SATA
ENTRY TYPE:
WORK TITLE: MISTER IMPOSSIBLE
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://maggiestiefvater.com/
CITY: Shenandoah Valley
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: SATA 354
http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/book/sinner#cart/cleanup * https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/maggie-stiefvater/all-the-crooked-saints/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born November 18, 1981, in Harrisonburg, VA; first name Heidi; name legally changed; married; husband’s name Edward; children: one son, one daughter.
EDUCATION:University of Mary Washington, B.A. (history), 2002.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, musician, and painter. Worked as a portrait artist, waitress, calligraphy instructor, and technical editor. Creator of animated short films. Performer with bands, including Ballynoola, 2000, and Kate Hummel, 2007-11. Exhibitions: Work included in shows at American Academy of Equine Art; Uniquely Fredericksburg, Fredericksburg, VA; Cross Gate Gallery, Lexington, KY, 2007; and Colored Pencil Society of America International Exhibition, 2007.
AVOCATIONS:Playing Irish harp, bagpipes, guitar, tin whistle, and piano; reading.
AWARDS:Best Books for Young Adults and Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers designations, American Library Association (ALA), both 2009, and Midwest Booksellers’ Choice Award for Children’s Literature, 2010, both for Shiver; ALA Best Books for Young Adults and Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults designations, both 2010, both for Lament; Best Children’s Books selection, Bank Street College of Education, Chicago Public Library Best of the Best designation, and ALA Notable Books for Children and Michael J. Printz Honor Book citations, all 2012, all for The Scorpio Races; numerous state reading association awards.
RELIGION: Christian.WRITINGS
Work represented in anthologies, including Kiss Me Deadly: Thirteen Tales of Paranormal Love, edited by Trisha Telep, Running Press (Philadelphia PA), 2010; and Demons: Encounters with the Devil and His Minions, Fallen Angels, and the Possessed, edited by John Skipp, Black Dog & Leventhal (New York, NY), 2011. Contributor of short fiction to Merry Sisters of Fate blog; contributor to periodicals, including Jalopnik, the New York Times, and Road & Track.
Shiver and Linger were released as audiobooks. Author’s work has been translated into over thirty languages, including Brazilian, Bulgarian, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Turkish.
SIDELIGHTS
UPDATE SUBMITTED IN SGML FORMAT.
Often geared for teen readers, Maggie Stiefvater’s fantasy novels have earned praise for their fully realized characters, rich prose, and gripping narratives. In Lament: The Faerie Queen’s Deception, Shiver, The Scorpio Races, and her “Raven Cycle” books, Stiefvater blends romance, adventure, and mythology to produce compelling and romance-tinged supernatural tales. As she explained in a YA Reads interview, “it’s not that I believe in werewolves or faeries per se, but I do believe in … something more. And writing about them lets me write about that feeling of wonder and curiosity.”
A self-described “Navy brat,” Stiefvater grew up in Virginia, Florida, and California, among other places, and her family’s constant moves caused her to develop a love of both reading and music. As a young reader, she enjoyed contemporary fantasies such as The Girl with the Silver Eyes by Willo Davis Roberts, The Castle in the Attic by Elizabeth Winthrop, and The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks as well as the works of Diana Wynne Jones. After majoring in history at the University of Mary Washington, Stiefvater worked as a landscape and equestrian artist and musician before finding success in the literary world.
Set in Virginia, Stiefvater’s young-adult debut, Lament, concerns sixteen-year-old Deirdre Monaghan, a talented harpist who finds herself at the heart of an otherworldly conflict. While competing at a music festival, Deirdre meets the mysterious Luke Dillon, a flautist who joins her onstage during her number; their gorgeous duet stuns the crowd and earns the grand prize. As the days pass, Deirdre becomes infatuated with Luke, whose disturbing presence prompts her grandmother to give the teen an unusual gift: an antique iron ring. While wearing the ring Deirdre begins spotting strange creatures and develops telekinetic powers; she also learns that she is a “cloverhand,” one who can see and attract faeries, charming but soulless tricksters that enjoy toying with humans and are repulsed by iron. She grows suspicious of Luke when she learns from her grandmother that he has appeared to their family before, when Deirdre’s mother and Aunt Delia were children. Ultimately, her path leads to Thomas Rhymer, a man imprisoned by the queen of the faeries, and learns that her powers threaten the queen’s reign.
Booklist reviewer Diana Tixier Herald described Lament as “beautiful and out-of-the-ordinary,” further praising “its authentic depiction of Celtic Faerie lore and dangerous forbidden love in a contemporary American setting.” Cara Chancellor predicted in Kliatt that Stiefvater’s story “will delight nearly all audiences with its skillful blend of magic and ordinary life.” According to a Publishers Weekly contributor, the author is “unafraid of taking plot developments to their logical outcomes, even when they mar the characters’ happiness,” and Voice of Youth Advocates critic Caitlin Augusta applauded Deirdre’s narrative voice as both “intimate and immediate.”
A companion novel to Lament, Ballad: A Gathering of Faerie focuses on James Morgan, a gifted bagpiper and loyal friend to Deirdre. During their first week at the prestigious Thornking-Ash School of Music, James is drawn to the nearby woods by a haunting melody and spies a wondrous, antlered figure; at the same time, Deirdre sees the faerie on campus. Nuala, a beguiling creature whose life is at risk, promises to make James the greatest piper who ever lived. When he refuses her offer, Nuala invades his dreams and becomes his muse. Ultimately James falls in love with her, and they make a deal with the king of the Dead to save her life. Torn between his love for Nuala and his love for Deirdre, James faces a heartbreaking decision. “The book’s backdrop, so firmly rooted in Celtic myth, is scary, mysterious, magical, and horrifying,” Herald stated in her Booklist review of Ballad.
Stiefvater shifts her attention to werewolves in Shiver, the first book in her “Wolves of Mercy Falls” series. Attacked by wolves as a child, high-school junior Grace is now obsessed with animals, especially the yellow-eyed wolf that once saved her life and now roams alone in the woods near Grace’s home in Mercy Falls, Minnesota. When schoolmate Jack Culpeper becomes the victim of another wolf attack, a hunting party pursues the vicious pack. When Grace finds a yellow-eyed boy, Sam, at her back door, naked and bleeding, she realizes that her wolf has taken human form. Sam’s ability to transform is controlled by the seasons: summers find him human while he lives as a wolf the rest of the year and will ultimately revert to wolf form. Despite being bitten, Grace does not transform, and their research leads them to theorize that a high fever can halt the slow mutation from human to wolf.
Described as “sensuous, intense, riveting, and so very satisfying” by Voice of Youth Advocates contributor Bonnie Kunzel, Shiver was also praised as “a lyrical tale of alienated werewolves and first love” by a Publishers Weekly contributor. The novel offers “a paranormal romance that is beautiful and moving,” noted School Library Journal critic Donna Rosenblum, and in Booklist, Ian Chipman cited Stiefvater’s “elegant writing.” As Shelly Shaffer observed in the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, the “compelling story” in Shiver “will keep readers guessing until the final page.”
As the “Wolves of Mercy Falls” series continues in Linger, a now fully human Sam assumes the role as caretaker of the pack even as Grace begins suffering from headaches and fever. When Grace’s parents discover Sam in her bedroom one night, they try to prevent the teens from seeing one another. Meanwhile, recently arrived pack member and talented musician Cole St. Clair devises a new theory to explain the lupine transformations, and his theory may help Grace when she becomes violently ill. “Stiefvater’s slow-perk style of crafting suspense builds to a satisfying boil in the final pages” of Linger, observed School Library Journal critic Amy Pickett, and a Publishers Weekly critic reported that the novel “sets the stage for an explosive third installment” in the saga.
