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Introduction:
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Welcome to Modern Signed Books. If
you're interested in what makes your favorite authors tick, then you'll love
hearing what they have to say in our interviews. Learn how they got started
writing, books and authors that inspired them, and much more. Meet today's
hottest authors as they discuss their lives and writing with our book specialist
Rodger Nichols. And, don't forget to pick up a copy of your favorite books at
vjbooks.com. Here's Rodger.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Welcome to Blog Talk Radio. Karen
Dionne is the internationally published author of science thrillers Freezing
Point and Boiling Point. She is co-founder of the online writers community
Backspace and organizes what sounds like a whole lot of fun the Salt Clay
Writers Retreat held every other year in a private island in the Bahamas.
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She is a member of the Mystery
Writers of America and the International Thriller Writers where she served on
the board of directors as vice president for technology. Her short fiction
has appeared in a number of periodicals as well as a wonderful anthology
called First Thrills: High Octane Stories of the Hottest Thriller Authors
which was edited by this [inaudible 00:01:36] guy name Lee Child.
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And, she is written about the
publishing industry from an author's perspective for AOL's Daily Finance and
blogs at the Huffington Post. Now, all that would be fantastic but her latest
work, The Marsh King's Daughter, is absolutely stunning. This is the brief
precis of it, when the notorious child abductor known as the Marsh King
escapes from a nearby maximum security prison, Helena Pelletier realized she's
in grave danger for the Marsh King was the man who kept her and her mother
captive until she was 12 years old and also was her beloved father. So, now
she must protect herself and her own two children, a terrifying thought
perhaps. But, what nobody knows is that her father raised her to be a killer
as well. So, we're very delighted to welcome Karen Dionne. Good morning.
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Karen Dionne:
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Hi, thanks so much for having me
Rodger.
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Rodger Nichols:
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This is an extraordinary piece of
writing and I'm going to try not to drown you in superlatives here but it has
an authenticity and an emotional involvement that you just don't often find.
My understanding is that you have actually experienced some of this
[inaudible 00:02:40] because you and your husband actually did live in the
wilderness of the Upper Peninsula for a while.
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Karen Dionne:
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I did. My husband and I moved to
the Upper Peninsula during the 1970's with our six week old daughter as part
of the Back-To-The-Land movement. There were a lot of young people at that
time who were searching for a more natural way of life. So, we were city
kids. We didn't have any experience with the various skills that we would
need to build a cabin. But, we lived in a tent on our property and carried
water from a stream and sampled wild foods.
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And, I had always wanted to write a
novel that was set in the Upper Peninsula because it's such a wild and
beautiful place but it had to be the right story. Well, it turns out this one
is the right story. So, I drew heavily on the detailed knowledge that an
author doesn't really have access to unless they've lived it themselves. I'd
done a lot of research for my science thrillers but that was from distance.
This was up close and personal.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Just one of the sentences as I was
reading just jumped out at me that feels like it's part of that. It says,
"I loved exploring the marsh in winter. It was as if the land had
magically expanded and I could walk wherever I wanted. Here and there frozen
cattail heads poked out of the snow to remind me I was walking on
water." That's got to be personal.
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Karen Dionne:
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Yes, it is. We did ... we hiked, we
explored. When you live in a wilderness area and I should add that we raised
our family there and we lived in the Upper Peninsula for 30 years. You don't
let winters stop you. So, you go for winter picnics. You go for hikes in the
woods. And, that's true. I used to think how cool it was to be able to walk
across a swampy area in the winter where in the summer there's no way you
could walk into it. So, yeah that's one of those details.
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Rodger Nichols:
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It's also educational for those of
us on the West Coast [inaudible 00:04:40] here. You write in there that with
more than 3,000 miles of coastline, Michigan has more lighthouses than any
other state which is something that just bowled me over. I stared looking and
you're absolutely right there.
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Karen Dionne:
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Yeah, it's really astonishing and
the Upper Peninsula, as I mentioned in the book, has 29% of the land area of
the state of Michigan but only 3% of the population. So, it's mile after mile
of state forest and national forest and campgrounds and lakes and wild
animals and no many roads. A lot of the roads aren't paved. So, it's just a
very unique place. A lot of people in the rest of the United States aren't
necessarily aware of how life is in the Upper Peninsula.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Yeah, there was another line that
jumped out at me. It says, "Imagine cold as a malignant fog" which
is a nice piece of anthropomorphism there.
