Welcome to the fourth day of the LEGACY OF THE BRIGHTWASH book tour presented by Storytellers On Tour! I am super thrilled to have had the opportunity to interview author Krystle Matar about all things related to her stunning debut. I was lucky enough to read LEGACY OF THE BRIGHTWASH prior to its release and I fell in love with it immediately. In fact, I consider it one of my favorite books of all time. Krystle has a way with words; not only has she written a truly immersive world, she’s written some of the most sympathetic characters I have ever come across. LEGACY OF THE BRIGHTWASH is a dark story that touches on romantic love, familial love, and much more. Here’s the official blurb:
Follow the law and you’ll stay safe. But what if the law is wrong?
Tashue’s faith in the law is beginning to crack.
Three years ago, he stood by when the Authority condemned Jason to the brutality of the Rift for non-compliance. When Tashue’s son refused to register as tainted, the laws had to be upheld. He’d never doubted his job as a Regulation Officer before, but three years of watching your son wither away can break down even the strongest of convictions.
Then a dead girl washed up on the bank of the Brightwash, tattooed and mutilated. Where had she come from? Who would tattoo a child? Was it the same person who killed her?
Why was he the only one who cared?
Will Tashue be able to stand against everything he thought he believed in to get the answers he’s looking for?
Before we proceed to the interview portion of this, uh…interview, I would like to note that Storytellers On Tour are running a tour-long contest. One lucky winner will walk away with a hardcover edition of LEGACY OF THE BRIGHTWASH. You can enter by clicking HERE—and trust me, you want to enter.
Without further ado—the interview.
- Who is Tashué Blackwood?
Tashué Blackwood is a whisky-drinking, cigarillo-smoking hot mess. He loves his son and he did his best, but he lives in a hard world and his choices weren’t easy. He’s a veteran, now an Officer of the Authority, trying to keep his shit together but failing a little. But, in spite of all that hardship, he’s a romantic at heart.
2. There is something cathartic about writing about guilt, grief, and loss. The characters in LEGACY OF THE BRIGHTWASH are broken but at times find threads of hope. How easy or difficult was it to balance opposite ends of that spectrum when writing about these characters?
I think the threads of hope and romance came naturally because of who I am as a person. I can build a dark world, and dark concepts, but ultimately I have to believe in people’s capacity to love. It’s a tough world out there, but I have been incredibly blessed to make amazing connections with genuinely good people, and those connections have healed my own jagged pieces. I needed the same for Tashué. The darker his world got, the more he and I needed the threads of love and hope to help carry him through to the end.
3. One of the most important themes in your book is the relationship between parents and their children. How did your own experiences as a parent influence this?
I mean, parenting is complicated. We do want our best for our children, but we’re human and we’re messy, too. My experiences as someone’s child also play in it. My perception of my own parents has changed a lot after I became a parent myself. I can still feel the pain of feeling let down, but also see where they were just trying their best, but they carried their flaws into their existence as parents themselves. It’s worth saying, though, that Tashué became a parent before I did. I’m not sure why I made that choice for him, or maybe he made that decision for himself, but he had Jason before I had my own kids. He was almost meant to be a father, I guess!
4. Yaelsmuir is a bleak place but one that feels instantly familiar. What inspired it?
I definitely reached for a familiar place when I was worldbuilding, and most of the flora and fauna I included (they don’t show much in Brightwash, but they’ll feature more in Brick & Bone) I got from research and inspiration for an ecosystem that felt like my area of Ontario. By extension, I think Yaelmsuir ended up with an Old Montreal vibe. The river traffic, the old bones, the ecosystem spreading around it. But of course, I put my own spin on it!
5. The cast of characters in LEGACY OF THE BRIGHTWASH present with varying sexual orientations which go unremarked upon by society as a whole; they are fluid, natural, and not written as such in order simply to meet a quota. Why was this important for you to convey?
I make no secret of the fact that my first crush as a writer was fanfiction. My earliest projects were fun, raunchy smut (shocking, right?) and it was a way to kind of process my own identity and sexuality when I didn’t have any other way to talk about it.
I carried this along with me as I moved into my own characters. Eventually it was suggested to me that, if I wanted to be “taken seriously” by a publisher, and have a career one day, I had to leave my queer characters behind, because “no one wants to read about that”. Unfortunately, I took that to heart, way back then, and my writing split. There was “for fun” writing—smutty, raunchy, larger than life, queer—and there was “for serious” writing which was more formulaic and sterilized of the things that I might have brought to my own stories.
I carried that with me for too long. A sharp, jagged stone, that pierced my heart and bled my own creativity. Earlier novels were empty and hollow because I was trying to recreate things I didn’t really believe in. Things that I had internalized, based on what people said to me, and said around me.
To look at the revision process of Brightwash is to watch me break through those limitations, those shackles. Bit by bit, characters talked about their sexualities more and more. Jason & Lorne have always been Jason & Lorne—there’s no separating them. But everyone else… They shed their sterilized shells and became more and more themselves as I looked into the self-published community and saw other authors being brave and defiant and rejecting those concepts that I had internalized. I saw that, if I chose to exist in the self-published community, I could write my book the way I wanted, and there would be an audience waiting for me.