That “explosive” third “Wolves of Mercy Falls” novel, Forever, treats Stiefvater’s fans to “an intelligent paranormal romance that surreptitiously folds in serious adolescent issues, including teens’ relationships with their parents, suicidal ideation, morphing bodies and young love,” according to Los Angeles Times reviewer Susan Carpenter. After transforming from human to wolf, Grace disappears into the woods and Sam becomes a suspect in her mysterious disappearance. After a local girl is killed in a rogue wolf attack, an army of sharpshooters hunts down the remaining wolves of Mercy Falls. “Stiefvater’s emotional prose is rich without being melodramatic,” Cindy Welch noted in Booklist, and Lauren Newman wrote in School Library Journal that Sam and Grace’s “plight is palpable and heart-wrenching.” Carpenter praised the story’s themes of romance, writing that “how the two couples work together to combat the wolf hunt, and their own werewolf-ism, is the magic of Stiefvater.”
In concluding series novel Sinner, Cole St. Clair is reunited with girlfriend Isabel when he returns to Los Angeles and tells her that he has quit using drugs. Isabel remains skeptical, however, knowing that Cole is starring in a reality show and viewers are practically rooting for him to relapse. Reviewing Sinner, a Publishers Weekly critic wrote that “Stiefvater’s talent for word-craft and her powers of observation are as sharp as ever,” while a Kirkus Reviews writer quipped that, while “the ending wraps up a bit too neatly, … getting there is an absolute delight.” “Powerful and compelling,” Sinner “is certain to be a hit with fans of the series,” concluded Donna Rosenblum in her School Library Journal review.
Steifvater opened her “Raven Cycle” novels with The Raven Boys, in which sixteen-year-old Blue hails from a family of renowned psychics. Somehow the gift has skipped a generation, however: The only power Blue possesses is the ability to amp up the psychic traits of those around her. In addition to missing out on the psychic part of her inheritance, the teen is burdened by a prophecy: When she kisses her first love, he will die. Hoping to avoid true love, the teen becomes a friend to the Raven Boys—Ronan Lynch and friends Gansey, Adam, and Noah, all who attend exclusive Aglionby Academy. When the boys enlist Blue to help them find Owen Glendower, the enchanted king of Wales, her ability to enhance the psychic power of others proves useful.
Reviewing The Raven Boys in Horn Book, Cynthia K. Ritter cited the novel for its “overall fast pace, intriguing concept, and [a] plot filled with psychics and ghosts.” Booklist critic Michael Cart asserted that “reading this novel is like walking through a tangled thicket and coming across one unexpected and wonderful surprise after another.” Citing the “hopes, fears, quirks, and forebodings” that animate Stiefvater’s story, a Publishers Weekly critic dubbed The Raven Boys “a tour de force of characterization,” while a Kirkus Reviews critic described the first “Raven Cycle” story as one “very few writers could dream up and only Stiefvater could make so palpably real.”
When readers rejoin them in The Dream Thieves, Blue and her friends have accessed the ley lines bridging them to King Owen’s dream state, but the lines’ instability makes using them fraught with risk. When Ronan is suddenly plagued by night terrors, he marshals his powers in order to stop them, only to discover a family secret and learn that he is being stalked by a hit man who is dating Blue’s mother. The Dream Thieves is “more tense and foreboding than its predecessor—and every bit as gripping,” asserted a Publishers Weekly critic, and Cart deemed Stiefvater’s novel “richly written” and “an absolute marvel of imagination and an irresistible invitation to wonder.” Reviewing the second “Raven Cycle” story in Horn Book, Ritter praised Stiefvater’s storytelling skills, noting that her “descriptive prose reveals a complicated plot, multiple viewpoints, and detailed character backstories.” A Kirkus Reviews writer concluded of The Dream Thieves that “the pace is electric, the prose marvelously sure-footed and strong.”
Stiefvater continued her “Raven Cycle” series in both Blue Lily, Lily Blue and The Raven King. In the former, Gansey, Adam, Ronan, and Noah learn that King Owen is interred with two other slumbering royals, and waking the wrong one means certain destruction. Meanwhile, Blue’s mother has gone missing and the four friends team up to search for her as well. To complete their quest, they will need a mystical object, the Greywaren, which is also sought by the evil Colin Greenmantle and his wife Piper. “Expect this truly one-of-a-kind series to come to a thundering close,” stated a Kirkus Reviews critic upon completing Blue Lily, Lily Blue, and a Publishers Weekly critic wrote that the book’s “brutal cliffhanger ensures that readers will snap up the final installment the second it’s available.” Cart praised the consistency of the series as a whole, noting that Stiefvater’s prose is “rich in simile and metaphor” and her “tone, at once mysterious and foreboding, is a perfect match for the material.”
A spin-off of Stiefvater’s “Raven Cycle” series, Call down the Hawk is the first volume in her “Dreamer” trilogy, which is set in a world where dreams are real and the future looks dim. Here readers meet Hennessey, a dreamer and talented art forger who can clone herself during REM sleep; Declan Lynch, whose focus on survival has allowed younger brother Ronan to explore his dreamer powers; and Carmen Farooq-Lane, a government-sanctioned dreamer hunter who is motivated by fears of a dark future. Missing Adam, who is now attending college in New England, Ronan remains in Virginia, hoping to control his powers. When a mysterious dreamer enters one of Ronan’s dreams, it sparks the events that cause the lives of these characters to intersect. Brought to life in Stiefvater’s “artful prose” and “exquisitely painted characters,” the novel “is filled with satisfying twists and turns” as these characters each pursue their separate goals, explained a Kirkus Reviews critic. For School Library Journal critic Jane Henriksen Baird, “every chapter” of Call down the Hawk “pulls the reader deeper into a story that starts out dark and gets progressively darker.” The novel’s “exquisitely drawn characters and witty, graceful prose complement the artfully crafted plot,” concluded a Publishers Weekly contributor, producing a story that is both “epic and intricate.”
In All the Crooked Saints, the year is 1962 and the place is Bicho Raro, a remote settlement in an arid region of Colorado. Bicho Raro is home to the Soria family, whose Mexican ancestors settled here generations ago. Pilgrims continue to arrive here, seeking a miracle even though each one comes with unpleasant consequences. Three teens are the newest generation of Sorias, but only one of them, Daniel, possesses saintly powers. As each teen attempts to define his or her life, arriving pilgrims affect their efforts, and Daniel takes a drastic step after violating a family rule. All the Crooked Saints contains “a rich exploration of perception and the power of love,” noted Kevin Beach in Voice of Youth Advocates. Also praising the novel, Horn Book contributor Jonathan Hunt praised the “lovely prose” in the novel, describing it as “both evocative and philosophical, with wonderful moments of humor.”
Praised as a “beautifully told coming-of-age story” by Voice of Youth Advocates critic Blake Norby, Stiefvater’s standalone novel The Scorpio Races is set on the island of Thisby and based on a Celtic myth. Island residents Sean Kendrick and Kate “Puck” Connolly have lost their parents to a breed of man-eating water horse that is ridden in local competitions. Sean, a champion rider, is able to soothe the wild creature while Puck hopes to save her destitute family by riding her land mare to victory in an upcoming competition.
According to Booklist contributor Karen Cruze, in The Scorpio Races, “Stiefvater has created a thrilling backdrop for the love story that blooms between Sean and Puck,” and Martha V. Parravano maintained in Horn Book that the author “masterfully combines an intimate voice … with a wealth of horse detail” set within “a plot full of danger, intrigue, and romance.” “If The Scorpio Races sounds like nothing you’ve ever read, that’s because it is,” Jennifer Hubert Swan asserted in the New York Times Book Review, adding that “Stiefvater has successfully plumbed lesser-known myths and written a complex literary thriller that pumps new blood into a genre suffering from post-Twilight burnout.”
Turning to younger readers, Stiefvater has teamed up with author/illustrator Jackson Pearce to create the “Pip Bartlett” series of middle-grade novels. A girl with the remarkable ability to communicate with magical animals, Pip is introduced in Pip Bartlett’s Guide to Magical Creatures, where an unfortunate school episode involving unicorns leads to her spending the summer in rural Cloverton, Georgia. There, Pip aids her Aunt Emma, a veterinarian who caters to HobGrackles, Pegasi, and other supernatural creatures. When Cloverton is overrun by combustible Fuzzles, Pip joins forces with a trio of allies to solve the town’s problem. In Pip Bartlett’s Guide to Unicorn Training, Pip tackles a local mystery during a competition featuring unicorns and other fantastical beings, and the series continues in Pip Bartlett’s Guide to Sea Monsters.
