Tamora Pierce: Lit by Fire
Tamora Pierce was born December 13, 1954 in southwest Pennsylvania, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and Pennsylvania. She studied psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 1977 with a degree in liberal arts.
Pierce sold her first story, true-confession ‘‘What We Did Was Sin’’, in 1967 while a junior in college. The following year she enrolled in a writing course and began to write fiction featuring strong female heroines, mostly because she hadn’t found many books about women she could relate to. She worked briefly as a housemother in an Idaho group home for teenage girls, where she told the residents the story of the female warrior Alanna, before moving to New York in 1979. While trying to make it as a writer, she worked as a reader of romance manuscripts, reviewed martial arts movies, did freelance editing, and helped found a radio comedy and production company where she met actor and writer Timothy Liebe (who had a role in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, among others), whom she married in 1985.
Debut YA fantasy novel Alanna: The First Adventure appeared in 1983 and launched the first of a series of related quartets, trilogies, and duologies. The overall Tortall series includes the Song of the Lioness quartet: Alanna: The First Adventure (1983), In the Hand of the Goddess (1984), The Woman Who Rides Like a Man (1986, also as The Girl Who Rides Like a Man), and Lioness Rampant (1988); the Immortals or Wild Magic quartet: Wild Magic: The Immortals (1992, as Wild Magic in the UK), Wolf-speaker (1993), The Emperor Mage (1994), and The Realms of the Gods (1996); the Protector of the Small quartet: First Test (1999), Page (2000), Squire (2001), and Lady Knight (2002); the Tricksters duet: Trickster’s Choice (2003) and Trickster’s Queen (2004); and the Beka Cooper trilogy, Terrier (2006), Bloodhound (2009), and Mastiff (2011). Some Tortall stories were collected in Tortall and Other Lands: A Collection of Tales (2011).
In 1997 she began a new group of series set in the Circle universe, about four children with special powers. These include Circle of Magic: Sandry’s Book (1997, as The Magic in the Weaving in the UK), Tris’s Book (1998, as The Power in the Storm in the UK), Daja’s Book (1998, as The Fire in the Forging in the UK), and Briar’s Book (1999, as The Healing in the Vine in the UK); the Circle Opens: Magic Steps (2000), Street Magic (2001), Cold Fire (2002), and Shatterglass (2003); and the Circle Reforged: The Will of the Empress (2005) and Melting Stones (2007).
Pierce won a Skylark award in 2005 for her contributions to SF literature and has been nominated for the Mythopoeic Award twice, once for the Circle of Magic quartet and once for the Beka Cooper trilogy. She has been a full-time writer since 1992, and currently lives in Syracuse NY with her husband and their critters.
Website: Tamora Pierce, Author BLOODHOUND, …
Excerpts from the interview:
‘‘The most important struggle for a lot of us (especially girls and women) is that period of time when we discover that society wants one set of things from us, and our own hopes and desires and skills and talents have given us other desires. We are now faced with a choice: Do we give way to what society wants – do we compromise – or do we go with what we want for ourselves? And how do we shape our lives to reflect who we want to be?
‘‘This is not just true of girls and women; this is true of everyone. But girls and women face that demand of femininity and what it means to be a lady – to behave properly, to be ‘nice.’ How do we break free of those centuries of conditioning? And that struggle takes place right as we’re making the transition of girl to woman. I find these very fruitful areas to work.”
…
‘‘Let’s face it. Look at what’s happening to the country now, what’s happening to the world: the haves are separating from the have-nots at practically light-speed. The separation between the classes is as viable now as it was in the Middle Ages. I think of that time period by the title of the William Manchester book A World Lit Only by Fire, because what was lit was so bright and what was dark was so dark. The contrasts are really useful. This is why I prefer the medieval setting: I use those vivid contrasts to make my points and to get people to think.”
…
‘‘For ideas I hope to write about someday, I keep track of them in my head. If an idea is meant to be, if I stick it in my head it will stay there, cook away and develop, and then I’ll take it out and play with it for a while. I’ll tinker with it while I’m doing dishes or taking a shower or feeding critters or whatever. And I’ll talk about it with my husband or my editor or my agent. Usually, by the time I sit down to write a book, it is a minimum four to six years that I’ve been thinking about it – unless it’s the first book in a series. That might be a shorter period of time, although with the way things have been going, four to six is still usual.
‘‘As for keeping track of what’s going on in the current book, I have a form I fill out for each main character, and sometimes for secondary characters. I have a complete cast list for all the books, by first name and by last name, so that I never use the same name twice. I also have notes on the magic that gets used in each universe – just things like that, that I’ll need to go back to. (I’ve found that I will be going back to this stuff later.)”
…
‘‘Right now I’m working on Battle Magic, a Circle of Magic book that’s the prequel to Will of the Empress. My fans were really upset that I split the four kids up for The Circle Opens, and I had to write Will of the Empress to bring them all back together. So now I’m backing up, and I’m showing what happened to Briar Moss, Rosethorn, and Evvy when they journeyed east and got caught in the middle of a war – which accounts for all the symptoms of PTSD that they show in Melting Stones and Will of the Empress. …
‘‘Once those things are done, I’ve got another Tortall book contracted for, and I have other stuff lined up after that. My husband Tim Liebe and a friend of ours, Julie Holderman (a young writer I’ve known for years), are working on The Tortall Companion. They are taking all those files of notes that I’ve had, and things that I’ve said elsewhere that fans have copied down, and they are turning them into chapbooks and guidebooks to different areas – like a Diplomat’s Guide, a Mage’s Curriculum for the Royal University, a Healer’s Curriculum, a journal on the Royal Kitchens, and an exchange of letters that deals with plans to revamp the training program between the pages and squires. So we are all working on these notes that everyone will have. That will probably be out in 2013.’’
…
‘‘I started getting fan mail around 1985. When a kid tells you your books changed his or her life, you know they’re telling you the truth, because you remember the books that changed your life. When you’re an adult, it doesn’t happen like that. There are books that make you think, books you remember, but there aren’t books that change your life, literally.”
