An Interview with Jenny Blackford and a Preview of The Priestess and the Slave

Interviewer: Sonia Helbig

Jenny Blackford is a full time writer and reviewer who lives in Melbourne, Australia. Her first book The Priestess and the Slave is coming out from Hadley Rille Books www.hadleyrillebooks.com/ on April 15. It is a fascinating novella, with rich settings and vivid characters. While historical fiction, it often reads like a historical fantasy. Jenny is one of the five World Fantasy Award judges for 2009.

SH: Welcome to The Specusphere Jenny!

JB: Thanks, Sonia. 

SH: Jenny, before we get onto your amazing new novel, and your interest in religion, classics and ancient history, would you like to fill the readers in on some of your other passions and past writing projects?

JB: I love gardening and cooking, good red wine, and cats of all sizes, large and small. And books, of course. I've been reviewing for ages: Russell Blackford and I were a core part of the collective that produced Australian Science Fiction Review: Second Series in the 80s. Since then I've reviewed fantasy for the Age; sf and fantasy for the New York Review of Science Fiction; and science and ecological books for Cosmos and G magazines. Since I gave up my day job in 2001 I've had stories published in places including the NSW School Magazine, Jack Dann's Dreaming Again, Paul Collins' Trust Me!, and Random House's 30 Australian Ghost Stories for Children.

SH: What is life like as a World Fantasy Award judge? Does it mesh together easily with your life as a writer and complement it?

JB: So far I've been positively enjoying it, though I'm sure it will get overwhelming soon enough. I've loved reading through piles of stuff including all of the 2008 issues of F&SF and Realms of Fantasy, and a bunch of great anthologies and collections, as well as some fine novels. Some are not so great, but that's okay.

The best bit is that if I don't feel like writing, I have a wonderful excuse to lie around and read fantasy, and plenty to choose from. That's the worst bit, too; it's all too easy to read instead of write, and my output is way down. Even so, the boxes are starting to pile up in the hall waiting to be opened. When the reading is over for the year, though, I'm going to have a great overview of the worldwide fantasy market.

SH: The Priestess and the Slave is set during a very tumultuous period in Greek and Spartan history. Could you take a moment to set the scene for us and explain what a Pythia is?

JB: Ancient Greek history was almost always tumultuous; rivalry between the city-states for power and resources led to a series of constantly shifting alliances, dangerous diplomacy and frequent wars. When the gigantic Persian Empire threatened tiny Greece in the fifth century BC, there was temporary unity between the squabbling states, but soon afterwards Sparta and Athens and their allies, were at one another's throats in the Peloponnesian War. The plague of Athens was one of the most dreadful episodes of that wasteful, tragic war.

A Pythia is one of the oracular priestesses of Apollo at Delphi. The plural is Pythiai. Sometimes there was only one, but in the heyday of the shrine in the firth century BC there were up to three at a time. Apollo had other oracular priestesses and priests, for example at Claros, and there was another legendary prophetess at Delphi, the Sibyl, but the priestesses who prophesied for Apollo in his temple at Delphi were designated as Pythiai.

As far as possible, I've followed Plutarch's account of how the oracle worked. He was a priest at Delphi in the first and second centuries AD, and a philosopher and biographer. Historians of the last few centuries tried to second-guess his account of the oracle – of course male priests had to "interpret" the women's "incomprehensible" prophecies, and of course the Pythiai couldn't have been inspired by anything as fanciful as sweet-smelling vapours from a crevice in the rock under the temple. I've never seen that Plutarch had any reason to lie, and feminist reassessment of the texts plus some controversial modern archaeological discoveries have encouraged me to rely on his account. 

SH: Your characters' beliefs in their deities are so real, that their lives begin to cross over into a fantasy realm. Your Pythia-priestesses channel Apollo and his wisdom for a nation. How do you think your novel will be received by historians?