“Loaded with kid-friendly similes,” according to Elisa Gall in Horn Book, Stiefvater and Pearce’s “fast-paced prose” in Pip Bartlett’s Guide to Magical Creatures “is lively, witty, and gripping.” A Kirkus Reviews critic also had praise for the fanciful “Pip Bartlett” novels, writing that the “feel-good” story in Pip Bartlett’s Guide to Unicorn Training benefits from both “humor” and a “uniformly good-natured multispecies cast.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December 1, 2008, Diana Tixier Herald, review of Lament: The Faerie Queen’s Deception, p. 50; August 1, 2009, Ian Chipman, review of Shiver, p. 61; October 1, 2009, Diana Tixier Herald, review of Ballad: A Gathering of Faerie, p. 33; June 1, 2010, Cindy Welch, review of Linger, p. 58; September 1, 2011, Karen Cruze, review of The Scorpio Races, p. 102; September 15, 2011, Cindy Welch, review of Forever, p. 74; August 1, 2012, Michael Cart, review of The Raven Boys, p. 66; August 1, 2012, Daniel Kraus, review of The Curiosities: A Collection of Stories, p. 72; September 1, 2013, Michael Cart, review of The Dream Thieves, p. 103; June 1, 2014, Cindy Welch, review of Sinner, p. 96; September 1, 2014, Michael Cart, review of Blue Lily, Lily Blue, p. 108; April 15, 2015, Julia Smith, review of Pip Bartlett’s Guide to Magical Creatures, p. 50; September 15, 2015, Maggie Reagan, review of The Anatomy of Curiosity, p. 62.
Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books, November, 2008, review of Lament, p. 136; October, 2009, Karen Coats, review of Shiver, p. 85; January, 2010, Karen Coats, review of Ballad, p. 220; May, 2015, April Spisak, review of Pip Bartlett’s Guide to Magical Creatures, p. 462.
Financial Times, January 9, 2010, James Lovegrove, review of Shiver, p. 16; July 10, 2010, Suzi Feay, review of Linger, p. 17.
Horn Book, July-August, 2010, Tanya D. Auger, review of Linger, p. 123; November-December, 2011, Martha V. Parravano, review of The Scorpio Races, p. 114; September-October, 2012, Sarah Ellis, review of The Curiosities, p. 88; January-February, 2013, Cynthia K. Ritter, review of The Raven Boys, p. 91; January-February, 2014, Cynthia K. Ritter, review of The Dream Thieves, p. 100; July-August, 2015, Elisa Gall, review of Pip Bartlett’s Guide to Magical Creatures, p. 141; September-October, 2017, Jonathan Hunt, review of All the Crooked Saints, p. 108.
Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, May, 2010, Shelly Shaffer, review of Shiver, p. 692; February, 2011, Ashley Huskey, review of Linger, p. 384.
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2011, review of The Scorpio Races; August 1, 2012, review of The Raven Boys; September 15, 2012, review of The Curiosities; August 1, 2013, review of The Dream Thieves; December 15, 2013, review of Hunted; June 1, 2014, review of Sinner; September 15, 2014, review of Blue Lily, Lily Blue; August 1, 2015, review of The Anatomy of Curiosity.
Kliatt, November, 2008, Cara Chancellor, review of Lament, p. 30.
Los Angeles Times, July 17, 2011, Susan Carpenter, review of Forever.
New York Times Book Review, November 13, 2011, Jennifer Hubert Swan, review of The Scorpio Races, p. 40.
Publishers Weekly, October 13, 2008, review of Lament, p. 55; August 3, 2009, review of Shiver, p. 46; June 14, 2010, review of Linger, p. 54; August 22, 2011, review of The Scorpio Races, p. 67; July 30, 2012, review of The Raven Boys, p. 67; September 17, 2012, review of The Curiosities, p. 57; July 22, 2013, review of The Dream Thieves, p. 71; May 12, 2014, review of Sinner, p. 63; September 15, 2014, review of Blue Lily, Lily Blue, p. 71; August 31, 2015, review of Pip Bartlett’s Guide to Magical Creatures, p. 85.
School Library Journal, October, 2009, Donna Rosenblum, review of Shiver, p. 138; August, 2010, Amy Pickett, review of Linger, p. 114; September, 2011, Lauren Newman, review of Forever, p. 174; November, 2011, Anthony C. Doyle, review of The Scorpio Races, p. 140; September, 2012, Cindy Wall, review of The Curiosities, p. 157; October, 2012, Emily Chornomaz, review of The Raven Boys, p. 151; October, 2013, Maggie Knapp, review of The Dream Thieves, p. 130; June, 2014, John R. Clark, review of Hunted, p. 64; July, 2014, Donna Rosenblum, review of Sinner, p. 112; November, 2014, Luann Toth, review of Blue Lily, Lily Blue, p. 124; September, 2015, Anne Bozievich, review of Pip Bartlett’s Guide to Magical Creatures, p. 59; October, 2015, Cindy Wall, review of The Anatomy of Curiosity, p. 117.
Voice of Youth Advocates, December, 2008, Caitlin Augusta, review of Lament, p. 458; December, 2009, Bonnie Kunzel, review of Shiver, p. 424; April, 2010, Caitlin Augusta, review of Ballad, p. 75; August, 2010, Bonnie Kunzel, review of Linger, p. 275; October, 2011, Blake Norby, review of The Scorpio Races, p. 411; September, 2012, Heidi Uphoff, review of The Curiosities, p. 494; October, 2013, Lisa A. Hazlett, review of The Dream Thieves, p. 87; February, 2015, Lisa A. Hazlett, review of Blue Lily, Lily Blue, p. 84; December, 2015, Stacey Hayman, review of The Anatomy of Curiosity, p. 75; October, 2017, Kevin Beach, review of All the Crooked Saints, p. 78.
ONLINE
BookPage, http://bookpage.com/ (June 1, 2011), Emily Masters, author interview.
Maggie Stiefvater website, http://www.maggiestiefvater.com (May 15, 2016).
Open Book Society, http://openbooksociety.com/ (November 14, 2009), Karin Perry, author interview.
Publishers Weekly, http://www.publishersweekly.com/ (October 6, 2011), Sue Corbett, author interview.
Seventeen, http://www.seventeen.com/ (December 15, 2011), Laura Rosenfeld, author interview.
YA Reads blog, http://www.yareads.com/ (September 29, 2009), author interview.*
Maggie Stiefvater
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Maggie Stiefvater
Maggie Stiefvater Blue Tile .jpg
Born Heidi Hummel
November 18, 1981 (age 39)
Harrisonburg, Virginia, US
Occupation Writer
Alma mater University of Mary Washington (B.A.)
Genre Fantasy, Young Adult fiction
Website
Official website Edit this at Wikidata
Margaret Stiefvater (/ˈstiːvɑːtər/ STEE-vah-tər; born November 18, 1981) is an American writer of Young Adult fiction, known mainly for her series of fantasy novels The Wolves of Mercy Falls and The Raven Cycle. She currently lives in Virginia.[1]
Contents
1 Life and career
1.1 Early life
1.2 Writing career
1.3 Music
1.4 Art
1.5 Cars
1.6 Personal life
2 Bibliography
2.1 Novels
2.1.1 Books of Faerie
2.1.2 The Wolves of Mercy Falls
2.1.3 The Raven Cycle
2.1.4 The Dreamer Trilogy
2.1.5 Other novels
2.2 Anthologies
2.3 Short fiction
2.4 Graphic Novels
3 Film adaptations
4 Recognition
4.1 Shiver
4.2 Lament
4.3 The Scorpio Races
4.4 The Raven Boys
4.5 The Dream Thieves
4.6 Blue Lily, Lily Blue
5 See also
6 References
7 External links
Life and career
Early life
Stiefvater was born in Harrisonburg, Virginia. She described herself as an "anxious child with many phobias."[2] As a child, she wanted to be a fighter pilot and race-car driver[3] and was a voracious reader who enjoyed writing.[4] By age 16, she was submitting manuscripts to publishers.[4] After being home-schooled from sixth grade on,[5] Stiefvater attended Mary Washington College, graduating with a B.A. in history.[6] By the time she had entered college, she had already written over 30 novels, including four thrillers about the Irish Republican Army, a historical blockade runner novel, and a high-fantasy novel about "impassioned enchanters fighting among civil unrest."[4] At 16, she legally changed her first name from Heidi to Margaret.[7] Her maiden name was Hummel.[8] After graduating, she worked as a portrait artist, specializing in equestrian art.[9] In 2010, she gave a TEDx Talk for NASA entitled "How Bad Teens Become Famous People",[10] in which she reflects on her youth as a "Bad Teen" and how those years have impacted her.
