Editor and CSFG member Simon Petrie has been interviewing contributors to his latest Peggy Bright Books anthology, Use Only As Directed (co-edited with Edwina Harvey) and has just posted the interview with fellow CSFG-er Leife Shallcross about her story “The Blue Djinn’s Wish”.
What should readers know about you before they sit down to read ‘The Blue Djinn’s Wish’?
Before they read it? Ummm… I love fairy tales. Not the boring ones. The ones with clever characters who have to use their wits, whether they’re princesses or peasants; with quirky and fascinating magical creatures; with conundrums and twists and unexpected truths. I like how numbers are important in fairy tales. How, often, a plot has to loop around itself a certain number of times before it can go on. I love the tales with that rhythm to the story. And I love a satisfying ending (which doesn’t have to be happy.) I like the tales that don’t spell it out for you, that leave room for your own imagination to add colour. I also love stories that might not actually be fairy tales themselves, but borrow from them.
And now I’ve put all that out there, I can only hope that people reading this story think I’ve achieved some of that.
What provoked you (or, if you’d rather, encouraged you) to tell the story you did? What was the germ of the idea that led to it?
Hi Ian,
Thanks for this. And thanks for your interview Simon and thanks Leife for sharing your writing process and insights on The Blue Djinn’s Wish. I like how you used the word Djinn instead of Genie, it adds to the intrigue somehow because it is less familiar, at least that is how it works for me.
I think your sentence ‘It held the faintest echo of summer thunder’ is beautiful, which is why I like your writing because your imagery is so beautiful and evocative and it makes it really easy to immerse myself into the story.
Thanks for persisting with it so that it eventually found its right publishing home, so now we can all read it.
Kind regards,
Joanne