Writers on Writing: Interview with Samantha Garner
With themes of Filipino Canadian and mixed-race identity, fantastical elements from Norse and Filipino mythology, and tarot card symbolism, Samantha Garner’s debut novel, The Quiet Is Loud, was one of my most anticipated reads of 2021. Here's a synopsis:
"When Freya Tanangco was ten, she dreamed of her mother’s death days before it happened. Freya’s life since has been spent in hiding: from the troubled literary legacy created by her author father, and from the scrutiny of a society that is hostile to vekers—people who, like her, have enhanced mental abilities. When her prophetic dreams take a dangerous turn, Freya finds herself increasingly forced to sacrifice her own anonymity—and the fragile safety that comes with it—in order to protect those around her."
In The Quiet Is Loud, Samantha Garner delicately weaves a page-turning tale of self-acceptance, the lasting impact of family legacy, and the bonds formed when we encounter people who share our identities and in safe spaces with allies. I’m thrilled Samantha stopped by the blog to share her writing process for TQIL in this Writers on Writing interview:
So, I’m always trying to understand how writers get our ideas. Sometimes it feels like they arrive in a flash, and other times we have to patiently pick through well, life, to put together a concept that can sustain a novel. How did you develop the premise for The Quiet Is Loud?
The Quiet is Loud is my first novel, and one that I don’t think I intended to be a novel. I’d written a short story that was published on storychord.com, which featured some eventual TQIL characters and the basic family conflict of Freya’s father’s controversial, barely-fictionalized novel about his childhood.
Something about that idea stuck in my brain. It merged with the beginnings of another short story I’d written (unpublished), which featured a woman having a nightmare of her mother’s death – this became Freya’s prophetic dream in The Quiet is Loud. I thought of that short story scene and wondered how it would be if it were more than a nightmare. What if it was a vision, and this person had to live with seeing the nightmarish images come to pass?
Once that question came into my brain, other elements floated in to make an idea I knew I could sustain for a novel-length project. It was exciting and unexpected!
The world in The Quiet Is Loud features a social class of characters with unique “paradextrous abilities,” discreet support groups, and complex political and interpersonal dynamics. What was your worldbuilding process like?
Even though the paradextrous people in the novel can do things like see visions of the future, induce a person to believe they’ve caught fire, and make others go catatonic, I didn’t want to go too far out of the realm of what could theoretically be possible in our world. As one paradextrous character says to Freya, “That’s what people don’t get about us. It isn’t like we wield lightning or throw cars with our minds. We just have more developed brains than other people.”
Honestly, at first this was a limitation I put on myself because I believe the best magic systems are the ones that have rules, but then I started to see some really interesting possibilities for worldbuilding. I could imagine how paradextrous people would be treated in our existing societies, because their existence doesn’t involve too much suspension of disbelief (I hope). They probably wouldn’t all be considered dangerous, and not by everyone, but it would be a scary enough world for them that they’d want to stay hidden. They’d seek each other out rarely, or in secret. And sadly, I didn’t have to do much imagining to find real-world analogues of the sort of prejudice they face in the novel.
In addition to the socio-political worldbuilding, The Quiet Is Loud includes Norse and Filipino mythology, and tarot symbolism—how do you organize your research? What role did research play in the story’s development?
I used Scrivener to organize everything – I switched to using it while writing this novel and it was such a lifesaver! I’m pretty awful at organizing my own files and Scrivener made it very easy for me to have all my notes in one place, create folders, even colour code. Heaven.
As for the research itself, I did more than I thought I would, considering this is a novel that’s set in a world almost exactly like our own! I was only faintly familiar with Norse mythology and tarot cards, and so had to do a fair amount of research on those elements – I think the most fun research I did was spending a few days hanging out on various tarot reader chatrooms, to help me create Oneira, the chatroom site Freya works for. There’s a scene in the novel where Freya mentions another tarot reader on Oneira who’d picked her teeth with a card while visible to everyone in chat – that actually happened during one of my research sessions! What a godsend.
I think the most infuriating research though was in creating the word “veker,” the slur term that people use for the paradextrous. I had this idea that in the world of the novel, “veker” would be a word that someone somewhere on the planet used to describe them, and it caught on. I thought it would be easy – I’d just translate a few rude words and one would surely work. But it was so much harder than that! Some words weren’t impactful enough. Others wouldn’t be easily pronounceable by English speakers. Others were too close to English words. It felt like it took forever but in the end I found my word in Old Swedish, where “veker” meant “weak.” I also liked how it sounded like a curse word, with those hard V and K sounds.
As I was reading, I was pleasantly surprised by the way food was incorporated into the story. The meals and traditions were an effective way to connect the reader with Freya’s multi-cultural heritage, as well as her emotional state. How did you choose which dishes to feature? What was your process like for crafting those scenes?