Writing career
Stiefvater published her first novel, Lament, in 2008.[11] Before Lament had been released, she sold the rights to Ballad, the sequel to Lament, and to Shiver, the first book in the trilogy The Wolves of Mercy Falls.[12] Shiver spent more than 40 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list.[13] There are over 1.7 million copies of The Wolves of Mercy Falls series in print and more than thirty-six foreign editions have been licensed.[14]
In 2011, Stiefvater published The Scorpio Races, which received 5 starred reviews and was named a Michael L. Printz Award Honor Book.[15]
Stiefvater has been very open about sharing her techniques and methods when writing. She has a series of blog posts entitled "how i write" describing her different approaches and sharing advice.[16] In 2018 and 2019, Maggie Stiefvater gave writing seminars entitled Portraits & Dreams: Writing with Maggie Stiefvater.[17] It included a lecture and a Q&A. She gave this lecture in Edinburgh, New York City, Seattle, Austin, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Toronto, and Vancouver.[18]
Music
Stiefvater plays various musical instruments.[19] She recorded original compositions for the audio books of The Scorpio Races[20] and The Raven Cycle.[21] She has a SoundCloud account where she releases her original tracks.[22] Stiefvater is very connected to music and has released playlists for some of her novels of songs she listened to while writing.[23]
Art
Self portrait by the author.
Before turning to writing full-time, Stiefvater was a professional portrait artist, specializing in colored pencil.[24] She currently has her own Etsy page and Society6 page where she sells her original art.
Stiefvater also created a Tarot card deck, The Raven's Prophecy Tarot Cards in September 2015.[25]
She was asked to create a poster for the American Library Association to promote reading.[26] The poster includes characters from The Raven Cycle and the phrase "The future belongs to those who read."
Cars
Stiefvater greatly enjoys cars, especially fast ones.[27] She has completed a stunt driving class.[28] She has worked as an automotive journalist.[27][29]
Stiefvater has frequently used her passion for vehicles to promote her novels. To promote the second book of The Raven Cycle, The Dream Thieves, Stiefvater spray-painted her own car. She later allowed fans to also spray-paint the vehicle at the book's launch in Kansas City on September 18, 2013.[30] She repeated this for another event in October 2016, where she let fans paint her Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X.[31][32] In 2013 Stiefvater went rally racing in a race car printed with the cover of The Raven Boys.[33][34]
In 2015, Stiefvater drove her Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X in a race against fellow author John Green at the Princeton Speedway.[35][36] Both their vehicles caught fire.[36][28]
Personal life
Stiefvater has a personal blog where she shares her life events.[28] Stiefvater is married to a "straight-laced husband"[28] and has two children.[37] She has four dogs named Winnie, Parsifal, Jane, and Rose.[38] She also has nine goats[39] and a horse.[40]
In 2019, Stiefvater was diagnosed with Addison's disease after she collapsed on a book tour.[41] She has been very public about her health condition in the hope that it would raise awareness for others.[41]
Bibliography
Novels
Books of Faerie
Lament (2008)
Ballad (2009)
Requiem (TBD)
The Wolves of Mercy Falls
Main article: The Wolves of Mercy Falls
Shiver (2009)
Linger (2010)
Forever (2011)
Sinner (2014)
The Raven Cycle
Main article: The Raven Cycle
The Raven Boys (2012)
The Dream Thieves (2013)
Blue Lily, Lily Blue (2014)
The Raven King (2016)
Opal (2018)
The Dreamer Trilogy
Call Down The Hawk (2019)
Mister Impossible (2021)
TBD
Other novels
The Scorpio Races (2011)
Spirit Animals Book 2: Hunted (2014)
Pip Bartlett's Guide to Magical Creatures - with Jackson Pearce (2015)
All the Crooked Saints (2017)
Anthologies
The Curiosities: A Collection of Stories - with Tessa Gratton and Brenna Yovanoff (2012)
The Anatomy of Curiosity - with Tessa Gratton and Brenna Yovanoff (2015)
Short fiction
The Hounds of Ulster (2010)
Non Quis, Sed Quid (2011)
Graphic Novels
Swamp Thing: Twin Branches - with artist Morgan Beem (October 2020)[42]
Film adaptations
Unique Features, in association with Warner Bros., optioned Shiver's film rights shortly after the book was released.[43] A screenplay was written by Nick Pustay.[44][45]
It was reported in 2011 that David Katzenberg and Seth Grahame-Smith’s KatzSmith Productions would produce a film of Scorpio Races.[46] New Line Cinema, in conjunction with Weed Road, optioned the film rights for The Raven Boys shortly before the book's release in September 2012.[47]
In 2019, Stiefvater wrote the pilot for a TV show of The Raven Cycle.[48]
Stiefvater
I am Maggie Stiefvater. I write books. Some of them are funny, ha-ha, and some of them are funny, strange. Several of them are #1 NYT Bestsellers.
I play several musical instruments (most infamously, the bagpipes), I make art, and I sometimes write about cars for magazines like Road & Track and Jalopnik.
Currently I live in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia with my husband, my two children, some cows, five dogs who fart recreationally, a horse of many colors, a criminally insane cat, an interminable number of miniature silky fainting goats, and one 1973 Camaro named Loki.
I like things that go.
Maggie Stiefvater’s Superpower
By Shanti Escalante
May 20, 2021
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Photo by Stephen Voss.
Maggie Stiefvater is one of the best young adult authors working today. Having written 30 novels by the time she was 18, her craft has ripened over time, giving us some of the most complex work being done in the genre. A master of mood, Stiefvater brings a rare lyricism to her work that deepens her graceful handling of difficult narratives, both magical and common. Her four-book series The Raven Cycle dealt with themes of class, abuse, and mortality, using magic as a means to explore these issues, not wish them away. Now her sequel series, The Dreamer Trilogy, pushes against the implicit message that magic is something that expires at adulthood, pushing her protagonists to develop their magic into maturity. Here, she discusses her writing tricks, the building blocks of YA fiction, and the importance of holding on to magic.
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SHANTI ESCALANTE-DE MATTEI: Could you describe your ideal writing atmosphere?
MAGGIE STIEFVATER: I used to say that I like to work in my office where I could have my music on and have my cup of tea. I know now that that’s completely incorrect. I’ve had to write in airports and hotels, I’ve written entire chapters in parking lots of various grocery stores while on tour or in hospital waiting rooms. Now I know that all I really need to do to be prepared to write is to have music in my ears, reminding me of the mood. Knowing the mood I’m trying to put the reader in is the most important part. If I can remember that, I’m good.
ESCALANTE-DE MATTEI: Do you keep a notebook or journal?
STIEFVATER: I do. At the beginning and end of every single book, I still pull out a journal or a piece of scrap paper and I write down my brainstorming thoughts.
ESCALANTE-DE MATTEI: Do you have a favorite quote that you tend to keep near you?
STIEFVATER: I normally have a Post-It note on my computer that has a tone statement for the book or the series that I’m working on. There’s one stuck on my computer since I started writing The Dreamer Trilogy and it says, “What do they want more?” For The Raven Cycle the note reminded me that the worst thing that would happen to any of them was that they would stop being friends.
ESCALANTE-DE MATTEI: Who’s writing do you always return to?
STIEFVATER: I have an entire shelf of favorites next to me. One of my things that I love to do when I’m stuck is I love to pull out 10 of them. I like to open up random chapters and look at the way that people start to tell a story. I really do love Diana Wynne Jones. She was probably one of my first favorite authors.
ESCALANTE-DE MATTEI: What books did you read as a kid or teen?
