New Territory
Los Angeles, Finland, and other adventures into less-than-familiar places
My sister and I are on our way home from ten days in Finland. For those of you who haven’t been exposed to my nearly nonstop rhapsodizing about this beautiful Nordic country—it’s where my mother was born and raised. She had a large family, hence I have a lot of Finnish cousins, one of whom I’m very close to. During the pandemic, my sister and I bought a small house on an island on the southern coast, not too far from the capital, Helsinki. The air is sweet and the water is pure. It has a sauna and a dock that floats on the cold, rocky Baltic sea. It is my favorite place in the world, and if you get me going about it after a drink or two, I may never shut up.
My two novels occur in the here and now, bound by the “rules” of the real world. All last year I tried to write a another one like that, but no matter how I tried, it just never wound up working. (It might have a second life. I never throw anything away.)
I’ve always wanted to write something set in Finland. The mossy, bouldery forests, the cool northern light—so much about it evokes a sense of wonder for me. But somehow the seed never took root for a contemporary, realistic novel there.
Enter a nudge from someone I respect to try a little magic. To think of it like the films of Hiyao Miyazaki—in her words, “a warm blanket of what-the-fuckery.” And off I went. Now I am almost 2/3 of the way through a new and weird and different thing. Kind of Frozen meets Alice in Wonderland in the Finnish archipelago. Only Alice is 35 and pregnant, and Wonderland might be trying to kill her.
After two novels of contemporary realist fiction, this feels so different. I keep asking myself, Am I really allowed to do this? Just wholesale make shit up? Magic and danger and worlds within worlds? Apparently, no one is stopping me.
I’m not talking Lord of the Rings high fantasy or anything. The main character is still my kind of girl—a real woman over thirty with stuff to figure out—she just finds that her story plays out in a beautiful and dangerous world of nature spirits haunted by a ghostly malevolence called the Haamu who seems very interested in her.
Who knows if this will work at all. But what is life if not a long series of chances taken or not?
Audio Accolades (Marni Penning is my hero!)
The audiobook of Johanna Porter is Not Sorry has been having quite the season! First my narrator, Marni Penning, was nominated for a SOVAS award for it. SOVAS is sort of like the Screen Actors Guild only for voice artists. Then she was nominated for an Audie award—which is more like the Oscars of audiobooks—not only in a category, but as audiobook narrator of the YEAR! She was one of five finalists along with two other professional narrators, as well as Ethan Hawke and Meryl Streep. We went to a fancy awards gala in Los Angeles together (photos below). It was wonderful to be among all these amazing professional voice actors, and to see them light up when Marni introduced me saying, “this is my author!”
Then, just to show she’s a total badass, she won AudioFile Magazine’s Earphones award. All for my little book! So if you haven’t experienced Johanna on audio, now you know Marni Penning is the bomb.
Events
Thursday, April 18, at 7pm I will be at Bluebird & Co. in Crozet, Virginia talking with A.H. Kim about her newest release, Relative Strangers, a delightful homage to Jane Austen’s Sense & Sensibility about the lives, loves, and adventures of two sisters and their mother in a cottage on the windswept coast of Northern California. Details here.
What I’m Reading—Aednan: An Epic, by Linnea Axelsson
I have never read a novel in verse before, and this one is blowing my mind. The author is Swedish and Sami (the migratory, indigenous people of northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland), and this book traces, in a deeply personal and intimate way, the complex history of the Sami from their traditional (i.e. normal) life, through governmental oppression, and to a renewed push for Sami rights. It’s like magic how much power and beauty and feeling Axelsson is able to convey with incredibly spare language. Highly, highly recommend. There’s a good review in the Washington Post here.
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Omg SO beautiful!!! I love that you’re trying something new!