Lilja's Library (21 page)

Lilja:
You have also done a mascot for Lilja’s Library (the readers will get to know him once the site’s new design’s up, so this will be a teaser for them). Any comments on that creation?

Glenn Chadbourne:
I did indeed whip up a little mascot for Lilja. We knocked noggins on what might befit the site, and as it deals with all things King, why not have a little Library Policeman hosting things.

Lilja:
What’s next for you? I understand you have part two of
Secretary of Dreams
coming. Can you tell me more about that one? Maybe what stories it’ll contain?

Glenn Chadbourne:
I can’t tell you about the stories, they’re a surprise, but I’m sure fans of Steve’s short stories will be extremely pleased with each. All these stories are true gems of his career.

Lilja:
How would you feel if you where asked to do, say, eight illustrations to the next King book? More like
The Dark Tower
book instead of
Secretary of Dreams
? Interested?

Glenn Chadbourne:
I’d be delighted. This
Secretary
project has really been beyond belief for me, and as I’ve said and will say again, repeatedly, it is truly dream-come-true stuff for me. Any opportunity to illustrate any of Stephen’s work is truly an honor.

Lilja:
If you could pick one King book to illustrate, which would it be, and why?

Glenn Chadbourne:
Tough question because there are so many great stories, but I guess if it came down to it I’d like to take a crack at
’Salem’s Lot
, for a couple reasons. First, because I love the atmosphere of the book as well as all the characters. Second, it would be great fun because you have to realize, I actually live near the fictional goings-on of that book. There are several “real” towns surrounding the place and it would be fun to include actual settings that border the “Lot.” I think SK might get a hoot out of that.

Lilja:
OK, thanks for your time; it was a pleasure talking to you!

Glenn Chadbourne
: A real pleasure on this end as well. Thank you.

****

Robin Furth

Posted: February 28, 2006

Lilja:
Thanks for doing this interview. Can you please start by telling me a bit about yourself? You are a fairly anonymous person in the King community, even though you have done a lot.

Robin Furth:
Thanks for the invitation to chat. So, where should I begin? (These kinds of questions are always the hardest.) I suppose a fundamental aspect of my personality is my love of books. I’m a fairly obsessive reader and writer. My favorite areas are poetry and supernatural fiction. My poetry has been published in magazines and journals in the U.S. and the U.K., but my fiction has yet to venture into the world. (I think it’s a bit shy. I have a hard time coaxing it out of my folders and into an envelope.)

When I was a child, my grandparents gave me lots of books. I loved C.S. Lewis’s
Chronicles of Narnia
, a series that has recently gotten a lot of press because of the film adaptations done by Disney. My personal favorite was
The Magician’s Nephew
, which—of all the books—explored travel between worlds most fully. Three other books that had a profound effect on me were Ursula LeGuin’s
The Wizard of Earthsea
, a 1904 edition of
Russian Wonder Tales
and
The Complete Tales of Hans Christian Andersen
. As you might have guessed given my approach to
The Dark Tower
books, I am also a great fan of myths and legends. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, I almost became a folklore major. Since it was a real toss-up between literature and folklore, and since my parents feared that folklore would be an even less practical major than lit, I stuck to English. In retrospect, I’m glad. As a folklorist you’re supposed to approach your subject with a scientific detachment. I don’t think I’ve ever been good at such detachment, and wonder if it is even possible. (We humans are, I believe, profoundly subjective creatures.)

For me, and I’m sure it also holds true for many of the people reading this interview, books are literally doorways into other worlds. When I was a child I’d find that while I was reading fantasy I’d always have one foot in that land and one in this, the “real” world. Sometimes it got a little confusing because the “fantasy” world felt more real than this one. Ironically, what was probably a liability during my childhood became an asset as an adult. I don’t think I could have written the Concordances without actually living in Mid-World for much of the time I was writing. I occasionally joke about being haunted by Roland, but it’s a joke based on truth. All my life I’ve been haunted by characters, both my own and other people’s.

As for the biographical details of my life, I grew up in Upper Darby, a town near Philadelphia, although I spent the majority of my summers on the Maine coast, at my grandparents’ house. Though I spent most of my childhood in the States, I also lived for two years in Scotland—one year in Glasgow and one in a little village outside of Aberdeen. My love of the past, of the dream life and of different cultures was probably also affected by the fact that my paternal grandparents were from Eastern Europe and were old when I was born. During the First World War my grandfather served in the Austro-Hungarian army, and my grandmother trained as a doctor when few girls had any secondary education at all.

When I graduated from college, I won a scholarship to study English literature at the University of York in England. I studied English and American fiction written between the end of the Victorian period and the beginning of the First World War. Many of the great horror tales of our time were spun during this period—
Dracula
,
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
,
The Turn of the Screw
,
The Yellow Wallpaper
, and
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, to name just a few. Just as important to me as the books I read was the medieval city of York. Perched as it is on its Roman foundations, it is arguably one of the most haunted cities in the British Isles, if not in all of Europe. While in York I saw my first ghost. (For those of you who are interested, it was an old tramp. He haunted a pub where I worked.) While doing my M.A. at York I also had the good fortune to meet my husband Mark, who was studying Romantic poetry.

