it’s like these places that feel like earthly hellscapes, right. And it was interesting to me, because in classical literature, hell is a fantastical place. Right? You have the city of pandemonium. In Paradise Lost, you have the nine circles of hell and like these Inferno, you have, you know, Odysseus visits, the underworld, in The Odyssey, et cetera, et cetera. And this transition from like, sort of fantastical, hellscape to like, earthly hellscapes felt like part of this vague notion of the apocalypse that I was building in my head. And of course, the follow up question that comes naturally is, what is the devil do in hell made by people? Then what? And that was really the sort of fundamental question that drove the novel, especially the fantasy aspects.

And I think too, something we briefly started talking about right before we started recording was that there are not as many of these representations we have many representations of sort of the later earthly hells, like you mentioned, World War Two and Hiroshima, but World War One, I think sort of goes underserved and underrepresented maybe even in our consciousness, I think in the United States, especially since we entered so late and we missed I think a lot of the truly horrifying pieces of what that were wasn’t sort of the longevity of it, and what that meant on a grander scale. And so I think sometimes we’re not as attuned to the scale of the losses that some other countries faced post World War One.

I would definitely agree World War Two was kind of the American war, for sure. I mean, they didn’t get a World War One monument on the National Mall until 2018, or centennial, I think has not finished as of now. So it’s just not something that lands the same way for Americans. But same time, the largest American Cemetery abroad is not Normandy. It’s the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery. In Belleau France, which is a World War One cemetery. Right? So definitely Americans were present in the conflict, and they did perish. There is just something doesn’t have the same resonance emotionally. I think for some reason.

There’s, you know, we’ve started to, like you mentioned All Quiet on the Western Front that sort of had its resurgence last year with that new film coming to new adaptation, and there is some other literature and things but there is sort of this fantastical element of scale of it that I think lends itself very well, like you said to editions of some speculation of some fantasy. And I think anytime where there’s a world in flux, like we were at that moment, where everything is happening so fast, everything’s changing so fast in certain ways, you know, similar to how technology changes now that we are constantly trying to keep up with that constant change. And we are always feels like maybe a little half step behind from what real things happening. And that’s those little gaps are where the fantastical can slip in.

I’m a big horror fan. And I think fantasy in the same way as horror, one of the best aspects of these genres is that it allows you to embody and explore things that otherwise can’t be embodied or explored. The best horror gives a voice and a shape to things that are disembodied, right? emotions, feelings, terrors, right. And I think, fantasy the same way you can give a shape to abstracts. And that was what I hope to do with this book. And with especially the fantastical elements of it, is to take these abstract notions about change and about loss and about moving on, and give them give myself a way to explore them concretely on the page. That’s one of the great joys of like the fantasy horror, like speculative genre of literature.

I think something that allows the reader in so well is the characters that you’ve created to sort of bring us along into this world. I think, without sort of the eyes of Laura and Freddie, guiding us through these incredible times, it would be a little overwhelming, but you managed to give us this macro world, but also these micro, you know, conflicts and struggles that really allow us in and be like, oh, yeah, maybe I can’t imagine what this grand scheme of this war would be like. But I can’t imagine what it would be like to have these feelings about loss and grief and love that, I wonder how those two voices sort of came to you.

I mean, so Laura and Freddie, the protagonists of The Warm Hands of Ghosts, a book told in two perspectives that alternate chapters between this brother and his sister, this is very, very unscientific, but I think there are some authors who start with a character, and then build their story around the person they’ve envisioned. I think those authors who build the plot first, and then build their characters into their plots, I find myself doing the latter. Usually, I feel like plot comes first. Because certain kinds of story demands certain kinds of characters, right. And it’s easier for me to shift my characters and have them change and grow to suit my plot, then vice versa. And so from the get go, I knew the kind of characters I wanted to make the story work, and that guided me in building their personalities. Often characters will also surprise you on the page, what they say how they react, and that helps build them as people too. I think sort of the biggest thing I try and keep in mind for As tempting to build a multifaceted character is that heroes make mistakes. And villains are human, keeping every single character’s humanity in mind, which means they have understandable and relatable desires and aspirations. And the villains also have relatable desires and aspirations. Helps keep it feeling alive. Instead of feeling like cardboard cutouts. One thing I struggle with, in this novel in particular, and characterization, is that war and being in war flattens, right, it’s a it’s a flattening it force, right? It’s, it narrows your scope, it narrows what you want. It narrows what you believe it’s it, changes people. And so trying to build characters who feel alive, but also feel true to how people might have reacted to their circumstances at that time was a challenge. My other challenge is that the big theme of a novel was a world in transition. And the two siblings in this novel, sort of stand on either side of that transition. Their brother is a 19th century character. And the sister is a 20th century character. And getting their mindsets and their voices right to kind of make that that shift believable, was also challenging. But it was interesting to do.

