Step into the world of Joy Preble and Baba Yaga

Joy Preble, the author of Dreaming Anastasia: A Novel of Love, Magic, and the Power of Dreams, was the kid who loved reading, science, history, and even math, although she was always dreadful at it. She didn’t so much read as she consumed books. Vats of them. Buckets full. Baskets. Well, you get the idea. Her debut novel is a young adult contemporary fantasy with a teen girl heroine, a mysterious handsome guy, and a famous Russian witch, all inspired by Anastasia Romanov’s dissappearance.

I had the fortunate opportunity to ask Joy a few questions regarding her influences and inspiration…

Tell us about your path to publication.
Well, obviously, there’s the longer version which includes stories I wrote with spelling words and the embarrassingly disastrous phase of Star Trek fan fiction (shhh… don’t tell anyone what a total dorky geek I was). But the shorter and more immediately relevant version is that I’ve always written, even though I was doing other things like teaching and traveling and getting married and having a son. I’d even had some pieces published in newspapers and magazines. And in the fall of 2005, I finished the first draft of the novel that would eventually become Dreaming Anastasia. Then titled Spark, it was about 45K words, told in third person, and lacking some of the elements it would eventually contain, such as the Russian folklore witch Baba Yaga! It did, however, have this totally kick ass fight scene that took place in Chicago’s Art Institute in the Weapon’s Room. (I eventually removed it, but I sometimes miss all those spears.) And although I was still revising, I began to submit it here and there – ten pages at an SCBWI conference in Houston, queries to a couple of editors, some agents. And I was soundly rejected. The usual story, honestly.

So I fiddled some more, and as I’ve mentioned on my blog, I was having a really bad year at my day job that year. The kind of year where you come home every day ready to either slam back that bottle of Jameson’s every evening or do something that you’ve never had the courage to do. I chose the latter. (Okay, mostly) So in February, 2006, I queried four more agents. One never answered. Amazingly, two asked for partials! And in April of that year, came an amazing email from Laura Rennert at ABLA. She wasn’t interested, but she was passing my work on to their new agent at the time, Michelle Andelman. I remember reading that email and getting chills and honestly, being unable to actually speak. It was that shockingly exciting. Some conversations, and a little revision work later (yes, agents sometimes ask newbies to revise early on, just to show you can do it), I was a client. We then revised for a number of months, and in 2007, it sold to Lyron Bennett at Sourcebooks.

Between then and now, Michelle has moved on to a different job in the publishing world. I’m now repped by the fantabulous Jen Rofe, also of ABLA. And my editor changed as well – I’m now working with Mr. Tiger Beat himself – the amazing Dan Ehrenhaft. Let me add, by the way, that that’s the short version. Changing agents and editors in the middle of a project is not, um, a stress-free way to take this journey!! Obviously, there’s more to the story, but the quick ending here is that on September 1st, the product of that crazy journey will be on book shelves and virtual shelves for everyone to enjoy. I am one lucky girl.

What inspired you to write Dreaming Anastasia?
Dreaming Anastasia actually started as two pages of Anne’s voice. She was sitting in history class, bored to tears because her teacher was more interested in plotting out football plays on the computer than in teaching. And she was writing a note to a friend. It really just started as a voice exercise one rainy afternoon for me when it was pouring too hard for me to leave school (I teach high school English) and get to my car without getting soaked. So I was playing around on the computer and suddenly there she was.

I’d been fascinated since junior high with stories of the tragic Romanov family and especially the princess Anastasia. Did she die? Didn’t she die? There’d always been so many rumors. So I gave that piece of my curiosity to Anne – only not just an academic curiosity. The idea came to me to wonder what it would be like if not only was Anastasia not dead, but if someone could really and truly find her or in some way alter what had happened. And then of course, there was Ethan, my handsome little mysterious hottie. Which of course somehow posed the question in my head: What if this totally amazing looking guy smacked into you one day at school and told you that you were the one who could save a princess and change history. Would you believe him? What would happen? Exactly how much wackiness would ensue? And what if he wasn’t exactly what he said he was? What if he, too had a secret? All of which, beyond being cool and fascinating to me, really did pose some interesting moral dilemmas. And I guess since I’m a big fan of where our choices take us, and the crazy things we do because of love and loss, the story just sort of poured out of that. Plus the whole idea of second chances looms large for me, maybe because I chose one path – teaching – and now have had this crazy wonderful opportunity to travel another!

Tell us a little about Baba Yaga and her influence on you.
Oh Baba Yaga!! As I mentioned above, she actually didn’t even appear in my first draft. But as my then agent, Michelle and I were talking about the novel, I began to contemplate the idea of adding what Michelle had referred to as “organic Russian folklore” to ground the magical elements in something that would be very specific to the Romanov story. From that conversation came my idea to use three specifically Russian items – a matroyshka doll – those Russian nesting dolls where you’ve got the same doll nested inside each larger one over and over; a lacquer box depicting the fairy tale of Vasilisa the Brave, and Baba Yaga herself, the witch who is a major part of that tale. And once I began to research her, I knew this was the path I needed for this novel.

