Poor Things: Is Alice in Wonderland at the Oscars?
Seventy-two years ago, Disney’s animated Alice in Wonderland walked away from the twenty-fourth Academy Awards empty-handed after composer Oliver Wallace lost to Johnny Green and Saul Chaplin (An American in Paris) for what was then called Best Scoring of a Musical Picture. In 2011 Tim Burton’s Alice adaptation took home statuettes for Best Art Direction (Robert Stromberg and Karen O’Hara) and Best Costume Design (Colleen Atwood) having also scored a nomination for Best Visual Effects. This Sunday, Alice will again be attending the Oscars. But in true Wonderland fashion, she’ll be in disguise as Emma Stone’s intrepid heroine Bella Baxter from Yorgos Lanthimos’ surreal masterpiece, Poor Things. Widely regarded as one of best films of the years, Poor Thingsis nominated for 11 Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress) and has already won five BAFTAs and two Golden Globes amongst a host of other awards. While the film is not an Alice adaptation, nor does it reference Lewis Carroll’s novel, but Lanthimos’ construction of the world of Poor Things and Bella’s character arc are classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, an odyssey of self-discovery through a strange yet beautiful world.
Poor Things begins as Bella Baxter ends (the first time). The eccentric (some might say mad) doctor and scientist Godwin Baxter (the sublime Willem Defoe) saves Bella’s life by transplanting the still-living brain of her unborn fetus after jumping off a bridge. As a result, Bella begins the film with the intellectual and emotional maturity of an infant. She rapidly matures, however, transitioning to a teenage mindset throughout the first act, discovering sexual pleasure and masturbation. Her world continues to broaden when she meets Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), her father’s assistant. McCandles swiftly falls for Bella and she accepts his marriage proposal. But Bella’s curiosity for the outside world and thirst for sexual exploration leads her to run off with her father’s debauched, scoundrel of lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (the delightfully outrageous Mark Ruffalo). What follows is a coming-of-age epic equal parts sensual, troubling, and enlightening.
So what does this have to do with Alice in Wonderland? Well, it can (and will) be argued that Bella is an Alice avatar, that Poor Things is an adult version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice’s journey is one of self-discovery, in which her journey through a strange, seemingly arbitrary world informs how she defines herself. When the Caterpillar asks Alice who she is, Alice replies, “I-I hardly know, Sir, just at present – at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.”
Alice feeling like she has gone through rapid change mirrors Bella’s arc over the course of Poor Things. Bella rushes through her emotional development, going from an infant to an emotional mature adult in the span of about a year. Just as Alice feels anxious about her sudden changes, Bella also experiences intense shock at certain points throughout her journey. One pivotal experience comes when the cruise ship on which Bella and Duncan are traveling stops at Alexandria, Egypt. Bella disembarks and is horrified to witness the intense suffering of the city’s indigent.
Prior to this experience, Bella had been sheltered. Whether confined to the twisted yet familiar environs of Godwin’s home or ensconced in the variety of sensual pleasures offered by Libson hotels and Mediterranean cruise ships during her galavanting with Duncan, Bella had never experienced, much less seen, true suffering. This revelation is devastating and causes Bella to experience an existential crisis, questioning everything she’d ever been told. Her distress and inexperience with the “real world” leads her to make the impulsive decision to give the ship’s crew Duncan’s money, who falsely promise to use it to support the poor of Alexandria. This has disastrous consequences on Bella and Duncan, leaving them penniless and stranded in Marseille. Yet the experience causes Bella to grow, giving her a more realistic view of people and morality.
One of the common beliefs about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is that it is a pure nonsense tale in which Alice breezes from one surreal episode to the next until she wakes up back in Oxford, her odyssey in Wonderland ostensibly just a dream. Yet Alice does undergo a change throughout her story. At the Knave of Hearts’ trial, Alice becomes more confident in herself, criticizing the arbitrary nature of the inquest and standing up for herself in front of the Queen of Hearts. Alice’s experiences in Wonderland did change her. Alice needed to be independent and think for herself in order to navigate that wild world and those lessons prepared her to confront the tyrannical Queen at the end of the story.
Similarly, Bella’s experiences with Duncan, in Alexandria, and in her time as a sex worker in Marseille prepared her to confront her ex-husband, the sadistic General Alfie Blessington. Blessington was the reason for Bella’s suicide in her previous life, his cruelty and controlling nature driving her to jump into the Thames rather than let her and her child suffer under his tyranny. But by the end of the film Bella has developed a strong sense of her own independence and competency, leading her to exact revenge on her former tormentor. It is a powerful moment, showing how the lessons imparted struggle can lead to triumph.
The world’s of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Poor Things also perform similar functions in relation to their protagonists. With both stories initially set in Victorian England, their secondary worlds provide a juxtaposition of customs and rules to the protagonists’ primary worlds. Carroll’s Wonderland is a surreal dreamworld characterized by non-existent rules and ever-changing properties. It is designed to confuse and frustrate Alice’s preconceived notions. Lanthimos’ world is not a fictional realm, it is a twisted version of our world, yet operates as Wonderland due to Bella’s unfamiliarity. The fantastical steampunk aesthetic reflects Bella’s point of view as she moves through a world filled with strange customs and confusing behavior. Both Alice and Bella have unreliable guides. Alice’s include the White Rabbit, the Caterpillar, and Cheshire Cat, while Bella must navigate the ulterior motives of Duncan and Madame Swiney in order to extract value from their examples. For both characters, their “Wonderlands” function as teachers, interacting with them so they can grow and change.
While not overtly influenced by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Poor Things’ narrative and protagonist certainly share Alice-ean functions and characteristics. Bella’s odyssey of self-discovery through Yorgos Lanthimos’ beautifully crafted world thematically mirrors Alice’s own journey through Wonderland, with both experiences inspiring the characters to grow, becoming more self-confident and self-assured than their former selves. Alice may not be on stage this Sunday at the Dolby Theatre nor may she be thanked if Poor Things captures any gold statuettes, but, nevertheless, the film owes a debt to the type of fantastical coming-of-age story that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland helped popularize.
An itinerant storyteller, John Drain attended the University of Edinburgh before studying film at DePaul University in Chicago and later earned an MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute Conservatory. John focuses on writing mysteries and thrillers featuring characters who are thrown into the deep end of the pool and struggle to just keep their heads above water. His work has been recognized by the Academy Nicholls Fellowship, the Austin Film Festival, ScreenCraft, Cinestory, and the Montreal Independent Film Festival. In a previous life, John created and produced theme park attractions across the globe for a wide variety of audiences. John keeps busy in his spare time with three Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and a seemingly never-ending stack of medieval history books.
BATTLE OF THE IPS: ALICE IN WONDERLAND VS. DUNE
Welcome back to the Alice-dome! The blog post where I throw a helpless IP into the fighting pit to see if it has what it takes to stand up against the bone-crushing giant that is our beloved Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. So far, there have been no survivors. That is to say that Alice always wins. Perhaps this is due to its enduring qualities, perhaps the reason it always wins is because it truly is the best, or perhaps it is undefeated because the ref of this competition (Me) is paid to write these blogs about Alice in Wonderland on an Alice in Wonderland website. We’ve had our top scientists trying to figure out why it always wins, but we will never truly know. Anyway, today’s contender is Dune, the science fiction classic authored by Frank Herbert. That’s right, it’s Jabberwock vs Sandworm, tea vs the Spice, Timothee Chalamet vs… I don’t know, Johnny Depp’s Mad Hatter? The categories that will be used to find the victor will range from worldwide cultural impact to whatever else I feel could be interesting. So, sit back, relax, and watch the fight.
Worldwide Cultural Impact:
In this first round of our showdown, we’ll examine the global impact of these two extraordinary franchises. Both have earned their places in the hearts of audiences worldwide, but they do so in distinct ways.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: When Lewis Carroll introduced the whimsical and surreal world of Wonderland in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, it was unlike anything people had ever read before. It’s so influential that it is referenced in and/or inspires everything from film to fashion and even our everyday language.
Dune: Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction saga, Dune, has left an indelible mark on the genre. Its intricate world-building, political intrigue and exploration of complex themes resonate with audiences globally, solidifying Dune’s place in the science fiction canon.
Verdict: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Dune’s influence on the science fiction genre and its intricate world-building makes it a strong contender but there is no beating Lewis Carrol’s masterpiece here. Dune might have influenced science fiction but Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has influenced everything else.
Critical Appeal:
In this category, let’s delve into the critical responses to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Dune.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece is celebrated for its imaginative storytelling, surrealism, and exploration of the absurdities of Victorian society. Its unique blend of whimsy and philosophical depth has earned it a timeless status in the literary canon.
Dune: Frank Herbert’s Dune has received critical acclaim for its depth, complexity, and impact on the science fiction genre. The intricate narrative, complex characters, and Herbert’s exploration of sociopolitical themes have garnered praise from literary critics.
Verdict: Tie – With the invention of Yelp, everybody can truly be a critic. Unfortunately, I don’t read Yelp reviews. Both books were critical successes. A tie might be boring but this one is based on people’s opinions so it’s not that easy to score.
Influences on Language:
Now, let’s talk about language. Both franchises have left linguistic marks with unique phrases and terminology.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Lewis Carroll’s work brought terms and phrases like “wonderland” and “down the rabbit hole” into common usage. The term “wonderland” simply did not exist before Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Dune: “Fear is the mind-killer” and “Spice must flow” are phrases from Dune that have become part of the cultural lexicon. Herbert’s creation of a rich vocabulary, including terms like “sandworms” and “mentats,” has contributed to the language of science fiction.
Verdict: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – In terms of linguistic impact, it’s a no-brainer that Alice is the winner here. Listen, I’ve literally written a blog about how Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is such a massive influence on our everyday verbal lexicon that we don’t even know we are referencing Alice anymore. The terms that were created in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland have transcended references and just are a part of our language.
Controversy:
It’s worth noting that both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Dune have faced controversies related to their content and themes.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Over time, some critics and readers have engaged in discussions about the surreal and whimsical nature of Wonderland, questioning its appropriateness for certain audiences. The abstract and sometimes nonsensical elements have sparked debates regarding the interpretation and potential impact on readers.
Dune: Frank Herbert’s Dune has faced criticism and controversy for its portrayal of complex political and social themes. Some critics argue that the narrative’s depth and intricacies can be challenging for certain readers, while others praise its intellectual complexity.
Verdict: Tie – Unfortunately, we have another tie here, as I find both criticisms to be incredibly weak and if I’m being blunt, pretty stupid. In Alice’s case, the “dangers of nonsense” argument is really grasping at straws. Who doesn’t like a bit of nonsense in their lives? As for Dune, being complex isn’t a negative, just get better at reading. I say this in general too, I had read somewhere that the average reading level of adults is that of a ninth grader… That’s the reading level of a fourteen-year-old! Statistically, you, reader, have not gotten better at reading since you were fourteen. Lucky for you my writing level is that of a ninth-grader so it evens out.
Books Published:
Now, let’s turn to book sales and the impact of the printed word.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Lewis Carroll’s literary masterpiece has sold over 100 million copies worldwide and has been translated into more than 100 languages. With over 300 editions in print, Alice’s adventures continue to find new readers across the globe.
Dune: The Dune series, initially written by Frank Herbert and later expanded by other authors, has sold millions of copies worldwide. The franchise includes multiple novels exploring the expansive universe Herbert created.
Verdict: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – One hundred million is a bigger number than the vague “millions” that I could find online relating to Dune. I know you read and I write like a ninth grader but this math is elementary.
Box Office Success:
Next, we compare the box office success of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Dune.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Various film adaptations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland have had success at the box office, particularly Disney’s adaptations.
Dune: The 2021 adaptation of Dune achieved both critical acclaim and box-office success, reigniting interest in the franchise.
Verdict: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Okay, this is tricky, since there are multiple Dune movies and, if I counted correctly, a little over a billion Alice in Wonderland film adaptations. So, what I did was compare the most recent live-action Alice film to the most recent Dune film. If we are looking at success purely from the financial angle, Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice in Wonderland grossed over $1 billion at the box office whereas Denis Villeneuve’s Dune made only $402 million. BUT, I do want to mention that the Dune remake was much more successful critically, averaging a strong 83% on Rotten Tomatoes compared to Alice’s 53%. Also, if we were to compare the older versions of each franchise, the 1951 Disney Alice in Wonderland grossed $96 million adjusted for inflation compared to the 1984 Dune’s $30.9 million.
Things That I Like and Dislike
And now for the least biased section of the blog, things that I think are cool from each IP and things that I don’t like.
Things I like:
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: Jabberwock’s, The Looking Glass Wars trilogy (Frank didn’t tell me to say this), flamingo croquet, those hammer birds from the cartoon, and of course, playing Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon over a muted Alice in Wonderland and freaking out at how perfectly it syncs up.
Dune: Sandworms, those dragonfly helicopter planes, the Pain Box, saying “spice mélange” in a funny accent, Zendaya.
Things I dislike:
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: The little box that Frank keeps me in when I’m not writing for him.
Dune: Timothée Chalamet.
Verdict: I was too lazy to count the points – I was told this section wouldn’t count in the final tally anyway but I wanted to place it here. In my heart, I want to give it to Alice since, to my knowledge, Timmy C has never been in any of the film adaptations. Look, it’s not because I think he’s a bad actor or anything, I just enjoy disliking things NYU students like. That being said, the box Frank keeps me in is quite small and dark so I guess it’s a tie.
The Battle of the Franks
This is a last-minute addition that I realized is worth pointing out. Frank Beddor, my warden and/or boss and author of The Looking Glass Wars (which is the TRUE story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) has the same first name as Dune author Frank Herbert. I think it would be only fitting for us to throw them into the fighting pit as a sort of an undercard match before the conclusion of the main event.
Pre-Fight Weigh-Ins:
Well, this is awkward. It turns out that unfortunately Frank Beddor and Frank Herbert will not be able to fight physically because Frank Herbert has been dead for the past thirty-eight years… So, I guess instead we will compare them as authors. What’s worse is that I had bet my life savings on Herbert getting a knockout in the third round and my bookie is refusing to give me my money back. Well, let’s just get on with comparing them.
Round 1:
Number of Books written in the series
Frank Herbert: Six books in total for the whole story of Dune.
Frank Beddor: Three if I count the novels for the main series of The Looking Glass Wars. There is of course; The Looking Glass Wars, then Seeing Redd, and finally ArchEnemy.
Round 1 Scores: Frank Herbert: 1, Frank Beddor: 0
Round 2:
Games inspired by their books
Frank Herbert: Besides the many actual Dune games that have been released, Frank Herbert’s book has been a massive influence on an uncountable number of games not directly related to the Dune universe.
Frank Beddor: Being trapped in a box and forced to write for Frank, sometimes I hear things. Little nibbles of knowledge. While I cannot officially say anything for fear of my water bowl not being filled, there may or may not be some kind of game based on The Looking Glass Wars Wonderverse. Perhaps there might be some cool lore expanding on the more intricate details of the aforementioned Wonderverse. If there were to be such lore, maybe, just maybe, there might be a short story or two written by yours truly. This is all purely hypothetical though.
Round 2 Scores: Frank Herbert: 2, Frank Beddor: 0
Round 3:
Film and Television Adaptations
Frank Herbert: Two official film adaptations with part two of the most recent adaptation on the way.
Frank Beddor: Frank Beddor’s The Looking Glass Wars trilogy has not been adapted to the screen yet. That being said, it should. I’ve written many a blog talking specifically about how it should be. Not only would it be a good show, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that if the stars align properly, perhaps, just maybe, with the right amount of begging, he would maybe consider staffing me for the show.
Round 3 Scores: Frank Herbert 3, Frank Beddor: 0
With a landslide victory of 3-0, Frank Herbert is the top Frank! Now I’ll be honest, I’m hoping I can sneak this past Frank Beddor. No one tell him he lost in this section. If I stop making blog posts, don’t assume that I’m on some kind of break or found another job, it means Frank Beddor found out about this section and I am missing. This stays between us. Okay? Now, let’s quickly get back to the main event before he finds out.
Conclusion
Alright, now that the dust has settled in the fighting pit, let’s see who has won. With six points to Dune’s four, our winner, and continual reigning champion, is none other than Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. And the crowd goes wild! Nobody could have seen this coming, not even me. When it comes to IPs, Alice is the reigning champion. I hope you all enjoyed this installment of the Alice V.S. series. Let me know what you think. But please know, all those who are Tim Chalet fans, aka NYU students, will be ignored.
Meet the Author
Jared Hoffman graduated from the American Film Institute with a degree in screenwriting. A Los Angeles native, his brand of comedy is satire stemming from the many different personalities and egos he has encountered throughout his life. As a lover of all things comedy, Jared is always working out new material and trying to make those around him laugh. His therapist claims this is a coping mechanism, but what does she know?