I think the dual points of view is really key in this story that we’re getting both perspectives as we go through, because I think there is a book that could exist that is solely from either person’s perspective, but I don’t think it gives us that same richness and that same perspective that propels things along in the same way.

I mean, the thing about books is there could be any like, it’s like life, right? There’s a million different possibilities for everything. And one of the challenges of writing is sort of curating which idea you want to use because there’s so many of them. And will were one I think one of the barriers to having more fiction about World War One is the war itself is very slogging, it’s heavy, it’s slow. It’s repetitive. It feels futile. Write and a novel is supposed to move it’s supposed to change is supposed to have momentum is supposed to bring you to somewhere else as a reader. And finding that momentum in a world that is stuck is challenging, right? It’s very difficult to, to make the world feel real, but also have a book that doesn’t just slog you over and over through the same place.

That’s the thing about that sort of oppressive feeling of that trench warfare and describing it and notice sort of understanding and putting yourself in that moment of like, that is your day in and day out. And there’s no sort of movement there. And it’s one thing when we’re reading and you can sort of look at the dates in the book and know, okay, you know, we’re reaching this point or reaching that point, but for you know, the people there that that could be indefinite. So I will say you did manage to give me one of my favorite characters that I have read in a book recently, which is my dear sweet Pim, Penelope Shaw. She really took my heart in about 4000 different directions, but I loved her very much.

She was a fun character to write. So again, with the with the different pieces like she’s, she’s sort of like this Victorian in a little bit. I don’t want to spoil anything. But I think this is this is okay to say I read as a famous, little like, article that a woman apparently wrote into a newspaper during the war. It’s called like, it’s called, like a letter from a little mother. And it’s very, very scary. This letter because this woman’s like, our dear sweet boys, we get we raised them and give them up to die. And it’s a glory to us and a joy to like the, the, you know, the homeland and stuff. And it’s very frightening. I don’t know if it was propaganda, or if it’s real, actual person writing this, but the character of Penelope Shaw in this book is a mother herself. And she’s kind of my answer to that letter, right? Where it was supposed to be like, good and glorious to like, raise your child and hand them over to mechanized warfare.

And there are a few characters in the book. And she’s one of them, where you can sort of feel where their story might take them. And you might realize it a half a step before they do and you can’t do anything to stop it. And you just have to sort of ride along with it and see, you know, how it’s going to play out. But the sort of emotions that come up in this time, it is, like you said, there is so much of that flattening that sort of trauma that goes through everything. And though they didn’t have language for, you know, some of the things that they were seeing the soldiers face or seeing these, the nurses, the doctors, these people who are in that front line, they didn’t have the language yet to describe fully. You know, shell shock is one thing, but what they were feeling but there’s also a lot of emotion and grief and love and joy that finds its way through.

You know, I’m not sure we have language today. I think one thing that really struck me and read I read a bunch of memoirs, a lot of folks wrote memoirs from this time period. And a lot of facts, a lot of dates, a lot of scenes like set in these books. No one No memoirist expressed how they were feeling at any point, right, like somebody could, in detail, describe like a scene, you know, a trench raid or death, a terrifying ordeal, something, something, something. But in all of these scenes that I read from various memoirs, no one ever said, I felt X, I felt why I was frightened, I was sad, the most you get is like it was a shame that like x person died, it really struck me as missing emotional context. And I almost feel like, in part, it was cultural. But in part, it’s like some things don’t have words, some feelings, if you put words to them become too big to handle. And I wanted to honor that as well in the novel.

That’s something that any sort of war fiction sort of brushes up against, especially for the majority of us who have never experienced something quite like that, and probably never, hopefully, never will come right up against that, especially right up against that concept of death. And what would you do if you could avoid that pain in that fear? Which is, you know, another thing that comes up in this novel is what would you do to avoid? Or what would you do to save yourself from some of that feeling?

Yes, that is kind of at the heart of the novel is, what would you do to escape, I guess trauma? How far would you go? And sort of, which is sort of the greater lesser of two evils? Because I think one sort of interesting thing that I grew in over the course of the book is how the definition of evil seemed to change, right, because in sort of the classical sense, the devil is this character who sees you sees your flaws and exploits them, right? Sort of like understands the individual human soul, whereas in this sort of giant, large scale mechanized work, human souls don’t matter at all right, it doesn’t matter if you’re brave or scared or nice or evil or ugly, you might die anyway, like it’s very, very impersonal. And the shift from like, evil, being intensely personal to being utterly impersonal felt very important, interesting to me. So that was another kind of key foundation of this book.