JB: I don't think historians will be shocked. I based my characters' feelings about the gods and the way they relate to them, firmly on Greek literature. Whether you read the plays, the epics or the histories, it is clear that the gods permeated the consciousness of the ancient Greeks, and their lives, in a way that is hard for modern Australians, or Americans, to understand.

Greek history tells us that the Oracle of Delphi was consulted before any important action: declaring war, founding a colony or starting a business venture. And both states and private people treated the statements of the oracle very seriously indeed.

I took the story of Perialla's corruption by Cleomenes, and Cleomenes' dreadful death, from Herodotus' history of the Persian Wars, which is full of fascinating anecdotes. I modelled my account of the plague of Athens on that of Thucydides, the historian of the Peloponnesian Wars. Thucydides lived in Athens at the time of the plague, which is estimated to have killed a third of the population. He was one of the small number of people who caught the plague but survived, which makes his account of it especially valuable – as well as frustrating. Medical experts still argue what the plague pathogen was: bubonic plague, smallpox, measles, typhus, or even Ebola. A recent DNA study found evidence of typhoid fever, but this has been disputed.

The point that some historians might worry about, is my transliteration of Greek words. Rather than using the old-fashioned and misleading Roman transliterations of kappa into "c", chi into "ch", the alpha-iota diphthong into "ae", upsilon into "y" and so on, I much prefer simple phonetic transcription into a more authentic representation of the ancient Greek — so, Aiskhulos rather than Aeschylus. This should add to the sense of the strangeness and "distance" of the culture. In a few cases where words are so well known through Latin that they are naturalised into English and the Greek form would be too jarring, e.g. with Apollo and Python, I use the Latinised form.

SH: There were points during the novel that I cried. Both women go on incredible emotional journeys through contrasting landscapes. Harmonia, the slave, faces constant death and plague, while Thrasulla, the priestess, faces political intrigue. Who is your favourite character and why? Who was the hardest to understand and write about?

JB: I don't think I can choose between the Pythia and the slave. I identified with each of them pretty much equally, as characters, and they both took a huge amount of research to get the physical, personal and political aspects of their lives as accurate as possible.

SH: Choosing to tell a political tale through the eyes of women from two contrasting social standings, one, a Pythia, Apollo's Oracle to a nation, and one a household slave of a marble carver, is an extremely clever way of presenting a patriarchal world. Would you like to tell us how you came to settle on this point of view and a little about your writing process?

JB: After years of reading historical fiction, as well as two years of Ancient History in senior High School and four years of Classics at University, I never wanted to hear about, let alone write about, any of the (male) aristocrats who clustered around Socrates, even Alcibiades, no matter how beautiful and treacherous he was. Women and their everyday lives seemed far more interesting.

One of my favourite courses back at the University of Newcastle was Greek Daily Life; the lecturer had us looking at the construction of ancient chairs and tables, and trying our hands at weaving and spinning, as well as reading Plato's Symposium and similar texts. I didn't set out deliberately to highlight the patriarchal nature of Greek society, but once I'd decided to present women in the process of going about their daily lives, the constant background patriarchy was unavoidable.

Despite the best efforts of my teachers, wars per se never interested me – but the plague of Athens did, and it seemed obvious to use as the viewpoint character for it, one of the people who would be doing most of the work, a female slave. There were so many slaves in Ancient Greece, many of them women kidnapped from their foreign families.

PICTURE OF HERODOTUS

I came across Herodotus' account of Perialla's corruption by Cleomenes while I doing some background reading for the novella, and decided straight away to use the incident. It helped that the Pythia is such a mysterious, romantic figure, and that I'd fallen in love with Delphi when Russell and I had visited in 2001.

SH: It's often said authors live their novels. Were there any moments you felt swept up in the otherness of the period and found it hard to exit writing and come back to the real world?

JB: While I was writing the novella, my body might have been in Albert Park, but my mind was in Ancient Greece most of the time. It was hard at times to think of anything other than the plague, and the temple of Apollo, as real.

SH: Was there any part of the novel where you struggled to stay true to history while writing entertaining fiction?

