Bramble Fox - Prize-Winning German Fantasy Writer, Kathrin Tordasi, and Portal Fantasy

Hello and welcome to MythMakers. MythMakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives brought to you by the Oxford Centre for fantasy. My name is Julia Golding. I'm an author but I'm also the director of the Centre. And today I'm very excited because I am joined by a new to me writer from Germany called Catherine Tordassi. So Catherine, first of all, have I got your name right? So I said that. Yeah that's my in the ballpark. And I had great pleasure reading Catherine's new book Bramble Fox. Well it's new to translation which is published by Pushkin Press. And I thought Catherine would be a wonderful person to talk to for many reasons but mostly because this is a fantastic fantasy book for children. So first of all Catherine, do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey to becoming a writer? And also perhaps where you're sitting right at this moment? Yeah sure. First of all, thank you very much for inviting me to this podcast. It's a real pleasure and I'm really glad I get to do this. So thank you very much. Yeah right now I'm sitting in Berlin in my little flat on the rooftop so to speak. And yeah I've been living here for 10 years now. And yeah this is where I live and work if I'm not travelling. And yeah Bramble Fox is my first, my debut novel. It came out in 2020. It's a fantasy for children. And I'm very chuffed that I got picked up by Pushkin Press and translated. It was the whole process was actually very lovely and a big thank you to Pushkin Press again. And my editor over there Daniel Ceton because I got to work with them on the translation which which is really nice. So I got to sort of see how the book transformed from German to English. Yeah I've been writing or telling stories. Sometimes it feels like forever. So like since I was a little kid, my grandma and my mum were big storytellers and I kind of picked it up from them. So and then just never stopped. And then when I got a bit older, I wanted to do something with literature. And as you do you know you do something. I wanted to be a writer for as long as I knew that it's a job. But then you go into something sensible. Go to university and I studied German literature and English literature and studied in Wales for a while. Then came back to Germany, got a PhD, taught English literature and cultural studies for a couple of years here in Berlin. And then I started publishing books, children's books, Bramble Fox or the German Bombay books was the first. A couple have now followed. I'm still on it. And yeah since of this year I switched jobs and I'm working as a full-time writer and translator now. Well first of all congratulations because people listening may not know how difficult it is to make you know all the pieces of things you do as an author add up to something that pays the bills. So well done. Thank you. We also just before we move on we should do a shout-out to the translator of Bramble Fox for those we do. Catherine Witts, Vince, Vince, yeah. Don't speak German but I sort of knew that Witts. I suspect Catherine that you've sort of given me the answer to the first question I have for you which is one of the things that surprised me when I started reading Bramble Fox is Bramble Fox. Well it's set in Wales and it draws on the fairy law of Wales as well as Shakespeare's Mid-Summer Night Streams. So first question I have is you're sitting in Berlin. What made you want to write a story set in Wales? Oh yeah well first of all a big big shout out to Catherine Witts who wrote a really excellent translation. It was such an amazing experience to read a story that I've written translated into another language and she did this really beautifully. I already told her via email but if she's listening to this thank you Catherine once again. Why did I choose to have this story and have Wales as a setting? Yeah I've been I lived in Wales in North Wales in Banga for about a year and I really loved it there. So it was it was a great time for me. It was a very formative year as well so towards the end of my studies and I loved the landscape. It's a very banga is sort of situated between the sea and the Snowdonia National Park so you have the mountains here, the coastline. I'm very big on hiking so I was outdoors a lot and I also really enjoyed the university program there. So Banga University took a lot of classes, also got into archery which was fun and yeah of an archery club at that's what I did for a while and yeah when I was there I went on hikes I always had my notebook with me and started to sort of collect impressions of the places that I would visit and the different kinds of legends and folklore elements that I came into contact with and yeah so that's how the first ideas for the Bramberfog stories got together and then I got to read I think it's Charlotte Guest a version of the Binogian which is this collection of the Welsh biological and and folkloristic stories that inspired a lot of the King Arthur Law for example and there came first came across Anoun and and around and so that sort of lodged in there I read then more recently I came across a Welsh artist called CCJ Alice who did a wonderful art book on Welsh monsters and creatures so there's a bit of inspiration there and yeah I also when I wrote the book the probably a diski kimreig department at Banga University who who helped me with research questions and language which checks and so on so it's yeah they're born out of a stayed her into sort of a fortive year for me in Wales yeah so we've mentioned for those of you who love your Welsh language or just love languages anyone who like talking's languages will know that it's based