R.J. Sullivan

R.J. Sullivan Blog Interview: Kathy Tyers Part 2

Q: When you wrote the first Firebird books as secular novels, were you aware of the salvation message even then, or is this something you drew out in the rewrites? Did writing for a Christian Fiction house help bring out the message you wanted, or create problems you had to work around?

KT: The Bantam Books version was more of a “cultural conversion story,” but I feel the potential always was there. I had a great time thinking through Brennen’s heritage from a religious viewpoint, brainstorming possibilities and running them past my friends. The assistant pastor at my church was a particular help with Fusion Fire, which deals with the existence of evil within and without.

Q: What surprises can readers of the secular and previous Christian Fiction versions of the Firebird series expect in this new re-release?

KT: My favorite “surprise” is a set of maps, beautifully adapted from my hand-drawn originals by the gifted Jamie Upschulte. The new titles continue the family saga for two more generations, and our heroes are there. Just a glimpse in Wind and Shadow. More centrally in Daystar.

Q: Okay, here’s the question I’ve been dying to ask for years. Would you agree with my assessment that Crown of Fire seems to indicate your struggle as a believer wishing to serve God with your talent juxtaposed with the temptation of chasing bestselling fame as a “name” author on the wildly popular Star Wars books? Did this create a dichotomy in your career path? If so, how did you approach this then and how do you approach it now?

KT: It’s actually more complicated than that. Crown was originally supposed to be Books 3 and 5 of that expanded series I proposed to Bethany House. And the Star Wars books were all written by invitation, so honestly, it wasn’t possible to “chase fame” by writing more and more of them. By the time Crown was contracted to be published, I was far more emotionally invested in the Firebird series than in Star Wars, although I will always owe SW a deep professional debt. I even considered turning down the invitation to write Balance Point, because I was writing Crown when the offer came. My Bethany editor, Steve Laube, essentially said “are you nuts?”

Q:  In the mid-2000s you went “off the grid” on a sabbatical for several years. Was Kathy on a “walkabout?”

KT: You might call it a walkabout, or maybe a pilgrimage. When my husband eventually lost his battle with alcohol abuse in 2004, I was too physically and emotionally exhausted to write. I took in a German exchange student for a year. I attended a C.S.Lewis conference at Oxford and taught at a writing conference in Pennsylvania. Then I went back to school.

Regent College in Vancouver, BC calls itself the unSeminary. It offers programs for Christians from all professions. Its focus on God as both Creator and Redeemer means that people who work in the arts—all the arts—are respected, challenged, and nurtured in community. It was a perfect fit, and I got used to working under a new kind of stress. Writing papers was comparatively easy for me (and I loved doing research in their fabulous library), but cramming for exams all those years out of undergrad … yikes!  I studied Christian thought and culture, Biblical books, systematic theology, history, Hebrew, postmodernity, exegesis, etc., and sang in a gospel choir—and for my thesis project, I was required to create a full-length work in my chosen art form. I assumed God would nudge me in a new direction, possibly poetry. What took shape, starting just a few weeks after I arrived in Vancouver, was a novel about Firebird and Brennen’s sons. That book, Wind and Shadow, has a different tone from the original novels. Of course—I was in theology school when I wrote it!

Almost as soon as I came back home, I stumbled on an idea for a contemporary fantasy, which I am also writing. With The Annotated Firebird, Wind and Shadow, and Daystar under contract at Marcher Lord Press and Holy Ground well underway, I think the walkabout is officially over.

Q: How does it feel to find your newsgroup of fans still active with discussion and anticipation, patiently waiting for your return into the spotlight?

KT: That group has become a circle of friends, no longer focused on my books but on each other. I love that! I hope they still get a kick out of the new books.

Q:  With social media, ebooks, the internet, etc., how have these innovations changed how you will go about promoting your upcoming releases versus the methods of the early 90s?

KT: The changes in my promotion calendar have more to do with my new publisher than anything else. Marcher Lord sells online only, so there probably won’t be any book signings. The focus will be on email, interviews, and conferences—starting with the February 2011 “Writing for the Soul” conference in Denver. It’s put on annually by the Christian Writers Guild. I’m scheduled to teach a two-day intermediate workshop on Point of View as well as a clinic on writing dialogue.

Q: Through the years I have known many openly Christian authors of secular fiction, who struggle with guilt and even receive judgment from other believers for their content. Many writers (I subscribe to this viewpoint) feel that holding a magnifying glass on the sinful nature of mankind struggling in our fallen world is a valid use of their gifts and not a contradiction to their beliefs. Do you have a response?

KT: At Regent College, I was exposed to some authors who’ve written thoughtfully about many aspects of being a Christian author, poet, musician, filmmaker, potter, etc. Let me point your readers toward Dorothy L. Sayers, Madeleine L’Engle, Nicholas Woltersdorff, Kathleen Norris, Jeremy Begbie, Alan Jacobs, and Maxine Hancock. Essentially, I agree with you: the real questions aren’t about superficial censorship but the sacramentality of creation, our honest humility in art and art criticism, and being choosy about which hill we really want to die on.

