Maggie Stiefvater wants to bring childlike wonder to adults with "The Listeners" | Audible.au
Maggie Stiefvater wants to bring childlike wonder to adults with "The Listeners"
The author of beloved YA series like The Raven Cycle and The Shiver Trilogy turns her awe-inducing prose on an adult audience with a historical, magical story about a luxury West Virginia hotel.
This post was originally published on Audible.com.
Note: Text has been lightly edited for clarity and does not match audio exactly.
Melissa Bendixen: Hi listeners, this is Melissa Bendixen, an editor here at Audible. Today I'm speaking with Maggie Stiefvater, author of YA classics like , , and . Now she's written her first novel for adults, . Welcome, Maggie.
Maggie Stiefvater: Thank you for having me.
MB: I'm so glad you're here. Well, The Listeners is a World War II story, but it's set in West Virginia. Beginning after the attack on Pearl Harbor, luxury hotels were tasked with holding Axis diplomats in the US while exchange negotiations were taking place. This is something that did actually happen in 1942. Our story starts here, from the perspective of June Hudson, the general manager of one such hotel, the Avallon, which offers the epitome of luxury, as well as a mysterious and magical water source called the sweetwater. So, Maggie, my first question for you is, how long have you been working on this story, and when did you know it would be a story for adults?
MS: It feels like I have been working on this novel forever, but not because it's taken longer than my other novels, even though it has, but because I think this is the novel that has actually changed me the most as a person while writing it. I knew before I began it that it was going to be a novel for adults. I was partway through The Dreamer Trilogy, which was for young adults, and I had come to the conclusion that as I looked to my bedside stand, that every book that was sitting there and every book that was sitting on its face turned to page 16, as my children like to joke, all over my house was now adult general fiction. I realized that my reading tastes had changed, and I've always used myself as my first reader. I thought, "Well, that means that your instincts are going to be all wrong for the genre that you are in." So, I knew that I wanted to move into adult, but I also knew that it wasn't just about making your characters older. It's an entirely different category with a different expectation.
I threw myself, over years, into, before I even knew what I was writing about, reading just loads and loads of adult general fiction from across all categories, to tell you the truth, just to get a sense of what you could and couldn't do, and to just get a sense of how I could use it as an opportunity to grow as a writer at the same time. To not just become an adult author, but to become the adult version of myself, which is where the coming of age comes in. I really thought that getting to be a better writer would be what changed me. But when I encountered this idea of Nazis in my mountains, because I was born in the Shenandoah Valley, I couldn't believe that I'd never heard about it when I was growing up, because it's not a secret exactly, but nobody I knew of had even heard of it.
So, I threw myself into the research, and the research is what changed me.It completely changed my way that I looked at class. It completely changed the way I looked at luxury. It completely changed the way I looked at what the real dangers of dehumanization and war were. And it also even changed the way I thought about how we participated in World War II, and I did not expect any of these things when I started out writing it.
MB: Wow, yeah. I'm curious, what's been the most interesting or unexpected element of writing for adults for you?
MS: Well, craft-wise, I would say the biggest challenge was time. In a young adult novel, everyone has to be under 18, and they're always coming-of-age stories. You can only skip a couple of weeks maybe because if you skip too much, they've already aged out. It also has to feel quite immediate, because young adult is a genre which has a lot in common with television and film. So, you're sitting on a character's shoulder and you're experiencing it with them. Everything feels very raw, and if it's happening to them, it's happening to you. And adult can be that, but adult has many other things it can be as well. It uses time in many ways to look back at those moments when it was quite immediate, and that sense of perspective and having learned something from it is what makes it feel quite adult, that sense of equal past and future. And I had no ability to skip time. I didn't know how to use time at all. I just thought to myself, "How am I going to do this?"
"I think this is the novel that has actually changed me the most as a person while writing it."