on Welsh or partly is there you're using another a little list of vocab at the back you're using the Welsh language as part of the texture and feeling of the tale and also just do a sort of promo for this podcast if you go back a couple of episodes to the Welsh episode you can hear us talking to Claire Faea who is a Welsh lady who collects Welsh tale so this will lovely in 2001 after you've heard Catherine speak today so I was also interested so there you've got Wales as one centre for the story but you then have many of the characters from Shakespeare's Amidsterm and Nightstream Nightstream has an element of existing folkloric characters and one's Shakespeare made up and part of his plays but that's obviously he's the man from Stratford upon Avan an Englishman so how do you go along with the idea of incorporating the Welsh tradition with oh was your fact that you are from Germany make that you could just ignore all that kind of well I would call by method perhaps irreverent homage so I kind of I mean I studied English literature so Shakespeare was very big of course in the courses that I took and the midsummer night was one of the plays that fascinated us and I was also always fascinated by how by sort of the myth surrounding Shakespeare the author so these questions of where did he get his ideas did he write the plays did someone else write the plays so all these these different kinds of yeah myths and questions and stuff so I what I did when I wrote Bramberfox I knew that I wanted to include fairy law or and always appreciated or what I've been fascinated by it comes to the the use of myth and folklore in in literature is how how these myths and legends overlap and transfer and transform in different cultures but also in different types of literature and how they had reread and rewritten so this kind of pastiche or or or or bricolage of different motives put together into into retellings and then slightly issue stories of of other material I always liked when I when I read books that did that so I that was something that I wanted to try out and in in Wales you have this you have a lot of fairy law there they're called or one term that is used there till with till with tech so the fair family as a sort of collective term for for fairies or elves but I did for Bramber I so imagined Shakespeare as a traveler between worlds so I thought what if he actually went through a portal like the children in the books and visited the the the fairy world and came back with a back full of stories but he's made up to that more entertaining and there wasn't an early bramberfox there was this scene where Titania complained about him writing amid someone a donkey story is pure fabrication so it's it's just it's it's a bit of silliness to be honest coming from an English literature student I think we see a perfectly allowed to do that because obviously here at the Oxford Central Fantasy one of our sort of other quatchstones is the Narnia stories and C.S. Lewis completely means no a Greek mythology and all sorts of Arthurian legends and he just goes oh okay chuck a bit of this in bit of that he's like that he's like that chef who's around the kingdom around the kingdom pulling everything out with the cupboards put into his kingdom so I mean you've just touched on it but another way of describing Bramberfox is that it's a portal fantasy which we've had while it's in folklore you know the doors in the hillside you go through into another world and you get it in literature in Alice in Wonderland and back to Lewis again so how do you come up with your version of a portal leading into this liminal land of a land of mist that sits between our world and not many worlds but including the world of the faith yeah so liminal space I find this the idea behind that quite fascinating so this idea that there are places where our understanding of reality dissolves like threshold places or even a space in time where we transition from one state of being to another and of course there's also the real life or metaphorical implications of that there's tons of cultural studies on the idea of liminal rituals or liminal states of being that people in basically all societies that we know have to go through in order to grow up so coming of age rituals would be one one example where you're sort of caught between the status of a child and a grown up and then you go through kind of ritual and then you sort of slip into this new identity and I really like this idea that you have to go through a sort of in-between phase and for Ben and Portia the borderlands between the human world and the fairy world they signify exactly that so they they have to go through this place in order to distance themselves from the world they know but also from their own place in the world so they they change quite a lot in this book Ben needs to find more confidence and move a little bit out of his shell and also confront his own personal grief and Portia will discover that there's a certain wilderness in her that she has to content with so it's yeah I like this idea of the transition that you have to sort of that sort of unlocks things so for people who are wondering what kind of book this is that we're reading I think that as having read it I would say that it feels like quite a traditional children's tale in the sense of you've got children one child going away to stay with relatives because her mother's in a bad place who discovers the secret in the house which will and has the spooky presence of a fox who keeps turning up and she follows the fox and the fox wants something from her she doesn't know what but she kind of gets led along her named Portia and then the other main character is a boy called Ben that you've just