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WORK TITLE: The Shadow Prince
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WEBSITE: http://www.davidanthonydurham.com/
CITY: Hadley
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COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly vol. 247 no. 49 Dec. 4, 2000, review of GABRIEL’S STORY. p. 54.
Book Mar., 2001. LeClair, Tom. , “Gabriel’s Story.”. p. 74.
Kirkus Reviews vol. 70 no. 4 Feb. 15, 2002, , “Walk Through Darkness. (Fiction).”. p. 206.
Publishers Weekly vol. 249 no. 13 Apr. 1, 2002, , “Walk Through Darkness. (Fiction).”. p. 50.
Kirkus Reviews Apr. 15, 2007, , “Durham, David Anthony: ACACIA.”.
Black Issues Book Review vol. 9 no. 3 May-June, 2007. Barnes, Steven. , “Acacia: Book One, the War With the Mein.”.
Kirkus Reviews Sept. 15, 2009, , “Durham, David Anthony: THE OTHER LANDS.”.
Booklist vol. 106 no. 1 Sept. 1, 2009, Estes, Sally. , “The Other Lands.”. p. 50.
Kirkus Reviews Oct. 1, 2011, , “Durham, David Anthony: THE SACRED BAND.”.
Kirkus Reviews Mar. 15, 2016, , “Durham, David Anthony: THE RISEN.”.
School Library Journal vol. 67 no. 8 Aug., 2021. Rawlins, Sharon. , “DURHAM, David Anthony. The Shadow Prince.”.
Booklist vol. 108 no. 3 Oct. 1, 2011, Huntley, Kristine. , “The Sacred Band.”. p. 38.
Washingtonpost.com May 4, 2016, Drabelle, Dennis. , “‘The Risen,’ an absorbing new historical novel about Spartacus.”.
About Me
I was born in New York City to parents of Caribbean descent. I grew up mostly in Maryland, but I've spent the last twenty years on the move, jumping from East to West Coast to the Rocky Mountains, and back and forth to Scotland and France several times.
I'm the author of a trilogy of fantasy novels set in Acacia: The Sacred Band, The Other Lands, and The War With The Mein, as well as the historical novels The Risen, Pride of Carthage, Walk Through Darkness, and Gabriel’s Story. My middle grade solarpunk fantasy novel, The Shadow Prince, is the first in a series from Tu Books. My novels have been published in the UK and in French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Swedish. Three of my novels have been optioned for development as feature films.
My stories have appeared in four of George RR Martin’s Wild Cards novels: Fort Freak, Lowball, High Stakes, Texas Hold ‘Em, and another is forthcoming in Pairing Up. Other short fiction has been anthologized in Unbound, Unfettered, and Unfettered II.
I've taught quite a bit too: at the University of Maryland, the University of Massachusetts, The Colorado College, for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, Cal State University, and at Hampshire College. I've reviewed books for The Washington Post and The Raleigh News & Observer, and served as a judge for the Pen/Faulkner Awards, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards, and the World Fantasy Award.
I currently teach in two MFA programs: at the University of Nevada, Reno and the Stonecoast MFA Program of the University of Southern Maine.
American novelist
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David Anthony Durham is an award-winning novelist. He began writing seriously while an undergraduate on a Creative Arts Scholarship at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. While there his short story, August Fury, won the 1990 Malcolm C. Braly Award for Fiction. Another story, The Boy-Fish, won the 1992 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Fiction Award.
His debut novel, Gabriel's Story (Doubleday 2001) was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Best of 2001 pick, and a Booklist Editor's Choice. It won the 2001 First Novel Award from the American Library Association's Black Caucus, the 2002 Alex Award and the 2002 Legacy Award in the Debut Fiction Category. It has also been optioned for development as a feature film.
Walk Through Darkness was also a New York Times Notable Book and one of The San Francisco Chronicle's Best Books of 2002. His third novel, Pride of Carthage, was a finalist for the Legacy Award for Fiction.
His Acacia trilogy of novels are set in an alternative world. The first, Acacia: The War With The Mein, made a number of best of the year lists including Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus.
He currently teaches Popular Fiction at the Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA Program. Previously, he was an Associate Professor in the MFA program of California State University, Fresno, the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Writer at The Colorado College, and he's taught at Hampshire College, the University of Maryland and the University of Massachusetts.
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David Anthony Durham
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Stonecoast MFA Office - 98 Bedford Street, Portland, ME 04102
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Stonecoast Office: stonecoastmfa@maine.edu
ACADEMIC DEGREES
MFA in Creative Writing, University of Maryland
BA in English, University of Maryland
PROFILE
David Anthony Durham was born in New York City to parents of Caribbean descent. He grew up mostly in Maryland, but has spent the last twenty years on the move, jumping from East to West Coast to the Rocky Mountains, and back and forth to Scotland and France several times.
He is the author of a trilogy of fantasy novels set in Acacia: The Sacred Band, The Other Lands, and The War With The Mein, as well as the historical novels The Risen, Pride of Carthage, Walk Through Darkness, and Gabriel’s Story. His middle-grade solarpunk fantasy novel, The Shadow Prince, is the first in a series from Tu Books, to be followed by a sequel: The Longest Night in Egypt. His novels have been published in the UK and in French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.
His stories have appeared in four of George RR Martin’s Wild Cards novels: Fort Freak, Lowball, High Stakes, Texas Hold ‘Em, and another is forthcoming in Pairing Up. Other short fiction has been anthologized in Unbound, Unfettered, Unfettered II, It’s All Love, and Gumbo: An Anthology of African-American Writing.
Four of his novels have been optioned for development as feature films, and he has been a writer/consultant on several TV shows.
David has taught at the University of Maryland, the University of Massachusetts, The Colorado College, for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, Cal State University, and at Hampshire College. He’s reviewed for The Washington Post and The Raleigh News & Observer and has served as a judge for the World Fantasy and Pen/Faulkner Awards. He also teaches in the MFA program of the University of Nevada, Reno.
AREAS OF SCHOLARSHIP
Science Fiction and Fantasy, Historical Fiction, African-American fiction, Literary Fiction, Screenwriting for Television and Film
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
The Shadow Prince (2021)
The Risen: a Novel of Spartacus (2016)
The Sacred Band (2011)
The Other Lands (2009)
Acacia: The War With The Mein (2007)
Pride of Carthage : A Novel of Hannibal (2005)
Walk Through Darkness (2002)
Gabriel's Story: A Novel (2001)
AWARDS AND RECOGNITION
Winner of the 2018 Sierra Arts Foundation Grants to Artists Literary Arts Award.
Winner of the 2009 Astounding Award for Best New Writer of Science Fiction (formerly called the John W Campbell Award).
Acacia: the War with the Main was a Finalist for the 2009 Prix Imaginales (France).
Pride of Carthage was a Finalist for the 2006 Legacy Award for Fiction from the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation.
Walk Through Darkness was a New York Times Notable Book and a best of 2002 selection from The San Francisco Chronicle, Black Issues Book Review, and The Atlanta Journal Constitution.
Gabriel’s Story received the 2002 Legacy Award for Debut Fiction from the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, the 2002 Alex Award from the American Library Association, the 2001 First Novel Award from the Black Caucus of the ALA, and was a New York Times Notable Book.
David Anthony Durham
USA flag (b.1969)
David Anthony Durham was born in 1969 to parents of Caribbean ancestry. He won the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Fiction Award in 1992 and received an MFA from the University of Maryland in 1996. He has travelled widely throughout America and Europe and lived, along with his wife and children, in Scotland for a number of years. David Anthony Durham currently lives in Shutesbury, Massachusetts.
Genres: Fantasy
New Books
December 2021
(hardback)
The Shadow Prince
(Shadow Prince, book 1)
Series
Acacia Trilogy
1. Acacia: The War with the Mein (2007)
2. The Other Lands (2009)
3. The Sacred Band (2011)
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Shadow Prince
1. The Shadow Prince (2021)
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Novels
Gabriel's Story (2001)
Walk Through Darkness (2002)
Pride of Carthage (2004)
aka Hannibal
The Risen (2016)
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Novellas
All The Girls Love Michael Stein (2014)
David Anthony Durham (born 1969) is an American novelist, author of historical fiction and fantasy.
Durham's first novel, Gabriel's Story, centered on African American settlers in the American West. Walk Through Darkness followed a runaway slave during the tense times leading up to the American Civil War. Pride of Carthage focused on Hannibal Barca of Ancient Carthage and his war with the Roman Republic. His Acacia Trilogy is an award-winning epic fantasy series. His most recent novel, The Risen, is about the Spartacus slave rebellion in ancient Rome. His next, The Shadow Prince, is the start of a middlegrade fantasy series set in a solarpunk ancient Egypt. He also writes for the Wild Cards series of collaborative novels, edited by George RR Martin.
He currently teaches for the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and for the MFA Program of the University of Nevada, Reno.
David Anthony Durham
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David Durham was also a pseudonym of mystery writer William Edward Vickers.
This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (March 2013) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
David Anthony Durham
October 2012
October 2012
Born March 23, 1969 (age 52)
New York City
Occupation Novelist, associate professor
Nationality American
Alma mater University of Maryland, College Park
Website
www.davidanthonydurham.com
David Anthony Durham (born March 23, 1969) is an American novelist, author of historical fiction and fantasy.
Durham's first novel, Gabriel's Story, centered on African American settlers in the American West. Walk Through Darkness followed a runaway slave during the tense times leading up to the American Civil War. Pride of Carthage focused on Hannibal Barca of Ancient Carthage and his war with the Roman Republic. His novels have twice been New York Times Notable Books, won two awards from the American Library Association, and been translated into eight foreign languages. Gabriel's Story, Walk Through Darkness and Acacia: The War with the Mein are all in development as feature films. A third book, Acacia: The Sacred Band, concludes his epic fantasy Acacia Trilogy. In 2016, Durham returned to historical fiction with the publication of The Risen: A Novel of Spartacus.
Born to parents of Caribbean ancestry, Durham has lived in Scotland for a number of years. He has worked as an Outward Bound Instructor, and as a whitewater raft guide and kayak instructor. After receiving an MFA from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1996, he taught at the University of Maryland and University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Writer at The Colorado College and was an associate professor at Cal State University, Fresno and an adjunct professor at Hampshire College. He won the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Fiction Award in 1992, the 2002 Legacy Award for Debut Fiction and was a Finalist for the 2006 Legacy Award for Fiction. In 2009, he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He currently teaches for the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Novels
Gabriel's Story (2001)
Walk Through Darkness (2002)
Pride of Carthage (2005)
Acacia Trilogy:
Acacia: The War with the Mein (2007)
Acacia: The Other Lands (2009)
Acacia: The Sacred Band (2011)
The Risen: A Novel of Spartacus (2016)
Articles and short stories
"Those About to Die" (story), (Lowball, edited by George R. R. Martin, Tor, Summer 2014).
"Snake Up Above", "Snake In The Hole" and "Snake On Fire" (stories), (Fort Freak, edited by George R. R. Martin, Tor, June 2011).
"An Act of Faith" (story), (It’s All Love, edited by Marita Golden, Doubleday, February 2009).
"Appreciation: The Green House, by Mario Vargas Llosa" (book recommendation, with commentary), (The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books, edited by J. Peder Zane, W. W. Norton, January 2007).
"Recommendation: A Scot’s Quair, by Lewis Grassic Gibbon" (book recommendation, with commentary), (Post Road, 2005).
"An Act of Faith" (story), (Intimacy: Erotic Stories of Love, Lust, and Marriage by Black Men, edited by Robert Fleming, Plume, February 2004).
"The Boy-Fish" (story), (Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing, edited by Marita Golden and E. Lynn Harris, Harlem Moon Press, October 2002).
"The She-Ape and the Occasional Idealist" (short story), (QWF (UK), June/July 2000).
"One Room Like a Cave" (story), (Staple: New Writing (UK), 1998).
"The Boy-Fish" (story), (Catalyst, Spring 1992).
"All the Girls Love Michael Stein" (story), (Unfettered, 2013)
David Anthony Durham Biography
David Anthony Durham (born 1969) is an American novelist, author of historical fiction and fantasy. The child of parents of Caribbean ancestry, he grew up in Maryland. He has also lived in the United Kingdom and France, where he wrote his first novel.
Durham's first novel, Gabriel's Story, centered on African American settlers in the American West. Walk Through Darkness followed a runaway slave during the tense times leading up to the American Civil War. Pride of Carthage focused on Hannibal Barca of Ancient Carthage and his war with the Roman Republic.
He has won two awards from the American Library Association, and his novels have been translated into eight foreign languages. Gabriel's Story, Walk Through Darkness and Acacia: The War with the Mein are all in development as feature films. Durham's most recently released book, Acacia: The Sacred Band, concludes his epic fantasy Acacia Trilogy.
He was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Writer at The Colorado College and was an Associate Professor at Cal State University, Fresno and an adjunct professor at Hampshire College. He won the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Fiction Award in 1992, the 2002 Legacy Award for Debut Fiction and was a Finalist for the 2006 Legacy Award for Fiction. In 2009, he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.
He currently teaches for the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing.
An interview with David Anthony Durham
David Anthony Durham explains his interest in Hannibal, the protagonist of his first novel, Pride of Carthage; and refutes the historical concept of him as a brutish barbarian.
I met the protagonist of Pride of Carthage while I was still a boy in elementary school. I'm not sure just who it was that brought tales of Hannibal Barca into my house, but whoever that forgotten relative or family friend was I owe them thanks. He or she filled my head with images of armies riding elephants over snow covered mountains, of great battles and triumphant heroes. I was fascinated by the exoticness of Hannibal's war, by the bravery and barbarity of ancient battle, by the notion of such a titanic clash of African and European powers. It's the first instance I can remember of being enthralled by a distant historical event and by the persons who featured prominently in it. I never forgot this initial enthusiasm.
It was with considerable excitement, then, that I began to write the story of the Second Punic War several years ago. Beginning the novel I was aware that the same things that attracted me to it where the things that might do me in. How would I capture the polyglot diversity of Carthage's army? How would I write of an event like at Cannae, when seventy thousand Romans were cut, stabbed, trampled and suffocated to death in the dusty heat of summer afternoon? How could I convey the largeness and complexity of the political turmoil of the time while still maintaining a narrative drive? And from where would I find the wisdom to breath credible, multi-faceted characters like Hannibal Barca and Publius Scipio (the man who eventually defeated him) back into life?
The answer is strangely simple and potentially anticlimactic… I just dug in and did it. For about two and a half years I got up every morning, turned on the computer, paced from one side of my tiny cottage to the other, looked out at the changing Scottish landscape (I lived in Dunkeld, Scotland, while writing this), and then I sat down and imagined myself into a different time and place. I had the pleasure of a taking several extended trips to the Mediterranean. I drove and walked as much of the territory of the novel as I reasonably could. I also read everything I could find about Hannibal, the Punic Wars and the Ancient Mediterranean World. In terms of other fiction, I was influenced by Mary Renault's work, like The Persian Boy and The Bull From the Sea, by some of Gore Vidal's historical epics, like Creation, by Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Spartacus, by Gustav Flaubert's Salammbo, as well as by novels considered more commercial in objective, like Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire. Those are all set specifically in the ancient world, but there were other novels that I looked to for inspiration in a more general sense of historical fiction. Beloved by Toni Morrison, Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks, The Known World by Edward P. Jones, and Madison Smartt Bell's novels on the Haitian Revolution: all of these are epic works of literary fiction that served as models for what was possible from a historical novel.
At the heart of it all, of course, is Hannibal Barca himself. I believe you'll find the Hannibal of this novel to be a complex character composed from a variety of known facts and imagined possibilities, a person more interesting than either the villain or the hero that some camps wish to reduce him to. Most of the serious works on Hannibal make it clear that he was a military genius, a well educated man, a multi-lingual, talented orator, loved by his troops, feared by his enemies, respected by military figures ever since. I've written Hannibal as living by a code that he would've thought of as innately fair and honest - even though he's also a cunning killer who used any and all means at his disposal to achieve his goals. Some believe that Hannibal was driven by simple, unbridled hatred of Rome. But his actions throughout the campaign suggest that his ultimate goal was primarily to see Rome reduced in power - to see them remain a city-state just like any of the other city-states in Italy. He and his father recognized that Rome was gearing itself up to build an empire, and he knew Carthage could not remain as prosperous as it was if Rome had its way. His offensive can be seen, I believe, as a preemptive strike. Hannibal believed Rome was going to attack Carthage eventually, so he decided to do it on his time frame instead of waiting for theirs.
But Pride of Carthage is about more than one man. Instead of writing it as a limited first person account I chose a cinematic third person voice, one that tells the stories of a myriad collection of characters. Thus the novel follows the Carthaginian foot soldier, Imco Vaca, and also tells of a Numidian horseman, Tusselo, and of a Greek scribe, Silenus, and of the camp follower, Aradna, and it recounts the tale of Masinissa, a young man who enters the story a prince, looses his throne part way through, and yet perseveres to become one of the classical world's most prosperous kings. The women of Carthage are also important players. Sapanibal, Hannibal's older sister, is a strong-willed women who would have made a fine soldier. With her husband dead and with no children, she finds herself exerting influence behind the scenes, both within her own family and in dealings with Carthage's aristocracy. Hannibal's mother, Didobal, is a wise older woman who knows a great deal about the trials of war and fate of nations. Imilce, Hannibal's wife, is a foreigner sent to live in Carthage. She's dropped into an alien society of women that she has difficulty navigating. And in Hannibal's youngest sister, Sophonisba, I found the story of one of antiquities greatest, most tragic love affairs.
Pride of Carthage is my first offering of the style of novel I want to build my career on. When the reader turns that last page I want them to feel saddened that the book is over. I want them to have been so involved with these character's fates, so familiar with them and their struggles that they feel a loss at not being able to spend more time with them. In my own life a few books have given me that feeling - although not in a while. It's mostly the books that I read as an adolescent that did that for me, fantasy-adventure books like The Lord of the Rings or The Mists of Avalon or Dune. I'm not writing fantasy here, but the story is on such a scale that rarely can fact-based material be so grandly plotted. I wanted to regain some of that lost enchantment with the majesty of a complex story unfolding in epic form. From page one of this book I'm writing about human beings caught up in the swirl of one of history's greatest conflicts. The things these characters witness are triumphs and calamities beyond what any of us are likely to experience in our lives. There are love stories of Shakespearian complexity within these pages, twists of fortune, tales of retribution, personal tragedies, and lessons on the virtues and follies of war. I fortunate to have been able to put this episode of human history into words. The material was all I could have asked for and more. I feel it's improbable that I'll ever find another story so grand. But I'll try. I will certainly try.
Misunderstanding Hannibal
A note on discovering the virtues of one the West's most notorious enemies
by David Anthony Durham, author of Pride of Carthage: A Novel of Hannibal
A quick search for information on Hannibal on the internet provides an array of perspectives on his character and legacy, many of them negative. It never takes long to come across the declaration that Hannibal was driven only by hatred, or that he sacrificed children, or that he wanted to destroy Rome completely. He was a brute, a barbarian, an ogre that we should be thankful Rome saved civilization from. Quite often I've heard his accomplishments belittled by those who wish to point beyond all his successes to highlight his ultimate defeat and promote his victor, Publius Scipio, as his superior.
As I began the research that led to my novel, Pride of Carthage, I didn't have definitive refutations of these claims. Hannibal simply drew me toward his story, and I assumed telling it would require a sometimes uncomfortable partnership with a man of considerable ill-repute. During the course of my readings, however, I found none of these negative claims to have much validity. I found him to be a nobler character than I expected, grander of vision, driven by complex emotions, often exceeding the norm in terms of acts of benevolence. And I was not looking outside the traditional sources on the subject: the ancients Polybius and Livy, and the many contemporary scholars working comfortably within the academy. Why then does the understanding of Hannibal that I reached seem to differ so greatly from much of the popular, censorious rhetoric surrounding him? I think the answer lies firmly on one particular factor: the effective use of propaganda
Almost everything we know about Hannibal and Carthage comes either from Roman historians or from Greeks writing under the sway of Roman authority. These scholars had the unenviable task of explaining why their patrons eventually sieged, overran, and sacked Carthage in a door-to-door killing spree that left only fifty thousand survivors out of an estimated population of seven hundred thousand. No, the Roman and Greek sources were not--by any modern standard--reliable. They certainly weren't fair and balanced. Yet they are the only source through which the identity of Carthage and its heroes was passed to the world.
Hannibal was, of course, a man of his times. And a warrior. As such it goes without saying that he orchestrated the deaths of a great many people. In this he's no different than any of the historical figures of the period. But what truly fascinated me--and what informs the novel--was my discovery of a great many virtues in this often demonized man. To name a few of the many details the public may find surprising about Hannibal:
Hannibal did not declare war on or preemptively attack Rome. He tricked Rome into declaring war on him in a manner that betrayed their own imperialist aspirations.
Hannibal did not seek to destroy Rome the way Rome eventually destroyed Carthage. In fact, he didn't even march on Rome until he'd already been on Italian soil several years. His intent was clearly to defeat Rome's troops on the field of battle, to convince the city's allies to abandon her, and then to answer Rome's eventual pleas for peace with harsh measures that would curtail her expansion.
Hannibal's army was not made up solely of mercenaries drawn from North African tribes. In addition he brought with him Celtic Iberians, Gauls from Southern France and Northern Italy, and he all but completed a treaty that would have brought the Greek kingdom of Macedon into the war on his side. In truth, Hannibal convinced vastly different groups from among Africans and Europeans that Rome was a threat to them all.
Hannibal did not sacrifice children. Most historians agree that if Carthage did practice infanticide--and there's growing debate on whether they even did--they'd stopped doing so before Hannibal's time. On the other hand, Livy is forced to mention that the Romans publicly and officially sacrificed humans as they grew more desperate and confused by their inability to defeat the Carthaginians.
Such are just some of the details I discovered in the process of writing about this remarkable figure. It still surprises me that there have been so few fictional treatments of Hannibal, and that those there are have often reaffirmed old prejudices while selectively ignoring aspects of the historical record that suggests he was so much more. Pride of Carthage is not an attempt to turn/revise Hannibal into a hero. The novel is, however, an effort to bring to life a man who has been both seen and unseen, spoken of and misunderstood for two thousand years. I'm hoping the book will help, in a small way at least, to kindle a debate about this man and the history he influenced, a discussion that any desire for a fair understanding of Western civilization demands that we undertake.