ALL THINGS ALICE: INTERVIEW WITH LENNY DE ROOY
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have Lenny de Rooy join me! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor Welcome to the show Lenny de Rooy. I am really happy to have you on as I had seen your book, Alice’s Adventures Underwater. I gotta tell you, you are very brave because, with The Looking Glass Wars, I use Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a jumping-off point. I felt like as long as I got the references correct, I should be okay with real Alice fans. But you decided to write a sequel, and you pulled it off because of all the different puns and all the references. I want to get into that with you as well, but my first question to you is there seems to be two camps in the interpretation of Alice. There is one camp which is the whimsical fantasy dream and the other camp interprets Alice as more of a nightmare. It’s horror. It’s self-sustaining madness. I’m pretty sure I understand, at least in terms of your book, what side of that debate you fall on, but I was curious what your answer would be.
Lenny de Rooy Yes, I’ve never read it as nightmarish, but maybe that’s also because I read it at a later age and not as a child. So I wouldn’t be able to say how it would have impacted me as a child. But to me, there actually is quite a bit of structure in the books, which is what I like. The fun part of the story is that it turns around everything you know, but there is a structure to the madness. So that makes it not nightmarish to me at all.
FB When you say structure, are you talking about the plot or are you talking about the structure of the thematic references that Lewis Carroll is going for?
LDR To us, everything Alice encounters is nonsense. But for the characters in Wonderland and The Looking Glass Wars, it makes perfect sense because things are the other way around. There are puns that actually make sense to us if we look at it differently. So that’s what I mean, there actually is a structure to the world. It’s not completely random at all.
FB One of the things that I found in my reading was that there was a randomness to Alice’s Adventures as she was going along. Things were happening to her and she didn’t have as much agency as the traditional reluctant hero story. But as I’ve reread it, I can find more structure and more agency. It’s just not so traditional in terms of the hero who’s finding themselves and then going on some victorious evolution.
LDR Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is very episodic. That’s because of the way it came into existence. It was told to the real Alice and her sisters in episodes, it grew and grew over time. That’s what you still see in the first book, while with the second book, Through the Looking-Glass, Carroll could think about it for much longer and there’s the chess structure that really guides the story.
FB I agree with that. The second book has a lot more structure. Your website, alice-in-wonderland.net, is one of the deepest sources of Lewis Carroll’s works on the internet. Where did this obsession with Alice in Wonderland come from? I did read that you first fell for the story through the Disney movie. But then what happened?
LDR When I was a child, we watched all these movies that our parents taped for us and the Disney Alice in Wonderland was one of my favorites. Then, in high school, I chose to do Alice for a presentation and then while reading for our exams, I decided to dive into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland because I thought, “Well, I already know the Disney movie so how hard can it be to pass the exam about the book?” I found all these layers inside it and references to actual people and I found that so interesting. Then I started gathering clippings in the library and then I went to university and I got access to the internet and I saw that there was not as much material as I would have liked. So I decided to start my own website. It was a very basic one, just a front page and animated images. There was a part about me and my hobbies, and then a part about Alice. I got a lot of comments on the Alice section so I decided to focus my whole website on the topic of Alice in Wonderland.
FB So you didn’t realize at the time you were you were putting together your website that Alice is so deeply seated in culture and there’s such a broad range of interested folks until you started to get those comments? Did your fascination grow, through that? The more you discovered, the more it revealed.
LDR Yes, but I’ve always been rather focused because I’m not a collector of books or all things Alice that I can get my hands on. I’m always focused on the background of the books. What are the origins of the story? What are the references to actual people and politics? What’s the meaning behind the jokes? That’s always what interested me. I deliberately focus my website on that, because there’s just too much to tell about Alice in Wonderland. It would get out of hand if I added all that to my website. I always say I don’t collect stuff, I collect information.
FB Your website’s very deep and really fascinating. But let’s talk about Alice’s Adventures Underwater. Lewis Carroll didn’t invent the rabbit hole, of course, but he did invent falling down the rabbit hole for adventure. That has gone on to penetrate pop culture for over 150 years. You, on the other hand, have used two devices. You use “taking the plunge,” which is the title of the first chapter, and also the reflective surface of the water. So when Alice takes the plunge, she finds herself underwater. I thought it was really interesting and effective. What were the origins of using those two devices?
LDR I wanted to make a continuation of the original books. But they’re also still very many references to the originals. So her plunging into a lake resembles falling down the rabbit hole and looking at the reflection of the water resembles the looking glass. It’s a mash-up of both things. When she looks into the water’s reflection, she sees her reflection, what’s behind her, and what’s underneath the water. She sees herself and other things. That’s a bit of a theme.
FB I liked that. The reflection part, the falling, and then holding her breath before realizing that, suddenly, she can breathe.
Can you do a quick comparison of the characters in your book that are reflected by characters in Lewis Carroll’s two books? There are queens in both books so you invented a Queen Bee for yours. Is there, for example, an equivalent of the caterpillars in yours?
LDR There are different levels of references to the original books. There is a queen in my book because Lewis Carroll’s books had queens. There’s also another cook because, in Carroll’s book, there was a cook. But then there’s the jellyfish which resembles the caterpillar because of his many tentacles that he’s folded, which is maybe a bit more of a resemblance to Disney’s version of the caterpillar, when he sits on the mushroom with his legs folded. There are also references for people who know the books very well. For example, the Queen Bee’s husband, a waspfish, wears a very ugly wig. Alice asks, “Why does he wear a wig?” The answer is he wants to stand out because he always feels left out. Most people won’t understand that reference. But in Through the Looking-Glass, there’s actually a missing chapter called “The Wasp and a Wig.” If you know that, then you’ll know that the Queen Bee’s husband feels left out because he was taken out of the original book.
FB That’s exactly what I’m talking about. I did not put that together. I’m sure our listeners would love that. There are lots of those things in your novel, which are really fun to discover.
LDR I even have one character that is based on an actual person within the Lewis Carroll Society community. He might recognize himself.
FB That was something else I was wondering because Lewis Carroll made a lot of references to real people. Did you make any references to any friends? Did you make fun of or tease anybody? Anybody that if they read it, they would see that themselves in the book?
LDR I thought about that but I couldn’t copy Lewis Carroll exactly. He’s so famous that people studied his background and history. I don’t think anyone will do this with me so they won’t know my personal friends. I would be honored if my book became that famous. But I thought I should put in characters and references that most people, or at least some people, would recognize. There is a reference to someone in the Lewis Carroll Society that I hope people will recognize by the description or the illustration. I also added references to Donald Trump, which should be very obvious.
FB Was that positive or negative?
LDR I would say not that positive.
FB There are so many funny political cartoons. I wrote a whole blog about the cartoons out there using Alice in Wonderland to make fun of Trump. So you’re in good company with many people that have found a way of referencing “Off with your head,” or “Down the rabbit hole.”
Back to your book for a second. I really loved the grooming fish. There were a couple of fun lines. “A brush for your hair and a comb for your teeth.” Then the fish goes on to say, “Humans wash with water and walk through air, we swim through water and wash with air.” That made me giggle. Tell me about the grooming fish. You have to be a marine biologist to write this book.
LDR I did have to do some research on fish. My illustrator, Robert Louis Black, helped with that because he had to visualize those fish. He named two things that I overlooked and that I needed to know.
FB The illustrations were terrific. In your book, Alice’s Adventures Underwater, Robert Louis Black did 42 fantastic original illustrations. The style is close to John Tenniel’s work in the original book. What is Robert’s background and how did you find him?
LDR It was a real challenge to find someone who could illustrate my book because 42 Illustrations are not cheap. Eventually, I found Robert online on one of those platforms where artists offer their services. We had a great collaboration because I had several ideas about very specific illustrations and he drew them perfectly. On the other hand, there were also illustrations I didn’t have any specific ideas for and he came up with some great pieces. He even put some jokes into it himself.
FB That’s excellent. I believe that’s how the collaboration between Lewis Carroll and Tenniel went as well. Tenniel had lots of creative ideas to offer Lewis Carroll.
LDR Robert also corrected me because, for example, in my story, there’s a cobbler, which is a type of fish, and also someone who makes shoes. So I had the idea of having him wear two shoes on the points of his tail. Then Robert said a cobbler does not have a tail with two points. It has an ear-like tail. I said, “Thank you. So I guess he’s wearing them on the fins on his sides, then.”
FB That’s where the research comes in and the collaboration comes in. I found collaborating with artists to be deeply, deeply satisfying. It also reminded me of Christmas. Suddenly, in my email, there would be a gift of an image that was previously only living in my mind and now it has been expressed through another human being’s art. When it was working, it was so deeply satisfying, that I became a little bit addicted to the exchange. “Hey, let me write a little description,” or “I need you to interpret this because I have no idea what the card soldiers look like when they fold up.” When that exchange happened, it was such a beautiful, satisfying moment. Did you have the same feeling?
LDR Oh, yes. Robert was very dedicated to getting things exactly right. But he was also able to make my ideas so much better. I can’t draw for the life of me but I sometimes made sketches of the general idea I had, and then looked very crappy. If you compare those to what he drew, he was just the perfect guy for this job. I’m so happy I found him.
FB You and I have that in common, terrible drawings. Which is probably why it’s so satisfying when somebody who’s masterful can deliver on the concept.
LDR That’s another parallel to Lewis Carroll. He drew the illustrations for the manuscripts he wrote for Alice. Then when he went to publish his book, he realized, “Well, I can’t draw that well so I really need professional artists.”
FB But it was not bad. From my viewing of it, his work was pretty impressive. But I found that if I was able to do that my artists would have been way ahead of the game. I thought he did a pretty good job. The way Carroll wrote some of the poems also was quite interesting and I think Tenniel copied some of that.
LDR We can find some parallels between Lewis Carroll’s original drawings and Tenniel’s drawings. It’s unclear how deliberately he worked off of Carroll’s drawings. He always claimed to work from his own imagination. But he must have seen the original manuscripts and could very well have been influenced by them. Carroll also may have asked him to draw something a certain way. Not much of that conversation has been kept, unfortunately.
FB There were a number of letters between them and Tenniel wrote a lot of letters to the publisher and even to Alice, correct?
LDR I don’t know if Tenniel wrote to Alice but yes, several of his letters have been kept. For example, the letter in which he advises Carroll to get rid of the “A Wasp in a Wig” chapter because he couldn’t find his way to a picture. He did have an influence on the story as well, not just the illustrations.
FB That alone is a big influence, cutting a chapter because he couldn’t find his way into the art.
FB Also, the seahorse has a great line. He says, “When you look at me, you see a horse.” Did you have fun coming up with the puns?
LDR I had a lot of fun. Some I had to think about for a long time, but most of them just came so easily. As Lewis Carroll said, some things just came by themselves. I wrote down things when I thought of them and then I thought, “How can I use them in this book?”
FB That’s when you know you’re onto something. How do you enjoy writing poems and prose? Do you find one easier than the other? Because there’s quite a bit of poetry in this book.
LDR It was really hard writing the poetry. I like writing both prose and poetry but I’ve had the most struggles with the poetry because Carroll’s poetry is so good. It’s very hard to live up to. I’m not sure if I succeeded, but I wanted to give it a try. I had many discussions with my proofreader about the metronome because I’m not a native speaker. I had some idea about how to pronounce the words, the right cadence, and where to put the emphasis, but there were slight nuances that I didn’t pick up on and had to change.
However, I do have to say that writing poetry in English is still a bit easier than writing poetry in Dutch. Even though it’s not my native language, I think English has many more rhyming words than Dutch. It’s easier to match them.
FB On that note, I’m going to ask you to read a little bit from your book. In Chapter Five, there’s a very nice poem, feel free to read the setup, if you’d like. The chapter is called “The Well of Fishes.” Would you be comfortable reading a little bit for us?
LDR Yes, I wonder if people will recognize its origins.
“Three times when adding up primes I was distraught, Seven pages homework somehow getting burned, Nine nights of studying all for naught, One error made and not a lesson learned From the school of Laketown where the cod are taught. One Fish to teach them all, One Fish to commend them, One Fish to test them all and in the end suspend them From the school of Laketown where the cod are taught.”
FB Excellent. Would you want to share the origin that you were teasing? All of us novices would love to know. Give us the inside scoop.
LDR The hint is in “one fish to teach them all.” It’s a reference to The Lord of the Rings, “One ring to rule them all.”
FB Clever. Did you have any hesitation in taking on a childhood classic as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?
LDR Of course, I was hesitant because I wanted it to be done right or not at all. But I’ve had this website for so many years. I know so much about the story and its background. I felt confident about understanding all aspects of the original books. So I did know what to put into it. It needed to have poetry. It needed to have 12 chapters. It needed to have 42 illustrations, and you’d have puns and things like that. I felt confident about that. The challenge was to create a good story that was Carroll-worthy.
I presented it to my proofreader who is also into Alice in Wonderland, and he liked it. I thought that was a good sign. I just went ahead and decided to publish it and I’d see how people receive it.
FB If you were in an elevator and you had to pitch it to somebody, how would you do that? How would you pitch it to people who are not very into Alice?
LDR I would say it’s a sequel. It’s written in the same style as Lewis Carroll’s original stories but with more recent references, jokes, and puns. So people that live in the now will understand it because of Carroll’s books, you really need to know something about Victorian times to understand all the jokes. This is an Alice version for modern readers.
FB So it’s a contemporary version, in terms of some of the puns and the jokes and the references. Do you want to give us an example of something recognizable in your book where we would be in on the joke?
LDR For example, there’s a reference to Brexit. I’ve had parodies in the books that are from poems like “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe, but also more modern songs and poems that people will recognize now. Like The Lord of the Rings poem.
FB I think people really love that. I don’t know if you’ve seen the musical Wicked. But people love guessing and trying to figure out what the backstory is and what the references are. There’s so much of that in your book for people to enjoy.
I’m curious. Curiouser and curiouser. Why do you think Alice still matters?
LDR I think it’s one of those stories that everyone can read into it what they want. It’s for children. It’s for adults. You can read it as just a funny tale. You can read it like I do and try to find out what Carroll was referring to. You can read it as something spiritual or something related to drugs. Anything you want, you can find in the story. And that makes it appeal to so many people.
FB This story really captured the collective consciousness because of what you just said. Everybody can take something out of it and interpret things in the way they want. Also, thematically it’s so much about who you are. She asks, “Who am I?” We’re always evolving as people so I do think it’s a beautiful way to reflect all kinds of different cultures and themes that people are dealing with. Because there’s so much Alice out there, how do you hope that your book will add to the Alice canon?
LDR There are many books that are inspired by Lewis Carroll in different ways. Your books have taken inspiration from it and you made this whole new world and did a completely different take on the story. There are a lot of people who are interested in that. I wanted to target another audience, the people who want to read more of the original tales, and who like staying very true to the original story. Or the people who are more interested in the books from a scholarly perspective. I wanted to give them something.
FB I didn’t realize how many collectors there were and how many Alice scholars. I didn’t know about all the Lewis Carroll societies. It’s very rich and very deep. I ask all my guests, if they were a character from Lewis Carroll’s books, who would they be? But because you wrote the sequel, I’m going to throw your book into it as well. You can pick from any of the characters in the trilogy.
LDR Actually, I don’t identify with the characters. I would say I identify more with Lewis Carroll himself, with Charles Dodgson. I’m the writer of a book, but I also am a person with many hobbies and interests like him, and I can relate to him a lot.
FB You are really creative in all sorts of capacities. And Lewis Carroll was very creative with his photography, which was cutting-edge at the time. I understand the reference, being an author and following his footsteps in terms of the ideas behind his book. But there are a lot of misconceptions, like that he was reclusive. I’m assuming you’re not reclusive, but maybe you are.
LDR I’m actually a social person. I like locking myself up in my room for my hobbies but at other times I like meeting people and doing fun things together. As did Lewis Carroll. I think the misconception of a reclusive Lewis Carroll was created because he wanted to differentiate himself from his pen name. He did not like to publicly acknowledge that he was Lewis Carroll. Of course, he had a religious background so maybe that’s why he never married, but he was a social person. He had lots of friends, not only child friends. He also visited many famous people. He was a bit of a lion-hunter from what I understand. He had dinner dates and went out to the beach. I would say he was social as well.
FB Also, people wrote that his books were written just for children, which we clearly know they were not. People think that the stories were about taking drugs. They clearly were not but what’s interesting about that comment is that culturally, Alice is always representing what’s going on. So yes, if you’re reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in the 1960s, you would see it as a psychedelic trip falling down the rabbit hole, but if you’re reading it during this era, it’s a completely different lens that you’re reading the book through.
There was also the whole thing with Alice Liddell and the missing diary page, which picked up a lot of internet buzz, and a lot of conspiracy theories. I used the missing diary pages as a device to say, “Those pages were taken out because he didn’t want to tell the true story of meeting Alyss Heart from my book.” I also used the Lewis Carroll Society as somewhat of a villain, who didn’t want my book to come out.
LDR They were very grateful for that.
