Poured Over Double Shot: Celia Bell and Claudia Cravens

By Jenna Seery / June 17, 2023 at 6:00 am

Two authors take on historical fiction with these novels featuring queer love, heartbreak, coming of age and agency with rich settings and vibrant casts, from 17^th century France to the wild, wild American West.

Celia Bell’s The Disenchantment finds Paris amidst political and social upheaval, while one noblewoman balances her unhappy marriage and her female lover in the tenuous world of high society intrigue. Bell joins us to talk about this particularly interesting time period, how a fairy tale inspired the novel, incorporating real people from history and more.

Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens is a nonstop Western following a scrappy and resilient young woman who faces hardship head-on by taking a job at a brothel where she finds strength, friendship and maybe even love with an alluring gunfighter. Cravens talks with us about creating a tactile world, telling queer stories, writing hot mess characters and more.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Jenna Seery and mixed by Harry Liang.          

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.      

Featured Books (Episode):
The Disenchantment by Celia Bell
Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens
Kissing the Witch by Emma Donoghue
Regeneration by Pat Barker
The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters
Lone Women by Victor LaValle
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin
Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi

Full Episode Transcript:

Jenna Seery
I’m Jenna Seery bookseller and associate producer of Poured Over and today I am joined by Celia Bell, the incredible author of her debut novel, The Disenchantment, it is a heartbreaking, lovely, gorgeously written story of two women in 17th century France. It is so deep and so rich; I can’t wait to talk about it. Celia, thank you so much for being with us today.

Celia Bell
Thank you so much for having me, Jenna, I’m really excited to be here.

JS
Since this is your debut, I’d love to have you introduce this book and sort of talk about the plot a little bit, we’ll stay spoiler free, because this has so many interesting elements that I would love for readers to discover for themselves. But I’d love to hear you talk about it and sort of how it came into your life.

CB
Of course, yeah, so the sort of main character of The Disenchantment is Marie Catherine de Cardonnoy, who is a woman from the minor nobility in Paris, who has been unhappily married to her husband who’s much older than her, she’s kind of had him selected for her as a husband as a teenager, her father arranges the marriage, she has very little say. And as you might imagine, it’s a very unhappy relationship, which she is sort of resigned to it until she meets this younger woman, Victoire, who is from kind of from a higher class of the nobility than Marie Catherine, and she is this incredibly kind of rebellious, gender bending, young woman who’s unmarried and kind of not quite out as a lesbian, but kind of like the closest that you could be at the time, they fall in love, and begin having an affair. And as she is trying to, as Marie Catherine, is trying to keep this affair secret from her husband. And she begins to live kind of a separate life from him before and during her affair with Victoire. She gets involved in the French salon culture of the time, in which women had a lot more freedom to like, speak, and think and write as they wanted to. And she becomes kind of famous in the salons as a teller of fairy tales, which was really popular game at a time as people would get together and sort of tell these communal stories or play games that involved kind of on the spot oral storytelling, she is for a while able to have these kinds of double lives, one in which she’s kind of, you know, tolerates her marriage, even if she’s not happy with it, and this other separate salon life, where she has a lot more freedom and a lot more ability to be a little bit closer to herself. And this lasts until the beginning of a scandal, which is a historical scandal called the affair of the poisons, which basically was a witch hunt. There were the pull of the Parisian police began to crack down on fortune tellers, who are operating in Paris, because of rumors that these they were mostly women and a few men, but these women were supposedly selling poison to people who wanted to get rid of their relatives, either because they wanted to inherit their money faster, or in many cases, because they were women who were unhappily married and just wanted to get rid of their husbands. This became a huge scandal, and it began to affect very famous and prominent members of nobility. At the time, there had been a lot of really big scientific advancements, one of the results of this is that people were beginning to realize that they didn’t really know a lot about how poison worked, and they didn’t really have an extremely effective way of testing for it. And so suddenly, all of these deaths of major public figures that had seemed like they were probably natural deaths, began to look suspicious. And a lot of these cases were kind of reopened as like maybe this person was poisoned. You know, maybe this person who was you know, suffering from syphilis didn’t actually have syphilis and that was poison. And all of this stuff started looking really suspicious. And this was kind of reinforced by the justice system that at the time, which pressured people who had been arrested very, very hard to incriminate other people. And what happened is a lot of the fortune tellers who were arrested, just began kind of giving up anything that they thought might be relevant to the police, including a lot of stuff that was, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, pretty clearly fabricated and just sort of made up. And so if the meta gets cleaned, this scandal has a huge effect on her because there are some people in her salon who are implicated and because her husband knows that she hates him and becomes incredibly paranoid that she is going to try to poison him and starts kind of looking at her behavior and her friends with a much more suspicious. And so the story is about her kind of trying to figure out whether she can salvage her respectable life or whether there is some other option open to her that she could kind of live in a way that’s less restricted and more free.

And the way that these two stories sort of meet and these two sort of lives that Marie Catherine is living are so intricately woven together. It’s such a lush experience. So I feel like we have to start with the research that you did for this book, because it is even as far as historical fiction goes, it is so deep and lush in the world that you’ve built. And I can’t I feel like we’d be remiss if we didn’t start with how you researched for this, and how all of this how all these real life stories came to you?

