Photo Inspiration - Forest

I took this photo in the Forest of Dean last Sunday. I love the forest. When I was a little girl I stayed with my grandmother in Berryhill, not far from Symonds Yat. My house in the Czech Republic is only fifteen minutes walk from the forest. When I can’t write, I take a basket and wander through the trees looking for mushrooms.

Desert Island Books - Earthsea books

A superb four-part fantasy, comparable with the work of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, the “Earthsea” books follow the fortunes of the wizard Ged from his childhood to an age where magic is giving way to evil. As a young dragonlord, Ged, whose use-name is Sparrowhawk, is sent to the island of Roke to learn the true way of magic. A natural magician, Ged becomes an Archmage and helps the High Priestess Tenar escape from the labyrinth of darkness. But as the years pass, true magic and ancient ways are forced to submit to the powers of evil and death.

Goodreads description

I managed to not read Ursula Le Guin’s books as a child and a teenager. It was not until my student son read The Wizard of Earthsea and told me that I would love it, that at last I settled down with the book.He was right, I loved it and all the other Earthsea books. Why, oh why did I wait so long? Maybe because I wrongly thought of them as children’s books. They can be read by children, but an adult reader will get so much more from Le Guin’s writings. What makes Le Guin so special?Le Guin has a genius for world creation  – Earthsea feels like somewhere I know and will know. Sometimes, as with my own fictional worlds, I come upon a place in this world which is Earthsea. Of course every reader will have a different Earthsea; Le Guin is brilliant at giving enough but not too much description so that we each can see our own vision. The same is true of the descriptions of her characters. I have an image of each, but what I remember tends not to be their physical appearance, but their thoughts, motives, loves and fears. For all Le Guin’s genius in world-making, she writes about humanity.

I love the way she is able to create fantastic worlds which allow her to explore big issues. In the Wizard of Earthsea, the first Earthsea book, the young hero makes an error of judgement and must face the consequences. In Jungian psychology all that we dislike and repress about ourselves is called our shadow. In order to be fully mature we must turn, face it and name it, something most of us fail to do. This happens quite literally in the Wizard of Earthsea. There are other similarly important themes in her other books.I had been a poet, playing with symbols and metaphors. Le Guin showed me that this was possible in a novel too and that it was possible to do this whilst telling a good story.

Ursula Le Guin inspired me to start writing novels. And she even provided the best book I know on writing – Steering the Craft.

This morning my new book Love of Shadows had its first review on Amazon and Goodreads. In it the reviewer says that she thought the series “similar to Ursula Le Guin’s books set in the fictional country of Orsinia”. I could not be more honoured by a comparison.

Photo Inspiration - Olsina

This is a photo of Lake Olsina in Southern Bohemia. I can walk here from my Czech house. It’s a very special place for me. It is set in a natural bowl formed by the surrounding hills. One of its attractions is that it is undisturbed. Much of the surrounding forests are in a military zone, which means that it is accessible only at weekends and that building is restricted in the locality.

The lake is man-made – a renaissance fishpond, which is still farmed today. Every other Autumn (in October or November) the sluices are opened and the lake drained. The carp are herded into the nets of the waiting fishermen. My friend Hannah had an old cottage next to the lake and I stayed with her one year, waking at 6 to watch the harvest. Crowds gathered to watch and buy fresh fish. When everyone had gone, it was the turn of the water birds to arrive – gulls of course, but also herons and white egrets.

At other times I have watched the mating dance of crested grebes rising and bowing on the still surface of the lake. In the summer Hannah and I would go swimming in the lake’s now warm waters, with the carp blowing bubbles around us or we would wander into the forest to collect wild mushrooms.

On the day of Hannah’s funeral I came to Olsina and launched a little paper boat on the waters in remembrance of her. In the boat’s prow I set a picture she had painted of a man waving. The boat bobbed in the current before disappearing round a small headland. My farewell said, I returned to my car and drove home. Later when I looked closer at the picture I saw that it was titled “Crossing Lethe.”

Desert Island Books - Weirdstone of Brisingamen

A tale of Alderley

When Colin and Susan are pursued by eerie creatures across Alderley Edge, they are saved by the Wizard. He takes them into the caves of Fundindelve, where he watches over the enchanted sleep of one hundred and forty knights.

But the heart of the magic that binds them – Firefrost, also known as the Weirdstone of Brisingamen – has been lost. The Wizard has been searching for the stone for more than 100 years, but the forces of evil are closing in, determined to possess and destroy its special power.

Colin and Susan realise at last that they are the key to the Weirdstone’s return. But how can two children defeat the Morrigan and her deadly brood?

Amazon description

This (and Moon of Gomrath, the second book in the Alderley trilogy) has to be my all-time  favourite book from my childhood.  I remember arguing with my teacher Elizabeth Webster that Alan Garner’s stories were better than Tolkien’s.

What makes this so great is the authenticity of the stories – they are based on real localities (Alderley Edge) and local myths. They are fantasy, but their roots are in the hills of Cheshire and British mythology. Garner arguably gave me my first introduction to magic realism, the genre in which I write. I could have chosen other books by this writer – The Owl Service, Elidor and of course the great Red Shift, but Weirdstone was how I first experienced Garner’s work and so it holds a special place in my heart.

