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>> Hi, I'm Leigh Bardugo.
I am the author of many books in the Grishaverse
including Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows.
And I'm also the author of
a book called Ninth House,
which is my first fantasy novel for adults.
I am speaking to you from my
living room in Los Angeles.
It is set among the secret societies at Yale and
it's the story of a young woman named Alex Stern
who has a criminal past and is now
thrust into a world where she needs
to navigate privilege, dark magic, and murder.
Magic is really just another kind of power.
And I don't mean a magical power,
I mean it is just another kind
of power that operates in the world.
So, some people exercise the power of privilege,
some people have the power that
comes with money or status.
And in the world of Ninth House, magic
functions in exactly the same way.
It's a resource.
It's a tool that some people are
trained to use and others are not.
And I think that for me, you know, the secret
societies at Yale at very real and the kind
of power that some of the people within
those institutions wield is very real.
So, I wanted to tell a story about somebody
who was a true outsider and who had been locked
out of the language of privilege
and the language of the elite,
but who brought her own skills to
bear from her past into this world
where she really is learning to navigate what
it means to have power and who gets to wield it
and what choices you get to make when you're
somebody who has an extraordinary ability
and who has been given this opportunity,
but who really only has this one chance.
She is a woman who is surrounded
by people who burn
through second chances and
she's got this one shot.
And so, I think that it's one thing to talk
about magic and it's another thing to talk
about stories of survival in
which magic is just a tool.
I think there's no question that both fantasy
and science fiction usually operate in terms
of metaphor and they take us to places
of extremes and extreme situations
that then provide us a certain level of
remove and comfort to deal with things
that we are experiencing
potentially in our real lives.
So, there are some very real issues
and very real monsters in Ninth House
and people will recognize these boogeymen.
And, you know, the idea of
what it means to be a woman
on a college campus now is not much different
than what it meant when I was an undergrad,
though the language around
that experience has changed.
And so, for me, it was really important to
explore these things within a fantasy world
and to use horror, because there are horrific
elements in Ninth House, and to use this kind
of visceral sense of the body and of
transgression that happens when you have magic
in the room, the potential of that, of
all the danger that comes with that,
and the things that we'll do to
get the things that we desire.
That is all built into Ninth House because
those explorations I think also maybe jar us
out of our ordinary world and the things that
we're willing to accept in the ordinary world
when they're reframed through fantasy.
You know, every book is different.
The idea for Ninth House really arose out of
an experience I had when I was a freshman.
I was walking home from the post office, because
we communicated through the antiquated system
of letters back then, and I was
reading a letter from somebody.
And I looked up and I had ended up on a
street that I had never been on before.
And to my left, there was a huge mausoleum.
I mean, a mausoleum the size
of an apartment building.
And it was surrounded by a black wrought iron
fence that was covered in black metal snakes.
And to my right, there were
these massive neo-Egyptian gates
that led to the Grove Street Cemetery.
And right across on the plinth in
these huge capital letters it said,
"The dead shall be raised."
And, you know, I had been a fantasy
fan since I was a very little kid.
And so, I felt as a girl from Los Angeles
where everything, you know, is built new
and then erased and then built again, to
be in this place and to suddenly be exposed
to this feeling that I had walked into a place
that was both sinister and magical and full
of latent power, was completely thrilling.
And I think that that is really the spark,
though it took many, many years to develop
and grow into a fire, that became Ninth House.
But I also think when I set out to
write Ninth House I thought, oh,
I'm going to write this one
magical romp through the occult.
And what really changed was when I started
excavating my own experiences from college,
I realized that I had disregarded, or chosen to
forget, a lot of the experiences that I had had,
that my roommates had had, the way
that we talked about each other,
the way we talked about other women,
the way we didn't talk about some
of what we were experiencing because we
simply didn't have the language for it,
and that really became a
huge part of Alex's story.
I think that characters are always built the
same way if we're doing it right in terms
of their wants and their needs and the way
they come into conflict with the world.
Their goals are probably radically
different from say a contemporary story
or a political thriller or a fantasy novel,
but the things that make them human
and relatable remain the same.
And I think too we have a tendency to look
at the idea of world-building and place
as something that only belongs
to fantasy or science fiction.
But the truth is, world-building happens
in every book that you're reading
because you are usually being
exposed to places you've never been
or systems you've never been a part of.
You don't know how a particular office
works or how political capital works
or what this small fishing village is like.
And so, every author's responsibility as they
move into those worlds is to give you a sense
of that place and the way that power functions
in it, whether that is political power
or personal power or magical power,
and also a sense of what this place --
how it breathes in terms of
texture and taste and economy.
And so, for me, that process is really not
radically different from a fantasy novel
to a novel like Ninth House that is
set in a very real place, New Haven.
But the experience I had of discovering
New Haven, you know, to be totally frank,
and it is embarrassing, I
spent four years at Yale
and I knew almost nothing
about New Haven as a city.
