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| Darcie Little Badger | |
Darcie Little Badger is a Lipan Apache writer with a Ph.D. in oceanography. Her debut novel, Elatsoe, will publish with Levine Querido in August 2020 and is a BookExpo 2020 Young Adult Buzz Finalist. She currently lives on both coasts of the United States and is engaged to a veterinarian who cosplays as Cassandra Pentaghast and Luke Skywalker.
I cannot get over how in love with your world-building I am. Tell me about your process creating this world.
The world started with the question: how would contemporary life change if the ghosts of animals roamed the earth? Invisible mosquitoes sipping on blood and carrying the red droplets into the air. Wooly mammoths crushing prized orchid gardens underfoot. Bodiless dogs howling for treats in the night. After refining that concept and creating the rules of these ghosts--i.e., how they function in the world of Elatsoe--I expanded my creative scope to everything else.
At one point, Ellie overhears people talking about a cornfield full of scarecrows with human eyes. There are also, maybe, "teenage-bodied vampires, carnivorous motormen, immortal serial killers, devil cults, cannibal families, and slenderpeople." How did you come up with the creatures that inhabit this world?
I have a deep appreciation for the horror genre. That includes urban legends, creepypasta and movies. The characters in that list, who unfortunately don't play a bigger role in Elatsoe (well, except for the vampires), are an homage of sorts. As for the scarecrows with human eyes: that was me playing with the creepier aspects of Ellie's world, the horrors that lurk in her personal scary story reservoir.
How macro did you go with how your world would function? There is magic and you tell readers that magic playing a part in crimes can be a "potential death blow against justice." What other things did you come up with along these lines?
I did actually contemplate how things would work. Unfortunately, I rarely write stuff down if it doesn't go into the book. It would have been cool to make a manual for the maintenance and smooth operation of fungal transportation rings. Maybe that can be a side project.
There's a point when you relate the growing scourge of human-eyed scarecrows to monoculture corn and soy crops. Tell me about that.
Sometimes, I get cravings for corn. Not that watery, sweet yellow corn you find in every grocery store. I want rich blue corn with a flavor I haven't tasted in a long time. It's like my body needs the stuff. And I think of the Coleridge line, "Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink." Because there's corn everywhere. It just ain't the right kind.
And often, I feel that way about pop culture. Like I'm surrounded by so much of the same, but none of it is what I'm yearning for.
You of course know that Indigenous populations are the least represented groups in children's literature. Did this add pressure to your process?
Oof, yeah, in terms of pressure, I worry that some people are going to read my book and assume that it's an ethnography or that I am a mouthpiece for all Lipan Apache people (or even all Native people). Elatsoe is a fantasy/mystery book, and I'm one person.
What are you hoping readers will take from Elatsoe?
Overall, I hope they'll enjoy the read. If there's one take-away, it's this: don't let anyone use the story of Icarus as a weapon against your full potential.
That makes sense in the context of Elatsoe, I swear.