Q&A with Genevieve Gornichec

Photo credit: Daina Faulhaber

​Welcome Genevieve! Thanks for taking some time to talk about writing. First, a few quick-fire questions: Do you prefer to write over coffee or tea? Are you a militant vegetarian, strict carnivore, or all-around omnivore? And who would you say is the most bad-ass woman in all of Norse Mythology and the Icelandic Sagas? 
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​Coffee in the morning, tea in the evening; total omnivore for sure; and Skadi. I mean, the woman got armored all up and marched to the gods’ doorstep to demand compensation for her father’s slaying. She will always have a special place in my heart. 
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I mean, the woman got armored all up and marched to the gods’ doorstep to demand compensation
​for her father’s slaying. She will always have a special place in my heart. 

Some authors stick to strict writing schedules while others prefer flexibility when managing where and when they write. How have you managed to maintain productivity as you write short stories and novels? Do you have any tips for writers who feel that ‘there just isn’t enough time’ to write? 
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​My advice to writers who feel there isn’t enough time is to give yourself a deadline and try to plan around it. Find a magazine accepting short story submissions and say to yourself, “This is the deadline for submissions; I need to have the story done by x date to have it ready to submit,” or tell your friends or beta readers you’ll have a story to them by x date and implore them to keep you accountable. 
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Find a magazine accepting short story submissions and say to yourself,
​“This is the deadline for submissions; I need to have the story done by x date to have it ready to submit.”
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​My other piece of advice—if you hate pressure and deadlines—is to just try staying inspired. Read books in your genre, do research on your subject matter, write your outline, or write drabbles to get to know your characters. If you’re busy, there’s no such thing as “making time.” But if you’re so invested in your story to the point where it won’t leave your brain until you get the words down, you’d be surprised how much you can accomplish even in a short amount of time. 
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Illustration of Thor and his goats by Max Koch

We share a common interest and source of inspiration in the Norse Myths and Icelandic Sagas. What first drew you to these stories and why do you find yourself still writing about them?
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It started when I returned from a semester abroad in Sweden in college and was seeking out classes back home to take towards a Scandinavian Studies minor. One of the classes being offered that quarter was Intro to Old Norse/Icelandic and I just fell in love with the subject, plus the professor for that class is amazing and was a huge influence on me. I ended up taking her Norse mythology and Icelandic saga classes too, and co-founded the Icelandic Saga and Scandinavian Clubs with some like-minded geeks.
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​​After graduation, I ended up in a Viking Age living history group to fill the void in my life that college left behind, and I’m so glad I did. I came in knowing all about the myths and sagas but knowing very little about daily life for people during that time. I’ve learned so much more about material culture since becoming a reenactor. 
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I ended up taking her Norse mythology and Icelandic saga classes too, and co-founded the Icelandic Saga and Scandinavian Clubs with some like-minded geeks.
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I think one of the things I love about Norse mythology is that every time I reread the Eddas, I come across something I didn’t realize before and find myself looking for an Old Norse version of the poem or paragraph and reaching for my Old Norse dictionary to look up certain words. 

Plus every translation of the Eddas is slightly different, and there are also several different manuscripts that could be used as sources—and if you’ve ever seen pictures of them, you can see that there’s room for error in transcription. The whole thing is like one giant puzzle and you can’t take anything at face value, and I love it. 
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...every translation of the Eddas is slightly different... The whole thing is like one giant puzzle
and you can’t take anything at face value, and I love it. 
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You have now had two short stories published in fantasy anthologies: Beneath Yggdrasil’s Shadow and Between the Tides. Will you continue to write short stories now that your debut novel, The Witch’s Heart, has been signed for publication? Also, do you have any tips for writers trying to break into the fantasy publishing scene with a short story?
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​I’ll definitely keep writing short stories! I’m hoping long-term to assemble them into a compilation, but more than that, I never used to be able to write short stories in the first place. I had real problems with brevity in the first couple of novels I drafted, but in short stories, every word has to count. So it’s kind of a point of pride for me to be able to say, “I told an entire story in only six thousand words!” 

My advice to fantasy short-story writers trying to break into the publishing scene: You have to start somewhere! Even if your first published story isn’t in a huge magazine or famous press, you still have a published story under your belt and you should be proud. You have something to promote now. And if your end goal is traditional publishing, having a short story published is something you can add to your query letter. 

Even if your first published story isn’t in a huge magazine or famous press,
​you still have a published story under your belt and you should be proud. 
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Signy Ketilsdottir versus the Sea (as featured in Between the Tides) is the story of a Viking woman living in a remote fjord with a grudge against Ran, the Norse goddess of the sea. Was Signy’s inspiration a specific historical figure, a character from the myths, or from somewhere else?
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The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen Harbour

​Since it was for an sea-themed anthology, I made Signy’s story a little bit of a nod at Disney’s The Little Mermaid. She’s a dreamer who wants more than the life everyone has planned for her, and ends up falling in love with a “prince” named Eirik, although none of this ends well for either of them. 