So, fuck it. I’m writing a hard story, and a heavy story, but I’m writing it my way. Love need not be constrained by hetero-normative ideas. With the grim, ugly world these people are navigating, I didn’t want them to struggle with homophobia on top of everything else. Love, as I revised, became soimportant to the balance of the tone, and I didn’t want to put limits on the quality of that love. I was also tired of telling myself that “people don’t want to read about this”. I was tired of accepting that. The book is hard and heavy to write and I had to read it a million times as I revised—so I neededthis potential of having delight mixed in as I was working through. When I was doing a revision pass, I saw this opportunity for an amazing sex scene, so I wrote it on the side because I hadn’t made Tashué’s bisexuality “canon” yet. I was writing fanfiction for my own book! And with that, there came a point of clarity for me, as I was trying to decide just how much I would include (I’m thinking of Tashué and Ishmael specifically) and I could see myself building the foundation of my whole writing career with this book. Book One in a series, Book One in a new world. If I flinched, and left things out, I would have come to regret it, going forward. I decided I wanted to lay that foundation properly. I wanted the space to write stories how I wanted them to be. I didn’t want to be stuck in a cycle of writing a sanitized version, and then writing fanfiction because I hadn’t been brave enough to write sexuality the way I thought it should be. And I’m so, so glad that friends around me have been brave enough to do the same, and friends around me saw me struggling and pushed me. I’m still worried—but I think I made the right choice.
(PS—the extra sex scene didn’t make it into the book, because it didn’t fit at all with the plot I had built, but there is an extra smooch now)
6. Adoption and found families play a part in your novel. As someone who is adopted I connected immediately with this. How important was it for you to illustrate that family goes beyond blood? Was it something you considered when drafting the story it did it happen naturally?
I can’t say that was an intentional thing, it was just natural. Family is a messy concept. The people we are related to can install a lot of damage in us. The family we find can be so massively healing.
7. Who is Krystle Matar?
She is a whisky-drinking hot mess, without the cigarillos. She loves her children and she’s trying her best to protect them from a hard world, and prepare them to stand on their own feet one day. She’s trying to keep her shit together, and her husband is massively supportive and helpful. She’s had kind of a hard life, but she’s romantic at heart.
8. Why whiskey?
Tashué drank whisky before I did! Don’t ask me why. It’s one of those decisions he made for himself, I dunno. So, I followed him into it so that I could write about it most accurately, and he taught me how to love it. It’s deep and smoky and complex, with a hint of sweetness, just like him.
9. You find yourself in Yaelsmuir—why are you there?
I’m a chronicler, come to study the history. A lot has happened in Yaelsmuir. It’s the nexus of a massive political shift, and I’d love to know what happened. Oh, and the food. I’m going to eat all the food.
10. You find yourself somewhere in a book by your favorite author or the author by whom you were most inspired—where are you?
I’m either in the shadow of the Caer Druagh, the highland home of the Rigante clansmen, or I’m in Boston. Either way, things are probably going to be a little rough, but absolutely beautiful in its unfolding.
11. What was the motivation for self-publishing as opposed to going the traditional route?
The best summation of self-publishing vs traditional publishing houses is this: it’s like the difference between being an entrepreneur and an employee. There are pros and cons to both sides, and it’s good to be aware of the freedoms and the limitations of each one, and hopefully choose the one that suits you best. I like ability to seize control of my own career. I loved finding an artist—Brad, I love you—and choosing my own editors, and finding sensitivity readers to help me craft my vision. I adore being so involved in the community, among such brilliant and talented writers. I love that we’re hustling to move ourselves, and to move each other. It’s a beautiful community to be a part of. Y’all make me brave.
12. What can readers expect next?
I’m working hard on Legacy of Brick & Bone, Book Two in the Tainted Dominion series. Ishmael, the brat, demands his own novels. I have two ideas so far, told in his 1st person POV in the years before Brightwash; The Watchmaker’s Son and The Diplomat. Some day, I want the opportunity to explore other cities in the Dominion. I look at the West Coast, Gladwydd and the Ghost Mines and the Breaking Stone. That place is begging me for some gritty, windy, hurricane stories.
13. What do you think of lemons and turkeys?
Citrus and poultry go really well together! Stick halved lemons into your bird’s cavity before you roast it, with onions and garlic. That way, you know for SURE they aren’t Harrowers, and there’s no room for anything else in there!
Thus concludes my stop on the LEGACY OF THE BRIGHTWASH book tour presented by Storytellers On Tour. A huge thanks to Krystle and Storytellers for having me on board, and be sure to check out the other posts by some people much better at this book blogging thing than I am.
You can connect with Krystle Matar online via her Website, Twitter, Instagram, and Goodreads.
You can purchase LEGACY OF THE BRIGHTWASH on Amazon by clicking HERE.
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