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Author Biography | Interview | Books by this Author | Read-Alikes
How to pronounce Susann Cokal: COKE-L
Susann Cokal was born in California and lived most of her life there and in the Southwest, where she found much of the material for Breath and Bones. She also spent a year studying medieval history, art history, and literature in Poitiers, France, the inspiration for Mirabilis. After earning two PhD's (one from Berkeley in comparative literature, one from Binghamton University in creative writing), she taught at California Polytechnic University in San Luis Obispo.
She now lives in Richmond, Virginia, and teaches creative writing and contemporary narrative at Virginia Commonwealth University. And she'd like to state for the record that she's not quite as stuffy as all that sounds.
Her most recent book was published in October 2013, The Kingdom of Little Wounds.
Susann Cokal's website
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What inspired you to write Mirabilis?
Inspiration is a sticky subject—I can't say exactly where Mirabilis
came from, or at least how the different elements managed to congeal into a
story for me. Most of the characters and events lived in my mind for years
before I figured out how they fit together. For example, I've always thought wet
nurses fascinating because they use their bodies to make both food and an
honorable living—I just needed to find a story to fit such
a remarkable profession.
A lot of ideas came from the long-ago year I lived in Poitiers, France, which
was an important city during the Middle Ages. I didn't have money to travel, so
I got to know the town and outlying villages very well—mostly
on foot, which is the way my characters would have had to get around, too. I
became more and more interested in how common people (not fairy-tale princesses)
conducted their lives in medieval times; I wanted to imagine what they would be
like in love, for example. One of the tidbits that really fascinated me was that
a sculptor had put his name on a capital in nearby Chauvigny, at a time when
almost no one signed an artistic work. I kept wondering what would suddenly make
someone ...
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If you enjoyed:
Mirabilis
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