Yeah, I did quite a bit of research for the book. There was a point earlier in the process where I was in grad school, and I was just going to the library. And I would have like, one book that I knew I needed. And I would just kind of go through the shelf of French history and look through all the indexes and be like, Okay, this has a little thing about like, servants in 17th century Paris at like, these are the books that they stayed on this. And this, like this book has something about dressmakers and like, here’s the book that they say it on dressmakers, and I would just kind of like go through the shelf and pull off everything that looks like it might be relevant. Before I started this book, I had not really written historical fiction. And I was a little bit scared to do it. Because while I really there are a lot of historical novels, I really like the ones that I love the most have always been the ones that feel sort of deeply, like really deeply imagined as if the author really understands the set the way in which the past is kind of this whole different world. And I knew that I admired that, but I didn’t quite know how to do it. And the thing that made me feel sort of read in that respect was I went to a reading that Marlon James gave. And someone asked him about the research that he does for his books. And he was like, well, I just obsessively read everything I can and if I don’t know how people brush their teeth, I feel too anxious to start writing. And I was like, oh, okay, that like that sounds like problem, I can just do that. And so I did that for probably like 10 months or a year before I wrote a word of the book. And then at a certain point, it was like, I had a good enough sense of the world that I could kind of like, see the way the characters would like, move through it and interpret it. This happens to me often on long projects, but it was really noticeable. For this one, I started having these sort of like whole passages of narration in my head that just sort of before I knew the entire plot or the structure of the book, I would get these moments of just like, Hey, kids been walking through her house, and thinking themes or remembering things, and a lot of them ended up in the published novel, one of the first passages that kind of came to me in that complete way — there’s a there’s a bit early in the novel, where Marie Catherine talks about sending her daughter out to a wet nurse. And it was something that I had read about and researched and like I had this whole document of notes on. And you know, one day I was like sitting up at sitting up at my desk late at night. I don’t think I was even at my desk. I think I was doing something completely unrelated. And I was just like, I have this whole passage, like and she’s telling it to me.

I mean, this book feels so— it never feels like homework. It never feels like oh, I I’m being told this like barrage of information. Everything that I didn’t know that I felt like I needed to know in this book, you weave in so well with the story that it just feels like oh, okay, everything is here for me. In many ways I knew about this period of time. It’s something where we see other things set. But this exact story is so different than other things that you expect from this era of France of Europe, especially the aspect of queer stories in historical fiction. There are other authors that do it, you know, we have Sarah Waters and Emma Donoghue, who are specifically writing about women. But it is such an untapped vein, I think of historical fiction, or how did the queer aspect come into this in the grand scheme of things?

Honestly, it was. It was partially because I was just reading a lot of fairy tales. Marie Catherine is very is very loosely based on a historical woman, or I guess I shouldn’t say based on I should say, inspired by because when I was first starting to decide what the plot of the book was, would be I was very consciously like, I don’t necessarily want to be bound by historical facts. When it comes to my character’s life. I want to be able to make things up freely. But she does share a first name with her. They’re both Marie Catherines. But I was reading I was reading through these old fairy tales, and I realized that I actually had a book of fairy tales of that were French fairytales of the time that I’d had as like a little girl. And some of them were fairy tales by Madame d’Aulnoy. But they were these incredible, like gender bending fairy tales. There’s one recorded as being by Pierrot, but it was inspired by a couple different people. But it’s a story about a young woman who discovers that she actually was born a boy and her mother, her father had died at war. And so her mother was like, I actually don’t want to son, I want a daughter and raised her as a girl. And she lives her whole life that way, and then falls in love with a man and marries him, despite her mother being kind of aghast by the idea that like she’s going to be discovered on her wedding night, and it’s going to be really awful for her. She’s like, No, like, I’m a woman, I’ve lived as a woman my whole life, like my husband, like, my fiance loves me, and we’re just going to deal with it. And they get to their wedding night and her husband is like, I have something to confess to you. And it is that I am actually a woman and have been have decided that I would like to be a man and like, I probably should have told you this before I got married. But the ending of the story is they each live as the gender that they’ve chosen, and they don’t have to switch back. And it’s a completely successful marriage. You know, there’s a lot of kind of interesting gender play in these stories, you know, it’s something that we don’t really think of think of as being a possibility in the past. But you know, that particular story is called the Counterfeit Marquise. It was inspired by two different by two particular people who is sort of dedicated to at least one of them, I think, was a trans woman. And it’s, you know, you kind of start finding these records of queer people in the past that like a lot, like a lot of historical women, like a lot of writing by women were people, they aren’t necessarily recognized or they aren’t canonized. I wanted to be able to play with that in the novel.

I think it’s so important. I mean, queer people have always existed, trans people have always existed. And we know this now. And now we’re able to sort of look back at these times and tell stories that historically have been completely erased. And even though this is, you know, inspired by real people, it has such a grounded connection, you have an author’s note at the end that talks a lot about your research that you’ve done. And that was super helpful. I read that after obviously, after I had finished it, and the first time and when I went back the second time and read through, I really was able to pick up so many more of those connections to those real life, people and events. And so it was such a, an enriching experience, to be able to go back and try to pick out all those things that feel so real in this story. ThI got to do the research, you gotta know, speaking of these characters that are so rich and alive for historical novel, I think sometimes people worry that historical novels aren’t going to, we’re not going to be able to connect with the characters in the same way that we would connect with contemporary fiction. But the voices of your, your characters, particularly Victoire, and Marie Catherine, are so real and so alive, that it’s so easy to fall right in with them. How did you find these voices as you were writing, because especially when you’re working on inspirations on real people, trying to turn them into something your own is a different experience, I’d imagine.

Yeah. I mean, Marie Catherine, I didn’t, in many ways, I didn’t feel like I had to work very hard to find her voice. There were moments where I felt like I was channeling her rather than making her up. Like, she just felt like she appeared to me kind of very forms. And when I started sharing the manuscript with readers, you know, I was occasionally getting comments of like, oh, like, you know, things, you know, things like she seems a little bit too assertive with her husband, like, maybe she like she would probably be kind of like, more beaten down, or like, you know, it’s like the, like the moments where she kind of shows anger, especially anger over like small things in her marriage. We’re sort of occasionally getting flagged as like, oh, like, we I worry that like, this isn’t relatable. She felt like she came to me with such a strong personality that it was like, like, I just sort of knew like the way that she would think of things and kind of perceive the world and like the sort of thing she would say, and it never really felt like I was struggling to get to her Victoire was a little bit more difficult. In the first drafts of the novel. There were a few passages from Victoire’s perspective, a lot of them were added a little bit later, which in a certain sense is strange, because like if I had to pick the person who’s a little bit more like me, in some ways, I feel like I’m a little bit more likely to ask him if he gets seen, but I really don’t like writing about Like myself, and I was very kind of hesitant to give her those parts of my personality even though I knew that she kind of had. And so I really had to think sort of like how you would kind of build her out. And it was a little bit like it felt a little bit more like the work of actually getting her onto the page in a way that she felt the way I knew she had to feel was a little bit trickier.