I do also want to talk about the Paradise Lost of it all and the influence of Paradise Lost on this as a text.

The book has a lot of influences. I think paradise loss is a huge one. The Mikhail Bulgakov novel, The Master and Margarita is definitely there. A lot of World War One fiction has little pieces. There’s a real foundation in Greek myth as well. There’s an Orpheus and Eurydice vibe, especially a little bit of Hades and Persephone as well. It definitely is a book that has its roots in a lot of different things. For Paradise Lost in particular, I think that the one of the most fascinating characters you’ve ever written a poem is Milton’s Satan. He’s a character that I think I’m probably surprised himself with how interesting he became, obviously motivate him that way in order to like, show his readers how easy it is to fall. Right? Because you, as a reader, find yourself be like, This guy’s kind of cool. He’s fierce. He has goals. He’s funny, sometimes, like all this stuff. And I again, we’re so fascinated by the idea of this colorful, interesting, very human character set in the modern hellscape. Right, they don’t fit. And these places where they don’t fit, I think, created this sort of rich landscape of for a writer, I guess.

And I know, it feels like we’re probably for our listeners, like we’re talking around a bunch of things. But there’s so many really good moments that I want readers to experience for themselves as they go through, especially involving some of these are character of evil will say, but at the same time, I think that the grandness and the scale of Paradise Loss, and a lot of those other epics that you just mentioned, really fit so well up against this backdrop of this huge mechanized war system.

I mean, it’s funny because like, the chapter titles are all taken from either Paradise Lost or the book of Revelation. And I feel like the grandness and the fantastical illness set against the reality sort of echoed emphasize each other a little bit. They seem to fit well, just the size, I think was something that made them fit but also the dissonance to write of, of the colorful poetry versus the realities of war, like though it was it was really interesting for them together, and challenging to get them to fit in a way that made any kind of sense.

And I think it shows, with not only this book, but with any of your work, the level of research and detail that goes in to sort of create this world. We talk a lot about world building when it comes to fantasy. And I think it applies doubly so when you’re writing something in that historical space as well, because you have to create both, but in a way that doesn’t feel like you’re just regurgitating details at me. And I never felt that way. In this book. It’s very like atmospheric and creates a space for you without laying everything out. And the same time. I got all the things I need to know to sort of put me right there.

I mean, that’s a drafting issue. What you do is you do a lot of research, and then you start writing and every like, third paragraph, you’re like in this essay, I will write and give somebody a lecture on like something like, like, Oh, yes, trench warfare, tanks, oh, yes, this disaster. But then you go back and your second draft and say, okay, delete, delete, delete, because once the ambient knowledge is there on the page, people pick it up from context, they don’t need you to do like this, in this essay, I will look at my research, we go me people will get what you’re putting down if you have the knowledge there, and nobody wants to read, I don’t feel like sort of a long discourse on some fun thing you discovered. I definitely am a lover of the author’s note, in part because I can then go back and write my essay that had takeout, the main, the main text, and this book is the author’s note. So it kind of goes back and reiterates some of my thoughts and feelings that I could not put in the novel.

The thing I always think about when I think of World War one that just shapes my entire reading is it was wet. Everything seems wet, and damp and awful. And that, really, I’m like, as soon as I can, like, I mean, there’s so many scenes, I think, especially the beginning of this where I’m thinking of, from Friday’s perspective, or I’m just like, they never felt dry. And that really stresses me out. No,

Well, I mean, if you think about it, you have the Western Front, which was what the eastern front which was cold, and Gallipoli, which is hot and cold, awful. So the Western foreign I mean, the big chunk of that is because the British in particular, had this sector in Belgium, which is this farmland that had been Very, very swampy and over centuries had been reclaimed from the water with these system of dikes and canals to keep the water out of the farmland. But of course, bombardment destroyed all that. And so the ambient water in the land just refilled the trenches. Right. So water had to go somewhere. And so I think since we as Anglophone English speakers have a lot of our accounts of the war from the British, who were in this very wet environment, we think of the war as like, wet, kind of calmness to that. And yes, it was awful, very damp.

I know this book took you quite a while to write, this was an endeavor, and you did traveling and you did a lot of things to sort of shape your research, which I think gives a little bit I think you can feel that in the book more. So like, there are things that are there because you’ve experienced them and you can pass them along for us.

