On this month's We Love Books Podcast, we're ringing in the spooky season with multi award-winning author Eilish Fisher!
Eilish couldn’t move for awards being flung at her last year for her debut novel Fia and the Last Snow Deer and fans will be delighted that her second book, The Waters and the Wild is out now, and it certainly doesn’t disappoint!
Listen to Eilish on We Love Books on RTÉ, Apple or Spotify - listen up top now!
A shade spookier than Fia, Eilish's latest book centres around an atmospheric woodland, so where better to interview her than the woods from which she draws so much inspiration.
Niamh Bennett joined Eilish in Clara Vale, Co Wicklow to talk about how much her work is entwined with the beautiful natural landscape she calls home, to hear all about the new book of course and to talk about her unusual style of writing that has hit all the right notes with readers. Eilish writes in free verse, so how have people reacted to this unusual style of narrative?
She says: "I’ve had a few people be like, "I can’t do poetry, it’s scary!" you know, and adults as well as kids go, oh, what is this? And I always say give it a chance because it’s actually incredibly easy and accessible to read. The way verse novels are written is so that you are drawn into the story and I always feel like a verse novel will transport you narratively, but it trusts the reader enough to let them put the pieces together with their own imagination. You kind of have this relationship between your reader and the author and this trust that, you know, I trust you to figure this out and to know where the story is going and I know you can do it, and I do! I think that it’s one of the most fun ways to go about storytelling and it’s also the oldest."
Eilish's writing style wraps itself around the narrative in ways that make the characters and scenes spring from the pages and judging by the astounding success of Fia and the Last Snow Deer, readers have embraced it. So, what can they expect from the latest book?
"It’s about a girl who grew up in Arizona and she and her mother move to a very remote mountain town on the east coast of Ireland because her father who’s from that town has passed away and they bring him home to be buried there. The main character, Rowan she’s full of grief and she’s upset, and she’s been drawn away from her home and she’s lost the person she’s closest to and she starts to notice something very strange about the town. There’s this wall that surrounds it and nobody will cross it and everybody has to keep this wall upright and safe and nobody will tell her why. It’s completely off-limits."
Of course, being told that something is "off-limits" has never stopped an intrepid explorer from going where no one else dares and Rowan must decide if the allure of what lies beyond is worth the world of trouble that crossing the wall might bring.
Eilish tells us: "It’s a spooky story, I hesitate to say that it’s a bit of a ghost story, but it’s also got a lot of Irish folklore in it and it’s a bit creepier than Fia. This is a little bit more Halloween-y!
"I think it's the unknown and the potential for something magical and I know magic is usually seen as something very positive, but there’s so much magic in the spooky and the idea of ghosts because we don’t understand it. It’s the potential then for what could exist, if ghosts exist, what else could exist that we haven’t proved and I think that that really draws kids, it draws me."
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