And that’s, I mean, yeah, you don’t, it always is a little tough when that spotlight swings a little bit too close back onto ourselves. When we’re writing or reading. I know that sometimes I’ve had that experience, even as a reader where you’re like, ooh, this feels a little bit. A little bit too close to home. I think it’s interesting what you were saying about Marie Catherine on some of it seeming too assertive. It reminds me a lot of there was a movie that came out this past year. Corsage is about it was a Vicki Krieps movie about Empress Sissi of Austria. There’s some parts of it that were a little anachronistic and a little bit more modern. But I I’ve heard people having sort of that same reaction of like, oh, I don’t think women would have talked in this way. But it also like, well, maybe we don’t think women acted like this, because most of our history comes from men who either didn’t accept that women talked like this or wouldn’t have recorded if they did.

Yeah, or I mean, or it’s recorded, it’s just sort of recorded unsympathetically. Like, you know, you have the whole sort of model of like the, you know, like the nagging, harpyish, scolding wife. And it’s like, you know, in some ways Marie Catherine as she kind of tries to do her marriage, like, she has that sense of herself, where she, you know, she is assertive, and she’s standing up for herself. And as she’s doing it, she’s like this is bad, and it’s making me look stupid. And like, I feel frustrated with myself that I can’t just like get along. I do think that sometimes there’s a little bit of a danger of historical fiction, in that, like, the people of the past were the same kind of people that we were, I think they had, you know, like, we have the same kind of basic emotions and human needs, and like need for connection and dignity and intimacy and all of that. But the way they understood their world was often quite different. And so what the challenge to me was with the characters is making people who felt like their personalities and their motivations and their needs were fully inhabited, while also not sort of giving them a world that felt too modern, you know, that’s sort of a balancing act. But I think it becomes easier when you really when you understand the history because it’s you, you don’t just get a sense of their material world. You get a sense of like, what kinds of things would seem impossible in this world.

And these characters, like I said, they are easily connectable, and I felt very, you know, able to connect to them, but at the same time, you still have those moments of like, Oh, if only you know, could get out from this. There’s so many moments just want to scoop them up and be like, it’s gonna be okay. Even if you’re not really sure that it’s going to be okay later on. There’s you have that sense of like, okay, I can see where these are all coming from and my one of my favorite things like you were talking about before one of my favorite things about this this story is the act of storytelling being so prevalent in the text itself. I know even when I was reading the salon scenes I I could never the thought of like just making up a story on the spot is so nerve racking just like looking at some buttons and being like, Okay, here’s a here’s a fairy tale. Here’s a here’s a parable, whatever here and it did remind me a lot there is Emma Donoghue has a great fairy tale retelling collection called Kissing the Witch that has a lot of like queer and gender play stories. And it felt that I kept that kept coming to mind while I was reading some of these fairy tales as well. But the storytelling piece I loved that aspect of Marie Catherine’s character.

Thank you. Yeah, those were really fun to write, and I you know, I tried to make them feel like they were oral stories but you’re like as you’re doing it you’re like, there’s a very minor character who’s a real person that appears in one of the of the salon scenes. And she is she is a real person. She was a real writer of fairy tales. But the place that she appears in the salon scene is that she’s a teenager, and somebody like turns to her just like you want to tell a story next and she’s like, oh.

Yeah, there’s so many your supporting characters are so interesting. There’s such a wide tapestry. I mean, we haven’t even touched on all the like, sort of more important supporting characters that come through, but creating this tapestry of like, of real and inspired by real and then I imagine many just fictional characters as well. It makes everything so deep because there are so many sliding doors of things going on and This because there are so many intertwined characters, but how did it feel to sort of create these supporting characters? And how do you fit them all in amongst your bigger plots?

Oh, really fun. I knew when I started the novel that I didn’t just want it to be a novel about the nobility, the affair of the poisons, became like a framework for kind of connecting those two worlds because it spanned from the kind of, you know, lower class fortune tellers, and witches and Abortionists, and people like that, up to the really high levels of society, I knew that I wanted to kind of expand the world of the novel outside of the, the two women, Marie Catherine and Victoire. And I knew that I wanted the life of the servants in Marie Catherine’s house to feel like important. And that’s how we get the character of, of Jean, who is Marie Catherine’s lady’s maid, and who ends up playing a very important role in the novel.

It is so fun, fun feels like the maybe the wrong word for so many parts of this novel, because there are so many, for every sort of light piece that you have, there are, there’s a dark counterpart, sort of like any good artists and a good painter, which is painting is another big art that’s prevalent in this, you weave together that light and dark so well, that, you know, it never feels it’s not an oppressively heavy novel, even though I think that there’s probably a very easy version of this story that is very heavy and dark and hopeless. But it doesn’t read through that way in this story. You know, I didn’t know very much about sort of this time, this affair of poisons, I guess that you could say I hadn’t heard much about that. I think we know so many other like, similar things that have happened in other places and other times. And, you know, I think it fits so well against this idea of female freedom and sort of that goal for independence. And then you’ve got this vilification of so often of women, and so often of lower-class women, during this time, having those two things come together creates a really interesting back and forth play. While we’re watching these, this nobility, and then we’re also watching these scenes in prisons and scenes in sort of these lower-class areas of France as well.

