Moira Young
About Author
Moira was born in New Westminster, BC, on the west coast of Canada, to a business man father and a primary teacher mother. She has two younger sisters and all her immediate and extended family live in the Vancouver area. She also travelled to Europe as a child and lived in Scotland for a period.
Moira graduated from high school in Winnipeg, and from University of British Columbia with a history degree. She moved to the UK to attend The Drama Studio in 1983/4.
She gained her equity card performing with Fancy Goods on the alternative comedy circuit in the mid-80s when highlights included being pelted with fruit and vegetables by the audience at the infamous Tunnel Club, and being hissed off the stage at the Lewisham Labour Club...
She became a tap-dancing chorus girl in London's West End, appearing in High Society at the Victoria Palace directed by Richard Eyre.
From 1988 - 1992, Moira lived back in Vancouver, where she retrained as an opera singer and was winner of the Metropolitan Opera Regional Auditions, Western Canada in 1991.
In 1992, she moved back to the UK to continue vocal studies and work in opera, where she sang in most London venues and also toured in the UK and France with Travelling Opera. Her solo concerts include St Martin's-in-the-Fields and the National Portrait Gallery.
Moira's first ambition was always to be a writer. She wrote her first book aged nine entitled 'The Heirloom Mystery'. Shortly after that, she was bitten by the theatre bug and didn't take up writing again until 2003 when she enrolled on Elizabeth Hawkins' Writing for Children course and workshop at the City Lit (2003-2005).
Moira's first YA novel, Blood Red Road, won the 2011 Costa Children's Book Award. It was followed by Rebel Heart and Raging Star. The Road to Ever After is her first book for children.
Moira now lives in Bath with her husband.
Author link
Interview
THE ROAD TO EVER AFTER
PUBLISHED BY MACMILLAN CHILDREN'S BOOKS
OCTOBER 2016
MOIRA YOUNG, award-winning author of the dystopian trilogy Dustlands, has written her first novel for younger readers aged nine years plus.
The Road to Ever After is an evocative and warm portrayal of the relationship between an older woman, Miss Flint, and Davy David, an orphaned boy she persuades to help her fulfill a final journey; revisiting her childhood home and a tragic event that has cast a long shadow over her life.
We asked Moira Young to tell us more about THE ROAD TO EVER AFTER and the ideas she explores within the novel.
Q: What inspired you to write a novel for children that explores questions around mortality and the relationship between older people and children?
A: It's funny how things can drop into the well of ideas and get parked away and then up they come when you're writing a book. One of the things that helped inspire The Road to Ever After was a bookshop event in Los Angeles while I was on the road with Blood Red Road. An older woman wanted to ask a question and it was quite esoteric, about fate and destiny.
It turned out that she had travelled quite far across the mountains to come to this event, though she rarely left the house because, she said, she 'sees the dead'. She wanted to know why she could when others couldn't and she didn't want to; she found it profoundly upsetting.
I don't need to know if it's true or not; it's someone else's reality and perhaps those people live on a different wave length from most of us. So I'm not ready to dismiss people; the world is a far stranger place than we know and I'm always interested in the edges of life and perceptions and understanding.
Memories of that encounter came out unexpectedly when I started to write this book. I had woken from my sleep while I was writing book two of Blood Red Road and my unconscious was nagging at me until I woke and wrote the title, 'Here Pass no Angels'. I had to discover what it meant. I knew it would be about a 13-year-old boy who has a dog, and an old lonely woman, and that they would go on a journey together. But I didn't know what to expect from the novel.
I watched movies about angels, read a lot about angels and stories about people who had died and come back to life; and I was interested in a story about a relationship between an older person and a child, especially because my dad is quite elderly now, and I wanted to explore the passing of time. There was also a strong pull from the film, It's a Wonderful Life, with the angel that came out of my subconscious.
I had a sense very early on that it would be set at Christmas and that it would have a timeless, classic feel to it so I knew it wouldn't be a contemporary story. I needed to take it away from the present and to take it slightly away from reality. When I thought about this old woman and the 'not quite anywhere' feel to the story, that's where the movies came into it, and it gave me this playground of ideas to play with and took it to a strange place in time.
Q: Many of your books, like The Road to Ever After, feature journeys; what is the pull for you there as a writer?
A: Yes, for me journeys are something of an obsession. Given that the Wizard of Oz was the first proper movie I remember seeing as a child, the journey as a story is something I think will always be part of my stories, plus that's the story of my family - emigrants who moved for a better life - and it's my story, moving back and forth from Canada, and moving from being a performer to going on a journey as a writer. Moving through landscapes in my imagination is part of who I am.
I am trying to make my next book not a journey but it's very hard for me, there's a freedom and there's always the hope that leaving the place where you are will reveal something in you. In the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy says what she has learned on her journey; "If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any farther than my own back yard", which I take issue with because you're back to a sepia image of a farm during the Depression. But beyond that is the discovery that you have found out something about yourself which is that journey you're on.