Baba Yaga is so fascinating to me. First of all, she’s physically very frightening. She’s enormous in size with these hands that can actually detach from her body and go do her bidding and then come back to her. If that isn’t scary, I don’t know what is! Typically, she’s described as having huge iron or sometimes steel teeth and like other fairy tale witches, she can use them to eat up those who might stray her way or try to cross her in some fashion. She also flies not on a broom, but in a giant mortar which she stirs through the air with an equally giant pestle. Plus Baba Yaga lives in a little hut that stands on chicken legs, so it’s always on the move. Visually, that was stunning to me. (If you’ve seen that great anime movie, “Howl’s Moving Castle,” Howl’s castle basically looks like that!)

I’ve done a fair amount of research on Russian folk tales and on the Baba Yaga legends in specific. And what I also loved was that the Baba Yaga stories were often sorts of initiation stories. Confronting her, entering and then – hopefully- exiting her hut always changed the characters who did so. (If they weren’t eaten up in the process, that is, although I suppose that’s a change, isn’t it?) Like Vasilisa – who is sent to Baba Yaga’s hut to fetch fire for her stepmother, who hopes to just get rid of her, but who, with the help of her magical doll, manages to very cleverly survive the encounter.

The other cool thing to me is that Baba Yaga is never permanently conquerable and even better, you never really know which side she’s on. She’s a very mercurial character – she might use her powers for good or choose to use them for bad and there’s no predicting which one might occur. This duality has fascinated a lot of people, including me, and I’ve attempted to weave that duality throughout Dreaming Anastasia, actually. And you know what else really amazed me and that I had no idea about until I started writing was that lots of people really dig Baba Yaga in this whole “reclaiming the crone” kind of way. She’s seen by some as this sort of “screw the patriarchy, don’t accept male versions of old women as ugly crones, take back our female power” kind of figure. Given that two of my main characters – Anne and Anastasia – are pretty strong feisty females, I tried to take that idea and run with it and I really fell in love with the whole mythology.

What were some of the challenges in writing a story with 3 narrators?
Great question! I think the biggest challenge was making sure that each voice was very separate and distinct, since I was writing in 1st person. Anne is a basic contemporary Chicago high school junior. Anastasia is a Russian princess and she’s been trapped at Baba Yaga’s so she’s not only a product of her time period, she’s got this whole mystical experience driving her character as well. Plus, not only does Anastasia help narrate in the real time of the novel, she also does some of her narration through a journal that she’s been keeping. So that voice, while hers, is her writing voice. And that added an extra level of challenge for me. Ethan is well, not exactly the eighteen year old high school guy he seems to be at first. So he really does speak differently at times, and not only because he’s a guy. So the balancing act of all that was sometimes challenging. But honestly, the more I got to know my characters – and I think this is the case for everything we write – the more I really knew what they would say and how they would say it.

On your blog, you state that you just finished Sarah Dessen’s Along for the Ride and how you’re in love with her world. What other current reads would you recommend and why?
Oh, there is so much in YA today – such amazing novels, it’s honestly hard to pick. I’m in love with Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely series. Her latest, Fragile Eternity, is just a pleasure. Maggie Stiefvater’s newest werewolf story, Shiver, just came out and I was lucky to have read the ARC a month ago. If you want a deeply romantic story with some good werewolf loving, this is for you. There’s a scene in a candy store that… well, I won’t give it away. But oh! And of course, I’m a huge fan of Libba Bray’s Great and Terrible Beauty series. If you like your fantasy with a Victorian era twist, this is for you. I’m looking forward to her Going Bovine, as well. (Just as a fun aside, I will let you know that I was absurdly nervous the first time I met my new editor, Dan Ehrenhaft, not just because he was my new editor and I wanted to impress him but mostly because he’s in a rock band with Libba Bray and I’m such a silly fan girl!) Also Albert Borris’s Crash Into Me, from Simon Pulse, which has been out since July is this lusciously dark and edgy read about teens who have formed a suicide pact and are on a road trip. Another dark but oh so moving book that came out last year is Before I Die by Jenny Downham. It’s about what the title reflects – a dying girl’s list of things she wants to do before she is no longer here – and it is beautiful and moving and not in the least bit maudlin. And finally, I’d like to add a book that will be out in October, Lauren Strasnick’s Nothing Like You, also from Simon Pulse. It’s the story of a girl who has a one night stand that takes on disastrous proportions and it is so brilliantly written and so sparse and stunning and poignant that I cried most of the way through it.

To learn more about Joy and her debut novel, please visit www.joypreble.com

Read my review of Dreaming Anastasia.