The biggest thing I got from traveling was ambiance, oddly enough, not in Belgium. But the Belgians after the war, worked very hard to reclaim the war zone, they took up the shells that were still on the ground. They filled in the craters, they made it farmland again, the country is too small to lose a bunch of its farmland to like war sites. They’re still finding, you know, shells and bodies in Belgium today from the war. But in France, which is much bigger country, a lot of the worst hit sort of battlefields were declared like zone rouges like these red zones and just left alone. And if you go to France was around Verdun. You can just see a landscape that looks like the moon with trees, because it’s so cratered. It’s looks so unnatural. And it’s just because this, this sort of area of land was shelled million times 2 million 10 million, and just left alone after that to regrow. And so it looks very strange. And there’s still old trenches there. There’s old emplacements, there’s old forts, a lot of the infrastructure of the war still in place, you can still find old bottles or forks, old bales of barbed wire, just lying in the woods, it’s very uncurated, it’s just kind of old, they’re still you get a sense of the scale of the conflict. And also, there’s haunted spots, like a couple of places, if you’re there after dusk, you’re like, oh, that goes through very angry, and you leave again, like it just, I’m not a massively superstitious person. But there’s places that have just very, very, very bad vibes. And all of that was there when I was writing the sense of like, this kind of world pulled apart.

And I think understanding that is something that historical fantasy and these sort of speculative books allows us and a little bit better, I think it’s a little more accessible and understandable when we’re putting this perspective versus just, you know, reading some of those more challenging accounts, those memoirs, which are incredible and have so much to offer, but can be a little overpowering overwhelming to just go into without some other knowledge. But I think that’s sort of whathistorical fantasy brings us in general, a lot is a is it just a new entry point to a lot of things that we might only know a little bit about?

I mean, the World War one genre of fiction, I think, in part because been still overshadowed by this one masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front definitely has fallen into types of novel, right, there’s the disillusionment check, there’s the girl left at home check. Like there’s, there’s things there’s, you know, there’s sort of doomed youth, right is a thing. And all those things are so important, so valid, and so present. But I think one way to shake up a genre of historical fiction that’s very kind of classic tropes, and it’s like spaces, is to throw in a little bit of fantasy, and I think it helped me look at the history differently, which is the role of fantasy in some senses?

So often fantasy in general, even when it’s high fantasy, or, you know, completely separate from our world, is often used to mirror back the social issues that we encounter. And so it really isn’t much of a step in any direction to be like, well, when we start with our own world, this just amplifies us being able to look at some of those same issues.

If you look at Tolkien, for example, who fought in the First World War, a lot of his descriptions of landscapes, like the area of Mordor and the surrounding lands, a lot of that could come straight out of a memoir about the Western Front, right? He was near Belgium. And like water that burns your mouth like smoking pit slag heaps, mud swamp bodies, like all that is not something he imagined he lived that right. And then his entire worldview about this threat from the east is industrialization, like coming over to cover like three peoples of the world, like his whole world, and sense of the world was hugely influenced by the war. Right? And so it’s hard to see. These were the inventor of fantasy almost in some ways, the inventor of the modern fans genre separately from his experiences in this one conflict.

I feel like I’m never gonna look at Battle at Helm’s Deep, quite the same way. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense or the Fangorn forest itself, you know like that, where it meets the industrialization of, of Mordor. It’s yeah, it all tracks and I think that we don’t always like to look at fantasy in that realm. Sometimes we want to be like, No, that’s completely separate and I don’t have to think too hard about it.

I mean, the great thing about fantasy and honestly horror too is that it allows you to take a step back from a real world and look at things that impact the real world in a space that feels safe, right? Because there’s hobbits in it. You know, there’s elves, it’s not our world. But the themes and the images pulled from the world can be looked at differently given this new space. Another kind of escape, right?

Yes. I mean, we’ve started talking about some other authors, but I always have to ask, and we’ve talked about some of the influences on this book in general, but on your writing as a whole, do you have some sort of literary influences that you find yourself coming back to again and again.

A lot of historical fiction and fantasy but kind of my deep buy? My favorite author, and I think she will always have a top spot is Dorothy Dunnett, a wonderful Scottish writer of historical fiction. And another sort of mid century writer, Mary Renault’s who writes Greek myth, who has written some fantastic Greek myth, retellings that sort of skate the boundary between history and mythology. So there’s a two absolute favorites. When I was a kid, I had a lot of Robin McKinley, who does fairytale retellings, which I loved as a as a younger, younger reader. And as an adult, I read so many things I read, I read horror, original conviction, I read fantasy, I love Naomi Novik. I love Stephen Graham Jones. Like I just I kind of run the gamut a little bit with my reading. And I do think that it’s hard to know what exactly are your writerly influences, you can have writers you like and read a lot and come back to but I feel like it all goes in this kind of churning space in your head, and then it comes out yourself. And it’s hard to know exactly like which writer is the backbone. But I think most writers have a lot of other writers in their heads with their words and their ideas kind of churning around.