Q: Why did you decide to make your two main characters an older person, Miss Flint, and a boy, Davy David?
A: I am sure that there are plenty of young people who have close relationships with their grandparents while others don't. I didn't really and as a young child I was slightly nervous of older people. I found them a little scary.
Sometimes my mum would take us to visit this old lady, Mrs Griggs, who was knarled and beaky and boney and generally when we went she had been canning chestnuts so her fingers were black and I was terrified of her. She was the crone, the witch from the Wizard of Oz, and it was imprinted on my mind.
My Miss Flint from the story is based on my formidable grandmother, who didn't suffer fools gladly, and I was nervous of her. She had flinty eyes and you never knew what she was thinking. She had to be tough; she was essentially living a pioneer's life. So I drew on her for the story, but also the great movie dames like Katherine Hepburn and Maggie Smith.
But I also wanted to show that inside an old person is a young person. As we get older, people tend to judge on what they see and that is very dismissive. The boy, Davy, learns that what you see is not necessarily what someone is; there are all these different selves inside us. So the story is about a younger person discovering that this old person, Miss Flint, has been young, too.
Q: When we meet Davy, he is drawing angels in the dust and angels continue to feature through the story. Why are they such an important feature?
A: I don't know a lot about angels or what is written about angels but when I was writing Davy, I was trying to find out what was his story, why he was going on this journey with Miss Flint and what was different about him.
I think there's something about the age of 13, Davy's age, when you're on the cusp of tipping over into adulthood but even though you're leaving your childhood behind, there's still the possibility of wonder; you're still open to strange things happening. When a line dropped onto the page that Davy David was an 'angel sweeper', I had to follow that line and gradually discovered what it meant.
Davy has an inborn ability to survive but he's not lost his wonder and in the hard and unkind world he lives in, he can express something of the wonder of life. He had to be like that in order to accept the challenge from Miss Flint to accompany her on this journey. His willingness to be open to things means I think that he will live a rich and imaginative life.
Q: The book has a hint of Christmas about it; is that a special time of year for you?
A: It's a strange time of year for me. This year I'll spend it with family in Vancouver so that will be a remarkable Christmas for me. I think being with family makes it something different. Mainly they are pretty quiet, I keep my head down and wait for it to be over.So I don't really enjoy Christmas; I hope for it to be over so I can get back to work!
Q: What would be your favourite kind of day then?
A: To go to a cinema and watch It's a Wonderful Life. I'd be happy to spend the whole day in a cinema. I've always been to the cinema a lot, ever since I was little, and I love the ritual of the lights going down and being in special seats. My dad used to take me as a child, he was the assistant manager at the Odeon in the days when they still had to wear a tuxedo and it was an extremely respectable occupation.
We used to watch Westerns and epics like Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia and Dr Zhivago. As a child I just fed myself stories of all different kinds, film or books, and I think that is what made me into the actor, singer and writer that I became.
DUSTLANDS: REBEL HEART
PUBLISHED BY SCHOLASTIC
AUGUST 2012
Rebel Heart, the sequel to the critically-acclaimed dystopian novel Blood Red Road, picks up where the first book ended. Saba has rescued her kidnapped brother and defeated the Tonton and is on her way to join Jack - before discovering he has betrayed them. Meanwhile, the Tonton have regrouped and pose an even greater danger than before.
Q: Why did you choose to write a dystopian novel?
A: It was my first ambition as a child to be a writer and I was a voracious reader, and I wrote a lot; I made my first attempt at writing a book when I was eight or nine. Then I moved into acting and singing, but I decided that I needed a new direction and, after an accident that left me with two broken wrists, I decided to enrol on a writing course.
My aim was to write a fast-paced rollicking adventure that people wouldn't want to put down but I wanted to do more and within this journey there's a huge amount of meat and soul that can be drawn from it.
It took me a long time to find the real story when I started Blood Red Road - that took me four and a half years to write - and it wasn't until I found I should write as the first person that I found my voice.
The environment, though, was my starting point for this story and the anxiety about climate change and the sense of the enormity of the problems we face. It reminds me of growing up during the Cold War and being two minutes away from nuclear disaster, that's how close we were to nuclear annihilation.
Around the time of the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit I was feeling very helpless and anxious and that was the impetus for writing the books, they were a channel for that anxiety. I thought the books would be gloomier than they were. In the end they weren't angry and gloomy but working towards something hopeful.
As a writer for young people I don't feel I have any right to be gloomy, it's morally wrong for you to be hopeless because they will be dealing with whatever happens. We are living in a rapidly changing world and people will need to learn to live with climate change and I think they will. People are resiliant but it will be a different world from the one we live in. Some changes will be gradual and some abrupt but we will survive; we have already survived terrible historical apocalypses.
