Author Nova Ren Suma is fascinated with lost places such as in time or places not found on maps. That was one of the reasons that drove her to write "Wake the Wild Creatures."
What was your inspiration behind your most recent book?
"Wake the Wild Creatures" is a coming-of-age story of survival with a touch of the fantastic about a girl named Talia who is captured from an off-grid community of fugitive women hidden at an abandoned hotel deep in the mountains. One thing this book explores is my fascination with lost places — places lost to time, places not found on maps, places where people go missing… But instead of writing a place that’s sinister, a bad place that steals someone from the world in a menacing way, I wanted to write a refuge that someone would long to reach instead. I became inspired thinking about the kind of person who’d want — or need — to escape to a place like that. What is she running from? What if the whole world has failed her, or she’s done something she can’t come back from? What if she needs this place as much as it needs her? Those curiosities drove me forward and got me writing.
What does Reading Rainbow mean to you?
Reading in celebration, recognition, and without fear. Reading to find yourself on the page and in a character, and also to see and understand others. To me, as an author, this speaks as well to lifting and loving books by writers in the LGBTQ community and standing against the dangerous book bans that are threatening the stories we need, especially today.
Why do you feel representation of a variety of people is so important when it comes to writing books?
I know how powerful books can be. When I was a young reader — and in fact, all my life — books showed me the world outside the little box I first lived in and challenged me to step beyond my own personal experience. Books helped me recognize hidden parts of myself, and also opened me up and allowed me to have compassion and connection with people different from me. If the only books readers can find are about the same people over and over again — the ones that those in power have decided are “acceptable” to read about: white, cis, straight, etc. — we will lose integral opportunities for connection. And every single one of us will be worse for it.
If writers want our stories to feel true and connected to readers today, we need to reflect the diverse world around us. I also believe that when you’re writing books for young adults, as I do, and creating worlds that stray from realism into fantasy and beyond, it’s important, too, to imagine the world we want to see, the world we aspire to live in. We need to question our preconceived biases and challenge ourselves to break out of the system we were born into when envisioning what we’re building on the page. I strived to imagine that when I was creating the community hidden in the forest in "Wake the Wild Creatures."
Tell us a little more about the book and why you decided to write it.
"Wake the Wild Creatures" begins the night the young protagonist, Talia, is captured. Soon she’s forced to enter what she’s always been so frightened to imagine: the outside world, scarred by misogyny, capitalism, disconnection from nature… everything the community she came from is against. Writing this story and seeing the world through Talia’s eyes came from a need to challenge my own pessimism about the world and the human beings who live in it. I spent years writing this book, so it had many sparks, but I can see now that this need was at the core of it. Writing the book saw me through the most isolated period of the pandemic and the disillusionment and upheaval that have since followed, but it was through finding the story that I also found my way back to myself. At its heart this is a book about building an intentional community when greater society is harmful. It’s also about rebuilding when things are broken but are worth saving. I didn’t know any of that, of course, when I was in the thick turmoil of writing, but I see the way my desire to find my own community and place to belong shaped every word of this story.
What can fans expect from your book?
I write strange, often fantastical or ghostly novels, and I love exploring so-called unlikable girl characters and unreliable narrators. In "Wake the Wild Creatures," there is a touch of possible magic connected to the natural world. There is rage. There is fear. There is anger. And, finally, there is hope.
What's up next for you in the bookish world?
I’m in the opening stages of a surreal new YA novel that I can’t talk about yet, but it has absolutely captured my imagination and will not let go. I also teach creative writing and have some speculative fiction workshops coming up, which you can learn more about on novaren.com.
Nova Ren Suma’s latest novel is Wake the Wild Creatures. She’s the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling The Walls Around Us and A Room Away from the Wolves, which were both finalists for the Edgar Award. She also wrote Imaginary Girls and 17 & Gone and co-edited the story & craft anthology FORESHADOW: Stories to Celebrate the Magic of Reading & Writing YA. She has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and has taught creative writing at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Vermont College of Fine Arts. She currently lives in Philadelphia but grew up in the wilds of the Hudson Valley. Find her online at novaren.com.