FB They were fine. Back to your hobbies, you’re a musician and a seamstress. But interestingly enough, I haven’t seen you do any Alice in Wonderland cosplay promoting your book. You should be at Comic-Cons with your book dressed as Alice. Maybe instead of having a booth, you’d be in a water tank.
LDR That would be interesting. Maybe a bit of a logistic challenge.
FB But you would get a lot of attention and you’d sell a lot of books.
LDR Actually, I do own an Alice costume but I have not worn it for promotional activities.
FB What are you thinking girl? Come on. Let’s make the connection. You should be using your bagpipe to record Alice songs, dressed as Alice, with the book cover everywhere.
LDR I did play in a band called Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
FB I did see that. I thought that was very fun. How often would you perform?
LDR Well, the band doesn’t exist anymore. Unfortunately, my bandmate passed away. I’m in a medieval band and we play mostly during festival season, the end of spring until the beginning of autumn. I’m also in a balfolk band. Balfolk is traditional West European music. It’s mostly performed for dances as live performances and we usually play several times a year.
FB Is this a hobby or something that you’re trying to make into a career? Are you recording music?
LDR I call myself a semi-professional musician, it’s more than a hobby, but I do have a job. Besides the music and the book and sewing and things, I work in the marketing and communications department at a university because I do like some stability when it comes to finances. I do not know if I would like the lifestyle that comes with being a full-time musician. It’s a lot of working nights and weekends.
FB You have some Alice art on your screen. You have a mushroom and the Cheshire cat. Speaking of that, what was your cat called in the book?
LDR In the book it was called Villikens.
FB Tell us about your cat character.
LDR That’s a reference for people who are more knowledgeable about the background of Lewis Carroll’s Alice because the real Alice actually owned cats. In the original books, she has Dinah, which was actually one of her kittens. Another one of their cats was called Villikens. So in my book, Alice tells Villikens, who is a meerkat actually and not a real cat. But Alice tells him about Dinah and now she meets Villikens which is actually the littermate.
FB Tell me about some of the artists that you love that have depicted Lewis Carroll’s books. Are there any favorites?
LDR I am a Tenniel fan. I’m not into collecting books from other illustrators. There are so many to choose from. I like some of the illustrations, but I am not a real fan of someone in particular. The image I have in my Zoom background is one that was done by someone for contests and I just liked this particular image, so I saved it.
FB So you’re a traditionalist?
LDR I guess you can say that. That’s also why I wanted my illustrator to draw in the style of John Tenniel.
FB It was terrific. Can you share a little bit about the website and maybe give us some interesting facts about Lewis Carroll that are more obscure? For instance, the White Rabbit’s obsession with time. It’s my understanding that it was a satire on the British cultural obsession with being very punctual.
LDR There are many theories about the origins of the characters. It is also said that Lewis Carroll modeled the White Rabbit after Alice’s father, the ecclesiastical dean of Christchurch, Oxford because he apparently was often running late. But there’s no real proof of that.
FB That’s just fun information. So you put things like that on your website?
LDR I’m mostly focused on things that have a little more proof or it’s more likely that it’s true. I also focus more on the origins of the story, like how everyone imagines Alice with a blue dress even though the original illustrations are black and white. So what would Carol have had in mind? First, illustrations that were officially published in his books have Alice in a yellow dress, but there was also merchandise showing her in a red dress or a blue dress. So Disney was not the first to depict her in a blue dress, but it made it iconic. So I’m trying to add those things to the website so people will know more about how these things come to pass.
FB That’s really interesting. I knew about the yellow but I didn’t know about a red dress. What is the indication that there was a red dress?
LDR I think it was on the merchandise.
FB Lewis Carroll was selling merchandise back then?
LDR He produced his own stamp case. He was quite commercially talented.
FB He was way ahead of his time. Authors weren’t doing that back then. That’s really interesting.
LDR He was always focused on how to promote the story, how much it should cost, and who should be able to afford it.
FB What are some of your favorite references to Alice in pop culture?
LDR I’m mostly a fan of Disney’s cartoon Alice in Wonderland because that’s my childhood thing and it led me to the books. I’m less of a fan of the Tim Burton movie. That’s too far from the original story. But I am grateful to him that the movie leads more people to the original books. Because every few years something comes out that is popular with the new generation and that really helps to keep them interested in Lewis Carroll’s books.
FB What did you think of Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter?
LDR I actually parodied him in my book.
FB I feel like I’m mining and I’m getting these little gold nuggets. Eventually, I’m going to have all of them by the end of this interview. Tell us about that.
LDR My secret desire is that someone publishes an annotated version about my book, as Martin Gardner did for the Alice books. I’m not going to tell you everything, there should be something to figure out. Also, there’s way too much in there to put into one podcast.
FB As a musician are there songs or musicians who have used Alice that you really like?
LDR I do know some songs related to Alice, but I’m not really into all those pop culture adventures. I’m more about the book’s origins. That’s my focus.
FB So when I say you’re a traditionalist, that is 100% accurate?
LDR I’m not saying that all the other things are not relevant and shouldn’t be there. I really love how people get inspired by the stories. It’s just I have to have a focus or I’ll be all over the place.
FB When did you start your website? It’s so deep.
LDR I started it in December 1997. That’s 25 years ago, even longer.
FB Wow, it’s really expansive. But it’s also a great resource and it does feel like a work of passion. It’s easy to navigate. I didn’t realize I had been utilizing it because when I went on it to do a little bit of research before the podcast, I went, “I’ve been on this website a million times! I’m always looking at this website and now I get to interview the person who created it.”
LDR Famous without knowing it. I like your compliment because my day job is being an online marketer where I really focus on usability. I do want my website to be user-friendly. Also, I do not want it to be very commercial. I want to spread knowledge and I want people to know about the origins and be able to look up everything.
FB It’s a great resource. From everybody out there who’s an Alice fan, thank you for giving us a website that we can navigate down the rabbit hole into Wonderland and find our way home.
LDR That would be something to make you get lost there.
FB Are you planning on writing any more fiction in the Alice universe? And, where can we find your book?
LDR I have been asked whether I will write another sequel but it’s not on my to-do list. This book was on my bucket list. It just had to happen sometime. I’m not saying I will never write another book. I do blog a lot on my personal blog and on my Amazon website. I will focus on that from now on. As to where you can find the book, you can buy it at alice-in-wonderland.net. You can also find it on Amazon and in bookshops. You can just order it from your local bookstore or online bookstores.
FB Before we go, is there a passage from Lewis Carroll’s books that stands out, maybe something that is not often quoted that you would like to share with us?
LDR Yes, it’s a passage from Through the Looking-glass. It’s when Alice encounters a door and she wants to enter. There’s a frog and she has this conversation with the frog that I, for some reason, find immensely funny.
“‘What is it, now?’ the Frog said in a deep hoarse whisper.
Alice turned round, ready to find fault with anybody. ‘Where’s the servant whose business it is to answer the door?’ she began angrily.
‘Which door?’ said the Frog.
Alice almost stamped with irritation at the slow drawl in which he spoke. ‘This door, of course!’
The Frog looked at the door with his large dull eyes for a minute: then he went nearer and rubbed it with his thumb, as if he were trying whether the paint would come off; then he looked at Alice.
‘To answer the door?’ he said. ‘What’s it been asking of?’ He was so hoarse that Alice could scarcely hear him.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.
‘I talks English, doesn’t I?’ the Frog went on. ‘Or are you deaf? What did it ask you?’
‘Nothing!’ Alice said impatiently. ‘I’ve been knocking at it!’
‘Shouldn’t do that—shouldn’t do that—’ the Frog muttered. ‘Vexes it, you know.’ Then he went up and gave the door a kick with one of his great feet. ‘You let it alone,’ he panted out, as he hobbled back to his tree, ‘and it’ll let you alone, you know.’” – from Chapter 9: “Queen Alice”, Through the Looking-glass by Lewis Carroll.
I liked this door discussion so I’ve put a door discussion in my book as well.
FB Excellent. Thank you very much for being on our show, All Things Alice. If there is a perfect guest, who knows all things Alice, it is you, Lenny. So hats off.
LDR Thank you very much for having me. It was my honor.
One of my readers was very, very upset with me. I was on a tour of British schools promoting The Looking Glass Warsand, though it had been a great success overall, at that moment I was in the crosshairs of a very cross young man who believed I made a grave mistake. Why had I neglected to tell the story of Hatter Madigan’s 13 years searching for Princess Alyss? It was a damn good question, one I didn’t have a ready answer to. But on the plane back to the States, I thought, “Maybe I could do a comic book about those 13 years.” That’s how the Hatter M graphic novel series came into being.
School visits are one of the more rewarding aspects of promoting and talking about my stories. You’re going right to the source. You have to go out to the audience to understand what your world is and how it’s affecting them. Having the feedback from kids in terms of what they like, what they feel is working, and what sparks their imagination is really important.
I met Kira Assad (the writer of the article below) when I spoke at an event hosted by Professor James Blasingame at Arizona State University during the promotional tour for Hatter Madigan: Ghost in the H.A.T.B.O.X. Kira told me an amazing story about how The Looking Glass Wars inspired her to study English in college and to write fiction herself. It’s so gratifying and humbling to know that my work has been a looking-glass through which young people fall in love with reading and storytelling. As evidenced by the stern English lad who inspired six graphic novels, sometimes your readers can provide the biggest sparks of imagination.
ALL THINGS ALICE: INTERVIEW WITH TERESA LIN, PART 2
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have Teresa Lin join me as my guest for Part 2 of our deep dive into our creative process! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor Welcome to the show everybody. Happy Valentine’s Day. Given that it’s the day of celebration for love and relationships, I thought I would invite my beautiful bride to join me today so we can have a chat about all things Alice and some of the relationships that are significant both in The Looking Glass Wars and in the musical that we’re developing. Welcome to the show again, Teresa.
Teresa Lin Hi, it’s good to be back. Speaking about Valentine’s and love, love is such a complicated thing. It certainly is in The Looking Glass Wars and the musical. I think we all want to lean into that because love can be complicated.
FB Complication makes for good melodrama. Let’s talk about Alice Liddell and the Alyss that I created in The Looking Glass Wars and the relationships from real life and fiction. One of the things I wanted to talk about is in The Looking Glass Wars Alyss Heart meets Prince Leopold, Queen Victoria’s fourth son and he fancies her because she’s famous from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, famous for being Lewis Carroll’s muse. At the same time, she meets Reginald Hargreaves, who is a real-life figure. He was actually the real-life Alice Liddell’s husband. He was a cricket star and, in the novel, he fancies Alyss so there is a natural conflict for her love between these two men. But in the novel, I wrote Prince Leopold as a bit arrogant and not all that desirable, too much of an aristocrat.
When you and I started talking about the TV show and the musical, you referenced The Notebook as an example, because in The Notebook, the two men, Noah and Lon, who are vying for the lead character, Allie, are both very, very desirable and likable. So there’s a real decision and there’s a real conflict. In The Looking Glass Wars, once Alyss is deciding if she should marry for status, it’s not very romantic.
TL We were really trying to capture what would make a great love story.
FB Why would she fall in love with Leopold? What were his desirable qualities?
TL Also, what would be the real conflict for them? What would be the opposition to their relationship?
FB In The Looking Glass Wars, the opposition came from Queen Victoria because Leopold was marrying a commoner and someone who had been a street urchin. Also, and this is something you conceived of, Alyss is much more proactive in the TV show and the musical in terms of helping other orphans.
TL For the show, what we really wanted to hone in on was Alyss being a champion of people who are down on their luck or had no voice and had no power, because she felt something like that in her own story, deep in her DNA from being kicked out of Wonderland. She feels this injustice and her destiny is to be the person who fights for these people. I think to have her embody these qualities at a time when women didn’t have much of a voice, they couldn’t own property, they were property themselves in the Victorian age, and for her to pursue love, on her own terms, was something that was really out of time for that story. For her to come in and be the one who chooses the man rather than the man choosing her feels really in line with our modern values.
FB The other interesting thing was the solution that you had regarding the love triangle. Alyss returns to Wonderland and it turns out the love of her life is Dodge Anders. While she’s in our world, she has strong dreams and visualizations of a destined love.
TL When she was young, she had these experiences with Dodge of being able to run off and have their own adventures and to have someone who was really a close friend and confidant, and someone she felt would risk his life for her. So I think that was in her body and memory, even as a dream that she was not supposed to be having.
FB So in the novel, she returns to Wonderland and she’s reunited with Dodge, who’s angry and bitter. He’s struggling with what happened during Redd’s coup.
TL He didn’t even know whether Alyss was alive or dead.
FB He did hold on to the belief that she was alive somewhere but it takes a minute for them to rekindle their friendship and find their romantic interest as adults and it’s something that I think people wish I had written more about. But what I wanted you to mention is the solution that you had for the love triangle in the musical.
TL We came up against the story conflict of Alyss having two different love interests, one in our world, Prince Leopold, and one in Wonderland, Dodge. What kind of choice would she be making? We circled this idea of the doppelgangers and that there was a version of ourselves in Wonderland that exists in our world and maybe other worlds. But when Alyss returns to Wonderland, the reveal is that Dodge and Leopold are the same person and they would be played by the same actor. They would be doppelgangers of each other.
FB I love that idea. It also gives Prince Leopold a moment in our world to tell Alyss, “It’s okay. It’s your destiny.” In essence, he sets her free, even though there’s a version of him that we’re going to meet in Wonderland, unbeknownst to his character.
TL I find that deeply romantic. One of the things that we researched when we were working on these projects was a possible real-life romantic relationship between Alice Liddell and Prince Leopold. It’s easy to construe that Queen Victoria would have been against their courtship. But when Leopold married and had his first child, he named her Alice.
FB And when Alice Liddell married Reginald Hargreaves, their first son was named Leopold.
TL That just gave me goosebumps.
FB It’s Valentine’s Day, that should give you goosebumps.
I think that it is really interesting and hopefully, when we get either the musical or the TV show made, it will be an effective moment. So those of you listening are getting a little preview of one of the shows.
Also, Leopold was a bit sickly. He had haemophilia, which is a bleeding disorder where your blood doesn’t clot properly. He inherited it from Queen Victoria. His daughter, Princess Alice, was a carrier of the disease and his grandson Rupert, died from it.
TL It lends a sense of fragility and vulnerability to his character, which I thought was really sweet and in line with Alyss being the warrior princess. She was, in essence, his protector. It was also the reason that he couldn’t go back to Wonderland and fight with Alyss.
FB Because he was worried he might get cut if he went through the Looking-glass.
That’s the central love story, for which I think we will continue to find moments. But there’s also the familial love story between Queen Genevieve and Princess Rose, who became Queen Redd and there’s also the story between Hatter and his brother Dalton.
The relationships between the two sisters and the two brothers carry a lot of emotional power, because of the love and the betrayal. So you have both sides of this coin.
TL The familial relationships are always hard to tease out because you have the loyalty to family, then you have, for them, the loyalty to the nation and to their queens. Then they also have their own private feelings about who they choose to love and how that complicates things if that doesn’t fall in the right domain.
FB In terms of the development of, one hopes, a very long-running show…
TL There are a lot of story and relational threads that could feed into the complicated conflict set up in our stories.
FB For folks that have not read the graphic novels, I introduce Hatter’s brother, Dalton, and there is an entire backstory of Dalton having a relationship with Queen Redd, or Rose when they were younger.
There’s just a lot to work with. There are multiple timelines and multiple characters to play with and we don’t have to follow the structure of the novels. We can take prequel stories and sequel stories and we can feather those threads into season one with the hopes that we do a good job and it’s long-running.
TL Bringing it all back to love, I think the best love stories are the ones where you see the characters fighting for their love. They have to go through this long, arduous emotional journey of really fighting and proving themselves and testing the love. I think we have all of those pieces in our story threads for all the characters. They have a lot of opposition. There’s a lot of conflict before they ever get to a place where they are reunited or there’s peace in the land or their hearts.
FB I think we can really stretch out the tension between Alyss and Dodge when Alyss returns and she’s trying to find her footing as the destined queen, the warrior, and Dodge’s eventual wife. For anybody who has read Crossfire, the graphic novel, we see that the two of them are married and it’s be careful what you wish for. Ruling is difficult and ruling as a couple is also difficult. But their love is strong.
TL How would you describe the relationship between Hatter and Alyss? Although it’s not a romantic love, he’s her sworn protector, her guardian, and very much a father figure. What does that feel like for you, when you think of those two characters?
FB The father figure aspect is really important because she grew up with him for those first seven years. They had a very playful relationship, she would tease him quite a bit. Hatter, as a Milliner, is meant to marry within the Milliner race and, of course, he falls in love with somebody outside of that race. So, being in this forbidden relationship, he can’t envision having a son or a daughter of his own.
TL By the time he’s catapulted into our world, and he’s lost Alyss, his whole journey and his whole focal point over 13 years has been finding Alyss. I thought that was really, really strong in your graphic novels. Even though he’s come across all of these romantic relationships throughout time and in different places on Earth, his primary focus is to find Alyss. Yet when he does find Alyss, he’s rejected by her. I find that so interesting. I think about the internal turmoil that he has to face. He’s found his charge, his lost child, but she rejects him. That’s very rich.
