With Kaylie Seed
First of all, congratulations on your debut novel! I absolutely loved Throw Down Your Shadows and I’m so excited to be able to ask you some questions about your book that comes out this July as well as about your writing process!
I adore the concept of our entire lives being a coming-of-age story and that we are constantly learning and becoming more of ourselves. Where did you get the idea to write Throw Down Your Shadows as a coming-of-age story with a twist?
I’ve always loved stories about personal transformation, but I’ve often felt they can be a bit misleading. A character faces a series of challenges and, in the course of a narrative, changes in the face of them. The end. Something about ending a story at that moment of transformation felt unsatisfying to me. It suggests that a person can come out of an experience as this fully formed version of who they’re meant to be. But life really isn’t like that. People react and respond and change and grow, but in my experience, the more we change, the more we learn to keep changing. Over time, we develop a kind of self-flexibility.
That’s why, with this novel, I wanted to consider personal transformation as an opening rather than a conclusion. I like to think we are forever “coming of age” and so Winnie’s story looks at adulthood—and specifically, womanhood—not as a state to achieve but as a space to continuously grow within. I wrote with this idea in mind, and though it was a challenge to break from the typical hero’s journey narrative structure, I think Winnie is all the more interesting because of how she resists a familiar conclusion.
Using a winery as the central setting for your novel is so unique. Where did you gain your insight and knowledge on vineyards and wineries? Through experience, research or both? Tell us more about it and why you chose this setting for your novel?
For years, I’ve been fascinated by the world of food and wine. I’m a passionate cook and, living in Nova Scotia, the local wine industry is really starting to take off. That’s been exciting to see and it’s opened up opportunities for learning about wine and being exposed to wine production. Because of this, I got the idea to set Throw Down Your Shadows at a winery. The novel is very much about young desires, appetite and pleasure, so it seemed very fitting to echo those themes by exploring other forms of physical pleasure and stimulation, such as wine.
While I knew a little bit about wine making when I started writing, I did a lot of research to add texture and gravity to the scenes at the winery. I read books on viticulture, wine making, and even wine tasting. I’m also a huge fan of a wine podcast called Wine Face by sommelier Helen Johannesen, which provided me with a lot of helpful information about natural wine making in particular. For those interested, Wine Face is super accessible. Helen does an excellent job of demystifying the more intimidating aspects of wine. She’s hilarious, too!
In your acknowledgments you mention that the boys you grew up with were a huge inspiration for the boys in Throw Down Your Shadows. Where did the inspiration for Winnie come from? Who was an easier character to create: Winnie or Caleb?
Winnie was born out of a void. I wanted to write a teenage girl who was unlike most of the other young women I had encountered in literature. Teenage girls are so often portrayed as overly emotional, desperately needy and disempowered, particularly when faced with a love interest. I wanted to write a character who was expressly different: detached and independent, but still complex. I wanted to explore what it looks like for a character like Winnie to deal with the first pangs of lust and desire. I hadn’t seen that before.
Both Winnie and Caleb posed unique challenges in their construction. It took me a while to find Winnie’s voice, partly because she can be quite cold in certain situations and I still wanted her to come across as vivid and engaging to the reader, not flat. With Caleb, the challenge was making sure he was convincingly intriguing. Even if the reader isn’t fully seduced by him, I still wanted it to be believable that this group of young people (Winnie and the boys) would be. To do this, I focused on developing him as a literal outsider: he comes from far away—a big city—and he’s been exposed to ideas and opportunities the others have been sheltered from in their small town life. This creates a sense of inherent intrigue, as Caleb represents the endless possibility of everything they don’t yet know.
What was the most surprising thing that you learned while going through the process of creating and writing Throw Down Your Shadows?
Once I started working with my editor, I was surprised by how intense and immersive the revisions process was. We had five months to revise, we went through multiple drafts, and during that time I lived and breathed the manuscript in a way I never had before. I was always, always thinking about it: absorbing my editor’s comments, figuring out how to crack the puzzle of the narrative so it was as effective and meaningful as possible, digging deeper and deeper into each character. Strangely, revisions turned out to be more immersive for me than originally writing the story, which I didn’t expect.
With such a great debut novel, I have to ask, will there be another book from you soon?
I’m currently working on a new novel. I can’t say much about it yet, but it will be very different from Throw Down Your Shadows. No teenagers in this one and it’s set in the present moment. I’ve been thinking a lot about the environment and technology lately, so those are proving to be major themes.
Now that you’re almost at the end of this process of publishing your first novel, what advice would you give to aspiring authors?
For me, so much of writing is about having faith: in yourself and in the story you’re telling. My best advice is to trust your initial instinct, that first seed of an idea that got you started. In the process of writing, you’re going to feel lost but it’s important to write through feelings of doubt and insecurity. There’s a reason you started writing your story. Believe in yourself enough to finish it!
What is your “must-read” book recommendation and what book has had the most impact and influence on your writing?
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, the first book in her quartet of Neapolitan novels, is definitely my “must-read” recommendation. It’s beautiful and ground-breaking and my favourite in the series. Plus, you’ll be hooked and want to read them all! When I finished all four books, I actually went through a bit of a reading crisis. For months, I’d pick up other novels and put them back down after a few pages. I felt like nothing lived up to Ferrante!
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson had a huge influence on me as a writer. Jackson is a genius in so many ways but I’m particularly fond of how she illuminates the everyday, highlighting the strange and uncanny aspects of commonplace routines and domestic spaces, such as the home. I’ve always been interested in “the mundane” as a concept and We Have Always Lived in the Castle taught me a lot about how to crack that open through writing.
Deborah Hemming’s novel Throw Down Your Shadows is set to be released on July 30th, 2020 and is available for pre-order.