Sophie Anderson
About Author
Sophie Anderson grew up in Swansea, studied at Liverpool University, and has worked as a geologist, science teacher and text book author.
Sophie was inspired to love stories by her Prussian grandmother who fled her homeland during WW2, losing her family in the process. She carried the stories, music and food of her home in her soul and brought them with her to Wales...and to her granddaughter Sophie. Growing up, it was the tale of the chicken-legged house that captured Sophie's imagination the most. She thought it would be incredible to live in a house that could take you to see new places or to visit the homelands of ancestors.
Now living in the Lake District with her husband, Sophie enjoys the freedom of home schooling her three children, fell walking, canoeing, and daydreaming.
@sophieinspace @usborne #TheHouseWithChickenLegs
Interview
THE HOUSE WITH CHICKEN LEGS
USBORNE BOOKS
MAY 2018
THE HOUSE WITH CHICKEN LEGS is a story of loss and discovery, of grief for the past while finding a future, in which the house itself plays as large a role as the child Marinka and her grandmother, Baba Yaga.
Marinka's grandmother, Baba Yaga, roams around the world in a house with chicken legs, helping the spirits of the dead to move on. Marinka herself is being trained to be a Baba Yaga, but reluctantly, as she has a yearning to be with the living rather than the dead. But in trying to find a real friend, Marinka sets in process events that will force her to examine what she really wants from the life she has been given.
We asked author SOPHIE ANDERSEN to tell us more about THE HOUSE WITH CHICKEN LEGS.
Q: This is your debut novel, so what has your earlier career involved?
A: I trained as a teacher originally and, after doing some reading around children learning organically, I decided to take a year or two off to home school my children and they are all still happy to learn at home for now. I like the freedom of them choosing what they want to learn. I find the 'edges of the day' to do my writing.
Q: You have mentioned that your grandmother has influenced you in becoming a writer. Can you tell us more about her?
A: Yes she was a massive influence on me. She was Prussian, while my grandfather was very Welsh, so they both had strong accents and sounded very foreign to me. My grandmother would play her music and did fancy embroidery, and she had lots of stories from Eastern Europe and stories about the war, and told us quite scary stories when we were still young but we loved it.
I was fascinated by her stories, they were so different from the Disney stories and 'happy ever afters' we were growing up with. These were much more ambiguous and fascinating. I hadn't planned to be a writer - in fact, my mother is a writer (Catrin Collier) and I always saw her in this dark little room, typing away. But I started to share my grandmother's stories with my own children and to tell my own versions of them - mainly so they were less scary - and I added things to them. The next step was to start writing them down.
Q: What was it about Baba Yaga stories that appealed to you enough to make her a central part of your novel?
A: Baba Yaga is an amazing character, a scary witch who would eat people in some stories; in others, she is kind and helps people. So the question I asked is why people would think she was ugly and apt to eat people. I think it was because she lived on the edges of society and so people were scared of her. I didn't want to change her so much in my story that she was all good.
In the folklore, stories about Baba Yaga run deep, she is the goddess of death and her house - with chicken legs - stands on the edges of life and death, which is why skulls light the way to her door and the house has a fence of bones. She is between life and death.
Q: How did the character of Baba Yaga's house develop from these stories?
A: In the old stories there is a house that, while it can't run around, it can stand up and turn around. For me, as soon as you give something legs it must be sentient. In some stories the Baba Yaga is so close to her house that she's an extension of it, so they must have a joint purpose.
In my story, the personality of the house came from our own chickens, which I love to watch. So the house is curious, it can run or plod, and it was such fun to write the house, and also Jack the x. These are big, expressive characters but they can't actually talk.
Q: Although you had a lot of your grandmother's stories to draw on for the background to your book, did you also need to do much research into Baba Yaga folklore?
A: I did lots of research especially around the beliefs of the ancient Slavic people. A lot of the old Russian fairy tales were changed when Christianity came in but there wasn't much written down before that so it's quite difficult to research. We do know that the ancient people worshiped nature gods and believed in spirits of the home, spirits of the family and so on.
I like to draw from the same place that the stories come from and found it fascinating learning about the ancient time and beliefs.
Q: Can you tell us how you deal with the theme of death and grief in the story, which is so much a part of Baba Yaga's purpose?
A: I wanted to keep the link with death and to explore why people were scared of Baby Yaga, but I was also writing a children's story so I didn't want it to be morbid and dark so that's where the guiding element came in; she helps those who are dying.
In the couple of years before I wrote the book, I lost both my grandparents and my brother, who was younger than me. That was hard to go through but I also tried to see it as a natural process and that grieving is a natural thing to do - just like the guiding ceremony in my story, I tried to think about what people have gained from their lives.
But this isn't a story about death, it's about an average middle grade girl who is becoming a teenager and who wants to control her own life. Grief is a part of her story, but it's not all her story.
Q: Why did you decide to explore that question that all children have; what will I be when I grow up?
A: I wanted to write about this world of Baby Yaga, but for the focus to be Marinka who has big questions about her future. She was partly inspired by my daughter asking 'who will I be?' and 'what can I be?' and as soon as I started to write her story, she came to life.
Children might love their lives with their parents but at some point they will start to think that they can do more, that they will follow their own path. I wanted to explore that moment that a child realises that this is their life and they can choose what they want to do with it. There might be a sense of belonging, but there is also that sense that they want to try to escape from that life and I think that's a great age to be.
Q: Were those also the kinds of books that appealed to you as a child?
A: I loved Anne of Green Gables, I connected with the idea of this ordinary girl who struggles to fit in; it's the only book from my childhood that I still reread. I also loved Tamara Pierce's The Alana Books, where the girl dresses as a boy and leaves home to have adventures, but I also loved the Moomins, they are multilayered fairy tales that children can pick up so much from reading.
Q: What are you writing now?
A: I have just finished writing my second book, it's not a sequel but it does have a house with chicken legs in it... It was also inspired by Russian folk tales and I will stay in that world. My third book, which I am starting, is set in the Siberian snow forest, the Russian Taiga, and draws on a Russian fairy tale called The Lime Tree.
I don't plan to revisit Marinka's story; where we left it, she has lots of options for her future and where she goes is her choice now.
The House with Chicken Legs
