The Raven’s Song – Q&A with Zana Fraillon and Bren MacDibble

The Raven’s Song by Zana Fraillon and Bren MacDibble, cover by Joanna Hunt and Sheila Smallwood, published by Old Barn Books

I absolutely adore this book, which I read when it came out in hardback last year – you can read my review of it here. It’s a wonderful blend of folkloric magical realism, cautionary environmental messages, scientific advances and fierce family bonds and friendships from two of my favourite authors.

It was one of those books where so much about it got me thinking and I just knew I had more questions to ask. Luckily Bren and Zana very kindly agreed to answer them for me, so here they are to tell us more about The Raven’s Song, their inspiration, working together, the writing process and why enivronmental-themed fiction is so important to both of them.

Hi, thanks so much for coming on the blog to answer some questions about The Raven’s Song. Firstly, can you tell us a little bit about it?

Bren: The Raven’s Song is about a girl in the future who is a survivor from the collapse of civilisation through disease, climate change and pollution. She lives in a closed community waiting for the world to heal outside their fences but one day she goes through the fence and finds a derelict city, a strange man and a terrifying mystery about the past.

You’ve both written several books before this one – what is your writing process like, and how did you adapt it when co-writing?

Bren: I’m all over the place. I don’t plan, I rewrite a lot (because I don’t plan obviously) and I write in intensive bursts. When Zana and I got together we made a plan to write up  until our characters met. We already knew we’d write chapter about and each take one main character, but we did a lot of back and forth planning and it really saves on the rewriting, hitting stonewalls in the planning stage instead of the writing stage is much simpler (who knew?). The back and forth planning was so exciting, new ideas bouncing back and forth, a gazillion what ifs, so many ideas! Two brains are definitely better than one. Then we went away to write our characters up until they met, then we came together to write turn about sending the whole manuscript back and forth. It was exciting waiting for Zana to add a chapter and send it back.

Zana: I don’t plan either, so this was quite the revelation for me too! Having said that though, I don’t think the planning would work for me without another brain to plan with! Usually when I write, I have a few scenes that are very clear, and the rest of the book is kind of hazy. Most of the time I don’t even know what the story is about – it starts with a character or a situation and I write myself into the story and plot as I go (or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the story reveals itself to me as I get to know it). But for obvious reasons, that doesn’t work in a collaboration! I don’t think I have ever been as excited about a book as I was in that first crazy planning burst that Bren and I had over Twitter. We were messaging so quickly that my fingers couldn’t keep up, and each new idea resulted in a burst of further new ideas. It was like an explosion of creativity!

Having a partner in the writing process also gave me someone to write for. I had Bren in mind when I was writing, and it was lovely having that very specific reader in mind – especially as I know the kind of reader Bren is.

Both of you have such wonderful, lyrical and distinctive writing voices and I could really hear both of you in The Raven’s Song, although it also came out with its own unique style too, different to the books you’ve both published solo – how easy was it to marry your different styles and voices up to create The Raven’s Song?

Bren – We definitely wanted the reader to know which character they were reading, so we didn’t set out to marry our styles. One character is from the future, one from now, so we wanted points of difference. We just naturally seem to chug along at the same speed, I guess, because it came together so well.

Zana – It’s funny, because we have very distinctive styles and voices, but in lots of ways, they are quite similar. We both write the courageous kid in a tough situation, nutting things out for themselves because they have to. So at no point did I think our voices would clash. What was so interesting was seeing how perfectly the tempo of our writing matched each other. We hadn’t read what the other had written until the part where our two characters meet – so it was a delightful surprise to see that our character arcs lined up so perfectly. Bren put the chapters together, and I think we had to cut one chapter in two, but that was it. They slipped perfectly into place with each other.

The next questions I guess are along a similar line, as there’s specific things I always really love about both of your books individually and I saw both of these in The Raven’s Song.