mentioned who is sort of following on behind when Portia opens the door to the other world so it's it's got a lot of air of mystery reminded me of things like Tom's midnight garden books by Susan Cooper those sorts of stories so it's it's a wonderful read so thank you so much that's quite a flattering comparison it's not super I mean there's lots of things to discuss but one thing that I was thinking about it about it as from the point of view of also being a writer of fantasy is that you have in it a very interesting take on Good and Evil in that the Bramble Fox who I don't actually want to say who he is because the Bramble Fox himself and Titania who is the queen of the fairies who we go on to meet they are fearsome and they have their own agenda and so do you think that having this you can't say they're evil though they're not like on the same scale as the humans in the story so do you think it's important to complicate what's good and evil in fantasy because your big baddie actually just thinking about him the great king who is this presence in the very scary presence in the the liminal land of mist I mean arguably he's not bad either he's just in the wrong place is my my take on him yeah so tell me about your sort of a take on Good and Evil and how we should approach it in fantasy well thank you that as there's a great question and a big question I mean the short answer is yes I think it's important to have gray characters to as you say to complicate this distinction between Good and Evil especially in stories that that are about a fight between what we might call the good side and the bad side and I really I have to say I really struggle with categorical distinctions between good and bad a lot because I think there's I mean on the one hand there's something deeply satisfying and reading and writing you probably have this experience as well but there's a clear distinction between good and bad perhaps because it speaks to this wish or desire we have that there are people or causes that are fundamentally good and they will prevail in the end and while I also think that that it's important to to critically reflect on what's morally right and wrong and it's it's sometimes also crucial to point out in no uncertain terms that certain acts of behavior are bad in the sense that they heard discriminate against or otherwise harm people I also think that good and bad can be a tricky binary if that makes sense so I think good people can be flawed right and bad people can have relatable motives and to to simplify that in stories to take away the complexity I fear it can encourage skewed expectations about people in real life so for example it could encourage the presumption that people can only be good if they never make a mistake or that they can't be good if if they also have selfish motives or perhaps people might be blindsided when someone who does bad things has a big following because they can't further more understand how that person manages manages to tap into an emotional niche by their followers so yeah I think it's important to have a spectrum of complex characters and stories and fantasy stories especially because they are so often woven from similar stuff than archaic myths about good and evil yeah I think that's why the world are fairly really interesting because they've always in folklore they've stood aside you know they've not been part of the religious world they've been separate so having their own politics their own reasons and it's been a useful third point on the triangle of good bad and oh fey chaotic sometimes yeah and another favorite quote which I always tell my writing students is from Terry Pratchett who says dark lords should be rationed what's interesting about Tolkien is that yes that he will see he has the bad dark lords of them all you know originally meld or in morgoth in the summer in but then saren so he's keen on dark lords but actually when you when you follow his story he's not that interested in saren in lot of the rings he's really interested in what happens when the evil goes out into society and starts to affect people like denathor saren man barameer that's where volume wow you know yeah definitely in the shades of gray and I've always thought that in the harry potter universe the strongest character for them the evil side is not vulnerable who is wonderful as played by rafines and you know gray but actually it's Dolores umbridge oh gosh yeah you know the the aparachic who who is just dire um so I actually find those kind of characters far more interesting than the the uber bad guy well it's okay the bad you know yeah I mean it's wireless you know that's yeah yeah definitely I mean it makes it easier to dismiss them right as the like um saren who so so you know so profoundly clearly evil um that you you can push them sort of away and saying okay this is what we need to fight against but this will never I will never be in danger of becoming like that or becoming corrupted by that so and I think it's it's dangerous to um I really like the terry pretent quote it's it's dangerous to to assume that or to see evil always as something this big and huge and externalized and not as as a more force that can have an impact in so many ways and that we have to engage with in ourselves as well and I think that's actually that's one one thing that talking does pretty well doesn't he this this idea of how it's not just how how do I face an external threat but also how do I deal with my own fears and and flaws and shortcomings and what makes us human is that we are flawed but we can still do good things but yeah yeah I mean what he does is he's a little as embodied by the ring which is kind of like saren in room and it's a test and it