After three years in England, Mark and I decided to move back to Maine. It seemed like an obvious choice at the time, since my grandparents had passed away, the house was empty and Mark and I could live there while we tried to eke out a living as writers. As all writers and artists unfortunately discover, only a few make their living by their art, especially at the beginning. Mark was already a published poet, but there’s little work going for poets these days. So, Mark started a creative writing grad program at the University of Maine at Orono (Steve King’s alma mater). After working various jobs, I also decided to return to UMO to get my teaching certificate. We both taught in Maine for about ten years. (I taught in middle schools and high schools; Mark taught at college.) In the fall of 1998, Mark and I returned to the University of Maine to start PhD work.

Lilja:
How did you get involved with Stephen King and
The Dark Tower
saga? I read that it was originally intended only for making sure Stephen kept to the truth of the story while writing the last three books.

Robin Furth:
As I said above, in the late 1990s I was at the University of Maine doing work towards an individualized PhD in supernatural fiction. One of my supervisors was Burt Hatlen, who had been one of Steve’s teachers and was still one of his friends. Burt knew I was a serious writer and that I really loved horror stories, and so when Steve told him that he was looking for someone to do some occasional work, Burt recommended me. (Boy, am I in that man’s debt!) The first thing I did for Steve was sort through the thousands of stories he received for
On Writing
. It was an amazing job, because I also got to look at the stories as I sorted through.

After I finished that short-lived assignment, I went into the Bangor office to pick up some paperwork. It was the winter solstice of 2000. Our part of Maine had just suffered one of the worst ice storms in history and so I’d been without power for a week. Needless to say, despite my best efforts I was feeling pretty grubby. Anyway, I ran into the office at about 4:00 to pick up my paperwork and to chat with Marsha (Steve’s personal assistant) before she closed shop, and who should be sitting there but Steve King—the man himself! I hadn’t met Steve in person yet, and was extremely embarrassed that I should meet him when I felt like such a mess. He obviously wasn’t bothered by my appearance (maybe he’d lost power too) and he asked me if I wanted some additional work. Of course, I said yes.

What Steve asked me to do was to make lists of all the characters and important places in the first four
Dark Tower
books, and to write down the pages where he could locate them. I hadn’t read Steve’s
Dark Tower
saga at that point, but I was a real fan of his other fiction, so I was excited about the job. I don’t think Steve had any idea what he was getting into at that point. (Never ask a frustrated folklorist to map out your imaginary world—you will get a huge tome!) Anyway, I did what Steve asked, but I couldn’t resist putting in commentary as well. I also started to collect lists of Mid-World games, Mid-World sayings, and Mid-World gods. Before I handed in the final project, I had it bound. The cover page was a door with a sigul on it, just like the one at the front of the first Concordance. However, the door on Steve’s book was two-sided; in other words, once you turned the page you could see the back of the door (including the reversed sigul) to show you that you really had entered Mid-World. (The U.K. version of the Concordance has a two-sided door, which is really fun.) To the front of this proto-Concordance I taped a key, so that Steve would be able to unlock the magical door. Steve must have liked my silliness because after that he handed me his manuscript in installments so that I could continue expanding the Concordance.

While Steve was working on the final three
Dark Tower
books, and while I was expanding the
Concordance
, we started to have a really good email conversation. Obviously, we were both living in Mid-World, so our conversations were about that. Occasionally Steve would hit a stumbling block in his writing and I’d receive a question like, “Robin, what does Jake have in his backpack?” My first reaction would be panic. I had no idea. But then I’d go back through the books, paying special attention to what Jake shoved into his bag and what he took out, what he kept and what he lost. There were many other such brainteasers, the result of which is that I know
The Dark Tower
books inside and out.

As well as doing
Dark Tower
research, I occasionally did other bits and pieces for Steve. One of my favorites (believe it or not) was going through the New York Public Library archives to find articles about the trial of Albert Fish, the child-eating cannibal that Steve King and Peter Straub referred to in
Black House
. I think I have a pretty sick sense of humor sometimes, because right next to a particularly gruesome article about Fish’s exploits was a cartoon-advertisement for some sweets, which really caught my eye. It featured chubby children feeling each other’s muscles while eating “Dresden-Style” chocolates. Well, it was too much for me, so when I handed in that bit of research I included the advert at the front with the words “Albert Fish’s favorite dishes” written all around the edges. I knew at the time that it was a kind of risky thing to hand to your boss—I figured that Steve would either laugh or fire me on the spot. Luckily, he thought it was darkly humorous.

Lilja:
How did you feel when it was decided it was going to be published?

Robin Furth:
As you can imagine, I was thrilled. I was really hoping that the
Concordance
would someday make it out to the larger world, but I didn’t know how that would happen. I think I’d been compiling for about two years when I got a phone call from Ralph Vicinanza, who is one of Steve’s agents. He thought that there would be an audience for the book, and so asked me to send him what I had done so far. I quickly sent him a copy and kept my fingers crossed. Ralph liked what he saw. Scribner made an offer—they wanted to publish the book in two separate volumes, one covering books I-IV, the next covering V-VII. In the end, I had to expand each volume since (as Steve has said) they were written for his use only, and they contained many shorthand references to issues that had come up during our conversations.