Interview: Jeffrey Overstreet

With the release of Jeffrey Overstreet’s new book Raven’s Ladder (the third in his Auralia Thread series), Faith & Geekery wanted to talk with the author to find out more about him and his books, explore some of the deeper aspects of his writing and the motivations behind them, his unique spin on the genre of fantasy, and discuss everything from fairy tales to Indiana Jones!

If you’re unfamiliar with Jeffrey Overstreet, he has written extensively on film and continues to do so at his website, Looking Closer, as well as on the blog Filmwell. His book Through a Screen Darkly (“a travelogue of dangerous moviegoing”) examined the world of film from a different perspective than do most Christian authors, and his writings have appeared in magazines such as Christianity Today, Image, and Paste. The first book in the Auralia Thread, Auralia’s Colors, was published in 2007, and the sequel, Cyndere’s Midnight, arrived in 2008. This year’s release of Raven’s Ladder is the third of four books in the series.

You can find out more about Jeffrey Overstreet at his site. You can also check out Faith & Geekery’s reviews of Auralia’s Colors and Raven’s Ladder, and we invite you to enter our contest to win one of three signed sets of the Auralia Thread — all three books — by visiting our contest page!

FG: Welcome, Jeffrey! Diving right in…one of the aspects of your books that I’ve personally appreciated is their unique artistic focus. So many books in the fantasy genre are really just ripping off Tolkien, but your books have a very original take on a new sort of world.

Jeffrey: Thanks. I’ve frankly become so bored with “How many ways can we rewrite Tolkien?” (or Lewis, for that matter) that I would lose interest if I tried a project like that myself!

FG: I’ve noticed a very large faith element in these books. To refer again to Tolkien and Lewis, they each had a unique way of dealing with their faith in their writings. Tolkien simply let his faith show through in the way his worldview naturally worked itself into his books, while Lewis crafted very intentional metaphors. Where do you land between those two camps in the way that your faith gets into your writing?

Jeffrey: Well, I definitely am not interested in turning these stories into some kind of evangelical tract. I’m interested in story as exploration, but I trust that what is revealed, if it is beautiful or if it rings true, it will not contradict what I believe as a result of my Christian faith.

I don’t have any deliberate intent to try to persuade the reader about Christian faith. I’m more interested in, “okay, if art reveals something true, how does it do that?” If art is revealing something true, then that must imply that there is such a thing as absolute truth. If art does convey truth in a powerful way, then is that not in itself a redemptive function? Even if the art is disturbing. Even if the art shows us things we don’t want to see. Is that not a redemptive influence that it has?

I just sort of take it for granted that because I am a Christian people will find echoes of the gospel in these stories, but I don’t like to be stuck in the “Christian fiction” box, because as soon as you put that label on it, then you’re suggesting that there is an assumed agenda or a particular response I want from readers, and frankly I’m not thinking about how readers are going to respond when I write! I’m thinking about what’s going to happen next, scene by scene, and how does that change as I write and rewrite and revise for the sake of trying to craft beautiful language.

That does happen — that’s very interesting to me that the more I revise how the language sounds, or the possibilities of how poetic it might become, the more the story changes! That’s something I’m very interested in. So I’m pleased whenever anybody interprets this as a story that has to do with art rather than evangelism, because that’s certainly more of what’s on my mind as I’m working.

FG: I remember the first chapter in Auralia’s Colors and all of the descriptive “color” language you used in the opening paragraphs…I could tell right from the beginning that it was going to be a very art-based thing.

Jeffrey: I appreciate that. That’s what happens when you can take ten years on a book. It’s been a struggle since then. Cyndere’s Midnight I wrote in eight months, and Raven’s Ladder I wrote in eight months and then had to cut it in half in order to get it down to a publishable size. It’s very difficult to maintain the kind of impressionistic approach that I took with the first book when I’m writing at that rate.

I’m lucky if I can just get the plot down in a way that doesn’t have massive continuity errors, so to achieve any kind of poetry in the description is much more challenging. It’s what I miss in so much fantasy writing. The books I read when I was a kid that I loved the best were the ones that sounded good when they were read out loud. That’s hard to do!

FG: Changing gears a little bit…as we mentioned, your faith is expressed very clearly in these stories. Is there a character that closely matches how you view things? Not a character that you think of as yourself necessarily, but a character that is more “you” than perhaps some of the others?

Jeffrey: In some ways I relate very strongly with Cal-Raven in that everything he sets out to do seems to fall apart! Sort of the way I used to relate to Indiana Jones: “Oh, I’ve been pursuing the wrong thing. Oh, I’ve got it. Oh, and now someone has taken it away, and –”

FG: “–and now there’s a snake.”

Jeffrey: “And now there’s a snake! And now I’m tied to a post and someone else is getting the glory.” I definitely relate to Cal-Raven in his sort of perpetual disappointment in having to step back and change or revise his dream, revise his expectations. That probably goes hand in hand with having a life in the arts!

In a way, Jordam is a character I tend to connect to most personally in that he is constantly wrestling with weaknesses, constantly feeling the pull of temptation, constantly falling back into violence and then having to step back in horror at the consequences. I mean I’m not a physically violent person…but I can become very upset! I can say things I wish I hadn’t said.

