Once Upon a Western: An Interview With Rachel Kovaciny
Once Upon a Western: An Interview With Rachel Kovaciny
Today I'm hosting fellow indie author Rachel Kovaciny for an interview, to celebrate this week's launch of her newest book, Prairie Tales. The sixth book in Rachel's Once Upon a Western series, Prairie Tales is a collection of short stories—each a retelling of a fairytale, folk tale, or nursery rhyme, and all featuring characters from the previous books in the series. It sounds like such a fun, cozy, altogether delightful collection, with a cover to match! For more about this newest book and the Once Upon a Western series in general, let's get to the interview:
Welcome, Rachel! Tell us a little about yourself, and why you love (a) Westerns, and (b) fairytales.
Hi, everyone! And thank you, Elisabeth, for having me here on your blog.
The short answer is, I love westerns because cowboys make me happy. I grew up watching cowboy movies with my dad, and they always left me feeling satisfied and energetic. Even now that I often watch the more somber westerns as well as the cheerful sort, they still satisfy me in a way no other genre really does.
The longer answer is that westerns provide so much opportunity for variety of characters and settings. The American West isn’t only mountains or only plains or only deserts. And the characters can be from any background around the world, really – not only people from the East Coast, or people born in the West, but Canadians, Mexicans, Europeans, Asians, Australians, South Americans, Africans – when the West was being settled, it drew people from every place and every walk of life. There is no limit to the kinds of stories you can tell when you throw together people of such different backgrounds, beliefs, hopes, dreams, and desires.
As for fairy tales, they are one of the friendliest forms of mythic storytelling, and I gravitate toward myth-based story structure. Because the Wild West is America’s great national myth, in a way, it makes sense to me to blend the two together.
Your first foray into Western fairytale retellings was a Sleeping Beauty story in the multi-author anthology Five Magic Spindles. How soon after that did you get the idea for your next Western retelling, and when did you realize it was going to be a series?
I had actually had the idea of retelling fairy tales as westerns a year or so before I wrote The Man on the Buckskin Horse for Five Magic Spindles, but I never went anywhere with that idea. While I was doing revisions on Buckskin, the editor from Rooglewood Press I was working with said she thought there would be a real audience for more wild west fairy tale retellings, and encouraged me to consider writing another one.
“Little Red Riding Hood” is a pretty obvious one to retell as a western, what with the wolf and the dangerous journey, so I settled on that one for my next story. While I was writing Cloaked, I did a little brainstorming and figured out how to make “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” “Beauty and the Beast,” “Cinderella,” and “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” into westerns too. So the idea of it being a series came pretty early on, definitely before I finished the first draft of Cloaked.
The Once Upon a Western series features stories of all different lengths, from the short stories in Prairie Tales up to short novels. How do you pick which fairytales you want to retell at full length and which will be shorter tales—or do they kind of decide for themselves?
They kind of decide for themselves, usually. I’ll get an idea for how a fairy tale would work as a western, figure out who the characters could generally be and what the plot line would be, and once I know the basic plot, I know whether it will be a book or a short story. Usually! I actually wrote a retelling of “The Seven Swan Princes” last year that I thought was going to be a short story, and it got to be almost 30,000 words! And it needed to expand more yet. So, I now plan to turn that one into a full book.
I know some of your characters make cameo/crossover appearances in different stories across the series. Is that something you plan out or is it more spur-of-the-moment?
I have planned all along for these books to take place in a shared universe, if you will, and to have them connected to each other in the background while still being stand-alone adventures. But I don’t always know until I’m planning the next book how it connects to the previous ones. For instance, there’s a character from Cloaked who shows up in a later book, and I did not expect that until I got about a third of the way through the first draft of that later book. Suddenly, I was looking at my series timeline and going, “Wait, could this work? Could this person be in this place at this time?”
Other things, I knew before I started the next book, like Marta Beckmann from My Rock and My Refuge being the cousin of Hauer from Cloaked. That made obvious sense, since they both have German ancestry. And there are a lot more connections that get revealed in this short story collection, some quite obviously and some a little more subtly.
Do you have a favorite decade or period of Old West history? If so, are most of your stories set in that time or are they scattered across different decades?
I particularly love the classic Cowboy Era of 1865-1885, and this whole series takes place then. But I am currently writing a fantasy western for a multi-author series called the Cornerstone Series, and that takes place in a magical realism version of 1807 California! That one’s called A Noble Companion and is set to release November 12. It has no relation to my Once Upon a Western series, but it IS a fairy tale retelling. It retells “The Ugly Duckling,” but focusing on some side characters.
Can you tell us anything about future plans for the Once Upon a Western series?
I think the next book in the series will be Steadfast, a retelling of “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” set in Texas and involving a cattle drive. After that will be either a “Cinderella” retelling set on the Santa Fe Trail or that “Seven Swan Princes” retelling I mentioned earlier, which I’ll expand into a book. I have ideas for a couple more short stories already, too, so I’ve called this new release Prairie Tales: Volume One because I fully anticipate putting out a Volume Two one day!
Thanks so much for this interview, Elisabeth! This has been so much fun.
You're so welcome! It has indeed!