shows where people fall on that on that scale of good and bad whereas with you going back to the bramble fox um you make sure your two child characters are tested and tested by in different ways this is really fascinating they're on a separate journey and they often they spend quite large parts of it apart as well it's not a kind of famous slide story where people go off together and spend it together they they've got their separate temptations and I wanted to ask you um about the temptation for Ben which is um the bereavement story um and did you have any sort of thoughts about how to handle this and put it across to a younger reader I mean because obviously it's a big theme in going back to Harry Potter bereavement is a big theme in Harry's backstory and something like the magician's nephew it's yes it's sort of rerunning his own mother's death but happy ending where were you going with that in your thoughts about sensitive handling of that hardest of themes yeah yeah I thought about this quite a lot and um that was one aspect of the story that was really important um to me to get right always right as I could um and um I think when we're dealing with these big things like death and loss and grief I think it's important that they have a place in children's literature um because I mean the sad truth is we all have to engage with these aspects of life and the feelings that they that they might bring up and for some this this moment or perhaps even in the form of first-hand experience of loss comes quite early in life so children will be confronted with with illness and death so in in the book Ben's father has died um a year before the before the story starts his died of cancer and Ben is still dealing with the grief of that and um so I think kids will be confronted with with death in real life it's it's too big a part of um of our existence and of our media frankly um for them to not become aware of it and it can be really scary and confusing so I get why people might want to protect their children from becoming aware of it or confronting it for as long as possible so that's I mean that's very relatable and sensible um but I also think that it makes it easier to deal with the big things the things that scare us if we understand that it's a shared experience um and something that's woven into into everyone's lives um not something that we have to deal with alone without having any reference to how others experience loss and grief and um I think that's actually what stories can do so they can show us that we're not alone with what we're fearing or feeling or hoping and um when it when it comes to two stories that talk about death I think they can acknowledge death as a part of the experience of living but they can also show they can also show them there are many ways in which people can comfort each other how they can love each other through difficult times and how they can ground themselves recover a sense of joy enough safety or simply how to move with grief and how to carry it as you go forward and um to share a bit of that was my hope with when when I wrote Bramble Fox yeah so that was part of my process there and the other thing um on the sort of scale of difficult things to write for a young audience is it's actually very scary in part yes it's just the gray world um the sea world and there's a character another borrowing from Shakespeare Hermia um who has been left behind and kind of taken over um by the mist did you I mean it's it's fun to indulge in the nightmare stuff but again what was how did you think about that in terms of the age of the audience and how you would deal with yeah I mean on a on a very practical level I have a couple of kids who read my stories before they go to the publisher so and I'm talking with them about um what their thoughts on certain uh certain um scenes or images are and um so um and and I do this in in also in collaboration with their parents so it's it's a sort of like a like a better reading book club that we have going on so that that helps a lot um and also yeah the book the book is it has these sort of eerie creepy parts about it um and that is mainly the reason uh the reason behind that is that is the kind of story that I love to read as a kid so I I was one of those kids who loved uh to get goosebumps and to be a little scared um when I was reading a story so one of the one of the books and in movies that that had a real big impact on me was um michael and the never ending story and um I don't know have you have you seen the the movie version of that I think it's like the forties yeah and in in the in the movie version um the the images you get of the of the gmork this wolf-like creature that um sort of pursues the protagonist or this once of sadness so that is very horror-esque as well and I know that this this really left an imprint um but as in in terms of how how to sort of deal with or or prepare kids or talk to kids who who want to read this story I think it very much depends on the kid I mean I know readers aged 10 who love goosebumps and and as much as I did as a kid but I also know kids who don't want to watch finding Mimo because they find find this uh the charm to scary yeah and I mean that's perfectly fine you know it's all it's all depending on uh the individual kid and I think perhaps the best thing that parents or other adults who take care of children can do is to take an interest in what they like to read and to talk with them about it and be there when they have questions or the need to discuss themselves something yes I don't want to give people the wrong impression is definitely with his goosebumps territory rather than the sort of screaming running behind the sofa's territory um one of the