David Anthony Durham on Middle Earth & Curry Tinged Trinidadian Breezes – Interview
Today I represent my chat with David Anthony Durham as I republish my past interviews with many of your favorite speculative fiction authors. With works of historical fiction already under his belt that include Gabriel’s Story, Walk Through Darkness, and Pride of Carthage, Durham was already an accomplished writer in historical fiction and I remember being able to tell how much more confident it was than many fantasy novel debuts I read that often, even the good ones, feel stunted with this kind of sheen of just happy to be here juvenile male fantasy fulfillment that both comes from good and maybe not so good places.
acacia david anthony durham
Durham already had the feel of writer who already had novels with his name on them and his stab at epic fantasy was a fairly unique one for it as he seemed to be going after another layer of storytelling, his character weren’t characters, they were people, of people, and as we went to different areas in his world, the differences were more than just what adjectives and adverbs he decided to use.
Durham’s forthcoming book, Acacia, is a stab at epic fantasy, the first in a series that has been grabbing pre-release accolades from seemingly all corners on its way to its release in June.
Having read it myself, it’s quite clear that Durham’s foray into epic fantasy will be a welcomed one as he easily distinguishes his voice; an addition to the small group of writers who threaten to make the form more than just the production of heavy, empty tomes. He has something to say, something to show us, and a story to tell, so we are going to let him.
Your fantasy debut Acacia is being released in June. What unique quality do you feel you bring to a competitive epic market that should give cause for a reader to perhaps pass on a title and give this new series a shot?
David Anthony Durham — I’d like to think that readers of fantasy will find they’ve never quite read anything like Acacia. I’ve been very pleased that early reviewers have mentioned writers like George R.R. Martin, Guy Gavriel Kay and Ursula LeGuin in talking about the novel. That’s both flattering and humbling. They’re all influences and inspirations, but I’m not quite like any of them.
I came to fantasy as a writer of historical fiction. My approach to storytelling and world building comes from a different base, as does my worldview. I grew up black in America, but my family is from the Caribbean — which means my outlook on many issues was shaped by a different culture. As an adult, I chose to live for years in Europe. I’m married to a Scottish woman (born in Shetland, no less, about as remote as you can get) and part of a multi-racial extended family that stretches as far around the world as New Zealand.
All of this informs my writing. The world of Acacia is multicultural and diverse. Villains and heroes don’t line up in black and white terms. I see the world as much more complicated than that, and I wanted that complexity to fuel the narrative of Acacia. I’ve heard many fantasy readers say that while they love their old favorites and tried and true authors they also want something different. That’s what I’ve tried to provide
Having read Acacia, and noting the title of the series, is The War with Mein merely a first arc in a grander series of books?
David Anthony Durham — Yes. At the moment I’m excited about a narrative arc that carries through two more books. I wouldn’t want to give away too much — either about what happens in this book or in the next — but I will say that the next two books deal with a much larger struggle and larger cast of nations. It’s about the conflict between the Known World and the Other Lands.
Your previous published work has been in the historical fiction field. What prompted your desire to write fantasy?
David Anthony Durham — I had been living with the notion of Acacia for about eight years before committing to write it. And that’s just in terms of the particular plotline and conflict of the novel. My love of fantasy goes much further back. I learned to love reading because of fantasy. I was a poor reader when I was young.
It was hard for me, but when I first read fantasy I discovered worlds and characters and tales that were so wonderful I was more than willing to struggle my way into them. I owe a lot to C. S. Lewis, Lloyd Alexander, Ursula LeGuin, and, of course, to Tolkien. I remember the first time I read forty pages in a day. It was The Hobbit. And I remember the next day, when I read sixty, and the day after that, when I read a mind-blowing ninety pages in a day! I’d never imagined that possible — at least not for me.
By the way, I was in Trinidad during all this, so imagine the combination of being immersed in Middle Earth while surrounded by the baking heat of the tropics, the smell of curry cooking on the breeze, listening to the scurrying of lizards and watching buzzards circle in the air above the hills in the distance, patiently waiting for the wildfires to pass so that they could drop down to feed… It was fortunate for me that imaginative stories could speak across such racial, cultural and geographic divides. I still believe it can do so now, in ever fresh ways.
There were many years between that childhood and now. Along the way I admit I lost fantasy. I studied English and History in college, and then went to graduate school for creative writing. I was indoctrinated into a “literary” world that looks down on anything they deem to be “genre” writing. Many in the academy disdain plot, narrative, adventure, ambition to tell grand stories, and they look down on writers that get read by real people. By the time I escaped, I had forgotten much of why I liked reading in the first place.
It was only after I’d been out of my MFA program for a few years, suffering rejections for my first two, literary (and still unpublished) novels that I slowly began to rediscover a love of reading. My wife’s family reminded me that — contrary to the doctrine of the academy — smart people do read historical fiction, and crime, and sci-fi and fantasy. I remembered that I did like plot, action, adventure, and remembered that substantive issues can also be explored while a reader is being entertained.
That put me back on the track to writing publishable works with tons of plot. Gabriel’s Story is a western. Walk Through Darkness is a chase and pursuit novel. Pride of Carthage is an ancient war epic. The jump to fantasy may seem arbitrary to some, but to me it’s a return to where my love of the written began. I’m proud of that, and I’d like to stay in this part of the literary world for a while.
Can you comment on the differences in the research process that went into your historical fiction from The War with the Mein?
David Anthony Durham — In many ways it didn’t feel different at all. I recall Neal Stephenson talking about how world building in The Baroque Cycle wasn’t all that different than in more obviously sci-fi work. In either case you have to create a credible, foreign world.
For Pride of Carthage I had to scour historical texts for details of that strange time and place; with Acacia I had to create similar details, ones that felt just as substantial and true. With Pride of Carthage I read specifically about ancient war in the Mediterranean; for Acacia I read widely from world history, mythology, cultural anthropology. It was great to be freed from the limitations of historical fiction.
I could take a little bit of European history, a little bit of tribal Africa, a bit of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a little of Chinese history… and I could toss them all into the pot along with some banished sorcerer’s and an invading race of nomadic warriors. That was fun.
You have periods in your novel where we jump forward in time, aging the Akaran Royal family’s children from adolescents to adulthood. George R.R. Martin fans knew of his desire to avoid writing about children if possible — wanting at fist to hasten their growth — was this an issue with you and if so, do you find such problematic as a writer?
David Anthony Durham — I don’t mind writing about children. Actually, I look forward to writing some YA material one of these days. The decision to jump forward across those years was a mercenary one. I knew I was going into uncharted territory for my publisher with this whole fantasy venture. I felt a lot of pressure to deliver as much of a story as possible within the confines of one book.
I did propose breaking the story arc of this novel into two or even three books, but I couldn’t come to terms with my publisher on how to do this — or feel sure it was the right thing to do. So I chose to use the break between the first and second parts of the book to move forward in time to get to the meat of the conflict and what the young-adult Akarans are going to do about it.
Would it be incorrect to say The League becomes the capitalist punching bag in Acacia?
David Anthony Durham — If you mean do I see them as representing my criticism for the type of enormous commercial powers that shape influence national policies and control global supply and demand for their monetary benefit… Well then, yes, they are a bit of a punching bag for that issue. Although for a punching bag they hardly get hit by the world-shaking blows that strike all the other major forces. They float above it all, always turning a profit as nations rise and fall. I kinda respect them for that
One of the more intriguing elements of the Akaran military tradition/training to me was not the practice, but the strict application of mimicking the combat sequences of past historical and even mythological duels in actual combat. From where did you draw this idea?
David Anthony Durham — The notion of the Forms grew organically — by which I mean I’m not sure when, where or why it came into being. It just did. It felt right. In some ways it’s symbolic of the Akaran view of themselves. Their noble classes look back to an idealized mythic past.
They see themselves as direct descendants of the heroes of old, so what better for their noble young warriors but to follow the example of ancient warriors? I think they understand that it’s unlikely they’ll ever find themselves in just the situation that the Priest of Adaval, for example, had against the twenty wolf-headed guards of the rebellious cult of Andar… but still, there’s a lot to be learned from training ones body through routine. As important as anything, though, I think the Forms training is about indoctrinating a class of youths into ownership of their national myths.
Who are your literary influences?
David Anthony Durham — There are so many different types of influences, things that struck me at different points in time. As I mentioned, I learned to love reading because of Tolkein and Lewis and Leguin. In college I delved into African-American writers like Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and then into world fiction from Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe and Russia.
As a historical/literary novelist I look to writers like Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, T. C. Boyle, Louise Erdrich, Michael Chabon as influences. I also admire good crime writers like James Lee Burke, George Pelecanos, Walter Mosley, Dennis Lehane. And most recently I’ve been relearning my love of sci-fi and fantasy writers like Frank Herbert, Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman, Susanna Clarke, George R. R. Martin. There are many more as well. Ask me this question on a different day and you might get a different answer.
One of themes you seem to be tackling is the feasibility of the mantle of leadership and the feasibility of benign or altruistic motivations in the role. We see this with both the Akarans and the Mein. Is this an accurate observation, and if so what draws you to the subject?
David Anthony Durham — It is an accurate observation. What draws me to it as much as anything is the modern world and America’s role in it. I lived long enough overseas to know that many, many intelligent people around the world see America’s actions, intentions and effects in a very different light than American’s themselves see them.
I couldn’t just shrug that off, especially as these differing ideas were coming from people I cared greatly about — my new friends and family. I’m still American enough to hope that leadership and altruism can go together. On the other hand, my study of history and my life experiences question that hopeful possibility in major ways.
My characters get to struggle with the issue for me. That’s what interests me about them. Rarely does an obvious “evil-doer” feature as a main character in my work. They may occupy the margins, but my main characters are people trying to do the best they can with what’s been presented to them.
That’s true of Leodan Akaran as he rules an empire he knows is rotten on the inside. It’s true of Hanish Mein as he attempts to conquer that empire and to find a better way to rule in its place. And it’s true of all the Akaran children as they grow to maturity and — sometimes grudgingly — come to accept the roles their birthright has bestowed on them.
The paths thrust on the Akaran children are diverse. Which did you enjoy seeing grow the most?
David Anthony Durham — I enjoyed writing them all. If I had to pick a favorite, though, it would be Mena. I wouldn’t want to give away the details, but I love the way she grows to balance the intuitive, emphatic nature of her childhood with the sword wielding-eagle headed goddess of rage she becomes later on. I got a kick out what Dariel became too.
As you plotted the series did any of your characters perhaps surprise you on where their path eventually led at the end or did everything kind of fall in place?
David Anthony Durham — It’s strange — and I’ve heard other writers say it too — but I knew exactly how this volume ended when I began it. I didn’t know exactly how I was going to get to that ending, though, so a lot of the process of the book is coming to an understanding of just how the characters became the people I envisioned them being at the end.
As noted in my review, my favorite thread to follow in my reading of Acacia was that of Leeka, the Acacian general. The rest of the threads in this book focus almost exclusively with the Mein or the Akaran leading family member. What is the perspective that Leeka brings to Acacia?
David Anthony Durham — I like to cast a wide net of main characters to represent different portions of the society I’m writing about. I did that to a lesser extent in my early novels, and then to a large degree in Pride of Carthage. In Acacia it’s true that most of the narrative threads are on players from the two main families, but there are also scenes following Thaddeus, Rialus and, your favorite, Leeka. They’re all important to me, but Leeka was a favorite for me too.
Right from his very first scene he’s on the ground, in the wilds, fighting for his life. At a time when most of the main characters don’t even know anything is wrong Leeka is going toe to toe with a horde of invaders like nothing the empire has faced before.
I like the juxtaposition of his action-filled scenes next to the quieter ones set in the luxury and apparent safety of the royal precincts. All the other major players inherited their rank and responsibilities. Leeka is just a working man, a career soldier. The role that he carves out in this book — and in the future volumes — he did purely on his own initiative. I respect that about him.
The role of ‘counselor’ is a fixture in epic fantasy and you have a couple. Is Thaddeus at all supposed to be a foil or study in contrast with Rialus?
David Anthony Durham — They’re conflicted for different reasons — and they have very different personalities — but they both “have issues” in terms of their relationship to the powers they serve. I don’t really think of them as having much to do with other, though. Interesting that you bring it up. I think they both developed without my having a grand idea for them. It’s just that every time I placed a character near power — but not in power — I found them easily compromised.
I find that you tend to play out your large scale conflicts off-page or with minimal page use, was this a conscious decision on your part?
David Anthony Durham — I don’t think it was conscious at the start. I bet, actually, that it began as a product of just having written Pride of Carthage before Acacia. That novel was so battle heavy that I had to find new way after new way to describe them, or different eyes to see them through. I didn’t want to repeat all that with Acacia.
As I went along, I realized I wanted more of the focus to be on the characters and the emotional struggles they go through to make the decisions that win or lose the big battles. Some other plot points felt natural to have off-stage. Some of the things that Corinn pulls off, for instance, happen at a distance from her. She doesn’t see them, but she creates them and then faces the results. It felt right to me that the reader would have a similar experience.
You mention a rekindling of love for Fantasy and Science Fiction and that you wouldn’t mind writing a YA title in the future. Is Science Fiction a field you think you will tackle in the future?
David Anthony Durham — I don’t think I’d be any good at science fiction. I do like to read good sci-fi just as much as good fantasy, but I’m not much of a technology/science-oriented person. I’ve no idea what the future holds and no idea which technologies will shape it.
I know that not all sci-fi is about the technology or set in the future or in space, but my attentions tend to get drawn back in time, to the histories or myths that have shaped us. Because of that the themes I’m interested in I can explore for a long time in fantasy and historical fiction. I’m happy leaving science fiction to the writers that are really good at it.
On the other hand, my interest in YA stems both from my experiences as a young reader and from my reading with my kids recently. I’d love to write stories for them, the particular type of imaginative stories that live most vibrantly in young minds. My interest in YA is quite personal, but I also think it’s a wonderful audience to write for. I’d like to write stories for others who are like the thirteen year old boy I once was, combing library shelves for their next adventures.
The debate between the lines of Science Fiction and Fantasy are an annual debate. From the perspective of a historical fiction writer, who just wrote his first Fantasy, and from a newborn fan, what distinctions do you make if any?
David Anthony Durham — Maybe the longer I’m part of this world, and the more I know about it, the clearer I’ll be on the distinctions. Right now I don’t make those distinctions too sharply. When I think of great writers in either field — Herbert, Stephenson, Card, Gaiman, Martin, LeGuin — I’m drawn to them because of the freshness of their vision, the quality of their writing and their stories.
Those things are always what matter to me most, and I’m happy to cross any genre lines to find the writers that most speak to me. Same goes for writers of literary fiction, or crime, or historical… In a way, I’m not a genre reader. I won’t read anybody just because they’re in a genre that I like; and I won’t not read anybody just because they’re in a genre I’m not familiar with. It’s all about the writing. My inclination is to fight against drawing those lines. I’d like to blur them a bit, actually.
The saddest moment for me was Hanish’s non-policy on slavery. Until then I found him and his more overt brothers — perhaps even more so — rather heroic. How important was it to give the Mein a face?
David Anthony Durham — It’s of primary importance to me that both my heroes and my villains have real identities, real faces and hearts. Look, I’ll probably watch The Lord of the Rings movies another hundred times in the years ahead. I’m a willing participant in stories about overt good and faceless evil.
For my own work, though, I’m more interested in compromised heroes and complicated villains. That’s the world as I see it, and it’s the world as I see it that drives me to write in the first place. I’ve found that in real life our heroes tend to disappoint us, and that it’s a lot easier to say what you would do if you were in charge than it is to actually do those things once you are in power. But what can you do? We need heroes to keep going. We need to dream
Conceptually, did this series begin with the Akaran’s or the Mein’s story?
David Anthony Durham — The Akarans. I knew who they were before I knew much of anything else about this novel or this world.
How significant, either as a representative of an ideal, or directly to other character’s lives do you think Igguldan is?
David Anthony Durham — That’s a hard question to answer without giving a lot away. Actually, I don’t think I can say much of anything about him while avoiding spoilers.
You mention your unique outlook — an insider and outside looking in perspective — do you consider what you are presenting a different vantage or a more complete one?
David Anthony Durham — I don’t want to claim that my world was more complete than others. Certainly George R.R. Martin and Steven Erikson and others write in enormous, complex worlds. I do feel different, though, so I guess it’s a matter of providing a distinctive perspective. As a person of color I see the world with lenses tinted by my identity in particular ways.
It’s the same world, yes, but different things stand out. I believe it’s valuable — and one of the main things literature can provide — for people to put on different lenses every now and then. Having said all that, I think a lot of what’s unique about my perspective shows itself in subtle ways in Acacia. Some readers will notice; some won’t. That’s how it should be.
I’m suspecting you have just begun in the promotion of Acacia. I know Colleen is one of the best; setting up interviews, utilizing both print and online in spreading the word — from where you sit is there any difference in the process this time around focusing on a Fantasy fan base than there was with previous books or is it much the same?
David Anthony Durham — It’s very different. For one thing, Colleen trusts fantasy readers to be authorities on what they do and don’t like, and she’s not afraid to give them the chance to voice their opinions. In literary publishing editors and publicists don’t give advanced reading copies to honest-to-goodness readers. Their efforts are aimed at industry professionals: booksellers, reviewers, newspaper editors, noted writers, libraries and book clubs, etc. I don’t think they trust their audiences enough to give them the chance to shape early opinion on title.
We’ve still been doing all the usual stuff in terms of getting that mainstream industry attention. I’m glad to hear that some major papers will be reviewing it, etc, but I know that some mainstream media sources don’t give fantasy much space, if any. So it makes sense to me that we make up for that by taking the book right to devoted readers in the field. And the online community that you’re part of is new to me, but I can see how important it is.
When I think about literary titles that do get a lot of attention it’s often for the wrong reasons, like getting a big advance, or the publisher promising a big budget for promotion, etc. The attention is often on the risks being taken. Will the book earn out? Will it flop and destroy the author’s career? I find it refreshing that the attention I am getting now is mostly from people who actually want to read good books, people who are willing to give me a shot and are hoping that I bring them something good.
I was going through your site and when answering a question about the useful application of historical fiction, you said this:
“I believe historical fiction can be just as informative as straight historical writing. I’ve never read a history book that wasn’t overtly subjective, that didn’t want you to believe certain things and strive to shape your understanding accordingly.
I have read fictions, however, that — because of my involvement with characters and a connection to an imaginative time and place — have left me pondering historical events well after the reading was complete. Maybe it’s that the best works of historical fiction — Toni Morrison’s Beloved, for example — are not so much about providing answers as they are about asking questions. So many positives start with asking questions.”
You moved to even a more stigmatized genre — what is your feeling on any potential usefulness of the literary fantastic, and how has it applied to you?
David Anthony Durham — I’m a firm believer that people crave a mythologized cultural identity. Most enduring stories last because they connect with what a culture wants to believe are its values, its qualities, it’s nobility as documented in some terrible struggle. That’s part of what ancient epic poetry did, and I think that, at its best, contemporary fantasy or sci-fi can do the same.
I remember the effect that Star Wars had on me when I was a boy of seven. Now, amazingly, I’m watching the effect of it on my children. They know more about it than I ever did! They have more action figures and a longer narrative arc and much more background complexity to deal with. The story of Anakin’s rise, fall, and return is important to them in ways that must be defining their early notions of morality.
I think the same can be said for the incredible popularity of The Lord of the Rings, especially as the movies fed into the dark mood and fears of the post-911 world. Thing is, when I read The Hobbit that summer in Trinidad none of the characters in it looked like me. None of them. I still loved it. I still connected with it. I sublimated my ethnic reality in favor of inclusion in someone else’. That was okay… And then again it wasn’t okay, and that’s part of why I wrote Acacia. My hope is that pretty much anyone in the world can pick up Acacia and find characters in it that look like them. It’s an imagined mythology that’s inclusive in a way I’ve rarely experienced (with Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series being the exception). That’s something I’m very proud of, something that I believe might affect individual lives in modestly immeasurable ways.
David Anthony Durham Interview
By Joel Cornah -Oct 20, 20162807 0
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Our Writers of Fantasy Interview series continues with David Anthony Durham, best known for the Acacia trilogy and his new book The Risen. We talked about building fantasy cultures, characters, and wider themes of representation and more!
acacia-uk-cover-736216Your books develop and explore numerous political machinations (Acacia especially); what was the development process for building and developing them? What did you enjoy most about the political intrigue?
I think the same thing sort of answers both parts of your question.
What I enjoyed most about the political intrigue was the process of slowly uncovering the secrets that are at the heart of what makes the Acacian world tick. In the first book I introduce the notion that the Acacian empire trades with a distant power that they know little about. They offer slaves; they get drugs to help them sedate their people in return. That’s about as much as the reader knows about things in the first book. Thing is, that was also about as much as I knew as well.
All the power players of the novel have secrets, things they keep hidden from others to give themselves advantages. They tried pretty hard to keep them hidden from me, too! I mostly had to figure things out by writing the story forward, following the characters, and every now and then going, “Oh… so that’s what these guys are up to…” And a little later, “And that’s what these other guys are up to…” And, “Wait… so these guys over here are actually doing this because of…” And so on.
That was fun. It kept things interesting and, hopefully, unpredictable.
With a number of cultures represented in your books what was the most interesting part of making new cultures and countries for your worlds?
I enjoyed being able to take bits and pieces of cultures from our world, pluck them out of their entrenched context, and splice them together with things that wouldn’t be possible in historical fiction.
The culture of the island power of Vumu, for example, is a real mixture of influences. Racially, I picture the people as looking like Sri Lankans. But the culture that took shape in my mind wasn’t particularly Sri Lankan. The mythology is more influenced by The Epic of Gilgamesh, which came from an entire different part of the world. I loved the racy bombast of the story, the epic conflicts and deceptions and the strange turns of events.
The people of Vumu take my variations on those types of stories and bring them to life with a visual religious display and ceremonies that seem to me to be sort of Polynesian. And I took the historical tidbit that there were once eagles in New Zealand that were large enough to snatch people into the air. I gifted that particular problem on Vumu. It became a physical danger on the islands, and it wove into their mythology and religion as well. The result, I hope, is fun and interesting and not quite like anything on earth.
auteurs-david-anthony-durhamHow important is diversity within your books? In terms of race, gender, sexuality, and more.
