I had the opportunity to interview Nova Ren Suma, the author of A Room Away From the Wolves, which has now been released! The young adult novel features a dark and mysterious story about a girl who’s found herself at a boarding house for girls. However, the house that might be haunted by more than just the ghosts of these girls’ pasts, but something much more sinister…
Nova Ren Suma is the author of A Room Away from the Wolves, a ghost story set in a refuge for troubled girls deep in the heart of New York City, and the #1 New York Times bestselling The Walls Around Us, a finalist for an Edgar Award. She also wrote Imaginary Girls and 17 & Gone and is co-creator of FORESHADOW: A Serial YA Anthology. She has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts. She grew up in the Hudson Valley, spent most of her adult life in New York City, and now lives in Philadelphia. Find her online as @novaren on Twitter and Instagram and at novaren.com.
What was your writing process like while writing A Room Away From the Wolves?
I was lost in a forest. The forest was dark, I couldn’t find my way, and I kept getting myself tangled up in the trees. Thankfully I had the help of a brilliant editor who aided me in smoothing out the knots and led me to lightbulb realisations, and I had a partner who talked me through the most frustrating plot points during many a late night cry session, and without them both I’d still be lost in the forest to this day. When I read the typeset pages for the first time, I had the most gorgeous moment seeing what the book had become. I felt so happy, it made me want to dive in and start a whole new book all so I can do this punishing yet ultimately rewarding process all over again… Will I never learn?
Can you tell us a little about your inspiration in writing Bina and Monet’s characters?
Some parts of Bina came from myself, from experiences I had as a girl, and from my own starry-eyed dream to move to New York City—a dream I chased as soon as I was old enough. The idea for Monet, Bina’s enigmatic downstairs neighbour, came not from anyone I knew in real life… but from a book. I always loved how the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s is wondrously told through the eyes of an unnamed narrator who becomes enamoured by his neighbour, the young woman who lives in the apartment below. She’s a mystery to him, one not fully solved by the book’s end, so even the reader is left wondering who she is now, and where in the world she might be. This was a direct inspiration for Monet Mathis, the enigmatic, smooth-talking downstairs neighbour in A Room Away from the Wolves.
If you could sit down and have coffee with any of the characters in your story, which one would you pick and why?
In A Room Away from the Wolves, my narrator Bina is effectively obsessed with her downstairs neighbour, Monet. She even goes so far as to eavesdrop on her, or try to, through the floorboards, hoping some secrets will travel their way into her ear. I’m just as fascinated by Monet, and even after writing a whole novel featuring her, I still see her as a puzzle to be solved, not near trustworthy and definitely still carrying a good number of secrets. Maybe if we sat down to coffee, she’d tell me just one.
Were any of the characters, Catherine House, or even Catherine de Barra herself based on real life?
Diehard PJ Harvey fans will recognise the name Catherine de Barra—yes, the song “Catherine” is where the name came from. The opening lyrics are:
Catherine de Barra, you’ve murdered my thinking
I gave you my heart, you left the thing stinking
I’d break from your spell if it weren’t for my drinking
And the wind bites more bitter with each light of morning
But that was only my mind whirring and making inventions from something I heard in a song, and the story obviously followed other paths. The boardinghouse in the book—Catherine House—is based on a real place. Years ago I found an old article in The New York Times that got its claws in me. It was about one of the last running boardinghouses for young women in New York City, a women’s residence on West 13th Street in the Village called Katharine House. I was fascinated by its history and all the rules—the curfew, the parlour where male visitors could come only at certain hours—and, when I did more research, by a small mention of a girl who fell onto the spikes of an iron gate outside, a tragedy that haunted witnesses on the sidewalk. I wondered what it would be like if such a place were still open today… and, of course, filled with magic. That’s how my own Catherine House was born.
Do you think that you’ll be revisiting the world of A Room Away From the Wolves?
