Contents
Contact Info
Author contact
Meghan Rose Allen
meghanrose[at]gmail[dot]com
@reluctantm
www.reluctantm.com
Publisher contact
DCB Press
An imprint of Cormorant Books
260 Spadina Avenue
Suite 502
Toronto, Ontario
Canada
M5T 2E4
publicity[at]cormorantbooks[dot]com
416.925.8887
Product Info
ISBN: 9781770865259
Price: $12.95
Format: Trade Paperback
Size: 5.375″ x 8″
Ages: 10 to 13
Publication Date: June 19, 2018
Sales Copy
Enid has never fi t in with kids her age. They don’t speak the way she does. They don’t get accused of cheating because their scholarly writing style arouses the teacher’s suspicion. Also, they don’t see the faeries. The only remedy: Enid is going to write a book on how to see the faeries. But can she get her book written before the faeries completely ruin her life? If only she can trap one…
Enid Strange is a hilarious and touching story told from the point of view of an eleven-year-old girl who knows, and can prove to you, that the faeries are real.
Biography
Meghan Rose Allen has a Ph.D. in mathematics from Dalhousie University and a certificate in creative writing from Humber College. Previously to publishing Enid Strange, she facilitated business courses for youth in Ethiopia, evaluated cryptographic algorithms for the Federal government, and taught mathematics courses at Mount Allison University. She has called New Brunswick home since 2012.
Author Photos
Interview Resources
Bio Talking Points
- Meghan has a B.Math from the University of Waterloo, an M.Sc in mathematics from Dalhousie University, and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Dalhousie University.
- For Meghan, math and fiction overlap.
- Since 2012, Meghan has made her home in Sackville, New Brunswick.
- Like many writers, having a book published is …
She started studying mathematics because she couldn’t not. “Every time I looked at university calendar way back in high school,” she says, “and the program didn’t have any math courses, I would decide that program wasn’t for me. Finally, I decided that if I was rejecting programs because they didn’t have any math courses in them, that might be a sign that I should take all the math courses instead.”
“I always say I’m not a fan of reality,” Meghan says. She studied pure mathematics, the area of mathematics that doesn’t have immediate real-world applications. “Of course,” she explains, “what has no real world application today could be vitally useful tomorrow.” Still, not being constrained by the real world when working in mathematics has helped her with her fiction. “Even when I’m working mathematically, I’m using my imagination to figure out where to go next, what to look at next. It’s exactly like writing fiction, except using math as a language rather than words.”
“I lived in Halifax for five years going to graduate school,” she says. “We moved away for work, but always said we’d move back to the Maritimes if we could. Luckily, four years after we left Halifax, my husband was offered a job at Mount Allison. We didn’t even consider saying no. I left a stable government job to move to a small town in New Brunswick,” she laughs. “People thought we were crazy. But the Maritimes is where I’m supposed to be.” Since moving to New Brunswick, Meghan has been able to focus almost all her time on writing. “Not that I’ve left all mathematics behind,” she says. Meghan has worked as a sessional mathematics instructor at Mount Allison university, as well as volunteered her mathematics and science skills with the local elementary school, Brownies, and Girl Guides.
“Well, one of the characters, Margery, in my book, Enid Strange, banned the use of all clichés, so I’m reluctant to say it’s a dream come true.” Meghan grins. “So let’s just go a bit more obscure and instead say that I’m as happy as a clam buried deep in the sand where nobody’s digging for it.“
Sample Interview Questions
Your background is in mathematics. How did you transition from mathematics into fiction writing?
It wasn’t a hard transition actually. The area of mathematics I studied, pure mathematics, is very creative, dealing with objects and ideas that don’t have immediate real-world applications. This means that my imagination gets exercised when I’m still in math-land. As well, mathematics at higher levels requires writing papers explaining your ideas, and I think I structure a lot of my mathematics papers as stories: you want to make the ideas interesting and encourage the reader to keep reading. So even when I work with mathematics, I’m taking made-up ideas and writing them down creatively, which is the same as writing fiction.
Is Enid inspired by a real person? Or any of the other characters in the book? If so, who?
Other than Mrs Estabrooks, the vice-principal we briefly encounter in Chapter Two, no one is one hundred percent based on a real person (Mrs Estabrooks is based off two teachers I’ve encountered). I can see parts of myself in Enid, but, maybe worryingly, I also see a lot of myself in Margery, and I find Margery to be a really troubling character.
Your book is dedicated to Anne-Tamara, who first told (you) that the house was haunted. Can you explain that dedication further? Do you believe in ghosts? More importantly, do you believe in faeries?
A few years ago, I rented a house from a woman named Anne-Tamara. She emailed me one day, maybe a week after I signed the lease, and said Oh, just so you know, the house is haunted. I’m thinking “Great, tell me that after I sign the lease.” But, at the same time, I totally dismissed it, because that’s crazy; houses aren’t haunted.