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Karen Dionne:
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Well, I can tell you where that
came from. One winter my husband and I decided that we were going to go
camping with our daughter. I think she was about three or four at the time.
We just wanted to try it out. What would it be like to stay in a tent in the winter.
So, we went to a campground, pitched our tent. There was maybe about six or
eight inches of snow on the ground, not a lot. And, we had air mattresses. We
had a kerosene heater for the tent.
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Well, what we discovered was the
topside of us was warm. The air in the tent was warm but the cold coming up
from the ground and then through our air mattresses ... you just couldn't
compete against that. We were freezing. We gave it up. So, that's where that
thought came from. The cold, it does, it just seeps in through every crack
and every crevice and takes over.
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Rodger Nichols:
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There's so many wonderful images in
here but I want to talk a little bit about the story because it's unique as
far as I know. The fact that our protagonist Helena Pelletier had been born
of this union where her father kidnapped her mother as a 15 year old and
dragged her off into the wilderness and a year later here comes young Helena
and she's raised ... one of the things you point out is that ... you say that
children don't understand whatever the situation is is natural to them. And
so, she does not, for a long time, realize her situation.
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Karen Dionne:
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That's true. And, I've always been
fascinated by stories of people who overcome a less than perfect childhood
lets put it that way. I remember many years ago, I was probably just a child
myself, reading an experience in a Readers Digest magazine about a person who
had grown up in an abusive home but he and his wife adopted maybe 30 foster
children with special needs and so forth. I always ... that stuck with me.
And so, Helena's certainly applies to that. We know, of course, in real life
some of the girls who have been kidnapped and held for a long time have had
children with their captors. And, I think to myself, "What would it be
like to be that child?" Because, you're growing up in this completely
abnormal situation but it's all you know so it's your normal.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Yeah, and there's so much about it
that's really conflicting because she absolutely loves her father who treats
her in this really odd situation where sometimes he just absolutely dotes on
her and teachers her everything about living in the marsh, other times he
punishes her fairly harshly by dropping her in a party dug well and making
her stay there inside the Earth for some time, sometimes a day or so. That's
bound to set up some really interesting psychological problems in somebody.
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Karen Dionne:
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Yeah, and then of course the larger
picture because in the story her upbringing is half of it and the other half
of the story she's a young mother. So, the larger question I wanted to raise
for readers is based on her experience as a child and what she learned or
accepted as being normal, what kind of mother would she be you know? How much
does she have to overcome as far as her natural thinking. This is a side
point but I grew up in a family of three kids and I have four children. So,
when my fourth child was born, it just felt wrong because it was like too
many children. Sorry, [Deanna 00:09:18], I love you to pieces. But, that's
sort of what I'm getting at here. We're so ingrained with the way we grow up
and thinking that it's the right way or the only way. So, I wanted to address
larger question for the reader. What kind of mother would a person like
Helena ultimately be.
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Rodger Nichols:
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And, she's a pretty good mother as
near as I can tell from all the way through the book. She dotes on her
daughters who she has named after flowers, Marigold and Iris.
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Karen Dionne:
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Yeah.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Which I like, nice touch. And then,
there's one ... she talks about Marigold and she describes her as "Mari
is sparkling water, golden sunshine, the chatter of wood ducks
overhead." That's a wonderful image.
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Karen Dionne:
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Thanks, thanks. Yeah, what sunny
little girls.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Yes. And then, she describes
"If Mari is fire, then Iris is water, Iris the Largehearted." This
often, those of us who are parents, know that you can have children who are
totally different in every respect from one another in their personality and
their likes and dislikes and what they are like and yet they're all part of
the family.
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Karen Dionne:
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That's true. And, I contrived
Helena's situation to where she would be an only child because I wanted the
focus to be strictly on her and her upbringing. And so, you have to wonder
and perhaps she does to when her two girls are so different, what would a
brother or sister for her have been like? Possibly very different than what
she was.
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Rodger Nichols:
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The interesting relationship that
she has with her husband [Steven 00:10:55], she says at one point that
"He's the only one that ever really loves her for herself. The only
person on the face of the Earth who chose me, who loves me not because he has
to, because he wants to." She also adds this, "My gift from the
universe for surviving the past."