My question that I love so much that, you know, a lot of authors, maybe don’t, but I have to say, I know that this book was with you for a long time. So I know that there’s probably, you know, a degree of needing to step back for a moment. But is there anything on the horizon that we can look forward to from you?

Oh, sure. I’m publishing a picture book in September, total departure, like little picture book for kids with illustrations, and fantastic illustrators are on Marwan is doing the pictures, and I’m very excited for that. It’s called the strangest fish, sort of fish, and a girl of a county fair. It’s very cute. I’m working on a lighter book for adults set in the modern day, which I don’t want to, like, give too many details about. And then I’m working on a book for kids, which I am really enjoying. So I like having multiple things going. It’s fun.

I think that’s a good plan. And obviously, there’s so many readers out there of all ages, who scan books, bookstore shelves for that new thing. So I think that there will be a lot of excited people in the coming years.

It is fun shifting audiences, I do enjoy looking at different audiences, it’s good for the author’s voice, I think looking at different people and writing for them.

I think having that ability to move back and forth between the adult space and a younger reader space gives you that agility to sort of create a voice for yourself in a lot of different spheres.

I enjoy it. I think it enriches me as a writer, and I really appreciate having the chance to do it for you.

And I can’t wait for everything that comes and I can’t wait for people to get their hands on The Warm Hands of Ghosts. It’s truly something that I think a lot of people will enjoy, whether they’re coming from historical fiction, whether they’re coming for a little bit of romance, whether they’re coming for that fantasy element, they’re gonna find something that they’re really going to love.

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, the producer and host of Poured Over and Yangsze Choo is back with a new novel. I’m so excited about this. The Ghost Bride was at the time we called the program the discover great new writers program and it was picked back in 2013 It’s been so long since The Ghost Bride came out. And we’re going to touch on it if you haven’t read The Ghost Bride, please go back and pick it up. It became a bestseller so many of you have actually read it. The Night Tiger was her second novel it was also a Reese Witherspoon book club pick and now we have The Fox Wife. And we have left Malaysia first few books obviously were set in different time periods in Malaysia. And now we’re in northern China. And Yangsze I’m going to ask you actually, to explain why we had to move to an entirely new country, because it matters.

Yangsze Choo

Thank you so much Miwa. I am a big fan of yours. And it’s such an honor to be with you today. I’m very thrilled. And you know, that’s a, that’s a great question about why Manchuria, North Eastern China and, and it’s all because of foxes, as you’ve probably did used, you know, the idea of the shapeshifting Fox is common to both Chinese, Japanese and Korean literature. But the ancestral home of the Fox, I did a ton of research about boxers and the fox, corporate culture, the fox, lots of rabbit holes to go down, so and then, and it really is northeast China. And so when I started writing the novel, I did think like, could we like have them go to Malaysia or Malay at the time, and I thought, that doesn’t make much sense. And I’ve been wanting to write about after two novels set in a steamy tropical locale, I thought it was really nice to have something set in the snow. So winter, and snow actually features a lot in this novel.

I was so pleased when I started The Fox Wife and I realized we were going to get dual narratives, which you do particularly well. And obviously, we are staying spoiler free in this conversation, because this book is such a delight. And there’s so many interesting things. And you’ve zigged a lot when I thought you were gonna zag. I just had a really good time reading this book. So really the two characters we’re going to focus on, there’s a woman named Snow whose name translates to snow. And there’s a detective named bow. And eventually, their stories come together, which we’re not going to explain exactly how that happens. But eventually, their stories come together. But you also very deliberately chose a time period in China’s history where there was a lot of change coming. And people weren’t necessarily prepared for what that meant. And I really loved this idea, too. So can we talk about why you chose the end of the Qin Dynasty?

You know, I’m so happy that you enjoy that because I think in normal life, one would like a calm life. But in novels, I think change and chaos is what is it? I really sorry for the protagonists, a lot of novels. I didn’t think that and by the way, in Chinese literature, like foxes and ghosts appear during times of chaos. Yeah, when a dynasty falls, they are considered omens, or portents. So I thought it’d be very apt that that novel is set in 1908. It is last year of the Dowager Empress who’s been there, who’s a former concubine has been running the country. She’s dying. You know, China is in upheaval. It’s being carved up. And the Northeast is actually being northeast China, which was all Manchuria at the time, was being fought over by the Russians, the Japanese and also the Chinese, and the other different ethnic groups like the Manchus, the Mongolians, it’s always been a very interesting area, which is right on the Korean border as well. So I thought if anyone was going to profit off chaos, it would be foxes. So that’s why I chose that time period. I also think it’s a time that isn’t often talked about very much in historical novels.

