Kater Cheek's Blog - Posts Tagged "feminism"
Hawthorn Hex Interview
Feminist Mage: Kater Cheek discusses Hawthorn Hex
Kater Cheek is the author of seven novels, dozens of short stories, hundreds of book reviews, and a comic book about chickens. She’s just come out with Hawthorn Hex, the sixth book in the Kit Melbourne series. We talk to her about childcare, feminism, refugees, and how they relate to urban fantasy.
This is the sixth book in what is proving to be an enduring series. How has Kit changed as a character since Seeing Things?
Kit has come a long way since the first book. When she started out the series, she had a typical young person’s problems: how to make the rent, how to find love. Now that she’s started a family, she has to balance taking care of her daughter with her work for the Vampire Guild. It’s a struggle that a lot of people go through that’s not well represented in fiction, especially not in contemporary fantasy.
Why do you think it’s underrepresented?
Partly I think it’s because it’s inconvenient. For example, in high fantasy you have this problem with horses that are basically cars that Diana Wynne Jones mocked so beautifully in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland back in 2006. Fantasy horses don’t need to eat, they don’t need to rest. They just take the heroes from place to place, a prop that gives the book that high-fantasy feel, like cloaks and castles.
I’ve seen that in other novels, where the heroine has a baby but it’s merely used as a prop. It’s disingenuous, because raising a baby is hard work, and to pretend that it isn’t is disrespectful to the people who have done it, who are doing it. It requires a lot of time and a lot of skill that has to be learned.
Tessali and Kit have a complicated relationship in this book. Kit seems to seems to feel guilty about how much she needs Tessali, and yet she resents her as well. Do you think readers will respond to this? Most readers don’t have a full-time faerie nanny.
The struggle of how to raise children or not raise children is one I think that all women deal with. Even women who don’t have children (maybe especially women who don’t have children) have thought about how much weight is placed on every decision. No matter what you decide, society will judge you harshly.
My female friends and I joke a lot about how much we’d like to have a wife. Anyone who’s read the series will know there’s a lot of parallel between the karla/spira bond and a traditional marriage. In the Vargel society, the Indel have been conditioned since birth that bonding, becoming a submissive helpmeet to a Vargel, is the highest role they can attain. As in real life, it doesn’t always work perfectly even if both people think that’s what they want.
Kit feels conflicted about having Tessali do this for her, because our society still tells women that their natural place is as a caregiver. And Fenwick has a problem with it too, because he wants to be at home with the kids, but as a man, he’s been taught that it’s his job to earn the money. So they’re all struggling with the conflict between what they want and what they think they’re supposed to want.
Would you say that this is a feminist book?
Oh, yes. I would say anything I write is feminist. I feel very sad when I hear women say a woman’s proper place is to be under the authority of a man. Women who claim that a woman should not have her own authority and autonomy remind me of victims with the Stockholm syndrome.
Being a homemaker was the right decision for me and my family, but I’m extremely aware of the risk, the sacrifice, and of the pressure it puts on a relationship to have one person financially dependent on the other. In a way, writing this book was like an exploration of what the other side of the coin is like.
For me, feminism is not just about deciding whether a woman should have kids and whether she should stay home to raise them. That’s a loaded question, designed to set women against other women. Feminism should be about women helping each other. That’s a strong theme of this book, women trying to help other women, and about how far you can go to help another person without endangering yourself.
In the novel, the Vampire Guild has to make decisions about how many vampire refugees to take in. Did you mean to draw parallels with the situation in Syria when you wrote this?
Not at all. When I first wrote the sixth book in the Kit Melbourne series, it was a very different story. it was called Familiar Battles, and it was about a rather sympathetic witch named Barbara who had an incurable degenerative disease. She had an opportunity to live disease-free forever if she was willing to kill an innocent woman. Kit was a background character in that version. In trying to incorporate her as a main character, I had to abandon the plot and start over from scratch.
When I rewrote the novel, I knew I wanted to focus on Kit and Tessali’s relationship, and on Kit’s career as Dayrunner. I also wanted to flesh out her development as a mage. The plot needed a pressing reason why she had to finish the ward in a short amount of time. I’ve already written later books in this series, so I kind of know where I want the story to go. I had written in Adamiak’s background story that he had been living in Toronto when an internecine vampire conflict caused a lot of vampires to flee to other Guilds. I decided to use that backstory here.
This book took me over a year to write, and when I started it, I knew nothing about the Syrian refugees. In Hawthorn Hex, the vampire refugee situation is made more complicated in that if a city gets too top-heavy, that is, too many vampires per humans, it can endanger everyone in the city. It’s a heavy question. Who do you allow to come into your safe space? How do you balance the desire to help others with the need to keep your own group safe?
What’s next after this?
I’m currently working on an omnibus of the first three Kit Melbourne novels. Its title will be Bindi Magic, and I’m working with a cover artist to give it a fresh look. My next standalone novel will be Parasitic Souls. It’s an emerging adult contemporary fantasy novel about what happens when people develop the technology of transferring a soul into another person’s body.
As for Susan Stillwater, the third book in the Desert Mages series, The Heat Stealer, won’t come out until 2017 at the earliest. I’m pretty busy with work and kids, and I only do one project at a time, so it can take a lot longer than I’d like.
Kit would understand!