STIEFVATER: I was a library brat, and a Navy brat in general. I moved 18 times before I was 18 and so every time I went to a new city, my mom would get me a library card, which means I almost never read anything that was brand new. Instead, I read what was prevalent on library shelves, which means my tastes tended to be more eclectic and old-fashioned. I already mentioned Diana Wynne Jones. I think she was probably the most influential writer [in my life]. Not only did I love her combination of magic and humor, but I still remember the summer that I opened up her book and there was that page in the front that said, “Also by the author.” There was a huge long list of titles and I thought to myself, all of a sudden, “This is her job. This is what she does. You could be a writer.” I wanted to have that.
Another author that was hugely influential to me at that time was Susan Cooper, who wrote the Dark Is Rising series. Again it was that combination of writing the mundane and magical that you can see in my work you can today.
ESCALANTE-DE MATTEI: How many drafts do you typically write?
STIEFVATER: Do I think of them in terms of drafts? I don’t know. Some parts of my manuscript I’ll write and it just ends up that way in the book. Other chapters will be redone 15 or 20 times. The general scheme of having a rushed, rough, trash draft, and then having a more beautiful draft, and then having a line edit draft is true for me.
ESCALANTE-DE MATTEI: Do you consider writing to be a spiritual practice?
STIEFVATER: I do. I think that if I started to think of it as just work it wouldn’t move the reader in the same way. I’ve also done many different kinds of writing, I was a car journalist for a while, I’ve written craft pieces. Writing that [type of work] was important and obviously I was respecting my reader but it didn’t dig deep. I feel like fiction, for me, definitely digs deep. It has to.
ESCALANTE-DE MATTEI: Which writer would you choose to have dinner with living or dead?
STIEFVATER: This answer would change from day to day but I’m going to go with Susanna Clarke for today. She wrote Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and she also wrote the novel that was my favorite novel of the past five years, Piranesi. It would be cool to talk magic with her.
ESCALANTE-DE MATTEI: Do you think great writing can save the world?
STIEFVATER: I think great ideas can save the world and beautiful writing is a way to convey great ideas.
ESCALANTE-DE MATTEI: Has having children affected the way that you write?
STIEFVATER: I don’t know that it has, except I did have a very difficult parenting moment a couple of years ago. We’re very strict about our children’s bedtime, especially back then, and I realized that my daughter’s light was on and it was one o’clock in the morning. I went up there and asked her what she was doing. She had a book hidden under her pillow, and when she pulled it out, it was Shiver, which, of course, I wrote. I had to ask myself, “Do I tell her to go to sleep or allow her to keep reading my book?” You have to put aside your ego when parenting.
ESCALANTE-DE MATTEI: What makes YA different than “adult” literature? Is it the thematic concerns? The age of the characters?
STIEFVATER: To me, the major difference between a YA novel and an adult novel is the size of the protagonist’s past and future. The more a protagonist is carrying forward from the past, the more adult the story tends to feel. Characters moving forward without a lot of background to weigh them down or inform them? That tends to feel YA, no matter how old they are. That said, YA is a young and changing category. It’s transformed a lot since it became mainstream a few decades ago, and I’m sure it’ll keep shifting to keep its footing in a changing literary world.
ESCALANTE-DE MATTEI: When I was reading YA, especially when I was younger, there was this immense pain that followed ending any of these books, especially those like His Dark Materials or The Underground Chronicles, where the characters make the decision to seal off the portal to the magic world and and accept living a mundane life ,or one that isn’t full of magic. Is that pain something that you also feel as an author? Did this pain encourage you to create this sequel series?
STIEFVATER: That’s true. Every single long-running fantasy story has that moment at the end when magic goes away, the elves sail off to the Western world, the portal is closed, magic is done. Now you put away childish things, like the Bible says, and you become an adult. I disagree so much with this as a thesis statement for how to live your life. It promotes a kind of ageism and makes you think that adults are fundamentally different from teens. It makes you regret the idea of growing up. It means you always look back and think about this magical time in your youth. And it means you’re not as forward-thinking as you should be.
I don’t want to say too much about it because of course I am wrapping up this spinoff series which is very much about what happens when you become an adult and you have magic at your disposal. Looking at the end of this trilogy, and knowing that all fantasy is a metaphor, I’m very mindful of thinking about what it is that I’m telling people. I believe the rule of magic and power is in the world as an adult. And so again, not to be too spoiler-y, but I don’t agree with the concept that the portal is closed and the magic is over as being the solution to the fact that you’ve introduced magic into your narrative.
ESCALANTE-DE MATTEI: And this issue pre-dates of fantasy or YA, the concept of tucking away magic for younger readers and foreclosing that for adults. I was reading Anne Carson’s translation of Euripides’ tragedies. She has this essay on Herakles where she writes, “Herakles has reached the boundary of his own myth. He has come to the end of his interestingness. Now that he’s finished harrowing hell will he settle back on the recliner and watch TV for the rest of time?”
STIEFVATER: Right. But that’s so depressing to me. It’s the question that gets asked again and again, and it seems to be answered the same way again and again. I’m not sure that folks are happy with that answer anymore. I was reading a piece today in Scientific American that was talking about how statistically humans have really won the lotto in that we have the benefit of only being a newborn baby for the first 24 hours of our life rather than our entire life being 24 hours. This means that we see the world so differently.
I feel like as long as you explore that concept again and again that we are the mentors, we are the ends, if you start looking at that backwards and forwards, it means that you have room forever to talk about magic. Just putting it away or sending it off to a tragic death or sealing it away or destroying Narnia’s doorway–we have more interesting answers to that. When you’re a child, you’re learning how to use this magic and experience it. What do you do with it when you’re an adult? You don’t just push it away. Instead, you learn a way to mentor the next generation or change the world with it. That’s our responsibility.
ESCALANTE-DE MATTEI: You mentioned going through a very painful period of an illness and it wasn’t allowing you to write at the time. What was it like losing your ability to write easily and what was it like being able to return to that?
STIEFVATER: Losing my superpowers? It felt in many ways like the doors being closed. I had hypopituitarism. I couldn’t find words, literally. I had no sense of time and that made narrative almost impossible. I would sit at the computer for 16 hours and sometimes I would return the next day, reread what I had done, and it wasn’t even an English. The sentences didn’t make any sense at all. I threw myself into finding out what these different diagnoses are, what the different conditions are and what kind of advances they’ve made on them. Eventually I found my way back to health. I’m grateful for it every single day. Everyday that I sit down and the words come easily is an amazing thing. It makes me want to do more with it than I did before. Before it was flippant, and now it’s like I’m playing for real.
Swamp Thing: Twin Branches: Maggie Stiefvater & Morgan Beem Introduce the New Alec Holland
Swamp Thing: Twin Branches creators Maggie Stiefvater and Morgan Beem discussed their new approach to the longtime DC character's mythology.
BY MEAGAN DAMORE
PUBLISHED OCT 15, 2020
Prepare to see Alec Holland like you've never seen him before. In Swamp Thing: Twin Branches by Maggie Stiefvater and Morgan Beem, the biologist-turned-Protector of the Green is re-imagined as a teenager who finds himself sent to live by the Virginian wetlands with his twin brother Walker. As he struggles to fit in with his brother and other people his own age, he finds a kindred soul in Abby Arcane and makes a startling discovery, which triggers a twisted transformation that may save those he loves.
Speaking to CBR, Stiefvater and Beem discussed their approach to Swamp Thing's mythology. They explained the appeal of reinventing a lesser-known character in DC's stable and compared the process to retelling a fairy tale. They shared how their research changed their perception of plant life, as well as how that helped them understand Alec better. They also weighed in on whether they would return for more stories with these characters, how colorist Jeremy Lawson brought tone and atmosphere to the story and more.
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CBR: What drew you to Swamp Thing, of all the characters in the DC canon?
Maggie Stiefvater: When I was first approached by DC Comics, they were fantastic. They said, "Maggie, would like to come and play with our box of toys?" And I said, "I would love to play with someone else's toys! How exciting!"