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Karen Dionne:
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Yes. You know, I have to confess
here, that thought was expressed by my editor. And, I'd like to deviate for
just a second and say what a unique experience it was working with my editor
because he saw nuances and layers in a novel that I had no necessarily seen
myself or articulated. And so, it's such an interesting experience as a
writer to work with someone who helps you to get the best out of your novel.
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Another thing that my editor pointed
out, I created a distance between Helena and her mother, again, because I
wanted so clearly for her to adore her father and not ... she's actually
quite cruel to her mother when she's a little girl in that she has no regard
for her. And so, again, my editor pointed out something that I thought was
really cool which was how hard would it have been for Helena's mother to
nurture a child who was a carbon copy of the man who had kidnapped her.
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So yeah, those two particular
points, they really strike me. An author lays the groundwork for things but
sometimes they need help articulating them or someone else to pull them out
of the story. So, I just wanted to insert that, that working with an editor
on this book to elevate it, to be the best it could be was a very cool
experience for me.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Obviously it turned out
fantastically. And, I understand. I want to get into a lot of that stuff but
that when it came time to market the book, there were 19 places competing at
an auction for it which does not surprise me in the least having read the
advance on it.
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Karen Dionne:
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Well, it surprised me. It was
pretty astonishing.
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Rodger Nichols:
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That's got to be a fabulous feeling
though to realize you've created something that's going to be hugely in demand.
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Karen Dionne:
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It was. And, I won't say which
editor, but my agent told me that, just recently, he had dinner with one of
the editors who had been on the book and didn't get it. And, this editor said
that it was the best book they read last year which I thought was kind of
astonishing because obviously they have their own authors you know?
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Rodger Nichols:
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Right.
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Karen Dionne:
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In their publishing house. So yeah,
I think the reason that the book resonates so deeply with people is because
at heart it's a father, daughter story. You've read the book so you know the
progression and I'm not really giving anything away either to future readers.
But, when for her first 12 years Helena loved her father unconditionally and
then when she finds out the truth about him and leaves the marsh and has such
a hard time adjusting, she hates him completely. And, of course she's a
teenager so that [crosstalk 00:13:55] all the more.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Yeah, that's part of it.
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Karen Dionne:
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And then, as a young woman she
denies who she is. And so, of course ultimately by the end of the book she
has to come to terms with who she is. And, I think that's why so many editors
love the book. And also, it's sold in a lot of countries around the world
which is also astonishing to me because it's hard to picture, for me at
least, in Russia and Turkey and China, reading this story set in Michigan's
Upper Peninsula. But, one day they will.
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Rodger Nichols:
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There's some universality to it. As
a matter of fact, my understanding is that the title comes from Hans
Christian Andersen's story that echos throughout the book.
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Karen Dionne:
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Correct, correct. And, how I got
the idea for the story ties into that. I actually woke up in the middle of
the night with the first sentences of the novel in my head. "If I told
you my mother's name, you'd recognize it right away" and so forth. About
three sentences, four sentences and they sounded good but you know how it is
in the middle of the night.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Yeah, yeah. We'll check [crosstalk
00:15:01] in the morning.
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Karen Dionne:
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Sometimes they sound good ... yeah,
exactly. So, in the morning it still sounded good. So, I wrote up a few
paragraphs in her voice which was just basically her telling me who she was.
And, none of the first page is a novel. And, as I was writing that, I almost
gave the book an urban setting because I was thinking of the girls in
Cleveland who were hidden in plain sight.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Yes.
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Karen Dionne:
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That's so intriguing. But, at the
last minute I changed it to a cabin on a ridge surrounded by marshland in
Michigan's Upper Peninsula just for something a little different. Well, in
the subsequent days, this character kept talking to me. She didn't have a
name yet. And, I kept writing snippets in her voice and finally I decided I
need a story for this character. And, I always loved fairytales since I was a
little girl. The darker, the better.
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And, I like books such as Eowyn
Ivey's Snow Child that offered a modern take on fairytale. So, I pulled my childhood
fairytale books off the shelf and started paging through them. That's when I
found the Marsh King's Daughter. And, I was so astounded. Not only is it the
marsh and book is set in the marsh, but in the Hans Christian Andersen
fairytale, the Marsh King's Daughter is the offspring of a beautiful Egyptian
princess the evil Marsh King. And, by day she's beautiful like her mother but
has a wicked, wild temper like her father, whereas at night she takes on her
mother's gentle nature but turns into a hideous frog.