Diversity is at the heart of my books. All of them, really. I’m interested in representing an array of peoples and cultures in my stories. Looking at all the things that make us different is part of that, but equally I’m interested in highlighting the things we have in common despite those differences.
(related) is this something you think the industry as a whole is getting better at?
Well, there are lots of different worlds within “the industry”, and I’m sure some areas are making more progress than others. From a personal perspective I can see a lot of growth within the science fiction and fantasy community. When I joined it about ten years ago, there were a handful of writers of color who had made a name for themselves in the genre, but that was about it.
There was a vibrant group of aspiring writers of color, though, all of them aware of diversity and representation issues and wanting to bring their particular worldviews and insights into the genre. In the decade since, they have, gaining large audiences and winning awards in the process. That’s real change.
And what underlines this like nothing else? The fact that there’s been a backlash against that change, as seen in the shenanigans with Hugo ballots recently. Some people feel threatened when strong new voices get heard. It makes for challenging times, but ultimately it’s a sign that progress is being made and the thing to do is to push it forward.
durham-sacredWhen you look back at some of your earlier writings, short stories (some going as far back as 1992, or so I believe), how have you changed as a writer? How has your process developed?
In many ways I don’t feel like I have changed. I can pick up a story I wrote early in college and recognize the words as my own, the approach and description and the purpose of it as things that still feel part of me.
That said, one of the most obvious changes is that as a young undergrad I had no idea how much I was missing by not reading genre fiction. It wasn’t until after grad school that I gradually began reading genre writing. It was Westerns as I researched my first novel, Gabriel’s Story, and then it was crime, which was quite an influence on my second book, Walk Through Darkness. I read heroic ancient war epics as I wrote Pride of Carthage, and then jumped into science fiction and fantasy of all types, remembering suddenly that it was SFF that I’d loved as a kid. It was the reason I became a writer! I think my life is richer for having lots of different genres on my bookshelves, and I think I’ve learned a lot by looking at what different types of writers provide for their audiences.
How do you usually create your characters, and do you build a story around them, or them around the story?
Both. For there to be a story at all there has to be some idea that sparks it, something I want to write about for some reason. To enter that – whatever it is – I need to hitch a ride with a character.
I create him or her, try to figure out what they’re about, and let them loose into the story I have in mind. Invariably, the characters are more complex than I imagined at the start. There’s always more to them than I knew, and the things I learn about the affects how they respond to the world I let them loose in. And that can’t help but change the story, the world, the themes, everything. So the process is partially a matter of shaping the story and partially a matter of letting the story shape itself. It can be a tricky balance, but it works.
Having been a writer for both magazines and book publishers, what do you see as being the big differences in those industries?
I’ve no idea how to answer that! I know a lot more about book publishing than magazines. Though, I also feel like I’m always surprised by book publishing and often confounded. It’s complicated.
the-risenAnd finally, your new book, The Risen, came out this year! What can readers expect?
A really good book. Can I say that?
The thing about The Risen is that it was a hell of a thing to write. I proposed it to my publisher confident that writing it would be similar to writing Pride of Carthage. That one worked easily for me, so I figured this one would too. But it wasn’t so easy. The source material wasn’t as complete. I didn’t find my take on it as readily. I tried lots of different approaches before finally finding the stories I really wanted to tell. It was really a process of figuring out whose individual stories I was going to tell within the larger frame of the rebellion. It’s not just about Spartacus and his gladiators, or about Crassus and his Roman officers. It features a host of other characters – male and female, young and old, warriors and noncombatants. When I realized how much the book was about these otherwise anonymous characters I found the heart of things. The writing flowed from there.
(Bonus question: what can you tell us about what you’re working on next?)
Nothing much – because I’m not sure. I’ve just come through an international full family and all our stuff and dog move, from the UK back to the US. It was months in the making, really stressful, and the landing has been fine, but it’s been a long unsettled period. Throughout this I thought of all sorts of next novels in all sorts of genres. I mean… really I’ve been all over the place.
As of today, right now, this past week, I think I’ve figured it out. It’s partly an idea I’ve had for a long time, but with a new spin that kind of explodes things in a way that I’m loving imagining. That’s where I am, but… I’ll have to keep it a secret until I know it’s the real deal. Thanks for asking, though. And I hope to be able to reveal it soon.
Interview with David Anthony Durham
By Rebecca Lovatt on November 8, 2012 in Interviews, RLovatt3
Last weekend at the World Fantasy Convention here in Toronto, I had the opportunity to interview several authors, a couple of those interviews have already been posted over the past few days. Today, I will be sharing my interview with David Anthony Durham, author of several historical fiction novels such as Gabriel’s Story, and author of the epic fantasy series Acacia.
For convenience,
D = David Anthony Durham, and R = Rebecca (myself).
—
R: What would you say is the main inspiration for your writing?
D: This is going to be kind of vague… Just life in general. I sometimes get surprised by stories, often though, they slowly creep up on me, and are some aspect of things I have observed or am experiencing. Sometimes it’s something that sticks and doesn’t want to go and needs to find a story for me to work through that.
Other times it can be pretty random, an inspirational moment. My son once borrowed a book about Egyptian gods from our next door neighbour and it was on the coffee table. I had just mowed the grass. It was a Sunday afternoon and I was flipping through the book and I just loved it. For the first time these weird, exotic, strange gods jumped off the page and seemed very alive to me. Hours later I was there with a notepad scratching out notes, with a series concept which I’ve been working on since. Of course I’d known about ancient Egypt, and had been interested in it for a very long time… But something happened that day. I just so happened to flip through that book that afternoon and it just clicked. I’m glad it did cause I’m enjoying writing this series very much. Hopefully, it’ll be in print before too long.
R: Is there anything more you can tell us about that book? Any title or release date?
D: Not yet, we’ve had some negotiations with publishers, including an actual offer. It’s sort of been locked up for a while with one publisher, but we didn’t come up with terms that were agreeable to both of us. We’re going out with a wider range of submissions now. Hopefully, in the next couple of months it’ll land someplace else. I can say that the first book is entirely written, and the second book – I see the series as being 6 books – is drafted as well. So when someone does pick it up, things will roll quickly from there.
R: Awesome, and do you have a name for this series?
D: I do! It’s called The Shadow Prince and it is going to be for the middle-grade audience, set in ancient Egypt. Quite fun, I think. Strange gods, demon fighting, magic based on writing spells in hieroglyphs, and a bit of humour woven through it all. I like to think of it as Jonathan Stroud territory. Very different than anything I’ve published, but I really enjoyed writing it. My kids are my primary readers for it. They’re 11 and 13, and it’s been great to finally be writing something that’s completely for them.
R: That kind of leads into my next question.. You’re written historical fiction, like Gabriel’s Story, and Walk Through Darkness, and you’ve also written epic fantasy like Acacia, what were the challenges you faced switching in between the genres like that?
D: There were a lot of them, but I seem to have a hard time sticking to any one thing. Gabriel’s Story and Walk Through Darkness were two 19th century African-American historical novels and in a way they were more literary. They were well-received, and I could have stayed in that territory. But it seems to me that each book you write – and get fortunate enough to publish and are going to ask people to read – needs to be something you’re fully invested in and care about.
So when it came time to negotiate a new contract for my third book, I did have some ideas that were similar to the first two, but I thought about what I really wanted to do, and that was to write a novel about Ancient Rome and the war with Hannibal. There was no particular reason for me to think that I could do that well. With the large cast of characters and all the research it was a very different book, but my publisher was behind it, and so we went there.
After that was done, I could’ve done another historical novel like that, but what I really wanted then was take a lot of the largeness of the story like Hannibal’s War with Rome but put it into a fantastical setting. I had been a fantasy reader as a kid. That’s where I learned to love reading. In a way, the idea I had was to write a historical novel for a place that doesn’t exist, and that had a little bit of magic. That helped me quite a bit because some of the things I had learned to do in a historical novel for world building was equally applicable to a fantasy setting. Also, the Acacia books we begin fairly low in magic, and they get more magical as they proceed… In a lot of ways, that paralleled changes in me as well. I knew the books were going to get more fantastical as they went, but it was a way of me working my way into the genre and becoming more at home in it, more comfortable with writing fantastical.
And it also made for a whole new puzzle for my publisher. They did a great job of bringing in a consultant who could help them place the book because they don’t normally do fantasy. It meant meeting an entirely new group of writers and coming to conferences, and meeting the fans in the community of science fiction and fantasy. That was actually all new to me. A lot of fantasy writers came up through that. My first convention was World Fantasy Con in 2007. Acacia: The War With The Mein was already out at that point. Fortunately, getting to know the sff community has been great. I love that I can go into a bookstore and look at the titles and be like, “I know that person. And that person. Oh, isn’t that a great cover for so and so’s book!”
R: And “I wrote that one!”
D: At which point, I turn the book to face out. Every bit helps.
R: Do you ever sneakily sign any while you’re there?
D: Yeah. Normally, I would get them and take them up to the desk and say, “Hi, this is me..” But sometimes I just kind of scribble on them. It does feel a bit stalkerish, like I’m doing something mildly criminal.
R: Going back to the historical fiction and fantasy. Which do you enjoy writing more? Do you think you’ll return to fantasy?
D: It’s a work in progress. The next book I’m contracted for – Doubleday has already bought – is a historical novel about Spartacus. It’s a return to the ancient world and warfare, and I am thoroughly behind doing that novel, but it’s been difficult re-entering purely mainstream storytelling. For a while there, I couldn’t help but want to change it to a werewolf vs. vampire thing… I actually spoke to my publisher about that and they said they were interested, but worried that it could either be really good or really bad. I agreed. So I’m keeping it straight historical.
But it does seem like having opened up the fantastic in my approach to storytelling, it’s not easy to put that back into the bottle and then just be Earth-grounded again. I think where I’m getting traction with the book now is finding the fantastic within the ancient world setting. And it’s there, because they have strange names, worship different gods and believe different things, and in a way it is a world that doesn’t exist now. So it is quite fantastical, in a realistic way – if that makes any sense…
If you were to ask what was the funnest to write so far…
R: Funnest?
D: Funnest… Is that a word?
R: Nope. Definitely keeping that though.
D: And I’ll say it again. What’s funnest to write has been the ancient Egyptian stuff, because a lot of my writing has been kind of serious, intended for adults. Finally writing stuff for kids – and particularly writing fantasy for kids – has been really engaging.
R: Do you think you’ll ever return to writing epic fantasy?
D: Yes, I would like to. I don’t have a plan exactly for what that is, but there is some talk of revisiting the Acacian world – not in a trilogy or big one again, but in stand alone books. That attracts me. I spent a lot of time creating that world and I’ve only just looked at half or it. I’d like to see more of that world.
R: It is pretty interesting, because the map does even say “Map of the Known World”, and there is a lot you can add to that. So, I’m sure it’s safe to say that myself, and other readers would love to see more of it.
D: Well, thank you. I hope they would! The maps of the three books kind of reflect that. The first one is just the Known World, and then the second one expands and has the edge of the Other Lands across the ocean. The third one expands a bit more and goes a further as the story moves more inland of the Other Lands. At the edge of that map is a mountain range. I’d love to see what’s on the other side of those mountains. I do not know. But it’s something really cool.
R: I think that could be interesting to read.
D: Thank you.
R: Alright… Hm… If you could spend a day with any one of your characters, who would it be and what would you do?
D: I would hang out with Mena and Elya, and go for a flight. I’d love that. Elya is kind of a dragon-y thing, but she’s feathered and smells citrus-y and is a little bird-like and is very lovely. The notion of flying into the air above the Acacian ocean is pretty exiting. Of course, this is just a pleasure fight. I’ll leave the aerial battles with other winged creatures to Mena. Going across the Grey Slopes seems pretty exciting too, but I guess you can’t just do that on one day…
R: No, probably not. Maybe if you had a weekend or something. Okay, and not to do so much with your books, but you teach creative writing. Are there any points of advice you could give to people who are trying to get into writing?
D: Nothing that doesn’t always get said, the common wisdom of “Read a lot” and “Write a bunch” and know that you can make time to be productive even though it can be a challenge. For me, on a daily basis the hardest part of the day is beginning to write. It’s looking at the blank page and putting something on it. But it seems to be the case that if I can finish the hardest part of it and push through it, then it’s easier once there’s material to work with.
Also, one thing in terms of productivity, Steven Pressfield – a historical fiction writer – has said something about “resistance” that I find quite apt. It’s his way of talking about all the different ways people manage to not do the things they want to do the most. It’s like this nebulous force that takes on all sorts of shapes. You want to be a writer but maybe you drink to much. You don’t get enough writing done at night, and then you’re hung over in the morning… Or you want to write but you have a bad relationship and that throws you off. There can be so many different things that can emerge each and every day, every time you want to achieve what you most want to creatively, that you’re kind of shooting yourself in the foot. I love the concept that these aren’t all necessarily different things. They’re just different ways of falling prey to resistance.
When I was writing Pride of Carthage, there would be these times that I’d realize I was outside weeding the path in the middle of the afternoon. I’d kind of look up and go, “What the hell? I don’t need to weed this path. I’m supposed to be writing!” Almost without noticing it, I’d managed to go up and outside, and kill an hour. And I found it was really quite helpful to be able to name the thing that wasted that time “resistance”. With a title, I can spot it, and smack it about and then get back to work.
I encourage people to read broadly. That’s something I have always thought, but now I think it even more, with the broadness being across genre as well. Having begun as a literary writer, and then moving into genre, I realize I have learned a great deal from reading commercial fiction, science fiction, fantasy, urban fantasy, and crime. I like to think that mix of reading has made me a better writer at whatever I attempt to do. I would encourage others to read things that aren’t necessarily what they aspire to write yourself. Get outside your box and get exposed to new ideas.
R: Okay, and are there any books that you think everyone should read? Like, ones that you’ve finished and just though “Wow, people have to read this.”
D: I could name a lot of good books, but that doesn’t seem like the right answer… There are books that I think speak to each person at the right moment in their development. I don’t know that there need be one book that can do that for everyone. When I think of some of the books that really hit me, it was really just the right moment for me to be exposed to that, and the books themselves almost seem random. The important thing was that I was reading, and that my growth as a person is bookmarked by great books along the way.
R: Sounds good.. and time for a silly one I think, it’s one that I’ve asked a few people, but if you could be any flavour of ice cream, what would it be?
D: I’m going to answer that with the first thing that came to my mind: Pistachio. But definitely one that is green. If it’s not green.. It’s not me.
R: Alright, and that’s all I have.. So thank you very much.
D: Rebecca, thank you.
—
It was great meeting David, he was a blast to spend time with and get to know. His books are definitely worth reading, and I’ve (apparently) not posted any reviews of his books, which will have to change — I do recall writing one for the first in the Acacia series, so I’ll be hunting through my binders in search of that. So I’ll hopefully have that review up sometime in the next couple of weeks.
Thank you, David!
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Interview with David Anthony Durham, Part I
Due to the growing length of this interview, David and I decided it would be best to divide it into two parts, with the second part appearing in the next few days.
A couple of years ago, you were interviewed by several bloggers at Pat's site, including myself. What important things have happened in your professional and personal life between the publication of Acacia: The War with the Mein and The Other Lands?
Lots of stuff, mostly good. Acacia: The War With The Mein performed rather nicely. I was very happy with the reviews it received and with the overseas attention and publications. It got me nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer twice, and the second time I won it!
As important as any of that is that I’ve been overwhelmingly pleased by my acceptance into the community of science fiction and fantasy writers. When I walk into a convention now I know I’m among friends. Also, I’m part of a group of sff writers from around the world that daily shares information and exchanges ideas and stories about publishing. I’ve been asked to do several anthologies and collaborations – most of which I’ve had to turn down – and I’ve had the pleasure of accepting George RR Martin’s invitation to write for his Wild Cards series, which I’m doing right now.
All things considered, it’s been a good couple of years professionally.
Very cool news! I’m curious about this group of sff writers of which you are a member. Can you divulge any information on what that group does - is it more of an informal manuscript peer review, support group, or all that and a bag of chips more?
Oh, the group isn’t exactly a secret, but we don’t really advertize ourselves either. It’s sort of quiet, self-regulating group. Every now and then we invite new folks in, not as if we’re trying to be elite or something, but just with an eye toward keeping the group supportive and diverse and low-key. Once in, we’re just sort of an extended group of friends and peers to call on when we need to. We talk publishing biz stuff. We ask questions as we make publishing decisions or just want to get other perspectives. It’s great to see what other writer’s experiences are, and to have folks to talk to other than our editors and agents. For me in particular it’s eye opening in terms of issues specific to sf genres. It’s a good group.
Interesting. So this is as much of a social support group as it is a writing workshop one? Also, have you been involved in such groups for all of your professional writing career or have there been shifts in how you approach the writing craft and the sharing of written material with other writers?
It's not really a writing workshop group at all. I'd say social support group describes it.
I've not been involved in anything remotely like it before. This genre nurtures more networking and interaction than the "literary" genre does. There's certainly plenty of friction between factions in sf, but there's supportive communication too.
In terms of sharing work with other writers… I still don't do that much. I had a few people read Acacia: The War With The Mein during the revision period, and a few read The Other Lands. Mostly I work alone, and then bring my wife, agent and editor in.
That said, I have floated my stories for Wild Cards out to a few of the other people working on the series, and I've read pieces from others as well. And one prominent author recently asked me to read an early draft of the first novel of in a new series. So I guess sharing is becoming more and more a part of my writing life.
Whenever I read your blog, one of the things I notice most is how close-knit your family is. How much of an influence has your family been on the characters and settings of your novels?
Quite a bit, actually. It would be hard for me to explain just how, though, since they get into my writing in bits and pieces, in fragments that probably only make sense to me. For example, the Akaran children are based on the template of my wife’s family, but once the template was set the characters began to evolve different. Sometimes Mena is my wife; sometimes she’s more inspired by my daughter; much of the time she’s neither. A character like Melio is named after one of our cats, a fact that brings my kids fits of laughter every time I mention something heroic the character did.
Other things I only understand afterwards, like that in writing about the relationship between Mena and Elya in the second book I was sort of writing about the relationship between my daughter and another one of our cats, Dolphin. Go figure.
My family affects everything I write. How could they not?
Since your family takes such an active role in influencing the characters, have there ever been times that one of them has been tempted to throw something at you because they saw themselves reflected in one of the characters?
For a while I lived in fear of that. It’s most obvious with the Akarans. Aliver was based on my brother in law, and look what happened to him! And Corinn began as my sister in law, and you know how she turned out… I’m happy to say they took it all in good humor, though. The truth is that from the moment the characters first open their mouths and start moving around the Acacia stage they become something different than any of the real life people that inspired them. My family understands that. Lucky for me.
Every now and then, there's some comment or assertion on some blog or article about how there's some discernable difference between "mainstream," "literary," or "mimetic" fiction and "speculative" or "SF/Fantasy" fiction. As an author who has had stories marketed in both categories, what differences, if any, do you believe exist between these perceived narrative modes?
There are differences. Sure. There are commonalities too. I tend to think we make too big a fuss over differences, though. People stake out their turf and take too much self-righteous glee in lobbing insults onto other people’s turf. To me this is kinda silly. Kinda childish.
Here’s what I believe about “literary” and “mainstream” fiction – just today’s selection of thoughts.
I believe that there is value in writing and reading purely for entertainment, but I also believe fiction can offer more than that and that when it does it’s often harder to access without effort.
I believe that literary fiction by its nature intends to speak meaningfully about the human experience, but I also believe literary writers have no monopoly on this and that they often wear blinders that stop them from seeing quality work in other genres.
I believe that genre fiction has its roots deeply in long-standing traditions of storytelling, sometimes reaching right back to the classics, but I also believe a lot genre writing is uninventive and boring.
I believe that literary fiction’s goals are admirable, but that it’s often… uninventive, boring, safe and lacking ambition.
Looking at my own work, I’ve heard many responses that make it clear genre readers have appreciated my literary attention to character psychology, language, complexity of detail in social and political landscape, but I’m also aware that my writing seems to short circus some readers that don’t connect with any of those things at all.
Some genre readers seem to choose not to like a book when the book fails to be what they expected it to be, when the story or characters aren’t just like the last book that they really loved. That’s a perfectly valid reaction, but I don’t think it should necessarily lead one to conclude that a book is bad – or that literary is just boring. That book may just be different. The author’s interests may be different. Not all readers may share those interests, but some readers give up before they’ve engaged enough to know.
And that’s where I think there is a difference between mainstream and literary that matters. Mainstream writing by its very nature should be easy to swallow. It should go down smooth, without challenging a reader too much – or by challenging them in the ways they expect to be challenged. To take another example, McDonald’s isn’t a massive chain because they make the best tasting hamburgers in the world. They’re massive because they’ve managed to find the right formula for delivering consistently familiar food, food that never surprises and… never fails to be what you expect when you walk in the door. That’s a rather remarkable achievement, and I do think similar impulses drive book buying in the genres as well. Why not return to authors, stories, plot twists that have worked before, rendered in language that doesn’t get in the way?
Literary fiction often begins with a different premise. It may require that a reader learn to read it. Even if you’ve bought a hamburger of a novel, it’s hopefully a different cut of meat. Your first bite isn’t just like the first bite of every Big Mac you’ve ever tasted. You might have to chew for a while to know what it actually tastes like – and then to figure out if you like it.
That’s probably a lot easier an experience to go through with a hamburger than with a novel, but I think there’s a parallel. Some genre readers are turned off by literary fiction before they’ve chewed on it long enough. And, to be fair, I think that many literary readers ignore that the genres do have lots of complexity within them, many titles that they’d love if only they had the sense to give them a try. I’d say one has to learn to read Octavia Butler or Neil Gaiman or Kelly Lynch. They’re literary. They’re also fun to read regardless, but I think they get better the more you digest them.
I’ll never forget an early review of my first novel, Gabriel’s Story, in the San Francisco Chronicle. The reviewer found the language of the first part strange, convoluted and a bit hard to figure out. But then he wrote that by the second part the language had started to work to “greater effect”, and by the end he loved the book! He seems to have walked away thinking that the first part wasn’t as good as the following three parts. But I’d argue that the writing was consistent. What changed was that it took him that first part to get into the rhythm of my writing. After he did, everything got smoother and smoother for him.