things Catherine you've done is is um what they did in the erratic park the first movie is the people who get the most scary things happen to them are adults and I do think there is an element as long as it's not the children you can get away with both things because yeah adults so you know it's a bit of an it's okay I'll say kind of feel yeah and I mean I hope it balances out so the kids get to do really cool stuff in the book as well so Portia gets to transform into an animal I'm not revealing which animal right now because it's a sort of a um surprise to her as well and um band gets to visit a um an underground mystical library um and and uh don't do a bit of magic stuff so I think it's all in the balance with with the grief as well so grief can be in there but then there also needs to be comfort then it needs to be a sense of safety of being protected so um yeah yeah yeah it's not game with phones it's you know no that's literally not people thought oh it's gonna be really horrific it's not it's not um so what I was reading it there was several moments where I um wanted to shout at the hero characters don't do it don't open the door don't open the um don't follow the fox and so on um how much fun with writing those moments when you know your audience is going to be like really angry with your characters for being doing them go they're like oh they into the haunted house then oh lots of fun lots of fun I mean that's um when people make mistakes when they run headlong into disaster because they they're convinced uh they have a have to for some reason that's when the good stuff happens in my opinion when you write I don't know about you is that your experience when you write yeah definitely um I suppose it depends isn't it um sometimes because you know the full picture that you don't get the same feeling because it's you're you're taking them through it and you're just really enjoying taking them through it um bad things have to happen to characters in order but uh but I feel it more as a reader I think then the writer you know that sensation is much more when I'm not in control um and I can't stop whereas if I'm the writer I've got the choice and so I can throw them in you know that's true that's true no that makes a lot of sense I mean as a reader it's a little bit like watching a uh football game isn't it you yeah I mean you have this view of the whole field and you can say oh pass pass the ball can't you see um yeah exactly exactly but the characters in the story they don't have the full picture so I had readers uh write to me because Portia makes uh she makes a bad decision when she comes into into fairyland and um people people have written to me and said oh I don't get why she did that at this point and I said yeah it wasn't a good decision but at the moment she was in a situation of where she was emotionally very stressed and sometimes she don't make the best decisions now in in the situation especially if you don't have the full picture yeah absolutely so um you mentioned Michael Ender's book uh in passing um just to hear more broadly you've done um study in English literature and German literature do you see a difference between the German tradition of fantasy looking at it in the football strokes in the tradition is there something you think oh you know that's really Germanic that part of it is really good yeah I hope I hope I don't get myself into uh how do you say into uh hot water's deep waters was the phrase yeah hot water when I talk about this so I'm by no means an expert but I have I have some thoughts in this so um in in Germany there's a there's a long tradition actually of texts that incorporate magical and fantastical elements yeah especially during the romantic period um with texts like Faust or Etier Hoffmann's Descentmann or Ludwig Tix der Ruhnenberg so those are texts um whose settings are closely modeled on the real world with fantastical elements bleeding into the everyday and we also had a similar trend to the rise and popularity of Gothic fiction in the in the UK and throughout Europe during the I think late 18th early 19th century so but overall I my my sense is that historically in Germany there's a bit more magical realism or proto urban fantasy going on then then high fantasy like what Tolkien did for example this whole um fantastical world building and um I mean as for for more recent years very generally speaking if I compare and I'm biased yeah but if I compare the role of fantasy literature in the German literary canon with its role in British literary canon I'd say there's a notable difference in terms of canonization maybe or appreciation even um so for one British academia seems a lot more and correct me if I'm wrong but it seems a lot more comfortable with including fantasy and science fiction in their curricula these days and um the recognition of these genres as worthwhile research subjects has started a lot earlier in the UK then it hasn't Germany um and same goes for the field of literary criticism outside of university so in in Germany the literary theatre still maintains a very stark division between realist fiction and fantasy fiction and there has been pushback and there's a lot of great research on fantasy literature in Germany going on as well you have the library for fantasy literature in Wetzlar and the Forschung's Institute for a fantastical literature so there's a lot going on but fantasy literature still has a harder time getting critical or academic um attention over here which I personally think is as I said I'm biased I personally think it's a shame because there's a lot of great books out there which excel in um creative world building and their use magic as a metaphor for all kinds of issues