Even though I write standalone novels, my YA books still contain threads of connection—they have conversations with one another, as if they’re part of one larger set. For example, Bina is a 17-year-old runaway from the Hudson Valley… and in another novel, 17 & Gone, I tell the story of a girl named Lauren, also in the Hudson Valley, who is haunted by the ghosts of missing 17-year-old girls and tries to save one of them… the idea of Bina and Lauren coming into contact if only inside my head is surreal and kind of perfect. There’s also a haunted house in each of these books.
So I don’t necessarily see a direct sequel for A Room Away from the Wolves… but I see ways to connect back to the world and continue the conversation in future books.
Do you have a favourite horror story that you find yourself coming back to time after time?
I’ve read The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson about three times now, and each time it terrifies me and I have trouble sleeping after. There’s a certain passage that frightens me most of all—if you’ve read the book, it involves a hand being held in a dark bedroom… a hand that isn’t there when the lights are turned on—and I go back to this passage again and again, reading it aloud to myself and others, trying to understand how it can be so chilling when nothing scary is ever described in specifics. That there is the magic of the book: It’s a ghost story, but you never see a ghost—all the while you’re questioning the sanity of the teller, and even of yourself. That’s precisely why it’s so terrifying.
What has been one of the hardest characters to write about in any of your stories?
Fathers are always difficult for me to write—fathers and stepfathers. They may be minor characters in the story, barely on the page, but their impact ripples forward and is felt in the lives of my characters, sometimes in terrible ways. I found the scenes in The Walls Around Us involving what my narrator Amber ultimately did or didn’t do to her stepfather to be emotionally draining to write, but cathartic and so necessary to the book. And in A Room Away from the Wolves, the scene when Bina confronts her estranged father was one I was circling around for months… but when I found it, it came out in a glorious explosion, kind of like what happens in the scene itself.
What are some of the things that help you focus when you’re working on a project?
I’ve tried the usual advice like caffeine and internet-blocking software and hiding my phone. I also like to take walks around the block—orbiting dozens of times, notebook at the ready in case words start spilling. But the most effective method to gather my focus and plunge deep into a scene is to build a writing tent. Don’t laugh! The writing tent is made from scarves and sheets and blankets and is a small contraption built over the top of a desk. I sit at the desk and hide my upper body and laptop inside it—only that; the rest is darkness, no lamp, no lights. In the writing tent, I get fully immersed, only myself and the scene. I can’t do it all the time (who wants to live with such an ugly, bulky contraption on your desk every day?), so I save it for moments when it’s most necessary. My last resort.
Can you tell us how you got started with writing, and what authors might have inspired you?
I don’t know if I would have become a writer if my mother wasn’t such a voracious reader, and if I didn’t follow in her footsteps and devour all the books on her shelves after she was done reading them. This is how I discovered Margaret Atwood when I was about twelve years old. The first book was Cat’s Eye, and after that I read The Handmaid’s Tale—and while I fully admit I didn’t understand all the nuances and meanings in either story—reading these books left me completely hooked. They made me want to write my own stories, too.
Are you working on any projects currently, and are you able to tell us about them?
I’m in the very early stages of a new novel, when everything feels electric and full of possibility and I don’t even know if there’s a forest to get lost in yet. It’s still so fresh, I can’t talk about it… But there’s another project I’d love to tell you about, and it’s not about my writing—it’s potentially about yours. It’s called FORESHADOW: A Serial YA Anthology, and it’s a new online venue to publish YA short stories. My co-editor-in-chief and fellow author Emily X.R. Pan and I created this project to offer a new opportunity for writers, and our mission is to highlight marginalised voices and emerging authors. We recently launched our debut issue to the world, Issue Zero, featuring stories by Dhonielle Clayton, Samantha Mabry, and a new never-before-published voice Nora Elghazzawi, whose story was selected by Nicola Yoon. We’re open for submissions for our 2019 issues right now! I hope you’ll check us out and read Issue Zero!
A Room Away From The Wolves is now available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers.