Now, if I’d started the book with simpler language he might have been happier from the start, but if I’d done that I wouldn’t have been using the language that he’d learned to love by the end. I think that’s often the case with good literary fiction. (And I do mean the “good” stuff; I’m not saying that all literary fiction is.) Hopefully, it holds you from the start, but in a great many ways full appreciation of it comes gradually.
Nice presentation of the literary/genre presumed divide there. You raise an interesting point about how your first novel was received. Would it be fair to say that for those who read Acacia: The War with the Mein and struggled with the first section before finding themselves enjoying the rest of the book might have had a similar experience to that review of Gabriel’s Story?
Before I delve into that, I should make it clear that I don’t believe a writer has an elevated authority in terms of judging how readers respond to them. We think about it and can have opinions, but I don’t think we can determine exactly what any reader is or isn’t experiencing. The whole process is about offering stories to people. It’s the offering that counts, and once you do that you loose control over how others interact with your stories. That’s the way it should be.
With that caveat out there, do I imagine that some Acacia readers had the same experience as that Gabriel’s Story reviewer? Sure. And I thank them for sticking with it! I hope my novels are enjoyable to many people, but they do require some effort on the reader’s part. Most of the people that read Acacia were new to my work. It makes sense that some would need to get used to my approach. I’m just thankful they did.
When someone comes up to me and says they were hooked right from page one I’m always a little surprised. Really? From page one, huh? I’m proud of everything I’ve written, but I don’t think that hooking readers quickly is one of my strengths. I try to get readers chewing on an entire mouthful of baited hooks without really feeling any of those hooks too obviously. I don’t rush to yank too soon, either. I’d like to think it happens gradually, that it grows on readers so that they never know the exact moment when the hooks start sinking in.
Anyway, that’s my approach. It must be natural to me because even in novels that begin in mid-action, like Walk Through Darkness, I still don’t reveal the main hooks controlling the story until near the end.
Have there ever been times that a reader or reviewer comment has led you to reevaluate your approach, perhaps even add an element or two in order to “clarify” a point that may have been more confusing for readers (I’m particularly thinking of Acacia here) who were not used to your narrative approach?
Things that readers/reviewers say may plant seeds that effect decisions I make in the next book, but I’m not sure I’d be able to pinpoint what comment effected things I did a year later. It just gets in the mix somehow. On one hand, I make decisions consciously and I believe in them, but I also know that the whole thing is about communicating stories and ideas with people. I'd be a fool if I didn't keep an ear open and stay willing to respond to readers.
Multiculturalism in literature of all sorts has become more prevalent in the past two decades. However, in certain fields, epic fantasy being one of them, there seems to be some controversy over how certain characters are portrayed and if the imagined secondary worlds are a bit too homogenous. What is your take on the arguments on this issue, including the so-called “Racefail ‘09" debates online?
I can’t speak about Racefail ’09 specifically. I didn’t participate in it, and, though I know some of the details, I’m no expert on what went on. What’s my take on this issue in general? Again, I offer the thoughts as I have them today…
I think it’s part of the record that a lot of fantasy and sf has been laughably white.
I think it’s a bit silly when depictions of humanity in the future 1) are basically white, or 2) are diverse in ways that mirror our contemporary notions of what diversity is. The first is embarrassing because the majority of the human population isn’t white (not even right now), and unless all these folks have been killed off in some way they’re going to be in the future in ever larger numbers. The second is embarrassing because it’s so limited and shortsighted. I think it’s much more reasonable to imagine a browning of humanity that means it will be harder and harder to find people that have kept the bloodlines undiluted (and lacking the benefits of genetic diversity).
I believe that in fantasy there is something insidious about creating an entire world peopled only with variations of white people: humans, elves, dwarves, etc. I’m not moaning about it. I’m just saying that intentionally or not writers that have done that are revealing things about they way the perceive – or don’t perceive – people of color.
But I also see growing diversity in fantasy. I think it’s always been there in the readership – although not necessarily visible in the folks that make up fandom – and I see it in people’s work and in the small, growing population of writers of color that are striving to get into the field. That’s progress. It should be acknowledged and encouraged – partially because it’s just a good thing, and partially because it can only make the genre more interesting. It doesn’t mean the issue is resolved, though.
There are layers upon layers of issues built into our racial perceptions and interactions. This is one thing I think white people often view differently than people of color. (I’m very aware that I’m speaking in generalities. Such things aren’t perfect, I know.) I think it’s easier for a white person to point at a few authors or books and say, “Look, there’s proof that there’s diversity. Case closed. Can we please stop talking about it?” Whereas a person of color is more likely to say, “Yeah, you can name five black sf authors now, but let’s look at what they’ve written, how they’ve been marketed and received, how that compares to how white writers of similar material were treated, etc. And, yes, there may be other races in lots of new fantasy series, but let’s look at how they’re depicted, how central their roles are, how much they embody earthly stereotypes, and let’s consider that there’s something wrong when the people in the book are all brown and the people on the cover are all white, etc. And perhaps you can stop talking about it, but that’s because it doesn’t matter to you the same way it does to me. I have no choice but to keep talking, because stopping would mean I was failing to acknowledge and express things that I think, feel, experience every day.”
As with everything to do with race and culture and social history, there aren’t any easy answers. And when there are advances it doesn’t close the matter; it just opens up further avenues that need exploring/debating. I do wish the debating didn’t get so hostile so quickly, though. From a distance, that’s one of the things that seem problematic with episodes like Racefail ’09.
In general, we can all do better. I had a friend over from Scotland a few weeks back. White guy. He’d been talking about how much he liked District 9, which I haven’t seen. As I looked up stuff about it online I came across Tananarive Due and some other writers of color talking about depictions of race in it. Some were highly critical; others supportive of the film, etc. I showed them to my friend. He came away from reading them and said, “Well, I don’t exactly agree that it’s racist in the ways some of these authors think it is, but, still, it does get me thinking about some things I hadn’t before.”
To me, that’s perfect. Couldn’t ask for more. I wish more folks could listen to people they don’t agree with like that – with a mind open enough so that the dialogue broadens their perspective in some way, even if it’s in ways lateral to the point being argued.
Good points. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t part of the problem many PoC writers and readers have is with “diversity” in writing that consists of having a shallow, token non-caucasian appear in a limited, or rather limiting roles? In what ways have your stories shown a substantive difference in approach toward addressing the issue of representing PoC characters, concerns, and situations that might differ from how a caucasian writer might represent them?
Yes to the first question. Often when white writers included PoC they're there as part of the gang around the main characters, in support roles. I'm sure those writers feel that they've been inclusive by doing that, but being on the margins of the story doesn't help if the PoC characters are always at the margins. That's not true engagement.
White writers having true engagement with non-white protagonists is rare. Richard K Morgan does it. I love it that Neil Gaiman has had lots of diverse characters in supporting roles in his books and stories, and that he made a black Caribbean character the primary in Anansi Boys. Neil delivers. He also made the decision to have Lenny Henry read the audio version of that book. You could say that's just because the main character has a different personality than Neil, but that's only part of it. We all know Neil's an awesome reader. I'm sure he chose Lenny because he wanted a black voice narrating his story about a black character. If he'd tried that with his own voice the identity would've blended with Neil's, and that would be diluting the effect of his narrative choices.
And that happens a lot too. Writers like Ursula K LeGuin have explicitly written about worlds filled with brown skinned characters, only to then see their publishers or filmmakers present those characters as white on the covers of their books. This is partially a subconscious thing – the ones making the artistic decisions kinda forget that the characters were described as brown-skinned. And I know it's partially intentional – that publishers believe they're more likely to sell less books with a PoC on the cover.
Readers may scoff at that. "I don't think about the color of the person on the book!" I can't argue with an individual on what they do or don’t consider. I'll just say that it's a fact that publishers consider race and prejudice as they make marketing decisions in which race and prejudice may play a part. You may not think you think about it; they're sure that at some level – even subconscious – you do.
In terms of my own writing, the most direct ways I've approached race differently can be seen in my earlier novels. Gabriel’s Story was a response to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. I loved that book, but I hated the way the one black character in it was called "the nigger". He was as much a part of the group as any of them, but his marginalization had it's own nasty character to it. So I wrote a Western that began with a solid historical fact – that there were many black settlers in the West, especially after the Civil War – and ran with it. I made the black characters the central focus. I’m not aware of a white writer ever having done that.
Walk Through Darkness is as a runaway slave story, but an entire half of the book is focused on a white character, the one who I'd argue is the real main character of the book. It was an exploration of how intermingled the American bloodline is, how much that's been subverted, and how freeing it can/could be to acknowledge it more directly. I choose to include it because I think it's an important aspect of the American experience and because the story is in my blood, in my family history.
In my Hannibal novel, Pride of Carthage, I wanted to translate what ancient sources and what modern historians tell us about the Second Punic War into fiction. That meant making decisions, choosing between alternative possibilities, condensing and splicing things, but it was all in an effort to get that epic conflict on the page. I also wanted to pay tribute to the diversity that was the ancient Mediterranean. That's part of why there was such a wide cast of characters: Carthaginians and Romans, Greeks and Macedonians, Gauls and Celts, and Libyans and Numidian. They all featured in the war; they all feature in my novel – not just as walk on characters in the background, but with devoted scenes specifically telling their stories. I’ve read a few fictional takes on the Second Punic War, but none of them made central characters out of North Africans other than the Carthaginians. I did. It felt important – and natural – to do that.
With Acacia: The War With The Mein I just wanted to write a large fantasy story set in a racially diverse world. I didn't center the story around Northern European-like cultures or around sub-Saharan African ones. I went for placing it in between, and then casting a wide net around that. Once that was in place I just proceeded with the story I wanted to tell.
How have reader reactions been to your decisions in your novels, especially in Acacia: The War with the Mein, to include so many different ethnic groups that have their traditions and which aren’t shallow riffs on the dwarves/elves/orcs that you noted above?
Nobody's complained about it. Nobody’s said, “I’m so disappointed. Where are the elves?”
Readers of color and folks interested in PoC have quite welcomed it, who seem to feel that the combination of a writer of color creating a multi-cultural world is a very good thing. I’m happy about that. On the other hand other readers have said, "What's the big deal? It doesn't feel that different." Different readers; different reactions.
I believe that only part of the way an individual perceives a story is shaped by the written words themselves. Those words mix with whatever perceptions/perspectives/prejudices the reader carries with them. That’s the magic of it, but it means that not everyone reads the same thing the same way, especially when ethnicity is one of the issues at hand. When I read Earthsea I’m jolted each time Ged and most other people are physically described as dark, coppered, brown. Each time that rings in my head like a little bell, reminding me that this is a world of PoC characters. It’s so very there in the text, and I think readers who match those descriptions themselves latch on to the ethnicity of the characters – as LeGuin wants us to do. But I’ve also spoken with a lot of white readers that look at me funny when I point this out. They don’t notice it the same way. To them those descriptions don’t stick, or don’t seem to mean the same things.
The same is true in Acacia. Again and again, I mention that the Acacian’s are of a light brown complexion, that they tend to have brown eyes and dark hair, that feminine beauty is typically round featured in the face. By contrast, the Meins are the ones that have really blond hair and fair skin and sharp features. The Talayans are very dark-skinned.
Still, though, a lot of readers sort of slide the Acacians to the European realm. I’ve seen this in the artwork for some of my European covers. I’ve certainly seen it in the names of actors people come up with to fit roles in the film. I think the tricky thing is that secondary world fantasy has been Euro-centric for so long that it’s become the default picture people have in their minds. Subtle changes to that template don’t always register.
On the other hand, complete shifts, like what Charles R. Saunders attempted with Imaro, truly resets the template. He wrote African-based sword and sorcery. No mistaken that. Problem is that few people read it. Sales dove. The series got cancelled. They tried this twice, by the way, and the same thing happened both times.
Posted by Lsrry at 12:19 PM
David Anthony Durham
Acacia, Book One: The War With the Mein
Interview by Ed Robertson
David Anthony Durham is the author of the earlier novels Pride of Carthage, Walk Through Darkness, and Gabriel's Story. His work has been translated into German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.
He is currently an Associate Professor in California, and his latest novel, Acacia came out in June of 2007.
Ed Robertson: Rather than being driven by simple ideas of good and evil, Acacia's characters are motivated by history and personal goals that makes their morality very complex and often murky. Did your previous work in historical fiction help build that perspective? Or was it that perspective that drew you to historical fiction in the first place?
David Anthony Durham: Interesting question. My answer might be a bit murky and rambling, but bear with me a moment…
I was a terrible student in high school. I almost didn’t get out, honestly. A big part of why – it seems to me now – was that I’ve always disdained simplification. And simplification was (is) so much a part of secondary education. Instead of being interesting, the history I was presented with was dead boring. It was all a list of noble deeds done against evil foes, wrongs corrected by higher ideals, etc. It seemed too neat. It never made sense compared to the messy, complex world all around me. I felt like I was being fed the party line, and that lead me to turn off.
BUT, what joy when I stumbled my way into a few college classes! Finally, I was being asked to think, to have opinions, and I was turned on to a whole new world of historical perspectives. Suddenly it seemed like academia acknowledged that the world really was as messy as I thought. It went a bit further than that; the world was a lot messier. That’s when I fell in love with history – when it was confirmed that the past was just as complex and multi-faceted and confusing as the present. So in many ways my interest in the past came out of desire to make better sense of the present.
That’s what I love exploring in my historical fiction. And that’s what inevitably worms its way into my fantasy. Acacia isn’t an escapist fantasy. It’s not about fleeing the problems of this world to find a happy place. Instead it’s about a world with amazing possibilities and with amazing problems. It’s a lot like ours, but different. I still think it can be enjoyed as an adventure saga, but I hope readers will also enjoy the complexity of characterization, politics, social and economic forces.
Ed: Lots of Acacia's rulers try to do good things, but often get mired up in the world's messiness. Is understanding its complexity necessary for making positive change?
David Anthony Durham: Absolutely. It’s true in our world; it’s true in the Known World of Acacia. Actually, I think every leader – Acacian, Meinish, Talayan, Vumuan, etc – tries to do good things for his/her people. Good is relative, though. What Hanish Mein believes is good for his people is invariably bad from the Akaran perspective. That sort of dynamic is a starting point. Beyond that everything gets further complicated, so that even one’s best intentions are skewed.
Hanish, on gaining a new level of power, finds that a whole host of the ideals he’d held to in his fight are no longer possible. Idealism of a sort gains him power; but to hold that power that idealism has to whither. Can he regain it? (Answer is in the book, of course.) If he doesn’t, will he become victim to the same sort of righteous overthrow? And, if so, how can his victors hold on to their ideals when nobody else seems to have managed it so far?
It’s tricky, and the questions can go on indefinitely. It’s my hope that this makes good reading and provides a good bit of food for thought mixed in with the adventure and intrigue.
Ed: Of which there's plenty, especially in the latter two-thirds. How did you decide to make that shift from the more deliberate, character-based first section to the more action-heavy second part?
David Anthony Durham: I always wanted to get to the action. Action is great! But for me the action only really has substance if a reader is invested in the characters and the situations they face. In the first part of the book I keep a few threads of action in play – the Numrek invasion, the assassination plot, Hanish’s surprise attack – while using other scenes to intimately introduce all the main characters. It was especially important to me that readers know King Leodan and his children well, since the novels are ultimately all about what they do with the challenges the world throws at them.
By the time we get to Part Two everything is in play and characters – whom readers know well now – can really get on with the struggle at hand. Also, in Part One the Akaran children are… well, children. It’s not until the second section - which jumps forward a few years – that they can start to play a real part in shaping their world.
So, part of it’s a necessity, but also it’s a feature of all my novels that the drama builds as it progresses. I want people to like a book early, but I want them to really like it in the middle, and love it at the end. And I want the action to build right up to the very last pages, so that major plot points are still falling in to place ten pages or so from the end. That happened in Gabriel’s Story, Walk Through Darkness and also happens in Acacia. It’s sort of feature of my writing.
Ed: The politics, history, and economy of the Known World are incredibly detailed. Do you prefer to work out all those plot points ahead of time, or are a lot of them fleshed out in revision?
David Anthony Durham: I certainly worked out a lot ahead of time, but some things didn’t really make sense until I struggled with them in revision. In the first draft I put a lot on the table. By the end some of the things that I’d begun were still affecting the outcome. Other things had sort of died while I wasn’t looking. And there were a couple extra layers of secret societies, etc, that I realized at the end I just didn’t need. They were complicating the plot without adding to it.
If I relied on an outline of the plot points made before I began writing I’d be hamstringed. I simply can’t know everything ahead of time. I much prefer using the outline as a starting point and basic framework, while still knowing that the more I live with the story the more I’ll understand the world and the characters. That’s the only way it can work for me.
Ed: What's your writing process like in general?
David Anthony Durham: I believe in the “by any means necessary” school of writing. (I’m not sure if anybody else is in this school. It might just be me. One room schoolhouse sort of thing.) That is, I get up and gear all my efforts toward carrying my novel forward. There are tons of disruptions, sure, but again and again I refocus on the work, on pushing through a new scene, on really hearing that bit of dialogue, on juggling scenes around to better effect. It’s chaotic. There are just so many different things that need to come together to make a story work. I can’t write via a checklist. I can’t map it all out ahead of time. Even just thinking about it does my head in…
Hence my reliance on any and all devices/techniques/incentives to keep the hammer down. It also means I try to loop whatever I’m doing in my non-writing life back into my writing life. So I’m taking a bike ride to stay fit – and I’m thinking about the book. I’m cooking dinner – and I’m thinking about the book. I’m at the grocery store shopping – and I’m thinking about the book. TV, music, news, other books, conversations, interactions with my children and wife – it all weaves into the book. It’s a pretty weird way to live when I think about it.
I know that answer doesn’t have much structure to it, but neither does the process, really.
Ed: What was the first idea that sparked the writing of this one?
David Anthony Durham: I don’t think of it so much as a spark. It’s not like it happened one day. No eureka! moment. I see it as happening slowly, in four parts…
First, I met my wife and her family. I thought how interesting it would be to write something with her and her siblings as the inspiration. Like the Akarans, they were raised by a kind, caring and idealistic father. And like the Akarans they left their island home and are now flung far around the globe. They are four in number, and have the same age distribution and – in some way or another – they all have characteristics that inspired their Acacian counterparts.
Second, I had kids. As they grew we began to read a lot of fantasy to them. It was a little bit of rediscovery of the genre for me. I was reminded how important it had been in my young life and it got me hankering to read some on my own.
Third, I started reading – and loving – good genre writing. Some of this was from the crime/mystery side of things – getting into James Lee Burke, Dennis Lehane, Walter Mosley, George Pelecanos. But also I pushed the fantasy/sci-fi geek knob as well – Octavia Butler, Orson Scott Card, Susanna Clarke, Neil Gaiman, Frank Herbert, Ursula K Le Guin, Neal Stephenson. (I didn’t read George R.R. Martin until I’d finished Acacia, but he’s a favorite now – and in some ways more like my writing than any of these folks.) I started having fun again, enjoying reading in a way I’d forgotten about in grad school.
Fourth – and this might by the spark part – I watched and loved the Lord of the Rings movies. It reminded me how much I wanted to craft my own epic fantasy, and how I wanted to do it in an ethnically diverse world that would represent the many different colors of our world’s people.
How did the specifics of the story and plot emerge? Oh, I don’t know. That stuff just sort of creeps up on me.
Ed: Though rarely addressed head on, race relations seems to be one of the book's concerns. When it comes to prickly subjects like race, do you think working in a fantasy setting is an advantage over a real-world setting?
David Anthony Durham: I do, although I don’t think writers have taken advantage of it.
I like the way you frame the question. I rarely address race “head on” because I’m not interested in superimposing our racial issues onto a fictional world. I’m not sure what the point of that would be, especially as the white (good) and black (evil) scenario is already so much a part of fantasy. I’ve looked into a lot of eyes in my life and it wasn’t only the blue ones that were beautiful. I’ve seen a lot of evil done and by no means did most of the people doing it have dark faces veiled by black cloaks. It’s frustrating that this rather racist framework is such a part of fantasy. It doesn’t have to be, and as far as I’m concerned we should move beyond it.
For context… I view the state of race relations in our world as having been the result of a combination of circumstances that effect different groups of humans in various way. Things happened in a certain way in our history (due often to circumstances of geography, resources, climate, vegetation, and how all these shape human behavior and culture) but who’s to say they’d happen in the same way in an imagined world?
That’s why in Acacia I’d like to challenge readers to spend some time in a world just as culturally diverse as our own, but without all the old, familiar paradigms. It’s a world a lot like ours, but they don’t necessarily share the same notions that we unfortunately do about what color defines virtue, beauty, nobility or evil, ugliness, savagery. Dark-skinned Talayans have a history and culture that’s near the heart of world’s history. The blond, Nordic Meins enter the story as the villains, but they too have a long and often noble history behind them. The Acacians – right between the two – claim supremacy over both of them, but they don’t do so because the think they’re racially superior. They may feel culturally superior, but that’s not the same thing. The Talayans have no problem whatsoever with their self-image. And the Meins, who protect their bloodline fiercely (with a notable exception), don’t do it because they think other races are inferior. They do it because of a shared sense of pride at the insults they alone among all the races of the Known World have experienced.
There is definitely a clan culture and lots of cultural discord, sure. Thing is, in the Known World there was no Atlantic Slave trade to define and institutionalize a race-based system of exploiting labor. Instead, in the Known World they know that anybody’s child can be sold into slavery. They’re all equally fair game. For me, that’s a much more exciting fictional possibility. One that’s only available in fantasy of some sort.
Ed: With exceptions, genre fiction's seen as less important than literary fiction, though, especially in academia. Have you seen many of your students writing genre pieces? Do you think people are starting to take things like sci-fi and fantasy more seriously?
David Anthony Durham: The lack of respect for genre fiction is certainly well-entrenched. It’s often merited, too. Or, more specifically, there’s plenty of fiction in all the genres that’s really not very good. And a lot of what I’d say wasn’t good still sells well. This is what confuses the “literary” folks – and, yes, I do think they’re often bewildered and on unsteady ground in terms of their loathing for genre writing. Instead of sorting out for themselves where the quality is – or understanding why stuff appeals to people - they tar the entire genre with the same brush. It’s easier that way. This, in my opinion, is just as criticism-worthy as the bad writing that genre novels often are.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told by academics that like my work that it’s not genre. Gabriel’s Story wasn’t really a Western. Walk Through Darkness wasn’t just a slave narrative. Pride of Carthage wasn’t an ancient war epic. Acacia isn’t exactly a fantasy… They’re well-meaning when they say this. It’s intended as a compliment, and I understand where they’re coming from. What they’re actually saying, though, is that my work can’t be genre because they like and respect it – and they don’t like and respect genre. The possibility that it’s genre and good is a bit too troubling to take on board.