Hawthorn Hex is available as an ebook through most formats or paperback through libraries or retailers. For more information on her other books, visit: http://www.catherinecheek.com/fiction-2/
Kater Cheek is the author of seven novels, dozens of short stories, hundreds of book reviews, and a comic book about chickens. She’s just come out with Hawthorn Hex, the sixth book in the Kit Melbourne series. We talk to her about childcare, feminism, refugees, and how they relate to urban fantasy.
This is the sixth book in what is proving to be an enduring series. How has Kit changed as a character since Seeing Things?
Kit has come a long way since the first book. When she started out the series, she had a typical young person’s problems: how to make the rent, how to find love. Now that she’s started a family, she has to balance taking care of her daughter with her work for the Vampire Guild. It’s a struggle that a lot of people go through that’s not well represented in fiction, especially not in contemporary fantasy.
Why do you think it’s underrepresented?
Partly I think it’s because it’s inconvenient. For example, in high fantasy you have this problem with horses that are basically cars that Diana Wynne Jones mocked so beautifully in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland back in 2006. Fantasy horses don’t need to eat, they don’t need to rest. They just take the heroes from place to place, a prop that gives the book that high-fantasy feel, like cloaks and castles.
I’ve seen that in other novels, where the heroine has a baby but it’s merely used as a prop. It’s disingenuous, because raising a baby is hard work, and to pretend that it isn’t is disrespectful to the people who have done it, who are doing it. It requires a lot of time and a lot of skill that has to be learned.
Tessali and Kit have a complicated relationship in this book. Kit seems to seems to feel guilty about how much she needs Tessali, and yet she resents her as well. Do you think readers will respond to this? Most readers don’t have a full-time faerie nanny.
The struggle of how to raise children or not raise children is one I think that all women deal with. Even women who don’t have children (maybe especially women who don’t have children) have thought about how much weight is placed on every decision. No matter what you decide, society will judge you harshly.
My female friends and I joke a lot about how much we’d like to have a wife. Anyone who’s read the series will know there’s a lot of parallel between the karla/spira bond and a traditional marriage. In the Vargel society, the Indel have been conditioned since birth that bonding, becoming a submissive helpmeet to a Vargel, is the highest role they can attain. As in real life, it doesn’t always work perfectly even if both people think that’s what they want.
Kit feels conflicted about having Tessali do this for her, because our society still tells women that their natural place is as a caregiver. And Fenwick has a problem with it too, because he wants to be at home with the kids, but as a man, he’s been taught that it’s his job to earn the money. So they’re all struggling with the conflict between what they want and what they think they’re supposed to want.
Would you say that this is a feminist book?
Oh, yes. I would say anything I write is feminist. I feel very sad when I hear women say a woman’s proper place is to be under the authority of a man. Women who claim that a woman should not have her own authority and autonomy remind me of victims with the Stockholm syndrome.
Being a homemaker was the right decision for me and my family, but I’m extremely aware of the risk, the sacrifice, and of the pressure it puts on a relationship to have one person financially dependent on the other. In a way, writing this book was like an exploration of what the other side of the coin is like.
For me, feminism is not just about deciding whether a woman should have kids and whether she should stay home to raise them. That’s a loaded question, designed to set women against other women. Feminism should be about women helping each other. That’s a strong theme of this book, women trying to help other women, and about how far you can go to help another person without endangering yourself.
In the novel, the Vampire Guild has to make decisions about how many vampire refugees to take in. Did you mean to draw parallels with the situation in Syria when you wrote this?
Not at all. When I first wrote the sixth book in the Kit Melbourne series, it was a very different story. it was called Familiar Battles, and it was about a rather sympathetic witch named Barbara who had an incurable degenerative disease. She had an opportunity to live disease-free forever if she was willing to kill an innocent woman. Kit was a background character in that version. In trying to incorporate her as a main character, I had to abandon the plot and start over from scratch.
When I rewrote the novel, I knew I wanted to focus on Kit and Tessali’s relationship, and on Kit’s career as Dayrunner. I also wanted to flesh out her development as a mage. The plot needed a pressing reason why she had to finish the ward in a short amount of time. I’ve already written later books in this series, so I kind of know where I want the story to go. I had written in Adamiak’s background story that he had been living in Toronto when an internecine vampire conflict caused a lot of vampires to flee to other Guilds. I decided to use that backstory here.
This book took me over a year to write, and when I started it, I knew nothing about the Syrian refugees. In Hawthorn Hex, the vampire refugee situation is made more complicated in that if a city gets too top-heavy, that is, too many vampires per humans, it can endanger everyone in the city. It’s a heavy question. Who do you allow to come into your safe space? How do you balance the desire to help others with the need to keep your own group safe?
What’s next after this?
I’m currently working on an omnibus of the first three Kit Melbourne novels. Its title will be Bindi Magic, and I’m working with a cover artist to give it a fresh look. My next standalone novel will be Parasitic Souls. It’s an emerging adult contemporary fantasy novel about what happens when people develop the technology of transferring a soul into another person’s body.
As for Susan Stillwater, the third book in the Desert Mages series, The Heat Stealer, won’t come out until 2017 at the earliest. I’m pretty busy with work and kids, and I only do one project at a time, so it can take a lot longer than I’d like.
Kit would understand!
Hawthorn Hex is available as an ebook through most formats or paperback through libraries or retailers. For more information on her other books, visit: http://www.catherinecheek.com/fiction-2/
