Interview with Author Nancy Springer

About Nancy Springer

“Conform, go crazy, or become an artist.” I have a rubber stamp declaring those words, and they pretty much delineate my life. Conforming was the thing to do when I was raised, in the fifties. Even my mother, who spent her days painting animal portraits at an easel in the corner of the kitchen, tried to conform via housecleaning, bridge parties, and a new outfit every spring. My father, who was born into a British-mannered Protestant family in southern Ireland, emigrated to America as a young man and idolized the “melting pot” because at last he fit in. Once in a rare while he recited “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” or told a tale of a leprechaun, but most of the time he was an earnest naturalized American who expected exemplary behavior of his children. My mother was a charming Pollyanna who would not entertain negative sentiments in herself or anyone around her. As their only girl and the baby of the family, I was coddled, yet hardly ever got a chance to be other than excruciatingly good.

My “conform” phase lasted right into adulthood. When I was thirteen, my parents bought a small motel near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and I spent most of my teen years helping them make beds and clean rooms. I did not date until I went to college—Gettysburg College, all of seven miles from home. It was the height of the sixties, and I grew my hair long, but eschewed pot, protests, and “happenings.” Instead, I married a preacher’s son who was himself conforming by studying for the ministry. Within a few years I was Rev. Springer’s wife, complete with offspringers, living in a country parsonage in southern York County, PA.

Here beginneth the “go crazy” phase.

Because I had never been allowed any negative emotions, I began to hear “voices” in my head. First they whispered “divorce” (unthinkable), and later they hissed “suicide”. They scared me silly. I couldn’t sleep; images of knives and torture floated in front of my eyes even during the daytime; something roared like an animal inside my ears; my wrists hurt; I saw blood seeping out of the walls; panic jolted me like a cattle goad out of nowhere. Is it necessary to add that I was clinically depressed? The doctor gave me Valium and sent me to a shrink. The shrink took me off the Valium and told me I had a problem with anger. (No duh.) The next doctor zombied me on the numbing antidepressants which were available at that time. The next shrink said I had an adjustment problem. And so on, for several years, during which I somehow managed to stay alive, take care of my kids, handle the vagaries of my husband, sew clothing and grow vegetables to get by financially, cook, can preserves, show up at church, do mounds of laundry and publish “The White Hart” and “The Silver Sun”—yet not one of the doctors or shrinks ever suggested that I might be a strong person, let alone a writer. All of them were intent on “helping” poor little me “adjust” to being a housewife, mother, and pastor’s wife.

Eventually I became resigned to the fact (as I perceived it) that I was an evil, sinful person with horrible things going on inside my head, and I stopped trying to fix me. I stopped going to doctors or therapists. Somehow I found courage—or desperation—to stop trying to conform or adjust or live a role.

“I am going to start taking an hour or two first thing in the morning to do my writing,” I said to my husband.

“Fine,” he said. He had reached the point where he would agree with whatever to humor the neurotic wife; to him it was just another of my brain farts. But to me it was the most important sentence I ever spoke. With that statement I stopped being a housewife who sometimes stole time to write, and I started being a writer.

Conform, go crazy—or become an artist.

By becoming a writer—by becoming who I truly was—I became well.

It was so simple. Although it did take years, of course; it takes a long time for good things to grow. Trees. Books. Me. Odd thing about books; they not only nourish growth but show it happening. In “The Black Beast, The Golden Swan” and many other of my early novels, you can see me dealing with the yang/yin nature of good and evil, struggling to accept my own shadow. In “Chains of Gold” and “The Hex Witch of Seldom” I start writing as a woman, no longer identifying only with male main characters. In a number of children’s books I come to terms with my own childhood. And in “Apocalypse”—whoa, what a fierce, dark fantasy novel, the first thing I wrote after my income from writing enabled my husband to leave the ministry. I hadn’t thought of myself as repressed when I was a pastor’s wife, but obviously something broke loose when I shed that role. “Larque on the Wing”—whoa again, another breakthrough book that spiraled straight out of my muddled middle-aged psyche and took me places I’d never dreamed were in me.

It’s been a long time since those days when I thought I was an evil person. I know better now, and I love and trust me even to the extent of writing “Fair Peril”—a more perilous novel than I knew at the time, interfacing all too closely with my life. Written two years before the fact, it foresees my husband’s infidelity and my divorce. The most painful irony I’ve ever faced is that once I gained my selfhood, I lost my lifelong partner. He had supported me through episodes that would have sent most men screaming and running, but once I became well and strong, he transferred his loyalty to a skinny, neurotic waif all too similar to the young woman I once was. After supporting him through twenty-seven years of stinky socks, automotive yearnings, miscellaneous foibles, and the career change that put him where she could cry on his shoulder, I found this a bit hard to take. But I wouldn’t go back to being Ms. Pitiful. Not for anything.

Now married to a loving and not quite lunatic second husband, after living 46 years in Pennsylvania I moved in 2007 to the Florida panhandle, where I spent a year living in a small apartment above the aforementioned husband’s hangar in an exceedingly rural (swamps, egrets, snakes and alligators) airport. Now we have a hurricane-proof house about a mile from the airport on higher ground featuring tremendously tall longleaf pine trees with rattlesnakes and scorpions underneath them. Finally, there is adventure in my life, not just in my books. And anytime I want, I get to fly.

Interview with Nancy Springer

How long have you been writing and what motivated you to begin your writing career?