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Of course, that fits my character
astonishingly well who is equally the offspring of an innocent girl and an
evil man. So, I then used the story the Marsh King, the rough trajectory, to
structure the book. So, that's how that all came about. So yeah, it's
completely tied to the fairytale but it's also Helena's own story.
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Rodger Nichols:
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And again, that gives it, I think,
a larger resonance beyond simply what happened to her particularly because it
also speaks to themes about how we react and deal with nature as well. I
mean, we're civilized, city folks, most of us, who get our meats shrink
wrapped at the butcher rather than go out and carve it ourselves out of ...
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Karen Dionne:
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That's right.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Killing animals. So, there's a certain,
I don't want to say romance, but a certain resonance with our historic past
if not our personal past.
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Karen Dionne:
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That's a great point.
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Rodger Nichols:
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And, the thing that ... it is,
again, it's a page turner that kept me ... I'll put it this way, up very late
one night cause I had to finish the thing. And, I think ...
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Karen Dionne:
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I am so happy to hear that.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Yeah.
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Karen Dionne:
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Authors love hearing that.
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Rodger Nichols:
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It is ... there's a comparison I
think of the story teller in the marketplace who sits there with his little
begging bowl. Every so often, at the end of a chapter, he pauses and a
cliffhanger, and the rattles his little bowl suggestively for people and they
peel in their pockets and thrown money in cause they have to know what
happens next. The equivalent of that here and really good storytelling where
you've got to know what happens next. And, that's ... again, very well done
in this.
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Karen Dionne:
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Well, in intertwining the two
stories of Helena's growing up and of her as a young mother having to hunt
down her father before he can hurt her family. That intertwined the two
stories and then the two climaxes come at the same time at the end of the
book. But, that also helps to create that cliffhanger effect that you're
talking about because I switch back and forth between the two stories so the
reader has to wait a chapter before they find out what happens next in the
previous story.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Yeah, it is a nice ... it's
something that's used a lot but when it's done well, there's nothing that
will touch it as far as I'm concerned in terms of style of writing. Speaking
of style, she has, Helena has an amazing voice. How much of that is you?
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Karen Dionne:
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I would say a lot of it is me. When
I hear Helena's ... when I read her words, I hear myself saying these things
but it's myself if I were her, if that makes sense.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Yeah.
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Karen Dionne:
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So, for any author I think there's
always a little bit of, you could call it method acting, but yeah. It's a lot
of myself. I was a casual mother I would say about our kids. We didn't bind
them very tightly with restrictions and Helena is that way too. Early on she
leaves her three year old in the car while she makes her deliveries of jams and
jellies. And, I know that ... while I wouldn't do that now, not in the city,
but that's what we did. We didn't think anything of it. My children walked
home from school when they were kindergartners alone. It was just a different
lifestyle I guess. And so, a lot of her attitudes towards things are also
shared by me. So, it was a lot of fun creating her I have to say. She started
talking to me in the middle of the night and she just never stopped. So, I
had to tell her story.
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Rodger Nichols:
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There's an interesting aspect to
it. Once she realizes and turns in ... the police come and they take ... she
gets rescued and back into society. She meets her grandparents, her mother's
parents. And, they're not very nice people as it turns out.
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Karen Dionne:
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No, they're not. And, I think a lot
of people, again, that goes back to the idea of a person overcoming
adversity. The world is not a nice place for an awful lot of people. And, the
people who should be maybe supporting us don't. And so, Helena is very much a
loner. She was raised that way. The one person that she truly trusted and
relied on, her father, fell from his pedestal. And so, she's so alone in
those middle years. I really feel sorry for her. I feel sorry for her mother
too. Her mother is also a very tragic figure.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Yeah, and that's why when she gets
married and Steven is so understanding about many things. At some points in
there, you can't quite follow why she needs to do what she needs to do but he
trusts her and that is amazing for her.
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Karen Dionne:
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Yeah, he truly is the only person
that could have handled her because she has no standard to go by. She has no
idea what a normal marriage is supposed to be. So, it takes an awful lot of
give on his part to love her and have her in his life.
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Rodger Nichols:
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As I read through this thing and
I'm thinking somebody, somewhere will be buying the movie rights to this very
soon. So, do you see that happening and if so, have you cast the people yet?