Since it was for an sea-themed anthology, I made Signy’s story a little bit of a nod at Disney’s The Little Mermaid.
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​Signy’s sister Gudrun picks things up where Signy vs. the Sea leaves off in the story I’m working on now, although Gudrun is Signy’s opposite in every way. Gudrun legit just wants a good marriage to a decent man so she can manage her own farmstead, not to go off on a magical wild goose chase to find her sister and run into various Norse gods, iffy Norwegian royalty, and famous saga characters. Alas, poor Gudrun…
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The anthology Beneath Yggdrasil’s Shadow highlights stories about lost or forgotten goddesses in Norse Mythology. Your piece Bright One, They Called Her, as featured in the anthology, tells the tale of wandering witch who offers a young girl named Eydis a chance to avenge her murdered family. Within the story there is a tension in framing the traditionally heroic Aesir (i.e. Norse gods) as far less than admirable. Did you choose this alternative perspective simply as a way to freshen up an old narrative or as a critique of the traditional view of the myths?
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​That’s a great question! I framed it that way because the wandering witch is Angrboda, who doesn’t necessarily feel the gods are all that great, since they took her kids and all. Her whole message to Eydis is about taking her fate into her own hands and not relying on divine intervention or the support of others for justice. Eydis also appears as the witch Heid (which is more of a title than a name) in Signy vs. the Sea and will appear again in Gudrun’s story, so there’s a bit of continuity in these tales.  
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Her whole message to Eydis is about taking her fate into her own hands
​and not relying on divine intervention or the support of others for justice. 
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I am very intrigued by the topic of your upcoming novel, The Witch’s Heart, which sets the character Angrboda at center stage. A somewhat obscure figure in the myths, she is most famously known for her infamous offspring by the trickster god Loki: the world serpent Jormungandr, the ferocious wolf Fenrir, and the chilling half-corpse Hela who is queen of the Norse underworld. What was your approach and process for filling in the gaps of her storyline while writing The Witch’s Heart? 

​I am so glad you asked! You’re right that Angrboda is super obscure. She’s mentioned once by name in each Edda and both times in relation to Loki and their children together. In most retellings she’s either some sort of creature or just sort of…there. And a lot of people picture her as this fierce warrior women, which is totally cool and also I hope those people aren’t disappointed with me. (I happen to have one such depiction as a poster on my wall because it’s so awesome—just not the way I went in TWH.)

The angle I took with Angrboda was to explore the associations she has in common with or which are echoed in other female figures in the mythology, so I ended up writing them all as the same person. Sounds crazy, right? But Norse mythology abounds with multiple names for the same figure (Odin being the best example of that) so I just sort of took this idea and ran with it.
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Sounds crazy, right? But Norse mythology abounds with multiple names for the same figure
​(Odin being the best example of that) so I just sort of took this idea and ran with it.
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Artist's depiction of Angrboda, Loki, and their children
by Helena Rosova

​So, here we go: As you mentioned, Angrboda’s children are a wolf, a snake, and the ruler of the realm of the dead. Another giantess in the mythology who has associations with wolves, snakes, and death is Hyrrokkin, who rides a wolf with snakes for reins and pushes Baldr’s pyre into the water. Another giantess who rides a wolf is Hyndla, a seeress who predicts part of Ragnarök at the end of her spiel to Freyja in the poem “The Song of Hyndla.” 

So there’s our connection between giantesses and seeresses. From there, there’s the dead seeress in Baldr’s Dreams whom Odin accuses of being “the mother of three [monsters].” She’s widely guessed to be Angrboda because her grave is in Hel’s actual realm—what’s up with that?—and in Neil Gaiman’s Norse Mythology, “Vegtam” (Odin) actually calls her out by name during this exchange, making it canon at least in his retelling. (I may have screamed at that part.)
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Another giantess in the mythology who has associations with wolves, snakes, and death is Hyrrokkin,
​who rides a wolf with snakes for reins and pushes Baldr’s pyre into the water. 
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​And then there are the other seeresses: the Seeress from “The Prophecy of the Seeress,” who mentions Heid, the woman with the “pleasing prophecies,” who was once Gullveig, whom the gods burned three times and who was three times reborn near the beginning of everything.

So I ended up writing Angrboda as all of the above: Gullveig, Heid, Hyndla, Hyrrokkin, the Seeress, etc. and interpreting all their names as one name for the same woman, so the story just kind of flowed from there. My goal was to make this novel slip seamlessly into the background of Norse mythology—which meant not changing the myths themselves, up to and including Ragnarök. But my problem was that I’d given this one woman phenomenal cosmic power… what kind of person would she have to be not to use this power to save her children and alter their fates? 

But my problem was that I’d given this one woman phenomenal cosmic power…
what kind of person would she have to be not to use this power to save her children and alter their fates?
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With all that said, I definitely took some liberties when writing the story, and I’m the first to admit that. For example, I made Jarnsaxa one of the Jarnvidjur (the giantesses who inhabit Jarnvid) and made Angrboda and Skadi’s relationship central to the story. There isn't any evidence for either of these things—they just sort of happened as I was writing!
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Where can readers stay up to date on your latest projects and learn more about the upcoming release of your debut novel?
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I’m still in the revising stages of The Witch’s Heart so there isn’t much to update at the moment. I recently got the first peeks at my cover and I am so thrilled because it’s absolutely gorgeous and I can’t wait to share it. Although I’m most active on Twitter, I’ll be updating Facebook​ and my website as my release date (early 2021) draws closer.
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Find Genevieve on Twitter at @ironwitchy and keep an eye out for updates on her website!