Skyler White

Tell us a little bit about yourself:

You know, I’m a writer, and even I have a hard time finding the narrative thread to my life. I grew up in a very academic household – both of my parents were college professors.  I was a dancer.   A very, very physical person in this very heady household.  So I ran away and joined the circus.  Actually, I left home for a performing arts high school, but they turn out to be shockingly similar.

Later, I found a sort of mental-physical point of balance as a theater director, which was work I loved, but when I added Single Mother to the teeter-totter, it upended and I went into advertising which allowed me to be creative and paid.  Looking for a place of peace between all the things I want to do and need to be led me through a couple of other careers until my husband and my best friend sat me down one night with a glass of whiskey and pointed out that writing was the one consistent thread through all my endeavors.  This scared the shit out of me. So I had to take the bait. I wrote a novel.  I buried it.  I wrote another one that scared me even more.  Now I’m here to promote it.

Tell us a little bit about In Dreams Begin:

In Dreams Begin is a dark time-travel horror/romance based on my personal history and the occult movement of the late Victorian era. Laura, a contemporary graphic artist, wakes up on her wedding night channeled into the body of Maud Gonne, the famous Victorian beauty, Irish revolutionary and amateur occultist who was believed to be part faerie by some in rural Ireland.

In Maud’s body, Laura, our modern, professional woman, while still coming to grips with Victorian rules and outfits, meets WB Yeats, the Irish poet. He’s wildly romantic, ridiculously passionate, and she, of course, falls (rather embarrassingly,) in love with him, only to wake up back in Portland. The story tracks Laura and her new husband over two weeks, and Laura, Yeats and Maud Gonne over almost thirty years, all completely obedient to actual history.

It was a tremendously fun project to work on because history kept handing me such amazing stuff, allowing me to explore body-image, feminism, fidelity and about six different kinds of possession across a hundred years, through several perspectives and all echoed in the lines of Yeats’s poetry. My editor at Berkley has done an amazing job securing rights for me, so I’m going to be able to include the most relevant quotes and historical annotations in the manuscript!

How much of In Dreams Begin is true?

The assignment I set for myself is the inverse of the politician’s plausible deniability. To the best of my knowledge, there’s nothing in the book that can be proved false. I tried very hard to make certain that if a scene takes place between Maud and Yeats in London in 1898, that I had evidence that they were both there then (or at least no evidence showing they were somewhere else). Also, I tried to make sure that none of the historical figures in the book say or do anything inconsistent with what I could learn of their character. I also didn’t invent any of the named Victorian historical characters except Ida Jameson, and she actually existed; I just don’t know anything about her. I used her name, her parentage, and her friendship with Maud, and invented the rest. But with that exception, any character with a first and last name was a real person whose description and behavior is based in fact.

Where does the title In Dreams Begin come from?

Yeats used the line “in dreams begin responsibilities” an epigraph to a collection of his poetry, crediting its origin only as “from an old play.” I shortened it because I liked the rhythmic resonance In Dreams Begin created with and Falling, Fly, the title of my first book, and because I liked the ambiguity.  A lot of things in this story begin in dream, responsibility being only one of them.  And the story, to an extent is about what it means to dream. Or to be a dreamer.  Or to be fully awake.

Also, as a writer, I sample other writers.  With Falling it was mostly The Bible and Dante, but Dreams takes that to a whole new level, remixing history and Yeats’s life and writings very liberally.  This title allowed me to play with that very overtly, first as a line Yeats himself had sampled; secondly as the title of the brilliant Delmore Schwartz short story (which I reference both explicitly and thematically); and finally as a wink to my fellow U2 fans who’ll recognize the line from a song whose lyrics also outline the same problem space I’m working in with the story.

For people who haven’t read and Falling, Fly, can you give us a sense what it’s about?

It’s about the angel of desire.  She’s a fallen angel and a vampire.  She can only see herself in mirrors if someone who wants her is looking at her, and she can only feed from those who desire or fear her.  When she finally concludes everyone you don’t love tastes the same, and gives up, she goes home to Ireland, to the Hotel of the Damned.   The hotel is this weird, steampunk, underground refuge where she meets Dominc O’Shaunnessey.  Dominic is a radical neuroscientist whose research is fueled by the secret that he suffers from these inexplicable flashbacks to things that never happened.    He’s trying to cure what he thinks are seizures. He tries to enroll Olvia in his research study.  She says medicine can’t cure mythology, and that his “seizures” are memories of past incarnations, which is completely unacceptable to him as a scientist, even if it would actually explain what he’s been experiencing.

Where do you get your ideas?

I wrote ‘and Falling, Fly’ because I needed to tangle with Desire – with what it means to want and not get, with what turns desire into craving or addiction, and what takes it away. Because I was interested in the difference between wanting and being wanted, Olivia can only feed on people who desire or fear her. Because I struggle with body image, she’s a shape-shifter. Because she let me wrestle with these things through her, she is an angel – even if she’s still kicking my ass.

Does the world really need another vampire story?

Absolutely.  The same way it needs another love story or another buddy pic.  To me, the best new stories are direct confrontations with old stories, and vampires are fabulously rich symbolically.  Like most powerful symbols, they can be a kind of short hand, and writers can get lazy and let them carry too much of the narrative burden.  When people say they’re tired of vampires or fairies or whatever, I think that’s what they’re reacting to.  But these things are rich and lasting for a reason and we always have something to learn from them, if we allow them to challenge us.

Why are all your books set in Ireland? Have you been there?

I’ve been twice.  Once before I started writing, as sort of a personal odyssey and once after I finished the first draft of In Dreams Begin to do research for it.  And really, it’s all the books so far that have been set there.  I have an idea for the next one I want to write, and it’s all in the states.  I have another one that’s set, at least in part, in Germany.  The thing I’m interested in is the mythic element of a person or monster or country.  The Hotel of the Damned is underground in Ireland because of Ireland’s passage tombs and stories of buried kings and queens, because underground is so rich symbolically for what is unconscious, and because it’s where I’m from genetically.  In Germany, the damned would  have their secret home in the universities.  In America, it’d down unmarked roads. 

Your books aren’t really a series, but they’re linked, right?

Right.  They all take place in a shared universe where things that have mythic or symbolic power also have physical reality.  There aren’t enough characters in common, one book to the next to make it a proper series, in the strictest sense.  But in my head, they’re all a part of The Harrowing.

What’s with the “damned” tattoo gallery on your website?

They’re cool freebie temporary tattoos you can get by writing and asking for one.  Within the confines of my story world, the damned are those who have taken their destinies out of the hands of the supernatural, or out of the hands of their culture or received wisdom, and into their own.  Which can be a painful, scary place to be.  The journey through that hell is never the same,  one person to the next, and the tattoos are a playful way of illustrating that.  The tattoo is the same, but it looks different on each body.  I love seeing the the way people interact with them, and the visceral reaction a single word can still elicit, a certain hesitation people feel in actually applying “Damned” to themselves, even if it’ll wash off.

What can we look for next from you?

I’m working on an all-American, no travel west of the Mississippi, completely contemporary possible trilogy. It nestles into the world of Falling and Dreams, but I’m thinking of it as a stand-alone series. Sort of an existential detective series within the larger Harrowing world.