Yeah. It’s, it’s interesting what you say about kind of the lightness and the darkness. Because what there are, of course, things that happen in the novel that are quite dark. When I was first kind of talking, thinking of the idea of the novel. I had a friend who I talked to quite a bit about it. And the first thing that I did, the first thing that I started doing was I was I was doing all of this research, and I was particularly reading about the lives of a lot of these women like Madame d’Aulnoy who were writers at the time, and who just lived these incredibly scandalous lives, and often they were fictionalized within their own lifetime. Madame d’Aulnoy wrote her own memoirs and just made things up with the freest hand you can imagine in her memoirs, and then her contemporaries, you know, particularly like men and the male critics of her time, and shortly afterwards, made up a lot of stuff about her because she had this very scandalous life where she like, you know, she was married off very young, and she successfully escaped from her horrible husband, and like, had a couple children out of wedlock, and stuff like that. But so there’s all of this sort of material about her, some of which she made up, and some of which was made up by other people kind of maliciously, but you read them and you’re like, Oh, my God, this woman’s life is sort of already a novel. And so I was writing these, these, like, long emails to a friend of mine being like, and so like, here’s this great story about her. And I decided in my book, like, there’s gonna be an opera singer and a cross dressing episode, possibly three cross dressing episodes, and I want to have a painter because I like painting. Here’s what I think his painting should look like. I’ve got historical examples and just sort of like throwing these things out and being like, yes, I want her to like, gleefully poisoned her husband so that she can get that so that she can get control of their house, which I’m not actually what happens in the novel. It’s not a spoiler. The actual upset is something slightly different. But it was it was this sort of like very fun maximalist process of just like, this is everything that I want, that would delight me. And even though I knew it was happening on this kind of like, dark backdrop, I’m in many ways I see this I see the 17th century as this moment of like, it seems like there’s going to be a huge sea change for women in terms of like, their status and their participation in society. And even an even for queer people. You have a lot of queer women and men being sort of like almost openly accepted, even if not quite, and then it kind of doesn’t happen. There’s this backlash, and the there’s a lot of concern validation of power into the state. And the church’s sort of becomes a little bit more subordinated to the state. And all of this social change that seems like it might have happened sort of doesn’t come to fruition. But it’s this moment of incredible past incredible possibility where you’re like, oh, things could have really become different at this moment.

And maybe that’s what the mood of the darkest things of all about it right is that it feels so there are moments that feel so hopeful. And yet we know from where we sit, now we can look when you look back, you can’t help but read a historical novel, I guess, through the lens of knowing what comes next and knowing what the next couple of 100 years would bring for women and for queer people. And maybe that’s what makes it feel a little bit different is we can’t help but read things through the lens of where we are now.

Yeah, but I think it’s useful to remember. I mean, one of the reasons that I connected so hard with the life of Madame d’Aulnoy, I think is because she is someone who, despite living through that era, backlash, was really able to live her life on her own terms, despite, you know, some really incredible trials, you know, she was married off at about 15. And before she was 20, she had had four children, two of them had died in infancy. And you can imagine a world where like, that was her whole life, and she never wrote a word. And nobody remembered, remembered her name. And actually, she escaped, and was able to make a new life for herself and get rid of her husband and support her children and run her own salon. You know, it seemed like a reminder to me that even in times of incredible adversity and repression, people find ways to get themselves to freedom, and to live and to try to get other people out.

I think that’s an important analog for even today, right? We still have women and queer people all over the world living in oppression and adversity. And yet, there are still people in every single one of those places who are living their lives, regardless of the fact that there are these incredible obstacles stacked up against them. And just to read it back from even this far back, and you know, it goes even farther back than the 17th century, the same thing, people doing that exact same thing. It’s sort of one of those gems that historical fiction can give us. It’s that, like you said earlier, even though we’ve all lived in different lives and look at our universes differently, we are still the same people with the same emotions, regardless of when it is. Yeah, exactly. Did anything surprise you when you were writing this? Did you find did you change your mind on things? Or did things come to you that were so interesting that you didn’t know about as you were writing,

oh, my God, so many things. There’s an actually really important plot point in the novel. There’s a painter character in the novel, who is sort of the straight man character. I like. I was researching historical painting techniques and historical pigments. And as I was just I made myself this big list of like, different things that paints were made out of and how they were prepared. And as I was doing, as I was doing this research, I came across this detail and I was like, okay, that’s what I needed to know to write. To write the end of this book. It becomes kind of a major plot twist in the novel. And there were all sorts of things like that, like I didn’t, when I started researching, I didn’t know, for instance, that like, in the 17th century, France was still had slave galleys in the Mediterranean. You know, they had warships that were like galley ships that were powered by orders, staffed by condiment convicts who had been sentenced to like, forced labor in in perpetuity. And they, you know, and they were still maintaining this fleet of galley ships. Long after we kind of think of that as being the period Yeah, there were a lot of there were a lot of other things like that. There were a lot of kind of details that changed about particular characters from like, my first idea of what was likely to, you know, have like how, where the characters were in kind of what their lives were like, to the fight to the final what I was actually writing it, and I felt like I understood their world a little bit better after that.

I always want to know, like, those little things that people learn, because, you know, we see sort of this finished project and I think some people, I mean, I talked to authors all the time, and I always want to know, like, how did you get to this point? How did you know it was ready, and especially with a first novel, how did you know it was ready to go out into the world that you’re like, okay, I’ve done it. I’ve put it together. It’s here.

I had a lot of sort of angst about it, but I did. You know, I wrote it and I was like, you know, I think I did a round of revisions before I started submitting it to agents. We got rewritten actually quit. A lot of the editing happened during the publication process, but in certain ways it was fairly easy to write like, I didn’t have to go through a lot of different drafts I didn’t have to do, I didn’t have to make a lot of changes to the structure of the book. A lot of that I just kind of felt like I’d gotten right. The thing that did change a lot was the fairy tales, the first draft of the book, had one kind of very extended continuous fairy tale, which I liked. Well, partially because I was trying to mimic a mandolin or fairy tale she has these like very, very long, kind of convoluted fairy tales, where it’s just like, one thing after another after another after another happens to the heroine. And I had always kind of read them as this like, almost sort of, like, you know, how fairytales have that structure where like, the, the heroine goes out to seek her fortune, or like something horrible happens to her, and she has to like, leave her home and go out and wander. And then at the end of the story, she has kind of, she gets married, and she’s incorporated back into society. And like, everything works out. And I always read the sort of super long winded, metamodel noise structure as like a resistance to this, like moment of like, things have to be resolved, the heroine gets married, they live happily ever after. She has a lot of stories where instead of the young prince and princess getting married happily ever after they die. And she also has a lot of stories that end in a marriage, but in this way, where you’re just like, it’s like watching a car crash where just like one thing happens, another happens and another happens and you’re like, oh my god can this slip, like can this Please end in a way other than the princess marrying the prince. And it like it creates this sort of like revulsion and you to the idea that like this is going to end in a Marriage Plot. Which I think is really is really kind of clever and interesting, what I was trying to kind of mimic that story that like, there’s a heroine who just like keeps having stuff happened to her. And like, there’s more and more and more and more and more, and she can’t get to the end of the story, which was fun. But it meant that when he gets clean is telling fairy tales, she keeps a there’s this ongoing story that had that has big breaks in between it where like things are happening in real world. And also that she tells the story stories to different audiences throughout the book. So I kept having to like summarize, like, this is what has already happened in this story. And this is where we are. And now we’re going to get the next installment of like the misfortunes of our poor heroine. And so I finally, in a late in a had a revision of the novel where I was like, I’m going to sort of change the structure. We have individual fairy tales that hopefully express what I want to express. And I don’t have to like keep reminding you what happened to our four fairytale heroine to you know, 100 pages ago,

