Q&A: Kiyash Monsef, Author of 'Bird of a Thousand Stories'

We chat with author Kiyash Monsef about Bird of a Thousand Stories, which follows Marjan who travels around the globe in search of a mythical bird in terrible danger, whose fate could determine the future of the world. PLUS we have an excerpt to share with you at the end of the interview!

Hi, Kiyash! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?

Sure! I grew up in California. I’m an 80s kid, so I had all the Star Wars and Goonies and Indiana Jones influences, but I also had Iranian influences. My grandmother lived with us for a large part of my childhood, and listening to her tell stories in Farsi is a core memory. Before I was writing books, I was producing news and documentaries, and also writing and designing games and live experiences.

When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?

I started writing horror stories when I was in about third or fourth grade. I’d discovered that while my parents didn’t want to buy me Stephen King books, I could in fact check them out from the library, and so I was way into Skeleton Crew and Night Shift at that time. I think I was also just discovering HP Lovecraft. My first stories were terrible copies of Stephen King and HP Lovecraft, but I loved writing them.

Quick lightning round! Tell us:

The first book you ever remember reading: D’Aulaires Greek Myths
The one that made you want to become an author: Skeleton Crew
The one that you can’t stop thinking about: Right now it’s Tarka the Otter.

Bird of a Thousand Stories is the companion novel to Once There Was and it’s out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?

Quest, adventure, connectedness, cycles, healing

What can readers expect?

First of all, you can read this book without having read Once There Was. It works as a standalone, though some moments might be a bit more meaningful if you have read the first book. But to answer the question, I wanted to write a quest. The first book is more of a journey, but this book is very consciously a quest, in a pretty classical sense. So you can expect adventure, an epic scope, and some wild new creatures. It’s also a book about the power of stories, and the many ways that we tell them, so you can expect lots of storytelling interludes that play off of the main narrative in different ways.

Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring further?

This book was honestly a ton of fun to write. My favorite character, aside from Marjan (the heroine), is Malloryn, a teenage runaway who might or might not be a witch. She is always a blast to write, and she plays a big part in this story. And without spoiling anything, all the new creatures were really fun to think about and write.

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Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?

There are always challenges. Some are small and contained — getting a scene to land the way you want it to, for example. Maybe I have to write it three or four different ways, but it’s a contained challenge — it doesn’t affect the rest of the book. Then there are bigger organizational challenges — you have all these moments that you want to use, but maybe not all of them work in the story, or they work, but they’re in the wrong order, or they’ll work but you need to combine and condense them. Those are tougher puzzles to solve because every choice has consequences that ripple out into the fabric of the story, but that’s how I approach them — as puzzles. There is always a solution, and I just need to keep trying things until I find it. It’s a great privilege to get to write books, and even the hard parts are a privilege. I consider myself really lucky that these are the problems I get to solve.

What’s next for you?

There are definitely more stories to be told in the world of Once There Was and Bird of a Thousand Stories, and I hope I get to tell them. But the next thing I do might be something different. I think you can expect that whatever comes next will be a bit fantastical and a bit strange.

Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up in 2025?

This might be the year where I read the last Earthsea book. Ursula Le Guin in general and Earthsea in particular have been a huge influence on me, and I’ve had The Other Wind on my tbr for years, and have put it off because I know that there won’t be any more. But I think maybe it’s time.