Fablehouse: A Conversation with Emma Norry
Author Emma Norry chats with our literature editor Juliette Macron and our culture editor Aamina Khan ahead of her latest novel, Fablehouse.
Juliette Macron & Aamina Khan
Fablehouse, a mysterious mansion surrounded by ancient woodland, is home to some of Britain’s ‘Brown Babies’, born during the Second World War. At first, Heather is suspicious of how friendly the other kids are, especially Arlene, Nat, and Lloyd. But exploring together, they find a stone tower whose mystic secrets bond them. There they meet Palamedes, a knight from King Arthur’s court. He warns them that danger not of this world is coming. Heather and her friends must join Pal’s quest if they are to have a hope of saving Fablehouse and the children who call it home …
An empowering Arthurian legend–Fablehouse is an empowering read that shows all children have somewhere they belong, with a history and identity that can be theirs to own.
Emma's experience growing up in care has shaped this story in many ways and she is keen to speak about this and how she found her voice through books. She grew up in the care system in Cardiff, but now lives and works in Bournemouth with her husband and family. Emma’s previous books have been shortlisted for The Diverse book awards.
Our Editors, Juliette Macron and Aamina Khan, had the chance to speak to Emma about Fablehouse, her process, and the stories she’s drawn to. The following conversation has been condensed for clarity.
AAMINA KHAN: We wanted to start off by asking about the sort of general theme we see in children's stories, where it seems that children are often running away, finding themselves, in that ‘chosen one’ style story; why do you think these types of stories are so popular?
EMMA NORRY: Oh, great question. It’s massively popular in children's fiction, isn’t it? I think it’s because at that age– I’m writing about middle grade, so ages eight to twelve–children don’t really have any agency over their own lives. You’re always being told what to do, what to eat, what to think, and do your homework, there are very little choices you get to make. So I think that those stories and the popularity of magic and adventure and escape are really big themes. You know you don’t often get realistic contemporary fiction that kind of operates in the same space for that age group because you just want to be in charge of something, to control something, to make decisions, and have a hold over your own existence when you’re a kid.
JULIETTE MACRON: I saw that in the story. From the beginning when you meet Heather, you see her lack of agency and the unfairness of everything she was in, and how even when she attempts to defend herself, there’s all this pushback from the adults in charge of her. And then you see her get this power and get control in a very magical sense. I did some research into the other books you’ve written and I found an interview where you said that there was a point in your life when you actually weren’t interested in fantasy when you were younger, for a lot of reasons that people tend to like it; that you felt the escapism was a reminder of what you didn’t have in real life. What were some of the reasons that you eventually changed your mind on this and started to write in fantasy, and what drew you to writing about King Arthur and Arthurian legend?
EN: Well, the simple and honest answer is that the book wasn’t my idea. I was approached to write this project. You know as artists there are so many ways to be creative and collaborative, especially with writing I feel that there’s a real danger in the idea of it being one author and their vision. That’s amazing but people forget that there are agents and publishers and it never really stays one person’s vision unless it’s self-published. So I’d been around for a few years in the kids writing space, original novels, and short stories and commissions, and I was approached by this amazing woman, Jasmine Richards, who years ago set up a company called Story Mix. She used to work in publishing and she has over twenty years of experience and her big passion is making sure that black and brown children can see themselves as the heroes of stories. When we were growing up, we didn’t have that; at best we were side characters. Children of different ethnicities just weren’t seen as being the heroes. So she comes up with ideas for this company and looks for writers of color to write these stories. She’d read one of the agented, unpublished books I’d written about growing up in care. She came to me and said “I have this idea for a story about four children meeting a black knight” because she’s really into myth and Arthurian legend. She wanted to write this because there are never any black knights and she knew about my experiences in care as a mixed-race child. So that’s how this story came to me; I’m not a massive fantasy reader or writer. The fantasy world elements were really difficult for me and I really had to stretch myself. I read lots of King Arthur stuff and a few fantasy novels for inspiration and I took this on as a challenge. And you know, from a writing perspective, I’m probably shooting myself in the foot because publishers love for you to stick in the same genre so you can be marketed as a thriller writer or what have you, but if you look at what I’ve done you’ll see that my writing is quite varied. Through this, I did find a lot that I quite love about fantasy and legend but yes, I was not passionate about it from the start.