And the fairy tales. I would probably read that long fairy tale, but I can see why. Structurally, that would probably need to be a little bit different. So other than these fairy tales, who are the literary influences of Celia Bell, if we had to put that out there were a couple of your big ones

On this book in particular, Pat Barker is a novelist who I love. And she has a historical trilogy that is set in psychiatric hospitals during World War One. it’s follows William Rivers who was a psychologist who did a lot of pioneering work in treating PTSD, there’s not a lot of overlap and time period. But like, she is someone who I think is really remarkable in the way that she’s able to kind of create the world of her time period for you in a way that makes it feel alive without ever being heavy handed. I think I think I’ve mentioned her in pretty much every like anytime anyone has asked me that question about this book. I’m like, It’s Pat Barker. When I was starting to write The Disenchantment, I went and I reread the Regeneration Trilogy, just to sort of try and see like, how is she doing this? And she’s also a person you know, when we talked to a minute ago about kind of the cast of characters of the minor characters and that it was important to me that like it wasn’t just a story about the nobility, I wanted the it to bring in people from different social classes and for them to feel equally, equally realized and not to be kind of, you know, solely focused on like this segment of high society. And she is also someone who does that like really well and really effortlessly, and so I read those books as I was writing it. I also think Angela Carter was a big influence. She of course has a lot of fairytale writing. And she also is someone who, you know, is able to write about old things of you know, with quite a bit of darkness in this kind of very light met, like lights not the right word. But you know, she has this particular kind of ethos in her work of like, very terrible things happen. But they happen in a way where the focus always feels as if it is on kind of the dignity and the agency of her characters. Like it’s it has this kind of amazing carousel feel of like, things can go up and down. But like, it feels kind of like a current you could swim in. I really love her work. So those were two.

I love I can see, especially in the in those aspects, I can see where all those pieces would come together. This is always a question I asked to sort of round things out and some people love it, and some people hate it, but I have to ask it anyway. What is next for you? Do you have anything in the works that we can talk about a little bit?

Yeah, um, you know, I’m being a little bit secretive about it. It’s nobody has seen any parts of it yet. The next project I’m calling it the post-apocalyptic beekeeping novel.

I love that. I just read that and the essay you put out about beekeeping? Oh, yeah. I love that.

I think it only came out like yesterday.

Well, I’ve been on the internet. I love that. The beekeeping aspect that’s such an interesting thing and a post-apocalyptic beekeeping novel sound some very interesting so I can’t wait to see what comes next. For everyone. You need to go pick out pick up The Disenchantment. It is an incredible novel you will not regret getting this. It’s truly something special. Celia Bell, thank you so much for being with us today.

Thank you so much, Jenna. It’s been really great.

Jenna Seery
I’m Jenna Seery, a bookseller and associate producer of Poured Over and today I am joined by Claudia Cravens author of Lucky Red. And if you’re looking for a queer subversive, feminist Western look no further Lucky Red’s got it all. Claudia, thank you so much for being with us today.

Claudia Cravens
Oh, thank you so much for having me.

I love this book. I love these characters. I love this world that you’ve created. It’s so rich and immersive and fun. Even when you think you shouldn’t be having fun. It feels so complete and so interesting. I want to avoid spoilers because there’s some stuff in this book that is going to take readers by surprise in all the best ways but I would love for you to set up the story of Lucky Red for us.

Absolutely. So every Western has a hooker with a heart of gold and her job is usually to help the protagonist, usually a man, have his adventure. And in Lucky Red, she gets to tell her own story in her own words. After her father dies while they’re crossing the Kansas prairie, Bridget washes up at age 16 in Dodge City, she is penniless, she’s totally alone in the world. And she is picked up for work by a couple of madams that own brothel called the Buffalo Queen, where she winds up being quite successful. But then one day, she crosses paths with the mysterious lady bounty hunter Spartan Lee, she falls madly in love. And then when everything goes wrong, she and her two best friends have to settle up right out and sort everybody out themselves.

That is a perfect description of this book. It is an adventure story. It is a coming-of-age story. It is all these great things rolled into one. But the place I want to start the conversation. I think the place this book really shines is Bridget herself. She is such an incredible character. She has such a unique voice. I was two pages in and was already hooked and was like I could follow this girl anywhere. And we do we follow her through so many things. How did Bridget’s voice find you in this story,

Bridget really came together from a lot of different places, you know, I knew that she was gonna have to be a survivor, she was going to have to be tough. But where her toughness really came from was, by the time she even reaches the brothel in chapter two, she already has everything she needs. In order to even survive that long. She has to be scrappy; she has to be resourceful. She has to be a fighter. And she has to have some real like sort of inborn optimism. She’s got to be ready to like, take chances and hope for the best. And so all of those things really came together to inform her personality. And then I just started listening to her talk. And there she was just talking away in my ear.

When you were writing this story, was she one of the first things that came to you, this character? Or was it more plot building and Bridget came to you sort of through setting up these plot points you wanted to hit?

Actually, the way the book started was with the character of Spartan Lee, the lady bounty hunter. I just wanted to think of like, the coolest, sexiest, most badass character I could come up with. I think I described her to a friend as like, Han Solo, but like a really hot queer woman. And so I started with this character, and then I was like, alright, whose life can she totally ruin and it went off from there.

That’s so interesting, because I mean, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Spartan doesn’t come in for a little bit in the book. We have a lot of book before we get to that point. But she is probably the most memorable character as you go through. I mean, I think you leave being like, Oh, wow. Imagining I was even imagining like, how could you cast her in a movie, like trying to picture all these different things. But your cast of characters is so vibrant and strong, you have so many of these interesting, supporting characters that really make up an entire world. He couldn’t just have Bridget with her great voice, you have to have all of these strong women that she meets. How did it feel to sort of write this wide cast of characters? Wasn’t it? Was it just so fun to keep coming up with more and more?

