Kari Sperring is the author of two novels (Living with Ghosts [DAW 2009]
and The Grass King’s Concubine [DAW 2012], the novella Serpent Rose
[NewCon Press 2019] and an assortment of short stories. As Kari
Maund, she has written and published five books and many articles on
Celtic and Viking history and co-authored a book on the history and
real people behind her favourite novel, The Three Musketeers (with
Phil Nanson). She’s British and lives in Cambridge, England, with
her partner Phil and three very determined cats, who guarantee that
everything she writes will have been thoroughly sat upon. Her website
is here and you can also find her on Facebook.
1.
Tell us three things about yourself. (If you’ve done this
previously, ideally tell us three different things than last time!)
I’m really not that interesting! Ummm…
I’m really not that interesting! Ummm…
1)
Since childhood, I’ve loved ankle-length skirts and as a result I’m
the proud custodian of the Cambridge Skirt Mountain. I keep and wear
them for years: the oldest one at present is about 30 years old (the
previous oldest, a much loved light denim number, sadly fell apart
about 8 years ago).
2)
I’m Anglo-Welsh: my mother is Welsh, my father partly Welsh, but
the families all lost the spoken language in the 19th century, when
it was heavily suppressed. I speak a bit – I used to be better, but
I am out of practice.
3)
Politically, I am waaay to the left – my twitter handle is
CBRedwriter (red in the Red Flag sense, for US readers, not the
GoP!). I grew up in a very politically active family, and was out
leafletting and canvasing with my mother from around 8. I’ve always
been left-wing and as I’ve got older, I’ve got increasingly
anti-nationalist, too, because it is always, in the end, exclusive.
Minority and oppressed cultures and peoples must be protected and
supported: I won’t compromise on that. But I don’t like arbitrary
boundaries based on accent, ethnicity, language, culture or anything
else of that kind.
I
think it’s been mixed, for me. At the start, I was more productive:
my partner Phil has been working for home, and I found that helpful.
I also really appreciate the drop in traffic noise. At the same time,
I’ve been working with my local mutual aid group and that can be
distracting – I do a lot of monitoring the various help-lines and
it’s sometimes hard to concentrate when you have one eye on the
email all the time. But I have also had days where I have found it
hard to get motivated, which is probably at least partly due to the
background stress levels out there.
3.
What was the first thing you had published?
The
very first thing was an academic article on the mid-11th century
Welsh king Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, in the journal Cambridge Mediaeval
Celtic Studies (now Cambrian Mediaeval Celtic Studies). I wasn’t
paid: academic journals don’t pay, in general. But it was my very
first professional publication. My first professional fiction
publication was a short story called ‘Strong Brown God’, in
Glorifying Terrorism, ed. Farah Mendlesohn. About books and water and
ending repression, so the socialist flag was already flying.
4.
Which piece of writing are you proudest of?
Oh,
that’s hard. I am never completely satisfied with anything I write,
because I never feel that the end product has captured completely the
image I had in my head. Academically speaking, it would be either my
first book, Ireland,
Wales and England in the Eleventh Century,
because it opened up a debate about some of the fixed ideas and
embedded prejudices in the field (particularly around the nature of
legitimate kingship), or a paper I wrote on Denmark (‘A Turmoil of
Warring Princes: Political Leadership in Ninth-Century Denmark’)
because it was new territory and brought together materials that had
been neglected. In terms of fiction…. I really don’t know. Maybe
the novella Serpent Rose,
because it’s so different to the rest of my writing.
5.
…and which makes you cringe?
Everything
I wrote for Star
Trek
fanzines in my teens! And, well, there’s at least one story out
there that I don’t like much, but the editor will probably kill me
if I say which one. Oh, and the current draft of what I’m working
on – a state of affairs which is true of everything I write.
A
lot of cats! I log into my writing group’s chat room, look at and
deal with email and anything else that’s come in of that kind, try
and tidy my desk a bit, talk to Phil or a cat, open a file, look at
Facebook, peer at the file, read the news online, wonder what the
hell I thought I was doing when I wrote that last paragraph, look at
Facebook, sigh a lot, add some new words, hate the new words, look at
news online, mutter about how much I hate the w-i-p, add some new
words, fuss a cat, add some new words…. Something like that.
7.
What work of yours would you recommend for people on lockdown and in
need of a good book?
Living with Ghosts, because it’s fairly pacey for me; or, in non-fiction, The Four Musketeers: the true story of D’Artagnan, Porthos, Aramis and Athos, which I co-wrote with Phil.
Living with Ghosts, because it’s fairly pacey for me; or, in non-fiction, The Four Musketeers: the true story of D’Artagnan, Porthos, Aramis and Athos, which I co-wrote with Phil.
8.
What are you working on now?
The
book that will not end, aka A
Fire of Bones,
which ties together Living
With Ghosts
and The
Grass King’s Concubine.
