Kit Whitfield was born in West London and brought up in Wiltshire and London, where she now lives with her husband and son in a neurodiverse family. She is the author of Bareback (published in the US as Benighted), which was shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and longlisted for the Waverton Good Read Award, and In Great Waters, which was nominated for the World Fantasy Award. Her fantasy duology In the Heart of Hidden Things and the sequel , All the Hollow of the Sky, are to be published by Jo Fletcher Books. You will find her on Twitter @KitWhitfield.

Your new book All The Hollow of the Sky, the sequel to In The Heart of Hidden Things, is out now. Would you be able to tell us a bit about the two books?

The two books in the series are set in a fictional village of Gyrford, which you might say is in ‘Blankshire’. It’s somewhere in pre-Industrial rural England. There is an old superstition in British folklore that iron repels spirits and fairies. So it struck me that if that was the case, you would have fairy-smiths who specialized in dealing with that kind of thing. So it follows the fortunes of the Smith family who are the fairy-smith or farriers of Gyrford. Now, in the real world a farrier is basically a horse chiropodist, but it occurred to me that a farrier might be to a fairy what a miller was to a mill. I was so amused when I came up with that, I thought I’d include it for fun. 

It follows a family with three generations of farriers. You have the grandfather, father and the son of the Smith family. And their attempts to manage both the capital-P ‘People’ – the People are the fairies, and the folks are the humans – and dealing with the fact that on the one hand, the folks can be at least as much trouble as the People. And on the other hand, their son and heir, John, is possibly a little fey or touched himself – though to what degree, they’re not entirely sure. So it’s a life of crisis management, in both the natural and the supernatural world.

Where does your interest in fairies and folklore come from? 

I think that’s just something that’s always felt like part of me. You grow up with these fairy tales. I’ve always been a massive nature lover, and I spent a lot of time in the West Country as a child as well as in London. I sort of associate this old lore with the natural world, and certainly the way I depict things often as plants or animals that’s become like itself, but too much. So I think it just always feels like it’s been part of my personality. Also, if you’re looking around for plots, it’s really fun to take something small and just spin off it. It can feel like you’re creating a crossword puzzle or something like that. It also gives you the opportunity to mess around because you’ve got this basic spine of familiarity in the centre of it, and you can then be quite silly. I don’t think the tone of what I write is silly, but a lot of the time I am just kind of fooling around to amuse myself. If there is this sort of bedrock of this stuff that’s been around for a very long time, it gives a kind of freedom to hop around on the top of it.

One of the things I immediately loved about the books is the tone. The writing is full of ornate and beautiful descriptions, but then you have these quite wry, humorous ways of putting things…

I like to think that the narrative voice is sort of a character in itself, and the narrative voice finds the characters a little amusing. It’s fond of them, but it’s got a certain dry humour in how it views them that just makes them more fun to write about. And also you’re right: the way I write – and I do this because I enjoy it rather than for any other reason – is to write in a figurative, rhythmical way. If I don’t occasionally poke fun at myself, then it just becomes unbearable! I think it’s possible that in the character of Janet Smith, if you remember her, one of the things I was doing was slightly poking fun at myself. Because she is a very fanciful person who gets very excited about stuff, and I presented her as somebody who means well, and you can sympathize with her, but she’s just as capable of being a bit ridiculous as everybody else. I think it was me slightly taking the mickey out of myself. I think the other thing is that for somebody to be a reasonable person, they need some sense of humour. And so, humourlessness or cruel humour tend to be markers of an antagonist in the book. So if somebody doesn’t have a funny side, that’s worrying!

Does keeping track of the large cast of well-rounded characters require a lot of planning?

I’m more of a jumper-in-and-see-what-happens. I think once I’ve started creating characters, either I’ll start finding them interesting or I won’t. And once I started, then I have to keep at least some track of there’s this family and there’s that family, and there’s the other family. So I have to know who’s who, but I’m not a planner. I am much more an improviser.

Does that create problems down the line when you have like three generations of the families to keep track of?

Three generations is fine, but – I don’t know if you’ve read All the Hollow of the Sky yet? It was an octopus-wrestle, that plot, because that one involves six generations. 

For those unfamiliar, the patriarch of the family, or the ‘elder farrier’, is Jedediah Smith, who, I think you could say, is a gruff but kind person, and very concerned with being sensible. In the first book, I started writing him initially from the point of view, ‘This is the patriarch of a patriarchal clan.’ The women have plenty to say, but patriarchy is like a job within the family. When I was writing him trying to develop this character, I thought, ‘Well, let’s think about what it’s like when he was young, because nobody was born old.’ I introduced him as widowed, and then I thought, ‘But then he must have loved somebody enough to marry her once. He’s demonstrably got children. So what would he have been like as a young man, given that when we first meet him, he seems like somebody who has been a very old man for a very long time?’ And to think about that, I started thinking, ‘Well, what would his relationship with his parents have been like?’ And then I started thinking, ‘Okay, I’ve imagined that his father was like this, and his mother was like this. But since his parents were, in fact very unsuited to each other, why would they be married?’ 