I would ask my critique partners and my agent, I would say, "I'm having a good time writing, but I'm having an enormous time knowing how to skip time." And they said, "Maggie, just write, 'A few months passed.'" And I go, "No, it's not that. It's something broader." And it really did take me a very long time to understand that it wasn't just about the sheer mechanism of skipping time, it was about giving that space and using that time to have that sense of perspective. So that was the biggest thing that was really different about writing for adults.
MB: All these things I've never even thought of. I read in your author's note that you were a history major, and you immensely enjoyed researching for The Listeners. What initially drew you to this conflict and setting?
MS: So, when I first started this book, I didn't anticipate it being a historical fiction novel. And to tell you the truth, I still don't really think of it as a historical fiction novel. I would really like for people who, like me, love being bathed in history to get into it and feel, "Oh, yes, every single corner of this has been researched." But I don't think that it actually feels the same kind of immersive and alienating from the period that great historical fiction feels. To me, great historical fiction really reminds you on every single page how different we are from this moment, and that's the joy of it.
It's almost like when you're reading fantasy, if you have fantasy that downplays the magic, where's the fun in that? The fun is coming to feel that sense of magic. I feel like historical fiction reminds you on every page, "Aren't we having a great time being in 1942?" And in this one, the reason why I was originally drawn to making it a historical moment was, first of all, finding this moment in history and just thinking this just feels like it was tailor-made to be a Stiefvater novel because this corner of the world is so important to me.
But also I remember asking my agent, "What do you think makes a Maggie Stiefvater novel?" And he said, "It feels to me that you always take the reader to a place that they really want to go, but deep down inside, there's that wistful feeling that comes from knowing that you can't actually go there, either because it doesn't exist or because it was a moment in time." And I thought, "That's what I also love about history, is that sense that it's got that remove to it." I understand why time travel novels are so appealing because we know we can't go. So, that sense of wistfulness means, I think, that you can create a more pleasant reading experience that still has that wonderful, sentimental edge to it without feeling treacley, because you know it's lost. It's gone. That moment is somewhere else.
MB: Can you tell us some of the most interesting or fun tidbits you learned when you were researching?
MS: Some of the research that I did for this was just hotel-based, where if my main character is a hotel manager, I need to know how she's filling her day. Some of these things are things which remain true even today. I got to research by having phone calls with modern hoteliers, modern luxury hoteliers. One fellow had managed a property in Switzerland for $54,000 a night, and another was a Cornell School of Hospitality professor who rejuvenated properties that had fallen to their knees. Hearing the ways that they managed a hotel, in common with the memoirs I was reading from hoteliers in the '20s and '30s, and seeing how they agreed, that was really fun, to see how they all agreed that the most important thing that you could give to a guest, a luxury guest, was their name. Knowing who they were and not just knowing their name as in, "Hello, Bill. How are you? Good morning," but rather that being a kind of promise that you were going to provide an experience that was the best for them, rather than the best for just anyone, which is what keeps something from being an indulgence and turns it into luxury.
An indulgence is something that you can guess that everybody might like, that we all like soft sheets or we all like chocolate, but a luxury is something which is an indulgence just for you. And that personal touch, that was very fun to read about for just running a hotel and the little details of things that used to exist in luxury hotels. I think it was the Waldorf that had slots in the bathroom for you to put your used razors in, and they fell down to the bottom of the hotel. And I just thought, "This is not something that I ever thought that I needed, but I guess I probably shave a little bit less than the average Waldorf guest at the time."
But some of the research just floored me with how bizarre and how tragic the moments were. There's an incident which I adapt for the novel: In real life, one of the German military attachés had to be repatriated to Germany, and his 16-year-old son had just been diagnosed with schizophrenia. He knew that if his son came back with him to Germany, the country that he represented, that he was likely to be euthanized. And these kinds of ethical and moral quandaries were experienced by every single unusual guest of the hotels at this time, where it would just be these larger-than-life moments. Imagine having to make this decision. And so, ultimately, he made an under-the-table deal with the State Department for his son to stay in the US, and his son did. And he did live out his life. Turned out to be a false diagnosis as well, but he never saw his family again. And so that was his happy ending.