AK: I understand that and it actually gives the story so much texture. I always love when the idea of a story doesn’t come from where you think it comes from, and I’m interested in seeing the limitations writers like to play with and run with.
EN: It’s interesting because I resolved myself to not write about my own care experience again, because I spent five years on this YA novel that never was published. It got me an agent but a lot of publishers were like “Oh, we love it, but we already have a novel about a care home”, as though there’s only room for one. So I think that for self-protection, I decided that I’d just write other things. It was actually strange because when Jasmine came to me, I thought it would be much less personal than it became. That’s the thing about writing, the unconscious just takes over and it became massively personal. We worked collaboratively on the actual plot but full chapters I came up with. When she came to me, she had a loose idea of how to write the first three chapters and she asked for it to be written in the first person since kids fantasy generally is. I didn’t even attempt that because the minute I started writing, I heard Heather in my head, and I couldn’t go back and change that. I used to associate ‘fantasy’ with ‘high fantasy’ like Lord of the Rings, which requires such skills to build these entire worlds, but I had this amazing editor who explained to me that I didn’t need to be afraid of fantasy as a word, and it was just thinking of our world but with something different and unusual. Then I managed to have a lot of fun with it.
JM: It’s so interesting to hear you say all that because I wouldn’t have guessed any of that. Like the first person vs third person alone, when it’s third person, you’re slightly out of their head so you’re existing in the world but in this book, you’re in Heather’s world. It makes the world of fantasy more believable because it’s all through her eyes. One way I saw the fantasy working really well at showing the psychological state and how I understood Heather as a character was through the use of the changelings and the fae’s as replacements, and their metaphorical representation of emotional neglect or emotional distance. I was wondering if you could speak more about using that as a way to understand a child’s understanding of the world.
EN: You know from Jasmine’s outline, the original outline was much more ‘superpower’ and I didn’t want that at all. It’s been done and I wasn’t interested in that story anymore so much as I was interested in how we learn about ourselves and our inherent qualities and how they’re used as strengths, which can become powers for children. But they need to be your own thing, something you had in you already, not something given to you because that’s not power. So it had to be from Heather’s point of view, how she’s seeing her existence as someone who has been rejected and cast aside and not wanted. The faes and the changelings play those games of glamor and changing to look a certain way, and their deception and manipulation, had to be from her point of view, and her fears, they’re all specific to her. For instance, when she sees little Davy, who she’s so protective over, seeing him act so strange and creepy, that’s one of her worst fears coming to life. Couple that with the backstory of her mother who is mentally unwell, it plays with notions of psychosis, how you see things warped when you’re not well. The fae and changeling as a concept mirror that very well.
AK: You mentioned writing in the foster system before, with your own experience. How much research did you have to do for the care system of the 1950s care system, and how did that differ from your experience?
EN: Well, the house is based on a real place which was a big selling point for me. Jasmine told me about this nonfiction book called “Britain’s Brown Babies” by Lucy Bland, which explores the second world war when all these white women had babies with black Americans and all the black babies were shipped to orphanages around the country because these white women were married and it was unacceptable. The personal came into that for me because I’m mixed race; my mother is white Jewish and I don’t know my father but I know he was Jamaican. So because I was feeling insecure about writing fantasy and because I don’t have a visual sense without something physical to prompt it, I went to the honey house on a three-day walking holiday so I could see the real house and the landscape. So my research was that immersive point of view. The care system itself and how it was operated, I did very loose research, not much at all. But there will be a book two which I’ve been doing more research on, relating to policies and procedures. For me writing fiction, when you do research you want to do it lightly because you wind up using just a bit of it. You don’t want to dump pages and pages of info just because you discovered it.
AK: What do you think other stories don’t get right about foster experiences that implored you to write about your own experiences?