I mention this very much in passing in In the Heart of Hidden Things, but farriership is a skill that is passed down from father to son, and there are certain traits you need to have. You need a perfect pitch ear for music, for instance. Perfect pitch, I think, you can only learn when you’re under six years old. So you have to be trained from a very, very early age. Which means that if you’re a farrier who doesn’t have any sons, you can’t just hire somebody, you need to find somebody from another farrier clan and marry him to one of your daughters in order to keep it within your family, but still have somebody to actually run the forge. So I started thinking it would be interesting to have Jedediah be the child of one of those unions, that his mother was the Smith. And his father is from a clan called the Mackems. And, in fact, if you’ve had a look, there’s a family tree in the beginning of the second book, where you see the Smith and the Mackem emblems which get carved on their gravestones.

But then, I started thinking, ‘Well, how would his mother’s father have thought about arranging this marriage of convenience to his daughter?’ … and then I started thinking about what had happened to the grandfather’s grandfather. And by this time, I was just thinking to myself, ‘You know, I would make my life an awful lot much easier if I didn’t have to include this, but I can’t not because it’s happened in my head, and now, this is just what happened!’ 

So this was a story involving exploring Jedediah Smith’s relationships, mostly with his father, which is not a very positive relationship. One might say it ended up being a book about acting as the breaker between generational abuse and a more healthy family. But in terms of how to keep track of it? Keeping track of three generations, I didn’t find too difficult. Keeping track of six generations … they felt like an organic progression, but then there were branches of the clan that I had to keep written down just so I remembered who was who and didn’t get names mixed up. 

But then on the other hand, especially since I became a parent, the family unit is just so much a part of my life. The family unit as a sort of microcosm of the community is so much part of how I think that it’s actually a very rich ground for the storytelling. I wasn’t specifically going against the grain, but it’s quite a tradition in fantasy that the protagonist leaves their family and strikes off into the unknown – I just wasn’t really interested in that. I was interested in what happens if, like most people throughout history, you grew up with your family and you stay where you were born for the rest of your life. So your family and your neighbours and your friends are going to be the same faces around you all your life. What are you going to do about that? How are you going to deal with that? Because it means that you are deeply involved in this particular community and its net of obligations. 

And I’ll tell you something else that got me thinking about that, which is: my son has special needs. He’s in a special school now, but he was in mainstream before, and in a way, as a parent, that is very isolating. Because I stand on the playground surrounded by parents who are talking about all these supposedly universal experiences of parenting that were simply not what was happening with us. But then gradually, the SEN [Special Educational Needs] parents find each other. And you find out what you have in common – and then you have to help each other, because it’s an absolute nightmare trying to get a special needs kid supported. It’s a slow-moving chronic case of institutional child abuse, of lack of support for disabled children in this country; don’t even get me started! But because of that, I’ve been living in this world where if you meet somebody who is part of the same community as you – which isn’t necessarily ‘they live next door to you’, but they live in the same world as you – then of course you have to help them. It’s just a plain matter of fact that you have to help your community, not because you’re exceptionally good, but because that’s how you get by. In the same way that I started thinking, well, the reason humans ever made it through a winter is because we have this instinct towards each other. If you don’t help each other within a community, that community’s not going to work. And I think that did come from the mutual support that has to happen when you have kids with special needs.

I mean, you’ll notice that whether or not you get out of the first book alive can basically be measured by how you treat disabled children. I was just like, if you mistreat a disabled child in my book, you are not getting out of the book alive, I will not have it!

One of the lovely things about the book is that you have neurodiverse representation in both John Smith, the youngest son, and Tobias Ware…

I didn’t go into this planning to make either of them a representation of neurodiversity; it really is just that I come from a neurodiverse family. I won’t name everybody in it, but I come from a family where ‘normal’ and ‘neurotypical’ are just not the same thing. 

I don’t know what neurotype I’d be if you put me through enough tests, but I’ve certainly got dyspraxia in my family, and I am less than adept! In fact, something I noticed when I was editing was that I am really quite clumsy, and I’m terrible at sports, and I can’t dance; my body just is not a very graceful machine … but I noticed when I was going through and making changes, I kept saying, I need to adjust this balance. The rhythm isn’t quite right. The words I was using were all physical. I think I kind of put what physical grace I don’t have in the outside world into my use of language, because on the page, it doesn’t matter that I’m possibly a little dyspraxic (not extremely, but a bit). 