You can see the pulse of that story going through The Listeners where I just thought, "This is the most exaggerated example of it," but every single one of the diplomats who was in the hotel was more of a global citizen than they were a citizen of their own country, which meant that they had to make these decisions about the countries that they had been representing for their entire lives.
MB: You've always been a multi-hyphenate artist, writer, a musician, painter, drawer. Do all forms of art come together for you in the creative process when crafting a new story? What role does each medium play?
MS: I have always loved the poem about the blind men and the elephant. I don't know if you're familiar with this poem. It's a very old poem. I think it's from the 19th century. It's just a bunch of blind men are standing around an elephant, and they're telling the listener what they think they're standing next to. And so the one that has the tail thinks that it's a rope, and the one that has the leg thinks that it's a tree. And to me, that's how all of the different media feel. I'm describing the elephant, but every single media has its strengths and weaknesses. So, it's always going to be just a partial truth. It's really difficult to describe the entire animal.
So, I think that you get close if you do a whole bunch of different ones. But it also is so interesting to see how it changes the character of them. For instance, The Listeners in prose form is me doing my best to invoke that sense for the reader of luxury, of taking them to a place where they get to be completely held away from the real world and changed in that moment. And then they leave it and they just feel that sense of relaxation and wonder that comes from visiting a high-luxury hotel. And then if I am thinking about it in musical form, I wrote a piece for myself and it is that feeling of the wonder and mystery of the sweetwater, which is that it represents that part of West Virginia that you can't ever really make useful. You can't really ever describe it fully. The music, to me, manages to do a better job of that than the prose does.
"The book is really about embracing the power of that in-between instead of trying to escape it, which is what I think even myself spent a lot of my life trying to do."
And then I'm doing a project online every single day. I started, oh, my gosh, 78 days ago. I've been drawing a dachshund every single day to count down to The Listeners. And when I say I'm drawing a dachshund, I'm actually drawing a dachshund into an old masterwork. It's been such a fun project, but to me that also represents what luxury is, because luxury is something which isn't useful. No one needs a dachshund drawn into the Mona Lisa or da Vinci, but it just changes your mood for a tiny little moment. And if you're the person who needed that, there it is.
So, to me, that also represents the spirit of this book and this project in a way that the prose can't, and part of it makes it even more luxurious, I think, than the book. It's amazing to watch the community around it. You're experiencing it together. There's something wonderful about knowing that there's someone else who is also having a very fun time looking at those dachshunds. And so, yeah, that's what it is to me, describing the elephant in its different pieces.
MB: I've always thought about that with your work. After you read the book, your fans will know to go see whatever you've created. Your magic systems have always erred on the side of ethereal, undefined, much like magical realism. But here, I felt like the mystery of the sweetwater was an even more subtle form of the unexplained. How did this idea come to you?
MS: I have thought a lot about magic. More than the average human being, I think, I have thought about magic. I really thought about magic when I was moving from young adult to adult because I wasn't moving to adult fantasy. I knew that I loved magic in books, but I was increasingly aware that, again, those books that were sitting all over my house, sitting on their face, they weren't fantasy books. So how are they using magic? And they were using magic in a way that I think is a very history-major way to use magic. I was a medieval history major. They were using magic as myth and metaphor. And when you're a medieval history major, sources are often thin on the ground, and so you're forced to rely on ballads and songs and folklore, which means that, often, you'll be reading something which feels quite historical, and then all of a sudden there'll be a giant inside it. And you just think, "Well, probably there wasn't a giant. So, what are we actually talking about here?"