I'd always wanted to do a graphic novel, but I just didn't have the time in my schedule to draw a graphic novel myself. I was an artist before I was an author, and I wanted to do a graphic novel at some point, but since it would be my first, it would take me forever. So I loved this idea of being handed the opportunity to do a graphic novel that didn't involve me having to try and spend the rest of my life working out whether or not I could actually figure out sequential storytelling. Thank you, Morgan!
They offered me the choice of tons and tons of characters. They said, just, "What would you like?" and I was faced with this decision of either picking a character that came with a lot of interesting baggage that had been interpreted many times, put my spin on it and know that I would immediately be met with, "Yay, Maggie Stiefvater's take on fill-in-the-blank!" or I could pick a character that hadn't gotten reinvented so much, especially in a teen space and know that I had more freedom to play and turn it truly into a Stiefvater interpretation. I decided to go for the latter.
I went for Swamp Thing/Alec Holland, because I deal with the intersection between magic and nature, and science and tradition -- all of these things get thrown together in my prose novels. So it felt like a really good idea to be able to pick it up and just stare at it really closely with Swamp Thing.
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Morgan Beem: Then, for me, when they offered me the Swamp Thing book, I was thrilled because I think -- out of all the characters in the DC Universe -- that probably would have been my first pick, just because I really like that slow, organic, somewhat supernatural horror aspect, that I feel like Swamp Thing has going on more so than a lot of the other canonical characters in the DC Universe. So it was just really fun to play with Swamp Thing as a concept, I think, a little bit easier visually, than to, say, redesign Batman, or something that's just a little bit more, if you like, visually iconic.
With the understanding that all the OGNs in this imprint are out-of-continuity, this take on Swamp Thing is so different from anything I've seen with the character. What inspired this departure from the source material?
Stiefvater: Loads of things. For starters, what I really like about Swamp Thing as a character is that he's gotten reinvented a couple times, and each time he's been reinvented in a really drastic kind of way. His origin story, what he means, has been changed. I like that in the sense of what I write in my prose novels is mythology retellings. So you take old myths, and you have to resettle them into modern times, into different locations, to mean something else. They're a metaphor for something.
I really liked how Alan Moore reinvented Swamp Thing, so that his Swamp Thing was no longer Alec Holland. Instead, it was a creature that remembered being Alec Holland. To me, I thought that was brilliant because what I wanted to bring to the project was an exploration of identity and feeling out-of-step with communicating with not only your own body, but with other people, an apparent breakdown of language in a way that makes you feel completely alien.
So I liked this idea of coming to Swamp Thing, and seeing if I could make it so that the original Alec was already kind of planty. He spoke really well to plants. Then that meant that my later creature, my Swamp Thing, was a little bit human. Then you find a happy medium in between, a chance to talk about language and what it means to try and see things from other people's point of view, even if they look really different from you. For instance, they're a plant! [laughs]
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Beem: I guess, visually, I wanted to -- and it was also both a request of the YA books; DC is trying to divorce them from continuity a little bit, right? You want to make something that's new and super accessible to people who haven't necessarily read a ton of the lore or other comics before. It was actually one of the requests, was that I not base our Swamp Thing design on the older designs and just really have my own go at it, which was super fun. I wanted to represent who he was as a teen, as the character we were portraying, which was this lanky, sort of thin, trying-to-fold-in-on-himself guy. So pretty much, I was just like, "I'm gonna make a plant-alien," was my idea. [laughs] I was like, "Make it tall and lanky!" Also, because I really like spindly things. I think they're another added element of creepy. So that's what I went for.
Stiefvater: Morgan, I have to ask you this. Have you ever been to the part of the world that I set this in, by the way?
Beem: I have not.
Stiefvater: That was really interesting to me, because one of the things that I did when I reinvented it was that I took the swamp and, instead, the swamp I send them to was wetlands that I knew, because I spent a good bit of my childhood in the wetlands of Virginia. So I put them out there. It was really interesting to describe these places, and then watch you draw them. So I wanted to know if you'd been there, because you did a really good job, I thought, in capturing what that part of Virginia looks like. So that's cool that you haven't been there.
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Beem: Well, a big shout out to Flicker and people's vacation photos. [laughs]
Stiefvater: Thank you, oversharers of the world!
Beem: I've definitely combed through some family photos. Really sorry, people, if you put it on the internet, it's reference for my work. [laughs] There was a couple of good ones of just a couple of families having some great holidays and some lady who was really into the trees down there. I was like, "Thank you!" as I was collecting family vacation albums so I could get a good sense of what the trees and things looks like, because it is a little bit different from your super swampy swamp. I lived, for two years, in Savannah, Georgia. So that's definitely where my mind went to first. So it was fun to back off from that and be like, "Oh, here's how it's different."
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Having read the OGN, I feel like I know more about plant life than I ever have before. What did your research look like as you were preparing for this story?
Stiefvater: So for me, it's always a fine line between interest and research, right? So we write books about the things that we're into, which means that when we pick up books, it doesn't feel like research, and vice versa. So I'd already been reading a lot about plants and trees and the secret language of forests for my other series, but also just because it was interesting to me. I love language.
But also at the time that I was writing this book -- this is where the soundtrack goes to a minor key -- I was getting sicker and sicker, and no one could figure out why. It all came to a head -- I'm probably the most hyper person that I've ever met -- and I collapsed on tour. I had no energy, all of a sudden. I got sick, and I never got better. At the same time, I started losing language. I started losing words. People would come to my door and they would deliver a package; I would look at the words on the box and say, "That's not this address." Then the sad postman would take away my mail, because he knew it was my address, but I couldn't read anything.
They couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. It took them a very long time to work out that I actually had a pituitary tumor -- I still do -- and it was causing all kinds of havoc on my language center and my memory processing and giving me massive problems with cognitive processing that mimicked early onset dementia, which is what they tried to actually diagnose me with for a brief period of time.
So I was very fascinated with how brains worked, how it put together language, and where that could go wrong. So as I was researching, trying to find out what was going on with my head, I kept on running across all of the same research that was going on with plants, finding out that they had these slow pulses that you could measure that, just like us, moisture moves through a tree in a pulse that is driven by electricity. It's just that it's so slow that it has taken us years to finally look at them as creatures that might be close enough to us that they might have a heartbeat, even though they don't have what we see as a heart.
So all of this research became a giant pile together while I was writing Swamp Thing, and Swamp Thing itself -- because it was a completely different format from a prose novel -- was a kind of story that I could actually hold in my head even when I couldn't hold together a complete novel, because Morgan was doing all of the heavy lifting. She was doing the storytelling. I got to give her the skeleton and she was doing the parts that I couldn't think about. End minor key music.
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Beem: It was really fun! Maggie is not giving herself enough credit by talking about heavy lifting, just because I wish -- I feel so delighted, actually, that I'm one of the few people who actually gets to read the original scripts, because -- like Maggie said, now it's sort of an amalgamation of everybody working on it -- because it was so hysterical and delightful. I remember there was one part -- I think it's on page two -- where we zoom into a caterpillar eating a leaf. Maggie put a little note that was like, "Dear artist, I'm very sorry that I'm going to make you look up closely what a caterpillar mouth looks like, and you're gonna have to talk about it in your next interview," or something like that. [laughs]
Stiefvater: That was before I knew you! Now I imagine you're probably far less scarred by caterpillar mouthparts. But if you are the sensitive type, do not look them up on the web! They were never meant to be put under the microscope.
Beem: It was actually really fun that Maggie had done all this heavy-lifting research that all the plants that were -- if there's a plant that you're distinctly seeing that's not just in the background, Maggie did research about what it is, how it behaves, its scientific name, which was really great, because then it made it super easy for me to look it up and be like, "That's what that plant looks like," which was fun.
From there, then, using this specific plant research made me then think about the extra elements I was adding, not just putting a generic tree leaf or a different thing and starting to look up plant meanings or how plants resonate or different kinds of trees and tree leaves and which ones work better where they would grow, which was really fun. It almost felt like putting secret messages in our comic. Then, a really fun life thing is now I feel like when I wander around, I'll look at tree leaves and be like, "Ah, it's a maple!" Like, "Oh, that plant is whatever," because I feel like I'm much more informed now.
