Guest post written by The Enchanted Lies of Céleste Artois author Ryan Graudin
Ryan Graudin is the award-winning author of ten novels, including the Carnegie nominated Wolf By Wolf duology, Invictus, The Walled City and the The World Between Blinks series. She resides near Charleston, South Carolina with her husband and two daughters. You can find her online at www.ryangraudin.com.
My family has a special claim to Bigfoot lore. My mother, aunts and grandparents all shared tales of their firsthand encounters with “the Mount Vernon Monster” in the woods behind their house in Virginia in the late 1970s. How my grandfather heard a banging sound on the side of his shed while working there, how he ran outside and found himself face to face with a towering furred figure. Or how my mother saw the creature’s head sticking out from behind the tree of their neighbors’ backyard. Or how my aunt witnessed a pair of the creatures—a mother and child—digging through their trashcan in broad daylight. Or how my grandmother provided detailed sketches of her own multiple sightings. How seeing them sent chills up my spine.
I know how it sounds. Incredible. Improbable. Insane.
I loved listening to these stories as a child, staring out over my grandmother’s swimming pool into the endlessly green forest where the monster once roamed. Even as an adult I found myself utterly enraptured by a box of my grandmother’s “field notes,” where she documented the nights she sat up waiting for signs of the monster. A footprint, a scream, a flash of brown fur. But I seldom share this story because I can see the way people’s faces change, whenever I relay my relatives’ eyewitness accounts. Their eyebrows rise, their mouths pinch, and I know exactly what they aren’t saying out loud. Plenty of people did call my grandmother crazy for sitting up all those nights, watching those dark wood. If the scientists at the Smithsonian couldn’t provide proof of this monster after their sweep of the woods behind Mount Vernon, they reasoned, then it didn’t exist.
I never thought that though. Perhaps it’s because these stories were told to me during the enchanted, hazy days of a childhood summer. Magic is much easier to see when you are young…
Despite the mythic quality of my relatives’ stories, there’s a part of me that will always believe them. I must trust that there are corners of our world we do not fully understand. Because if magic and miracles don’t exist, then what are we left with? An unending scroll of wars and school shootings and political vitriol. A future where my daughters’ rights are stripped away, where housing and medical care and other basic human needs are hopelessly out of reach.
That seems pretty damn bleak.
No, we need something to hope in. I need to hear my daughters’ laugh and cry out “fairy!” when my iPhone’s reflection casts light on the car roof. I need them to find wonder in the everyday… because if they don’t learn to do it as children, how will they be able to face the world as adults?
Hope isn’t something that just blooms out of the blue, however. Hope is an exercise in faith. In imagination. In bravery.
These are all concepts I explore in my newest novel The Enchanted Lies of Céleste Artois. The magic system in this book is directly tied to characters’ imaginations. Artists who visit La Fée Verte’s magical Parisian salon can bring their ideas to life. Painters are able to explore their own landscapes. Couturiers can conjure dresses made of rainbows. Poets can pull flaming tigers from their minds. Ideas have power in this universe—a prospect that is very appealing to the three young women who feature as the book’s main characters. The story is set in 1913, a time when women couldn’t even open their own bank accounts. Céleste, Honoré and Sylvie have each felt this world’s injustice in their own way. Orphaned, abused, left to starve in Paris’s streets, they choose to rise above their situation the only way they know how: by conning rich men into buying forged art. While this lines her pockets, it doesn’t leave Céleste feeling any better about their situation. Her dreams of becoming a renowned artist in her own right seem beyond reach.
Until she discovers magic. …
I purposefully set this book at the dawn of The War to End All Wars. In 1913, Paris was in the very last stages of what is now known as the Belle Epoque. The Beautiful Age. A period of optimism, enlightenment, and great innovation. All of this fell apart in 1914, the beginning of
Les Années Folles. The Years of Madness. Europe became a battlefield, a charnel house, a mass grave for millions upon millions of people. Yet, what struck me as I researched the war, was the prevalence of trench art. Soldiers weren’t just fighting in the miserable muddy trenches. They were also writing poems and painting landscapes and engraving artillery shells. World War One ultimately became one of the largest outpourings of art in the 20th century. Why was that? How, in the midst of so much gruesome death, were these soldier poets able to find the words? How did they paint angels? How were their imaginations powerful enough to see past all of the mud and blood and death?
In Enchanted Lies, I tackle these questions with literal magic. For my two daughters, I must take a different route. I must let them dress up as princesses and hunt for pirate treasure and see dragons in the clouds. I let them get paint on their clothes and sing off-key songs at the top of their lungs, because if there’s one thing my grandmother taught me it’s that true magic is inherited.
Magic is so much easier to see when you are young:
The sound of a sea tucked inside of a seashell.
Fairy wings whisperings at the edge of a thick wood.
The scent of snow-covered pines through a wardrobe door.
The way your family cat stares fixedly at the phantom beside you.
Or your ability to transform into a princess by tying together a string of flowers for a crown.
Wishes are everywhere—in four-leaf clovers and eyelashes and birthday candles. You never doubt whether or not they’ll come true. You just believe. And your world is so much brighter. That is the true magic; the inherent ability to understand that some things transcend the hum-drum order that adult have accustomed themselves to, day in and day out. I am arming my daughters with creativity and hope. For when you are able to imagine a better world, you have the power to make it so.