It was so much fun. And like a lot of my favorite storytellers use an ensemble cast. I was really looking for that I love when you’re watching a movie or reading a book and you can just tell that like that guy off in the corner is having his own story. Oh, and they’ve got something going on over there. And so it was great to be like, okay, we need a friend. We need someone who’s difficult to work with. We need a bartender, what’s he like? And it’s also like, it’s a setting that demands a lot of people like it’s a saloon brothel. So we already have like a bunch of characters who need to be created like the madames and the other girls and the bartenders and security and blah, blah, blah. And so, in the course of creating these people that I just wanted them to be so alive, I wanted people to feel like They were really in a world, especially since Bridget can be a little bit difficult to get along with sometimes. So we needed some other people around her to sort of make her feel more real as well.

Oh, there are definitely moments where in my copy of the book, as I was reading, I wrote a hot mess next to Bridget.

She is a hot mess.

She makes these choices and you’re like, Oh, you simultaneously want to like, shake her and hug her and sit her down and give her a bunch of life advice.

Thank you so much for saying that. I really want people’s experience with Bridget to be like, oh, oh, baby, I understand. But please don’t do that. Like, oh, dear. She really

She really finds all of these, I think we all either have been in this moment of our life or know someone who just like finds every worst possible thing that can seemingly befall them at once. I mean, she really has these like series of unfortunate events back to back. And every time she tries to get her feet under her and say, Okay, we’re doing it, she something else kind of comes her way that really connected with me, as I was reading.

Thank you so much.

I guess I was thinking to myself, also, as I was reading this, that one of the most interesting things about your characters, I think a very easy way to look at this book would be to sort of strip a lot of agency from these women, particularly at the Buffalo Queen, we don’t think of people, especially you know, in the late 1800s, in sex work, we don’t think of them as having agency, but your characters, so many of them, really show us that they are in control of many of their own choices. I know it’s a conscious decision as you’re writing, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on sort of that theme of agency in this book.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the theme of agency is so, so important to me. And even though Lucky Red, is a love story and a coming-of-age story, to me what that it’s more of a coming of agency kind of Bridget grows into her own power and really starts, she always has control over her own life. And she starts to understand what that means. And how important that is, it was so important to me to show all of the women as having this agency in this sense of control over their own lives. You know, these are characters who are always pushed to the side, or used as props for violence, or sex or any, you know, whatever some other character needs. But you know, in the course of my research for this book, one of the things I learned was that a lot of women in this position, especially ones who were doing like higher end sex work, they considered themselves like this is how they thought about themselves was like, we’re in charge of our own lives. And they were looking at married women with just as much disdain as the married women were looking at them, they were like, well, your tricks own you— body and soul. And at least we know what we’re trading for what like, and we can leave whenever we want. I mean, I’m not a historian and I’m, so I don’t want to like speak for all of history. But there are definitely like pieces of that. And so it was important to me that everything that Bridget does, in getting into sex work is a conscious choice. The women who were there with her are making a conscious choice. And even though they’re all aware of how precarious their life is, and the dangers and all of their vulnerabilities, they know who they are, and they know what they’re doing. And that really gives them a sense of power.

And there’s a scene sort of early on with Bridget and Constance, when they’re trying to get clothes for Bridget, and they kind of encounter these women that pass a lot of judgment on them. And they have this, you know, power dynamic struggle in front of this store. And it really, there’s so many great lines in there, like you just said about who really has it worse, who really is under more control. These women who make their own money and have their own money, or these women who are just really reliant on men to exist during this time. I mean, there were not many ways for women, at least from you know what we know, from this book and what we all just generally know from history, there weren’t many ways to survive as a woman on your own.

No, no, there really weren’t. I think, you know, within subsequent decades there came there came to be like with industrialization, there came to be a lot of factory work that women could do. But up until then it was it seems like there weren’t a lot of choices. And so Bridget makes her conscious choice, and especially after all of the difficult experiences she had, like, taking care of her father for her whole life. She’s over it. She wants to be in control of her own life.

And especially we’re thinking in the West in these frontier towns. This isn’t you know, 1877 in New York City or you know, in sort of these more progressed areas. This is the Wild West Truly, everyone is sort of out for themselves. And we really see that that idea that you have to take care of yourself, and to watch Bridget grow into that and constantly have that in the forefront of her mind of she has to take care of herself at all costs. It really cements so much of that storyline that we’re following through. It is it’s a wild ride.

Thank you.

I mean, I think another big aspect of this that has to be touched on is that this is a queer story. And the importance of queer historical fiction is really something that’s getting a lot of play recently. Finally, we’re starting to see these queer stories. There have always been queer people in all times in all places. And finally, we’re seeing those stories. How important was it for you to tell this story in this way?

Oh, it was foundational. It was. Immediately I knew, you know, I created the character of Spartan Lee. And then when I was thinking about where she could go and what she could do, I definitely wanted to have the person who falls in love with her be another woman, as you say, there have always been queer people. We’ve always been around; we’ve always been living our lives. And it’s great that we’re starting to see more and more stories that sort of just take that in, and let it be a part of the scenery and let it be a part of life. I think, you know, going back to what you were saying a little bit about the Wild West being this place with fewer rules, like you definitely have to take care of yourself, and everybody’s on their own. But on the other hand, the other thing you get in exchange for that is more room to kind of let your Let your freak flag fly and be yourself. And like, even the most traditional westerns are peppered with real weirdos. So there’s so much space within the Western to tell a queer story. It’s like, let’s go, let’s do this. Like, I’m 100% sure it happened.

It’s such an interesting aspect. It really changes that historical novel from I think we’re all used to historical fiction. And I think people might have misconceptions that it’s dry and boring. And this is certainly not those things, it never stops moving. Once it starts in, you never make it feel dense or difficult to get through. It’s just a wild, fun time. But there is also so much heart among these characters. There is a community at the Buffalo Queen that is tight knit and contained. I think female friendship is another thing that we just like, don’t talk about enough in literature. There’s so few like great examples of women coming together t to support each other. That was one of my favorite aspects of the book is these women supporting each other and creating this community? I loved reading, especially Constance. I think Constance might have been my favorite character.