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Karen Dionne:
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You know, it's funny, a lot of
authors think about that or they have a visual as they're writing. I didn't
even think of a movie until my agent sent the novel on [inaudible 00:22:09]
and he's like, "Oh by the way, you have a film agent now." I was
like, "Oh okay, yeah, right. It could be a movie." So, I didn't get
a lot of thought to that. I will say I picture, and you know Jacob, Helena's
father in the story, he's part Native American, he's not an imposing man. He
intimidates by force of personality not by his stature. So, it could be
anyone, any actor that can be nice but really nasty at the same time. Maybe
you have an idea, I don't know.
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Rodger Nichols:
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I haven't yet but I keep seeing
people playing against type like, for goodness sake, Tom Cruise playing Jack
Reacher which is so far from the physical type but yet he seemed to have done
fairly well in the two movies in terms of projecting that psychological edge
that it has. So, you never know.
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Karen Dionne:
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Right. This is considered
psychological suspense. So, while there's action in the story, it's
definitely Helena's father manipulating her and pulling mind tricks on her.
So, how that comes across in a movie, I'm not sure. I would leave that to the
experts.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Yeah, there you go. Is there a
chance you could go back to the marsh at some point?
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Karen Dionne:
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You know, I took a two book deal
from Putnam, and with no idea what the second book might be. So, when I had
... yeah, I liked to live dangerously.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Yeah.
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Karen Dionne:
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And so, when I sat down with my
agent and my editor to discuss book two, I was really happy that both my
editor and I agreed that Helena's full story was told in this book. I had
explored possible sequels with my agent and the best that I could come up
with still seemed like a pale repeat of what was in The Marsh King's
Daughter. And, I didn't want to diminish the character in any way. So, we
won't see any more of Helena.
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The second book, however, does
still take place in the Upper Peninsula and it's also a psychological or a
domestic suspense. It also has a fairytale element and hopefully also
intricate structure. So, those are the four criteria that my editor set out
because we want the same but different for readers. That way book readers can
read either book in any order. And so, similar but still a different story
all together.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Stand alone's basically.
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Karen Dionne:
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As you can probably tell ... yeah,
I'm working on it. I'm in the middle of it now.
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Rodger Nichols:
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And, that's one thing that a lot of
readers don't understand is how the time lag between the time that the book
is created and the time it actually hits the shelves can be years or two
years anyway. So ...
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Karen Dionne:
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Yes.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Yeah. You're always working ahead.
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Karen Dionne:
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[crosstalk 00:24:58] because The
Marsh King's Daughter sold last May and it's going to publish June 13th this
year. So, that's very fast. I don't want to make any promises but I recently
found out my publisher would like to bring out book two in June of 2018. So,
one year after The Marsh King's Daughter. I know, [inaudible 00:25:23]. I
have to write this book first.
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Rodger Nichols:
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One of the things, in looking at
your photos on the website and whatnot, you seem like such a nice lady to be
able to imagine some of the stuff in this book. You're darker than you look,
lets put it that way.
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Karen Dionne:
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You know, my middle daughter read
the book and she said she really liked it but she was kind of creeped out
that her mother thought of these things. Yeah.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Obviously, if you had a good time
in doing this and the response has been amazing. Tons of people have already
endorsed it including Lee Child and Karen Slaughter and some other very well
known names. And I just think you're going to have a good, fun ride with this
one.
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Karen Dionne:
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Thank you. I don't think I've
stopped smiling since the book sold. I knew when I got the idea for the story
that it could be big, it could be very commercial. A writer has an instinct
for this. And, The Marsh King's Daughter was actually the sixth book that I'd
written. It will be my fourth publishing novel. So, you kind of get a sense
for story. And, I knew there was something special in this. But, everything
has been so beyond what I dreamed could happen for the novel that every day
is another surprise. It's been pretty cool.
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Rodger Nichols:
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Cool, indeed. Well, and if people
who are listening to this blog want to get an autographed first edition, VJ
Books would be the place to do it.
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Karen Dionne:
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Absolutely. It's such a nice
service that they offer because people have already asked me, "How can I
get the book signed?" My publisher is sending me on a national tour but
that's only certain cities. So, what VJ does is very cool.
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Rodger Nichols:
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They are. They're pretty nice
people too. I speak from personal experience. So, I want to thank you so much
for spending ... you've been very generous with your time this morning. Our
guest is Karen Dionne, the book is superb, it's called The Marsh King's Daughter.
It comes out in June. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did. Thanks so much
for being with us this morning.
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Karen Dionne:
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Oh, thank you. I had a great time.
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