kids and adults are dealing with and maybe as a as a as a last point um all that said the genre is vastly popular in Germany yeah so lots lots of people read it not only but especially in the field of children's literature so some of our most um popular and nationally and internationally successful authors um have written children's fantasy Michal Ender who we already mentioned you have Cornelia Funke and Paul Mar to name just a few of those and um I'm also very excited about current trends in German fantasy literature which is getting increasingly creative and loud with regards to celebrating diversity so with an increasing number of fantasy books including of focusing on queer and bipod characters that's that's really um something that I'm yeah that I that I am celebrating as well yeah absolutely um that's definitely happening in the the British tradition as well um front covers are changing for example you know yeah you see that the heroes heroines are for all works walks of life and people are so looking into um folkloric myths from lots of different cultures not just these you know UK-centered ones um so you mentioned some there uh is there a underrated German fantasy series that we should look up I mean I know off the ones you've mentioned I I know Cornelia Funke and Michal Ender already Cornelia Funke was really big when my children were reading I don't she still is I haven't you know now they'll wrap up I'm not talking with you or Michal because not but certainly um that they were reading her but is there someone we're missing that we need to know about in the English people world I mean I could recommend a couple that I think would really lovely in translation but um let me think about this for a second I mean one um fantasy author that I mean he's definitely not underrated in Germany but I don't know how how widely he is known in in an English speaking context is Otfried Poislar who is a children's book author who wrote in the 70s so his books are more on on the classic classical side and one of the books I can definitely recommend is Krabat and the sorceress Mil which also deals a lot with Slavic folklore in that case so it's a bit fairytale fantasy ish for for younger readers that one two series for young readers that have a lot of fans in Germany at the moment one is called the Flusterwald Chronicles Chronicles of the Whispering Woods by Andrea Suhanek and um shape-shifter series called Woodwalkers by Katja Brandes and there's also one book that is very not a series but a one book that's very near and dear to my heart because I got to watch it um sort of grow from first idea to to finish book and that's Christian Handels Rowan and Ash which is a lovely gay young adult fantasy with fairy tale and folklore elements um which is not translated in English yet but I'm hoping that will change so yeah listen maybe German readers so they can yeah yeah definitely we have to mention in that mix we mustn't forget the Bramble Fox thank you so much Catherine for talking to us and as an end we always choose something imagining that we can pick any fantasy world it can be something that's you know who being series or on film or in a old series or a new book series basically just have to be a fantasy world and we pick where is the best place to be or do something so you know we've picked from like the best tavern or the best place you know that kind of thing this time in honour of you and in the and for the way that your story begins I thought where is the best place to go and stay with an aunt people may think that's a strange thing to pick but actually know when you start to think about how many many um great children's stories start they start with getting rid of the parents or maiden aunts and great aunts are usually kind of the slightly neglectful stand-in parent figures so where would you go and stay with an aunt hoping to have an amazing adventure I love this question I mean um as is probably noticeable in Bramble Fox as well I am I love food and I love sitting somewhere cozy and having tea or or a picnic so um I guess for for a nice picnic maybe 500 acrewards or Hobbiton would be a good good place or I very recently I've gotten into Thomas Taylor's eerie on C books which is also a fantasy adventure series for kids where you have this this coastal town of eerie on C and they have really good fish and chips alongside very funny and weird and exciting monster hunts so that that actually might be a place where I would go to visit an aunt so I was asking myself the same question um I use this in my very first fantasy series for children and I set my character away to save an aunt which is why I thought about this um with a companion's quarter but think about this we've mentioned it once already I seem to remember at the beginning of Tom's midnight garden he goes to stay with his relatives I can't remember exactly an aunt possibly an aunt because his brother had scarlet fever or something and he sent away because of illness in the household and I've always loved that idea of this this house with a clock that strikes 13 and you travel back in time I think I'd go to Philip Philip appearances Tom's midnight garden world to go and stay with an aunt let's do more than that I'm talking too much Catherine it's been wonderful um talking to you today and I wish you all the best with Bramble Fox as it's now coming out in English published by Pushkin Press thanks for listening to MythMakers podcast brought to you by the Oxford Center for Fantasy visit Oxford Center for Fantasy.org to join in the fun find out about our online courses in person stays in Oxford plus visit our shop for great gifts tell a friend and subscribe wherever you find your favorite podcasts worldwide