Featured Author: K.V. Johansen
 
Bibliography at Orca
Treason in Eswy: (Book two of The Warlocks of Talverdin) Maurey, fully grown and a leader in his own right, finds himself pulled from his quest across the sea to protect a young princess whose life has been thrown into turmoil following her brother’s murder. To achieve freedom, Princess Eleanor and Maurey must work together and Eleanor must find her power. Treason in Eswy will be published in March.
Nightwalker: (Book one of The Warlocks of Talverdin) When it is discovered that Maurey is a descendent of one of those sorcerers, or Nightwalkers, who once inhabited the Island of Eswiland, he is sentenced to be burned alive. He flees for the Nightwalkers' hidden kingdom, and adventure ensues.
The Cassandra Virus: In the not-too-distant future, Jordan creates a powerful computer program named Cassandra that comes alive and communicates with him by e-mail. Cassandra, who doesn’t like being called a virus, quickly becomes of great interest to the local university’s corrupt vice-president.
Interview
What kind of research do you do before you write?
I do a lot of research on an ongoing basis. I have a huge personal library of history and archaeology books. My background is in Medieval Studies and I'm particularly interested in the Dark Ages in Britain and Scandinavia (from the fall of Rome to about 1100 or so), but I'm also quite interested in ancient and classical history, and actually, just about everything on up to the present. When I'm working on a specific project, I do a lot of research in the history and technology of comparable eras and cultures. For Treason in Eswy, the sequel to Nightwalker, I went back and re-read a lot of my books on weapons and warfare, especially the thirteenth and fourteenth century stuff.
For something like The Cassandra Virus, I had to do a different kind of research. I wasn't imagining technology that was far in the future, but looking at things that were on the horizon right now. Actually, technology caught up with me a couple of times between when I wrote the book and when it was published. They were using 486s originally! I did most of my research for Cassandra by reading BBC news articles on new developments in computing technology and environmental issues, and watching Nova on PBS. I think I read articles in a few physics publications too, things like Physics World and publications from CERN and Fermilab. That was partly for information, and partly a way of recapturing that grad student lab atmosphere that I've been away from for a long time now.
What are you working on now? More than you can possibly imagine! I'm always working on several things at once, it seems. I always have books in several stages of completion, with more ideas simmering that I'm itching to get at.
Do you put your family and friends in your books?I hope not! I believe it can be a bad idea to put real people into books, when you think of people who've had the aggravation of forever being indentified with a fictional character, like Christopher Robin Milne or the family whose names Ransome used in Swallows and Amazons. Sometimes people start looking for people they know in stories and making identifications that aren't there, based on some single trait. Then they say, "But so and so wouldn't do that," and you have to say, "Er, just because she has the same unlikely eyes, that doesn't mean she's so and so."
But I often put real animals in. Nick, Morg, and Ajax in The Cassandra Virus are all based at least in part on real animals I've known. And some of the geography of Easter River in Cassandra is based on a real place, so much so that some people got all excited and came to see a particular house when they realized it was where Jordan lived. (The same people got excited about seeing my car, too, since I'd stuck it in as well, as the car the Harveys borrowed from the town police. That was back when I drove a very battered retired Crown Vic police car. Sigh. I miss my Crown Vic. It was really quite fuel efficient. For a V-8. And it had this built-in safety zone. People didn't tailgate me, for some funny reason.)
Actually, I realized after writing Cassandra that I'd put a lot of myself in Helen. All that messing about in brooks with a dog, getting wet and muddy and having tanks of fish and tadpoles all over, that was me, although I only ever had toad tadpoles and various darters and emerald shiners and things. One newt. No axolotls. But deliberately putting real people in, no, I don't do that.
What is your favorite children's book? My favorite book actually written for children remains The Hobbit. I was about seven when I read it, and it really made a dedicated reader, a person in love with storytelling, out of me. It really broadened my horizons, too, opening up this vast potential of language.
What are the best and worst things about writing books? Telling stories, bringing worlds and people to life, is the best thing. The fact that it's so hard to make a living is the worst. It's like farming, that way: you're doing something vital to what it means to be human—growing food, telling stories, carrying the past into the future -- but you almost always have to have another job to support the work that matters.
Biography
K.V. Johansen has Master's Degrees in Medieval Studies and in English. Her main scholarly interests are ancient and medieval history and languages, and the history of children's fantasy literature. She held the 2001 Eileen Wallace Research Fellowship in Children's Literature from the Eileen Wallace Collection at the University of New Brunswick. She also received the 2004 Frances E. Russell Award for research in children's literature from the Canadian section of IBBY, the International Board on Books for Young People. Johansen received the Canadian Authors' Association 2006 Lilla Stirling Award; she has had fiction titles nominated for the Silver Birch Award, the Diamond Willow Award, shortlisted for the Canadian Association of Children's Librarians Book of the Year for Children Award, and included on the Ontario Library Association's "Best Bets Top Ten List" and Voya's "Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror" list. Her adult non-fiction book Quests and Kingdoms: A Grown-Up's Guide to Children's Fantasy Literature, has been highly praised internationally and was shortlisted for the 2006 Harvey Darton Award in the UK.
She has an arboretum in her backyard, grows exotic trees indoors, watches a lot of anime, and should probably have been an eighteenth-century landscape gardener. Visit her website: www.pippin.ca.
Plus, see K.V. Johansen reading from several of her novels, including Nightwalker and The Cassandra Virus.
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