Is this changing? I think it must be. For one thing, the Stonecoast MFA Program, for which I’ve taught, has a “Popular Fiction” focus. It’s uneasily set apart from the regular “Fiction” side of things, but there’s plenty of overlap. Bottom line, though, is that students are earning MFA’s based on their work in fantasy, crime, sci-fi or historical fiction. As far as I know this is a new development, and it appears to be one that’ll grow in the coming years.
Also, many established literary writers just can’t help but slipping into fantasy and sci-fi, even when they’re really reluctant to attach themselves to those labels. Pen Faulkner Award winner TC Boyle wrote a partially futuristic novel, A Friend of the Earth, and a bit of a crime novel, Talk, Talk. Booker Prize Winner Margaret Atwood wrote two futuristic novels, The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake. National Book Award Winner Cormac McCarthy wrote a crime novel, No Country for Old Men, followed by a post-apocalyptic work, The Road; and he grabbed a Pulitzer for the latter. Certainly Michael Chabon, another Pulitzer winner, is outspoken in advocating a wider view of what can be important writing. And, of course, Susanna Clarke got an awful lot of adult literary-types to dabble in a bit of magic. Beyond that I think a great many titles that are sold as literary increasingly have genre elements in them. It’s likely because of this that many of these titles stand out in what’s often a pretty drab market of literary fiction.
So, yeah, there may be some change in the air. I’d like to think I’ll help that a little, too. Acacia is my first novel NOT to get reviewed by The New York Times, but on the other hand it was reviewed enthusiastically by The Washington Post, USA Today and Entertainment Weekly, to name a few mainstream publications that rarely review fantasy. The reviewers in those papers – and in the sci-fi/fantasy press also – generally seem to agree that the novel is both firmly in the genre and also very much a novel of ideas, themes and metaphors. That’s highly gratifying, and proves to me that given material that bridges boundaries readers can also bridge those boundaries. I’m all for that, and I believe that the more we embrace it the stronger both our genre and our literary fiction will be.
Ed: Chabon thinks part of the problem is in the way genre fiction is marketed so nakedly as genre work, from the cover on up, but surely it's useful for publishers to be able to point at a new fantasy novel and say "Fantasy fans, you might like this." Is the marketing of genre fiction generally handled well, or can it do more harm than good?
David Anthony Durham: Actually, I’d be just as interested in your answer to that question. I’m only the writer, and I’m daily reminded that I don’t know nearly as much about the business of writing and connecting with readers as I’d like to…
A lot of very genre-ish covers seem to be relatively fair portrayals of what’s inside them. And it does seem that when the material has a more literary flavor in some way many of the covers suggest that. I think that Garth Nix’s Abhorsen novels look lovely. Same for some Ursula K. Le Guin covers and some Guy Gavriel Kay covers. And then sometimes simplicity seems to be the ticket with titles that can sell big, like George R.R. Martin’s recent hardbacks, and Susanna Clarke’s. Even some of the hardcore genre covers can be great. R.A. Salvatore’s recent ones, for example. They’re full-on, but I think they’re wonderful advertisements for the books inside them.
Clearly Doubleday wanted Acacia’s cover to appeal to readers outside of the genre. I’ve heard some people say they like it that they can carry it around without feeling embarrassed when co-workers see them with it. But I’ve also heard people complain that it’s not clearly enough a fantasy novel. As much as some folks want to get away from shirtless guys with sculpted abs and big swords many others seem to think that’s exactly what a fantasy cover should look like. My personal preference? Well, for Acacia I’m happy with what they came up with, and very happy with the cover my German publisher will be using.
I just think it’s hard to market for both. It seems like some of the fantasy titles that most work for mainstream readers are fantasies that aren’t marketed as fantasies at all (I’m thinking time traveling husbands, ghost-child narrators and girls in flammable skirts). Many of the readers that love these books don’t seem to know they’re reading fantasy, and don’t readily seek out other titles in fantasy that may tickle them the same way.
I think getting past this problem is more than about marketing. I’d offer that education has something to do with it too. I’m an academic, but I think it’s a shame that students come through university and grad school being taught that there’s nothing of any worth in the genres. So much so, they’re told, that reading it or having it on your bookshelf tarnishes your credentials. These same folks head out into the world as writers, teachers, reviewers, radio hosts and producers, and they perpetuate what they’ve been taught.
That’s a form of ignorance, in my opinion. I’d much rather we encourage readers to seek out meaning in the very best works they can find – regardless of what genre they find them in. That’s what I try to do in my classes. It seems to make sense to most of my students. It even makes sense to my colleagues when we talk it through enough. It’s an uphill battle, but one that I’m happy to help wage, both in the classroom and with words on the page.
You can learn more about David Anthony Durham at DavidAnthonyDurham.com
Interview conducted by email, August of 2007
Copyright © 2007 Adventures Underground
More Interviews
BHM SFF Interview Series Week Four: David Anthony Durham
Brent Lambert February 28, 2017 Authors / Interviews
Today, on this last day of Black History Month, we have a VERY special treat for you all. Prepare to have some wisdom dropped on you by a Master Class writer in the field. None other than David Anthony Durham is joining us today. This man has been a major influence on a number of folks in the FIYAH staff and we were all absolutely thrilled when he agreed to spend some time dropping some of his wisdom on us. Everyone please take notes! We know we did!
FIYAH: So what’s your writing routine like? Do you have any rituals you follow at all?
Durham: Right now I don’t have a writing routine. Sad to say, but I’m still in a long period of disruption, a big international move, teaching, a busy period of events/conferences, and I’ve just concluded a long period on the academic job market. That last thing turned out well, as I’ve just been offered a position in the MFA program at the University of Nevada, Reno. That’s got me very excited. It’s a new program and one of very few that is open to genre fiction: science fiction, fantasy, horror, crime, historical, YA, etc. I think we can build something special with such a program, and the fact that they hired me speaks to their desire to become a diverse program. I’ve also taught for years at the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. I still love that, too. If you know anyone interested in getting an MFA in either forward-thinking program send them my way!
But I haven’t answered your question! When I am in a good writing routine there are definitely rituals. Routine is, for me, important in setting up a structure that helps me get work done. It’s a lot of small things. I get up and immediately have to feed the dog and the cats, get the coffee brewing, make lunches and breakfast for the kids. It’s an hour of scrambling. Once the kids are gone, the dog makes sure I know it’s time for his walk. Once that’s done… More coffee. I check emails. Read news. Try not to be too depressed. All the takes me to about 9am, at which point it’s clear I have to start working.
My writing throughout the work day is still mixed in with other things. Has to be. That’s just life. But I try to keep myself focused on moving whatever I’m working on forward. It’s really a matter of constantly re-focusing. There’s a phone call. There’s a research question I need to find the answer to. There’s no coffee in my cup. That needs to be remedied. All day, things try to get in the way. All day, I keep reminding myself to get back to the page, to my characters, to the story they’re leading me through. That’s the routine: constantly realizing something has pulled me away from the page and then wrenching myself back into it. Until the next distraction…
FIYAH: Has that routine to evolved as you’ve published more books? Because I think distraction is something that we all struggle with as writers.
Durham: I’d say they’ve changed from book to book. Like, in terms of specific rituals… With Pride of Carthage I listened to classical music, especially a cello concerto by Elgar. I don’t know why, but there was something about it that captured the spectacle of Hannibal crossing the snow-covered Alps on elephants. It just kept reminding me of how amazing the whole story was. With the Acacia books I listened to a lot of music from Africa – Youssou N’Dour, Salif Keita, Cheikh Lô, Cesária Évora. It’s like I wanted to remind myself that I was creating a diverse world, like ours, one that was fantasy but that reached into cultures not historically included in fantasy at that point. With The Risen, my novel about the Spartacus rebellion, I didn’t really listen to music. It was a hard novel to write for many reasons. One thing I did do was take very slow walks on this one section of trail behind my house. It was like if I walked really slowly and stared at the ground for long enough I’d figure out whatever it was I needed to figure out. A lot of the time it worked. I can’t really explain it. The rituals don’t always make sense. But if it works…
FIYAH: What do you feel is the hallmark of a David Anthony Durham novel?
Durham: Interesting question. I think there are three things that are near the heart of all my novels: a focus on individual characters struggling amidst big social and political forces and conflicts, an interest in highlighting the things that can (or should) connect people despite all the obvious differences we tend to focus on, and a need to represent for a diverse cast of characters – across race and gender and sexual orientation, young and old, rich and poor, powerful characters and those at the mercy of tnat power. My novels never just focus on one character. They tend to be a chorus of stories that approach things from lots of different perspectives.
FIYAH: How did you initially approach the idea of bringing your blackness to the page when you started writing? Was there hesitation or did you just dive in?
Durham: My very first stories were specifically about growing up black and male in the 1980’s. Those stories became my first two novels. (The two that never got published.) And then my first two novels that did get published were specifically about being black in America – first in the Old West with Gabriel’s Story and then about the fugitive slave experience just before the Civil War in Walk Through Darkness. That’s where I began and things have grown from there.
FIYAH: For someone trying to follow your path as a master class fantasy writer, what advice would you give them?
Durham: I say check out the paths of other writers of color who have been exploding what fantasy and science fiction can and should be. Nnedi Okorafor, N. K. Jemisin, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Jennifer Brissett, Sofia Samatar, Tobias Buckell, and Daniel José Older, just to name a few. And check out Saladin Ahmed, Aliette de Bodard, Ken Liu, Zen Cho, and Cindy Pon, just to name a few more.
Point is, there have been a lot of people bringing more of the real world than ever before into SFF. Make sure to check out what they’ve done, and then find your way to bring even more into the mix.
FIYAH: Queen Corrin is arguably one of the most complex, interesting and nuanced antagonists in fantasy in the last decade. How did you go about building such a flawlessly sculpted character? (sidenote: I still cry in The Sacred Band when she’s at the end with Hanish)
Durham: Thank you. That makes me smile. Sadly, but still.
Corinn was an interesting character. It’s great that you liked her complexity. From my side of things she’s the character that I may have gotten the most criticism for. Some readers seemed to take issue with her suddenly becoming “evil”. And/or thinking she went from trivial to powerful too quickly.
Personally, I don’t see her that way. To me, she was never trivial. She was privileged by status and birth and beauty, with a fixed number of things expected of her. When events strip a lot of that away of course she’s going to emerge more fully as an individual who has to deal with the new situation. And I don’t think of her as “evil” at all. I see the logic behind the things she does, and I get that no matter how cruel some of things she does may be she’s doing them for what she believes are the right reasons – to protected herself, her loved ones, her nation, etc. Her evolution all makes sense to me. I’d just like to think she was never as simple as she may have appeared, and circumstances pushed her to extremes.
FIYAH: In THE OTHER LANDS, you brought back a key character towards the end of it. A risky move in some respects. How did you get to be fearless in your storytelling?
Durham: I’m not fearless. There’s plenty I’m afraid of as relates to writing. In this particular case, though, I had to weigh up whether bringing this character back was an easy way of bringing back a character who died too soon, or whether it was a reasonable result of the magical power Corinn comes to wield. I felt like it was the latter, that it made sense for her. Also, though, the character comes back, but comes back changed, limited, with a perspective that’s not always aligned with Corinn’s. It complicates things and challenges her. That felt worth including.
FIYAH: Ok so this is more a personal question for me, but I’m sure some other aspiring fantasy writers out there might be struggling with it. What is your process when writing out these epic action scenes where you have armies facing off?
Durham: This is fresh in my mind because I just presented on it at a university event. The first time I had to handle big action/war scenes was with Pride of Carthage. Historical fiction instead of fantasy, but the same things apply. When I began writing that novel I didn’t know how I was going to describe something like the Battle of Cannae – with troops numbering in the hundreds of thousands and with massive death tolls from brutal, hand to hand combat. By the time I reached the battle I’d come to know many point of view characters. Turns out, they were going to be my guides through the battle, giving me – and readers – glimpses of all the crucial parts. Mago is there with the generals watching the two armies converge on each other. Seeing through his eyes, I could present the big picture. Then I shifted to a foot soldier, Imco. With him, it’s all small scale, life and death, him and the men he’s trying to kill. And who are trying to kill him. Next Tusselo, a Numidian horseman, takes up the story. He’s part of the flanking maneuver that’s so crucial to how the battle plays out. And then we get Scipio’s perspective as the Roman army is surrounded and massacred. Lastly, a camp follower, Aradna, stands at the edge of the battlefield as the sun rises the next morning. She looks over the carnage and then she wades into it with the other camp followers to scavenge what they can from the dead. No one character told the whole story. They all showed me their part of it. Collectively, that added up to a bigger story than any one of them could offer.
That’s often how I address epic action scenes. Character by character.
FIYAH: So what’s new on the plate for you project wise? Small hints and winks are acceptable answers!
Durham: I found my next novel shortly after the last presidential election. It involves a slightly exaggerated version of our world, shaped by collapsing economies, increase deportations, rejections of refugees, and a huge expansion of the prison industrial complex. It’s a somewhat dystopian novel, but it’s my own take on a near future that I think will be a bit different than most of what’s out there right now.
FIYAH: Your entire family seems pretty darn talented. How much fun is it living in the Durham household?
Durham: You’re kind. It’s a good thing we’re not competitive with each other! My wife is a popular knitwear designer. My daughter is an amazing visual artist. My son is a great story doctor and character creator. I look to him often when I’m stuck with my writing. He always helps. He’s been a big help creating characters with me for the Wild Cards collaborative novels I contribute to, edited by George R. R. Martin. My first character, Marcus Morgan (aka The Infamous Black Tongue) evolved out of a character of his. I don’t mind admitting it. 😉
Yeah, we’re tight, creatively and as a family. I’m very grateful for that.
You can find our guest’s wonderful books at:
David Anthony Durham
We want to again thank Mr. Durham for taking the time to speak with us. His words have brought a very eventful and prideful Black History Month to a satisfying end for us here at FIYAH. We are beyond fortunate to have been blessed with his time.
Also, we would like to thank ALL of our other writers who have been a part of this interview series. Tade Thompson, Nicky Drayden, and Na’amen Tilahun were all phenomenal. We so look forward to their continued careers.
And for some of you reading this wondering about your own writing, keep pushing! Your voice is needed. You are loved and you are wanted. And we look to the day we can interview someone who read these words and were inspired by then.
Happy Black History Month! Let’s keep the year moving!
-The FIYAH Team
WONDERBOOK INTERVIEW WITH DAVID ANTHONY DURHAM
David Anthony Durham has written critically acclaimed historical novels such as Gabriel’s Story and the critically acclaimed heroic fantasy Acacia trilogy. He also writes for George RR Martin’s Wild Cards series of collaborative novels. He is at work on his seventh book, a historical novel on the Spartacus slave rebellion against the Roman Republic. He’s also developing a middle grade fantasy set in a magical ancient Egypt.
This interview differs from some of the rest because it began as an exploration of setting and the contrast between writing historical novels and fantasy novels. A portion of this interview not reproduced here has been used as an author spotlight feature in Wonderbook.
Just to get some context, you came up through the ranks as a mainstream literary writer, correct? And to what extent was there any merging of “literary” and “genre” in your reading as a teenager, beginning writer, up through your first couple of novels being published?
Yes, I did have a mainstream start. My first two novels were historical, with “literary” leanings. My third was the same, except it was history on a large scale – about the war between Hannibal’s Carthage and the Roman Republic. Up to that point, my writing had been entirely realistic. Or, as realistic as made up stories about distant characters can be. I was reading similar stuff at the time, writers like Toni Morrison, Russell Banks, Margaret Atwood, Andrea Barrett, Ben Okri, and T. C. Boyle. Although, looking at that list I should note that Morrison, Atwood, Okri, and Boyle all merge fantastical/futuristic visions into their writing at times. I may have always been interested in the genre, but for a while I chose to read stuff that didn’t label itself as such.
As a young reader, I was all about fantasy. Without a doubt, Tolkien and Lewis and Alexander and Le Guin first captured my imagination. They taught me to love reading and dream of being a writer. I forgot about them during my sojourn in the academy and while I was writing my first books. Fortunately, that phase didn’t last too long.
What drew you to historical fiction?
For about half my time in college I was a history major. I loved history once I discovered it was legitimate to study the gritty underbelly of American history and consciousness shifting stuff from African history and world history in general. It was quite transformative for me. Thing is, I was never going to be a good historian. I had no interest in focusing on one period or topic – which tends to be what scholars do. I didn’t want to be an expert in any one thing. I just loved surfing through the interesting bits.
I kept my fiction separate from this for a while. I actually wrote two unpublished contemporary novels first. I’m not sure why it took me so long to put fiction and history together, but when I did, the fit was natural. I took the basic familial relationship of one of my unpublished novels and recast it on the plains of 1870’s Kansas. Many of the central themes were intact, but the changed landscape and cultural setting freed the story to run in exciting directions. That’s when my publishing career really began.
Did you think that you were creating a world in those historical novels? In other words, do you believe a historical novelist can accurately re-create a time period or setting?
I doubt we can accurately recreate earlier worlds. No matter how hard we try, we’re going to get an awful lot wrong or put our priorities in the wrong places, etc. It’s worth the effort, though. I focus on understanding my characters in the context of their environment. I build that environment on a combination of historical information and imagined details. The peculiar details matter so much, and they aren’t all things that you can find in history books. You have to expand upon the “facts” with fiction that weaves through it. A big part of that, for me, is using small, sensory description to place readers in the setting.
Is historical fiction writing also a matter of texture or style—somehow trying to match the period or…?
Often, but certainly not always.
I quite liked Barry Unsworth’s The Songs of the Kings. The story was set just before the Trojan War. The setting is so distant that it’s potentially mythic material, but Unsworth doesn’t try to make the characters feel archaic. In many ways, he plays up traits that might seem modern: cynicism, duplicity, skillful manipulation of religion for political gain, disguising greedy intentions behind nationalistic platitudes. It works precisely because Unsworth is consciously appealing to a contemporary mindset, and doing so with a wink.
On the other hand, I’ve been wrestling with my next historical novel for a while now. It’s about the Spartacus rebellion against ancient Rome. I tried a multiple third person approach with a big novel in mind, but it didn’t quite feel right. I tried an erudite first person approach, then a lean, visceral take. For a while, I was convinced I should write it as a clash between werewolves (Thracians and Gauls) and vampires (the Roman elite). But that didn’t go anywhere.
At the moment, what’s working is taking inspiration from ancient epic poetry, writing with a somewhat mythic voice, more like an oral bard than a contemporary novelist. I don’t know if it’s going to work, but if it does it’s because of the language helping me to capture the feel and mindset of the period.
If you had to list a few things that are important to historical fiction, what would they be?
I read a novel recently set in the Roman Empire. It was ambitious in scope, but it failed to live up to that because it didn’t provide any new insights – not for this reader, at least. Romans were exactly how we already think of them. Famous figures lived to the letter of the familiar clichés about them. Things happened just the way the historic books say they did. It may sound counterintuitive, but I think historical fiction is best when it makes something new of the old material. I want to close a book understanding history differently than I did before opening it. A great deal of historical fiction does this. When it doesn’t … I’m not sure what the point is.
Some historical fiction writers talk about not letting their research overwhelm the narrative. Was this ever a problem for you, and how did it manifest if so?
Definitely. With Gabriel’s Story, my first novel, I was so enamored of the research material that I often wrote too much of it into the pages. I had to learn which details served the story and which got in the way. I wrote a long section about shoeing horses one time, quite proud of myself. My wife read it and said, “This is a pretty good chapter, but you’ve got to cut the horseshoeing stuff. It’s boring.” She was right. Just because I’d just learned about horse care didn’t mean I needed to inflict it on the reader. By the time I finished that book, I had a file of pages I’d cut out that was as long as the actual finished manuscript.
When you switched over to fantasy, what was utterly familiar to you in writing the novels?
The fascination with imagined worlds. The desire to drop into them and get lost in a place that doesn’t exist – or that doesn’t exist anymore.
I read Frank Herbert’s Dune around the time I made the switch. Part way into that novel, far out in the desert of Arrakis, traveling with Paul Atreides, I was completely gripped. I was engaged intellectually, transported to a fantastic place, filled with mystery, turning the pages like crazy … I thought, “Wow, I remember this feeling.” It had been awhile, but I hadn’t enjoyed reading so much since I was lost in Middle Earth and Narnia and Earthsea as a kid. Getting that back was, in a way, like becoming a kid again.
What felt new and, at times, unfamiliar?
The SF/F fan community. A lot of folks that write in this genre have been actively involved in the community all of their adult lives. I hadn’t. The experience was new to me. My first convention ever was World Fantasy in Albany. I arrived knowing next to nobody. There was a lot to take in. Language and terminology to learn. Politics to get acquainted with. A fair number of quirks to get my head around. I’m a little surprised, looking back, how I jumped in with both feet and how well it worked out.
Also, my relationship with readers feels different than it was with my earlier books. There’s less of a barrier separating writer and reader. I hear from fantasy readers more. They write me directly, talk amongst themselves, get passionate about the books they love in ways literary readers rarely do.
To what extent was your series in conversation with other fantasy and heroic fantasy? And to what extent did you see it, if at all, as a corrective?
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I’m inclined to shrug and say, “I dunno.” Who am I to be corrective of an entire genre? I could say that I wrote the sort of fantasy I wanted to read, so perhaps the main conversation I was having was with myself.
That’s true, but it’s not the whole story.
If Acacia is the type of fantasy that appeals to me, inherently there must be types of fantasy that don’t. True enough. I’m not that engaged by the notion of dark lords and white knights. Good versus evil. Evil minions against “men of the West”. And I don’t think fantasy needs to be nearly as tied to Europe as it has been.
I don’t need to change what other people are doing, or to denigrate their work. It’s not so much a matter of correcting as it of adding to it, expanding, including, and looking at what new things might be found in the genre’s potential. That’s what I’m for, and I’m not alone. The number of new voices and perspectives that are entering the genre excites me.
