We had the pleasure of chatting to author Gavriel Savit about his new novel The Way Back, which draws inspiration from the Jewish folk tradition and it’s a dark adventure sure to captivate readers of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book and Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust.
Hi, Gavriel! Tell us a bit about yourself!
Hello! I’m Gavriel Savit, author of Anna and the Swallow Man and The Way Back. I’m currently living in Springfield, Illinois, though I’ve moved around a fair bit in my life. Before here, my family and I were in New Haven, Connecticut, and I spent many years in New York City where I was lucky enough to work for some time as a Broadway actor.
With the current state of the world, what are you doing to cope with the changes we’ve had to make with our day-to-day?
Oh, man. Deep breathing? Writing full time is a relatively easy line of work to keep at during a global pandemic—most of my time is spent typing away in the proverbial garret anyway. What I miss most is traveling. New experience is the fuel of invention, and I’m certainly hungry for it right now. What I have done is doubled down on my reading, making sure to find time for it even when it seems impossible. It’s really keeping me sane.
When did you first discover your love for writing?
I never really planned for a life as a writer—it just didn’t occur to me. I started writing seriously in a lull in my acting career while looking for something to keep me creatively invested. But looking back, I’d been playing around with writing my whole life: embarrassingly derivative stories as a kid, embarrassingly sappy poetry in high school, embarrassingly pompous plays in college. I think I was in love with writing the whole time and just hadn’t noticed.
Your new novel, The Way Back, it is out November 17th! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
“Until we meet again, friend.”
Now tell us a little more! What can readers expect to find in The Way Back?
The Way Back follows the spooky adventures of two 19th century Jewish kids, Bluma and Yehuda Leib, as they travel from the little shtetl of Tupik deep into the heart of the Far Country, the land of Death and demons—and hopefully, manage to find the way back.
What inspired you to write The Way Back?
I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household reading boatloads of fantasy. I always saw such potential in the meeting of the two—fantastical stories and traditional Judaism—but even now there are relatively few fantasy novels you could reasonably call Jewish. When I was a kid, I couldn’t find any. The Way Back was conceived, in part, as a way to share the magic deeply ingrained in my culture with fantasy readers who might never have encountered it. But The Way Back is also a book about Death. In early 2017, I lost someone very close to me far, far too early. It was a crushing blow, and I also wrote this book in part to find out how I felt—to, in some sense, find my own way back.
Is there a scene, element, or character you really enjoyed creating and writing in The Way Back?
Toward the middle of the book, our protagonists converge at a swarming of demons in an old cemetery. I had a lot of fun coming up with lots of different things to go bump in the night—both the ridiculous and the terrifying. There was a very specific atmosphere that I had in mind—a kind of Quidditch World Cup for demonkind. I hope I succeeded!
Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?
With thanks to Neil Gaiman from whom I first heard a similar formulation, here’s what I have to offer:
Start things. Finish them. Make them better. Repeat.
That’s the whole game—from there, it’s just about tricking yourself into doing it more and better.
What’s next for you?
I’m currently hard at work on my third novel. With any luck, it should be coming soon, but I can’t say too much about it yet—I’m a bit superstitious.
Lastly, are you currently reading anything and do you have any book recommendations for our readers?
Absolutely—my big recommendation these days is Susanna Clarke’s new Piranesi. It’s short and propulsive and captivating and deeply magical. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!