Stiefvater: Look! See, we're changing, like Alec. I have to tell you, a reader just gave me such a great piece of advice. They said that they really recommended the app PlantSnap. I sound like I'm plugging this app, and I am, but it's fantastic. It's got millions and millions of plants and you just take a picture while you're out walking, and it will tell you what the tree is or the plant or the flower or whatever. I love it!
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I don't think an app like PlantSnap would have ever crossed my mind!
Stiefvater: I know, right? I don't know why I didn't think, "Oh, yes, there's probably something which is like facial recognition, except for poison ivy." But there it is!
How did you go about capturing the spirit of these characters, despite all the changes?
Stiefvater: Well, so I think that's the mythology thing, right? One of the things about retelling a fairy tale or myth is that you have to know why the original myth existed, in order to remove the bits that aren't important to it anymore. So if you retell King Arthur, if you don't know why Lancelot acts like Lancelot, you'll change too much and he'll become not recognizable. If you retell Goldilocks, then you have to know why there's three bears and the order that they come in, right? You have to know the rules that prove that. Otherwise, it will no longer look like Goldilocks. What makes a Cinderella retelling a Cinderella retelling: you have to know what is Cinderella's central problem, just metaphorically taken down to bare bones, and then you build it back up again, and that's the reason why we can do it again and again.
So when I was looking at Swamp Thing, I was asking, "What is the question that Swamp Thing is trying to look at, in every single iteration? What does it mean to be these characters? How do they engage with plants in different ways?" And always with Alec, it was engaging with biology as a way to understand himself. It was about trying to make the world a more understandable place, in general, for him to live in.
Abby, on the other hand, engages the plants and biology and science in a way that is very pure; it's for itself. So the way that she engaged with that big old tree is different than the way that Alec engages it, even though they're both interested in the world. So for me, maintaining that sense of Swamp Thing was really about making sure that it's still talking about that question of, "What does it mean to be human? And how much of yourself can you give away before you start feeling like you are no longer yourself?"
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Beem: I would just say, again, I think Maggie, with the story, did a lot of that heavy lifting for me. Visually, I think it's a little bit easier when you're recreating characters, especially in something like the DC Universe, because those characters have been recreated so many times, that as long as the reader knows the bare minimum of what to expect, I feel like, visually, you can differentiate a lot, right? For Swamp Thing, obviously, there is a classic Swamp Thing, like, "This is the way Swamp Thing looks." But if you look over time, between realism styles or cartoony styles or whatever, you expect to know what Swamp Thing looks like, and so you'll suspend disbelief into these different styles, but that just is who the character is.
Obviously, [in] our story, the design is very different, but I think the characters on a whole are different, and they're meant to be, but I think because you're still going into it with the Swamp Thing, knowledge of the lore, kind of like Maggie touched on, you're willing to just roll with that. So I think when I was designing her characters, I actually tried specifically not to think about the original source material, because I wanted it to have a fresher take. Again, because it was already still in that wheelhouse, I think that that gave me the opportunity to do my own thing a little bit more, if that makes sense.
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What was something this departure enabled you to do, that you're so excited to share with DC fans and new readers alike?
Stiefvater: For many of my readers, this is going to be the first time they ever pick up a book that is a graphic novel or a comic. I mean, most of my readers, the vast majority of them. I have very faithful readers. I love them! I've been doing this for a decade. They'll come to book signings and they have all 14 books or whatever stacked up, and they'll buy even my middle grade books or whatever. But they're prose readers! They read prose, and many of them will pick this book up just because it has my name on it, and I'm excited for them to see what they feel about graphic novels, because graphic novels are a really interesting medium right now.
When I first got into this industry, YA could be anything; it was all genres, and that was what made it really appealing as a novelist. You didn't have to be just a romance writer or a thriller writer or a fantasy writer. YA could blend all these things, and that's really literary language too, because the stakes are pretty low. It was very kind of the corner of the room, where all of the dorky kids stood around.
Now, as YA has become more commercial, it is falling back into various, more delineated genres. Instead, graphic novels is where all of these dorky kids are congregating, and it's also where there's lots of marginalized creators, and all kinds of stories that aren't getting told in other spaces. So I'm excited for my readers who are maybe still hungry for that kind of content to find this as an open doorway into other stories.
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Beem: Yeah, I agree with what Maggie said. I think one of the things that's really exciting about these new YA books, both ours and a lot of the other ones that have come out, is that they are free of continuity, and they are somewhat one-shot graphic novels. You can just pick up the one book. You don't have to worry about it being 27 volumes, and where you're going to get it, and it just makes it a lot more accessible.
Even myself, comics are my life; I want everybody to read graphic novels all the time, because just like Maggie said, I think they are so much more than people who don't know a lot about comics think they are. They can be so sunny and action-packed and that kind of thing, kind of like the movies, but they can also be deep-felt and teach you things about life and communicate in a way that other media can't.
Myself, coming from more of an indie comics background, or certainly a non-superhero background, it's really fun to have this comic, and even for comic readers! Maybe you're somebody who mostly just reads Image Comics or other complete graphic novels, and you don't know where to start with superhero comics and you're really interested in DC, but you don't really know where to pick up in Teen Titans or Swamp Thing or whatever, and so these YA one-shots are really cool because it gives you the opportunity just to grab this book to learn a little bit about a character in a new way, and then have an entry point to loving that character.
So that's what I hope for ours, especially for Swamp Thing not being as well known as Superman and Batman and some of the other ones, but somebody can just be like, "Oh, a Maggie Stiefvater book!" or just see it at the bookstore and pick it up, and then have an entryway into falling in love with this character.
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One of things that struck me is that Twin Branch's version of Abby Arcane is Black. At what point in the process of the story did you come to this decision, and why was this change important to you?
Stiefvater: I will let Morgan take this one.
Beem: When I was doing the character design, I think it's just how she came to me. Reading the descriptions that she was this goth girl who lives in this coastal marshland, this small town setting, but loves science and we're already kind of getting this idea that she is a little abrupt and awkward, but also very strong and a little bit more self-assured than a lot of teens around her. As I draw out the characters, I think about the descriptions and it just kind of comes to me. I get that it's obviously really important to show a diverse cast of characters, because life is diverse, and otherwise, you're kidding yourself and everybody else. But yeah, that's just kind of how it went.
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Maggie, from what I understand, you're something of an artist yourself! How did that impact the way you approached the script? Morgan, I'd also love to hear if and how that affected the way you tackled the art.
Stiefvater: So it's interesting, because I was not that kind of artist. Actually, in my post-college days, I was an equestrian portrait artist, which sounds really super fancy, and sometimes it was. Sometimes, I would go out into the countryside, and I would meet the owner of a horse or a very fancy child at a very fancy house, and I would paint some great portrait they would hang in their storied halls. Sometimes what I would do is I would just paint copies of the old masters and put the heads of cats on them and sell them on eBay. I mean, this was the artist life.
But what was interesting about writing this script is that it reminded me less of my traditional art, and more of a project that I had just done, and actually I was in the process of doing one, which, weirdly, is coming out [this] week, which is that I've drawn two Tarot decks. So Tarot is completely dissimilar from comics, except for the fact that it deals with tropes. It's 78 cards, and each of those cards has a specific, complicated meeting, kind of like a DC superhero. Then, your job as an artist, if you're reinterpreting it, is to try and create a piece of art on each card that will instantly remind the person holding the card of that complicated meaning inside it. So if you have a card that's the heartbreak card, which is heartbreak that you caused, versus a card which is about being destroyed by an external event that had nothing to do with you, trying to find a visual metaphor for that, where you're trying to be as efficient as possible to imply a huge amount of story with just an image, that kind of project felt so much like writing the pages.
As an artist, I would have hated to have been dictated how to do my job, and I wanted to make sure that whatever artist I ended up working with felt like they had the ability to work and interpret as broadly as they wanted to. So what I was trying to do was say, "Alright, what information would I need on this page in order to make it into a metaphor for the story that I'm trying to tell? What images mean what I'm trying to say?" So it felt like the same kind of puzzle. 180 visual puzzles.