How long have I been writing? Since 1972. What motivated me? Boredom, and a lot of people galloping around on horses inside my head. I would lie in bed till noon just daydreaming. Got worried about myself. Thought if I could offload some of the daydreams onto paper I might be able to function more normally. I had no confidence in my authority to write fiction, so I started with fantasy, since at least no one could tell me I got the facts wrong.

Over the years that you have written and published books, how do you feel that your writing style has changed as you developed as a writer?

How has my writing style changed as I developed as a writer? Gadzooks, it wasn’t just the style; loads of things about my first published novel were awful. I have always loved poetry and mysticism, so it wasn’t hard for me to develop an effective fantasy style; the hard part was not to overdo it. To learn to write clearly and understandably and concretely, visually, so that the reader would see it. When I started writing outside the fantasy genre, many editors helped me untangle my convoluted sentences. But after a while they started telling the copyeditors not to mess with me too much, because I had a distinctive voice—eventually, more than one voice, depending on the needs of the story—which did not conform to many of the rules.

Was there any particular inspiration for your latest Enola Holmes series?

A very unusual editor, Michael Green, who edited “I am Mordred” so relentlessly—nag, nag, nag—that I did better than my previous best, and who then suggested “I am Morgan Le Fay”. After the Rowan Hood series (my own idea, thank goodness) here came Michael again. He wanted something Gothic set in darkest London in the time of Jack the Ripper. Routinely I ignore people who try to tell me what to write, but not Michael. He has an uncanny genius for publishing. So what if I had never done anything Gothic, never been to London, and never written historical fiction? I gave thought to Michael’s wish, realized I could perhaps pull it off with the help of Sherlock Holmes, and Enola sprang to life in my mind within a moment, name and all.

Enola Holmes herself is a very strong and admirable character. Is she purely imaginative or did you base her character traits on people you have known?

Aaak. I’m afraid Enola R Us. Although I did not realize it until after the first book was written, Enola and I had childhoods entirely too parallel for comfort. Like Enola, I was a thin, awkward, bookish girl with few friends aside from my bicycle, and I spent a great deal of time in woods and fields. Like Enola’s mother, mine was an artist specializing in exquisite watercolor flowers. I had two much older brothers, my parents were in midlife when I was born, the family was distant emotionally, and although certainly my mother did not actually run away when I was fourteen, she rather lost interest in me, being quite justifiably preoccupied with her own problems — menopause and cancer. She never really “came back” because she then developed dementia. I am an old pro of an author who has written fifty books, yet when I handed in the first Enola book, I was as nervous as a newbie. I was so afraid nobody would like it. Afterward, I realized my anxiety was because I had put so much of myself in it.

I noticed that in the Enola Holmes series Enola has very strong skills in disguise and patterns and codes, but she doesn’t seem to use deduction in the same manner as her brother Sherlock. How have you had to balance Enola as a character so that she is like her brother in some ways, but not just like him?

Did I make Enola like her brother in some ways, unlike in others? Sure, but I have to admit I would have liked for Enola to use deduction more, which she might have done if I could reason, plot, and write like Conan Doyle. As I can’t, oh, well. Enola’s advantage over Sherlock is her knowledge of feminine arts which he has chosen to ignore. Simply the fact of her being female makes a fundamental and essential difference between her and her stubbornly bachelor brothers.

In addition to the characters, I enjoyed the landscapes and history in your Enola series. Did you do a lot of time period research on London to help make your story more realistic?

Oh, yes, scads of reading, not just history but also biography and novels set around the right time, and photos, and surfing the Internet, which is loaded with Victoriania plus more interesting and obscure sites about orphanages, workhouses, insane asylums and the like. A major difficulty was separating American Victoriania, for instance architecture, from British; they are quite different. It worried me that I have never set foot in London, but I was able to pull it off thanks (forgive me) to Hitler, who destroyed so much of the city that I did not fear fact-checkers; I was able to make up what I could not find out.

How do reader responses toward the Enola Holmes differ from that directed at some of your earlier books?

Well, I’m almost sure no one has tried to censor or ban Enola, both things which happened with a few of my earlier books. In fact, response to Enola has been almost entirely enthusiastic, and a surprising amount of correspondence has come from adults. Not that smart kids aren’t reading the books, but wise adults seem to be picking up on them also. Very gratifying.

How many books do you think Enola Holmes’ adventures will eventually span?

Enola decided that for me. I had originally meant for her to go on indefinitely, but she wasn’t having it. She insisted on growing, changing, developing character arc that pulled her closer and closer to Sherlock, until a resolution had to be reached in the final book, #6, “The Case of the Gypsy Goodbye”, to be published in 2010. I’m suffering from symptoms of severe Enola withdrawal, but at the same time I am glad the series has structure, rather than dying with a whimper the way most series do.

Do you have any advice for aspiring writers both young and old?

Remember that if Hemingway had belonged to a critique group, they would have told him to stop using simple declarative sentences beginning with prepositions. Until you are published, your readers, and this includes some editors, will unerringly pick out the unique aspect of your writing, the one characteristic you should really develop, and they will tell you to get rid of it. Good writing is not done by committees. Have faith in yourself, and (apologies to Thoreau) proudly march to the beat of a different kettle of fish.

Books For Sale would like to thank author Nancy Springer for taking the time to do this interview. To find out more about Nancy Springer visit her official website.