FB I often think of Hatter as Liam Neeson in Taken except his skill set is not as well honed, and it takes a very long time. But I don’t think Liam Neeson would be very happy if his daughter was like, “I’m fine. I’ve got this, Dad.”
On one of the other podcasts, I talked about not having a moment in the novel where Hatter confronts Alyss and she commands him to leave, which would have been a really great scene to write. I just thought that he would forcibly take her and forgot she’s really his superior.
TL I don’t know, I think after 13 years lost in our world, and then finally finding her, he’s not losing her again, no matter what she commands.
FB Thank you for that.
TL There is no way he’s leaving her side.
FB That’s what I thought. But then it is a complicated and interesting scene that creates a lot of tension and a lot of turmoil.
TL And also, the complications of them finding each other again, as people. She’s grown up now. She’s no longer a seven-year-old child. There’s a relationship that they both have to earn and there’s trust they both have to come back to because when Alyss got catapulted into our world, she was looking for him for a long time and then slowly had to let go of her hope.
FB And he’s only holding onto the seven-year-old Alyss. That’s the image that he has but she’s a completely different person, finding herself in our world for 13 years.
TL Back to love and Valentine’s and relationships, this underscores for me how we’re always evolving and we’re always changing in relationships. You can’t pinpoint a place in time and say, “You’re not the same person I met 20 years ago. How come you’ve changed?”
FB Well, how have you changed since we met 10 years ago?
TL That’s hard to describe. “Where have I stayed the same?” would be the better question.
I definitely feel more expanded and more aware and hopefully more conscious. Definitely in my sense of relational self. I feel like the more that you learn about yourself and about how life is the less you take things personally. You realize that everyone’s on their journey, everyone’s on their path, and you can’t fix it for anyone else. That is true of Hatter and Alyss. She has to do the work and he has to do the work.
FB Well, I am happy to be on this journey with you and to get the opportunity to wish you a happy Valentine’s.
TL Thank you, my love.
FB I love you very much.
TL Your favorite word, Ditto.
FB Thanks, everybody. Happy Valentine’s to everybody out there listening.
We will be back with, what I’m gonna call “All Things Creative,” where Teresa and I are going to talk about some of the other projects we’re working on and the creative process that we go through and give everybody a sneak peek at some other shows and books and things we’re working on. Take care.
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have Arnold Hirshon join me as my guest on this episode! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor Thanks a lot for being on the show. I’m chatting with Arnold Hirshon, who’s the president of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America. I’m really interested in the Lewis Carroll Society. I wrote The Looking Glass Wars books and part of my metafiction was some confrontations with Lewis Carroll Society members. When I was first publishing my book in the UK, I was invited on the BBC to talk about Alice and why I decided to write it. There was a little controversy because I’m an American rewriting it and it was even worse that I was a movie producer. So when I got on the show, there were all these Lewis Carroll Society members protesting and they had placards with “Off with Frank Beddor’s Head!” I thought, “Oh, my God, I’m going to be interviewing the president of the Lewis Carroll Society, I got to give that story up to start.”
Arnold Hirshon Was that the UK society or was that the North American?
FB I didn’t know there were multiple societies. Maybe you could start by filling our listeners in on the various societies and how the North American Society was formed and your involvement and what the mandate is.
AH The Lewis Carroll Society of North America, the one I’m President of, started 50 years ago. The basic purpose is to advance the study and interest in any of the works by Lewis Carroll, the mathematical works, logical works, games, puzzles, and of course, the Alice books, The Hunting of the Snark, Phantasmagoria, anything. And it could be any aspect. It can be the literature itself, it can be illustration, music, movies, plays, the whole gamut. All of that is part of our remit. The Lewis Carroll Society in the UK, which is known as the Lewis Carroll Society, continues to do its work, There are also societies in Brazil, the Netherlands, and Japan, and we’re all loosely affiliated in our interest. But ours, the North America society, is probably the one with the greatest reach and the most international membership. About 10-15%, 20% of our members are actually outside of North America.
FB What do the members do in terms of interacting with all of this work? Because it’s obviously so deep-seated in pop culture, I imagine you could spend your life studying and trying to keep up with it and not even scratch the surface. What are the members mostly interested in?
AH It’s a combination of things. We have a journal that comes out two times a year, the Knight Letter, which is pretty extensive. It is everything from scholarly articles to fun facts and the latest occurrences found in popular culture, whether it’s a political cartoon or a quote. It includes information about newly published editions, illustrated editions typically, anywhere in the world. That’s one element of our educational programming.
We also run two conferences per year, one virtual, and one in person. The last one was in Cleveland this past September and we’re looking to hold another one in the fall of 2024 as a celebration of our 50th anniversary. Those topics can be a very wide range. This last time, there were people discussing Alice in popular music and rock music. We had people discussing Alice in dance, Alice in literature, Alice in Japan. So those conferences tend to be a fairly wide gamut. Then we run typically about eight to 10 virtual programs throughout the year which could be an illustrator discussing a work in progress, or a recently published book. It can be Alice in the movies. Those, again, run that whole range and it is not just Alice-related. We also have collectors talking about their collections and latest acquisitions.
FB That seems like it would be a big section of the membership because there is so much to collect. There are so many interesting books. I have a book, Songs from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.
AH Yes, absolutely. I know it well.
FB I was fascinated with the lyrics. It was published in 1921. The art is amazing.
AH I have a copy of it sitting over there on my shelves. I actually have both that version, which is the original, as well as a couple of reprinted versions. There’s a delightful illustration of Beautiful Soup in that book, the Soup Bowl has this long pair of legs.
FB Yes, I love that image. Love it.
AH Charles Folkard is a brilliant illustrator. I also have the original sheet music of two of the three Alice in Wonderland songs that Irving Berlin composed in the early 20th century. There’s a whole wide range of things. I was an English major in college so my interest started from the literature side, from the text. But more and more it gravitated towards the illustrations. The Alice books in particular are, by far, the most illustrated books of fiction in the world.
FB There are so many remarkable facts. It’s the second-most quoted literary work in the world behind the Bible. There are more translations than Harry Potter. I think it’s 175 or 190 countries. I didn’t know there were that many countries.
AH Sometimes it can be two or three dialects from the same country. It could be Catalan, in Spain, as well as in Spanish. There are also multiple dialects in Chinese.
FB Is there somebody that collects everything that’s coming out so you have an archive? You brought up political cartoons and during the Trump administration, there was a massive use of Alice in Wonderland to describe the functionality of the government. “Down the rabbit hole” “Off with your head” and “Through the looking-glass”. Tweedledum and Tweedledee were used. Often to great comedic effect. So does somebody collect those things for your society? Or are they just talked about at these conferences?
AH It’s all individual collectors. There are some institutions, certainly, that collect but I don’t think that any institution by any means has comprehensive collections, meaning exhaustive, what we would call completist. I am not a completist collector. There were hundreds published by the original publisher Macmillan. So you have the first 1,000, the first 2,000, then you have the first 10,000. Some people collect all of those, every single one. I do not. If I have one good copy of Tenniel, it’s enough, because I use my collection for research and personal interest. I’m not necessarily trying to collect a perfect copy of a first edition of something. I want representative illustrations from that Illustrator. I want something that I can also afford because some of these things can go literally into the millions of dollars, and many of them will go into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
There are certainly some very major collections in not just the British Library, but also in North America at the University of Texas, New York University, the University of Toronto, Harvard, and the Morgan Library in New York. There are probably about 20 I could rattle off that have significant collections. But very often, they stopped collecting at a certain point, they’re not necessarily collecting late 20th century, early 21st century. Because I’m interested in illustration and so many of these illustrators have come out and continue to come out now, trying to keep up with all of the new ones that are coming out is just impossible.
FB It would be amazing to have an institution that collects everything that they can find in pop culture. My daughter loves Taylor Swift and I recently wrote a blog about her song, “Wonderland” which I did not realize before there was such a thing. Suddenly, I was a very cool dad for 24 hours. There’s so much out there and it’s really interesting. Visually, it’s really interesting, whether it’s the album or, as you said, the illustrations or photographs of gardens. There are cartoons I find terrific and it would be great to have the movie posters.
AH Absolutely, and not just movie posters but there are also pop culture posters from theatrical productions and concerts. So there are people who collect and there are a lot of people who, like me, have a more specialized collection. Some people collect just posters, some collect just sculptures, or even just soft sculptures. So you get this wide variety of people who have very varying interests and we’re all joined together by sharing some element of interest in the works of Lewis Carroll.
FB The original manuscript with Lewis Carroll’s drawings must be very expensive.
AH There’s only one copy of it. There have been facsimile editions but the original is in the British Library. Unfortunately, the British Library recently had a cyber attack so you cannot currently access it online but they normally have that available online as well. On the very last page, there was a photograph of Alice Liddell and an oval-sized picture of her and underneath that, he had originally drawn a picture of her. For decades, people had no idea the drawing existed but they finally realized it so now you can see both the original drawing and the picture of six-year-old Alice.
FB So the listeners realize the book was originally titled Alice’s Adventures Underground and that’s the book we’re speaking of. Is it a book that you can just touch there? I imagine not.
AH Somebody would have to have a lot of scholarly credentials.
FB I’m very interested in doing a documentary about Alice, not so much about how deep Alice runs in pop culture, but why Alice is a muse for so many artists like Taylor Swift and the Wachowskis who did The Matrix and using that to bring people into this deeper Lewis Carroll world. Show them things like the Guinness beer ads, which used Alice for years and years and years.
Why does Alice last? What is it about Alice that inspires us to keep reinventing her to reflect our contemporary world?
AH Just on the Guinness point, those ads were being used to promote the health benefits of beer. They were sending these things to doctors. When it started in the 1930s and through the 1960s, they were using Alice because everybody would know what the cultural reference was.
But Alice herself is essentially a cipher. Alice is not the main character, all the other characters are the main. All these things are getting absorbed through Alice and she’s learning as she’s going along. She makes for the perfect foil for any number of characters who come into her life and then leave her life in the next episode, which is essentially usually the next chapter. But there are so many ways of interpreting so much of the text. There are so many ways of visually representing Alice. For example, the Disney character is, to some people, more common than the Tenniel version of it. They have no idea that Disney’s was not the first movie, that there had been 50 years of Alice movie-making before Disney showed up on the scene. And he would have done it himself earlier, but he dropped the project and picked it up later. So there are all of those threads that keep coming through.
There’s so much ambiguity in the story. The scenes are not plotted out in any strict order. You could move the chapters in a different order, not so much in Through the Looking-glass but certainly in Wonderland, you could change the order if you were reading it to a child who never had read the books before. Except for the very beginning and the very end, the child would have no idea what order you’re reading them in, because there’s no logical sequence to it. There’s no description of the backgrounds. There’s no description of most of the things on the table in the Mad Tea Party, they’re not mentioned at all. So that gives, whether it’s a filmmaker or whether it’s an illustrator, license to make it up as they go along.
FB To your point, until Tim Burton came along all the other adaptations have had the flaw of being episodic and trying to give agency to Alice. One of the reasons I wrote my novels was to give her that agency. She meets Lewis Carroll who doesn’t believe her story but ultimately, she is destined, and ultimately, it’s her agency. Then she moves through enough of a plot that it feels more contemporary. There was more agency in The Wizard of Oz for Dorothy than for Alice because Dorothy had a very specific goal and there were obstacles along the way, and those obstacles became friends and then they helped her in the end. What you’re saying is that as a cipher, Alice affords creators so many choices with the other characters. That’s probably a really strong reason why she’s such an amazing muse for so many creators.
AH That’s the difference also between Wonderland and Looking-glass. I’ve often described Wonderland as a vertical tale. Alice falls down a rabbit hole and then proceeds through things without any rhyme or reason. Her conversation with the Cheshire Cat, “Where should I go?” “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.” Whereas Looking-glass is a very horizontal tale. Alice has an objective, she wants to get from one end of the chessboard to the other end of the chessboard so she can be crowned queen. Along the way, she’s going to meet people who she hopes will help her along the way and most of them in Looking-glass do help her whereas in Wonderland, many of them don’t care. Hatter and the March Hare, they’re living their own life so they’re not going to do very much to help. Some of the Looking-glass ones don’t either. Tweedledum and Tweedledee are not the most helpful characters in the world.
FB I think that is very helpful in terms of breaking down the two books. It seems that there are two camps. There’s the whimsical fantasy dream aspect of the texts that people take away and then there is the surreal nightmare in the illogical and self-inflicted insanity that happens in the book. Do you fall into either of those camps? Or, as a scholar, is there another camp that you look at the works from?
AH It’s an interesting question. I think the difference that you’re speaking to is, in part, is this an adult book for adults?” Or is this a book for children? The first part of what you said to me is more the children’s book, which can be appreciated by children at a certain level. But even in Victorian times, there were going to be any number of references in the text that no child was going to really pick up on. To me, the books are, in essence, adult tales. To really appreciate the text, you do need to be an adult not just to understand the cultural references of Carroll’s time, but to understand the life experiences. When I was a university administrator I would say to people, “Just read Alice in Wonderland and you’ll know everything you need to know about management.” Every chapter will teach you, and sometimes every paragraph will teach you something that you need to know about how to manage in a situation – how to get yourself extricated, how to deal with conflict management. I probably lean more towards your second category than I do towards the first for that reason.
Many, many years ago I read that one needs to read Cervantes’ Don Quixote as a teen, as a young adult, and in old age, because you will understand and read things into it and see things differently at different ages in your life. I think the Alice books are very much like that. You come to appreciate different things and even those of us who have read the texts many times, and can recite whole passages, will still reread it or reread a chapter or reread one of the poems and see something that we never saw before. There’s so much to distill in every one of those chapters and in each one of the poems. That’s why it’s such a brilliant work. It’s also one of the things that I think separates it from The Wizard of Oz.
FB I agree with that. I read it to my daughter when she was eight or nine and she thought it was very funny and weird. But during Lewis Carroll’s time, there weren’t all the categories of publishing that we have now. He wasn’t writing for middle grade or YA. So who was he writing for? It’s very satirical of the Victorian era and he referenced the government a lot. He makes fun of the emphasis on memorization in education, but he was telling the story to these young kids. What do you think he was thinking in terms of how his audience was gonna react?
AH Originally, he had an audience of Alice and her sisters, and himself. He was writing this to amuse them but also himself. So he was not really thinking about publishing it when he first told the tales. Alice Liddell was amused by the stories and she asked him to write them down so he wrote them down and illustrated them. Originally, I think he thought, “That’s it, I’m done.” But then other people read it and said, “You really should publish this.”
Of course, one of the key elements of the Alice books is they were the first books that did not speak down to children. They were not moralistic tales. This was “Adventures” in Wonderland. I think that was intentional. I think that’s what he was after for his audience, to speak to children as if they are young adults, not to speak to children as if they are little children. Whether Alice herself reread the books later in life and saw things we probably don’t know. But I think that certainly other people, and generations of people, have. I have a granddaughter who’s five years old and I brought her a copy. She can look through the pictures. It’s the classic, “What’s the use of a book without pictures?” I was giving her the five-minute version for a five-year-old. But after I left, her parents told me she went back to the book and she was spending a long time looking at the pictures. Every audience will appreciate it looking for different things.
FB I started with a pop-up book. I think it was the first pop-up book my daughter had ever seen. Any way to engage kids visually and then synopsize the story and use your voice because those things stick with them. Then they’ll come back to it, as you suggested, later in life.
I know that you’re the son of a photographer and your kids, one’s an editor and one’s an illustrator.
My other son, Michael is an illustrator and a professor of Illustration at the University of Utah.
FB That’s where I went to school. That’s wonderful for both of your sons.
So you would be well equipped to share with listeners Lewis Carroll and his early photography, which would be considered cutting edge by today’s standards compared to where the art of photography was when he first started. I don’t know if many people realize that he took photos of Alice Liddell and some of her sisters and he also had a lot of interesting techniques with his photography.
AH In the days when he was doing photography, the subjects had to sit very still for a longer period of time just for the exposure to be able to take. So he used to costume more girls, girls and boys, and adults, as well. It was very heavily portraiture, but he would enact scenes. There’s a picture of Alice in a beggar costume. He would have these typically painted backdrops that he would use. He had pictures of people who were prominent at the time. Ellen Terry was an actress, for example, that he photographed. He experimented quite a bit and then when he lost interest, he just dropped it entirely. Probably around the 1880s, he just stopped doing photography entirely.
FB Will Brooker, the author of Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture, which is a terrific book, has that Alice as a beggar photograph you mentioned on the cover. It’s a remarkable photograph given when it was taken. It’s so vibrant and she comes to life.