Bren, I always love your characters! Shelby here feels very ‘you’ (thinking back to Peony – How to Bee; Neoma – Across the Risen Sea; and Ella – The Dog Runner, who, while all very different, do seem to share a certain vivacious determination, which comes through here in Shelby too)

So I’m interested to know how much of Shelby was you and how much was Zana – and by extension, how did you write the characters/dual narrative overall: was it split between you quite definitively, or more fluid/mixed?

Bren – We wrote completely separately until our characters came together. Then if Zana wrote Shelby into a Phoenix chapter, I could adjust her dialogue, change her actions, etc. I found Zana wrote her a lot more chatty and energetic than I wrote her and I thought that was interesting that she felt Shelby was chatty and energetic, as interpreted by Phoenix obviously. I wrote her physical and busy, but I feel like she sped up a lot whenever Zana wrote her! Likewise Zana adjusted Phoenix’s dialogue, thoughts and actions anytime I wrote him into a Shelby chapter.

Zana, you have a wonderful ability to blend quite gritty, real-life scenarios (a detention centre in The Bone Sparrow; child slavery in The Ones Who Disappeared; child homelessness in The Lost Souls Atlas; climate change and pandemics in The Raven’s Song) with the magic of story, folklore and fantasy. I definitely felt echoes of The Lost Soul Atlas in The Ravened Girl – was this something you came up with or more of a combined effort? And is it based on a real ‘myth’ or ‘story’ or completely invented?

Zana – The Ravened Girl was actually the one bit we didn’t plan. We had spoken about child sacrifice, and what that might look like in the present (which was where the freezing of the children came from) but we hadn’t talked about having past child sacrifice in there also. But when I sat down to write Phoenix, the Ravened Girl popped herself into my head and wouldn’t let go. I knew I wasn’t going to get any further without getting her out of my system, but was amazed that she ended up being the glue that links them all together.

She is based on a sort of amalgamation of bog bodies and child sacrifices that I had come across already (it’s been an interest of mine for some time now…). I had read about a child who had been sacrificed to a bog, and there were (from memory) 12 birds sacrificed with them. Another article I read spoke of helmets made of human skulls that were placed on young sacrifice victims. And there were chapters I had read in various bog body books that suggested the kind of ritual that might have taken place. So I had all of that buzzing around in my head while I wrote her. Her sections came out in a couple of intensive writing frenzies. She still hasn’t left me alone though, so I suspect there may be another bog story lurking in there somewhere…

And both of you are clearly passionate about the environment, nature and our increasingly worrying climate crisis, which is a key theme of The Raven’s Song. Why was it so important for you both to bring this into your writing for children?

Bren – I think the world has already brought the subject to children, and it’s terrifying, but when we mention it, we’re fictionalising it, making it safe to think about and talk about and showing young characters coping, surviving, even thriving. It’s a wild adventure, but also it’s giving kids a language to talk about what is going on around them, maybe express their fears instead of letting the anxiety build?

Zana – Yep, I agree. I write about issues which are important to me, and the climate crisis is one of the biggest human rights issues we are grappling with, not to mention a more-than-human rights issue. This isn’t something that is going away. It isn’t something that is immediately solvable. Young people know what is going on in the world, and they need the tools to be able to imagine all the different possible futures that exist. No matter what the world looks like in the future, these kids will be part of it. So enabling them to imagine a way of living within that future gives them the power and strength to imagine all the different ways the world might look, and all the different ways they might exist within that world. The young people reading these books are at that wonderful age when they are trying to imagine the kind of adult they want to be and the kind of world they want to live in. If we are not talking about these issues, then we are denying our young people the chance to imagine a different future, and denying them the chance to work towards that future.

What one thing that we could do easily, immediately, would you suggest children, or all of us really, reading your books do to help our environment?

Bren – I’d hate to tell children to do anything. It’s not their problem. It’s an adult problem, but the best thing they can do, is to keep talking about it. Talk about it with their parents, their friends, their teachers. Keep learning what is true, what isn’t, what is the latest science and tell people. It’s too late to turn away now, acceptance and understanding will lead to change.