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Beem: Maggie, being a visual artist, definitely showed in the script. Sometimes I've worked with writers who, when they're going through the scripts, they see it a little bit more like a movie in their heads, which is fine, and again, you adjust and figure things out. I've been drawing sequential pages for almost a decade now. But sometimes, you'll get something that's called "a double action," where the character pours tea and then drinks it in one panel, and you kind of have to be like, "Well, you can't do that!" [laughs] I've definitely had to come back sometimes to a writer and be like, "Hey, this thing you wrote, can you visualize that in your mind? Because if you can't visualize it, I can't draw it!" You know, something that's just crazy that makes sense in the story, but that maybe you couldn't actually see in that moment.
The nice thing about our Swamp Thing script is that there really wasn't any of that in there. Everything really made sense. It was easy to interpret. There wasn't a lot of those hang ups.
Stiefvater: I felt really bad, Morgan, actually, about something that you actually did beautifully, and I don't even know if it was a problem for you. But I felt really bad about having to put in all the nuts and bolts about diabetes, about the blood sugar readings, because that's a really fiddly thing to show visually. It would be such a snap in prose. You just put a throwaway paragraph in there to describe how his sensor works or whatever, and so I felt really bad that I was sending you down this rabbit hole of trying to describe his complicated relationship with blood sugars.
Beem: No, you did a great job, because you provided all the information I needed to then -- the nice thing is that there are like -- God, the internet is a helpful place. There are so many YouTube videos of people installing the reader in the arm, and then how you check it and what that looks like. But I was able to watch just a mass of diabetic YouTube videos, and then take screen grabs of what the swipe motion looks like, and how you hold it on your hand and try and figure out the best way to do that. So that wasn't too bad at all.
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Stiefvater: Good! Imagine Morgan's year right now, by the way, of googling scientific plant names and watching diabetic YouTube. I just think, "You're welcome!"
Beem: There's also books I've worked on in the past, where it's werewolf hunters, or I don't know, different things that have really specific guns, and I'm not a gun person, so I don't know. So then I had to sit there and be like, "How do you load this? What does that look like?" I think the government is definitely watching my search history.
I will say, though, at the beginning, definitely, I had read a lot of Maggie's books, but Maggie, I had never actually followed you online. So I didn't know that you were a visual artist until I was telling -- I'm part of a small comic studio here -- and all my studio-mates are actually huge fans of your work. Then they were like, "You know that she's a really great visual artist too, right?" Then they pulled up your page and was showing me and I was like, "Oh, no." [laughs] A little intimidating to start, but I feel like we got the groove, so it was fine!
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Morgan, tell me a little about working with colorist Jeremy Lawson and what you felt he brought to the book.
Beem: So Jeremy is extraordinary. He's an extraordinary colorist. He also does sequential work, too, so he's his own artist. He's actually a member of my studio here in Denver, which was so helpful, because this was actually my first time working with another colorist. I usually watercolor my own work.
So Jeremy was infinitely patient, first off, in just helping me figure out how to format things properly for somebody to have an easier time coloring them and that kind of thing. He took a lot of time to internalize the mood of this book and the feeling. We talked about when you are in a more humid forest or a kind of marshland setting, that you can almost taste to the green, right? Like it surrounds you. So he worked really hard, and I think did an extremely good job, of putting this green overlay or this haze to the book that really made you feel completely encased in plant life, in nature, in green, even in maybe shots that they weren't.
He also, I think, did an exceptional transition in ramping up the color palette with a little bit more of these intense, psychedelic colors when things get a little bit crazier, that I think does a really good job of pulling the character into that mood and accelerating your heartbeat with that. So you're right, I think the colors play a really big part in how the mood is perceived, and I think he just knocked it out of the park.
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Do you have plans to write more stories with this version of Swamp Thing?
Stiefvater: I would totally be into it. Definitely following Abby. I think that would be very cool, because transformation is the first step of the journey. But then what you do with it, I mean, that's really the complicated part of an adulthood.
What do you hope readers take away from this story?
Stiefvater: Oh, man. For me, I would definitely hope that they would take away empathy for not just other people, but also for themselves and just for the natural world, because we have much more in common than we expect. A lot of times, the people and the things that we think we know the best are actually the things that we're giving the shortest shift, so I'm hoping that they'll read that and think, "Oh yeah, maybe this action that I was interpreting about this person was not what I was thinking, and maybe this plant that I am being cavalier about is actually a little closer to me" and just walk more lightly through the world, I think.
Beem: At least for me, and I'm sure for pretty much everybody else, that time period as a young adult, in your teens and especially your early 20s, I feel like there's a lot of settling into yourself and finding yourself that happens. Part of the hard part about that is sometimes you break the conception of yourself that you had, who you maybe thought you were, and also along with a lot of the good points and strengths that come with that, I think you also see a lot of possibly bad sides of yourself that you maybe were a little blind to before, and that can be a really hard transition. So I hope just reading this book, people can realize that everybody's got different sides, everybody's got good and bad sides in them, and that settling into yourself and being okay with that is an okay thing and that everybody, no matter if you are the outgoing life of the party or the introverted shut-in, everybody struggles with that to a certain extent and that things will settle and you will find your place in your own comfort and yourself.
Swamp Thing: Twin Branches by Maggie Stiefvater and Morgan Beem is now on sale from DC.
Stiefvater, Maggie MISTER IMPOSSIBLE Scholastic (Teen None) $16.99 5, 18 ISBN: 978-1-338-18836-3
Whether dreamed or crafted, art engenders life.
Creation and destruction, art and mimicry, power and disenfranchisement: The world requires balance, but the Lynch brothers, standing at the center of it all, have always tended to extremes. Although Ronan continues to be the pivot, the dreams take precedence: Jordan finds herself as a maker rather than a forger while Matthew grapples with who he is now that he understands he was dreamed. Power dynamics have shifted following the showdown between the dreamers and the Moderators. Three groups—the dreamers, the dreams, plus a rogue Moderator/Visionary team, each selfish, amoral, and deeply sympathetic in turn—circle one another, trying to change or save the world, or dreams, or themselves, or all of the above. The dreamers want open ley lines and the freedom to dream. The dreamed want to live free of their dreamers. Farooq-Lane wants to stop killing but still stop the dreamers. More meditative than the first volume, this complexly plotted wonder offers little to reorient readers but much to engage them. Stiefvater’s pitch-perfect prose, detached and full of precise details, creates a tension that never lets up until the zinger of an ending that will leave fans gasping. The Lynch brothers are White; Jordan is Black, and Farooq-Lane’s name cues some Middle Eastern heritage.
Explosive. (Fantasy. 13-adult)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Stiefvater, Maggie: MISTER IMPOSSIBLE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A661546028/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=d233708f. Accessed 16 Oct. 2021.
Stiefvater, Maggie SWAMP THING DC (Teen None) $16.99 10, 13 ISBN: 978-1-4012-9323-9
Twin brothers try to understand each other as their lives take separate paths.
The Incredible Holland Bros may be identical twins, but their personalities couldn’t be more distinct. Walker is the outgoing, thrill-seeking protector while Alec is the reserved plant whisperer. The boys are shipped off to Rappahannock, Virginia, to spend their last summer before college in the country with their cousins after catching their father cheating. Walker’s easygoing disposition makes his transition smooth, but Alec’s research on capturing and transferring the thoughts and memories of plants is disrupted when his cousin’s dogs eat his specimen, which he’s named Boris. The brothers grow apart as Walker becomes part of the local scene and Alec spends time in the high school lab working on his project. The summer heats up when a legendary tree is destroyed at a party, leading Alec to become his brother’s protector and sinking him further into his experiment. There is a slow, choppy build to the story, with botanical information interspersed so readers understand the science behind Alec’s research. Colors are used effectively, with green and earth tones indicating Alec’s bond with nature while deep purples and blues show the effects of his experiments. The panels vary in shape and layout, maintaining visual interest. The twins appear White, but there is diversity among the cast.
An unusual origin story for a lesser-known DC Universe hero. (Graphic fiction. 13-18)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Stiefvater, Maggie: SWAMP THING." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2020. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A632285580/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c7630c8f. Accessed 16 Oct. 2021.