I haven't read much dystopian fiction and I didn't think that that is what I would be writing - I thought I was writing a Western set in the future!
Q: Can you tell us why you decided to set the book in a North American landscape?
A: I love the landscapes and the drama in them. They are dark and inhospitable places mostly and I have such memories of car trips with my family across these landscapes during the '70s. The drama of driving through the Rockies for instance and also we would pass a particular place near the Crowsnest Pass where an entire town was buried by a landslide and for me the idea that a town was buried under the mountain just fascinated and mesmorised and scared me. I thought of how the landscape can just bury the past and how it can change and shape your life.
Q: You write the novel from Saba's perspective and with her accent, was that difficult?
A: It wasn't until I discovered her voice and realised that she should be the main character that I was able to complete the novel. I had written several drafts but had started writing it in the third person, then I used a much younger lead character. It took three and a half years, then I found Saba's voice. After that it was much easier to write. I heard her accent very clearly and in fact I had to tone it down on the page, I couldn't always write it how she would say it, because it had to be easy to read.
Q: Why do you give Saba the animal companions, a wolf and a raven?
A: They are like Toto in the Wizard of Oz. She is Dorothy's intuition and shows the Wizard of Oz for the fraud he is.
All the characters are different aspects of the main character on the journey and the animals in this story are the same. I'm a great animal lover, especially birds.
Q: How clear were you about how the novel would develop when you started to write it?
A: All I had was my starting point, Saba's brother being taken. I knew they would be separated but the reason why changed from draft to draft but I knew she would find him. As I went along I could see the structure and I stuck to that as I went along. I wrote the structure before I started to write Rebel Heart but it still took 19 months to write. I didn't know what it would be about but I knew she would be suffering the fall-out from the first novel and she would grow.
I had to put as much as I could into Saba's relationships so it would have a big set-up for book three, which is starting to emerge now, I have to be patient and let it come. All I can say is that at the start of book three, the main characters are all still alive.
I wrote the last scene of Rebel Heart during the first draft, which I later abandoned, but that scene came to me so strongly that I wrote it even though it didn't fit into the first draft. It made me feel a bit like there was a kind of destiny in the book, as if all roads lead to that place. Slim, the quack with the wagon, is another character that just came along. I didn't know why he was there but it all became clear as the story developed.
Q: Is there much of you in any of the characters?
A: I'm not like Saba at all, she's much more straight forward than I am, but she's certainly a big part of me and the emotional changes she goes through and her thinking processes, that's an accelerated process of what happened to me between ages 16 to 30 years. Saba has to grow up fast in her world. When I started with her, she was at a low point, she had had little social interaction and had a narrow world view and little emotional landscape but she moves very quickly to some kind of knowing who she is.
Q: Why do you write for teenagers?
A: It's an interesting age to be, you're not an adult nor a child but you're starting to experience the world outside your immediate family and friends and have so many new experiences and doing things for the first time, falling in love, broken hearts, the sense of betrayal and people letting you down. You experience these things for the first time at such an intense age and you never have that kind of intensity again.
I have included a love theme in the story because it's such big part of your experience at that age. I explore lots of different kinds of loving - family, friendships and romantic love, and being attracted and caring for people who are not that good for you. It's just all the things you experience around that age, different kinds of emotional attachment, but I've not made Saba soppy!
Q: Did you find it hard to draw a line in the violence in the story?
A: I thought people would be more concerned about the violence than they are. I was very careful about the level of violence, I tried not to be gratuitous, and I have also been careful not to be in the middle of the violence so I don't describe it graphically but I describe Saba's reactions.
Q: Do you have any tips for young writers?
A: My main point, when you're a young person, is to fill the well so read, read, read everything, even things you might not feel you're interested in. You need to read all kinds of genres and fill your imagination and fill your mind with images. Watch movies, look at art, go to the theatre if you can. They are all different ways of telling stories. Start to get an idea of what works for you - for me it's the big, epic things that get my heart racing.
You also need to be an observer, an eavesdropper onto other people's conversations so you learn different ways of telling stories.
Some writers will say, write something every day, but I don't although I feel I probably should and I may be a better writer for it, but I don't because when I write I empty myself out, then I have to recharge and get going again.
Q: What do you do to 'recharge'?
A: I do pilates because I get so crunched up from writing, and I love to walk, going to movies and gardening. I also like to travel - Venice is my place, I feel I must have lived there in another life! The last time we were leaving I just felt heart broken.
Q: Are you involved at all in the making of Rebel Heart into a movie?
A: The screen play is being developed at the moment and I am involved but only to the degree of commenting on the draft script and we have meetings and discuss the direction it's going in. I will also be involved in the lead casting and they hope to start shooting towards the end of next year, which is very exciting.
The Road To Ever After