What adults can do, is anything to reduce fossil fuel use, and meat and dairy consumption and to pick one thing to tackle, save a forest, the polar bears, rhino or koala, clean up a local waterway or beach, plant a roadside with wildflowers, protest a mine or coal power station, champion one thing at a time and involve the children in your life. It’s too easy to be angry about everything, feel hopeless and end up doing nothing. Just do one thing. When it’s done, win or lose. Do another thing.

Zana – I grapple with this all the time. What can any of us do? It can easily seem too immense an issue, and the very real danger there is that it becomes very easy to then give up. I think one of the things I have come to realise though, is that every small little action makes a much bigger difference than it seems. When I was a kid, I couldn’t imagine a time when we would be banning plastic bags in the supermarkets, and look at where we are now. The fight for climate justice has been going on for decades, and now people and government and big business are listening. Elections are being lost and won on the back of this. People have stopped denying that we are in a climate crisis. School children protesting in the street are showing just how much power they have. In the words of Paul Kelly, ‘From little things big things grow” – everything matters. Whether that is picking up rubbish along the river or rewilding a roundabout or nature strip or a single pot plant for insects and bees; or starting a Street Seed library – every action counts. And the more you do in the natural world, the more you notice about it, and the more you begin to genuinely care about the plants and animals and more-than-humans that co-exist with us. I read a wonderful article by David Farrier, and he talks about how we will be the ghosts that haunt the future. This is at the crux of what I wrote in Raven’s Song. If we can imagine being ancestors to people so far removed from us in time that they won’t even have traces of our language left, and we can ask ourselves what kind of ancestor we want to be, then suddenly our role as custodians of place becomes clear. Suddenly, we can see how each action we take will directly affect those who come after.

I can’t remember who said this, and I wish I could because it has really stuck with me and has changed the way I think, but they said that the last thing they want to do before they die is to plant a seed they won’t see grow.

The pandemics (and post-pandemic world) we hear about in the book feel eerily plausible and recognisable after Covid. Was Covid a factor in you choosing to bring this into the story? Were you worried about people’s reactions to confronting pandemics in a children’s book?

Bren – We started before covid. We were mostly done when covid hit and we thought it had ruined everything! We thought no one would want to read what was going on right under their noses. We talked about giving up, but we decided it was fun working together and we wanted to see how it all ended, so we kept going. It’s largely set in a post pandemic world rather than about a pandemic, even though Phoenix is living through a pandemic in his story line. It’s about what comes after, it’s about learning to be better people, and that what we do will flow on to the generations who follow.

Zana – I remember panicking to my writing crew when covid hit – I honestly thought the book wouldn’t be publishable. Pre November 2019, the idea of a global pandemic that shut the world down was the stuff of science fiction books. It couldn’t possibly happen in a Capitalist world! It was so wild and out there that it felt like a fun new idea to explore! Of course, living through it, we all know how very, very different the reality is, and living in Melbourne (who maintains the record for the longest period of lockdowns; and where we were only allowed out for an hour a day and had an 8pm curfew) I couldn’t imagine ever being in a space where reading about a pandemic would be enjoyable. But we couldn’t stop writing – it really was too much fun, and we agreed that maybe this would be just the kind of book that was needed when the dust settled. We did go back and add some things in there that we hadn’t originally considered though – the sanitisation of surfaces hadn’t entered our thinking originally, and the ‘hands, space, face’ notices were again something we felt needed a place in there.

Despite the serious issues both of you address in all of your books, including The Raven’s Song, there is always a real feeling of hope and possibility running through them – is it important to you to factor this in when you’re creating them?

Bren – Life goes on, it may change a lot but life finds a way. Zana says it best when she talks about time, and our position in it and the importance of being good ancestors.

Zana – I think it is about the resilience of young people. I used to work as an aide in schools, and I was working with kids who had terrible things happening to them, but they always had hope, and they were always able to find the small moments of happiness. Perhaps they didn’t realise how tough they had it, or perhaps they just had a long unwritten future ahead which kept them going. But as long as there is hope, there is possibility for change. This idea of having hope isn’t something I factor into my stories – it is vital to them. And vital to us as humans. When the Australian government told refugees that they would never be settled in Australia, that was a deliberate and calculated attempt to destroy the hope of the people who were seeking safety. And it broke people. Without hope, what is there? I may put my characters through terrible situations, but I would never take away their hope. And this goes back to the question of the way we write and talk and think about the climate crisis. If we are talking about it as if there is no hope, then there is nothing to work towards. But if we can imagine all the myriad ways that the future may look, then we still have hope. We can’t change the past, but we can always change the future. I hope that The Raven’s Song goes some way to showing readers that.

