The Raconteur's Commonplace Book

I have always been a big fan of Kate Milford’s books, and so when I heard she had a new book coming out I very quickly knew I would want to write about it. Since I had already written a blog post on her other books, I decided that instead of a review, I could interview her about the book and her writing in general.  The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book was released February 23, and, unsurprisingly, it was very engaging and altogether wonderful. In it, strangers are trapped together at an inn, and as the blurb so eloquently puts it, “to pass the time, they begin to tell stories… that eventually reveal more about their own secrets than they intended.” Each story told in the tavern stands on its own, but an overarching story emerges from all of the tales, making the book feel like a short story collection where each short story indirectly contributes to the overarching one. It takes place in the 1930s, in the fictional city of Nagspeake, the same city in which Milford’s novel Greenglass House is set. In fact, in Greenglass House, the story’s main character Milo’s peaceful winter vacation comes abruptly to an end when unexpected guests start arriving at his parents’ inn. One of these strange guests has with her an old book which Milo ends up reading and the book even ends up driving some of Greenglass House’s plot. This book within a book is The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book, which readers can finally read for themselves. Below is a lightly edited version of my Q&A with the author Kate Milford.   Sita Welt: Why did you decide to write “The Hollow-Ware Man” [the tale told by Sangwin] in verse? Kate Milford: It was actually one of the first stories I wrote for the book–I think the first three were “The Yankee Peddlers,” “The Devil and the Scavenger,” and then “The Hollow-ware Man.” I wrote the first draft of it back in 2014, when I thought I would be self-publishing The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book. I *think* my thinking at the time was that I wanted to write something that would be as haunting as the idea of this character was for me, and I love ominous old poems and ballads. Plus, since one of the things I wanted to do with Raconteur’s was represent a wide variety of different types of folklore, it would’ve been a bit of an omission not to have included something like a poem or a ballad. (In my head, I imagine there’s traditional music for it somewhere in Nagspeake.) But if I’m honest, I don’t think I was thinking about all that exactly, when I first sat down to write the poem. It was something I thought about later–that I wanted riddles and trickster tales and some form of fortune-telling, etcetera, and how nice that I already had something in verse. SW: Where did the idea of “old iron” come from? Why is old iron such a big part of your stories? [“Old iron” is a magical, self-aware iron in the books] KM: I began writing about Nagspeake’s self-aware ironmongery even before I had the first idea for a book set in the city. It was one of the earliest things I knew about Nagspeake. I actually don’t know why I started in with the self-aware iron in the first place, except I’ve always loved the way ironwork can take damage over the years that makes it look like plants growing at odd angles–like you’ve caught a fence or a railing mid-motion, and it’s frozen in place until you turn your back again. There really wasn’t a reason for it to make an appearance in Greenglass House, so it didn’t; however the iron is also why Nagspeake’s locally-made glass has the green tint that gives the house its name–iron oxide can give  glass a greenish hue. But it turns up in the other books set in the city, building to what we see in The Thief Knot and The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book. Over time, it sort of became a character, in a sense. SW: Where did names like Trigemine, Alphonsus, Pantin, etc., come from?  KM: Oh, I collect names from all sorts of places! I keep a notebook of names I like and words that I think might make interesting names. Old-fashioned words, obsolete words… right now there’s a tab open on my browser with a list of like a hundred types of seaweeds that I’ve been using for names in a current project. Sometimes if I know something about a character, I’ll pick a word or phrase that has a connection to them, then I’ll look up synonyms, etymology, history, etc., until I find something that sounds like a possible moniker. And sometimes I invent patterns to help me find names, mostly as a game to amuse myself. When I wrote the first draft of the story about the Yankee Peddlers, I gave them all names that were to do with the body. Trigemine, also a peddler, got his name from a body part, the trigeminal nerve. Sangwin’s name fits that pattern too, if you say it out loud. I didn’t invent the ‘Alphonsus,’ but his last name (being a Yankee Peddler) is Lung. Pantin means puppet in French, though I had to look it up just now to remember. The Haypottens got their surname from the word hypotenuse. I love finding names. Coming up with all the names for the different types of fire in “The Reckoning” was some of the best fun I had while writing this book. SW: I noticed that some of your stories seem to have a very eerie feel to them which gives them a very unique tone for a children’s book. Why did you decide to incorporate this into your writing and how did you manage that?  KM: It’s just what I like, I guess! I’m a little like Mrs. Haypotten, trying to tell a cheery story to Maisie and