Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

Once Upon a Western: An Interview With Rachel Kovaciny

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Today I’m hosting fellow indie author Rachel Kovaciny for an interview, to celebrate this week’s launch of her newest book, Prairie Tales. The sixth book in Rachel’s Once Upon a Western series, Prairie Tales is a collection of short stories—each a retelling of a fairytale, folk tale, or nursery rhyme, and all featuring characters from the previous books in the series. It sounds like such a fun, cozy, altogether delightful collection, with a cover to match! For more about this newest book and the Once Upon a Western series in general, let’s get to the interview:

 

Welcome, Rachel! Tell us a little about yourself, and why you love (a) Westerns, and (b) fairytales.

Hi, everyone!  And thank you, Elisabeth, for having me here on your blog.

The short answer is, I love westerns because cowboys make me happy.  I grew up watching cowboy movies with my dad, and they always left me feeling satisfied and energetic.  Even now that I often watch the more somber westerns as well as the cheerful sort, they still satisfy me in a way no other genre really does.

The longer answer is that westerns provide so much opportunity for variety of characters and settings.  The American West isn’t only mountains or only plains or only deserts.  And the characters can be from any background around the world, really – not only people from the East Coast, or people born in the West, but Canadians, Mexicans, Europeans, Asians, Australians, South Americans, Africans – when the West was being settled, it drew people from every place and every walk of life.  There is no limit to the kinds of stories you can tell when you throw together people of such different backgrounds, beliefs, hopes, dreams, and desires.

As for fairy tales, they are one of the friendliest forms of mythic storytelling, and I gravitate toward myth-based story structure.  Because the Wild West is America’s great national myth, in a way, it makes sense to me to blend the two together.

 

Your first foray into Western fairytale retellings was a Sleeping Beauty story in the multi-author anthology Five Magic Spindles. How soon after that did you get the idea for your next Western retelling, and when did you realize it was going to be a series?

I had actually had the idea of retelling fairy tales as westerns a year or so before I wrote The Man on the Buckskin Horse for Five Magic Spindles, but I never went anywhere with that idea.  While I was doing revisions on Buckskin, the editor from Rooglewood Press I was working with said she thought there would be a real audience for more wild west fairy tale retellings, and encouraged me to consider writing another one.

“Little Red Riding Hood” is a pretty obvious one to retell as a western, what with the wolf and the dangerous journey, so I settled on that one for my next story.  While I was writing Cloaked, I did a little brainstorming and figured out how to make “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Cinderella,” and “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” into westerns too.  So the idea of it being a series came pretty early on, definitely before I finished the first draft of Cloaked.

The Once Upon a Western series features stories of all different lengths, from the short stories in Prairie Tales up to short novels. How do you pick which fairytales you want to retell at full length and which will be shorter tales—or do they kind of decide for themselves?

They kind of decide for themselves, usually.  I’ll get an idea for how a fairy tale would work as a western, figure out who the characters could generally be and what the plot line would be, and once I know the basic plot, I know whether it will be a book or a short story.  Usually!  I actually wrote a retelling of “The Seven Swan Princes” last year that I thought was going to be a short story, and it got to be almost 30,000 words!  And it needed to expand more yet.  So, I now plan to turn that one into a full book.

 

I know some of your characters make cameo/crossover appearances in different stories across the series. Is that something you plan out or is it more spur-of-the-moment?

I have planned all along for these books to take place in a shared universe, if you will, and to have them connected to each other in the background while still being stand-alone adventures.  But I don’t always know until I’m planning the next book how it connects to the previous ones.  For instance, there’s a character from Cloaked who shows up in a later book, and I did not expect that until I got about a third of the way through the first draft of that later book.  Suddenly, I was looking at my series timeline and going, “Wait, could this work?  Could this person be in this place at this time?”

Other things, I knew before I started the next book, like Marta Beckmann from My Rock and My Refuge being the cousin of Hauer from Cloaked.  That made obvious sense, since they both have German ancestry.  And there are a lot more connections that get revealed in this short story collection, some quite obviously and some a little more subtly.

