An interview with Katherine Langrish.

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During a recent trip to England I was fortunate enough to arrange an interview with Katherine Langrish. My youngest son and his family live not very far from Katherine's home and as it happens Katherine's husband, David is Patrick's boss. When Patrick mentioned the connection I asked him to arrange contact for me and so Katherine and I were able to meet at the house not far from Oxford. Hilary came with me as scribe.

Katherine is the author of a trilogy for middle schoolers beginning with Troll Fell set in Scandinavia around the 10th century. The other two titles are Troll Mill and Troll Blood. I'll come back to them a little later.

Katherine has always written and wrote, unpublished, sequels to Narnia but as a mother of two daughters and living in both France and the USA broke with writing and became a storyteller to small groups of children. What she found was that her time as a storyteller helped her with literary composition and so back in the UK in 1999 she began writing again as herself and not as someone else. Katherine began with a picture of a viking. She was not interested in writings epics or princesses and dragons. She began with a boy meeting the god, Odin, but got stuck and so she turned to trolls. Here was a folktale slant about people who believed in a world of mythical creatures including the nis and the selkie--a world of mixed realities. Her setting became a small village with humans and these creatures interacting. The chief protagonist is an orphan, Peer, who is adopted by one of the village families. The first two stories show Peer growing up but at the same time finding himself dealing with trolls, who are much like vermin, and attempting to regain control of a flour mill stolen by two brutal uncles.

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The third tale takes Peer away from his homeland on a voyage to Vinland and deals with the relations with the North American Indians before returning home with marriage on the horizon. Katherine says for Troll Blood she researched at the Viking museum at Roskilde, Denmark and also the Bodlian in Oxford. For the US edition Katherine had the Indian folklore checked to ensure the accuracy of the preternatural and found that there were no spirit beings but rather creatures of this world with special tasks to undertake. Katherine's philosophy is to be true as accurate as possible by respecting other cultures. In this regard she would have liked to British edition to have had extensive endnotes but this was not to be.

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Katherine Langrish's writing and research are undertaken in tandem. Research is something of an adventure and findings are often unexpected. She found that baby cradles were used by the Scandinavians as one method amongst a number of coping with a baby and tenth century watermills were rather complicated so she settled on a thirteenth century horizontal mill around which to weave some events. Research, however, must be undertaken carefully to ensure issues such as food, clothing and religion are used as accurately as possible. As a writer Katherine is also circumspect about using magic as a way of solving problems. Although she uses magic to enliven her work, solutions must be worked out by real people. Magic, she says, can cause problems.

Structure is a vital part of her writing and her storytelling skills show through in this regard as her tales have a clear beginning, middle and end. As I read her books I was struck by the real balance of ideas and how they develop. What Katherine says is that at the beginning she is uncertain of detail. She has a rough idea of where she wants to get to, but her plan needs shaping and pacing. For example in Troll Bloodthere is a need for the season to end in winter and this requires deliberate planning. Tense is another issue and she finally settled on the present tense after trialing other options.

Katherine's writing day begins once the family leaves the house in the morning. She walks the dog, makes her coffee and then begins to write, slowly. She says she's an obsessive word counter and so often unpicks what she has written. While she uses a computer she can only really read the printed page so there is constant rewriting until she is satisfied with the end product. What she finds by working in this manner is that her work requires minimal editing.

At this point in her writing Katherine feels comfortable and indeed feels it necessary to leave the Troll books behind. She has moved on and this coming May her latest book, Dark Angel will be released. She wants a hero with a sword but a hero that is no angel. It is set just after the second crusade, or before the third, in the wild borderland between England and Wales. It is a time when Richard the Lionheart is a prisoner of war. The hero in this book is a boy called Wolf and a girl called Nest. Again there will be lots of supernatural creatures that mix Celtic and Christian folklore together. We wait with great expectations for this new work from a very capable tale teller.