How easy is it to bring this in considering how hopeless we can often feel in the face of the many crises (social, environmental, economical etc.) we face in the modern world?

Bren – It’s so important not to leave it out. Environmental damage has a cascading effect on social and economical aspects, you can’t go to work if the roads are washed out for instance. The modern world and the news can feel overwhelming, but we are creatures of hope. Believing better days are ahead helps us get there.

Zana – Oh yes – I jumped ahead and answered this too early! But this is also why education should be focusing more on process and the ways we can learn to open up imaginative and creative spaces, rather than on output and rote learning. The future is going to need imaginers – it is going to need those whose minds stretch wide and far and create a whole host of possibilities. In our lives, we will all face situations that feel hopeless. Whether those are small moments or large global ones. But the way through those moments is to imagine the way the world can be. No feeling lasts forever. No situation lasts forever. If we can imagine a more hopeful world, we can work towards that vision.

You know what a big fan I am of all your books, and I loved the collaboration between you both in The Raven’s Song – can you tell us what else you have in the pipeline? And will there be any more collaborations to look forward to?

Bren – Yes, we are at the preplanning big idea stage! And it’s exciiiiiitiiiing!

Zana – SO exciting! We are at the throwing crazy ideas at each other stage and exploring where those ideas might take us.

And just for fun:

Favourite writing snacks or post-writing treats?

Bren – Sesame curry peanuts

Zana – Coffee. Tea. Chocolate. Digestive biscuits smeared with butter. A seed/nut mix if I’m feeling I need to be a bit healthier…

Favourite writing location?

Bren – The couch

Zana – My studio. It is where I go to create and it is an old converted kids’ cubby at the back of the garden (so very small) but it is like walking into my brain. It is covered in newspaper clippings and piles of stones and gargoyles and gnomes and beachcombed objects and a whole bowl full of tiny hands and feet (gifted to me by an artist friend) and pictures and photos and maps and postcards pinned to the corkboard walls. There are shelves full of my go-to books and a whiteboard for when I am stuck. There is just enough room for one of our two dogs to be in there with me, so usually one sits at my feet and the other in the doorway.

Favourite character in Raven’s Song?

Bren – The giant raven in sneakers

Zana – The Ravened Girl

Favourite character from a book by someone else?

Bren – Pippi Longstocking

Zana – Oh my goodness, Bren! How did we not know this about each other?! I too have an epic love for Pippi, but as Bren as chosen her already, I will say Granny Weatherwax and Tiffany Aching (oooh! And Rob Anybody!) from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld (I couldn’t choose between them…)

Favourite fairytale, myth or legend?

Bren – The Snow Queen – it’s a rambling 6 part fairytale where a girl saves a boy.

Zana – This is so hard! There are so many to choose from! Okay. Tatterhood – two sisters are born minutes apart, one is the stereotypical princess, and the other is born wearing a tattered hood and waving a wooden spoon while riding backwards on a goat. How can you go wrong with a beginning like that?

Animal you’d choose to see if one appeared as a sort of ‘guide’ or ’sign’ like the ravens in the book?

Bren – A pegasus (because I’d take some convincing if it wasn’t unusual!)

Zana – Gah! I LOVE this question! I think I would have to go with fox.

Can you sum up Raven’s Song in just three words?

Bren – Healing the world?

Your actions matter?

Time heals all?

Zana – Ancestoring the future.

Thank you both so much for answering all my questions – I loved reading more about The Raven’s Song and how it came to life, as well as your hope and passion for the future of our world (also, Zana, your studio sounds like a wonderful writing space!).

The Raven’s Song is published by Old Barn Books and is available in paperback now!