Glenda Larke, fantasy author, was born in Western Australia, the daughter of a farmer. She gained a degree in history and a diploma in education from the University of Western Australia, married a Malaysian scientist and now lives in his homeland, where she is actively involved in rainforest conservation. She is the author of: Havenstar (writing as Glenda Noramly) The Aware, Gilfeather and The Tainted (these three make up the Isles of Glory trilogy) and Heart of the Mirage, The Shadow of Tyr and Song of the Shiver Barrens (which make up the Mirage Makers trilogy). She has several times been short-listed for the Aurealis Award and her fans know it’s only a matter of time before she wins one. She is currently working on a third trilogy, tentatively known as The Time of Random Rain.
SF: Glenda, you have been writing for a decade or two now. You have set stories in a tropical archipelago and a Middle Eastern near-desert and your current work-in-progress is different again. When you started writing, did you envisage writing such a wide variety of books?
GL: I’ve been writing more than a decade or two! I started when I was very young, and actually envisaged books about our world, not an imaginary one. My very first effort was set on a farm like the one we had in Western Australia, set in the present day (which was the 1950s). It was an adventure story about children of around my own age. I never finished it, but I believe I still have it, somewhere or another.
The second book I started, I did finish. I was twelve and it was set in Scotland a few hundred years back in the past. It was a love story, truly awful, and I researched the era in the local library – I’d never been to Scotland! (Fortunately it never occurred to me to research the love story part in a practical way.) I suspect what I wrote when I was ten was better than the twelve-year-old effort.
SF: Did you set off to write fantasy, or did you just find yourself veering in that direction as you wrote? Have you ever felt inclined to work in other genres?
GL: The first books I wrote as an adult in the 60s and early 70s were adventure thrillers with a strong element of romance. Strong heroines, dashing heroes and lots of bad guys and trouble. I set them in places I knew about: Western Australia and South-east Asia. My attempts to find a publisher were desultory and half-hearted though, for reasons that don’t exist any more. There were no writer groups to seek advice from, no internet to look things up on, no publishers down the street to try, no list of agents in the phone book, or stacks of "how-to" books to buy in a local bookstore. I didn't know anyone who wrote novels. When I had a rejection or two—which, looking back, I can see were actually very encouraging personalised rejections—I assumed they were just being polite, and never tried again. I was, in fact, pretty stupid about the whole business. There was another reason to make persistence difficult back then, and that was money. After we moved to Malaysia, to send off a manuscript even once was expensive, let alone to add an SAE. To do it multiple times was out of the question.
At that time (the early 1970s) I was pretty much unaware that there was such a thing as fantasy for adults, so it never occurred to me to write it. Then my sister—a school librarian—introduced me to those authors who were writing fantasy and opened my eyes to their magic. Around then too, one of my husband's relatives read something I wrote set in Malaysia, was obviously unable to separate the opinions of Glenda the author from the opinion of the characters in the book, which shocked me silly. It brought home to me the fact that I was going to be in deep sh―, er, trouble, if I continued to write books set in Malaysia. Those two things did indeed send me veering off into writing fantasy.
SF: World building is obviously one of your fortes. All the different settings in your books seem to reflect, to some extent, the journey of your life. Your main base is now Malaysia, and it is not hard to see how that environment might have influenced your setting for The Isles of Glory trilogy. But your husband’s work has taken you to other places as well. I’m wondering how these temporary homes show up in your work. Did your time in Tunisia, for instance, influence the setting for The Mirage Makers and The Time of Random Rain?
GL: I've lived on four continents and travelled widely - and yes, all of that has influenced my world building. I won't say, though, that any one book owes its setting to any one place. The Aware has elements of Fraser Island in Qld and Denham in W.A. as well as some coastal fishing villages in Malaysia. I chose that setting because someone made me so mad with a dismissive comment along the lines of: “Of course all fantasy is set in medieval times with castles and forests with wolves and quests on horseback.” So I sat down and wrote a fantasy set in an early 19th century type world, one that had not a single tree anywhere in it, let alone a forest, no wolves, no horses and nowhere to go. (Nevertheless, several reviewers then mentioned it was a medieval world, which makes me wonder about their knowledge of history.)
The two books that follow on from it, Gilfeather and The Tainted, were set on several different islands in the same archipelago, and I drew on my knowledge of places as diverse as Malaysian mangroves, tin mines and lakes, bird stacks off the coast of the UK, the Severn River tidal bore, and Runde Island off the coast of Norway.
Tunisia certainly turned up in The Mirage Makers, but so did the Roman Empire and other Mediterranean countries.
SF: You grew up on a Western Australian farm and you’ve also lived in Austria as well as Malaysia and Tunisia. You’ve visited Italy and other countries, too. Are you planning to incorporate ideas garnered from any of these places into future stories? For instance, how about a novel set in the Outback?
GL: The three books tentatively named The Time of Random Rain trilogy (of which I have written about half) owe a lot to the Australian desert landscape, always a love of mine. I envisage the world of these books as an alternative Australia-like place far in the future after a cataclysmic environmental disaster akin to global warning, at a time when people have learned to live with the result of this catastrophe by manipulating a kind of water magic. Mind you, I never confine myself to ideas gleaned from only one country or area. There are also bits of Tunisia, the Sahara of Algeria, the dry mountains of Iran…Yep, the world is full of interesting stuff, all grist to the writer’s mill.
SF: In each of your books we find hints of your interest in environmental issues. Were you aware of this influence from the start of your writing career or did it just grow on you as you went along?
GL: It grew on me. The love of the outdoors has always been there – as it has been with all my family. My concern for our natural world has been gradually growing ever since. When I was eleven we shifted to the city and I cried myself silly for days. I couldn’t imagine that I would be able bear city living!
SF: What do you think first aroused your interest in conservation?
GL: I got interested in birds first, and then alarmed by what I was seeing. Alarmed and staggered by the speed at which destruction was devastating our world and our climate. People who don’t think there is a problem must walk around with blinkers on. Or maybe they never leave their aircon offices and cemented cities. People who work in our wild places, as I do, are more than concerned; we fear for the future of our children.
SF: Birds do seem to be a particular enthusiasm of yours. Did this curiosity arise because of the wonderful tropical birds you see in Malaysia or have you always loved our avian cousins?
GL: Always, going back to being that farm kid in Australia. I wish someone had given me a pair of binoculars then. It was having someone with an equal interest in bird-watching—my husband—that led to the consuming passion.
SF: You lead bird-watching tours, don't you? Have you had any funny experiences showing foreigners around your adopted homeland?
GL: I have done that a bit, yes, but mostly I do ornithological work for environmental NGOs and government ministries. Alas, that’s probably more heartbreaking than funny. For instance, I’ve seen bird-watching in Malaysia being advertised by pictures of South American toucans and macaws and Chinese pheasant!
SF: I believe you're thinking of something entirely different for your next book and again your imagination has run riot. How many people would think of incorporating a pair of squabbling house imps and a gargoyle cat? Do tell us a bit more about your ideas for new works.
GL: Yes, that will be the next book after I have finished The Time of Random Rain trilogy. I have been aching to return to the world of my first published book, Havenstar. Havenstar was a land where the people devised a way of keeping an encroaching Chaos at bay, but there was a high price to pay for their success. There were other lands in that world, and one of them used a vastly different method of halting Chaos – and that’s to be the subject of my next endeavour. I have tentatively called it The Prince, the Inventor and the Gargoyle Cat.
Nagging house imps, an acerbic gargoyle, a hidden kingdom, a bumbling inventor, a princess…ooer. I can’t wait to get to it!
SF: And we can’t wait to read it! Thank you, Glenda Larke, fantasy author extraordinaire!
Glenda Larke blogs at http://glendalarke.blogspot.com