I didn’t set out to code the characters this way. I thought I would make John interesting, and to make him interesting and endearing to me … what do I find interesting and endearing? Well, I will make him like the kids that I know best – who are very often neurodiverse. 

Likewise with Tobias. He was initially just a little throwaway reference. I was writing about the spectral dog Black Hal, playing with the old superstition that a pregnant woman who was frightened by an animal will bear a child with that animal’s traits. I put in, just as a bit of a world texture, that his mother had been frightened by Black Hal. You get Black Dog legends all over the place, they’re very common. And so Tobias has certain traits. And I started describing him. And I started thinking, ‘Looking at the way I’m describing him, he kind of sounds like I’m describing some of the kids that I know – not just my own son, but other kids I know. Should I do that? Do I get to do that?’ And then I thought about it and I thought, ‘Well, actually, yeah, I’m gonna, because I love these kids.’ I wasn’t going to make it a big thing, but I found that when I wrote him this way, I cared about him until he became absolutely central to the plot. Because I have spent so much of my time with these kids I love, who would probably have been considered ‘touched’ or ‘away with the fairies’ in earlier times. 

I wouldn’t put a modern diagnosis on either John or Tobias, because I’m not a diagnostician. I don’t know what a diagnostician would say if I presented them as clinical cases. I am more a carer than I am a neurodivergent person – well, I now walk with a rollator, so that’s a disability. But it’s a delicate position to be more a carer than you are a neurodivergent person. Because you are and you aren’t. You’re not the #ActuallyAutistic person. And I don’t want to present myself as somebody who can speak for people who I am not, because that is not my place. But at the same time, this is what my life is about. And again, I just keep coming back to the fact that I find a lot of my friends have a bit of spice in their sauce. I like neurodivergent people. I just find my characters more engaging if I write them in ways that seem to come out that way.

John and Tobias’ families are both really supportive of them and care about them and want to figure out ways that they can do their best, which is really lovely.

There’s the sort of stereotype that pops up and a lot of folk horror – and I’m a big fan of folk horror – but the thing that I like least is the ‘village idiot’ stereotype, because it’s often used to make you think, oh, there’s something wrong with this place because there’s a village idiot wandering around. And I’m sorry, if there’s this village idiot wandering around, this means there is something right with the place. It means it’s a kind community, where somebody who has a developmental disability is free to go about their life and is safe outdoors. That’s a good thing. It’s much more frightening to me to look at a community where everybody is pristine perfect, because you just wonder, where are the other people? Because it’s not that they don’t exist! 

So yeah, it can be a tricky one, because there is a history of neurotypical writers presenting neurodivergent characters really badly. Again, don’t get me started! I completely sympathize with people who take offense. I will name no names, but there are writers I would like to shake. I think the only thing I can do is just to say, these are people that I’ve invented, they have certain personalities. And also, it’s a world with magic, some of the traits that they have are a little different. And I wrote it this way, because I find it makes it more likeable for me. And hopefully – I mean, other people will have to be the deciders – but hopefully if it comes from a place of love, then at least that’s better than the alternative! 

For example – this isn’t a very big spoiler – but in All The Hollow of the Sky, Jedediah’s mother is also somewhat touched. And the reason for this is that his grandfather accidentally pleased a fairy which decided to constantly bless him with things that he really, really, really would have been better off without! And one thing it decided to do is bless his children. So Jedidiah’s mother is born more beautiful than any other woman. And when her father says to the fairy, ‘Is that a good idea? I mean, you don’t want her to be vain. The fairy says, ‘You’re right! She will be beautiful and she will never know that she’s beautiful…’ which means it blesses her with enormous beauty and a massive information processing disorder. Then her next sister has the voice of a bird and can also understand what birds are saying – so she’s an extremely misanthropic person, because birds are always fighting. The next sister is blessed with the strength of a hundred men, but the inability to do any harm with it, which means that she can’t learn to fish, she can’t defend herself if somebody hits her … So it’s just sort of fooling around with the format, because fairies giving gifts in in tales is a very traditional thing. But actually, having done that, I started thinking, there’s actually a lot of character and personality in somebody who’s like this. And again, found myself I suppose identifying with or sympathizing or just liking these characters because of because of these qualities that I’ve been giving them, just in the kind of mud-pie-making stage of the story where you slap bits about and see what takes.

The sinister, playful side of the fairies really comes out in these books as well. There’s a lovely bit in the first one about fairies doing housework for people. They’re agnostic as to whether or not clean or dirty is better, they just enjoyed the change of state. 

