Interviewed by Isaiah Flair.
Editor’s Note: Susan Cooper is one of the preeminent fantasy fiction authors of the last 50 years. Her popular series, The Dark Is Rising, has influenced generations of readers. She won the American Library Association’s Margaret A. Edwards Award for writing “one of the most influential epic high fantasies in literature” and is the current 2024 recipient of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association’s award for writing excellence. Susan Cooper gave an exclusive written interview to Isaiah Flair for publication in The University Bookman.
The best fantasy fiction is a tonic for readers, playing emotional chords that fortify the spirit like an unexpected rainfall fortifies a forgotten flower in the middle of a barren field. G.K. Chesterton wrote about what fantasy fiction, specifically fairy tales, can do in his most iconic passage: “Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is known to the child already, because the child is in the world already.” Fairy tales do not stoke fear; they do not make the child imagine dragons where there are none. “The child has known the dragon ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”
In just 75 words, Chesterton established why fairy tales have resonated, at a primal level, with millions of people across centuries. He did that by outlining the structure of the innate psychological schema for which fairy tales are written. In doing so, he adeptly addressed the nature of fear, the inevitability of feeling fear in a world fraught with physical and emotional danger and even spiritual danger, and every subsequent need for the means to counter those dangers. This is the enormous power of fantasy fiction.
Few authors today are as successful at crafting stories that shape the imagination in the Chestertonian sense as Susan Cooper.
Nature is omnipresent in Cooper’s books. From storm clouds raging in the sky to gray mists quietly gathering around the summit of an ancient mountain, nature is almost a character of its own. Further, Cooper uses nature to set the graphic tone of her novels, but also to avoid the gratuitous violence that often mars work of this kind. In Cooper’s view,
Nature has always had a powerful place in my writing. When my editor read the first draft of the Dark Is Rising, she said, ‘Susan, there may be a little too much weather in this book….’ So maybe we took out a rainstorm somewhere—but of course that book in particular has the Dark using natural surroundings as a weapon. This is, I suppose, my substitute for graphic physical violence, which I’ve always avoided writing about, probably because there was so much of it around in Britain during my World War 2 childhood.
Central to fantasy fiction is the juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo is a normal young man, or so it seems, but he has an epic quest with wizards, necromancers, elves, and dwarves. His beloved Shire is simply a small country, out of the way of the great doings of the world, but it and its people shape the fate of many. J.R.R. Tolkien’s sense of place profoundly shaped his own sense. Ordinary becomes extraordinary through imaginative development.
Tolkien used the ordinary world to create an extraordinary one, or at least one where extraordinary things happened. But high fantasy also uses ordinary places where extraordinary things break through. As a fellow English author, Cooper captured the essential effect that place has upon an author’s craft of the setting of a story. According to Cooper:
The Dark is Rising books are rooted in a real world in which unreal things happen; this is most common in fantasies written by authors raised in Britain, like Alan Garner, Philip Pullman, and me, probably through the sense of inter-related time and place given us by the haunted history of our very old country. Fantasy writers from a young country like the USA, like Ursula Le Guin, are more likely to invent an entirely unreal world.
Contemporary Britain may be ordinary, but its ancient history provides a sense that there is always more to the ordinary than meets the eye. By exercising the moral imagination, the extraordinary may always break through.
While at Oxford University in the 1950s, she attended lectures given by two of the most famous luminaries in fantasy fiction history, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Tolkien lectured about Beowulf, and Lewis lectured about Renaissance Literature. Both were endowed with a moral imagination that colored their scholarship and fiction. When asked what she would say to them if she could talk to them now, Cooper replied:
I’d thank them—Tolkien for ending our English Literature reading list at the year 1832, thus making us focus on early and medieval lit, and Lewis for writing his early “fairy tales for adults,” Out of the Silent Planet and That Hideous Strength, which I enjoyed in my teens and thereafter.
As fans of both Tolkien and Lewis know, their brilliant books have been made into series and movies with varying degrees of quality. Cooper addressed the idea of her books being made into a miniseries, saying, “I would allow a TV adaptation of my books if the right director or producer came along, provided the contract gave me sufficient creative control—but that’s very uncommon.”
Every author whose books become successful has to decide how to preserve the artistic integrity of their work when it is translated into the medium of miniseries or movies. After all, the art of the books is integral to their nature and to the effect that they can have. Stories arising from the moral imagination can heal, teach, and give people better ways to be in their day-to-day lives.
From stories about brave warriors battling mighty dragons to epic sagas about magic rings and lyrical Arthurian tales set among mist-shrouded mountains, fantasy fiction has always connected with readers at the deepest level. Among the best writers of this genre is Susan Cooper, who writes beautifully poetic stories, like those of Tolkien and Lewis, that we will have with us for generations.
Those familiar with Tolkien’s writing habits know that the final draft came hard for him. He wrote and rewrote and rewrote. Asked for advice for the next generation of aspiring fantasy fiction writers, Cooper responds,
There’s no right pattern to follow: just sit down and write your story as it comes to you. Just write. If you find it has the same shape as something by a writer you especially admire, don’t worry: we all unconsciously imitate a bit in the beginning. Just keep on writing—and always remember the quote from my old friend Ursula Le Guin that has been attached to the screen of my computer for many years: “If you find that it is hard going and it just doesn’t flow, well, what did you expect? It is work; art is work. Nobody ever said it was easy. What they said was: Life is short, art is long.”
That is how one develops works of the moral imagination with the salutary staying power of Tolkien, Lewis, and, yes, Cooper.
Isaiah Flair is a content creator and marketing strategist who lives in the Pacific Northwest, between the evergreen forests and the sea.
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