And they're often using these components to be the level of myth, to make something true, more true. So, if you're talking about a giant, often they would be referring to a man who is larger than life. For instance, there is one Welsh cycle where this larger-than-life fellow had to lay down across the river so that his army could ride their horses across his back and attack their enemies. And I just thought to myself, "Right, so it's a very true story because it's telling you that this man who is larger than life, everyone knows him, was absolutely instrumental for defeating this other army. And he made a bridge of his body. He was the one who came up with the strategy." I realized that's really the level of magic that I like. I like when it takes a component of the story that you're trying to tell and makes it bigger.
So, if you have June Hudson, who is faced with this challenge of trying to keep her staff on an even keel as her hotel is being filled with the enemy. She's trying to balance all of their moods, and she's trying to balance the feelings of the townspeople, and she's also trying to balance these extremely disrupted diplomats. To give her a sweetwater that's running beneath the hotel, which is already a nice historical moment anyway—most of the hotels that were used in this had hot springs beneath them—to give her a sweetwater that is just listening to her very attentively and is ready to change its mood at the same time that the mood of all of the people above it change theirs, that, to me, gives the reader just a little thing to look at, to go and say, "Is June doing a good job?" And you can ask the water, which is what she does, "Has it gone bad yet? Let's go and ask the water." And it's not a different story, it's the same story made bigger because of that little bit of magic.
MB: One thing I thought that was interesting was how the sweetwater cycled through so many flavors and smells, depending on its moods. Iron when it was in a good mood, which seems kind of gross to me, but I imagine that's just historically accurate. Ramps when it was in a bad mood, and many other scents in between. Why did you choose these specific tastes or characteristics?
MS: I love that you pointed out that it smells bad when it's in a good mood, because the sweetwater really does smell bad. If you go out and you stay in an Airbnb out in the middle of nowhere in West Virginia and you drink the tap water, it's a very raunchy flavor. It is not delicious at all. If you go and sit in the springs, it's a very terrible smell. I mean, one of them was White Sulfur Springs, the closest town to the Greenbrier. That is not a delicious word, sulfur. And one of the things that I really kind of balanced was, “Does it have to be sweet?” No, because we make it sweet.
One of the threads that I wanted to talk about is how West Virginia has been ill-used by people who come to it. Another one I wanted to look at was how, when we're being useful, we're not always being our truest self. We're made into the most civilized and accessible version of ourselves. So, June, left to her own devices, was a difficult child, by her own admission. And Hannelore, the German diplomat's daughter, is also a difficult child. But to be made into something luxurious and suitable for public consumption, they're made sweeter, something nicer. But in their raw form, they're good for no one except for themselves.
"I... grew up reading books that told us that magic was something that stopped once you became an adult. And I thought, 'No, now that I'm an adult, that's not what adulthood feels like at all.'"
So, I wanted to preserve that sense that sweetwater, mineral water, when it's left to its own devices, when it's not being made useful for us, is not palatable to us. There's a scene which I won't spoil, but June gets to go and find some water that hasn't been made to do anything. And she realizes the difference between someone who has been made to be useful and something that just gets to exist. I really wanted to have that moment threaded through there.
And then having that scent of ramps, I remember reading a story in my research of a beleaguered newspaper man who felt it would be a fantastic idea to appeal to his West Virginia readers. They had just invented smelly inks for the newspapers. I used this anecdote in the book where he impregnated his ink with the smell of ramps, which are, they're related to garlic and they're in the allium family. So, you can imagine the smell. And they're a very West Virginia food to eat. Especially at the time, it would be a huge part of their diet, and it's really smelly. He got fined. They had people fainting in the post office delivering these newsletters. It was just awful. I just thought, "I really want this as a tantrum. I think this would be a marvelous smell for a tantrum."
MB: Well, let's jump into the cast of characters. There are so many to explore. We've got June, hotel manager and sweetwater whisperer, FBI Agent Tucker Minnick, and young Hannelore, a neurodiverse daughter of a German diplomat. The theme that kept popping up was one of misfits, those who have had an uphill battle in climbing the ladder or fitting into society's roles. This is a theme that comes up across your body of work. Why is it that you like writing characters who challenge the status quo?