Thank you so much. Yeah, I, I love Constance too, I want good things for her.

I think that’s that I mean, we want good things for all of them. Well, maybe not all of them. There’s a couple people, one in particular who I don’t want so many good things for. But I think we can, I mean, if you’ve read the book, you probably can figure out who I am, is my least favorite of them. But even then the characters that we may not like they’re still just trying to survive the best ways they can, which I think is important in these stories to that there’s no villains, really, everyone’s just trying to stay alive.

Yeah, I think that’s a really great way to put it, that it’s not really the people who are in conflict, it’s their needs and their motives and their goals that are in conflict. And if somebody’s goals were to change, then all of a sudden, these people would not be in conflict anymore, all of a sudden, they’d be running in the same direction.

We do see that a few times those sort of like you think you’re going one place, and it turns out, everyone’s on a completely different page. But I have to imagine that you there was a factor of research that you had to do to tell these stories. What was your research process like for writing this book?

So the caveat I would issue is that I am not a very good researcher, and nobody should follow my example. But I was less interested in like historical accuracy, for lack of a better term, I was really interested in making Bridget’s world feel real. I wanted it to feel so present. And you know, like, so tactile. So I wanted you to be able to smell the saloon when you’re in there, like that, to me was what was most important and so my historical research was largely focused around day to day stuff. I mean, I certainly did look up some, you know, I did, I did some reading on sex work in the Old West. And I definitely, you know, Googled some facts here and there to make sure that was like, okay, is Kansas a state or a territory, but the bulk of my research was about their day to day life that was largely focused on what they’re wearing. So I did a lot of visual research. I watched films I looked at history of costume books, but the real gem of a resource that I have is my mom, who’s a costume designer, and knows a lot about the history of clothing, especially American clothing. And so our text chain is peppered with screenshots from westerns, and me going like, Okay, what’s this shirt made out of? Would it be itchy? And like, you know, when they wash their red dresses, does the dye run or is it pretty fixed. And all of those little details were so important to me, you know, I learned stuff like, these girls all drink shot glasses of tea, because they can’t get drunk on the job. And it’s like, well, that’s a good detail. The reason that this was so important to me is that the everyday objects, the everyday things that we touch, and pick up and put down and the rooms that we move through, like we live and die on the every day, that’s where our lives are happening all the time. And so making that stuff all feel real, the, the glasses, the wood, that was really the top priority when I was doing research.

Tactile is such a great way to sort of describe your, your exposition in this book, anytime the characters would enter a room or were doing just like a simple task of laundry or when they would go into the different areas of the saloon, you immediately get it right away, you feel like you’re there. And that makes this so different than so many other historical novels I felt which are really based on maybe dates and plot, you know, point things where you really have to, I have to feel like I have to go do my also much my own googling to keep up which I can also love. But sometimes you just want to have everything right there for you that tactility that I understand how that would feel to touch or to look at. Is that something that you look for in other books when you’re reading that sort of, like, really immersive world?

Yeah, yeah, I love immersive world building. You know, I think my hero in terms of historical fiction, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this, is Hilary Mantel. And what I love about her books is they’re also, you know, in the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, there’s so much day-to-day minutia, there’s clothes and houses and food, and it’s just, it puts you there with people how they’re living their actual lives. And that’s what I’m really interested in. When like, yeah, kings and queens come and go and presidents and vice versa, you know, and then these people thought that people but like, what did it feel like to walk down the street? That’s what I’m really interested in is like, what it feels like to be a person.

Yeah, it sort of falls in line for me with you know, two of the queens of queer historical fiction, Sarah Waters and Emma Donoghue, it is that sort of like, these are real people, these are people just living their lives. This isn’t some big grand scheme or unraveling. It’s like, this is just one snapshot of these people doing things that any of us would have done. It’s so great.

Yeah, absolutely. Sarah Waters is such a hero of mine for that exact reason that she like, you’re not only getting the queer love story, but she’s taking you right there into their day to day lives. And it’s, I think that’s really important because it helps you understand how aversive love could fit could happen. You need to see like how it really fits? Where does it go in their lives? What parts of their lives does it touch?

I definitely thought about The Paying Guests a lot when I was reading this sort of that these women from two different worlds coming together into this story and having consequences abound. But yet, there’s this thread under it of love and hope this whole time, even when things are not going I think the way anyone would want.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think the idea of a thread of love and hope that sort of that gets it which for me was like really the guiding question all the way through writing the book. And that question was, what do we owe the people we love? And I love this question. I’m obsessed with this question because it has two easy answers: everything, nothing, and they’re both wrong. And so like, I wasn’t even consciously aware of that when I started writing the book, but as it progressed, it just bubbled up more and more and more and so I think you know, a lot of what happens in Lucky Redreally hinges on these intersections of like, love and hope and loyalty and obligation and every place that those two that any of those intersect is a fascinating place

And it creates somehow the most mess and yet the most clarity especially for Bridget in these moments of like, it seems like her moments where she is experiencing the worst things are also these moments of clarity for her where she’s like Oh, I just figured something out.

Yeah, yeah, she really likes to shoot first and ask questions later. And so yeah, she, she doesn’t tend to figure stuff out until after she’s already done it.

And sometimes things aren’t her fault like she has a lot of things happen sort of around her that she maybe couldn’t control. However, her responses in certain situations you’re like, oh, oh, almost. You almost got there.

Almost. Yeah, exactly. You just you watch Bridget, you go like, yes. But no, but yeah, but yes, but no, stop. But oh, you gotta.

And that’s the most compelling because, again, I think everyone has been there or everyone has watched that happen with like a friend. I feel like one of the reasons I loved Constance so much is she just like, watches from afar and goes like, but she helps when she can. But there’s a lot of well, I’ll just let her figure that out. She’ll get there in time. You wrote this in a like a yearlong program, right, the Catapult program? What was that experience like sort of drafting this in a year and coming up with this novel fully formed?

