But really, what would they teach in the college seminar about your life’s work?
This was one of the “not exactly serious, but maybe” questions we pondered when novelist Kelly Braffet and I sat down for the latest episode of KnotWork Storytelling.
Kelly is a fabulously talented writer and a damn good baker. Everyone who has picked up a copy of her latest book The Broken Tower, its prequel The Unwilling, or her previous novels knows the former statement is true. As a recipient of one of her holiday cookie packages, my family and I can attest to the latter.
The conversation you hear in “Power and Reality in the Midst of Fantasy” is a chat between friends. It’s also a conversation between two writers who love stories, the power of story in capital S sort of way, and tend to think deeply (overthink?) just about everything.
A Pandemic Novel that Never Mentions Viruses or Masks
When you pick up The Broken Tower, I think you immediately realize it’s a pandemic novel, even though no one in this story world would understand virology or the sense of insecurity that comes with empty grocery store shelves. (They’d know that many diseases are deadly and some healers can help, though their powers tend to come at a price. And those who never worried about food supply never shopped for it and those who have worried about where their next meal is coming from couldn’t imagine the abundance of even the “emptiest” modern supermarket.)
So many of the hardest feelings we all came to know too well are part of these character’s everyday conversations:
”Why is everything horrible?” Ida said, and Korsa was shocked to see that her eyes were filled with tears. “The orphan house was horrible. The streets are horrible. This entire place is horrible, except for us. What's the point of living? So we can experience more horribleness?”
“The point is, Korsa said gently, “ to try to make it less horrible.”
Kelly’s response when I read this deeply difficult but immensely true passage was: “Oh, that is so pandemic.”
And yet, somehow, this book in which horrible things happen to people (none of whom are totally good or totally bad) is comforting somehow. Fiction has a way of doing that, of course.
Tune into our conversation and read The Broken Tower
Themes of “power” (not just the magical sort), and how this is central to all of Kelly’s work
The dual meaning of “Work,” which describes the magic in this world and the factories that make the book “a capitalist dystopia”
The question of whose stories get told and feeling haunted by all the people whose stories were never told
The conscious inclusion of differently abled people as well as well as folks across gender identities and sexualities
The question “who am I writing for” and how the author’s choices can hurt certain readers, particularly those with marginalized identities.
Why Kelly chose to create a mythic world that does not replicate our own
More About Kelly Braffet
Kelly Braffet is the author of the Border Lands novels, including The Broken Tower and The Unwilling, as well as the novels Save Yourself, Josie and Jack and Last Seen Leaving. Her writing has been published in The Fairy Tale Review, Post Road, and several anthologies. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University and currently lives in upstate New York with her husband, the author Owen King.