[It's like how] someone will relate to Gollum when they read Lord of the Rings. We all know how it feels to be mastered by something — an emotion, or maybe something as concrete as a drug. So as Jordam is fighting against his weaker nature, I definitely relate to that. I think that was some of the most personal stuff of the series.

I definitely relate to Auralia, too, in her frustration at how people want to exploit her work or put it in a box or label it, turn it into a product for the kingdom. There was a lot of personal emotion in her angry reactions when she was arrested in the first book. I don’t notice these things until I step back and read them later, but then I realize, “Oh, good grief, that’s right out of the script of my life.”

FG: There’s a definite “Beauty and the Beast” aspect to the second book, and as I was reading Raven’s Ladder various other things struck me as being possibly inspired by fairy tales — things that bore aspects of everything from Cinderella to Rapunzel. Was that intentional on your part?

Jeffrey: I just sort of soaked in fairy tales when I was a kid, so it doesn’t surprise me at all. I hadn’t thought of Rapunzel, but I guess [one character at one point] is climbing a tower and this woman is standing in the window…

It was very deliberate to make Cyndere’s Midnight a “Beauty and the Beast” story. It just felt right. I always felt like one of the missing elements of the conversation about Beauty and the Beast was “why was The Beast drawn by Beauty?” We always talk about, you know, could he be redeemed, could the spell be broken, and why was she drawn to a beast, but I was always interested in the idea of the aesthetic power of beauty — what role does that play in that classic story?

In Raven’s Ladder, there was no model that was so deliberate, except that I was starting to see — even in the first book — I was starting to see that this was headed for a reversal of what seems to be the common Christian fantasy story: the eventual encounter with and deliverance by Aslan or Gandalf or whatever Christ-like, angelic, or Messianic figure is waiting for his moment. As soon as Auralia’s Colors came out, some reviewers didn’t even call the Keeper “the Keeper,” they just called the Keeper “God,” and I knew when I drafted the first story that the Keeper was not necessarily the God figure in the series, although it was important to me that the characters think so.

This is a danger for any artist: when you become so attached to a conviction or an idea that you don’t allow for the possibility that there might be something bigger going on. For a lot of artists, that’s a political view, and pretty soon their movies or their stories start to sound like political campaign speeches instead of art. For Christian artists, it can be the Christian lingo that we’re used to, or it can be the easy morals to the stories that have just sort of become as easy as vending machine products — you push the button and you get the lesson of God’s grace or whatever.

In the works of art that mean the most to me, I couldn’t tell you what the moral of the story is in two crisp, clear sentences. It’s mysterious to me, and in my own life the more I focus on questions of what I believe, the more mysterious God becomes to me. This seems to come up for artists all the time. Recently we’ve seen the singer/songwriter David Bazan talking a lot about the disintegration of his faith, and so many Christian audiences seem shocked by this. But David Bazan is one of the most serious artists I’ve ever paid attention to. He’s not just going to sing the clichés. He’s going to pursue the questions, and for him that has led to a lot of distress.

My faith isn’t falling apart, but it is certainly more mysterious to me now than when I was six or seven, and when I read stories of heroes of the faith, faith seemed pretty mysterious to them, too. Whether it’s the burning bush or coming down from the mountain with a meeting from God and your face is shining, I mean…faith leads you to very mysterious, even frightening places, where your reaction is to take off your shoes and be completely humbled by the encounter.

So it made sense to me that these characters, if they were really going to pursue the Keeper, if they were really going to follow those tracks, if they were really going to look for the origin of Auralia’s colors, all of these things would lead them to something completely baffling and unexpected and humbling — something that would cause them to see how insufficient their current understanding and their definitions are.

FG: That whole idea of the mystery of faith is certainly something that art does the best job of capturing, but especially the more “out there” genres of fiction, like sci-fi and fantasy. They deal so much better with the obscure concepts and the unknowns — they illustrate them so much better and help put them into words.

Jeffrey: Yeah, and if you read the prophets, they write some scary, mysterious stuff. We can sense there’s something true there, but we’re grappling still — even after the events that were prophesied have supposedly come to pass — grappling with what that meant. You know, when the transfiguration happens and Christ’s disciples immediately want to build a shrine, they want to build a monument, they want to say, “Here’s where it happened. This was the best thing ever,” and He says, “Whoa, don’t build anything. Don’t decide that this is it. There’s more! I’m making all things new!”

I think that is what great art is after. C.S. Lewis describes it as casting a net and then seeing what you’ve caught. That’s the artistic process. You don’t already have something and you go to deliver it; you’re casting out a net of words or images or something and then standing back to see what the relationships you’ve set into motion reveal to you.

I keep getting emails or notes on Facebook saying, “So what’s going to happen?” or “How does it end?” or “Can you give me a hint?” And it’s like, “No, I don’t know yet! The story is still unfolding, even to me.” I have some ideas about where some things might end up, but if I decide now how it all ends, the story will narrow, and I think the reader will have a sense that, “Oh, this is all so calculated,” and life doesn’t feel calculated to me. It feels more like jazz. It feels more like collaboration and improvisation and I don’t doubt that God has everything under control, but I also believe that for the sake of love He allows us to, as Tolkien said, co-create right along with Him. And I think there’s quite a bit of evidence in scripture that God was often surprised by things.

Thanks so much to Jeffrey Overstreet for taking the time to chat with us. We hope we can do it again some time!