Clare
asked
Maggie Stiefvater:
Hi Maggie, here's the second question that's been eating away at me since I read the Raven Cycle. Your portrayal of the Lynch brothers' religious faith is far and away the most daring and interesting portrayal of Christian characters I've seen. What inspired it, and why did you feel it was important to include it? And--at the risk of being too bold--does it spring from personal experience?
Maggie Stiefvater
I spent quite a bit of my youth in the highly religious South, and all of it in a Catholic family, and I always found it bemusing as a young reader that religion went . . . sideways in a lot of fantasy. No matter how realistically drawn other aspects of the story were alongside the magical elements, people's relationship to religion got either erased or made into a cartoon, a ghoulish stereotype to disprove or defeat. It felt odd to not see all sorts of portrayals in books: in real life, everyone had some kind of relationship to religion. They had it, or they judged it, or they were running from it, or they were searching for it. As an adult, I feel like it doesn't matter as an author if you do or don't believe in a god(s): you have to believe in religion. It is the practice of other people believing in something, and they do it no matter how you feel about the source material.
But it was hard for me to find in fantasy novels as a Catholic kid. It felt to me as if fantasy authors were saying that magic rendered religion obsolete. Even series like The Chronicles of Narnia, which of course are written by the extremely religious Lewis, placed the Christian God deep in allegory, which once again erased recognizable religion. They didn't talk about going to Mass or confession or Wednesday Bible reads or any of the things everyone I knew dealt with.
So the inclusion of the Lynch brothers' religion is two-fold. For starters, it's just real, and I always want my characters to move through a real world as much as possible. I was going to say "growing up in the South, I learned religion and the reactions were everywhere," but that's an untrue statement. I lived all over the country and religion and its footprints are huge everywhere.
And secondly, I wanted to keep religion intact in a fantasy world to talk about how someone's belief can and can't weather the introduction of new information — isn't this also real? 카지노싸이트, sexuality, sin: religion and faith have to decide if these are assaults that cancel each other out or merely complexities to fold in. In TRC, magic gets to be all those things. What is the fantasy genre for but to talk about real problems, but in metaphor?
Ronan in particular has to struggle with his faith, wondering if his particular magic and his sexuality render his God obsolete. Does his god hate him? Does his god not exist? Is RONAN a god? If he is, what value does a capital G God have for him? Does Ronan still have to go to Mass with his brothers if he stayed up late burying a magical monster's body? Doesn't every religious teen have to go through this process, even if they all come out with different answers on the other side?
As far as it springing from personal experience, I'm no longer Catholic, and I'm no longer religious, but I am deeply spiritual. I don't really talk about my spiritual beliefs or my sexuality in public, and I'm going to keep it that way, but I am quite comfortable saying that the process of living through the Church and religion up through my twenties has shown me pretty much the range of goodness, hypocrisy, obsession, rejection, wonder and horror that is fairly specific to religion, and it seems likely I'll be writing from that place of personal experience for a long time.
But it was hard for me to find in fantasy novels as a Catholic kid. It felt to me as if fantasy authors were saying that magic rendered religion obsolete. Even series like The Chronicles of Narnia, which of course are written by the extremely religious Lewis, placed the Christian God deep in allegory, which once again erased recognizable religion. They didn't talk about going to Mass or confession or Wednesday Bible reads or any of the things everyone I knew dealt with.
So the inclusion of the Lynch brothers' religion is two-fold. For starters, it's just real, and I always want my characters to move through a real world as much as possible. I was going to say "growing up in the South, I learned religion and the reactions were everywhere," but that's an untrue statement. I lived all over the country and religion and its footprints are huge everywhere.
And secondly, I wanted to keep religion intact in a fantasy world to talk about how someone's belief can and can't weather the introduction of new information — isn't this also real? 카지노싸이트, sexuality, sin: religion and faith have to decide if these are assaults that cancel each other out or merely complexities to fold in. In TRC, magic gets to be all those things. What is the fantasy genre for but to talk about real problems, but in metaphor?
Ronan in particular has to struggle with his faith, wondering if his particular magic and his sexuality render his God obsolete. Does his god hate him? Does his god not exist? Is RONAN a god? If he is, what value does a capital G God have for him? Does Ronan still have to go to Mass with his brothers if he stayed up late burying a magical monster's body? Doesn't every religious teen have to go through this process, even if they all come out with different answers on the other side?
As far as it springing from personal experience, I'm no longer Catholic, and I'm no longer religious, but I am deeply spiritual. I don't really talk about my spiritual beliefs or my sexuality in public, and I'm going to keep it that way, but I am quite comfortable saying that the process of living through the Church and religion up through my twenties has shown me pretty much the range of goodness, hypocrisy, obsession, rejection, wonder and horror that is fairly specific to religion, and it seems likely I'll be writing from that place of personal experience for a long time.
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