Coming from a genre in which you had certain constraints of history, what was it like to have the freedom to make it all up? Is calling the ability to make everything up “freedom” an accurate description?
There’s an element of freedom in it, but I’d call it a “responsibility” as well. The responsibility to create the fantastic realistically, to represent the complexity of your world, to do your research so that the stuff you’re making up has real substance, to establish the rules of your world and then live by them. I can decide to plop a desert down here and mountain range over there, but then I – and my characters – have to live with the challenges created by that. I don’t unmake stuff when it posed problems. Just the opposite. Watching how the characters are bound and challenged by the things I created is what it’s all about.
By the way, I think I did just as much research for Acacia as I did for any of my historical novels. It was broad research instead of specific, but I still wanted to make sure I was including as much real world complexity as I could handle.
What remained the same, regardless of genre, either about setting, characterization, or any other element of fiction?
Everything. Fundamentally, I think the same things apply. Different trappings, but similar scaffolding beneath the skin.
Do you feel there were questions you could ask, or ideas you could express, that manifested more fully or more organically in one genre over the other?
Not really. That’s probably why I feel comfortable moving between them.
One thing that I did enjoy about working in a fantasy world was that I could mash together things in one story that I couldn’t credibly do in a realistic setting. There are things in the series inspired by the Atlantic slave trade, and the Chinese opium trade, and nuclear fallout, and climate change, and the age of exploration, and germ warfare and … I could go on for a while. Point is that I saw so many things in our world I wanted to mix and mash. Fantasy made that much easier.
You mentioned having a hard time going back to historical fiction after writing secondary world fantasy. Can you explain why?
I’ve gotten over that now, but it was a problem. It took me forever to get traction on the novel I’m writing about the Spartacus rebellion. That vampires vs. werewolves idea really had its teeth in me. I even talked through some of them with my editor. Saner heads prevailed, and I reckon that’s for the best.
Why was it so hard? I can’t say for sure. I suspect that I’d been exercising different creative muscles with fantasy, and I was still using them on the historical material. But I was only half using them, and I was working against myself at the same time.
Lately, the novel has begun to take shape. What’s working now, I think, is that I’ve reconnected with finding the fantastical within the historical. I’m getting caught up in the very foreign world of ancient Thrace. Bizarre names. Strange gods. Warrior culture. Powerful women functioning within that. Divination and prophecy. Clashing visions of the world … It is a lot of the same stuff that’s so engaging about good epic fantasy. Perhaps it’s flowing easier because I’m finding a current of what’s similar with fantasy in ways that work fine within the real world setting.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Interview with David Anthony Durham
Official David Anthony Durham Website
David Anthony Durham's Blog
Preorder "Acacia" via Doubleday Books HERE
Sample Excerpts from “Acacia” HERE
"Acacia's" Release Date: June 12, 2007 for North America
David Anthony Durham may be a newcomer to speculative fiction, but with a bibliography that includes the multiple award-winning “Gabriel’s Story”, “Walk Through Darkness” and the celebrated “Pride of Carthage”, Mr. Durham brings a certain pedigree and distinctive viewpoint to his fantasy epic that is lacking in the genre today. If you’ve read my REVIEW of “Acacia – Book One: The War With the Mein”, then you know how much I loved the novel and how highly I’m recommending the book to anyone in the mood for meaty, character-driven storytelling. It also gives me great pleasure to present you with this interview where readers will get a chance to learn more about the person behind David Anthony Durham, his influences and goals as a writer, and of course, “Acacia”. I would also highly recommend that you check out the interview that Jay Tomio of FantasyBookSpot did with Mr. Durham HERE, which offers a more comprehensive and mostly spoiler-free look at the themes, characters and story that comprise “Acacia”. Additionally, you can sample excerpts from the book HERE to get a further taste. Finally, I sincerely thank David Anthony Durham for answering my questions and giving me the opportunity to review his wonderful novel, and I hope that readers out there will enjoy the interview and give “Acacia” a chance…
Q: Because of your first three novels, you’re portrayed as a ‘historical novelist’. For readers that may not be familiar with your work, how would you describe yourself as a writer?
David: That’s a long story… I came to writing through an MFA program, which means that to a large extent I was taught to look down on “genre” fiction. I bought into it for a while, and my first two (unpublished) novels were firmly contemporary “literary” fiction. I learned a lot about crafting a novel with those books, but they were difficult reads, not at all plot-driven. They got me some respectful rejections, but not much more than that.
When I began my third novel I’d been away from my MFA for a while and I was starting to find my own interests again. I’d long been fascinated by history – and specifically African-American history – so I thought I’d combine that interest with some of the coming of age material I’d been working with in those first two novels. The result was “Gabriel’s Story”. It’s a Western, and while writing it I read a lot of Westerns. I didn’t love them all by any means – and I rejected a lot of the tropes of the genre – but I did find some real gems. It rekindled my interest in reading novels with plot, with drama and quests and tales of retribution. By the time I finished the novel I realized I’d put all those things into it, ending up with something very different than what I’d thought I was writing. And what do you know, suddenly I was publishable!
I stuck with history for my next novel, “Walk Through Darkness”. It’s about a runaway slave and the man that’s tracking him. Serious stuff in many ways, but again there’s plenty of drama in it – and a few surprises. “Pride of Carthage” was a different sort of historical novel, about a much larger topic, with a much wider cast of characters and a body count that’s off the charts.
“Acacia” is yet another change, but I like change. Like those other novels I hope to combine the “literary” qualities of complex characters and carefully crafted prose with the genre elements that so many people love – an imagined world, massive struggles, heroes and villains fighting it out in world touched by magic. I’m hoping that’s a combination that will appeal to a new audience of readers.
Q: Speaking of “Acacia”, which is due for release June 12, 2007 via Doubleday, can you tell readers a bit more about what to expect from it?
David: I’d like to think readers will find a tale they recognize as being in the epic fantasy tradition, while also discovering something a bit different. Already there’s been a fair bit of comparing my work to George R. R. Martin’s, R. Scott Bakker’s and Steven Erikson’s. I don’t mind this in so far as I respect all those writers greatly. It’s good company to be in.
My only problem with those comparisons is that they’re based on the assumption that my work tries to be – or should be – like somebody else’s. That’s not how I approach writing, though. “Acacia” isn’t my version of a George R. R. Martin fantasy. It’s my version of a David Anthony Durham fantasy. It may take a little while for readers to sort out what that means, but that’s okay. I’m ready to work to earn my place in this part of the literary world. I’m confident that as time – and books – go by readers will have more to go on in terms of understanding my work, and a little less need to discuss it in comparative terms.
Q: Your previous novel, 2005’s “Pride of Carthage”, is “an epic retelling of the legendary Carthaginian military leader’s (Hannibal Barca) assault on the Roman Empire ”. It seems that both “Pride of Carthage” & “Acacia” share a lot of similarities, from the political & martial aspects, to the epic nature of the stories balanced by intimate characterization. In what ways did “Pride of Carthage” inspire and prepare you in creating the world of Acacia?
David: When I began writing “Acacia” I approached it in much the same way I would have approached a historical novel. I built the world, documented the history, placed the characters in it, and let them try to live their lives amidst the same sort of push and pull of political and social forces that shape historical fiction. In “Pride of Carthage” I had to research a distant, strange world and put it on the page; for “Acacia” I had to create a distant, strange world and put it on the page. The two have a lot more similarities than one might think.
Q: What about SF/fantasy authors? I know that in a recent interview you mentioned Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, C.S. Lewis, Lloyd Alexander, George R. R. Martin, Stephen Donaldson and Frank Herbert, among others as some authors that you read & respected in the genres. In what capacity did they or any other writers influence your writing of “Acacia”?
David: Most recently, they’ve influenced my writing by giving me examples of wonderful stories in imaged worlds. Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson are in there too, as well as a lot of YA fantasy writers like Garth Nix, Kai Meyers and Jonathan Stroud. It’s not a matter of writing like any of them, but it is very much that the experience of so enjoying fantastic stories stokes me with the desire to tell my own.
Those earlier writers like Tolkien and Alexander helped me learn to love reading as an adolescent. So their influence is immeasurable. And Le Guin gave me the first glimpse of a fantasy world that wasn’t entirely black or white. I’ve spoken to a lot of people who read her years ago without noticing the dark-skinned ethnic diversity of “EarthSea”. But it’s there, and Le Guin made a point of pointing it out again and again. That was something I noticed, and it made the potential of fantasy a whole lot more inclusive.
Q: Themes of family and ethnic diversity seem to play an important role throughout “Acacia”. How much of this do you draw from your own experience as a husband/father and of your racial background?
David: A lot of the diverse world of “Acacia” was inspired by the peculiarities of what I am, and what makes up my extended family. I’m a child of Caribbean parents, of complex ethnicity but raised as an African-American. I’ve lived much of my adult life in Europe, though. I’m married to a Scottish woman from a large family from the Shetland Isles. Because of all of this I have close family members all around the globe, as far away as New Zealand. I have mixed race kids, each with two passports to their names.
What does all that mean? Just that I feel lucky to have been able to experience a lot of different perspectives in terms of ethnicity and culture and nationality. That affects the way I view the world. And that, in turn, affects how I imagine the worlds I write about. I’d like to think that in our increasingly cross-cultural world my fictional creation will ring true – and relevant – to many readers.
Q: Looking at fantasy in general, one of its major criticisms is the supposed lack of originality or overuse of familiar clichés. What are your thoughts on this, and what efforts did you make with your novel “Acacia” to avoid these pitfalls?
David: What interested me was never the clichés of fantasy, never the shortcomings of writers in the genre. It was the potential. That’s always the case; in all my novels I’m drawn to potential for great stories. I saw the ancient war epic as full of potential avenues to explore, and that’s why I wrote “Pride of Carthage”. I felt that a runaway slave narrative could be a great venue for exploring race and identity in American history, and “Walk Through Darkness” came from that. And "Gabriel’s Story" came from feeling that the American West was such a vast panorama for storytelling, one that I wanted to use in my own way.
In each case I knew that I was writing in familiar territory in some ways, but as soon as I went to work my focus was on telling the best story that I could, which usually meant bending some of the norms of those genres a bit to follow where the story and the characters took me. So I have a Western where black characters are the focus, the white characters are often the bad guys, Native American play only small roles, and the Hispanic characters are largely sympathetic/heroic avengers. My slave narrative features a tracker who’s not tracking the runaway in order to entrap him. My ancient war epic is more about the emotional and moral damage of war than it is about the glory of battle. And my fantasy… well, it’s not a fantasy where major characters are safe, nor where destiny is quite what you expect, nor are good and evil drawn with a black and white distinction between the two, nor where a lost magic item will save the day. It wasn’t that I had to make any particular effort to avoid clichés, though. I just wrote what felt right and let the characters grow the same way I would when writing any other novel in any genre.
Q: What are your overall thoughts on how “Acacia” turned out?
David: I’m very happy with it. I still take joy in flipping through it, especially the latter sections when everyone’s fate is kicking in. I accomplished a lot of what I wanted to with the book – at least from my perspective as the writer. If you’re wondering what I might regret or wish I’d done different…
Well, if the book is a big success and readers want more I’ll regret a little bit that I didn’t take twice as many pages to carry this narrative to completion. I wanted the material in this book to maybe be two or three books. This was tough for my publisher, though. They’re a mainstream house, so the whole epic fantasy series thing was new territory for their list. Add that to the fact that this was a big departure for me and they were reluctant to commit to such a multi-book risk. So I felt a lot of pressure to pull off the entire narrative arc in one book. In many ways I’m glad I did. I think “Acacia” delivers an awful lot of story in its pages, and I like it that I closed the main narrative arc at the end. But there are still scenes that live in my head that never got into the book. That’s the way it has to be though.
Q: With that said, what can we expect in the next volume of the series and the series as a whole?
David: “Acacia” tells the story of a world rediscovering its distant past. Part of that is coming to understand the nation’s crimes and the way those still support an unjust system. But another major part is their discovering magic again, learning that mixed in with the lies and myths of their past there is also truth in some of its most fantastic elements. This discovery just gets started in “Acacia”. It affects the later portions of the book considerably, but there’s much of it to come in the next two books. Also, the conflict gets even bigger next time around, and includes the Lothan Aklun, a great nation beyond them, and a whole new threat of war. The canvas widens, the conflict increases, and magic becomes a living force again: expect all these things.
Q: Moving on, your novel “Gabriel’s Story” has been optioned for film and there’s been movie interest with another of your books, “Walk Through Darkness”. Can you give us any details about these potential feature films as well as any interest with your other books?
David: “Gabriel’s Story” has been under option with Uberto Pasolini (the producer of The Full Monty) for a few years now. Alan Taylor (director of a few features like Palookaville and The Emperor’s New Clothes and lots of cable TV: episodes of The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Rome, Deadwood, etc.) is attached to direct. He’s written the screenplay and they’re steadily shopping it around to actors and financial backers. It might take awhile, but they’re committed to making it happen.
At this point, it looks like the “Walk Through Darkness” option is going to happen. It’s just a matter of finishing up the paperwork. I probably shouldn’t say who is picking it up until the ink is dry, though. I will say that both producers are shopping them to A-list actors. Both stories have what they believe are juicy roles for good actors, and they’re hoping to hook a big name that wants a really challenging role.
“Pride of Carthage” sparked a lot of interest when it came out, but the timing wasn’t good. There were several Hannibal-related projects already in the works. Also, the studios were waiting to see how other epic war films like Troy, Alexander, Kingdom of Heaven, King Arthur did. As a group they took the shine of sword and sandals epics.
“Acacia” has also received some early interest. But, as with “Pride of Carthage”, I won’t be holding my breath. It would have to be such a big film that a whole lot of stars need to line up at just the right time, in just the right order.
Q: What would be your dream adaptation?
David: Well, my notions of dream adaptations have something of a pragmatic quality to them. With “Gabriel’s Story” or “Walk Through Darkness” my dream adaptation would just be to see them made into competent films that honor the lyrical qualities of the writing, but do so in a cinematic way. I think "Pride of Carthage" would be most successful as a mini-series or cable drama. I’d hate to see it cut down to a two hour feature, mainly because my intention with that book was to make it big, with a large cast and lots of details. With “Acacia”… strangely enough, I’d love to see it in a Japanese animated version, Studio Ghibli style. Miyazaki’s work has an ability to be epic and transcendent and surreal in a way that feature films rarely do. This is not to say I wouldn’t want a feature – if Peter Jackson wants it he can most certainly have it – it’s just that rarely do films realize novels as well as The Lord of the Rings.
Honestly, a dream adaptation is any film I don’t want to disown after seeing. A low bar, I know, but that’s the truth.
Q: What about you as a writer? I know that you’ve written short stories, you're labeled as a historical fiction novelist, and you wrote a Western, but are you interested in trying a different medium or genre in the future?
David: I could see having a hand in adapting one of my books into film, but I don’t imagine I’ll ever try being a primary script writer. I’m a novelist, and I think that’s enough of a challenge. Same goes for comic books and videogames; I’d love someone to use something of mine as inspiration, but I’m not up for pushing those types of projects on my own. (My kids really want to play the “Acacia” computer game. I keep telling them not to get their hopes up.)
As for other fictional genres… I’d never say never to any of them, but the most obvious area of fiction that I’m itching to try is YA fantasy. Fantasy was so important to me as a young reader, and I already see how important it is to my kids now. They’re not actually YA yet, but we do read plenty of it with them. I’d love to be able to write directly for them, and directly for other kids like the thirteen year old boy I once was. Maybe even more telling than those desires is the fact that I’ve got an idea for a YA story. If it sticks with me and continues to hang around for a few years… well, I’ll have no choice to but to put on paper.
Q: As someone who loves teaching/mentoring students, what advice would you give to an aspiring writer?
David: Be in it for the long haul. Nothing does – or should – happen over night. You don’t get it right the first time. You probably don’t get it right the second, third or fourth time either. That has to be okay with you. You have to be willing to put in the work day after day, trying to write the very best stuff you can whenever and however you can as you juggle the responsibilities of life. And you have to be resilient enough to go bed every night with the novel still unfinished, the novella still in need of revision, the story still unpublished… If you can do that – and then get up the next morning itching to find the time to keep writing – well then you’ve got a shot at making it in some form or another.
Q: Are there any preconceived notions that you’d like to dispel about being an African-American author?
David: Of course. The main way I can do that is with my writing, but one thing I want the world to recognize is that African-Americans have just as much right to write about anything in the world that they want to as white writers. That may seem childishly clear. Many of your readers will say, “Of course. That’s obvious.” And it is. But I challenge anybody out there to find one writer of African, Asian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern descent (just to name a few) that feels they’ve been able to write without preconceived limitations on what they’re allowed to be authorities on. We’re constantly told by publishers and booksellers what we can and can’t write about. And those publishers and booksellers will hold up their hands and say it’s not their fault. It’s the public that defines what they’ll read.
I don’t know what’s true or not in that equation, but I do know that it’s a very rare thing that I’ve been allowed to write about first Ancient Mediterranean history and now in epic fantasy. And I do mean “allowed”. If my publisher hadn’t supported my writing with significant advance payments I wouldn’t have been able to take these projects on. Even if I did choose to write them anyway I’d have had to have done so while working a day job, without professional support and encouragement, without any guarantee that if I ever got to the end I’d find a publisher. That’s a reality for many writers, but it can be a crippling one if you’re a “minority” who thinks outside the excepted norms.
My editor once said to me, after he’d finished “Pride of Carthage” and admitted to being fairly stunned by the whole thing, that I’d just stepped out of any box I might have been trapped in, and it was going to be damn hard for anybody to get back into a box if I didn’t want to go. That liberation was a big deal to me and I’m trying to make the most of it.
Q: Wow, I love your answer. So, what other activities or hobbies do you enjoy?
David: Obviously I read a lot. I also walk a lot. That may seem kinda boring, but it’s an everyday exercise that also provides me a changing landscape to move through as I conjure up stories. I was once an avid whitewater kayaker. I’m still a kayaker, just not quite as avid anymore. But I look forward to a future in which kayaking and hiking, rivers and mountains, being with my family and writing meaningful books that people enjoy is all that my life is about. That’s pretty much what I have already, but there are a few hurdles left to jump yet.
Q: Do you have any last thoughts or comments you’d like to share?
David: Nah. I’ve said more than enough already. The things I really want to say I say in my fiction. I’d love it if your readers would check that out.
9:29 AM | Posted by Robert |
An Interview with David Anthony Durham
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David Anthony Durham
David Anthony Durham
After David Anthony Durham had graciously agreed to this interview, I thought that I would be able to use the same kind of questions I had used in Peter Brett’s interview, but as I progressed through Acacia I began to realize that the book brought up different questions, so I decided to suit each interview to the book and the author (I’ve seen some interviews in which this doesn’t happen). J Some of the questions will necessarily be the same (I had to say that before I got quoted or something. J), but without any further a-do, here’s the interview:
First off, welcome to the South African fantasy-reading public, David, and thank you for doing this interview! J
My pleasure, Dave. Thanks very much for asking me.
Would you please tell us a bit about yourself?
Hmmm… How about if I avoid a straight biographical answer to that one? The details are out there already, and on my website, etc. So, some other random things about myself…
I’m married to a woman from the Shetland Isles, Gudrun. I have two kids. My daughter, Maya, is eight and an awesome writer. She’s penned several novels already, and they’re actually pretty good. Her artwork is tops, too. My son, Sage, is seven and has an encyclopedic Star Wars memory. He’s especially good with obscure Jedi’s and with identifying alien wildlife…
Me? Well… I tend to put ground hot peppers on just about anything I eat.
I spent four days naked and fasting in the Arizona desert in 1987.
I was once a whitewater raft guide, Outward Bound instructor, rock climber and a pretty keen kayaker as well. I’ve slowed down considerably, but I still get out hiking and camping as often as I can with my family. Actually, as I’m typing this interview we have the car packed up for trip we’ll be taking to Big Sur tomorrow. Camping. Swimming. Cycling. Stories in the tent. Should be good fun.
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I used to work in sushi restaurant. My nickname in Japanese translated to “Octopus Head”.
The most important pieces of furniture in my house are my bookshelves (and the books on them).
I should probably mention that I’ve written books before Acacia, three of them, actually: Pride of Carthage, Walk Through Darkness, and Gabriel’s Story. They’re historical, but don’t hold that against them. They’re pretty good, too.
That enough?
Can you please give us a small taster of what readers can expect from Acacia?
I hope they’ll find it to be a grown-up fantasy, one that acknowledges the joys of grand adventures in foreign and fantastic lands, while also being about complex characters and nuanced political and social situations. It’s a novel of big power struggles, war and empire and all that, but it’s not the sort of good versus evil story that is a feature of so much fantasy. My bad guys have some very credible grievances; my good guys have centuries worth of blood on their hands. I approached Acacia as if I was writing an historical novel like my third one, Pride of Carthage, with the added fun that it’s an imagined world that includes bizarre beasts and banished sorcerers, ancient curses and warrior princesses, etc.
‘The Known World’ is a vast and beautiful fantasy world; how did you approach the worldbuilding process? Was every region and landscape already clear in your mind’s eye before you began writing?
The details weren’t clear, of course, but the basic layout of the world was. I’d had it in mind for a few years before I began writing it. It was a matter of taking many influences from our own world’s cultures – European, African and Asian, in particular – that I shuffled around and recast. Some of the pieces fell into similar places. Some things took on very different forms.
For example, the Vumu people that live far out on an island archipelago are ethnically kinda like Sri Lankans, but they’re religious practices combine Epic of Gilgamesh-type tales with a certain amount of animal worship, with a bit of West Indian stick fighting as a local custom and a clam farming style from Japan. Oh, and they have problems with giant birds that was inspired by New Zealand’s Haast eagles…
I took a lot of pleasure out of pulling from disparate sources and blending together a world that won’t be entirely alien to readers, but which also provides possibilities different than good old Earth.
Without spoiling anything, can you tell us a bit about the themes you wanted to explore and the concepts (such as good & evil) that you blurred?
I’m not very interested in lily-white good versus night-black evil. I’ve rarely seen the world to work that way, so I’m not inclined to go that direction with my fiction. Instead, I’m all for combining the storytelling tradition of epic fantasy with themes that reflect on very real problems. The plot description of Acacia is that it’s about a four royal siblings who have to rush into hiding when their father’s empire is overthrown. When they mature, they set out to win back the throne and make a better world than either their enemy or their father had made.