 

Do you have a favorite decade or period of Old West history? If so, are most of your stories set in that time or are they scattered across different decades?

I particularly love the classic Cowboy Era of 1865-1885, and this whole series takes place then.  But I am currently writing a fantasy western for a multi-author series called the Cornerstone Series, and that takes place in a magical realism version of 1807 California!  That one’s called A Noble Companion and is set to release November 12.  It has no relation to my Once Upon a Western series, but it IS a fairy tale retelling.  It retells “The Ugly Duckling,” but focusing on some side characters.

 

Can you tell us anything about future plans for the Once Upon a Western series?

I think the next book in the series will be Steadfast, a retelling of “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” set in Texas and involving a cattle drive.  After that will be either a “Cinderella” retelling set on the Santa Fe Trail or that “Seven Swan Princes” retelling I mentioned earlier, which I’ll expand into a book.  I have ideas for a couple more short stories already, too, so I’ve called this new release Prairie Tales: Volume One because I fully anticipate putting out a Volume Two one day!

Thanks so much for this interview, Elisabeth!  This has been so much fun.

You’re so welcome! It has indeed!

Visit Rachel’s website | Join her mailing list | Add “Prairie Tales” on Goodreads

The Trail to Lost Lake House

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It’s not always easy for me to pinpoint the exact moment of inspiration for a story, or to remember what initially inspired it. More often than not I find myself with a partially-formed idea in my hands and a feeling of “Where did this come from, anyway?” But Lost Lake House is one of the exceptions—I can actually trace the little trail of influences and ideas that eventually came together in my mind to inspire the setting for the story. After recently enjoying K.M. Weiland’s fun post on 14 things that inspired her latest novel, I thought I’d do a little inspiration-backtracking of my own.

The oldest seed of an idea came from the Crooked Lake House in Averill Park, New York. I’ve never been there myself, but I’d heard various accounts of its history—according to local news articles, it began as a stagecoach stop in 1780 and was rebuilt after a fire in 1840; in its heyday it hosted famous guests such as Theodore Roosevelt and gangster Legs Diamond; and NBC broadcast live big-band concerts from it on radio during the swing era. And at some point, although I can’t trace this story now, I heard or was told that it had housed a speakeasy during Prohibition, possibly in a secret room. That idea stuck in my mind; it seemed to hold fascinating possibilities for a story. In fact, I was recently cleaning out some old notebooks and binders when I came across a scribbled note from years back suggesting the use of the Crooked Lake House speakeasy or one like it as the setting for a mystery short story. That story never happened, but the speakeasy was evidently meant to be.


Next came the fairytale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” I had actually never heard of this fairytale till a couple of years ago. During one of Rooglewood Press’s fairytale-retelling contests, someone commented on a post at Anne Elisabeth Stengl’s blog that they hoped there would be a contest featuring this fairytale further down the line. For some reason I was intrigued by the title and looked it up. Along the way I saw this beautiful illustration by Lidia Postma, or one very like it…and because of the lake setting, I think that’s when wheels started to turn in my head…

I think it was somewhere around the same time that I read A Secret Gift: How One Man’s Kindness – and a Trove of Letters – Revealed the Hidden History of the Great Depression by Ted Gup. The setting was Canton, Ohio, and a few times in passing the book mentioned the Meyers Lake Amusement Park, a popular attraction for Canton residents from the 1920s onward (click here to see some vintage postcards of the park). One amusing incident that stuck in my mind was the park owner’s “accidentally” letting loose the monkeys kept on an island in the lake, in what turned out to be a highly successful publicity stunt. The idea of a colorful attraction on an island in a lake lodged in my mind, and at some point it clicked with those ideas already brewing. A hidden speakeasy on an island in a lake…it dovetailed perfectly with the plot of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, and made the Jazz-Age setting a perfect choice.