So, for me, a big part of
building this world was getting
to know the city and fall in love with it.
When readers approach a book, I don't know
how many of them approach looking for a kind
of manifesto, particularly
when they're reading fiction.
I know that for me, fantasy and science fiction,
and really all fiction, and some non-fiction,
served as a kind of escape and
a kind of refuge from real life.
And the lessons I took from
fantasy were not ones of wanting
to hide away in a place where magic was real.
The worlds that fantasy gives
us are worlds with dire stakes,
where justice is on the line,
and the future is on the line.
And those stakes can feel very real and
frequently are very real for young people.
And the books that I read when I was young
gave me worlds where being smart and clever
and resourceful and courageous and
resilient were so much more important
than the things I was being
taught were important by culture.
So, culture was telling me, be pretty, be cute,
be cheerful, and the fiction I was lucky enough
to discover was telling me, be smart,
be brave, be tough, keep going.
And I hope that when people read my
books, they find what they need in them,
whether that is refuge or inspiration, to go
out there and fight whatever war needs fighting.
I think the story tells you
what it wants it to be.
And when I first had this idea for Ninth
House, I knew it didn't belong in young adult
because of some of the themes
I wanted to explore.
There were places I wanted to go and
things I wanted to be brutally honest
about that I didn't feel belonged in YA.
I think a lot of the same themes are present.
For me, I'm not as interested in chosen one
stories as I was at the start of my career.
I'm much more interested in people who are born
without power or who are born at a disadvantage
and who still manage to change their lives and
survive the world and potentially make an impact
in it without the benefit of extraordinary
magic or of extraordinary blood rite.
One of my least favorite fantasy tropes is
the idea that blood makes you who you are
and that gifts are always inherited.
I'm much more interested in the survivors
who seize power and advantage for themselves
and who make magic out of nothing.
You know, I think ingenuity
is born out of survival.
It's born out of hardship.
People who never have to struggle or never have
to work, who never have a bad job or a bad boss,
they don't really have a lot of reasons to
innovate or fight their way out of something.
I think ingenuity is really born
of sometimes the desire to help,
but often the desire simply to survive.
And I think that the idea of -- I always
say that heroes always find the third way.
You know, a hero will be
presented with two choices.
You can either do this or you can do this.
And the hero's job is to find the third way.
And I think that is all about ingenuity.
Imagination is such a mystery, right?
Like, I think that there are all kinds of
books and programs and projects that are meant
to help people tap into this mysterious
space of inspiration and that are supposed
to allow us to see beyond our own reality.
And I think that imagination is
something that is born of, again,
the need to be in another place,
but also sometimes the luxury
of having the space to explore that.
And I think we have to, especially
this time, really think about,
who is being given the opportunity to learn,
to rest, to adapt, to be put in a position
where that imagination can flourish and
maybe yield extraordinary innovation?
I think I am most inspired by --
-- people who experience marginalization
and who still find the fuel to educate
and share their experiences even
at great risk to themselves often,
people who have found grace
for me and grace for others.
I think I am constantly being inspired by people
who when they are in a situation like we are,
this new strange world of quarantine, still
find ways to connect with other people.
I think I've really been inspired by
the whole idea of stories right now.
One of the strange and wonderful
things about being an author is
that you know your books will
go places that you've never been
and that you will probably never get to go.
And that has become much more powerful to me
because I know that my books are reaching people
who are needing escape or who
are needing inspiration right now
and who then do me the great honor of coming
back to me and telling me, oh, I read your book,
or, oh, this particular passage
resonated with me.
To know that all of our stories are out there
and are tying people together in these ways
that people are finding other readers to
connect with over these books means a lot to me.
Look, I'll be totally honest with you,
this has been a very tough time creatively.
I'm a creature of habit and so I had really
developed this system of working very intensely
and then finding ways to escape in the
moments between a deadline and intense push.
So, for me, I've had to really reset and
to think about the things that allow me
to keep working and allow me to be inspired,
and to also be completely honest with myself
on the days when I am not able to work.
You know, we live in a duplex,
we have no outdoor space,
we have very little contact with nature here.
I live with a disability and so I'm dealing
with some intense physical pain right now.
But I'll be honest also and say that work has
become a refuge for me in a way that it kind
of hasn't been since I was a teenager.
When I was in junior high school, I wrote
to create worlds where I could find refuge.
And now, I am really enjoying getting to live in
places like the Grishaverse because there's --
well, there's no COVID there
and there's also other wars
to be fought and discoveries to be made.
And that is quite joyful for me.
I hope readers find themselves in Ninth House.
I hope that they see some of their
own experiences reflected there.
I hope it makes them feel powerful.
And I hope it makes them
honestly a little angry.
Not angry in a frustrated way, but angry in a
galvanizing way so that they go out there ready
to make some changes and
maybe burn some stuff down.
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