An Interview with Lissa Sloan

One of my favorite books I’ve read in the last year was Lissa Sloan’s debut novel, Glass and Feathers. I wrote a review of it this past February that you can read here. And I am honored to be a stop on Lissa’s blog tour.

Lissa was kind enough to send an autographed giveaway copy of her incredible book. If you’re interested in winning and live in the United States, please comment on my public Facebook post here! I’ll randomly select a lucky winner and send this wonderful story your way.

And without further ado, here is a fun Q&A with Lissa Sloan.

Can you tell us a little about how the story first came to you/came to be?

The original concept of “what if, after the royal wedding, the princess in the glass slippers finds that her famous shoes no longer fit her?” was something that just popped into my head. Or it seemed to at the time. I wrote a poem called “Sliver,” which I liked quite a bit but never did anything with, because I felt there was more to it, more I could expand into a short story. And when I did, I realized there were so many thoughts and experiences that had been brewing inside me for years that contributed to this idea, ranging from my wedding shoes suddenly becoming too tight, to not fitting in school, to getting scarred by a piece of glass when I was little. I put that story down unfinished, but when I took it back up years later, I realized it was not a story but a novel, and one I was very excited to start writing.

For anyone interested in reading that original poem, it is available as an exclusive welcome gift to subscribers of my email newsletter. Signup is at lissasloan.com.

Glass and Feathers was first released in serial form in Fairy Tale Magazine. How did you choose where to split the dividing points of the story? What was that experience like? Was it interesting to see/hear peoples’ reactions as they read along and wondered where the story might go?

Releasing Glass and Feathers with The Fairy Tale Magazine was an amazing collaborative experience! I felt so spoiled by how personal it was. My editor, Kate Wolford, and I had worked closely together on the manuscript as a novel for probably eight or nine months doing rewrites and getting feedback from beta readers. So we didn’t start splitting it out into sections until much closer to the serial release. At that point, I made note of the length and main action of each chapter. From there, we looked at where to make the section breaks so they were kind of equal in length and each felt like it ended at a good stopping point. We tried to arrange things so that readers would be curious about what would happen next, but didn’t want to be unkind, either. Once we had this figured out, Kate and I would do a final edit of each section, then send it to Amanda Bergloff, who was the amazing Art Director of FTM at the time. In addition to doing the layout, Amanda would create a new black and white illustration for each section. I felt like Amanda had been looking inside my mind. It was always so exciting for me to see what she’d come up with! And it was such fun to read comments as the serialization went along to see what people reading it for the first time were saying.

In the first part of the book, our Cinderella goes through a dark night of the soul of sorts. Was it hard to have to put your character through that? Did you struggle at all with transference of emotions, with feeling more bleak as the writer when she was going through her bleak part of the story?

Part one does see the narrator having a really rough time. When it comes to how she is treated first by her stepfamily, then her in-laws, she has gone from the frying pan into the fire, although the treatment now is couched in niceties. She is being held to impossible standards, and there’s no way she can ever be the girl the court expects her to be. When I originally wrote this part, I was subconsciously processing similar experiences I’d had, so it wasn’t hard. Actually, it was quite cathartic. It was a relief to write about, because these were feelings I wasn’t able to face head on by admitting to anyone—even myself. But, by the time the final rewrites came around, I was at last able to see my own experiences more clearly. And editing with increased knowledge of how personal this book is for me did make that final set of edits quite emotional to work on.

Glass and Feathers talks about healing and ending the cycle of self abuse because of trauma. What advice would you have to anyone struggling in a similar situation?

While I didn’t realize it originally, I wrote this book to imagine a path toward healing for myself. For the all the years I was working on it, I was telling myself a story about my life and experiences that I couldn’t hear any other way. And I needed to see how it could end to map out that journey for myself.

You know how people say to write the book you’d like to read? Glass and Feathers was a book I needed to write, and to read. But it’s felt really good to have readers tell me the book moved them. And my biggest hope for the book is that it keeps finding those readers who will connect with it. So, if you see yourself in my girl with the glass slippers, if you’ve been where she is, and especially if you are there now, I see you. You are worthy of love and belonging. I believe healing is possible.

Life doesn’t always move forward in the order we hear about in stories. In this story, our Cinderella gets her happily ever after, but external change of situation doesn’t always mean internal healing or happiness. Have you ever had a situation where life didn’t occur in the order it is supposedly “meant” to, but it worked out for the best? Or perhaps something that seemed to be a curse wound up as a blessing?

Oh, absolutely! And Glass and Feathers is very much about that for me. My original choice of degree and career was not right for me. I started acting at a very young age, and I loved everything about it. But it was very much like the kind of attention and approval Cinderella receives when she dresses up in beautiful clothes and takes the royal ball by storm. It got me focusing on all the wrong things. As I got into college, I started getting messages that this world was damaging me, but for a long time, I ignored them. It took me a long time before I realized I had to walk away. And you know what? I don’t miss it. I regret willingly staying in an atmosphere that was harmful to me for so long, but I can only move forward and make better choices from now on.

On your social media and newsletters you share various Cinderella stories. Did you find these in book research, and do you continue to find new ones?

My research for the book was mainly centered on details of 18th century Europe as well as plants and herbal remedies, which enter into the book later on. The Cinderella variation I used was Aschenputtel, which is the version from the Brothers Grimm. There was one notable exception, though. Aschenputtel has golden slippers, but because glass slippers have such a strong association with this story, I used those, which were made famous by Charles Perrault’s Cendrillon.

I have had such fun sharing different Cinderella variations from around the world on social media! (I do this every Tuesday using the hashtags #FairyTaleTuesday, #notdisneyprincess, and #AnotherCinderella.) So far my main reference for my posts is Marian Roalfe Cox’s Cinderella, Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-Five Variants of Cinderella, Catskin and Cap O’ Rushes. I have a print copy, but there is a super-cool digitized version on the Sur La Lune Fairy Tales site. At this point, I have stayed with the Cinderella tales with only an occasional reference to a Catskin or Cap O’ Rushes type story. (These are similar to Cinderella tales but have some differences that set them apart.) So, yes, there are still many more tales to discover. I love the variety of them, especially when I find versions that include elements from other well-known tales like Rapunzel, Snow White, etc. It’s completely fascinating!

What is your favorite fairy tale? If it is Cinderella, what are some other favorites, and might we someday read your twists on those?

Actually, Cinderella isn’t my favorite tale. I think the versions I was familiar with growing up (based on Perrault’s version) felt passive and kind of uninteresting to me. She was just there to be pretty. Now, of course, I know what a wide variety of Cinderella tales there are, and I appreciate her much more. But I do have many other favorites. I love tales of Death and the Devil in which they act a lot like ordinary mortals, so I have plans to mash some of those stories up in a novel. I’d also love to reimagine All-Kinds-of-Fur and Bearskin in the Glass and Feathers universe as novels. But for now, I’m working on a short story that takes place during Glass and Feathers. It’s based on The Goose Girl, and I hope to be able to share it soon.

If you could have a witch-made cloak made from nature, would it be made from feathers, or something else?

Oooh, I love this question! I really would love to see both of the cloaks I wrote about in Glass and Feathers (one of fur and fabrics, the other of feathers). But I wrote about another kind of cloak recently that I’d love to see. It was in a reimagining of Cap O’ Rushes, which is an English version of Cinderella. The heroine in my story (you can listen to it here) weaves leaves of all different kinds into her cloak of rushes. I’d love to have a living green cloak with vines and leaves and moss and maybe even flowers woven all together into a garment good enough for any fey creature.

It's been delightful chatting, Grace! Thank you for inviting me!