AH His composition was excellent. He knew exactly how to pose whoever he was taking the photograph of. Sometimes it would be two or three children, for example, in the same picture and he would very elegantly pose mis-en-scenes for his audience and that audience was typically the family. He was not setting up a shop. He wasn’t a portrait photographer by trade. Nor was he trying to sell these as works of art. If you try and buy them now, they’re expensive works, but, at the time, he was doing this basically for his own enjoyment.
FB So far in our conversation, we have only referenced him by his pen name, Lewis Carroll, and not his actual name, Charles Dodgson. In your experience in terms of randomly speaking with folks about Lewis Carroll, do people know Charles Dodgson?
AH Probably not. Unless I’m speaking with a mathematician or logician, probably not. Most people who know Carroll’s work reasonably well have some knowledge of him. If you said the name, they would probably recognize it, but not necessarily make the immediate association.
FB Interestingly, his real name has not become more prominent with all of the outlets out there. It’s always been Lewis Carroll. Because, in my conversations, nobody seems to know who Charles Dodgson is unless they’re a big fan of his.
AH Right. That was intentional on his part as he wanted to keep his professional life as an Oxford don teaching mathematics and logic, separate from his creative, fictional characters. Especially once Alice came out, people started to know that this Oxford don was Lewis Carroll. But he continued to publish the books under a pseudonym. He had two parts of his life and he wanted to keep them separate.
FB If you had to choose one illustrated book of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and that’s all you could have in that big library of yours, which one would you pick? Mine is Ralph Steadman’s take on Alice. I absolutely love Ralph Steadman. It’s the lines, the contemporary 60s vibe. It’s not a surreal nightmare, it’s a surreal world. I just absolutely love his Alice book. How about you?
AH I was afraid you were gonna ask this question.
FB I thought, “Oh he’s a scholar. Let’s break it up a little bit.”
AH It’s not an easy choice. I do love Steadman’s illustrations. I love Barry Moser’s. I love John Vernon Lord’s illustrations. Jean-Jacques Sempe, who most people know from his New Yorker covers, published an edition in French in 1961 that is just delightful. They’re all brilliant. If I had to pick one, Willy Pogany was an illustrator in the early to mid-20th century. In 1929 he did a flapper Alice and it is absolutely delightful. It’s just brilliant work. One of the reasons I like it so much is when I started collecting and I was leaving one of my places of employment to take another job, the Pogany edition was given to me as a going away gift, and I always treasured it.
There were multiple editions published at the same time. There was a deluxe edition and there was a trade edition. One of the things that’s different about the trade edition, the deluxe edition does not have this, ironically, is there are colored end papers. The rest of the book is all black and white line drawings but the endpapers are this montage, this collage of different scenes, all in color. There’s just so much to look at. There are so many things that he was the first to do. That’s really one of the things I look at in my scholarly interest. Who was the first illustrator who did something different?
We’ve mentioned Alice falling down the rabbit hole a few times. Carroll, in his manuscript, has no picture of Alice falling down the rabbit hole. John Tenniel has no illustration of Alice falling down the rabbit hole. It’s not until one of the early American pirated editions that somebody actually illustrates that scene. But everybody is sure they’ve seen it before and in fact, you haven’t because before that showed up in 1898. Those are the sorts of things that I look for. Sometimes it’s in the detail. It’s one of the things I like about John Vernon Lord’s illustrations; there’s just so much to look at in his work. There’s a 21st century Russian illustrator, Ksenia Lavrova, who is absolutely brilliant. It’s hard to come by her editions in the United States, you have to order them from abroad. I actually picked it up in Russia on a trip a while ago, but the color illustrations and the level of detail, you could sit for an hour looking at one illustration and not see at all. That’s how brilliant it is.
FB That’s terrific. Well, definitely going to check that out and the edition with Alice as a flapper.
You mentioned Barry Moser as well. I think he won an award for his Alice book in the 1980s. It seems that every generation reinterprets Alice. In the 1960s there were psychedelic aspects because of the Beatles and the Jefferson Airplane song, “White Rabbit”. In the 1990s there’s the whole tech side of it with The Matrix. What do you attribute that to? This re-purposing of Alice to reflect day-to-day life?
AH It’s the movement of the illustrator and using themselves, as well as introducing something generational. For example, how does fashion change? If I’m looking at a Tenniel illustration in the 21st century, these fashions don’t mean anything to anybody, right? Pogany’s work in the 20s, the bobbed hair and the flapper dress, and those sorts of things would be very different for that generation. Some of it is speaking to cultural reference in fashion, in the backgrounds, in what’s on the table. One of the things I collect are teapots, no relation to the Mad Tea Party, and I’ve threatened to do a study of just the shapes of teapots in different illustrations.
I think when you start looking at that, that’s what starts to tell you why things change. They want to bring something new to it and they want to bring something interesting to it. They want to bring out some elements of the story that nobody had brought out before and they want to do it in a contemporary way. For example, there are an increasing number of graphic novels. We talked a little bit about the translations, but if you look at the illustrations that came out of other countries, the dress can be very different. The portrayal of how the characters look, if you look at a Japanese or Chinese or Russian illustration is very different from a French or German or English illustration, which is very different from an American or a Latin American illustration. So some of why it gets reinterpreted in illustration is to make it relevant to the local culture.
One of the things I’ve looked at is, which illustrators got republished in a country other than their own, and which ones never did and why did that happen? I don’t have a great answer to that. I think in some cases, publishers were looking for what they could republish cheaper, and sometimes the not-very-best illustrations got republished. In Esperanto, it probably doesn’t matter what illustrations you use, but in other languages, it does.
FB It also speaks to why stories last, because they form timeless bridges that connect generations, cultures, and experiences. Alice just happens to work. You mentioned Japan, which I think has the most editions of Alice in Wonderland of any country.
AH It could be. The Japanese and the Russians each have a very deep interest in Alice, probably for very different reasons. But both have a very strong number of editions.
FB Stories that are generational and that we hand down, we’re sharing a piece of cultural connection for us to somebody else who’s then taking it and reinterpreting it for their kid.
AH Part of it goes to the absurdist surrealistic nature of the books, or at least they’ve been appropriated by surrealists and absurdists. Each generation thinks it’s the first generation that has dealt with the complexities that it’s had to deal with and the topsy-turvy nature of what’s going on in its world. That’s why Alice continues to be relevant because it was happening in the Victorian age, it’s happening today, and it’s happening every decade. If you look at some of the very early films, they’re very surreal. That’s why I think these things last because you can pull out these elements that are so peculiar but they’re timeless.
FB That’s very true how timeless it is and you can interpret it in so many different ways.
I also spoke at one of your events probably eight, or nine years ago in New York and showed my artwork and the various books and graphic novels I was working on. I’ve hired a lot of different concept artists, mostly people who have worked in Hollywood and it’s been really interesting to work with them and see how they interpret the material. They’re looking for something familiar, but they want to make it wholly their own and they certainly want to make it part of The Looking Glass Wars world. But there’s always a nod. There’s always a little detail for fans of the original books. I’m always looking to do that, even if I’ve made up all sorts of stories about Lewis Carroll.
I don’t know if people know that he had diaries and there are missing pages from his diaries. There’s all sorts of speculation about, maybe it had to do with those photographs that he took of young Alice and that the parents were unhappy and things like that. I dismissed that and I said the reason he ripped out those pages is because Alice Liddell was actually Alice Hart from my series and he didn’t want people to know that he co-opted her story. Granted, he thought she was traumatized from being on the street as an orphan. So there are little details that I’ve picked up over the years. I’m not a scholar, but I’m like, “Oh, I could use that. I could repurpose that. That’ll be good.”
AH It’s doubtful he ripped out those pages, by the way, it’s more likely that his heirs ripped those pages out of his diaries.
FB I think Will Brooker wrote about that. He mentioned in his book about Lewis Carroll. Where did those pages go? And what were they about? There was a riff between Alice Liddell and Charles Dodgson over something. I don’t know if anyone’s figured out what it was about.
AH The original riff was actually between Alice’s mother, Lorina, and Dodson. One of the films that had an interesting take on it was Dreamchild. Wholly fictional, but what a great film.
FB That really went outside of the books and found a way to tell a story that was edgy and of its era.
AH And the reenactments of the scenes with her in them with Jim Henson’s workshop were just brilliantly done.
FB There was a photograph of Alice when she was 18, 19, or 20 that Lewis Carroll took, and she looks very unhappy. What’s the story behind that photograph?
AH I don’t know a lot about it. In most Victorian photographs, people look unhappy for a reason. The exposure time was so long that you could not hold a smile for that long. So rather than do that, they just said, “Hold that.” Because if you started with a smile, little by little it was going to go down, it would almost be like the Cheshire Cat smile. You’re gonna see it disappear. That’s different between the mouth and the eyes.
But the eyes, she did not have the happiest marriage in the world. So whether that might have been part of what’s being reflected in that photograph. And of course, for Victorian childhood going into adulthood, there was this kind of heartbreak. You’re not a child anymore, you have to behave in a very certain way. Of course, Carroll was making fun of that in the books but that was very true and that’s the way Alice was raised. That would probably also help explain that photograph. She left behind her childhood.
FB Lewis Carroll gave us a lot of interesting words and terms, obviously, “down the rabbit hole.” He didn’t invent rabbit holes, but he made it a portal. Wonderland. I don’t believe he invented that either but he certainly invented it as a magical place. “Curiouser and curiouser,” is another phrase. But there are a lot more obscure words that he invented that are in culture today. Why don’t you give us a couple of the not-so-well-known ones?
AH Jabberwocky certainly has quite a lot of those words. Frabjous day. Brillig. Slithy toves. There’s hardly anything in that opening verse that he didn’t make up. Of course, Humpty Dumpty has to explain what every one of those words mean. If you string along Humpty Dumpty’s whole explanation, it still doesn’t make any sense. I’ve tried to do it multiple times. Humpty Dumpty gives this whole long explanation and he explains each word, but it doesn’t make a sentence when you get to the end of his description. The vorpal sword is another one.
FB I’ve made that into a really great weapon.
AH There are lots of those things that he either made up or popularized in a way that they wouldn’t otherwise have been without him.
FB Who was Humpty Dumpty in that 1930s movie? W.C. Fields?
AH Yes, the 1933 Paramount film. Cary Grant played the Mock Turtle. Gary Cooper was the White Knight.
FB Okay, so if you were cast in that movie, who would they cast you as?
AH It would be the White Knight. I love the concept of, “It’s my own invention.” In my work life, I would always come up with these off-the-wall solutions and I always felt like, “It’s my own invention.” Maybe that makes no sense to anybody else and it’s, “Why would we do that?” But I still thought it was a good idea. So I’ve always associated myself with the White Knight. Carroll associated himself with the White Knight. That’s essentially his self-portrait, not necessarily the illustration, but as a character.
FB I didn’t realize that. I think that is a perfect place to end this very compelling and enjoyable and fun conversation. And your book Alice in a World of Wonderlands: The English Language of the Four Alice Books Published Worldwide, explores the legacy of the four Alice books. Is that available?
AH We have two editions. There’s the Deluxe Edition, which is a two-volume set available to order if you contact jaredx2@gmail.com. We also have the Standard Edition for Volumes One and Two, which are available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
FB Perfect. I thank you for being on the show and sharing all your insight. Thank you very much for that. I really appreciate it.
AH Thank you, I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you.
Beyond the Borders: Navigating the Parallel Realms of “The Looking Glass Wars” and “Alice in Borderland”
In the realm of speculative fiction, two captivating narratives unfold, each drawing readers and viewers into the mesmerizing landscapes of wonder and danger. The Looking Glass Wars and Alice in Borderland share thematic threads that intertwine through their fantastical settings, complex characters, and the perpetual dance between peril and discovery. Let’s dive into the parallels and distinctions between these two imaginative worlds, uncovering the unique elements that make them stand out.
The Looking Glass Wars and Alice in Borderland: A Visual Symphony
Both The Looking Glass Wars’ Boarderland and the world of Alice in Borderland offer a visual feast for the imagination. Boarderland, carved from rock and stone with an endless blend of land and sky forming the mysterious Void, sets the stage for a landscape that shifts and transforms. Similarly, Alice in Borderland presents a dystopian Tokyo, a cityscape that morphs with each challenge, creating an ever-evolving backdrop for the characters.
However, while Boarderland leans towards a fantastical and mythical aesthetic, Alice in Borderland anchors itself in a contemporary urban setting, fusing the fantastical elements with the familiar. This contrast adds a layer of relatability to the latter, enhancing the immersive experience of the characters’ journies.
Nomadic Tribes and Martial Tribulations
The martial tribes of The Looking Glass Wars’ Boarderland and the survival games in Alice in Borderland share a common theme of constant motion and unpredictability. In Boarderland, nomadic tribes emerge like multi-colored oases, disappearing overnight only to reappear miles away. Similarly, in Alice in Borderland, characters face threats that shift and evolve, mirroring the transient nature of Boarderland’s tribes.
Yet, the distinction lies in their movements. Boarderland’s nomadic tribes traverse the land as warriors, a society molded by the necessity of constant warfare. On the other hand, the games in Alice in Borderland demand strategic thinking but lack the pervasive martial ethos seen in Boarderland.
King Arch vs. The Game Masters
The cruel and cunning King Arch is the chief commander of The Looking Glass Wars’ Boarderland, leading a mercenary state fueled by war. His ascendancy to the throne through constant battle paints a picture of a formidable ruler, a theme mirrored in the challenges faced by the characters in Alice in Borderland. The games in the latter are orchestrated by enigmatic Game Masters, each presenting a unique challenge that requires skill, strategy, and a willingness to confront mortality.
However, the motivations differ. King Arch’s Boarderland thrives on economic prosperity driven by warfare, while the games in Alice in Borderland seem more like a cosmic experiment, designed to push the boundaries of human capability. The contrast is clear – Boarderland’s king is a strategic military leader, whereas the Game Masters seem more like puppeteers orchestrating a complex experiment in an alternative Tokyo.
Games, Challenges, and the Puzzle of the Ancient Caves
The theme of games and challenges is central to both narratives. In The Looking Glass Wars’ Boarderland, various territories are considered game ‘boards,’ each known for its challenges. The ultimate game, the Puzzle of the Ancient Caves, takes place in the mountainous caves overlooking The Void. This puzzle, involving stones that when placed incorrectly bring alternate images to life, has been King Arch’s unconquered challenge.
In Alice in Borderland, the characters face a myriad of challenges and games set by the Game Masters. These challenges range from life-and-death scenarios to complex puzzles, each designed to test the participants. While both elements revolve around the concept of games, the stakes and motivations differ. Boarderland’s games are deeply rooted in the nation’s culture and economy, while those in Alice in Borderland seem driven by a mysterious higher power.
Lost Rocks and Wonderland’s Reflection in The Looking Glass Wars’ Boarderland
The concept of the Lost Rocks in Boarderland introduces an element of prophecy and foresight. Nomadic soothsayers traverse the plains in search of these rocks, splitting them in half to reveal intricate crystal images that guide military strategies. This mystical aspect of Boarderland contrasts sharply with the contemporary and technological challenges faced in Alice in Borderland.
Additionally, the delicate balance between Boarderland and Wonderland, akin to yin and yang, mirrors the uneasy alliance between Sparta and Athens. The nuanced interplay between these two realms adds a layer of complexity, reminiscent of the delicate balance between men and women in the real world.
Conclusion: A Tale of Two Fantasies
In the journies through The Looking Glass Wars’ Boarderland and Alice in Borderland, the similarities and differences weave a tapestry of fantastical realms. Both narratives invite audiences into worlds where challenges, mysteries, and the unknown beckon. Boarderland’s martial tribes and King Arch stand in stark contrast to the urban challenges and Game Masters of “Alice in Borderland.” Yet, the common thread of games, tests, and the unpredictable nature of their landscapes creates an undeniable resonance.
These narratives, each unique in its own right, captivate imaginations and spark reflections on the nature of power, challenge, and the delicate balance between opposing forces. As we navigate the boundaries of these parallel realms, the stories unfold, inviting us to venture beyond the borders and explore the vast possibilities that lie within the realms of wonder and danger.
In contemplating the Puzzle of the Ancient Caves, The Looking Glass Wars’ Boarderland introduces a strategic and mystical element to its challenges. King Arch’s near-defeat in the face of this enigmatic puzzle adds a layer of suspense and complexity to the narrative. In contrast, Alice in Borderland leans towards a more immediate and visceral experience with the challenges presented by the Game Masters, testing characters’ resilience and adaptability in the face of unforeseen trials.
As we delve deeper into these realms, it becomes evident that both The Looking Glass Wars’ Boarderland and Alice in Borderland are not merely tales of adventure; they are reflections of the human condition, exploring the innate desire for conquest, the pursuit of knowledge, and the unpredictable nature of fate. Whether navigating the nomadic magical plains or facing the challenges of a dystopian Tokyo, these narratives beckon us to question our capacities for survival, resilience, and the pursuit of the extraordinary.
ALL THINGS ALICE: INTERVIEW WITH SARA ELLA
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have Sara Ella join me as my guest on this episode! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor You’re the first author that I’ve spoken with that has also worked in Wonderland. Reading your book and seeing all these parallels to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as well as some of the things that I ripped off of was delightful. I’m very excited to chat with you today.
Sara Ella I’m so honored. I’ve been a fan of yours for years. Ages ago, my library introduced me to The Looking Glass Wars and I was so excited because I was so drawn to anything Alice so I’m just really excited to be here. Thank you for having me.
FB I’m talking with Sara Ella, the writer of the Curious Realities series. Why do you think Alice has lasted for so long? You’ve been a longtime fan so I’m curious if you’ve identified some of the specifics of what attracts us to Alice decade after decade.
SE I think in general, children’s stories seem to last the test of time. My librarian once told me that children’s stories are the ones that last because they resonate with us as children, but they also resonate with us as adults. For Alice, her story is one that we all relate to. We all want to escape. We all want to avoid growing up and adulthood. But her story is so interesting because she doesn’t want adulthood, she wants nonsense, she wants to stay a little girl and be silly. Then when she’s put in the world that she’s imagined for herself, she doesn’t want to be there. She can’t really be satisfied. Especially with portal stories, where someone portals into another world, that’s something that we all want. We all want to escape. That’s why we read. That’s why we love film. That little bit of time of escape is something that we can all relate to and just the reminder of imagination and what a huge role that that plays as well.
FB I’m glad you brought that up because I was very jealous of the Wonder gene idea. I thought it was very clever. I also thought it was similar thematically to what I was playing with with imagination. I often had people asking me, “Where did this idea come from?” I would say, “Well, it popped into my imagination.” Then I thought imagination can be a real power for people to think about what their life can be. Then when I was reading your book I came across the Wonder gene, which gives you magical abilities. Imagination, curiosity, and wonder are all very much childhood expressions that we lose or it starts to fade for some of us as adults. I often want to get back to that and being a writer, you have to live in that space of curiosity and wonder and imagination. I think what you did with the Wonder gene is very specific, but yet it’s in a grander thematic way. Can you talk about how you use wonder, curiosity, and imagination in your work?
SE I’m a huge Disney person. I love to go to the parks and what Walt Disney did in making Disneyland and Disney World so different from other theme parks. This idea of when you’re in a certain land, you can’t see the other land, and there are certain ways that Disneyland was built so you can’t see the outside world. I really love that idea of being fully immersed. So I thought how can I do this with Alice? I wanted to do something different with how she gets into Wonderland. How can I make this my own? How can I make this fit into this dystopian world I’ve created? And imagination plays a part in it. And I think there’s always that question of whether is Alice dreaming. Does she really experience this? We kind of see that in The Looking Glass Wars where Lewis Carroll has written this story and Alice is just so mad. “This is my history and you are pretending it’s some silly children’s story.” There’s always that question for the reader, is this real?
That’s what I wanted to explore. What does it mean for something to be real? Does it mean that it has to physically be there? Is it something that we see in our mind? Is it something we imagine? Is it something we believe in? All of those things culminated in the idea of the Wonder gene and this idea of virtual visual reality that Wonders have created for themselves. I love stories like Ready Player One or Warcross by Marie Lu and the idea of virtual reality. Even in Harry Potter, we see Dumbledore tell Harry just because it’s inside your head, why does that mean it should be any less real? I think that’s what’s so fun about Alice. As much as we, as authors, try to convince our readers the story is real, there’s always that question about if Alice really experienced this. Or was she imagining it the whole time? But also, if she was, why should that make it any less real?
FB You did a great job of creating those two realities within one overall reality that we all relate to. I also thought it was clever to have the Queen of England be the unimaginative, normal person, and then the Queen of Hearts be the real powerhouse in the underground or parallel.
Let’s start with the two worlds and the logic that you came up with so we could all suspend our disbelief. How much did you think about that? The world creation you’ve done is time-consuming and it has to be right otherwise it’s problematic for the reader.
SE I’m a discovery writer. The most frustrating part of the writing process for me is figuring out the logic behind my magic system and trying to make it all fit and work. I always see the characters very clearly in my mind and can kind of follow their storyline. But making sure the magic system makes sense is something I struggle with. With creating Wonderland on top of England or London, I played off the idea of what can Wonders see that those without the Wonder gene can’t see. I was inspired a lot by different stories. Brandon Mull’s Fablehaven, for example, where he has two children who go to this magical preserve and they can’t see any of these magical creatures until they drink this special fairy milk. So it’s playing around the idea about what is unseen to us until we have some kind of special ability or special understanding or special knowledge. We see it in Harry Potter where the muggles don’t see a lot of the things going on in the wizarding world and until Harry’s eyes are opened to it, he doesn’t see it either. I guess it would be like the Chosen One trope. There are certain tropes that are repeated but I think we’re so drawn to repeat those tropes because we all want to be the Chosen One, we all want to be Alice. We want to be the ones who can see into the special world of Wonderland. Then I ended up adding what I call a pinch of science fiction because, in a sense, all science fiction is somewhat grounded in fantasy, just at different levels. We see that with Star Wars. So I thought, how can I make up my own science about how the superheroes come to be? Why are superheroes able to do what they do? In my mind, Alice is a kind of superhero. Those with the Wonder gene are able to see something that others cannot see. So I played off that and it just takes a lot of rewriting and good editors to make sure it all comes together.
FB When you’re working on a movie, you’re always looking for some sort of IP that’s recognizable. Some of the most successful movies are stories familiar to people but told in unfamiliar ways. That is certainly what you’ve accomplished with the Curious Realities series. You did a reimagining of The Little Mermaid as well. Why do you think familiar stories told in unfamiliar ways constantly attract people?
SE I think we’re drawn to things that are familiar, we’re drawn to things that are nostalgic to us. It’s why I never tire of hearing Cinderella. I never, ever tire of hearing about the girl who overcame cruelty and stayed kind through it all. That’s something that resonates very deeply with me. It’s something I’m really drawn to. We’re all inspired by something. Whether we’re retelling a familiar tale or we’re reimagining it or we’re coming up with something totally new, we’re still going to draw from different inspirations. I think there’s that nostalgia aspect. Then it resonates with people who are drawn to anything and everything Alice in Wonderland, but then we’re also introducing readers who maybe would never bother to pick up the original Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I love that aspect, too, of inviting a new reader in and they might now be introduced to other versions of Wonderland or to the original, and be drawn to that. So I think on both sides, you have those who are looking for something new and they really want to like these classic stories, or these fairy tales, but they’ve just never resonated with them. Then finding that version of the story that finally connects with them is a really fun challenge.
FB Because you’re writing for a contemporary audience, you’re talking about contemporary themes, and you want to bring people in. You’ve done that with The Wonderland Trials, the first book in the Curious Realities series. But yet in terms of one of the games in the book, the first game Solitary, you have one of Lewis Carroll’s quotes. “Who in the world am I?” That magically is going to relate to my 15-year-old daughter and what she’s going through, what your kids are going to go through as they get older and so you want to cocoon that idea around a story that lets them explore and have adventure. So with the public domain and familiar stories told in an unfamiliar way you’re really trying to connect with a contemporary audience. And if they discover Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland because of it, you’re gonna make a lot of librarians happy.
SE I 100% agree with that. I also have a 15-year-old daughter, and as teenagers, they’re trying to figure out who they are. That’s why I love writing about teens and for teens. But at the same time, so much of my audience is adults. So I think that teenage period of figuring out who you are and what you want and what you want to do just continues to resonate with us, no matter how old we get.
FB I always ask my guests to choose a character from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to describe their personality and their aspirations. Who would you dress up as for Halloween or as cosplay? I have a feeling I know who you would choose.
SE I feel like my answer is very cliche and boring. But as I was friends with Alice, when I worked for the Disney parks, I would choose Alice. I love how she’s walking around in this world that she created for herself. Yet she’s going around, trying to tell people they’re not taking her seriously enough, everybody needs to be more serious. Stop with the nonsense. That just really resonates. It’s kind of the dynamic of my husband and I’s relationship, which is very similar to Alice and Chess in The Wonderland Trials. He’s always trying to lighten the mood. She’s always trying to get him to be more serious. It’s a fun kind of dynamic. So it might be a boring, typical answer, but I would definitely be Alice.
FB Interestingly enough, most of the time people pick some other character so I always find it interesting when someone picks Alice. What I also find curious is that in your book, Alice is really edgy. She’s street-smart. She’s a card shark. She’s got great retorts. I identify with Alice or when people ask me about my books and which character I enjoyed writing most I always say Alice. Her journey is so interesting and writing a book is like going on an adventure in Wonderland. It’s nonsensical at times. It was certainly nonsensical for me to even take on writing my first book. But of course, there has to be a little Mad Hatter, just to be in this business. But I love your character of Alice and her nickname is Ace, which is really appropriate. By the way, all of the references to cards in the design of the book, everything about the book from a production standpoint is spectacular. It’s so well done. Kudos to your team.
SE Thank you. I have a really great team. I was really grateful to work with a cover designer who took my sad little concept that I created and turned it into the cover because the cover is probably my favorite cover that I’ve ever had.
FB The covers for both the first book and the second one, The Looking Glass Illusion, are great.
You said earlier that your process is discovering the story as you write. Can you talk a little bit about that? Have you ever written yourself into a corner and gone, “Man, I gotta start all over again.”
SE Yes, but after six books, I’m working on my seventh now, I have learned to stop fighting that process. When I first started I thought I was doing it wrong and I needed to outline. The one book I outlined was Coral, which is my reimagining of The Little Mermaid, and I had to rewrite that book three times. This is why I tell all writers just because something works for somebody else doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you. We’re all creative in different ways and our brains work in different ways. So if you feel like you’re inside a box with outlining, try not outlining. I really love Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody, which is based on Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! As somebody who’s a very visual movie person, the beats that she puts together work for me. I follow those beats as a guideline, “I’m at this percentage of the book, where do I need to go next?” I use it as my map, my GPS. Jessica Brody has a really great course on her Writing Mastery Academy about fast drafting and how her process works for that. I realized this is what I’ve been doing. But she explains it and organizes it in a way that even though there’s a kind of madness to it, there’s still a method. It’s a lot of note-taking, just keeping track of and moving the story forward, getting that first draft down. I have comments in the margins, “Change this character to a female, make sure that you change this character’s personality.” It’s like I’m editing as I’m writing it, and I’m seeing the problems come out. But then I just write forward from that point, however, I’m going to end up changing the beginning.
FB We’re very similar in that way. Your writing is very visual. Certainly, that happened for me, because that’s the medium I was working in when I started writing The Looking Glass Wars. Also, I had to rewrite it three or four times as well. Then once my editor came on it was like, “Oh, my God, I have a lot of problems to fix.” But once you get the first book under your belt, you find your own rhythm. What you just described makes perfect sense and everybody does things differently. Also, your talent for prose is clear. It’s really beautiful writing. No wonder you have so many books under your belt.
SE Thank you so much.
FB Let’s talk about promoting your book. You live in Arizona, right?
SE Yes, I’m about 20 minutes north of Phoenix.
FB Did you ever go to the Comic-Con there?
SE Not yet, but I’m hoping to be able to go this year. It’s called Phoenix Fan Fusion now, but I am hoping to be able to go. I have connected with a local bookstore and I have several author friends who go.
FB I went to Comic-Con in San Diego and I had only published in the UK. When I was in the UK, I went to a school and one of the kids was upset because I didn’t write the whole story of Hatter Madigan’s 13 years and he wanted me to go home and finish the book. And on the plane ride home, I thought maybe I could do a comic book about those 13 years. So I did a comic and then I went to San Diego Comic-Con and it turns out that people were interested in the comic because of the artist. But when they read the comic and realized there was a novel attached to it, they started buying the British edition of the novel on Amazon. And what I’ve realized is I sold more novels at Comic-Con than I did comic books. The people who go are huge readers, they’re early adaptors, and they want to get the word out. It’s a great place to press the flesh and sell books, whether you get a dealer’s table which is for folks like us or you go in with a publisher and you’re at their table.
SE I definitely want to and now you’ve motivated me to try even harder to be able to get there.
SE Yes, they have been so fantastic to work with. They have collaborated with me to do pre-orders, so readers who pre-order my books are able to get signed and personalized copies along with a little envelope of pre-order goodies. They have just been fantastic. They’ve done my launch parties for the past three books and I will continue to go back there because they have a huge YA audience.
FB They’ve cultivated the best audience. I’ve done a number of events with Changing Hands and they’re also great at setting up school events. Have you done many school visits?
SE I’ve only done a couple of school visits. But I’d like to eventually do more so I’ve been really grateful to be connected with several authors in the area and keep my ear to the ground for different invites and opportunities that come up.
FB The thing about Arizona is the schools are very large. You can go into some of those schools, and Changing Hands set this up for me, where there’d be 30 6th graders, 30 7th graders, 30 8th graders and you do three presentations. Then Changing Hands or any other bookstore will sell the books on-site and you get pre-orders or post-orders. That was one of the great ways to build out that YA audience. You have such a unique and interesting story because of your time at Disney and your interest in fairy tales that I think you could really connect with those kids.
SE I always say it’s easier to speak in front of adults than children because you really have to win children over. But I do love public speaking. I taught a creative writing class last year to teenagers at our homeschool group. The year started with them saying nothing and acting like they didn’t want to be there but as the year progressed, I couldn’t get them to stop talking. I feel like you have to earn that from kids. That’s what I really love about speaking in front of teens and children, if you have them engaged and laughing and asking questions, you’ve earned it. So I definitely would love more opportunities to speak at schools. I had the opportunity to speak at the Arizona State University writing summer camp a couple of years in a row and that was a smaller group but also a lot of fun.
FB Do you do much with advanced reader copies when finalizing your books?
SE With my debut novel, Unblemished, I did work with several beta readers who were giving me feedback before I even submitted it to publishers. Now that I’m writing on contract and writing on deadline, I usually form a kind of street team. They’re the ones who get the advance copies and they get to submit reviews early so we can build that hype. Though, I always ask them please, before the release, only have spoiler-free reviews.
As far as feedback goes at this point in my career, it mostly comes from Nadine Brandes, my best friend, and a fellow author, and then just working with my editors. I’ll ask my 15-year-old daughter things because I sometimes date myself with certain references. I’m also an editor and I was editing a story for a client the other day and there was a reference to Smokey the Bear. So I asked my teenage daughter, “Do you know who Smokey the Bear is?” She said she did. So that’s how I gauge if I’m dating myself. But as far as feedback goes with beta readers, most of those advanced copies are really just going to those early readers who are getting the word out. But at that point, nothing in the novel can be changed.
FB In terms of reviews as it relates to Alice in Wonderland and the British sensibility versus an American taking it on, I got a lot of blowback. “What’s this Yank doing?” I noticed a lot of the reviews were not always that kind. It felt sort of personal because I was an American. I was curious if you had any feedback about taking on this classic.
SE You’re always going to have both sides of the coin with a retelling. Whenever I’m asked by a new writer, “What are your tips for writing a retelling?” I always say, “You can’t please everyone.” You’re gonna have your readers who expect it to be exactly like the original and they’re very protective of that story so if you get something wrong, or if you change something in a way they don’t like, they’re going to come after you. Particularly, when you’re researching another culture or another place you’re not from, you want to get it right. But there are inevitably things that you’re going to get wrong. On the one hand, I’ve had people say, “Wow, I lived in England for three years and this is so authentic and accurate. I loved it.” Then I’ve had other people who have reviewed it and said that everything was very forced and you can tell I know nothing about England or British culture.
FB I think I have that exact same review.
SE I think you have to expect that your story is not going to be for everyone. You’re going to research to the best of your ability but we’re also writing fiction. Sometimes our work is based on a part of our reality. But in the end, you’re going to take certain liberties and your book is not going to be for every reader. I don’t read reviews unless they’re sent to me. Sometimes I stumble across one or two I wish I hadn’t stumbled across. But for the most part, I find that either way, if I’m reading reviews that are building the book up, I’m gonna get a big head about it. If I’m reading reviews that are tearing the book down, I’m going to doubt the book. There’s nothing I can do about it because I can’t change it. So I just try to stay down the middle of the road. If someone tags me in a review, I’ll read it and I’ll thank them for it but for the most part, I always tell writers, that if reviews are affecting you one way or another to the point where it’s affecting your writing, and it’s changing the way you think about your own story, then it’s probably best to try and stay away from reviews altogether.
FB Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the sequel? My last two books, Seeing Red and ArchEnemy, were really a continuation. It really upset people. They were pissed off because it didn’t have that definitive ending like The Looking Glass Wars and it was a long time before ArchEnemy came out. If I had to do it over again, I would have had a more satisfying ending to the second book. But of course, I was inexperienced so I didn’t really realize that. So tell me about the ending of The Wonderland Trials and how you constructed The Looking-Glass Illusion. What’s the transition?
SE The Looking-Glass Illusion is a continuation. So for those who have not read The Wonderland Trials, now would be the time to fast-forward through this part of the podcast. But The Wonderland Trials ends with Alison and her team, Team Heart, leaving the third trial behind and entering the fourth trial, which is the Queen’s Trial, the Heart Trial, and they don’t quite know what to expect. The entire premise of The Looking-Glass Illusion is where you have The Wonderland Trials which has three different trials, the entire second book is set in the Heart Trial. For those familiar with Lewis Carroll’s second story of Alice, Through the Looking-Glass, the Heart Trial is all on a chessboard and it’s all about Alice trying to get to the eighth square. I went into this not knowing how to play chess. So how am I supposed to write a book that’s based on the game of chess? That’s where my friend Janelle came in. She sat down with me and taught me the basics of how to play. So the entire story of The Looking-Glass Illusion is trying to defeat the Heart Trial, but they’re also trying to find what’s real and what has happened to the real Wonderland. As Alice and her team learned in The Wonderland Trials, what they’re seeing is not necessarily what the real Wonderland is meant to be and is an illusion that they believe the Queen of Hearts has created. So if they defeat the Heart Trial, they believe they can find the real Wonderland. So that’s the second book and I had a lot of fun figuring out how chess played into it. I had a lot of fun with some of the nonsense words. Okay, this is a nonsense word, Lewis Carroll, but how does it fit into my world? I had a lot of fun with that and the Jabberwocky and really the whole theme is believing in the impossible, but also facing your fears.
FB I really like that, believing in the impossible. Do you have a favorite iteration of Alice? I’m assuming the Disney movie is one of your favorites because you worked there. But is there a song or another movie that you love?
SE I listened to “Welcome to Wonderland” by Anson Seabra a lot when I was writing The Wonderland Trials. It’s kind of a melancholy song but obviously, if you’re writing Alice, you’re thinking of Alice, but it’s really just a song for people. I really love the lyrics. One of my favorite reimaginings of Alice on screen has got to be what the TV show Once Upon a Time did with Mad Hatter’s character, who’s named Jefferson Hatter in the show. He’s a portal jumper and the evil Queen Regina wants to use him for this and he spirals into madness. Because there’s always the question, how did the Mad Hatter become mad? There’s obviously the history behind how hats were made but in the show, he’s so desperate to get back to his daughter that he continues trying to make a portal-jumping hat and he spirals. So I love what Once Upon a Time did with that and I love what they did overall meshing and melding the different fairy tales. That was a lot of fun. It remains one of my favorite on-screen retellings of Alice, particularly Hatter’s story.
FB Can you tease us with a retelling that you’re thinking about? Mine is Treasure Island. There’s got to be a way to do Treasure Island.
SE I would read that book. Treasure Planet is one of my all-time favorite underrated Disney movies. I am contracted for a four-book series with my publisher and each book is going to be a retelling paired with a literary classic. I cannot divulge specifically the one I’m working on now which releases in 2025 or my marketing director might have off with your head. But I will say that for anybody who’s followed me, you can find me on Instagram at @saraellawrites. I’ve been dropping lots of clues to the fairytale that I’ve wanted to work on for many, many years to come. It’s a fairy tale that has resonated with me and the book that I’ve chosen to mash it up with is one of my favorite stories from literature. But it’s also one of my favorite films and the film is very different from the book. But I feel that this particular fairy tale in this particular story from classic literature fits very well together. So if you want to go clue hunting, if you’ve read The Wonderland Trials you know I love clues and games, you can scour my Instagram to see the clues that I’ve dropped for what I’m working on next.
FB Okay, listeners, I need you to do that and message me what you think it is. I definitely want to follow up and have you on the show again and hear all about it because that is an excellent, tease for your upcoming book. It’s really been a pleasure to have you on the show and talk about all things Alice and in particular, your really successful, beautifully written books.
SE Thank you so much for having me, Frank. When I received your email to be on the show, I thought, “Is this real or am I being scammed?” So thank you for having me on. I’ve been a follower of yours for years. Love your books. It was really an honor to get to chat with you today.
5 Pieces of Science Inspired by Alice in Wonderland
We all know Alice in Wonderland is everywhere. Since Lewis Carroll’s tale about a young girl wandering through Wonderland was published over 150 years ago, Alice has been ever-present in pop culture. There have been numerous adaptations in film, television, literature, video games, and board games. Alice’s story has directly and indirectly inspired musicians and storytellers, most recently with Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things. Words and phrases such as a “Cheshire Cat grin” and “down the rabbit hole” are constant parts of everyday speech. But Alice isn’t just ubiquitous in culture, you can also find her in every facet of science. From the cosmos to psychology, Alice has influenced how we understand and define our world.
Here are five places where you can find Wonderland in science:
The Alice Ring
Wonderland is a wild, mind-bending world entirely different from our own. However, a recent creation by Finnish and American scientists shows that our world might have more in common with Wonderland than we previously thought. The Alice Ring is a decayed monopole “that flips the magnetic charge of any other monopole passing through its center, creating an anti-monopole.”
Yes, as someone who never took physics, that was confusing for me too. A monopole is essentially a magnet with just one magnetic pole. The Alice Ring looks like a regular monopole but when you look inside, things get curiouser and curiouser. “Everything seems to be mirrored, as if the ring were a gateway into a world of antimatter instead of matter,” said co-creator Mikko Mottonen of Aalto University in Finland. A realm where everything appears to be the opposite of the norm? It makes sense why they named it after Alice. The prospect that science can quite literally create mirrored realities is both exciting and frightening, similar to Wonderland.
Medicinal Magic Mushrooms
Mushrooms are synonymous with Alice in Wonderland, especially the psychedelic ones. In the novel, Alice eats a mushroom that changes her size, evoking the hallucinogenic effects of psilocybin mushrooms. While there is no evidence psychedelics or any other type of drug, influenced Lewis Carroll, the story’s connection to mind-altering substances is undeniable, especially since the 1960s when the counterculture embraced the connections to drugs found in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Mushrooms, however, are becoming more and more mainstream. Specifically, their medicinal qualities are being fully explored for the first time. In a recent presentation to the Memphis Rotary Club, Dr. Ronald L. Cowan of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center outlined the exciting possibilities that magic mushrooms have for treating depression. Magic mushrooms showed effects in a few days to two weeks and helped to resolve depression in about two-thirds of patients, both at better rates than traditional antidepressants. Though it is a small sample size, the results are encouraging.
How does Alice play into this? The music, film, literature, and values of the 1960s counterculture that embraced and espoused the psychedelic qualities of Alice in Wonderland have become part of the mainstream, bringing with it more progressive attitudes toward drugs. It is not improbable that Alice’s role in that counterculture, along with its continuing prevalence in our culture, played a role in society being comfortable with exploring the possibly life-changing benefits of psychedelic mushrooms.
Alice in Wonderland Syndrome
Perhaps the most famous, or infamous, example of Alice in science is the mysterious Alice in Wonderland Syndrome. The rare syndrome involves distorted perception and instances of it began cropping up in medical texts around 1900. In a 1952 paper, neurologist Caro Lippman recounted several examples from patients including “a sensation of the neck extending out on one side for a foot or more,” a woman’s “left ear ‘ballooning out 6 inches or more,’” and another patient reporting that if felt like her head grew to “tremendous proportions” and floated up to the ceiling. The litany of other testimonies is very similar to Alice’s experiences in Lewis Carroll’s novel. A common thread amongst Lippman’s patients was that most also suffered from migraine headaches. This gave rise to speculation that Carroll, who also suffered from migraines, may have been directly influenced by his affliction, though no such complaints have been found in his diaries.
The cause of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome is not well understood. Brain inflammation due to the Epstein-Barr virus seems to be the most common cause of symptoms in children while symptomatic adults most often present with migraines. Tumors and schizophrenia are also potential causes. While the syndrome is just as mysterious as the inner workings of Wonderland, scientists are better able to explore the disorder due to neuroimaging technology which can help track the relationship between symptoms and brain activity.
Cheshire Cat Galaxies
The mischievous grin of the Cheshire Cat is an iconic image that has cropped up in a variety of media. The cat’s teasing, enigmatic smile can also be seen in the cosmos. The Cheshire Cat galaxies are a group of distant galaxies that resemble the grin of Lewis Carroll’s feline. The galaxies are an example of gravitational lensing, where the galaxies’ light “has been stretched and bent by the large amounts of mass,” which is usually dark matter. In this case, the mass surrounds the “eyes” and “nose”. The circular “face” is formed by the gravitational lensing of four galaxies far behind the “eye” galaxies.
But these galaxies are not just stagnating in space. Much like Wonderland, they are constantly changing. The two “eye” galaxies, for example, are on a collision course, hurtling towards each other at over 300,000 miles per hour. Astronomers believe that the Cheshire Cat galaxies will eventually become more like a Cyclops group once the two “eye” galaxies collide and merge. But don’t worry, that won’t happen for another billion years.
Borogovia Dinosaur
Lewis Carroll created many fantastical creatures for Wonderland and one of his creations lent its name to a wondrous creature of Earth – a dinosaur. The Borogovia was a small theropod (hollow bones and three toes and claws on each limb) that lived 66-84 million years ago and was first discovered in the 1970s in southern Mongolia. The Borogovia, which belongs to the group of dinosaurs that evolved into birds, reminded paleontologist Halszka Osmolska of another avian creature – Lewis Carroll’s borogoves. Borogoves are mentioned in the poem “Jabberwocky” and Humpty Dumpty describes a borogove as “a thin shabby-looking bird with its feathers sticking out all round—something like a live mop.” The spindly legs of the dinosaur certainly evoke the characteristics of its Wonderland namesake and it’s fitting that fiction became fact and this feathered Wonderlander lives on in an ancestor of birds that once roamed Earth.
Meet The Author
An itinerant storyteller, John Drain attended the University of Edinburgh before studying film at DePaul University in Chicago and later earned an MFA in Screenwriting from the American Film Institute Conservatory. John focuses on writing mysteries and thrillers featuring characters who are thrown into the deep end of the pool and struggle to just keep their heads above water. His work has been recognized by the Academy Nicholls Fellowship, the Austin Film Festival, ScreenCraft, Cinestory, and the Montreal Independent Film Festival. In a previous life, John created and produced theme park attractions across the globe for a wide variety of audiences. John keeps busy in his spare time with three Dungeons and Dragons campaigns and a seemingly never-ending stack of medieval history books.
All Things Alice: Interview with Adrienne Kress, Part 2
As an amateur scholar and die-hard enthusiast of everything to do with Alice in Wonderland, I have launched a podcast that takes on Alice’s everlasting influence on pop culture. As an author who draws on Lewis Carroll’s iconic masterpiece for my Looking Glass Wars universe, I’m well acquainted with the process of dipping into Wonderland for inspiration.
The journey has brought me into contact with a fantastic community of artists and creators from all walks of life—and this podcast will be the platform where we come together to answer the fascinating question: “What is it about Alice?”
For this episode, it was my great pleasure to have Adrienne Kress join me as my guest on this episode! Read on to explore our conversation and check out the whole series on your favorite podcasting platform to listen to the full interview.
Frank Beddor As a kid, the whole idea of identity and trying on these different identities while growing up is really universal. But what’s remarkable, since I’ve been working in the Alice universe, is how deeply seated it is in culture and how Alice has become such a muse for creatives. We never had this conversation. Can you tell us a little bit about Alex and the Ironic Gentleman? I didn’t know that it was inspired by Alice. How did you use elements of Alice in your book?
Adrienne Kress The very basic plot is a girl, Alex, has to rescue her grade six teacher from pirates. She was raised by her uncle but he was killed and the only adult in her life who’s a parental figure is this teacher. At the same time, she’s found a treasure map, which is what these pirates were looking for. So it’s also a treasure hunt kind of thing. Act One establishes everybody and begins the adventure and has pirates kidnap the teacher. Act Three, we go to sea. We’ve got the H.M.S. Valiant, we’ve got our good guys and then we’ve got the Ironic Gentlemen, who are the pirates. We have a proper Treasure Island-style, Peter Pan-style adventure.
But Act Two is very much Alice in Wonderland. Alex has to get to Port Cullis, which is a port town where she’s trying to get a boat. So the journey from her town to Port Cullis, that’s the Alice bit and it’s very much Alice in Wonderland. She’s thrown into a very absurdist world. Even though it’s her world, her world is absurd. Everything is very episodic. It starts with a very strange train sequence that’s my Beckett, existential absurdism. My very first play was that Waiting for Godot style, the circle that never ends. I find it horrifying and deeply amusing at the same time. So it starts with that and then Alex ends up being plopped in a forest. Then in this forest, she comes across different people who are absurd caricatures or, in one case, an extremely ginormous octopus who’s an older English-style lush actor like Peter O’Toole.
Alex has to help solve its problems to move on to the next step, which is yet another person who needs another thing. She’s basically trying to get to Point B but she keeps getting waylaid. I remember my editor being like, “Okay, if we’re going to do this, it’s not very forward moving so let’s make sure that we have no extraneous words.” We did cut one scene where she meets a French horn player, which I was sad about because I used to play French horn which is why that was in there. But she has these scenes and for some readers that’s their favorite bit. I think the Alice fans at heart get it. Then some people are like, “Oh my god, I just wanted to get to Port Cullis.” They wanted that more straight journey.
FB They wanted Treasure Island.
AK Exactly. We get there. I just wanted to do a little bit before that.
FB So if you like Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Treasure Island, or 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, this is a book for you.
AK I did call it an homage to children’s lit. It’s the first book I ever finished writing. The first children’s book I ever wrote. So everything was very much an homage. Everything was something else. I put friends in it. Previous employers were in it. I tried to represent everyone nicely.
It was just everything I love in a book not thinking it would be published, not even thinking about publishing. Then, of course, there’s the challenge of realizing you have to write a second more challenging thing. I think writing a first book is hard but you’re so focused on this crazy huge accomplishment, “I have this goal and it took me 10 years, but I’m going to do it and put everything I’ve got into this thing.” Then you get published and you start to have a career and somebody asks you for a second book and you’re like, “But I can’t do what I did. I can’t do that all over again.”
FB I thought it was exactly the opposite. There was something about the first one in terms of not having any pressure because you don’t think it’s gonna get published and you can take 5-10 years, however long it takes. However, once it’s there, and you figured out the rules and the logic, then yes, there’s a pressure. But so much of it’s already a roadmap, and much easier, and the second book certainly took me a lot less time. I did feel pressure from the editors a little bit more, but I was happy that I had already established that, if they liked this world, I’d been working on it. I have all this stuff in a filing cabinet. I’ll just pull more stuff.
AK There is a difference. I don’t know why I did this to myself. I’ve now written some series but generally, I always enjoyed standalones. I decided for the second book, I was going to write a completely different story. It was set in the same world but with completely different characters and, a completely different story, and then halfway through, we would bring Alex back into it and stuff. So I think writing a direct sequel has its unique challenges, especially if people really liked the first one. It’s like, “Oh, no, how do I make this as well-liked, if not more well-liked too? How do I write the second book, but not rest on my laurels? There are a lot of challenges with that. But I think for me because I decided I’m going to write a second book that’s completely not the first, I felt again like I was starting a bit from scratch.
FB That’s for sure
You have a whole new series out. You have three books in the Bendy series.
AK The Bendy books are a series, but they’re also standalones. So we’ve done it again. But The Explorers, which is just mine is a proper three-book series.
FB Can you walk us through that? Did you know you were going to have a trilogy when you started it?
AK Yes. It was a three-book deal from the beginning. Just from the beginning, it was a very classic, hoping that each book is their own adventure but it had that very classic overarching arc. They had to collect things and they had to rescue somebody by the end.
FB Were they saying they wanted the book to come out every year or every 18 months? Did you have that added pressure?
AK It was every year or 18 months, I can’t remember which, but it was definitely that. So that window where you had to write the whole of the next book and then go through the whole process again and write it in time with their deadlines
FB I found that very stressful, by the way, hitting a deadline for the book. Because they said you’re going to lose your audience. The audience is going to find some other series.
AK There’s one book in the Bendy book series, which is in the YA section because it’s a memoir. In the very first game, there’s a book called The Illusion of Living, which is the memoir of Joey Drew, who’s the Walt Disney of this animation studio. So they wanted me to write the memoir, which was a really cool experience writing a memoir about an adult male for a young adult section. But with these three books, the other two are technically Y.A., there’s less of the pressure that you’re talking about, which just blows my mind. “You’re going to lose your audience.” Who says that? But that kind of pressure, when the developers of Bendy decided they wanted the next book, I guess they would talk to Scholastic about it, then Scholastic would come to me and say, “You have to get this to us in two months.” That level of fast. It isn’t the same way as writing a series where they’re like, “We need the next book ASAP for the series.” It was more like, “When we’re ready for the next one, we gotta go, go, go.”
FB Just to make it clear for the listeners, Bendy is based on a video game. So they needed these books for the day and date of releasing a new game?