And finally, another location that contributed to my imagining of the setting was the Thousand Islands in the St. Lawrence Seaway. I’d once caught a few minutes of a travel program about the islands on TV, and was captivated by the shots of beautiful old villas and castles (yes, castles) built by wealthy summer residents during the Victorian and Edwardian eras, when the area was a popular summer resort. In a bit of serendipity, the photo of the house that ended up being part of Lost Lake House‘s cover is actually what is now known as Singer Castle on Dark Island!

Lost Lake House releases on March 16th, 2016—add it on Goodreads here!
photos: Wikimedia

Fairytales on the Menu

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As I mentioned in a recent post, I’ve been having a lot of fun with fairytale retellings lately. It’s a genre I was never even really aware of until Rooglewood Press’s Five Glass Slippers competition gave me the inspiration to write Corral Nocturne. Writing for that contest and reading the winning entries was such fun, I’ve long toyed with the idea of writing more fairytale-based stories at some point. More recently, I’ve been inspired by Suzannah Rowntree’s wonderfully creative takes on both well-known and lesser-known fairytales. So the long and the short of it is, I have a couple more of my own in various stages of pre-production (to borrow a filmmaker’s term). Lost Lake House is a retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses set in the Roaring ’20s. And The Mountain of the Wolf, an idea that basically came out of nowhere and smacked me between the eyes this month, is a Western tale of outlaws and revenge based on Little Red Riding Hood. I’m planning to work on one or both of these over this autumn.

Along the way, I’ve been considering the question of why fairytale retellings are such fun to read and especially to write. Perhaps the appeal lies in starting with an existing story structure—for writers like myself, anyway, who find crafting a cohesive plot one of our biggest challenges! The few main plot points are laid out for you, almost like a template, leaving you free to play with the more colorful and subjective elements of character and setting to your heart’s content.

Looking for a metaphor, I thought at first of comparing it to a recipe, but then thought better of it: you don’t have quite so much freedom to shuffle the ingredients of a recipe. It’s more like a menu. On a menu you have a list of categories or components—appetizer, soup, meat, vegetable, side dish, dessert—and it’s up to you to fill in the blank on each and come up with as many different combinations you can think of, using a specified number of each of those pieces.

So, to take the most familiar example, the list of components for a Cinderella story looks something like this:

Key components (main dish and entrees, shall we say)

  • 1 heroine in unhappy or restricted circumstances (Cinderella)
  • 1 unkind relative/figure of authority responsible for heroine’s unhappy state (Wicked Stepmother)
  • 1 hero, deemed inaccessible to heroine by his station in life or some other circumstance (The Prince)
  • 1 important event at which hero and heroine are brought together, with a crucial moment or disaster coming at midnight (The Ball)
  • 1 benefactor who makes it possible for heroine to attend said event (Fairy Godmother)
  • 1 lost shoe that proves vital to the heroine’s fortunes (The Glass Slipper)

Minor components, optional (appetizers and desserts, if you will)

  • 2 other relatives/persons in heroine’s life who assist in making her unhappy; also frequently rivals for hero’s attention (Wicked Stepsisters)
  • Parent or parents of hero, preferably in position of authority and/or grandeur (King and possibly Queen)
  • Variable number of small friends or allies of heroine (mice, dogs, horses, etc.)

Putting it that way, you see how innumerable variations can be crafted on this one basic plot! How many difficult situations can we think of for our heroine to be trapped in (we writers are much too good at inflicting trouble on our characters), how many different eccentric or unlikely benefactors can we invent—how many creative uses can we find for a stray shoe? (Has anyone done a version where the shoe gets flung at someone?) Outlining my second and third, I’ve realized that my own particular angle on retellings—unintentional but consistent—is their real-world setting. They’re straight historical fiction, without magical creatures or imaginary kingdoms involved, but still paralleling the characters and plot of the original fairytale. Coming up with those real-world equivalents is a fun challenge.

Do you enjoy fairytale retellings? If so, what do you think makes them fun to read and write?