Whether the book had such a strong hold on me (which it retains) because it chimed with my vision of the world – history and myth woven in to the present – or because it informed my view is impossible to say now. But I read this book over and over again throughout my childhood, delighting in Garner’s wonderful descriptions – the account of Colin and Susan’s journey through the disused mineworkings of the Edge beats the journey through the Mines of Moria into a cocked hat.

After many years Garner has just published the sequel – a book for adults called Bonelands. It’s on the list of what I want for Christmas. That’s if I can wait that long.

My fox - World Animal Day Blog Hop

The first thing I do when I arrive back at my house in the Czech Republic, even before I unlock the door, is rub the muzzle of the fox door knocker. It is an old farmhouse on a hill called Liski  Dira (Fox Hole in Czech) and the house is just like a fox with its haunches buried into the earth. As I lie in bed at night sometimes I can hear a vixen calling in the orchards above. The village dogs respond with frantic barking, but you can hear the fox laughing at them. “You have sold your freedom for a bowl of meat,” she says. “I have the moon and all the dark spaces in the forest.”

When I first bought the house I didn’t see any foxes, perhaps I was too busy restoring the house. I certainly wasn’t writing, although I had bought the house as a writing retreat. One evening as a taxi brought me from the station a fox crossed the road in the headlamp beam. “Liska,” said the driver with a smile. The following day I walked down from the woods with a basket of chanterelle mushrooms, called lisky (foxes) in Czech. It had started raining as I picked them and now it was sheeting down, so my head was bowed. Then I looked up and there standing in the middle of the lane a few yards away was a large fox looking straight at me. It contemplated me for a while and then trotted off across the fields. When we lived in London we were used to the brazen nature of town foxes, and  even had a family of them sharing the garden with our cat, but in the countryside foxes are shy of humans. I told my Czech friend about the meetings with the fox. “That’s wonderful,” she said. “Foxes are lucky in this country, just like black cats in England. No wonder the taxi driver was pleased when a fox crossed your path. They are meant to be the familiars of witches, you know.”

After that sighting, the fox started to appear to me all the time and as it did so I began to write again. It seemed the fox was now my familiar and a bringer of words. Then during one stay in the house I didn’t see my fox at all and yet I still managed to write. My husband was visiting from the UK and as we stood in the back bedroom I commented on my fox’s absence. He grinned and said “Zoe turn round and look out of the window.” There, only a few feet away from us, my fox was strolling through the orchard. 

Toadstools - Photo Inspiration

How about these for classic fairytale toadstools? You can almost see one of the little people sitting on the top of them, can’t you? Fly agaric is the correct name. It’s not for eating, in fact a good rule is not to eat  red mushrooms. Fly agaric is a hallucinatory mushroom and eating it is said to give you the sensation of flying. It is a therefore part of many a shaman’s toolkit.

There are tales of reindeer eating the mushroom and staggering around trying to fly. Maybe Rudolf had eaten one too many!

Magic Realism Blog

Just after I had published Girl in the Glass I went to an alternative literature festival in Leicester. I was still incredibly green about publishing and was unclear what sort of story I was writing. I knew it didn’t fit neatly into the usual genre headings that one gets on Amazon. I had got as far as knowing that it was a) women’s fiction and b) not quite fantasy. I was having a soup for lunch when I got chatting to another writer, who asked me what I wrote. I gave a short description and he repled “Oh you write magic realism.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Well Terry Pratchett described it as fantasy for people whose friends went to Oxbridge.”

“Oh,” I said thinking that indeed many of my friends were graduates of Oxford or Cambridge.

I wrote the genre down on a piece of paper, stuffed it in to my handbag and continued eating. When I got home, I could not find the paper nor could I remember what genre he had said I wrote.

A month or so later I found a review of the book on Amazon. The reviewer Iain M. Grant said:
“Zoe Brook’s novel is a true magic realist story. Its setting is a world that is not ours but is nonetheless recognisable. It is a novel in which the almost magical and vaguely supernatural are an accepted reality. Reading it, I couldn’t help but be reminded favourably of other authors. The setting and Anya’s sprawling and occasionally grotesque family put me in mind of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Having said that the harsh, epic landscape of the story and the fable-like quality of a narrative held shades of Paulo Coelho.”

Lawks a mercy me! Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my all-time favourite books. Now armed with the name of the genre I did a Google search and discovered not only that I wrote magic realism, but that I had been reading it for years and not knowing it. There still seemed to be a lot ambiguity in my mind about what constituted magic realism, but I think this was because the term gets used wrongly. I decided that I would get to know my genre better. But how would this be achieved?

I knew that in order to do it properly I should set myself a task, one which is public and which I would feel obliged to complete. So I decided I would read one magic realist book a week for a year and that I would record my progress and what I found out about magic realism publicly on a dedicated blog. For the purposes of selecting books for the blog I chose the simplest definition I could find.

It’s now a month since I started and I’m loving it. I have drawn up a to-read list, following suggestions taken mostly from Goodreads, where there are at least two Magic Realism groups and several booklists. The books are very diverse – some literary, some for the popular market – which adds to my enjoyment. The requirement that I review what I read has proved extremely useful in solidifying my thoughts on the book and the genre.

So after all that work what is magic realism? I’m glad to say that the definition I chose is still remaining true: “Magical Realism is a literary genre that incorporates fantastic or mythical elements into otherwise realistic fiction.”

Please do visit the Magic Realism blog and check it out, better still join me in my challenge or at least part of it. It’s on https://magic-realism-books.blogspot.co.uk