The last sort of piece of art that I remember really sort of directly dealing with this period is The Last Emperor, that Bertolucci film, and I think that film is like more than 40 years old, I think that came out with like, the end of the 80s. I think it’s a really, yeah,

that totally dates to me, too.

Right? No, I know. It’s just like, Oh, okay. And I have to say, like, I did quite enjoy it. It is it is almost four hours long. But you’re absolutely right, that this isn’t a period that people necessarily gravitate towards. And even I mean, there have been a couple of major biographies of the dowager empress, but not a whole lot of sort of, let’s call it current scholarship on the period. I mean, there’s some stuff that goes back to sort of the 60s and the 70s. But it’s weird when you’re reading a history that was written sort of 50 years before you got your hands on it. And you’re like, if the lens is totally different. What is happening here, who are you?

And you know, the other thing that I think that made this time period, interesting to me was when I was a little girl, my dad had a picture of, I think it was a photograph book, or the end of the Qing Dynasty. So it was like, you know, this black and white photographs of officials of the Dowager Empress she shows that women because photography was new was a new art at the time, and that lots and lots of pictures of men and women, women with bound feet, some would not because we would begin to phase that out. And it was fascinating world I, I remember leafing through that it was like a coffee table book. We didn’t have a lot of books to read when I was a kid. So I looked at them a lot. And I thought, the faces, you know, the, the expressions on the faces, they haven’t really changed. The clothing is all like, very strange to us now, right? That’s part of it.

And photography was also such a class marker to like, it was not available to a lot of people the way it is not, you know, we walk around with our cameras on our phones, like, this is not I mean, we’re talking about giant glass plates, like, you know, and everyone has to stay on still. And like, it’s just, it’s an entirely different thing. And part of my fascination to The Fox Wife is, I knew sort of the Japanese folklore take on foxes, but they’re always women. Or at least the stories I’d been told, we’re all women and, you know, you give us a little bit of an expansive cast, that’s all I’m gonna say. There’s a little the Chinese take on it is so different. And of course, you know, the Chinese and the fox lore out into Korea and Japan, kind of like Buddhism, you know, the way Buddhism sort of. But I love the idea that once again, you’re very grounded in a world that some people might sort of look at and go, Hmm, okay, and I’m like, Well, if you can believe in Zeus and Athena, and Aries and all of this, like, you know, maybe a fox can do a thing.

You know, I love that. I love that you say that. Because it’s true. I think in East Asian cultures, everyone knows about foxes. I didn’t realize that many of my other friends like you weren’t brought up with fixes. It’s just a book about talking animals. Right? No, have you and you know, you’re bringing up the Greek myths, I think that’s so apt, because those are, it’s kind of a Western ethos that everyone knows about. But in the East, we’re all quite familiar with the foxes. They are fascinating. In fact, the subject of foxes was actually super popular in the 1700s, there was this positive rage for Fox stories. So when I was a kid, I also read a lot of stories by this scholar called Pu Songlin. And he’s famous because he was actually a failed scholar, he failed his Imperial exams, many times, he never got a good rank. But he’s famous because he collated a collection of 500 strange tales, which is called the Liaozhai. It’s an basically it’s the twilight zone on the 17th century, collecting stories about ghosts and foxes. And they informed so much of, I think the literary imagination of East Asia. And within the stories, as you pointed out, they’re actually both male and female foxes. They are disruptive creatures who look like humans and always come along. Usually, when you’re studying for the exams. I don’t know. There’s some obsession with the SATs yet. So I always wondered, you know, when I read these stories, when I was a kid, I always thought about, why do the foxes come? Why do they care about humans? These stories are very human centric, they are also patriarchal and male centric. Because the protagonist is usually a scholar who’s studying alone, the archetypal tale is like, and then there’s a knock on the door, and this beautiful woman comes and disturbs his studies. Oh, but I was always fascinated by what happened on the other side of the who were these creatures? Why did they bother, you know, and what happened their own complicated lives. And while I was researching this book, it was, by the way, very fun to research because I can not only look into a lot of scholarship about the color of the Fox, but also I’ve read a lot of purported first person historical encounters with boxes. I know you’re like, wait a minute, they were. It’s just like nowadays, people be collecting stories about ghosts. And they were in the Ming and Qing dynasties. There were people who were obsessed with foxes, and they will go around interviewing people. I also read a number of also Japanese accounts. The thing that struck me with these accounts is that they’re all very peculiar.