Then, sure enough, after I’d been living in the house a few weeks, I realized that Anne-Tamara was right. Nothing malicious: just I’d always see something out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned, there was never anything there. That’s partly where the idea of seeing faeries grew from, because what were these things I kept seeing if not faeries. I guess Anne-Tamara classified them as ghosts, but I went with faeries.
Do I believe faeries are real? I wouldn’t want to say no and incur their wrath, but I wouldn’t want to say yes and have you think me crazy the way I thought Anne-Tamara was. Let’s just say I never did find out what I kept seeing just out of my sight line in that house I rented from Anne-Tamara.
Why did you decide to write Enid Strange as middle-grade (ages 10-13) novel rather than a YA or adult novel?
I view Enid Strange as a middle-grade novel and an adult book. Since Enid is eleven, the obvious market is to kids around that age. But I don’t think there’s anything innately child-like about the book either. It assumes the reader, whatever her age, is eager for such a story. I would say that some teenagers would enjoy it too, but there isn’t a love story, which seems a staple of YA books, so it wasn’t marketed at all towards the YA audience. In any case, I never consciously sat down and decided Enid Strange was going to be a middle-grade book. It sort of organically came out the way it did, without much planning on my part. Enid, both book and character, are pretty headstrong; they’re going to do what they’re going to do, no matter what I say.
Who are some of your influences for writing middle-grade novels?
The War Between the Pitiful Teachers and the Splendid Kids by Stanley Kiesel. It’s this odd, sinister, book from the early 1980s where, essentially, a group of kids wage an actual war against the behemoth of teachers, and vice versa. There are hyenas and underground sewer communities and sharks and the whole thing is plain wacky. I’ve only met a few other people who’ve read this gem, and it’s quite a shame it isn’t better known. Some of my other favourite middle-grade books are Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, The Westing Game, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and From The Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler. Other than A Series of Unfortunate Events, which I read for the first time in 2014, these are middle-grade books I remember from my time as a middle-grade kid. They’ve stuck with me all these years later, and there’s no better indicator of influence than that.
When I think about this list of books and what they all have in common is that while marketed towards kids, they don’t assume kids can’t handle a complicated plot, with an advanced vocabulary, and full of Pyrrhic and/or murky victories. I wanted Enid Strange to be like that: there aren’t easy solutions and there are difficult characters but there is some intangible thing that pulls you into the world and has you remember it thirty, forty, or more, years later.
How would you classify Enid Strange? Is it a fantasy novel? Science fiction? Amazon has marked is as dystopian; would you agree with that?
Is it strange that I wrote a book with faeries in it and I don’t, at least in my mind, think of it as fantasy? I guess then that this answers an earlier question: if I don’t think of a book with faeries as a fantasy book, then I must not think of faeries as fantastic, which means that I must, at some level, think of faeries as real.
So can I channel Margaret Atwood? I didn’t write a fantasy novel — I wrote a novel that has fantasy elements in it? Has some science fiction elements, especially about the physics of light. It’s probably a stretch to say dystopian (if one assumes this happens a few years in the future), but at least alternate-universey could be a possibility.
Enid mentions wanting to eat Ethiopian food in the second chapter and you previously worked in Ethiopia. Why were you working in Ethiopia? What sort of stories can you tell about your time there?
In 2007, I spent three months in Ethiopia, in part running workshops for youth who wanted to apply for micro-finance loans. It was a “Train the Trainers” type of scheme, where the youth we trained would then go back to their smaller communities and teach youth there the same information: how to make a business plan, what sort of documentation the NGOs are looking for, etc.
I find it hard to say much about my time in Ethiopia — divided between Addis Ababa (the capital), Debre Berhan (a medium-sized city), and Debre Sina (a rural town) — without resorting to the typical white girl in Africa narrative. I really did appreciate my time there — the music and dancing, the food (injera with messer wot especially), the donkeys (I really like donkeys) — but it is a country that is still suffering the after-effects of a bloody civil war and the current effects of a much less open government than we have here in Canada.
Here’s a link to what I call my forgotten Ethiopian paragraph. It sums up a typical bus ride from Debre Berhan to Debre Sina. Left out is passing the rusted military tank sitting in someone’s front yard, the donkeys with one front leg tied to the kitty-corner back leg to make sure they can’t leave the hill they’ve been left to graze upon, the drunk soldier stumbling down the aisle, automatic rifle slung across his back that knocks against the seat back, the purple school uniforms, the blue school uniforms, the green school uniforms.
The smell of berbere always takes me back.
Your website has a link to artisanal mathematics. Could you explain what that’s about?
There’s something about the phrase artisanal mathematics I really like. It just seems like something that should exist. So now it does. Get hand-made pictures of mathematics to hang on your walls. Like art, but with math.
It makes me smile. I made some business cards with the phrase on it too.
Are we going to see more of Enid Strange in the future?
I hope so. I’m working on a companion book, more focused on Margery, right now. But it’ll wind it’s way back to Enid, I’m pretty sure.