A Daydream: A Guest Post by Roshani Chokshi

With lush world-building and fairytale influences, this tale of power and survival blossoms into a gorgeous love story between a prince and an unlikely maiden. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Roshani Chokshi on writing The Swan’s Daughter.

Writing The Swan’s Daughter was a strange experience. It did not feel like writing, so much as actively transcribing a daydream, one that visited me in the witching hours that only parents to newborns keep. First time parents make an odd club. We are reduced to our animal selves and our interests are singularly un-interesting. I could never have anticipated the amount of time I have spent tracking diapers or examining their contents. It makes one feel a bit like a haruspex and led to gross revelations such as the practice of scatomancy. But I digress. I am prone to digressions these days. Always, the mind slips elsewhere, into next week, into the introduction of solids, the expiration of milk. The Swan’s Daughter emerged within this digression. One moment I was despairing over an unfinished draft. The next I was reading aloud beloved childhood favorites to my daughter. The next moment I was crying. Why are these heroines always orphaned?

Magic is so murderous these days and as I have seen firsthand, whimsy and woe
are two sides of the same coin. Without woe, whimsy lacks depth. Without whimsy, woe is implacable. All my days had become both silly and serious. I was seriously concerned about our daughter’s milk intake. Was she eating enough? Was this color…correct? What was that sound? Cheek-to-cheek with my panic stood the knowledge that we were obsessing over literal shit whilst taking turns imitating the milk-drunk-scrunched-face-stupor of our daughter and negotiating with our cat about sleeping spots and why one of them cannot be the baby’s face. The Swan’s Daughter is silly. But it takes its silliness seriously. It is a world full of fairytale conceits. Talking trees, library wyverns, cursed maidens, depraved wizards. And yet the joy was in giving this dimension. A grandfather turned into a tree cannot cradle a child. A library wyvern might have agoraphobia. A cursed maiden still has ambition. And even depraved wizards might be exemplary fathers. Forgive me for the trite observation that life is complex. We know this. And yet, to explore this in a baroque fairytale world made me laugh when I was desperately in need of cheer. Even in a world of excess magic, what is more daunting than loving and being loved?

When we are children, we accept these nuances without question. Of course
animals can speak. Of course a word spoken in cruelty can land you in the form of a rock for 10,000 years. When we are children, we do not question the randomness of woe and whimsy. It is only when we grow older that we demand reason out of a fathomless universe and this need can drive us a bit batty. The Swan’s Daughter was my way back to that acceptance and, ultimately, back to joy. In exchange for the unknown, here lies an abundance of magic. All you have to do is look.