No, I think this is really important because, you know, Asia sort of has this refuge. Everyone’s very well behaved and polite, and all of these other things and everyone plays by the rules. And I’m like, Well, let us tell you a little bit about the literature because it gets super weird and also people genuinely believe this if you don’t have a way to explain a weird thing. thing that has happened to you, why not ascribe it to a fox? In the context of the 1700s? It makes perfect sense. You don’t have an answer for it. Something goes boom in the woods. And also, I mean, I might not be the only person who’s ever heard videos of foxes on like YouTube and this screaming of the Fox, that sounds very weird.

They sound like women, they sound like women in distress.

I see where it comes from, right, like this whole idea of foxes overlapping with people, but I just I kind of like the idea that these stories are so weird, like, ghosts, Japanese ghost stories, not meant to be read in dark spaces, like leave all the lights on lock the doors, close the windows, they’re freaky, you gotta tell the story, right? I mean, I really do love the idea that you were reading all of these first person accounts, I think it’s great.

I could tell you a lot of them ended very, like I said, they’re very odd. They’re disjointed. They don’t always make sense. But the disjointedness and the strangeness makes them feel almost real. I mean, I’m sure whoever was recounting that thought that they were real, too. Because it’s not like if you were making a story, you wouldn’t actually make a narrative in which someone throws bricks into your courtyard. So when I wrote The Fox Wife, I put in as many of them as I could, without going overboard. I think it speaks to our fascination with the unknown. You mentioned my previous book, The Night Tiger, and I do love animals, I’m really interested in animals, and then also interested in the fact that, I think as humans, we’re always trying to figure out our surroundings. So when you meet the idea of an animal that can change it a human, in some ways, it’s sort of us trying to assess a stranger. Is this a real person? Is, is this person trustworthy? Or are they other some other kind of creature? And you can imagine being a dark woods and meeting someone and you might think, why is there a young girl here in the woods? Maybe she’s not human. And you know, things do you happen to easily win, I do really think it speaks to just this huge world of the other that and the sense of wonder, and mystery, and also terror, that we in our current manmade surroundings seldom experience.

I think that’s totally true. The other thing is, I mean, Snow very specifically, one of our main protagonists, the fox wife herself, she’s really relatively powerless. Right, and we see this with Li Lan, in Ghost Bride, and we see this both with Ren, and Ji Lin, in Night Tiger as well, like you’re giving us people who are relatively powerless bow, who’s another one of our narrators in Fox Wife. He’s not necessarily powerless, but he’s not the dude holding all the power. He’s really not. And the idea that these are the people you’re centering the narrative on, right? They’re not really the traditional heroes heroines center of attention in their world, right. And it’s really kind of fun to watch them figure out, right? You put them all under pressure in different ways. But the three novels do kind of sit in this continuum.

You know, that’s very insightful. Actually, I didn’t set out to do that. But I do see that. And like I said, we all like peaceful times. But the protagonists and novels difficulty make the story interesting. And it is true that I think most people historically did not have much power. And you’re right, that I think women, women are very vulnerable children and old people, because bow is old, as well, and the difficulties they face and trying to get through the world. Those are interesting. Many historical accounts are they tend to be heroes. And the hero is a young man like greatness, you know, you’re in the prime of your life and off you go to fight the I don’t know, the Minotaur, right? But it is so much harder to make your way through the world. I’m going back to the foxes I did feel like as a, as an both as an animal and as a human, Snow is very vulnerable. And that’s something I tried to bring out in the novel. You know, the foxes, rather than being omnipotent, are always afraid of being caught. skinned, you know, these are all things that they talk about in Chinese literature as well. And when the Fox was caught, it was blah, blah, blah. And I thought, goodness, if you will, reading this history as a fox, it’s very alarming. And I think that’s why she says in the novel, but when, whenever humans encounter something new and strange, their first instinct is to kill it. So I thought that was very interesting.