Yeah, I did the 12 month novel generator through catapult and I was taught by Lynn Seger Strong, who was a phenomenal teacher. And we started in the fall of 2019. So we did a lot of drafting and a lot of meeting in person, and then womp womp, will had to go remote, it actually perversely was kind of perfect timing for writing a novel. I had a day job at the time that was remote. And so I would like work all day in my apartment, and then close my laptop and take a breath and be like, I really wish I could go out and get a drink, and then be like, well, I know one bar that’s open. And it’s the one I made up. So we’re gonna go there and hang, let’s go hang out at the buffalo coin. And so it really became like, a real refuge for me during the lockdown, you know, I was living by myself. And so it just became like the place I would go after dinner and get really immersed in that world. And as far as like drafting it all the way through writing is such a discovery process. For me, I will often have like a plot point on the horizon that I want to get to. But how we’re going to get there, I have no idea. And the only way to find out is to keep writing, which honestly drives me crazy to have outlines be so useless, but it’s really it keeps me really engaged. It keeps me really excited. It’s like, oh, I didn’t know, I didn’t know what we were going to talk about this or like, oh, wait, we need a new person to deliver this information. Let’s go.

Did you learn anything big that you feel like you’re definitely going to take to your next novel that you aren’t sort of in this intensive program working when you just have to sort of do it from scratch on your own?

Yeah, yeah. I think the big lesson that Lynn came back to over and over and over again, was to always come back to the body, always come back to where people’s bodies are in the space. And then how what is happening inside of their body at any time, and how does that feel, and that I found unbelievably helpful to keep us really tightly inside of Bridget’s experience, especially since she’s having like these massive revelatory, emotional breakthroughs. You know, she’s like, I’m in love. And it’s with the woman. And you know, like that stuff that can get abstract really fast. And so to keep having to keep coming back to her physical body, and we’re with her in her body the whole time. We’re with her going up and down stairs, we’re with her with tricks, we’re with her stepping out into the alley to grab a breath of like, quote, unquote, fresh air before she goes back to work. We’re with her when she’s drunk. We’re with her when she’s sober. And so like that lesson was really, really key and something that I’ll always come back to.

That’s so great. I think that is also a great way to read a book as well even just to come back to sort of that, who are we following? Who are we with? And I think that I can definitely see that in your writing. It is so tied to these like, physical and emotional experiences. So I feel like the second time I read this book, it’s gonna filter through the way I read. Love that.

Thank you.

Did anything surprise you while you were writing? Did you have any of those moments where you’re like, I can’t believe that this is, you know, happening or this changed or I never expected this would make it in?

Yes, a lot of them are spoilers. So I’m not going to say but the one that did surprise me was in an early draft, Bridget had a little brother and he was taking up valuable real estate after about 30,000 words or so I went back and ripped him out like copper wiring, but that was a surprise to me to sort of, like, get that far into writing something and then be like, wait, this guy has nothing to contribute. He’s gotta go.

Yeah, sometimes that those like extra characters, I mean, I think this is so this book is so tight and it moves so quickly and there’s not a lot of room for like for you to take a breath or for there to be extra space. I can see why you were like I just gotta, just gotta barrel through and just got to make it and it’s got to be about Bridget.

Sorry. Yeah, exactly. And I did part of that decision was you’ve hit the nail on the head that I really wanted it to be about Bridget and about her just like really becoming herself.

And I think something that’s so important about is that she is her own world like there is not she doesn’t have to take care of someone else. She is taking care of herself. And I wonder if it I think her character would have to be a little bit different in order to also be caring for another person during those times.

Yeah, definitely.

Here’s one of my favorite questions to ask because we’re getting towards the end of our time and I just need to know what is the Claudia Cravens book recommendation of the moment. If you had to give our listeners some great things to pick up. They can be old, they can be new, but what are some things that you would love for our listeners to pick up and read?

I just started reading Lone Women by Victor Lavalle and it’s so good and I love, love, love, love his books, and would recommend them to anybody. I also I think the novel that Lucky Red owes the most to is Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. It’s summertime it’s time to sit out in the hammock or on a beach or in your backyard or on your sofa and read a big fat page turning bittersweet epic of the West. I think I always look for people who build really rich worlds and my hero for that is Ursula K. LeGuin, if you’re one of those people who does not enjoy summertime, then The Left Hand of Darkness will take you to a whole planet of ice and snow and very interesting gender, politics and gender setup stuffs. And yeah, it’s very, very interesting. So I think those are some recommendations off the top of my head. Another book that I’ve been itching to reread is Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi. I love her books. I think like there’s something really free and exciting about the way that she writes just like she really goes where the story wants to take her. And I think that’s so admirable.

27:24

Amazing. Those are all amazing books and Lonesome Dove I can totally see that working with this book just like back to back if you’re like want your western sort of binge for reading that with with Lucky Red. Amazing.

Thank you. It’s my all-time favorite novel. I read it almost once a year.

I love that it’s I feel like everyone has those novels, right where you’re like, I just have to, I have to get my yearly read of this in and so many people that I know that like aren’t like huge readers, like, how many times can you read a book? How do you not? And I’m like, I can find something new in every single time I read them.

Yes, yes. And I’m such a reader. I like repetition. I like going back around and seeing new things.

Absolutely. There’s so many, like fun things you can find in books when you read them over and over and then they just become a part of us truly like part of our own personalities.

Yes.

My last question some people’s least favorite some people’s favorite. What is next for you? Are you working on anything new? Do you have something on the horizon?

I mean, in a lot of ways, I’m always working on something new. I have one of those like, noisy contraption brains. It’s always like worrying and making noises and emitting like jets of steam. So I’ve always got like multiple ideas like spinning around in various back rooms. And I’m definitely playing with a lot of stuff. I don’t have specific projects to share yet but I’m writing a lot and I’m really enjoying that discovery process of being like, okay, let’s find out what I’m interested in right now. What questions are really bugging me only one way to find out?

I can’t wait. Personally, I can’t wait for what you come up with next. It’s going to be so incredible after lucky read. I’m sold I’m in no matter what it is. So I can’t wait to see what those questions are that bubble up for you.

Thank you so much.

Claudia. This has been amazing. Thank you so much for the great conversation and for everyone, you need to pick up Lucky Red when it comes out. You will not regret it. You will love these characters. You will love this world just as much as I did. Claudia, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you so much.B

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi