Aurora: What was your inspiration behind your most recent graphic novel?
Maggie Stiefvater: Swamp Thing’s Alec Holland gave me a splendid opportunity to showcase something I’m passionate about: the humanity of plants and the strangeness of humans. It’s a theme I’ve explored a little in my prose works, but with this graphic novel origin story, I got to really dive in and do a story about what it meant to feel more instep with plants than with your own body. Are all teens really into the language of plants? No, probably not. But I think every teen (and maybe adult, honestly) has thought of themselves as an alien in their own lives at some point.
What character in this graphic novel do you most relate to and why?
I suppose I’ll have to go with the titular Swamp Thing. Well, Swamp Thing before he is Swamp Thing: Alec Holland, the introverted, science-minded teen who passionately studies plants and memory. In the book, he’s starting to understand that actually doesn’t have as much in common with his twin brother as he thought he did, and he’s also just been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, so he doesn’t understand his body like he used to, and he’s retreating into something that feels like it does make sense: the plant world.
I too have wrestled with my body (I got diagnosed with adrenal insufficiency after a collapse on book tour) and also often feel like I am a better observer than participant in society. Alec and I cope with it in different ways — he withdraws, I jump on tables and perform — but the root cause (that’s a plant pun! Admire me!) is the same.
Why do you feel graphic novels and comics with powerful and unique characters are so popular and have such a voice right now?
I don’t think we ever got tired of illustrated stories. Adults were just told for a few decades that they were silly and childish and eventually you were supposed to grow out of them. But why? We have photos with our newspaper articles. Illustrations on the blog posts. Vivid graphics accompany even the most sophisticated nonfiction pieces we consume. But for some reason, we developed this cultural understanding that to want a picture with your fiction was to be juvenile.
I think we’ve just gotten over ourselves, honestly. Hard-won territory, of course. But images are so normalized on web content now that it seems silly to pretend the presence of them ruins the neighborhood.
Please describe the content of your latest read and what can readers expect from it.
Swamp Thing: Twin Branches is a reimagined origin story for young adults and up. Alec Holland is an introverted, intelligent teen with his eyes firmly fixed on his research — research that gets upended when he is forced to spend the summer with his twin brother Walker and his cousins in the rural wetlands of Virginia. It’s an exploration of language, identity, and humanity, ultimately asking: what does it mean to be alive?
What’s next for you in this publishing world?
I don’t have another graphic novel on the table (although I did just have another artsy project come out, the Scorpio Sea Tarot deck, which features 78 cards based on the imagery of my novel The Scorpio Races)(that art was a ton of fun to draw), and I’m working on the final book in my NYT Bestselling trilogy the Dreamer Trilogy, which follows people who can take things out of their dreams through the art world. And I’ve also got two secret novels on the ol’ hard drive that I can’t say anything about.
What can fans expect from your Miami Book Fair appearance?
Plants. Plants. Plants.
What is your favorite book that you’ve recently read?
I just finished reading PIRANESI by Susanna Clarke and adored it; I think adult readers who remember Narnia fondly will love it, too. I also finished Octavia Butler’s short story collection BLOOD CHILD and thought it was fantastic and disturbing. And finally, yesterday I closed the cover of Atul Gawande’s THE CHECKLIST MANIFESTO, a surgeon’s exploration of how the simple checklist can improve medicine, engineering, and aviation. This year I told myself I wasn’t going to read anything I didn’t want to, and it’s worked wonderfully — it’s been a good year for good books.
Next, author Danielle Paige!