That is a folk tradition, apparently, that they will clean a dirty kitchen, but they will mess up a clean one. I just kind of thought, well, why would they do that? From what point of view would it make sense? The Charlotte Mew poem that I got this title from [In The Heart of Hidden Things, a quote from the poem ‘The Changeling’] describes the fairy state of mind as ‘not quite bad and not quite good’. And there’s a lot of fun to be had with that.

It’s currently a two-book series. Are there plans for any more?

It depends how these ones sell. If the market will support them, then I would love to write more. But that’s kind of in the hands of the publishers now. Let’s hope lots of people buy them, because I would love to write more in the series!

You also have two books you published before this. Bareback is about werewolves, would you be able to tell us a bit about it?

That feels like the book of a much younger woman! It’s an urban fantasy that posits that the majority of the population are werewolves, and it’s not being a werewolf that’s the aberration. And if you are not a werewolf, then you’re conscripted into a government body that’s responsible for maintaining order on full moons. Which means that on the one hand, you face quite a lot of societal discrimination because you’re a member of the minority, but that you have a lot of power within a very limited scope, that there is no guarantee you won’t to abuse. And it’s a murder mystery.

And there’s In Great Waters…

My husband said, ‘Well, you’ve done werewolves, why don’t you do mermaids?’ It started as a joke, but I went ‘Actually, now I think about it…’

The premise is that after the mermaid invasion of Venice in, like, the 1500s – which requires an alliance between the deepsmen and a landwoman called Angelica to settle their disputes because the mermaids speak a different language – any nation with a navy has to maintain an alliance with the deepsmen off the coasts in order to be protected from invasion. Which means that the royal family needs to be able to speak the deepsmen’s language, which means that they need to be hybrids for it to be physically possible; landmen’s throats just can’t make the right sounds. But at the point of the story, the throne of England has been so much weakened by intermarriage that there were very few of them left. And they’re not all in great health. And elsewhere in England, somebody who is referred to as a ‘bastard’ – which in this case means a landsman-deepsman hybrid, but who was not a member of the royal family. Just the son of some sailor, and some mermaid’s son. So a boy like this is found on the beach in England and is brought up in secrecy with political ambitions for him to usurp the throne – which might flow a little more smoothly if it weren’t for the fact that it does not really sympathize with landsmen at all! Like I say, I come from a fairly neurodiverse family and I’ve always been interested in differences. I think it was only later in my life that I realized what I was getting at.

All of them seem to have that playful relationship to the supernatural…

I find that fun. I don’t have a more sophisticated explanation.

Your work plays with genre fiction tropes in an unusual and quirky way, how do you sort of see it fitting within genre? The first two books are published by Vintage rather than by a genre fiction publisher…

Honestly, I just leave it up to my agent. I do what my agent says, she is very good. I love her. I trust her judgment. But I mean, as far as genre goes, I think these two recent books fit into the genre of fantasy much more completely than the first two. 

I’ve always been an eclectic reader when it comes to genre. Genre is more a convention to help booksellers reach readers than it’s really something that I think a writer needs to worry about at the writing stage. So I just kind of write it the way it comes out and let everybody else decide what shelf to put it on!

It’s clear from the first sentence of the book that you are a writer who cares deeply about the sound and rhythm of the words you use…

I read it aloud in the evenings to my husband. I read him my day’s work and will correct for rhythm and sound. I like doing it, is the simple answer. It’s just part of how I work. I wrote these with reading aloud in mind, and in fact there are audio books. I’m very excited that we’ve got this great reader, Juanita McMahon, and I’d certainly recommend her. 

I think just people have different … there’s a phrase in Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady by Florence King – which is a racist book, and I want to be clear that I’m not siding with that. But she talks about how her father, who was a musician, identified her fiddling around with sentences and described her as having ‘an ear for music gone awry’. I think that’s quite a good way of putting it. I think I think of writing in tangible and musical terms. And it’s not a rule I’d make for anybody else, it’s just it’s the way I enjoy doing things.

Do you also write short stories?

Sometimes, yes. Including one or two I’ve written set in this world just to amuse myself. One way I amuse myself it to write epistolary correspondences. There’s a whole short story I wrote between Jedediah and Matthew about a couple of cases that they’re working on shortly before Janet comes into the picture, which I like just wrote for my own entertainment.

That sounds like quite a fun way of getting the characters voices. 

It lets you feel out the texture of how they talk. You can see me sort of gesticulating wildly! I’ve been told until I use my hands a lot more when I walk about writing.

Are you allowed to tell us what you’re working on at the moment?

I probably shouldn’t get into it. I’m not at the stage of feeling open to talking about it yet. 

So for the foreseeable, I guess it’s just being involved with these works?

That is what I would love to happen. Whether it does or not is going to depend on sales!

Thank you so much, Kit Whitfield, for speaking to us!

All the Hollow of the Sky is available now! You can pick your copy up from Bookshop.org