Guest post written by author E. K. Johnston
E. K. Johnston is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of several YA novels, including the L.A. Time Book Prize finalist The Story of Owen and Star Wars: Ahsoka. Her novel A Thousand Nights was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award. The New York Times called The Story of Owen “a clever first step in the career of a novelist who, like her troubadour heroine, has many more songs to sing” and in its review of Exit, Pursued by a Bear, The Globe & Mail called Johnston “the Meryl Streep of YA,” with “limitless range.” E. K. Johnston lives in Stratford, Ontario.
Aetherbound started with a text message: 🐝🐝🐝🐝
The year was 2015. My second book, Prairie Fire, had just come out, and I was doing some traveling to promote it. Something I did to amuse myself in airports was text my agent, Josh Adams, where I was going and what I was doing, but only use emojis to do it. This would invariably garner the reply “I don’t speak emoji and the girls are at school, but have fun!” which always made me smile. I was on my way to Kansas when he asked for a movie recommendation, and I said that Jupiter Ascending had been wacky fun. The next day, in the airport again, I texted him four bees, and he immediately responded with how wild and ridiculous the movie had been.
“I’m going to steal it,” I said. “But with magic instead of vampires.”
“I can’t wait,” he said.
He did, though.
Aetherbound is the longest simmering book I’ve ever worked on. I had the idea for the world in Kansas in 2015. I met Pendt Harland on the I-90 in Upstate New York two weeks later. I realized Fisher’s name could double as the Fisher King at Skara Brae, Orkney, in 2017. I was driving home from Newfoundland in 2018, building space stations in my mind as I crossed the Maritimes. In 2019, I went to Norway and saw the midnight sun, and I thought I might finally be able to start writing.
This all makes it sound like Aetherbound is a huge epic that required me to travel the globe before I could sink my teeth into it, but that’s not exactly true. I traveled because I could, and because work-related travel for research is a tax write-off. I went and saw all those things because I could afford to, because my back had healed enough to carry a backpack for two weeks. It’s a big world out there, and Aetherbound’s world is big too, but the story is personal, something you can hug tight to your chest for warmth.
When the pandemic started, I, like billions of other people, had to completely re-engineer my life. I had never taken food for granted, exactly, but suddenly I was responsible for literally everything I ate (and all the clean up, which is no fun). I had to plan meals days in advance to get my grocery order in, and then I had to stick to it, or things would rot in my fridge. I made bread. I taught myself to make pie. I learned that I am actually a pretty good cook, when I have time to build a pantry. I resented it, though, because I was by myself. Aetherbound was always built around food (not being able to just stop for milk is my favourite thing about space stories), but during lockdown, it became about hunger and want and isolation, too.
In the early chapters of Aetherbound, my guiding concept was “how can Pendt’s family be worse?” It wasn’t fun to come up with more and more ways for them to abuse her. As I read reports of increasing domestic violence and exacerbated mental health problems, it was almost too easy to imagine ways to be terrible. But that wasn’t everything that was happening. My neighbours would stop to take pictures of each other’s flower gardens. There was sidewalk chalk art everywhere. You could always tell when someone was having a birthday or an anniversary. We shared flour and eggs and toilet paper, and taught our parents and grandparents how to use FaceTime. We grieved. And it sucked, but we did it together.
I drafted Aetherbound in July of 2020, at the end of a depression spiral. I was not in a good place. I could, at least, leave the house a bit, but I know I channeled a lot of pain into that book. I listened to Taylor Swift’s Lover album over and over and over again while I was writing. It became my emotional touchstone by choice. I wanted to find something good. I wanted to make happiness, somewhere. I wanted to choose love. And my characters did the same. They are building a world where they can be happy, regardless of what other people think. This is their house, they make the rules.
This essay was supposed to be about the inspiration for Aetherbound, and I think I might have gotten off track. At the same time, that was the point. You can’t plan a book for six years and expect it to hold still. You can’t live through what we’ve lived through and not make it part of your decision making process. I could tell you the book was inspired by Jupiter Ascending and the Fisher King mythology and the 1992 cod fishery collapse and Viking settlement patterns in the Atlantic and how much I love cheese, and all of those things would be true, but there’s that gaping wound we’re still trying to patch up, and I don’t want to leave that out.
Aetherbound grew. It grew with me for half a decade while I learned the truth of the words “There is a fine line between survival and cruelty.” Now, it’s time for Aetherbound to grow with you. May you always have enough to eat.