That’s the plot. But thematically I’d say Acacia is about questioning the notion of whether benevolent empires are possible. It’s about looking at the ways nations use mythology and selective history to explain away crimes. It’s about a culture that uses a nationally distributed drug to dull the minds of the masses, so they won’t notice that their children are being sent into slavery in foreign lands. It’s about a world in which a few trading conglomerates control just about everything…
Lest that all sound too depressing, it’s also a novel in which idealism does move millions to positive action. It’s very much about recognizing those ills and trying to do something about it.
Oh, did I mention it features mass battlefield nudity? There’s a “theme” in that, too.
Were there times that you had to take a break, such as after some of the more intense scenes in the book, and clear your mind a bit?
Not as much as you might think. In terms of specific scenes, actually writing the “intense” ones doesn’t feel much different than writing quieter scenes. I have to focus on the details, on vibrant descriptions and complex characters and in putting on the page the things I see in my head. That – the craft of it – is where my attention is when I’m writing. But I’m not usually emotionally involved while I’m in the process. That comes later, when I have distance from it.
If there was one character from Acacia that you would not like to run into in a dark alley, who would that be?
Interesting question… It gives me pause because the badass guys in this, guys like Hanish, Maeander, Thasren or Larken know a lot of ways to kill you and they’re not too troubled about doing it. Thing is, there are generally a reason for the things they do, objectives. So if I just ran into one of them in a dark alley it might be no big deal, unless they believed that my ancestors had put that horrible curse on their ancestors, the one that could only be reversed with a certain blood ritual…
Honestly, the scariest person in this book is the one that’s in power at the end. That’s who I wouldn’t want to have any sort of run in with!
Was the character of Igguldan a nod at a certain other writer of historical fiction?
I’d be lying if I said the name wasn’t a variation on Conn Iggulden. I just dug that name, and it felt right as the template for how Aushenian names should sound. On the other, there’s no message or symbolism or anything in the choice. It was just a small moment of petty thievery.
What, if anything, from the writing of your previous novels helped in the writing of Acacia?
Everything. They all build on each other.
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Gabriel’s Story was very much about learning to write with landscape as a character. That’s was important in Acacia also, and I certainly used muscles in describing the various landscapes that I first worked out in that first novel.
Walk Through Darkness was about characters trying to live their lives – to love and raise children and dream – in a time when the world is throwing up so many barriers and hurdles. In that novel it was important that I not loose sight of the small desires we all share as humans, even while the characters were racing through dangers pressed upon them by the world. I wanted to do the same in Acacia. My Akaran siblings may be out to capture an empire, but they also have the same sort of internal doubts, memories, insecurities, hopes that we all do. I didn’t want to loose that side of them as characters, even when the world is blowing up around them.
And Pride of Carthage was my big battle novel. Over and over again, I had to find fresh ways to show people dying by the tens of thousands in hand to hand combat. When I began the novel, I wasn’t sure just how I was going to accomplish that. By the end, I realized I’d relied on the characters to see my through it. Lots of different perspectives, lots of different eyes seeing the carnage. That reliance on characters and multiple points of view was something I used in Acacia.
What can we expect from Book 2, The Other Lands?
It obviously includes some sort of voyage to the Other Lands. The League and the Empire’s leadership has an ambitious plan for striking a new trading deal with them, but nothing goes as they intended. Before long there’s a great threat to Acacia awakened than anything Hanish Mein could have thought up. In general… more drama, more adventures, more development of all the main characters, more magic and a lot more strange beasts!
You’ve recently announced that Acacia may be in line to get big-screen treatment; should this happen (and we hope that it does! J) what are your hopes for it, and would you like to be involved in the process of getting it made?
Relativity Media and Michael DeLuca Productions acquired it. I’m very happy about that. We did have another offer at the same time, but DeLuca’s people really got the book and were passionate about it. And Relativity Media doesn’t just snatch up rights because they can (some of the bigger name companies do that, by the way). They buy rights when they believe their going to make the movie. So, all good there. Still a longshot, but a pretty good start, I think.
My hopes for it are that it’ll be huge and awesome and announce an entirely new type for 21st Century epic fantasy film! Do I expect that to happen? Well, no, not really. One can dream, though.
Hey, I’ll be happy if it gets made at all. And I’ll be really happy if it doesn’t suck. As for being involved, I’d rather keep writing my novels. There’s way too much Hollywood voodoo out there. It’s not really a language I speak, and that’s fine with me.
By the way, both Gabriel’s Story and Walk Through Darkness are optioned too. Much more modest hopes for them, but there are good people out there working to get them to the screen, too.
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If you could have given yourself one piece of advice with regards to learning the craft of writing back when you were writing your first novel, what would that be?
It’s not exactly a craft thing, but if I could have said something to myself back then I’d have warned myself that everything in publishing takes longer than it should and that that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
I wrote two novels before Gabriel’s Story. I had an agent for them and they got shopped around and rejected all over the place. At the time that was hard to deal with. I so badly wanted to be published, and I thought those books deserved to be. Now, though, looking back, I know that I’m much better off for having begun my career with my third novel. It meant I started with a major publisher, with a top team on my side, and with a book that received great review and award attention. So, those years of early rejection were a blessing, even though I didn’t see that at the time.
Finally, out of all the covers (those that you’ve seen) that have been commissioned for the various editions, is there any one that you think represents your novel better than the others? Were you able to offer any input in the selection of the covers?
About the only input I had is that I mentioned that the Akaran royal flag included a silhouette of an acacia tree. There you go. That’s the extent of it. The reality of being with a publisher as big as Doubleday (Random House) is that they’re professionals and have many, many professionals working for them in all categories. I may be a professional writer, but I’m not a professional artist or designer. So I’m pretty happy to let them take care of that.
To answer your question…
Well, I can’t. There are things in all of them that capture different aspects of the book. The French cover may be the most on topic; it has the acacia tree and the looming signs of armies massed for battle. But the German cover has such a magnificent sense of awe and exoticness to it; I want to go to that city and walk those streets! The Italian cover is totally different yet again, but it suggests an old, dark, tragic and kinda classic story. I love that about it. I like the crisp images on the UK cover, and the wacky feel of the Numreks marching on the Swedish cover… I know some hard core fantasy fans didn’t think the US cover was “fantasy” enough, but I’ve always liked it. In particular, I like the feel of the book when you actually have it in your hand, and can touch the raised lettering and shiny bits, etc.
I guess I’m easy to please.
Thank you, David, for a wonderful book! Now go and finish Book 2! J
Okay. I will.
Epic Literature and The Sacred Band: An Interview With David Anthony Durham
Posted on October 13, 2011 by Erin Underwood
Underwords has had the special opportunity to interview award winning fantasy writer David Anthony Durham, author of the acclaimed Acacia series. It is always so much fun to interview a person like David. Not only is he witty and talented, he is also a generous writer who has a great deal to share as he discusses his work on The Sacred Band, his writing career, and his family’s recent move to Scotland.
David Anthony Durham received his M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Maryland, and he currently teaches Popular Fiction in the Stonecoast MFA Program through the University of Southern Maine. He and his family live in Scotland. You can visit David online at http://www.davidanthonydurham.com/ as well as on Facebook.
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Before writing the Acacia series, you were most well known for your historical fiction Gabriel’s Story, Walk Through Darkness, and The Pride of Carthage? – all of which are award winning or noteworthy novels. What inspired you to write an epic fantasy trilogy, which has since been compared to the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin?
It’s simple, really. I read fantasy as a kid. I discovered a love of reading in Middle Earth and Narnia and Earthsea. I forgot about that for a while as I worked through an MFA and built a “literary” career, but I came back to fantasy when I saw how much it was becoming a part of my kids’ life. I watched them and went, “Yeah… I remember being that excited about a book. I want some of that feeling back.”
I think we should honor that–to some degree or another–as adults. I wish more literary writers would acknowledge this. I’ve heard many of them admit to the same love of fantasy as children, but they only do so after some prodding–as if I have to pull the old memories up from wherever they’ve buried them.
The transition from historical fiction to epic fantasy seems like a big step for a writer to take. What was it like to transition from historical to fantasy fiction? How did the two writing experiences conflict or conform to each other?
Historical fiction made for a great base from which to launch into fantasy. I’d just come off dealing with lots of large-scale issues with Pride of Carthage, and I used that experience as I began to build my fantasy world. Many of the things I covered in that novel I wanted to cover in Acacia: The War With The Mein, also. I think it helped create an imagined world that feels lived in and tangible. I hope it does, at least.
The main transition I was aware of was that I began with a fairly low-magic world with the first book. I wanted magic to become a larger part of the world as the novels progressed, so that by the end it was a much more full-fantasy than at the beginning. That made sense to me, but it also allowed me to grow more comfortable writing about fantasy creatures and actions as the novels progressed.
The books grow more fantastical. So did I as a writer.
The Acacia series tackles a story of epic proportions with multiple main characters, plots, and locations. When writing The Sacred Band, what was your biggest challenge in bringing this story together in only three books?
The hard part was not giving in to the impulse toward gigantism. Near the end of The Sacred Band I had a crisis. I couldn’t bear the thought of ending the book in only a few more scenes. Instead of the ending I’d been writing toward, I was suddenly sure that I needed to expand, not wrap up. I wanted one more book, and I hastily sketched out exactly what that would entail. I wrote my editor an impassioned email explaining my reasoning and asking for his okay for a fourth book. When I wrote it, I couldn’t imagine any other option.
How did he respond? He said the editorial equivalent of “No Freaking way, dude”. He felt strongly that I needed to finish it as a trilogy, and that my impulse to go longer meant that the story was getting away from me. He suggested I take a deep breath, come to grips with a trilogy again, and that he and I work together to grab the beast before it devoured me. He even suggested we push back the pub date by a year.
I took about a half an hour to process this, and then responded with the authorial equivalent of “No freaking way, dude”. I wasn’t saying no to the trilogy, though. As soon as he called me on it, I knew I really could and should finish it as promised. That urge toward gigantism in epic fantasy is completely understandable. I mean, what gets an author more invested than creating an entire world and all the people in it? Of course we want to stay in those worlds for as long as we can! But that’s clearly not a good impulse in lots of ways, including that we drag stories out in ways that can be pretty self-indulgent–not to mention callous to our readers.
My editor said no, and I had to admit that he was right. I wasn’t going to push the publication back by a year. Instead, I proposed a new deadline–more like a couple of months away–and I said I’d write like a madman, day and night, awake and sleeping, until I was done. He agreed. I did that, and I’m very happy to say that he loved the novel I delivered.
It was a close call, though. If I’d held my ground I don’t know what would have happened. And if I’d taken that extra year… Either way, I was at the edge of a career crisis. I’m rather proud–and relieved–that I came through it in a manner that I’m pleased with. And that Doubleday is pleased with, too. They signed me for another book, and in this publishing climate that’s not something to take for granted.
Over the course of the series, which character has surprised you the most or developed furthest beyond your original concept?
Corinn. I knew at the beginning that she wasn’t as trivial as she seemed, but I didn’t know how she was going to face the things thrown at her. In each case, she makes decisions that readers have every right to think are wrong, but for me there’s logic to everything she attempts. It comes–as I think is true of many people–from the betrayals and disappointments that shaped her in her childhood. I found her wonderfully full of contradictions, full of flaws and strengths in equal measure. She was very rewarding to write, I think she might be the most complicated character in the series.
My favorite scene to read in The Sacred Band was Dariel’s last scene because of everything that moment represented. What was your favorite or the most compelling scene for you to write in The Sacred Band?
That’s nice to hear. Thank you.
For me, there’s no one scene. I could never pick one of them. I enjoy different ones for different reasons. Mena and Elya at war… Corinn with her dragons and the ghost that haunts her… Dariel discovering what the sacred band is… Another character that I shouldn’t mention by name shaping the future of the empire… A lot came to completion in this book. No one plot line is more important than another. They all feed into the whole.
Are there any characters in the series whose stories you would like to continue after The Sacred Band either as a second Acacia series or as a short story? If so, is there any chance we can convince you to write it?
I could happily write lots of different standalone stories of various characters. All that needs to happen to convince me is for the series to sell well enough that publishers want to continue to publish me writing about this world. It depends on that more than anything–on readers.
My father in law, on finishing the book, said that surely I had to write something that deals with the hounds after they’ve grown up. Forget about the people. He wants to see the hounds in action! I kinda do too, really. He suggested a title: The Hounds of Acacia.
We all make mistakes as writers. Some good, some bad. What was the best or worst writing mistake you ever made? What was it about that mistake that qualifies it for the best/worst title?
It’s something I had to work through, but I guess it qualifies as a mistake… Youthful “literary” arrogance. I had a healthy dose of it. I floated atop a mighty wave of it during grad school. I believed my work to be terribly important. Important enough that it was all right for me to punish readers with unrelenting grimness as they read it. I was grim. And arrogant in that I almost felt my fiction was medicine readers should thank me for tipping it down their throats.
I’m being a little simplistic. I also learned a lot about writing during my MFA program. But it wasn’t until a few years after that I really came to understand the most important thing about this process. Readers don’t owe me anything; I owe them a ton, though, and I better repay them as much as I can with stories that reward them. That’s what I try to do.
You and your kids have a great relationship. How has that fed into your writing? Has story time with the Durhams resulted in any new fiction or new ideas that you have incorporated into one of your novels? Do you see any children’s stories in your future?
My kids are great. I love them a bunch and I’m happy to have spent so much of their childhood with them. They were homeschooled for the last five years or so. It was great. They’re both in school now and loving it, but I really do think having that longer period of time with each other has been wonderful for us.
You bet they’ve affected my writing. Actually, since you ask… I have been writing for kids. With their help, I’m 150 pages into a middle-grade solarpunk epic fantasy novel. It’s set in ancient Egypt. We’ve been having great fun playing with the gods, with history, with bringing a magical version of the distant past to life. For the first time, Maya and Sage are my beta readers. They’re good at it, too!
This was a side project. I sort of slipped in the writing of it between other projects. When I first told my agent about it he was highly skeptical. I showed him different proposals and explanations of it, but he didn’t really get it. Eventually, he said, “Fine. Just give me the whole thing and I’ll read it. And then I’ll give you my honest, frank opinion.” He was clearly expecting that not to have a very high opinion, at least as translates into the project’s commercial potential–into it being worth my time as compared to writing other stuff.
He got back to me recently. He…loved it. He really, really liked it. Stay tuned. I’ll soon know if this thing has legs. Or wings, as the case may be.
You and your family recently moved to Scotland. How has it been settling into your new home? How has the move affected your writing?
My writing has become wetter and windier, with the baying of sheep an ever-present soundtrack. All my characters now drink whiskey and are mad for football (soccer). They all say, Alright, pal? This is a problem considering that I’m writing an historical novel about the Spartacus rebellion. Now I find that Crassus is an Arsenal fan, while Pompey is all Manchester United. And Spartacus, he supports Aberdeen, which is not exactly a winning proposition…
Okay. I’m joking, obviously. The only way I’m aware of it affecting my writing is that the move has been a long period of disruption. It’s tough getting my routine back. I don’t really have it yet. I’m not in my own space, and that’s making it a bit tricky at the moment. I’ll sort it out, though.
Bunnies. Spartacus. Graphic novels. Oh, my! What more needs to be said? Do you think there is any chance that Clan Durham might collaborate on The Spartacus Bunny Wars, even as a fun little web project? Could be fun!
I’d love to. I don’t know where the idea for The Spartacus Bunny Wars came from, but it cracks me up imagining gladiator bunnies in armor, smacking each other with carrots, turnips or–most frightening–beets. I see the guards whipping them into submission with garlic scapes, and the crowd roaring for carnage as they munch celery sticks.
It could definitely be fun.
What’s up with those Scottish cows that are peering inside through your kitchen window?
I wish I knew. It might just be that they like the smell of a good curry, but I fear it’s something more sinister. I just haven’t figured out what.
Now that you’re living in the UK, there is a cultural requirement that you have a favorite Doctor. Mine is 10 with Matt Smith’s Doctor coming in as a strong second. So I ask, the oldest question in the universe, the question hidden in plain sight, “Doctor Who?” Why that Doctor?
David Tennant? I don’t have any good reason other than I’ve watched more episodes with him in them than anybody else. I like him. He’s Scottish. That helps.
Everyone has a secret superpower. What is your superpower and what would be your superhero name? Okay, now ask your kids how they would answer that question for you. What did they say?
I am a shape shifter. I don’t mind admitting it. It’s not my fault. I was just born this way. My kids will tell you that same thing.
As to a superhero name… Now, that’s just silly.
David, thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview. As always, it has been an honor and a pleasure.
I’m honored. It’s been fun.
DAVID ANTHONY DURHAM. Doubleday, $23.95 (304p) ISBN 0-385-49814-4
* The old West, both beautiful and brutal, is the setting of Durham's magnificently realized debut novel, a classic coming-of-age story of an African-American boy. Shortly after the Civil War, 15-year-old Gabriel Lynch, his mother and younger brother bead out from Baltimore to meet Gabriel's new stepfather in Kansas, where the family hopes to make a fresh start as farmers. But Gabriel finds homesteading to be backbreaking and depressing and is soon lured away by cruel, charismatic Marshall Hogg, who's leading a group of cowboys down into Texas. It seems a dream come true for Gabriel, but then the nightmare begins. While bloated with whiskey, Marshall accidentally murders a man, precipitating a flight from the law that degenerates into a grotesque spree of burglary, rape, kidnapping and murder. Gabriel desperately wants to escape, but is prevented by Marshall's threats and the menacing presence of Caleb, a mute and shadowy figure. When Gabriel finally manages to free himself, the evil that he unwillingly witn essed follows him back home--and threatens the people he loves most. Durham is a born storyteller: each step of Gabriel's descent into hell proceeds from the natural logic of the narrative itself, which manages to be inevitable even as it's totally surprising. Equally impressive is Durham's gift for describing the awful beauty of the American West: "The April sky was not a thing of air and gas," writes Durham. "Rather it lay like a solid ceiling of slate, pressing the living down into the prairie." The tale's racial dimension is subtly and intelligently developed, and though some readers may be turned off by the violence Gabriel witnesses, all will be impressed by Durham's maturity, skill and lovingly crafted prose. Agent, Sloan Harris. (Jan. 16)
Forecast: Durham's view of 1800s history through the eyes of a hopeful African-American boy adds a new dimension to the perennially appealing theme of the lure of the West. Doubleday seems ready to get behind this novel with focused promotion, including an author tour; readers may take notice.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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"GABRIEL'S STORY." Publishers Weekly, vol. 247, no. 49, 4 Dec. 2000, p. 54. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A77438189/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=07b0c1e3. Accessed 13 Dec. 2021.
Gabriel's Story Doubleday 288 pages David Anthony Durham
THE LITERAL American West is the condo-stacked Pacific coast, yet there remains in our continental consciousness a mythical "West," a vast open space where imagination can roam. These two first novels are Westerns: Gabriel's Story a cowboy tale about a post-Civil War black youth who journeys to the heart of whiteness in the Arizona desert; America's Children a pioneer story about a World War II-era Jewish scientist--Robert Oppenheimer--who fathered the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and exploded it at White Sands. David Anthony Durham and James Thackara are Americans living in Europe, and their books provide a European critique of New World innocence, Americans' hope that goodness can make even a Western desert bloom. Both novelists reshape pre-American genres--the heroic quest, the tragic fall--to give their densely historical fictions a timeless quality.
When Durham's Gabriel is fifteen, his mother and stepfather take him from a comfortable life in Baltimore to a sod hut on the Kansas plain, where the boy attacks the earth with an ax and his bare hands. Given the chance to escape farming with a band of cowboys, Gabriel and his young friend James join up. The group is led by Marshall, a fast-talking white man, and Caleb, his silent half-black half-brother. Not long into their trek toward Texas, Gabriel realizes the cowboys are horse thieves, who turn into rapists and murderers. Unable to leave the ironically named Marshall and his gang, Gabriel and James
are pursued across western borders for their presumed complicity in the gang's crimes and for their color.
Because the novel is titled Gabriel's Story, it's no surprise that Gabriel ultimately escapes the outlaws, makes a heroic journey home and tells part of his tale to his family. But Durham knows evil is not shed by telling, so he brings Marshall and Caleb to Kansas, the hunted now hunting Gabriel. Pervaded by Biblical allusions, including Gabriel's name, the novel ends with an Old Testament rigor and righteousness.
Durham has an ancient Israelite's knowledge of the desert, its mirages and badlands, beauty and threat. His language is King James plain--and poetic. The plot of Gabriel's Story is somewhat schematic in its stages of departure, initiation and return, and while Marshall sounds more like Flannery O'Connor's theological misfits than a cowpoke, Durham does not romanticize the West. Nor does he demonize it. His West is a testing ground where human emotions as old as humanity reveal themselves. Although Gabriel's Story has been compared to Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, Durham is more like William Faulkner on horseback. Rather than McCarthy's sometimes hardwired aggression, Durham focuses on acculturated racism--against Indians, blacks, Mexicans. The result is a morally complicated, socially nuanced story of American violence and its discontents. Told with great economy and restraint, it is a very promising debut.
America's Children is also a first novel, but it is not James Thackara's debut in the United States. In 1999 his Book of Kings, a panoramic treatment of World War II, received wide, if mixed, attention after The New Yorker published an essay on Thackara's trials in getting his attempt at War and Peace published. Now Overlook Press is also releasing America's Children, originally published in 1984 in Great Britain.
Since then much has been written about the novel's protagonist, Robert Oppenheimer, including Richard Rhodes' prize-winning book The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Thackara's fictionalizing contributes a highly charged, if sometimes eccentric, interpretation of Oppenheimer's life.
America's Children begins in the West with a section called "The Desert," the mesa at Los Alamos where the young New York-born physicist went in 1929 to recover from tuberculosis. A leftist altruist in the 1930s, Oppenheimer wanted to save lives when the war began--American lives and those in concentration camps. He continues his atomic research at Berkeley, collaborates with such European emigre scientists as Edward Teller and is tapped to head the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer chooses Los Alamos as the project's primary site not only for its personal associations, but because he believes in the mythical West, that space free of human pettiness, a pure place for his utopian community of scientific pioneers. When Oppenheimer sees the atomic bomb's power at Trinity Test Site in 1945, he begins to doubt his work and the West where it took place. After the bomb is dropped on Japan, he agonizes over his responsibility and uses his status to argue against further thermonuclear research. He loses that argument to Teller, and the Cold War arms race accelerates toward Mutual Assured Destruction. During the Red Scare of the 1950s, politicians find Oppenheimer's fellow-traveler past and his present moral scruples dangerous, and he is humiliated by having his security clearance lifted.
