We chat with author Nova Ren Suma about Wake The Wild Creatures, which is an extraordinary, timely, and must-read novel that explores freedom and rage as a young woman plots her way back to her hidden mountaintop home after her mother’s arrest for murder.
Hi, Nova! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
I write strange, sometimes fantastical novels about girls and young women. I’m fascinated by places lost on maps and lost to time, which you can find in some of my books, including Imaginary Girls (a town drowned at the bottom of a reservoir), The Walls Around Us (a girls’ juvenile detention center haunted by ghosts), and now Wake the Wild Creatures (an off-grid community of fugitive women built in an abandoned Catskill Mountain hotel). I love sad songs, short stories, and unreliable narrators. Wake the Wild Creatures may not be autobiographical in terms of plot, but it’s the book containing the most honest and bared parts of me that I’ve ever written… so far.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
In elementary school I wrote a story about an alien family from Venus. I bound it as a book and used my colored markers to illustrate the scenes. My teacher’s praise about it filled me with a great sense of joy and purpose. I was intensely shy as a child—I didn’t speak in class, though I read voraciously—and I discovered that I could speak through my writing in a way I wasn’t able to otherwise. Writing became a lifeline and has been ever since.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: The Dorrie the Little Witch books by Patricia Coombs. I was a messy little girl who wished to be a witch, so I deeply related to the protagonist.
- The one that made you want to become an author: Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood. The one that you can’t stop thinking about: The Seas by Samantha Hunt.
Your latest novel, Wake The Wild Creatures, is out May 6th! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
A broken world? Take shelter.
What can readers expect?
Wake the Wild Creatures is a YA story of survival with a touch of the fantastic about a girl named Talia who is captured from an off-grid community of fugitive women hidden at an abandoned hotel deep in the mountains. After her mother’s arrest for murder, Talia is forced to enter what she’s always been so frightened to imagine: the outside world. There she lives with estranged family she never knew existed and tries to understand who betrayed her community, her own possible role in it, and, ultimately, find her way back home.
This is a character-driven story that immerses the reader in Talia’s experience both at the occupied hotel on the mountain as a child and in the broken society below, where she’s sixteen and knows she doesn’t belong. Readers will find flawed and fierce women and girls in this book, and a healthy amount of female rage. There’s also an element of magic or, perhaps, magical thinking connected to the natural world. This is a story for survivors, for dreamers, for outcasts, and for anyone who wants to consider living a different kind of life of their own making.
Where did the inspiration for Wake The Wild Creatures come from?
Novels come from a thousand disconnected sources, and this one stemmed from my wild childhood running free in the woods, my mother’s band of women friends, the generational effects of trauma on young children, an ongoing fascination with female outlaws and fugitives, and challenging my own pessimism about humanity and the concept of utopias. That’s a lot.
But at the same time, there was one single spark that set this book idea into motion: A birthday present. I keep sharing this, but I must give credit where credit is due: Libba Bray, one of my favorite authors and a friend, gifted me a piece of art for my birthday years ago. It was a pen-and-ink drawing called “Daughters of the Forest” by an artist named Megan Eckman and it has a touch of possible magic in it, like a fairy tale. That glimmer of magic surprised me because I didn’t catch it in the picture at first, and from that surprise the seeds of this book emerged.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I love writing chaos and discomforting moments of confusion and even, when called for, violence. One of my favorite sequences in Wake the Wild Creatures takes place when Talia is a child, when she’s deep in the woods with a few other girls from the community and they spy a set of intruders. Three men have hiked up the mountain to find the hidden community and do the women there harm, and the girls make their best attempt to protect everyone and defend their home. Writing the frenzy of what happens to those men who should never have tried to trespass thrilled me.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
This book did break me, and it did take years to write. There was an agonizing point a few years ago when I lost all confidence and didn’t think I could articulate the story the way it deserved. I fantasized about stepping away from the book. But when you’re about to let go of something, right at that emotional edge, if it’s really a thing you’re meant to do, you won’t be able to give it up. That moment motivated me and I threw myself into revising the book and proving I could make it into something beautiful.
To overcome the low point, I decided to leap ahead and write the end of the book I wished I’d written… I visualized everything I imagined the novel could be in my wildest dreams and pretended I’d already written it that way. Then I wrote just the last page of that version of the book and pinned it to my wall. On the harder days, I would read those three paragraphs aloud and remind myself of what I was striving for and writing toward. And funny thing, the last three paragraphs in the finished book are pretty much what I had on my wall for all that time. I think seeing the end up there made me believe I could actually rewrite the whole book.
What’s next for you?
I’m in the early stages of a strange new YA novel, and those exploratory days of finding the story before the pressure sets in are always filled with such wonder and possibility. But for some time now I’ve also been working on a novel that’s very much not YA—it’s a return to what I first wrote when I was starting out as a writer, and what I’d originally longed to publish. A dream deferred only grows into a dream that has teeth. This, too, is something I can’t give up, so now it’s time I answer it.
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up this year?
I’m eager for some daring, ferocious, imaginative short stories. I’m looking forward to reading some new collections, including Hellions by Julia Elliott, Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda, The Pink Agave Motel by V. Castro, Green Frog by Gina Chung, and Exit Zero by Marie-Helene Bertino. And Mariana Enríquez has a new book of essays coming out called Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave, about her journeys through cemeteries, so obviously that’s a book for me.