I was surprised by how vulnerable she feels sort of in the context of the Fox culture and community and everything else. Because again, they’re presented as tricksters. They’re presented as the ones who can talk humans into, you know, maybe making some decisions they might not otherwise, that in fact, somehow they’re given power. So that flip to me was really interesting. It was not what I was expecting at all. And I did get very attached and I don’t— I knew what you were when I got the galley, I was not concerned that I was going to get, I’m not a Watership Down person. I’m glad the book exists. I know, there are many, many fans of that book. Rock on. That’s great. I’m delighted that that book works for you. I mean, I loved Paddington when I was little Sure, but you know, you do. Or I got to a point where it’s kind of like not for me. What you’re doing here is sort of turning folklore and history on its ear completely. And you know, there is that moment, sort of towards the end of the Qin Dynasty, where there is an actual exchange between sort of cultural exchange between students who are going from China to Japan, that gives our story, a little bit of movement. You’ve got some class things happening, that gives the story a little bit of movement, but it’s also a detective story. I mean, like, it’s a straight up old school, kind of, and there is this long sort of tradition to have detective stories. Throughout Asian literature. I was really enjoying it. I was like, okay, and it’s not quite, you know, poro or mismo. Like, we’re not talking but watching bow sort of figure out where he’s going and what’s going on and watching him put the pieces together. Sometimes I was a couple steps ahead of him. Sometimes he was maybe a step ahead of me. But can we talk about balancing Snow and Bow and their POVs? Because obviously, they are going to come together at some point. And we’re just going to leave it at that. But it seems to me like you were having a really good time writing this book. And that you had a really serious sense of play while you were creating this world.

Oh, well, thank you for your kind words, I did actually have a lot of fun with this book. I think Night Tiger dealt with a lot of rather heavy themes. And when I was done with that, I thought I want to write something cheerful, tragic things do happen in this novel as well. And I do also feel that in a part of this time, I was writing the novel as COVID was going on. And there’s just so much even today. I mean, horrible things happen the world all the time. And I did feel like for many of us reading is kind of an escape. Sometimes I just want escape. And when I wrote this novel thinking about that, the detective? Yes. I’m also a big detective. No, but I grew up on steady diet of PD James and Agatha Christie. Okay, so they’ve always like, at one point, I think The Night Tiger, my editor was saying, don’t you think there’s been a lot of dead bodies? And I was like, what I was thinking of, you know, and then they would know, it’s like, shouldn’t there be at least nine? Now we’ve got. But I didn’t I wasn’t planning this to be a dual point of view. Actually, it happened. I was writing it within the first chapter. And they sat on it. And then I wrote chapter two, and suddenly, a detective appeared. I mean, this kind of thing, just actually horrifies my husband, because he says things like, why don’t you have an outline, everybody else has an outline what? And it would save you a lot of this crying and rolling around on the floor. But the detective appeared. And I thought, oh, there’s a detective. And I can see him. And so I love that you referenced, you know, the East Asian love of detective novels. You know, you’re absolutely correct it China has a long history of detective stories. And so does Japan, especially around the turn of the century with, you know, edoga, Ron Paul, and people like that. I spent part of my childhood in Japan, and I was listening to some of your earlier podcasts. I think you have a connection as well in Japan, so there was just like a big explosion in mystery writing. And I did love putting that in because historically it fit with the time and I also thought it fits in with the the nature of how you think a fox would be like, they’d be deeply interested in, like detective novels that don’t read anything. Well,

And just the structure too, the way you cut back and forth, and I really liked the way the story unfurled. I kept being surprised. Yeah, I’m trying to dance around some things sort of very specifically because the way you bring everything together works so well, but I’m slightly concerned I might give something up. Didn’t I don’t want to do that. So I’m dancing around this for a second. But you know, the way you talk about where people live, or how they behave towards each other, I mean, this is all sort of status stuff that you need to know in the back of your brain as you’re writing about these characters. And of course, you know, snow is the ultimate outsider, right? But yet, she has been around for more than a minute, she’s figured out some stuff. So watching her struggle a little bit is really interesting. Because she’s doing a little bit of the, well, I should know better. And then she’s like, wow, but some things don’t change, and you just kind of watching her figure out, and then she has a couple of moments where she’s like, listen, now. Let me explain some things to you. And I just, I loved watching her journey, and that interiority that we get between snow and bow. And the way this world sort of unfurls is just it’s so satisfying. And you’ve alluded a couple of times to the amount of research you had to do just for the fox stories alone, but you clearly know your history, as well. And how do you sort of bring all of this together? Right, ultimately, you want to tell a story. Ultimately, you do want to be entertained. But we can’t really separate the entertainment piece from the actual like, what we know, kind of thing, right? It’s like, you know, it’s not like you’re dropping a flying saucer in the middle of Manchuria in 19. away, right, like, and, you know, that can work in other books. But that’s not the book you’re writing. So I just want to talk about pulling all those elements in because again, no outline, you’re passing the entire