AK I don’t fully know what the decision-making process is there. I’m just happy to be a part of it. So the second game was released this time last year. I think it’s possible that when they finished working on the game, they were like, “Okay, now we would like another book.” They were so focused on the game, as they should be. But I believe it was a year from being told they’d like another book. So that’s even before I’ve written an outline to send to them. It was a year, from that point to the release of the most recent one. This time last year, I would have been knee-deep in writing it.
The most recent one, Fade to Black, came out at the beginning of October and I don’t think I had started writing it last year at the beginning of October.
FB Let me just get all these titles right. So Bendy and the Ink Machine: Dreams Come to Life was book one, which came out in 2019. Did you have to audition for this? Send in an outline and based on the outline, they chose you or did you have a pre-existing relationship?
AK I think they reached out to maybe four other authors and there was very little that they required. They wanted it to be Y.A., set in the studio, the games take place decades after the studio is over, so essentially, they wanted it set in the 1940s. That’s about it. Then I came back saying I’d like to do an apprentice who’s 17, and works in the art department because obviously, the whole point of his game is art. So let’s put them in the art department. They liked that and they were thinking the exact same thing. At that point, all of us who they had asked wrote pages. I think they wanted about five pages but I asked if I could submit 15. So I did the opening which is almost entirely the same opening of Dreams Come to Life. I guess they liked it, which was very nice.
FB And the second is Bendy: The Illusion of Living. The third one is Bendy and the Ink Machine: The Lost Ones and the most recent book is Bendy: Fade to Black.
Also, it was published through Scholastic, which is great because they have such a far reach and they were your original publishers as well.
AK They were the ones who published Alex and the Ironic Gentleman. They were the very first.
FB You’re keeping it in the family. That must have been nice. Do they have an editor that they assigned to these books?
AK So it’s fascinating and goes back to what I was saying about reluctant readers. They have an imprint called AFK, which means Away From Keyboard. For those who don’t know your acronyms, which I did not, that’s a very cool online acronym. They did the Five Nights at Freddy’s books, which are massive.
I don’t know when they actually started the imprint or whether it was on the back of how successful the Five Nights at Freddy’s stuff was but they do all these video game tie-ins. My editors have all been incredible. What I really liked about it beyond it being fun is that they have this imprint that’s all focused on video game tie-ins and you’re getting all these readers like me, reluctant readers, who might not be into a book going “Well, that is my favorite video game.” I get it all the time from kids and teenagers, “I hate books,” or “I don’t like reading. I’ve never really read a book. But I read this one because I love Bendy and it was really good.” I hope that the Bendy books spark that realization of “There are books for me. I just have to find them. They might not be what even the school is showing me but somewhere there are books for me.” So as the reluctant reader I really, really love that.
It’s so fun to read certain reviews, like on Goodreads, where they said the author didn’t have to go this hard. No, I did. I have to get themes. I have to get morals. I have to get complicated ethics questions. I love that I’m able to do that and sneak that stuff into these books. Then next year, they’re adapting the first book into a graphic novel, which I’m also super into. I’ve got a graphic novel of my own that’s coming out in 2025 because it takes forever. It’s 250 pages and this incredible artist, Jade Zhang, has to illustrate it. I don’t know how she’s doing it. To me, it seems fast. But they’re releasing Dreams Come to Life as a graphic novel next year. Again, I love that because I think graphic novels also open the world of reading even more.
FB Are you adapting your own book, the prose, into the graphic novel or are they hiring somebody else to do that?
AK They’ve hired a writer named Christopher Hastings, who’s done this a fair bit. When I was first told there was going to be a graphic novel I was like, “They probably already have somebody but I could do it.” And then I thought, “No, even though I know how to write a script, how on Earth do you make that book that’s almost 300 pages into a graphic novel?” Even if it’s got the same number of pages, it’s not going to be that same length.
FB Let’s go to your graphic novel because that’s fascinating. I wrote my prose and then I had no idea what I was doing and then I did a graphic novel and I look back on it and go, “Wow, I made so many mistakes and set up this so terribly.” But it was really, really fun to do and now I understand how different it is. Can you speak to writing your first graphic novel?
AK The way that one writes a graphic novel is you have page numbers, specific pages that you have to dictate, and then what happens in specific panels on those pages. That is what is so challenging. I love it. I think very visually to begin with and I’ve read a lot of graphic novels. So I felt very comfortable playing around with how to use the space and what to do. I have a friend Stephanie Cook, who has a lot of kidlit graphic novels out now, and also is an editor, and she does tons with graphic novels in the comics community in general. So we met up, and I’m like, “Help me.” She told me generally, for middle grade, you don’t want more than five panels on a page. Very pragmatic things like that which were very, very helpful. But generally, I had a good vibe, I had a good sense of aesthetics.
But what I didn’t know until I was going back over it myself, and then working with an editor on it, was how hard editing a graphic novel is. Because in a book, screenplay, or play, if you need an extra bit of dialogue or an extra section to fully understand what’s happening, “Sure, I’ll put it here.” But if you add a single thing to a graphic novel script, it’s Tetris. You add another panel, and then that fifth panel has fallen off the page. Can I fit it into the next page? Or can I make this page six panels? Or do I need that panel? Maybe I can get rid of that panel? Or do we move everything down? But of course, there are two-page spreads and you have to make sure that you have pages two and three side by side. It can’t be three and four because they’re on opposite sides of the page. It’s math.
FB Every page you add is hundreds and hundreds of dollars for the artists because they get paid by the page unless you make a deal with them where they’re part of the authorship. I found the editing process really, really challenging, as well. But the heavy lifting is the artists. Also, the artists can say, “Hey, I can’t fit all those panels,” or “There’s so much dialogue in this particular panel, we’re going to have to move it around a little bit.” I was really leaning on Ben Templesmith.
AK I’ve given so many challenges to Jane. So the story is called Ghost Circus and it’s about these two kids and we meet these ghosts at the circus.
FB Not in the H.A.T.B.O.X.?
AK No ghosts in the H.A.T.B.O.X.
FB It’s in the circus, not the H.A.T.B.O.X. Okay.
AK There are flashbacks to how the ghosts became ghosts and they’re set in all different time periods. So Jade’s drawing 1930s New York and then the savanna with elephants, plus the main timeline we’re in with the ghost circus itself and all the characters there. It’s so impressive. I feel like I’ll know whether or not she had issues or whether she solved them. I think there’s one or two times she’ll do something with a couple of panels and I’m like, “Oh, yeah, that makes more sense.” But maybe just because I was so aware of the middle gradeness of it all, that was very much at the forefront of my mind. So being aware of the number of panels I needed per page. Then before even Jade came on board, editing it and working on it with the editor, he’d be like, “This is too much though. We’re not going to fit that dialogue on our panel.” That’s where the math came in. But it was an incredible learning curve.
FB But being a playwright, you really had a handle, because that is the closest form to writing for graphic novels.
AK One hundred percent. Thank goodness I had that experience. Because I did look at other people’s scripts, I wanted to learn, something even just as simple as page one, panel one. I wanted to know how that works. It’s great to have that reason for us to look at what other people have done but it didn’t feel awkward because graphic novel writing comes from playwriting and the scripts look like a play.
FB My wife and I are working on a graphic novel and this is her first graphic novel but she had been a staff writer on the show Bones. So she sort of understands but we were having the simplest conversations, “So, on the one page, is it panel 1 through 5, and then on page two, it’s panel six, do you continue?” “No, it’s just one through five and then the next page is one through five.”
AK That question makes perfect sense. Like, “You’re not repeating the same pattern?”
FB But this time we hired an editor from the very beginning and said, “Okay, here’s the basis of the story.” Then he was saying you have to have a sensitivity reader read it because some of the names and some elements don’t quite line up based on the story. So we’ve done that. It’s really a science, as you say, it’s a math question. There is a lot more going on in the world in terms of when you create something to make sure it’s accessible to all.
AK I do think it’s quite wonderful because I think we’ve been using sensitivity readers for a while, as authors. Reaching out to people we know or asking our friends, “Hey, do you know somebody who might be able to look over this section because I want to make sure this is as correct and sensitive as possible?” It’s all kind of already existed but I like that it’s been codified as a proper job. It’s something that I think is more front and center of awareness, which I think is important. We had one, specifically for Bendy: Fade to Black, which is set after World War II and the dad has PTSD from the war. It’s thematically important to the story. The whole story is actually about PTSD and mental health, and living with that sort of trauma. I did my level best, researching and trying to make things as sensitive and as authentic as possible, but Scholastic did give it to somebody to read over just to make sure that we were doing it right.
FB I agree with you. The level of subtlety is really different and we must be mindful. For the graphic novel my wife and I are working on in particular, the characters all come from different places and we wanted to make sure that we were honoring everybody’s heritage and getting it right. Are you interested in World War II much after doing that research?
AK It’s one of those things that I think is by virtue of being a cinephile there are so many movies about World War II. But then, for my generation, it impacted our grandparents. So it’s a very present thing. You’ve got a real direct connection versus perhaps other history that feels like it’s almost a story. You don’t have that visceral connection, which is why I think I might have struggled with other history classes and other history. It wasn’t until I started doing art history where you could actually go and see the actual works and connect to the reality of it that I realized I did like history. I just need to consume it differently.
There are a lot of phenomenal YouTube shows that are about the domestic side of history. So a day in the life in Victorian England. What did you eat? Where do you sleep? With the first Bendy book, they wanted it just after World War II. I had been to New York and somebody recommended the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side. They found a boarded-up tenement that hadn’t been renovated, and hadn’t been touched, and from there they started reaching out to families generationally for stories and objects, they looked at census information. What it’s become is you go on these tours and it’s like just walking through history. You’re there. You’re seeing and touching everything and it was incredible. Shortly thereafter, I got the gig for the book and they wanted it set in the 1940s and I was like “Okay, I’ll make it New York.” I know their lives. I know where he lives.
FB That’s great. You were destined to write these. Are there going to be more books in this series?
AK It’s been such a pleasure and I really enjoy working on them. I know the developers are very focused on the next games as well. They’re very sweet about it, which I’m grateful for because I was very nervous with a pre-existing fan base. I felt the same way about Hatter Madigan.
FB That was really fun, working on Hatter Madigan: Ghost in the H.A.T.B.O.X. together. I knew I was in good hands when you came up with the idea that he was an insider and not an outsider. Your rationale was that Harry Potter had done that to such great success and there are a lot of other stories that do the same thing, that Hatter being an insider would make the story in this book unique. Once you pitched that, I said, “Okay, that’s a very smart idea.”
AK Thank you. It was so much fun. The world is, God…creating that world the way that you have, with literally an encyclopedia, is so phenomenal and so intimidating as a writer. I admire so much just the depth of the world-building you had. As we were talking about with Alice in Wonderland, that’s what’s so great about all these adaptations of Alice is everybody’s unique perspective.
FB I was really trying to create a jumping-off place. Take some of the motifs and then use that creativity and share the sandbox and see what other people can bring to it. In every conversation I had with you and with other creatives, it doesn’t work unless you bring yourself to it. You bring something unique that you can do. That’s what I’m looking for. I don’t want to be precious. I want to actually break away from it a lot more because I’ve gotten so focused. I think about it in a loop and I can’t break out of it unless I have another voice.
AK That’s so fair. You were asking me about the adaptation of Dreams Come to Life. There is no way, with the narrowness of focus that I have, that I could possibly bring a unique look to that book. But a new person adapting it would. That’s the crazy part, isn’t it? Getting to write and make stuff up as a job.
FB How do you balance writing your own work, adapting something, producing, and auditioning? What’s the day-to-day balance that you try to accomplish?
AK What’s balance? I wish it felt more like I had a plan and I really stuck to it. The truth is, it’s a little bit flying by the seat of your pants. I can’t speak to what they are but I’ve got two write-for-hires that just happened this month. So right now balancing those…and I feel very good about the plan because the jobs are so vastly different. There are a lot of reasons why I can do that. I wouldn’t always say yes to doing two projects right at the same time but these worked very nicely together, they complement each other. But this summer, I had no writing, anything. I didn’t have edits. Nothing was sorted that way. So I decided I really wanted to write. I have a middle-grade story that’s much more in the style of Judy Blume. So not fantastical in any way, more coming of age. I’ve been really wanting to write it for a few years so I’m like, “That’s what I’m doing this summer.”
It takes place over a summer so it felt like the right temperature because I’m in Canada and we only get this so much. That’s with my agent and we’ll probably go on submission to publishers in the new year. But I’m glad I did that, over that gap in the summer, because then these projects came along and it would be sad because I don’t think I would have been able to balance them with my original work. The key is taking advantage of moments. If you can’t plan everything out ahead of time you can still have a sense of how long a project will take and maybe when that’s done I’ll do this thing that’s more in my control. The pet projects that might not have a home yet. You have to still honor and give space to that project.
FB You had a good summer. You finished a new book and you had a movie come out.
AK Post on the movie was a long post. There was no way you could focus on anything else. I was also injured at the time so that didn’t help. I think you’re well aware that moviemaking can be entirely consuming.
FB When you’re on set, forget it. You only have so many hours in the day and then you’re gonna lose crew and locations.
AK Exactly. If I was just acting, that would be different because you have a lot of downtime as an actor on a set. That’s a great time to maybe just get a few words in the computer. It’s much easier to multitask. But as a producer and as a writer on it, you do not have the same level of free time.
FB You said fly by the seat of your pants and one of the reasons for that is so much of the work is speculative. There’s the focus you need to finish your book that you’re not getting paid for or the movie that has enough financing just to get it made, but you’re not making any money unless the movie sells. Then depending on how many bills you have to pay it’s like “Okay, where am I putting my attention?” If I need to pay bills, I need that work-for-hire stuff, or for this movie, let’s gamble and see if we have a little payday at the end of it. It does feel like when you’re doing so many different mediums, you’ll fly by the seat of your pants because there is no structure to it. It’s really a self-generated structure. That’s not so easy.
AK A lot of people I talk to, even writers who are also doing a day job, I’m like, “Oh, if only I had all that free time.” I am very lucky. I get to write professionally as my job. That is an amazing, amazing gift. It’s incredible. But there are other challenges. There was a long period where I was writing, especially with Alex and the Ironic Gentleman, but I also had a day job. Even once it got published, I still had a job. That job schedule does actually help schedule out your writing too because you only have certain windows in which you can do it. If you have the whole day, it’s very hard to schedule things.
FB I had this equivalent when I had kids and it’s like, “Wait a second, I only have from 10 to midnight.”
AK Exactly. It’s hard. I do really admire people. There are just unique challenges for all of it. In the end, you have to be your own boss. You have to give yourself your own deadlines. With my deadline for this coming-of-age middle grade that I finished, I was telling friends, “I’m a week behind. I know I finished it the next week, but I really wanted to get it done earlier. I’m really annoyed with myself.” And my friends will say, “But it’s your own deadline.” I treat my own deadlines like somebody else has imposed them.
FB I agree with that. I think the more discipline, the better off you are. So yeah.
Before we go, if you were a character from Alice in Wonderland, who would you be and why?
AK That’s a good question. As a drama major in my art school, every year you had a different focus and in grade 10 a lot of that was performance, putting together a little production. We were very fortunate in our year that we got to do Alice in Wonderland. I was cast as the White Queen, which is what I wanted and I loved playing her. I don’t think I had ever played a flighty character. I tend to get cast as intelligent, grounded human characters. I think the White Queen might have been the first sort of flighty, weird character I got to play. That meant a lot to me. I realized I like playing these characters. I just love the character and her wordplay. Her particular scene that she has with Alice, with all the wordplay, “tomorrow, yesterday, today.”
Growing up, I’d obviously seen the Disney movie. But there’s a TV version from 1985 and Carol Channing is the White Queen, and she has a song. I grew up with that version. The Jabberwock was so scary that I couldn’t watch half of it because it gave me nightmares, but I still loved it.
FB That is a very, very good answer. It might be the best answer of anybody that I’ve interviewed because not all have played the character. So it’s generational from the 80s.
AK I’ve always loved her. Of course, I did get to dress as your Alyss and that was amazing. I need to wear that jacket again.
FB If people wanted to start reading your work, where would you suggest they start? Would you say something like Alex and the Ironic Gentleman or The Explorers?
AK I’m approaching 20 years since Alex came out, which blows my mind. It’s just a very weird feeling. There’s one boy who wrote this really great review. He sent me an email for Alex, probably one of the first kids who emailed me about a book. I reached out and we had this whole chat. He was 13 at the time, and now he’s an author.
But I do think Alex is still out there. It hasn’t gone out of print, actually, which is very exciting. A few years ago, pre-COVID, I was in LA and went into The Last Bookstore, and the one thing they had Alex. I was thrilled that Alex was the one that was there. So if you can find Alex and the Ironic Gentleman that was quite seminal as it’s my first book. But if you can’t, yes, go with The Explorers because that’s out there. That’s Random House.
FB Thank you so much. This has been a real pleasure. You have such a diverse creative life. I think it’s really inspiring.
AK Thanks for having me. It’s so nice to see you again.