MS: I have thought a lot about this because I was having a phone call with one of the hoteliers, and he said, "Well, you should make June you." And I said, "Oh, no, no, no, no. I should not do that because that is very bad behavior for a novelist to have a self-insert." And he said, "Even if you know that it's you?" I said, "No, I will not be doing that." And it's true that June is not me, but he really pressed me to be honest about what my emotional experience was growing up, and the things that are true about June and the things that are true about Tucker and Hannelore are that in-between status.
I was the daughter of a doctor, an emergency room doctor, and I was born in the Shenandoah Valley, as I told you, but I was a Navy brat. I moved all over, 18 times before I was 18. And so I don't actually belong to any of these. It's easy if someone says, "Where are you from?" to give them an answer, but it's such a partial truth. I don't actually belong to that corner of Virginia. I belong there more than other places, but I'm an in-between person. I feel like this is something which is more common in America than we really talk about, and we're always looking for that sense of one easy identity to give to ourselves, which involves pushing down the rest of it.
The other thing I wanted to look at is that, as a novelist, just like my father as an emergency room doctor, you don't actually exist inside a social class because you spend all of your time looking at social classes. When you move so fluently between them, you're ruined for the one you came from, but you're not actually going to belong to a different one because of the way class structure still works in the United States, which means that you become part of this new class. I was really interested that everyone in this book, by default, has to be part of this class. A diplomat is also that way. One of the reasons why they had to make their impossible choices about representing their country is because they weren't really Germans, and they definitely weren't Americans. And so what are they? They're something that's in-between.
June Hudson, as a hotelier, she came from nothing, and she was folded into the Gilfoyle family. But she's not going to become a Gilfoyle, and she doesn't belong to the mountains anymore. So, she's in-between. Tucker is in the same situation, and Hannelore. What happens to these people that are in-between? What happens when you have to choose an identity for yourself? I think the book is really about embracing the power of that in-between instead of trying to escape it, which is what I think even myself spent a lot of my life trying to do.
MB: June Hudson, her marker as not fitting in, is that she has a notable, heavy mountaineer accent that sets her apart from the high-society guests of the Avallon. How did you approach selecting the narrator to find the right sound for June's accent, plus all the many varied accents that came with the clash of cultures in this novel?
MS: It was very interesting to know going into this project that I would have a different audiobook narrator than I'd had for a very long time, because has read a million of my words. I met him a couple of years ago, and we were just shooting the breeze, and I said, "You've read a million of my words. That's a lot of words to read into a microphone." In many ways, it was such a ritual to get to the end of a book, to be signing piles of pre-orders, and to be listening to Will Patton's voice tell me what the book was.
But I knew going into this that we would want to have a woman reading June's voice. I'm also very sensitive to the idea of how much an accent would actually come through, because someone with an accent doesn't have an accent in their own head. They just sound like themselves. So, I didn't want to have this sense of distance between the listener and the narrator. To have that accent evoked, so we understand that sense of place, but to feel like eventually it just washes away, that was my real goal. And I think Erin did a beautiful job.
MB: Yeah, I noticed that , she has this pragmatic approach that fits with Tucker, June, and Hannelore's inner monologue, which I thought was interesting.
MS: It was very interesting to me to feel the difference between Erin's and Will's narration. Just that Erin steps out of the way of the book and lets the book come through, and Erin makes herself invisible. And Will, you can't forget that you're listening to Will. He's interpreting, and so it becomes another dimension on top of that. It was very interesting to hear the two different approaches and just think, "Oh, it feels so naked to listen to Erin reading my words because she really lets me come through in a way that it didn't feel with The Raven Cycle."
MB: I have to say, you've touched so many lives with your fiction, including mine. I was just chatting with my high school best friend last night about how I was going to interview you today.
MS: I love that.
MB: We were reminiscing about how Shiver and The Scorpio Races were so formative for us. I mean, we dreamed together through your novels. When you set out to become a writer, did you have a vision in your mind of who you were writing for and what you wanted to give us or say?