JB: I tried to ensure that there was a plausible historical basis for everything that happened in the novella, and I never had an impulse to write anything that contradicted known history. There was plenty of scope for fiction even with the historical figures such as Cleomenes. We know their actions in broad terms, but we can only speculate about many of the details, and their true motivations. Most of the characters aren't historical figures, but are based on classes of people whom we do know about – the many nameless Pythiai, for example. We have records for stone masons being paid for their work, and their slaves' work, on the Parthenon in Athens.

SH: What is your writing process? Do you have any special rituals to begin your day or sessions?

JB: I try to set a goal for a writing day: 500 words for material where I'm constantly checking details, such as The Priestess and the Slave, or 1000 words for pure fiction. Once the guilt level has built up high enough, I try to just sit at the PC until it's done, usually spending a lot of time checking the wordcount so far. When I'm stuck for the next word or sentence, I play either Tetris or Spider Solitaire. After a few games, the elusive words will often have formed in my subconscious and will be ready for me to write them down.

SH: Many people aspire to write historical fiction or historical fantasy. How hard is it to write, and how much study does it take? What is your advice for them, both as a writer and a reviewer?

JB: I get cranky with lazy errors in historical fiction – the sort that could have been avoided by a browse of a good reference work like The Oxford Classical Dictionary. That said, it's all too easy to make a quick assumption while writing and never get around to checking it.

In general, different types of historical fiction take different levels of expertise. This novella is the first in a series which my publisher, Eric Reynolds, has commissioned; he wants them to be written by experts and to demonstrate a high degree of accuracy and reliance on the historical and archaeological sources. That's what I've attempted to deliver here. As research, I refreshed my fading memories of the Classics degree by reading and rereading dozens of books and articles – including ancient Greek history and literature, and modern works of archaeology, history, ancient daily life and ancient religion. Some were very specialised and scholarly: a collection of academic articles about ancient Greek sacrifice, for example, a book about ancient disease and medicine, and articles about ancient toilets. If I hadn't already loved the period, I couldn't have managed it. Only a tiny percentage of the material was actually used in the novella.

A partially or wholly fictionalised historical fantasy setting requires far less research, of course, though perhaps more imagination. In my current project, a life of Medea, the requirements vary. Her childhood home of Colchis at the far end of the Black Sea was a real place, but to the Greeks it was a fairy-tale location full of sorcery and wonders. To fit in with the myths, I am making it very fanciful. After she went with Jason to Greece, Medea lived in the Mycenaean cities of Corinth and Athens, and visited others; I will try to present at least the physical and political aspects of the Bronze Age Greek culture as accurately as possible. That means months of blissful research into Mycenaean Greece.

SH: Readers who visit your website are going to want to know about the gorgeous Felix Blackford. It would be remiss of me not to ask you about him, and whether he inspires or chews up your writing.

JB: Felix is a very beautiful young cat, about three and a half years old now. He's a blue point Ragdoll, so he's creamy-white with blue-grey-brown ears, face, paws and tail, and he has gloriously bright blue eyes. His official name is Mystical Prince Felix, but I usually call him Fifi or even just Fee. It isn't totally coincidental that there's a cat called Fee in my kids' story in this January's Explore, the Pearson Education magazine for 8-10 year olds, though that Fee is black. 

Felix is usually happy when I sit down for the day's work at my PC, which is set up in the spare bedroom. He insists on a cuddle, then he will get down and settle himself on or under the spare bed for most of the day. Of course, if there are any papers on the bed he'll make sure he walks on them and gets them thoroughly crumpled and covered in white hairs, but he doesn't actually chew them.

SH: Thanks for sharing all your wisdom and insights with us! We wish you all the best with the launch of The Priestess and the Slave.

Jenny Blackford's website can be found at: http://www.jennyblackford.com

Chapter one of The Priestess and the Slave can be read at: http://www.hadleyrillebooks.com/Priestess

Copies of the book can be purchased on line with the publisher or through selected bookstores.