This month’s Lattes with Ladies is featuring Maggie Chang! Maggie is a writer, poet, artist, Top 25 Under 25 Environmentalist, and WWF Canada Living Planet Leader. She’s smart, she’s thoughtful, and she loves a good fantasy novel. It was incredibly fun to talk to her about YA novels, getting into a series before everybody else, and coping during COVID-19. You can find some of Maggie’s work on her blog or by following her on Twitter or Instagram.
HPL: Let’s start light and easy, what have you been reading lately?
MC: This is not light and easy when you’re in school, cause when you’re in school you don’t read anything! [laughs] Other than your readings. So, I have been working on Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness forever. I’m not entirely sure if I enjoy this book [which] is the issue, which kind of sucks because the first book, The Knife of Never Letting Go, I really liked.It was really good because it was fast-paced. Not to say that slow-paced books are bad, but I really enjoyed the fast pacing of this book. It was really just something after another after another and just as soon as you thought things would be ok something else happens and it’s super stressful again. Also, things happen that absolutely broke my heart. I just love that book; it was so good. Plus, it has this whole surviving the wilderness kind of aspect that is kind of similar to my novel and that was really interesting to see. I was kind of reading it for research, but then I got to the second book and it was very slow up until two-thirds in, and then it got really good again. Now I’m on the third book and I’m like 100 pages in and it is kind of interesting but it’s still very slow, and I’m just trying to see whether it’s worth it or not. [laughs] But yeah, I’ve been working on that one forever.
I’m also in a creative writing course now where I have to read stuff. Because really, mostly what I’ve been doing was not really reading anything except my own novel. Which you’re not supposed to do as a writer but here we are and that’s what I was doing. Anyways, we had to make a reading and writing plan so two of the books that I put on my plan that I’ve been meaning to read forever were Milk & Honey by Rupi Kaur and More Happy Than Not… so slowly getting into those as well. I don’t know if you want to count this, but I have reading apps on my phone?
HPL: Oh, that absolutely counts!
MC: Okay, I do more reading on my phonethan book reading nowadays. There’s this one app that I haven’t been using a lot lately, but I’m very into it on and off. It’s called Choices. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it?
HPL: No, what’s the Choices app?
MC: So, Choices is sort of like a virtual bookshelf in a way. It’s one app and the Choices team has written like a whole bunch of different books. And you have a whole bunch of different options so there’s stuff like fantasy to contemporary to horror to science fiction and space opera, that kind of stuff. They’re a choose-your-own-adventure kind of thing. So, you’re reading a story and you can make some choices about what your character said as well as what your character does. And with [the choices] you make the ending changes or they make different kinds of alignments for your character and earn prestige. That kind of stuff. There’s so many different game mechanics depending on what book you’re reading and honestly, there are a lot of these choose-your-own-adventure or reading type apps out there. Choices is my absolute favourite because the writing quality is so good. And I do a lot of reading to inspire writing or try to figure out cool new situations to put my characters in and that kind of thing. And Choices books have inspired me so much, all the time and they’ve broken my heart and made me cry. There was especially one book that came out, it was like chapters were coming out every week last summer, I think? That was what I lived for! It was like, “Wednesday! It’s Wednesday! Blades of Light and Shadow is coming out. New Blades!” That’s what I’ve been reading in a nutshell.
HPL: Now that absolutely counts! I’m a huge fan of books that are not “books”. We’ve reached this weird point where I almost don’t like to talk about book-reading anymore. I like to talk about reading in general or “story-reading” because between audiobooks and everything there’s just so much more media available now. It really divvy’s it up. You’re actually the first person I’ve spoken to for this that talks about a choose-your-own-adventure style book. Which is so fun because I remember reading those as a kid but the old school paper ones where it would say “Flip to page 63” and you’d flip all the way over there and then you’d die and you’d be like, “Ugh”.
MC: It’s nice though! When you die in Choices, they’re just like, “Restart from checkpoint?” and you don’t have to flip.
HPL: Ah, yes less flipping. And it was the pulpy paper too. I remember my thumbs; they’d feel really weird afterwards.
MC: Yeah, yeah, yeah! [laughs]
HPL: So, you kind of mentioned this already but it brings us to my next question which is: how does what you’re reading impact how or what you’re writing? Because as you already mentioned, you are also a writer.
MC: My joke is that 90% of writing is stealing things from other people, 9% staring at your ceiling trying to figure out how it works, and 1% writing… For me, a lot of inspiration definitely comes from other media, other books, and TV or movies. Also, songs. Often what happens is either something happens to the characters that I think is really cool or the writer is exploring something that I’m like, “Hey! That’s really interesting.” I wonder how I would do it if I wanted to explore that concept or this kind of impossible situation usually. Like what would this character do if they were facing these impossible choices. I also get a lot of inspiration from just emotional feelings. Like if something in Choices just hurts my heart physically then I think, “I need to do this myself”. I guess maybe it comes from also being a poet and stuff like that. Emotion is very important in my writing and so I get very inspired by emotion. When I’m kind of feeling what the characters might be feeling it’s easier to flesh out. It’s more like they speak to me, honestly. When I’m feeling how they might be feeling, I just get lines that come to me of how they might interact or what they might say or what they might do.
HPL: I agree with you. Poetry is more emotion-driven than a lot of other styles. It’s funny you bring that up because as I’m sure you already know, Amanda Gormon did a beautiful rendition of her poem The Hill We Climb for President Joe Biden’s inauguration recently and I’ve been very excited to speak to you about it because…
MC: So jealous. I am so jealous! Her books are topping the best seller lists now and they’re not even out. And I’m just like, “How do I get that exposure?!”
HPL: You’re too funny! Because I did not want to be rude about it, but you are also a 22-year-old poet I noticed and I wanted to ask how you feel about this?
MC: I feel very envious! [laughs] No, well… because the thing is, not to like brag or anything, but I have written similar style pieces. And I always say the marker of good poetry is that it makes you feel something: it’s a reader or a listener has something come up in their heart as a result from the poem. I watched her entire delivery of the poem on a Twitter video or something on inauguration day and like I recognized some of the things she was doing are like things that I did. It was also very spoken word style which is a similar style to me so yeah… Clearly the kind of stuff that I do is getting very popular now. How do I find the people who will notarize it?!
HPL: Are you not amped though? I have to say after that performance, a) she knocked it out of the park, she was the best performer that day and b) I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the amount of people I’ve been speaking to about the poem. People who, frankly, normally would not want to talk about poetry at all. They were very moved!
MC: That’s the thing about spoken word! That’s why I love it. Because honestly, back in the day I was probably one of those people said, “Ugh, poetry.” Because the “Love Poem of Alfred J. Prufrock” or whatever it’s called, I don’t connect to that. What poetry used to be was so inaccessible, so now you have the spoken word genre… It was revolutionary to [me] when I was first shown a video for a bullying assembly in school. Because I was like, “Woah, poetry can be like that?!” It was so interesting the way you play with words and the assonance and the enjambment. All of this kind of thing. It tells a story that people understand! And as I mentioned, my marker of a good poem is that it makes people feel stuff. It doesn’t always have to be cut and dry like people understand but I think also what I mean by it makes people feeling something is that they come to understand something in their heart. So even though they don’t necessarily know what the poet is talking about or maybe they have like a different interpretation of what it means from what the poet was specifically writing about. They understood something profound for themselves in the poem. That’s what I think is super awesome, what makes a super awesome poem, and that’s why I like spoken word because it does that.
HPL: How has COVID-19 and the pandemic really impacted your choice in what you’re reading or not reading?
MC: For me, especially during the beginning of the pandemic, I was starting to get really into my novel. I spent a lot of time, just full days hanging out with the characters and I was trying to figure out how stuff worked. I think, for me, it was definitely an escape and I even posted about it somewhere. It was kind of profound because my characters are in a world where they can still touch each other! That sounds really inane but it’s also like touch is such an important thing to the human condition. We are inherently social creatures and things like affectionate touch, whether it’s from a partner or platonic, it’s so important to our wellbeing. So, I guess being able to be in a world where people could still be together and touch and do all these things, even though they’re running for their lives in the forest, it was an escape.
HPL: Wait, what is your novel about? Are you allowed to talk about it?
MC: I am querying it, so I have a blurb: “In a world overrun by soul stealers, Azura, wakes with no memories. Caspian knows Azura but can’t admit it. And Drew has the biggest secret of all. Full of magic, Iridescia is a story of love, loss, and what it is to live every day a breath from death.”
HPL: It sounds like a sci-fi or fantasy genre?
MC: It is a YA fantasy sort of thing. I started it when I was 14 and broke a lot of genre rules… because it is actually set in a sort of dystopian fantasy future. So, it’s set on Earth, two or three hundred years after our time, after a huge war happened in a timeline where magical creatures always existed. And then more magical creatures came and created soul stealers and they are very scary.
HPL: So, you started writing around 14, were you into The Hunger Games or the Maze Runner series?
MC: Yeah, The Hunger Games. I was not a super fan, but I was one of the first people who read it. I remember that because I was in Grade 7 or something and it was before the movies had come out and we were like, “We should read these things because they are new and hot and whatever.” And then everybody started reading it because of the movie. And I was like, “I was before all of y’all.”
HPL: That is exactly how I feel about Twilight. I bought my copy of Twilight in 2006. It was a book no one had heard of, but the second book had just come out. With the way that the book-movie-production popularity scale went, I was reading these books in elementary/middle school and by the time I hit high school I thought, “This is lame.” And then the movies came out and everybody was into it.
MC: I actually had the Twilight box set. I am ashamed of it, but I did get it [laughs]… There were some things that I did learn from Twilight. Likehow to write a kissing scene. Honestly, straight up those were not bad.
HPL: Yeah! The books weren’t popular for no reason; I will give them that. Anyways, the reason I was asking is I was just curious…
MC: What inspired my novel? I can tell you! I think it was a Hunger Games kind of thing. Not that I was inspired by it but there a contest: ‘write a 500-page dystopia’ and in that kind of vein. So, I remember being like, “Hey, I could do this!” I remember I had watched The Princess Bride around that time and I also was really invested in this series… It was Tiger’s Curse by Collen Houck and there’s this love triangle in Tiger’s Curse that I was so invested in! I was like, “Oh my god, if this doesn’t happen, I don’t know what I’m going to do?!” I was so mad because this girl clearly loves that one, she just clearly wants to be with him, but she keeps on pushing him away because of duty, whatever. And I was like, “No, girl stop it! I can’t take this. I need to write my own love triangle where I have control and I can make sure that this person ends up with the person that she clearly is in love with.” So, that was one component and then soul stealers I’m 90% sure come from The Princess Bride. There was that one part towards the end where there is that machine that sucks out Wesley’s life and almost kills him… to have a thing that could actually suck away somebody’s life. I thought that was so, so, so interesting. Like I said before, I watch other media, I see the ideas they have and I want to explore it myself. I want to see what would happen when I put my spin on it and what kind of lessons I would want to learn and show through my own explanation of it. And then I just want to make readers cry, man. That is how my book came together.
HPL: What was the first thing that you read that made you want to write? Because not everybody who loves to read wants to write.
MC: I have thought about it. I don’t know if it was a specific book that made me want to write. If there was, I don’t remember what it is. But I was about 11 or 12 and I had been kind of like flip flopping up until that point of what my answer would be to: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” When I was in kindergarten, I thought a teacher because that is really cool. And then I flip-flopped in-between singer and dancer when I was a little bit older. At some point my answer became fashion designer. I was very artsy as a kid. And then when I got to Grade 6, I just had this epiphany where I was like, “Oh my god, I could be a writer!” I realized I love reading and creating books would be so awesome; I would love that. And then I started writing a really, really cringe story with unicorns and vampires, and it was also a fantasy. It was basically me mixing up all of the stuff I had been interested in at that point. I was 11 or 12 and that was kind of the age where you shift—you’re still reading some younger stuff like chapter books, but then you also start reading YA. I was still into this My Secret Unicorn series, so I was like I have to include that. I might have read Twilight around this point or it might have been just before I started it but I remember reading this series [called] My Sister the Vampire and it was about these twins where one of them is human and the other one is a vampire. I thought those were so cool. Let’s just mix all of the things that I’m interested in, so you came out with a Portal fantasy—because I was also really into Portal—with unicorns and vampires. That was what happened. And then, I realized that I thought it was really bad. [laughs] Maybe it could be revisited for a middle grade or younger audience. I definitely could not make it for YA which I focus on now. Then I read Melissa Marr’s Wicked Lovely series and it changed my life. I was like, “Holy shit! Faeries are so awesome.” I just became obsessed with faeries after that, still am.