When it came to the Filipino food I mostly chose my favourites! Freya’s favourite Filipino breakfast, longsilog, is mine too. There’s one scene where Freya agrees to try her Norwegian mother’s favourite rollmops, and the turmoil over eating pickled herring came from life, too. My mother is Finnish and loves pickled herring and I’ve tried for years to force myself to like it too, but I just can’t. She doesn’t care of course, but I really feel like I let her down!
Longsilog. Photo by Samantha Garner
I also wanted to use food as a way for Freya and Javi to bond a little. A few years ago I heard a Filipino person say that, where they sometimes had difficulty relating to some other Asian cultures, they often felt they had more in common with people from non-Asian cultures who’d undergone Spanish colonization. In a way I really understood that. Part of what makes Filipino culture so unique is that Spanish influence, and it really comes through in the food. Javi is half Colombian, and he and Freya undergo a little rivalry around Filipino chicharon vs Colombian chicharrón. They’re somewhat jokingly performing their loyalty to cultures they each feel half-connected to, but they’re using food as a safe, low-stakes way to connect to each other and learn to trust each other.
I related so much to Freya’s emotional journey as she came to terms with her identity. I was nineteen before I met another multi-racial Chinese person (aside from my brother). Growing up without a sense of belonging in either white or Asian-American community gave me a sense of alienation that I recognized in Freya as she tried to distance herself with the wider world, as well as the security she felt when she found a safe space with STEP. Were there ways your multi-racial identity shaped Freya’s journey to self-acceptance?
I’m so happy to hear that you felt a certain recognition in aspects in Freya’s life, even if experiences may not have themselves been fun. I also grew up feeling alienated from my respective communities, despite both of them welcoming me. The alienation was all internal. I felt I didn’t belong to either fully and just simply never could. And even now I honestly can’t extricate my feelings of alienation due to my multi-racial identity from other sorts of alienation. That sense of feeling not X enough for either culture is so ingrained in me that I feel like it must amplify other times when I feel othered, or “not X enough.” So when I was writing Freya’s story and the ways she tried to pass, the ways she felt unsure about speaking up, the ways she molded herself according to the people she was with, the ways she felt she had to hide aspects of her deepest self – it all felt too easy to put myself in her shoes.
Even though the struggles faced by paradextrous people in TQIL isn’t a direct reflection of a specific thing in our society, I found that writing Freya helped me to come to terms with a lot of my own internalized feelings about being multi-racial. Going back to your question about food, deciding to include certain Filipino dishes and Filipino mythology and folktales helped me to see that it was okay if I didn’t have a perfect understanding of Filipino culture, and it was okay to highlight and celebrate the aspects I did know, and did love. And it was okay to admit I may never have a perfect understanding of either of my cultures.
And on a similar note, the friendship between Freya and Javi was special to me for a similar reason. Even though they don’t talk about it directly, the fact that they’re both multi-racial forms another sort of connection for them. I don’t know if you’ve experienced this but I often find a greater sense of belonging with other multi-racial people, even if their cultural backgrounds aren’t the same as mine. There’s just … something. Maybe we can’t define it. Maybe we can just always relate to each other on some unspoken level.
What’s currently on your TBR list?
Oh the ever-shifting TBR list! Well, most immediately are the two books I just checked out from the library: Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark, and The Bloodprint by Ausma Zehanat Khan. Both authors recently appeared at the Festival of Literary Diversity and honestly, I think books I learned about at that festival are going to make up the bulk of my TBR list for a while!
What projects do you have coming up next? Do you have plans for a TQIL sequel?
I don’t have any plans for a TQIL sequel, though if a great idea comes to me at some point in the future, I’m open to it! Currently I’m reworking a “space magic” novel I’d begun and got somewhat far into before I realized I’d completely written myself into a corner. The new direction seems promising so far, so – fingers crossed!
What advice would you offer to writers currently working on a novel manuscript?
The “write shitty first drafts” advice has been very sound for me! Nobody’s going to publish anyone’s first draft of anything, so there is absolutely no pressure for it to be perfect or even good. That’s what editing is for! There’s honestly something magical about seeing your novel complete from beginning to end, so don’t work against that magic.
Photo by Susanna Kaapu
Samantha Garner is a Canadian SF/F author living in the Greater Toronto area. Samantha’s stories and poems have been published in print and online, in publications such as The Fiddlehead, Kiss Machine, Storychord, WhiskeyPaper, Sundog Lit, and The Quarantine Review. The Quiet Is Loud is available for purchase through Invisible Books or your favorite indie bookstore.
Learn more about Samantha Garner on her website.
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