EN: It’s just not seen in loads of fiction, especially for middle schoolers. It’s a nuanced conversation because the whole ‘owned voices’ thing is a very real thing and the counterargument is that we’re writers and we use our imagination and we should be allowed to write about whatever we’d like. But there’s something so profound if you’ve grown up in the care system, and there are some experiences so unique that they have ripple effects on your whole life, where it doesn’t matter how much research you’ve done; the emotional connection just won’t be there in the same way. Jacqueline Wilson and other writers have written about the care system and they’re brilliantly researched, but they still lack that emotional perspective that those with personal experience have. Everyone experiences things differently, obviously, and there are different experiences of the care system- foster care, adoption, blended families- and there’s the question of who you are and where you’re from and who else is in the family and all sorts of things. I think the US does middle grade a lot more than the UK does. The YA novel I wrote that got me an agent, it ultimately got turned down because the publishing house ‘already had a care system book’, which should tell you everything about how they think of that story. No one would say ‘Oh, we don’t need a wizard story, we already have one’.
JM: You know I’m really drawn to coming-of-age narratives and stories about children and how they understand their place in the world, and I just loved the use of changelings in the story because it worked so well in so many different contexts. Changelings are the replacements and there are so many different replacements; her mother is a changeling- how did her mother be her mother one day and then go into psychosis the next- and then the parents in her care system are her replacement parents, who are then literally replaced with faes. So her found family among her friends is obviously incredibly powerful to her. Could you speak more to the found family narrative and why kids are drawn to it?
EN: Similar to you, I’ve always been a massive coming-of-age fan in novels and films, I just love that arc. I think I just drew on my personal experience and it’s so crucial for children to know that you do create your own family. For middle-grade readers, 8-12, most of those readers haven’t yet started questioning their family or what their normal is. In my life I had two key people, my best friend that I met when I was thirteen, and my husband who I met when I was twenty-two. Both friends I met at ages where I had every excuse to go down the same road as my mother. She was a drug addict and she’d come from this good family, a strict Jewish family, and they’d gotten divorced which was so uncommon for her time, and she was so ashamed and so alone. But for me, I had those intensely close friendships, you know, those secondary school friendships where your friends become your everything. Being fifteen to twenty-five, it’s just you and your mates against the world. I’ve always loved books that explore those really close friendships and even how they develop and change over time. It’s that old saying ‘You can’t choose your family but you can choose your friends.’
AK: Before we wrap up, is there anything maybe we didn’t mention that you feel is crucial to your writing of this story?
EN: What was most lovely to write about it was finding experiences being universal and emotions being universal. Like how Pal only realizes that he was a doormat for King Arthur because he sees himself within the children. He’s out of time and he meets these kids who, for him, are modern, but they still see one another so clearly.
Emma Norry has a BA (Hons) in Film and an MA in Screenwriting. She grew up in the care system in Cardiff, but now lives and works in Bournemouth with her husband and family. Emma’s previous books include Son of the Circus (Scholastic, 2019), which was shortlisted for the Diverse Book Awards, and Amber Under Cover (OUP, 2021). Her short stories have been published in anthologies including The Very Merry Murder Club (Farshore, 2021), Happy Here: 10 stories from Black British Authors & illustrators (Knights Of, 2021) and The Place for Me: Stories about the Windrush Generation (Scholastic, 2021). You can find her on Twitter @elnorry_writer.
Juliette Macron is a New York-based writer and teacher. She was born and raised in Queens but now resides in Brooklyn with two fish, two cats, and a hamster. She's currently pursuing an MFA in creative fiction at Bennington College. She’s an eclectic reader and writer fascinated by gothic, horror, and coming-of-age narratives, especially when the genres overlap. You can follow Juliette on Twitter (@ladyjuliettem) or Substack.
Aamina Khan is a Brooklyn-based culture writer with work in Teen Vogue, Vogue, The Cut, W Magazine, and more. She is openly a fan of HBO’s Girls and reads substacks as bedtime stories. You can follow Aamina on Twitter @aaminasdfghjkl