MS: I have to take a moment to just bask in how delightful that image is. I have to say that's so charming and wonderful, especially because I remember that I always wanted to be a novelist, which sounds like a terrible thing to say. But I don't have an origin story of when I wanted to write, specifically in novel form. I just can't remember a time when I didn't want to do that.
But I do remember the moment that I realized you could be a novelist for a career. I was reading . I was reading Dogsbody. It was a summer of just going through every single Diana Wynne Jones book in the library. And probably most listeners will be familiar with . That's her most popular one, and it also got a film adaptation. But Dogsbody was my favorite for some reason that summer in particular, and I remember I had read it through 11 times. I just kept on checking it out and reading it and then starting over and reading it again. For some reason, on that 11th read through, I opened it up and I saw a page that I had not noticed before that said, "Books also by Diana Wynne Jones." And it was this huge long list, and all of a sudden it hit me, "This has to be her job. It's got to be her job. This has to be a job that someone can have." I remember just thinking, "Oh, this is a job someone can do, and I specifically want this job. I want to write books that, I'll be someone's summer, where all they do is they read my books for that whole summer."
So, when you talk about having lost yourself and having dreamed away for those books, it feels like that was exactly the writer that I wanted to be. I do think I still want to be rereadable. That's a goal. I don't think every novel has to be rereadable. I love an airport thriller as much as anyone else, or a harsh horror where you sit down and you think, "Oh, the twists and the turns." But it's done when you're done. There's something about trying to write a book that rewards the reread that I think is a different skillset. And that's definitely something I'm still trying to carry forward.
MB: You were saying that you're kind of entering a new phase of writing right now, you're trying to mark this as a new phase of your novel writing. So, what are you trying to say now, 17 years after your first published novel?
MS: I remember when I had that interview with Will Patton, and we were both reminiscing about this idea of The Raven Cycle, and The Dreamer Trilogy had come to a conclusion a million words later. And he told me that he went into the bookstore because he said he was already feeling a sense of withdrawal, that there would be no more of these books, which is very charming, again, very charming. And he said, "I went and stood in the young adult section and just tried to find another book like these." First of all, I love this image of Will Patton standing in the young adult section in 2000, this would have been 2021, I think, and looking for a book that's like The Raven Cycle, because that's not at all what young adult means now. It's got very different priorities. And I said, "How did that work out for you, Will?" And he goes, "I didn't find what I was looking for."
But he also only reads a couple of authors. He reads and he reads me and . That Venn diagram is quite a thing to think about. He was saying that when Stephen King uses the otherworldly in his projects, it's always to talk about some of the seedy underbelly of the world, to push us to become a different version of ourselves, but showing us our shadow selves. And then he was saying, "When you're reading about the other world in your books, it's not horror. It's something else. It's more like wonder." And I said, "Stop right there. That's the goal. That's the genre."
Whatever that genre is, wonder feels like what I want to do in the next decade because I'm now securely in my adulthood. I think you and I both grew up reading books that told us that magic was something that stopped once you became an adult. That this was a wonderful time, and then at the end of Narnia, it gets put away.And I thought, "No, now that I'm an adult, that's not what adulthood feels like at all." I want to write something that feels, instead, like my experience of moving through the cabin.
MB: Yeah. I feel like adulthood is better. I'm glad to be an adult.
MS: I am too. I hated being a child.
MB: Well, Maggie, thank you so much. It's truly been so special to talk to you today, and I wish you the best time on your upcoming tour for The Listeners.
MS: I appreciate that so much. And thank you for that wonderful anecdote about you and your friend. I'm going to put that in my cheek pouches and keep it for winter.
MB: [Laughs] She didn't know I was going to mention this in the interview today. So, I'm going to be like, "Look, here you are, not by name but by spirit."
And listeners, you can get The Listeners by Maggie Stiefvater on Audible now.