Q: Thank you very much for agreeing to this interview, Kathy! God Bless and I look forward to reading the next chapter in the adventures of Lady Firebird and the writing career of Kathy Tyers.

KT: All my best to you too, Bob. Thanks!

Learn more about Kathy at:

http://www.kathytyers.com/

Yahoogroup: Lady Firebird Signup page:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lady_firebird/

R.J. Sullivan Blog Interview: Kathy Tyers, Part 1

Q: Kathy, thank you for agreeing to this interview. And also, thank you for answering my fan letter all those years ago with such a gracious response. Who knew we’d end up here decades later? Did you receive many fan letters back then?

KT: Right … who knew? There was a steady trickle of those letters, and they were mostly about the Firebird books or Star Wars. It was a pleasant surprise to hear from you about Shivering World.

Q: How did the Lady Firebird Yahoogroups list come about?

KT: A fellow who goes by the online name TZ Maverick asked for permission and invited me to participate. That was a new experience! I still think of the folks on the group as friends, though I don’t check in as often as I used to.

Q:  How did this daily exposure to fandom discussion and dialog differ from the pre-internet fan response? How did it affect your writing if at all?

KT: It was a world of encouragement when I needed it. I was living a real-life horror story, and someday I’ll tell that tale. But fandom discussions were quick, fun, and personal. They were also distracting, when I needed to be writing.

Q: As a midlist Bantam author, you received an invitation to contribute original fiction to the Star Wars novel and anthology titles—what would be for many SF authors a “dream gig.” How did that come about and what was your reaction at the time?

KT: Truce was a dream gig. I’d been a Star Wars fan since the first film’s release. Bantam Books originally acquired a license from Lucasfilm for Timothy Zahn’s first set of three Star Wars novels. Their phenomenal success proved there still was plenty of interest in Star Wars—so Bantam acquired a license for an additional book series. At that time, I’d published the first two Firebird novels with Bantam Spectra, another space opera called Crystal Witness and Shivering World. That meant I was “known” at Bantam—and my editor Janna Silverstein was a fellow Star Wars fan. One February day, she called to ask if I would like to be a Star Wars writer. I can still hear the grin in her voice, and it took me quite a while to wipe the grin off my face.

Q: When interacting with fans, do they fall into different camps—that is, Star Wars readers and Lady Firebird readers? Secular fiction readers and Christian fiction readers? Do you find your readers exclusive to one interest over the other or are they overall “well read” on all things Kathy Tyers?

KT: Every reader has favorites. Some of them overlap. What I have in common with all my readers is our enthusiasm for imaginative fiction. But I enjoy meeting them as people even more than discussing books.

Q: Explain the history of the Firebird books at Bantam, Bethany House…..and beyond!

KT: I started writing Firebird in the summer of 1983. It was acquired by Bantam in August 1986 and published in June 1987. Fusion Fire appeared in November 1988. My Bantam editor then asked for a stand-alone novel, so I set the series aside.

I never gave up hope of finishing it, even though I had no idea how it would end. I simply felt committed to the characters and their story. I met Steve Laube, then at Bethany House Publishers, at the Mount Hermon Christian Writers Conference in the spring of 1998, and we hoped to make it a five-book series. Within Bethany House, it was cut to three books (Crown of Fire is based on the outlines to books 3 and 5; book 4 simply went away). Those three were published in late 1999, early 2000, and later in 2000. Bethany House reprinted an omnibus three-in-one version in 2004.

In the following years, I met Jeff Gerke at a different writers’ conference. He worked as an editor and author, and we talked science fiction.  We corresponded irregularly then, but he consistently mentioned—or hinted—that he would like to be professionally affiliated. The hints and encouragement got thicker after he founded Marcher Lord Press as an independent, internet-based publishing house for fantasy and science fiction. So in 2010, having finished writing a new Firebird-universe novel (more about that below) and having started a final book in the series, I emailed him a proposal: the whole Firebird series, with no exceptions (except for that unwritten “book 4,” since the events I proposed aren’t possible now). He accepted—immediately! – with his own stipulation: he wanted the republished trilogy to include some features that aren’t available elsewhere. He suggested I read the Annotated Chronicles of the “Dragonlance” series as an example. I did, and then The Annotated Firebird took shape.

It was wonderful to reminisce my way back through Firebird, Fusion Fire, and Crown of Fire. I dug out the notebook of charts, maps, family trees, linguistic brainstorming and other notes I accumulated when writing the series, and I looked for things that might make interesting annotations. Since I also work as a writing teacher, other annotations are writing-method oriented … so readers who aren’t interested in the niceties of point-of-view etc. are welcome to skip those! MLP has scheduled The Annotated Firebird for April 2011 release, to be followed by Wind and Shadow in October 2011 and Daystar some time in 2012.

As they say here in Montana: Yeehaw!

Concluded Friday, February 11