The story of Oppenheimer's life is dramatic in both its rise and fall. Thackara knows it well: the scientist's humanistic longings and romantic entanglements, his physicist friends and enemies, the generals and politicians who cared nothing for the pure science breakthroughs at Los Alamos.
But when Thackara attempts to make a man seduced by the blank slate of the West into Western Man--the guilty apex of Western Civilization--the author too often inflates with hyperbolic rhetoric the already remarkable events of Oppenheimer's life. Thackara thus does to his novel what the McCarthyites did to Oppenheimer, smearing his reality with loaded language.
It will take an Oppenheimer scholar to calculate just how much of Thackara's version is true, how much romanticized. But given Thackara's grandiose intentions, I doubt the author was overly concerned with facts. For Thackara, "Oppy" is a fabled hero, a scientific Paul Bunyan, that the brooding author can turn into tragedy. But for all its high seriousness, America's Children treats American readers like kids around a campfire, possibly impressed by Thackara's pretentious words, perhaps easily frightened by his apocalyptic bluster. As if only Thackara--not even Oppenheimer!--was aware of thermonuclear horror, that fire without a camp in the desert of the real.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 Barnes & Noble, Inc.
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LeClair, Tom. "Gabriel's Story." Book, Mar. 2001, p. 74. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A73536778/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bc87486a. Accessed 13 Dec. 2021.
Durham, David Anthony
Doubleday (304 pp.)
$23.95
May 2002
ISBN: 0-385-49925-6
The long arm of coincidence and an overload of what seems very like wish-fulfillment mar this potentially moving story of a runaway slave's northward odyssey, the successor to Durham's flawed but deservedly praised first novel Gabriel's Story (2001).
It consists of two parallel narratives. The primary one follows William "Humboldt's" flight (in 1854) from the Maryland tidewater plantation where he had remained after his pregnant wife Dover was brought by her mistress north, to Philadelphia. Interpolated italicized chapters and passages chart the progress of Andrew Morrison, a Scottish immigrant and hunter hired by William's owner to retrieve the latter's "property." The story is best in the early going, as Durham's obviously thorough research and deep empathy with his subject create vivid pictures of Morrison's haunted past and William's successive ordeals, including incarceration in a slave compound followed by a bloody rebellion during which he escapes again, rescue by a ship whose compassionate captain refuses the demands of Southern slaveholders, and William's embattled passage to Philadelphia and reunion with Dover. So far, so good--except when characters like saintly fellow fugitive Lemuel and Northern freedman Redford Prince are permitted to lectur e us about such issues as the Fugitive Slave Law and the brotherhood of man. And the novel collapses into ludicrous contrivance when Durham (as unsubtly as can be imagined) links the guilty secret in Morrison's past with William's clouded paternity and personal history. One understands that Durham's point is (as Faulkner made clear again and again in his fiction) the degree to which all our histories intersect and are interdependent. But his story's thrust is so weighted toward melodramatic oversimplification that one thinks, while reading it, less of earlier literary fiction built on similar themes than of the TV version of Roots.
The sheer power of its core material makes Walk Through Darkness intermittently gripping and affecting, but far too much of its content simply defies credibility. One wonders if it's actually Durham's first novel. (Author tour)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2002 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Walk Through Darkness. (Fiction)." Kirkus Reviews, vol. 70, no. 4, 15 Feb. 2002, p. 206. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A83761260/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0c44e786. Accessed 13 Dec. 2021.
DAVID ANTHONY DURHAM. Doubleday, $23.95 (304p) ISBN 0-385-49925-6
* Powerfully written and emotionally devastating, this new novel by Durham (Gabriel's Story) tells the parallel tales of two men in antebellum America: William, a young fugitive slave, and Morrison, a white man hired to track him. William escapes from Maryland and makes his way toward Philadelphia in search of his pregnant wife, Dover. Morrison, an older Scottish immigrant, has lived a hard, violent life he's not proud of, whose dark secrets--such as his responsibility for the death of his brother--slowly emerge as the story unwinds. During his hair-raising flight, William is captured by unscrupulous bounty hunters and threatened with discovery at every turn. He risks his life again and again because "there were regions within him upon which no claim of ownership had hold," and because he wants to find his wife and be a free man. The abominable treatment of slaves is always in the foreground, but Durham never succumbs to sentimentality. In one particularly grueling scene, Morrison learns of the tortures to be inflicted on a black prisoner before he is put to death, and he mercifully ends the man's life. In the thrilling climax, Morrison reveals an unexpected tie that binds him to William and makes a gesture that he hopes will redeem his sins. Durham's writing is forceful and full of startling imagery as he testifies to the courage (and sometimes the ambivalence) of people who, in one way or another, rebelled against the great injustice in American history. (May)
Forecast: Like Durham's well-received debut, this is a tale of quests and the transformations they inspire. Hopefully, those who missed Gabriel's Story will be alerted to this title--which definitively establishes Durham on the literary map--by Doubleday's publicity, which includes national advertising and a national author tour.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2002 PWxyz, LLC
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"Walk Through Darkness. (Fiction)." Publishers Weekly, vol. 249, no. 13, 1 Apr. 2002, p. 50. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A84651011/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=dc2819d9. Accessed 13 Dec. 2021.
Durham, David Anthony ACACIA Doubleday (Adult FICTION) $26.95 Jun. 19, 2007 ISBN: 978-0-385-50606-9
Something genuinely new from the author of historical novels about the black American experience (Gabriel's Story, 2001; Walk Through Darkness, 2002) and the Second Punic War (Pride of Carthage, 2005).
Volume One of a planned trilogy, it's set in a fictional empire, the Known World, whose political center is the fertile and temperate island realm of Acacia, ruled by King Leodan Akaran. He's a compassionate monarch who sincerely mourns his beloved wife and dotes on his four vibrant children: stalwart Aliver, his ingenuous brother Dariel and their sisters, headstrong Corinn and stoical Mena. Yet Leodan has inherited his wealth and power from "a slaving empire...[that] traded in flesh...[and] peddled drugs to suppress the masses." Opposition to Leodan's ostensibly benign reign appears at the outset, as Thasren Mein, one of three brothers who effectively rule a distant (and impoverished) northern wasteland, travels in disguise to Acacia to assassinate his people's longtime enemy. From every corner of the Known World, tribes and enclaves ally themselves with Akarans or Mein, and gradually assemble into battle positions. Meanwhile, a plan conceived long ago by Leodan and now orchestrated by his Chancellor Thaddeus Clegg (one of several characters possessed of divided loyalties) sends the royal children away, into separate adventures and ordeals: Mena among a remote island culture's sinister priesthood; Dariel as a warrior member of Rebellious Outer Island Raiders; Corinn as the mistress of Machiavellian Mein Chieftain Hanish; and Aliver as the hero he was bred to become, challenged to defend his people in single combat. The novel's strong echoes of Homer and Virgil, Tolkien, Norse mythology's Twilight of the Gods and America's compromised history as a republic built on slavery fuse into an enthralling, literate and increasingly suspenseful narrative.
Heavy going, but Durham has imagined its landscape and ethnography in persuasive detail. Many readers will eagerly await the continuation of Acacia's story.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Durham, David Anthony: ACACIA." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Apr. 2007. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A169082460/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=958d0b7e. Accessed 13 Dec. 2021.
Acacia: Book One, the War With the Mein By David Anthony Durham Doubleday June 2007, $26.95 ISBN 0-385-50606-6
Acacia is the first in Durham's War With the Mein trilogy, detailing the struggles of the house of Arkan against a deadly, dastardly and implacable foe. What we have here is an ancient world that resembles our own in enough ways (some of the same wildlife, some familiar customs and vestigial legends) to give it the ring of familiarity, while also incorporating magic, ethereal beings and mighty battles between the forces of good and evil. It seems that the king, Leodan Arkan, has been assassinated, and his four children have been sent to the four corners of the empire for safety. There in hiding, they learn the skills that will enable them to take back their kingdom, in other words, your standard high-fantasy conceit. But where Durham occasionally seems to lack specific facility with fantasy writing--magical events generally happen offstage, or in the past; most characters are richly drawn, but the Mein are a bit too absolute in terms of their villainy--he compensates with crisp, clear prose and vivid action.
Durham's use of ancient legends to fill cultural backstory while simultaneously mirroring and contrasting his world's current events is just flat brilliant. There are tasty, subliminal racial commentaries as well. High fantasy is notoriously pale, its dark-skinned characters usually villainous (Lord of the Rings or 300, anyone?) But here, the core players are "olive skinned" their mentors/allies ranging from blonde to black, while the villains are almost exclusively pale. Cough.
What we have here is an astonishing "first" novel--fantasy is far more difficult to write than most would think, and Durham has made the leap from contemporary to historical to fantasy/allegorical with formidable ease.
See (*) for BIBR recommended titles
New York Times best-selling author Steven Barnes lives in Los Angeles with his wife novelist Tananarive Due.
Barnes, Steven
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Cox, Matthews & Associates
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Barnes, Steven. "Acacia: Book One, the War With the Mein." Black Issues Book Review, vol. 9, no. 3, May-June 2007, pp. 41+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A167026830/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4ef73364. Accessed 13 Dec. 2021.
Durham, David Anthony THE OTHER LANDS Doubleday (Adult FICTION) $$28.00 Sep. 15, 2009 ISBN: 978-0-385-52332-5
Old wars are re-fought, new alliances and conflicts arise in the middle volume of a fantasy trilogy set in the embattled land that calls itself the Known World.
Acacia (2007) chronicled the clouded history of an empire that delivers some of its children to slavery in "the Other Lands" in exchange for money and a drug that keeps Acacia's subjects quiescent. King Leodan's losing battle against multiple enemies forced him to send his four children toward safety in four different destinations. As this volume opens, the king's eldest daughter Corinn rules as his successor, having dispatched the northern chieftain who invaded Leodan's palace and (temporarily) won her love. Younger brother Aliver died in battle, but surviving siblings Dariel and Mena have become feared warriors, fighting the transfigured Santoth (exiled prophets who have shape-shifted alarmingly), the itinerant Lothan Aklun (slaves empowered by their takeover of the drug trade) and the opportunistic seagoing brigands of the League of Vessels. This dauntingly complicated and frequently puzzling narrative also includes the stories of such intriguing secondary characters as revolutionary leader Barad the Lesser; Corinn's Mr. Fixit assassin Delivegu; and an exiled, intuitively all-knowing beauty named Mor, of royal or perhaps even higher lineage. Moving into fantasy after three well received historical novels, Durham (Pride of Carthage, 2005, etc.) handles his many-leveled plot with impressive thoughtfulness; racial stereotyping, exploitation of defenseless populations and tribal enmity are among the subjects whose continued relevance--for the novel's characters and its readers--becomes increasingly evident. When Corinn, a superbly complex character quite wonderfully drawn, announces that "no more children of the Known Word will be sent to the Other Lands," it's an emancipation proclamation that may have come too late to avert what the closing pages suggest could become a global war.
Desperately needs an annotated list of characters and a detailed glossary distinguishing various tribes and factions. But little else is missing from this ambitious work, which boggles the mind and transcends genre.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Durham, David Anthony: THE OTHER LANDS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2009. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A208571947/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0799b898. Accessed 13 Dec. 2021.
The Other Lands.
By David Anthony Durham.
Sept. 2009.480p. Doubleday, $28 (9780385523325).
The middle book of Acacia plays out several years after the Mein were conquered despite loss of the Known World's ruler and his son and successor Aliver (see The War with the Mein, 2007) and protective exile of the remaining four royal children. Mena and Dariel have lived among the common people and want to end drug and slave trafficking. Their sister Corinn, who becomes queen, sees things very differently. She appoints trained warrior Mena to lead an army to slay voracious, nausea-evoking foulthings created by spells of corruption cast on natural creatures, and Dariel as an ambassador to the unknown Other Lands, charged with restoring the trade needed to restore the kingdom's stability. Betrayed and imprisoned, he faces possible death. Meanwhile, former slave Barad foments revolution, Corinn's devious covert agent has his own agenda, and the discovery of Aliver's nine-year-old out-of-wedlock daughter further roils the political waters. As before, intrigue and treachery run rampant, and Durham maintains the momentum as well as the twists and turns of the plot in an eminently satisfying manner.--Sally Estes
YA/S: Fans of the first book will want to continue the saga. SE.
Estes, Sally
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2009 American Library Association
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Estes, Sally. "The Other Lands." Booklist, vol. 106, no. 1, 1 Sept. 2009, p. 50. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A207943574/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0dca81a2. Accessed 13 Dec. 2021.
Durham, David Anthony THE SACRED BAND Doubleday (Adult Fiction) $26.95 10, 4 ISBN: 978-0-307-73968-1
Durham (Gabriel's Story, 2002, etc.) brings his sci-fi Acacia Trilogy to a satisfying close. Samuel R. Delany meets Cormac McCarthy meets J.R.R. Tolkien as the striking and subtly powerful Corinn Akaran settles into queenship over the Known World just in time to take up arms with the Other Lands. "We're at war," she says, matter-of-factly. And war it is, with supposed allies turning tail and threats of invasion putting a decided downward cast on the scene. Corinn is a tough cookie, but she nurtures an abiding hope that her son, Aaden, will prove himself as "the greatest Akaran monarch yet." Naturally, opportunities abound for him to show his stuff. Meanwhile, Corinn's brother Aliver is on hand to help, having miraculously come back to life after having been killed in the second installment. ("You were dead before," says Aaden. "Exactly," replies Aliver. "I like you better alive," responds Aaden, having thought the matter over.) Durham is a master of the swords-and-sorcery genre, with the bonus that this is swords-and-sorcery with spaceships that give the Millennium Falcon a run for the money; the trilogy, this volume included, tends to be talky, but it's the right kind of talky, without wasted words. He also takes time to paint scenes in words that other writers might brush away, as with this description of a book-filled library: "Tall windows cast elongated rectangles of red-gold sunrise light, but the room's candles still burned, thick ones that jutted through the tables like tree trunks and burned with flames the size of spearheads." That's a world worth fighting for, and Durham's pages are full of thrilling action that would do Tolkien proud. A close, yes--but with wiggle room for more Acacian adventures. At any rate, on the strength of this installment, Durham's many fans will be clamoring for more.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Durham, David Anthony: THE SACRED BAND." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Oct. 2011. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A268238621/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bb1d59b4. Accessed 13 Dec. 2021.
Durham, David Anthony THE RISEN Doubleday (Adult Fiction) $28.95 5, 3 ISBN: 978-0-385-53566-3
"I'm Spartacus." "No, I'm Spartacus." No such shenanigans in this rousing historical novel, where there's no mistaking who the Thracian slave hero is. If everyone of a certain age carries in their heads the ideal of a ripped Kirk Douglas as the proletarian hero of the first century B.C.E., fantasy maven Durham (The Sacred Band, 2011, etc.) turns in a portrait perhaps more suited to, say, Brad Pitt or Channing Tatum: "A hulk of a man, muscled as only gladiators ever are, taller than a Roman, than a Greek. His longish hair and even his eyebrows shimmer like gold in the lamplight." Yep. He's Spartacus, all right, and as Durham's novel opens, in full-tilt medias res, he's down in the gladiators' pen plotting the first move in what will become a widespread slave revolt. By Durham's account--and in this there's no significant departure from what Plutarch said 19 centuries ago--Spartacus is a steely-willed but generous fellow with a secret weapon: namely, a wife with the gift of prophecy, a subject of some learned discussion as Spartacus and associates gather round the fire for strategy talks: "It seems revolts need mystics," says the Sicilian Philon, while his ascetic leader sits far enough away from the fire to enjoy the bracing cold and think good thoughts about killing Romans with a short sword. The conversation is occasionally a little too breezy to seem period-appropriate, but that lightness of touch keeps the story moving at a steady pace toward its inevitable end--and, since those readers of a certain age will have another vision of how things will wind up, Durham wisely closes at a different moment that still embraces the horror. The set-piece battles are especially well-done, fitting given Durham's sword-and-sorcery background. If the message is a little circular ("He looked free because he was free"), the yarn adds up to a competent piece of historical fiction.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Durham, David Anthony: THE RISEN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2016. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A446003850/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=42f9b484. Accessed 13 Dec. 2021.
DURHAM, David Anthony. The Shadow Prince. 400p. Tu Bks. Sept. 2021. Tr $21.95. ISBN 9781643794280.
Gr 3-7--This entertaining fantasy, set in an alternate solar-powered ancient Egypt features Ash, a poor orphan boy of unknown parentage, whose skin tone is described as "the same red-brown as Egypt's." Picked on by other village boys, Ash is secretly being taught demons' traits and fighting skills by his mentor Yazen--for what, Ash doesn't know. On Ash's 12th birthday, Yazen confesses he's been mentoring Ash because he is one of the children born on the same day as the prince. Ash is destined to become one of the candidates in a multiday contest where the winner becomes the shadow to Prince Khufu, the future pharaoh of Egypt, charged with keeping the prince safe. Ash and the other diverse candidates (including a lioness) have to fight magical demons and monsters commanded by different Egyptian deities. A few candidates befriend Ash; others are hostile, like arrogant Sutekh and snotty red-headed Kiya. Prince Khufu's unscrupulous older brother Rami has also enlisted the deceitful god Lord Set to sabotage the candidates, so the rule of succession reverts back to him. Adult author Durham's middle grade debut is full of action, political intrigue, inventive solar powered gadgets, and quirky creatures. Ash is a sympathetic character who discovers his own self-worth and a surprising talent while competing in the grueling competition. VERDICT An exciting, magical series opener perfect for fans of Rick Riordan, Kwame Mbalia's Tristan Strong, and Jonathan Stroud's "Bartimaeus" series.--Sharon Rawlins, New Jersey State Lib., Trenton
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Rawlins, Sharon. "DURHAM, David Anthony. The Shadow Prince." School Library Journal, vol. 67, no. 8, Aug. 2021, pp. 76+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A670397934/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1d1a727f. Accessed 13 Dec. 2021.
The Sacred Band.
By David Anthony Durham.
Oct. 2011. 576p. Doubleday, $26.95 (9780307739681).
Durham's sprawling epic fantasy trilogy comes to an end with this final volume, which follows The Other Lands (2009). The Acacians are preparing for war with their enemies, the fierce Auldek, and Queen Corinn Akaran has mastered a powerful weapon: The Song of Elenet. Not only does the Song allow her to lay waste to her enemies on the battlefield but it also gives her the ability to resurrect her older brother, Aliver--and control him. Her sister, Mena, is scouting ahead in preparation for the coming war, while their younger brother, Dariel, remains separated from his siblings and his lover. As she prepares for Aliver's coronation so that he can rule with her, Corinn is blindsided by the return of the exiled Santoth, a band of sorcerers who put a deadly curse upon her in order to harness the power of the Song. Readers who began the Acacia trilogy with the first book, when the Akaran siblings' father was overthrown by a warlord, will find themselves immersed in this absorbing, far-reaching conclusion and the many story lines it wraps up.--Kristine Huntley
YA/M: Teen fantasy fans will lose themselves in this vast world. KH.
Huntley, Kristine
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 American Library Association
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Huntley, Kristine. "The Sacred Band." Booklist, vol. 108, no. 3, 1 Oct. 2011, p. 38. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A269689554/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4bc6be9c. Accessed 13 Dec. 2021.
Byline: Dennis Drabelle
Readers might come to David Anthony Durham's absorbing new historical novel, "The Risen," expecting it will have Christian overtones. The title is suggestive of Christ, and thousands of the ex-slaves who composed Spartacus's ragtag army were ultimately crucified. But not only does Durham end his tale before that mass crucifixion (relegating it to a historical endnote), he also dwells on his characters' worship of many gods, as befits their multiple places of origin in the vast Roman Empire. True to the period of the Spartacus rebellion, 73-71 B.C., this is a polytheistic world, and "The Risen" is simply the name by which the uprising slaves are commonly known.
Spartacus is thought to have been a freeborn mercenary soldier, captured, enslaved and sent to gladiatorial school because of his impressive physique and fighting spirit. In Durham's telling, Spartacus is also charismatic and thoughtful -- and thinking will be at a premium if the movement he leads is to have any chance of succeeding.
In putting down the rebellion, the Romans can draw upon centuries of successful warfare. Most of the Risen, in contrast, are brand-new to military service. Careful planning went into the initial breakout at the arena of Capua, south of Rome, but after that, Spartacus and his followers are winging it. And as they go around liberating more slaves, they both add to their numbers and strain their cohesion. As one observer notes, the danger is that "the slaves would fracture along ethnic lines. They'd squabble among themselves and be no match for a proper Roman legion."
Durham is at his best in portraying characters who can't make up their minds -- or their hearts, either. As the euphoria of being freed wears off, common sense tells them the rebellion is doomed, so they should cross back over to the Roman side, gambling to stay alive by trading inside information. Yet so much about Spartacus's mission is stirring and valorous that they find it hard to cop out, and besides, won't a defection amount to a self-fulfilling prophecy? Spartacus can't possibly succeed, each turncoat is in effect saying, and I'll make sure he doesn't.
During the chase, we hear of the corrupt Roman governor of Sicily, Gaius Verres, soon to be excoriated for his corruption by that young orator-on-the-make, Marcus Tullius Cicero. And we are reminded of the original meaning of the word "decimation": reduction by a tenth.
Unlike the Stanley Kubrick movie, "The Risen" has no "I am Spartacus" scene, in which dozens of rebels answer a torture-minded Roman soldier who asks, "Which one of you is Spartacus?" by stepping forward one after another and saying those three words. That fillip was apparently the whole-cloth invention of screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. Durham's storytelling skills are such that he can get along fine without the Hollywood hokum.
Dennis Drabelle, a former contributing editor of Book World, writes frequently about the Greek and Roman classics.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Washington Post
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Drabelle, Dennis. "'The Risen,' an absorbing new historical novel about Spartacus." Washingtonpost.com, 4 May 2016. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A454695078/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f0f7aec2. Accessed 13 Dec. 2021.