I recently had the opportunity to ask some questions of author A.C. Wise in celebration of her new novel Wendy, Darling, which is available now from Titan Books! This lush, feminist re-imagining on what happened to Wendy after Neverland, is perfect for fans of Circe and The Mere Wife. Read on for my full Q&A with the author below!
Find the second star from the right, and fly straight on ’til morning, all the way to Neverland, a children’s paradise with no rules, no adults, only endless adventure and enchanted forests–all lead by the charismatic boy who will never grow old.
But Wendy Darling grew up. She has a husband and a young daughter called Jane, a life in London. One night, after all these years, Peter Pan returns. Wendy finds him outside her daughter’s window, looking to claim a new mother for his Lost Boys. But instead of Wendy, he takes Jane.
Now a grown woman, a mother, a patient and a survivor, Wendy must follow Peter back to Neverland to rescue her daughter and finally face the darkness at the heart of the island.
-Please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your work as an author/writer.
My name is A.C. Wise, and Wendy, Darling is my debut novel. I also have two short story collections and a novella published, and a new short story collection coming out in October. Within the overarching speculative fiction genre, I tend to dabble all over the place in horror, science fiction, fantasy, and various blends of the three.
-What draws you to speculative fiction?
I love how flexible it is as a genre, and the wide variety of stories one can use it to tell. You can have an immersive fantasy world that’s completely unlike our own, or a near-future science fiction story that is very much grounded in a logical extension of present-day technology and our current understanding of science. Horror stories can be supernatural, full of monsters and ghosts, or a reflection of the horrors of everyday life. You can have a world that is almost exactly like the one you live in, with just one or two elements set slightly askew, and through that lens, you can find yourself seeing the world in a totally different light. Speculative fiction is what I grew up reading, and what I still love to read now, so it seems only logical that I would be drawn to writing it as well.
-You’ve recently made the jump from short stories to longer works of fiction. Can you talk us through that transition and how your process differs for each?
Oddly enough, Wendy, Darling actually started off life as a flash fiction story (published at Daily Science Fiction in 2017), which is just about as far away from a novel as you can get. I thought it was a one-and-done thing, but the idea wouldn’t leave me alone and the more I thought about it, the more I came to realize that I wanted to know what happened next and to learn the rest of Wendy’s story. That said, I actually had to trick myself into writing a novel by first trying to expand the flash fiction story into a novella, and then expand it again from there into a novel. By sort of sneaking up on it and taking it in stages, I was able to keep the process from being too intimidating. I don’t tend to do a lot of outlining either for short fiction or for novels (thus far), but I do leave myself a lot of notes, and for both it’s an essential part of my process to have a trusted group of critique buddies to bring a fresh eye to what I’ve written and help me find the places I’ve gone wrong, and steer me back in the right direction again.
-Do you have any advice for fellow short fiction writers looking to take the plunge into novel writing?
I think the best advice I can offer is find the process that works for you, and to not be afraid to try out different things along the way to finding your personal process. I would also say that you shouldn’t feel like you have to write a novel, or that you have to write it at a certain point in your career, or that somehow novel writing is a superior form of storytelling and short stories are merely the practice that will allow you to graduate to becoming a “real writer” one day. Novels and short stories are simply two different but equally valid ways to tell a story, and if you’re a short story writer wanting to try your hand at a novel, do it because you want to, because you’ve found a story you’re passionate about telling in long form. Find what excites you and keeps you coming back to the keyboard or notebook or whatever writing method you choose, and run with the story you want to tell, not what you feel like you “should” be doing based on what has worked for others.
-Your new book Wendy, Darling is a kind of sequel to the classic story of Peter Pan. What inspired you to continue Wendy’s story?
The original spark for the flash fiction story that became the novel was the idea “What if the movie Taken was also Peter Pan?” After spending time in Neverland as a child, I figured Wendy Darling would have a very particular set of skills that would equip her to rescue her daughter and face down Peter Pan. I also wanted to explore the lasting impact traveling to another world, one that no one else believes in, would have on a person. In Wendy’s case, it both leaves her traumatized and makes her stronger. I wanted to explore that dichotomy in her character and the ways in which Neverland might continue to inform her life as an adult.
-What elements, if any, will we find of the classic Peter Pan that we know?
Wendy and her brothers, Peter, the Lost Boys, Tiger Lily, the mermaids, the pirates, and of course the setting of Neverland itself all make an appearance in Wendy, Darling, though I did take several liberties, and tried to put my own spin on things while still hopefully keeping them recognizable to fans of the original story. I think there’s a lot of darkness and unsettling ideas that are inherent to the original story as well, and I simply tried to draw them to the surface. One element that doesn’t make an appearance is the character of Tinkerbell, or really any mention of faeries at all. I just couldn’t find a way to weave that into the story I wanted to tell.
-In what ways does Wendy, Darling depart from the classic story?
There are more queer characters, the story takes a more feminist angle, and it leans harder into the darker aspects of the original. Wendy, Darling looks at consequences – what happens after a person has been to a magical land, and what kind of scars might that leave on their heart. What does it mean to refuse to grow up, to live in a world that’s all about play and making up your own rules? Consequences don’t necessarily go away in that scenario, so who are the characters left to deal with the aftermath of things while Peter continues to blithely be the perpetually-innocent, responsibility-free child. A lot of what I was trying to do with Wendy, Darling is explore questions around the margins and before the first page and after the last page of the original story. Why are things the way they are in Neverland, and what does that mean for Wendy and the people she cares about?
-How did you embrace or circumvent the established characteristics of Barrie’s Wendy?
I think my version of Wendy is probably quite a bit angrier. At the end of the original story, Wendy seems content to fade into the background while Peter takes her daughter, and her daughter’s daughter, and so on down the line off on their own adventures in Neverland. My version of Wendy has no intention of fading into the background, nor does she accept the idea of “aging out” of Neverland. She’s probably also more cynical, more distrustful, more willing to self-advocate, and at times she can even take that to the extreme and be self-centred, leading her to unintentionally hurt others. There is still a care-taker element to her personality, and she genuinely wants to look after and protect her younger brothers and her daughter, but she also wants to do it on her own terms. She doesn’t want to be forced into mothering the Lost Boys, or go along with Peter’s narrow definition of motherhood, or his narrow definition of what girls can and cannot do.
-What do you have planned next? What are you currently working on?
I’m currently working on a as-yet-untitled sequel to Wendy, Darling, as well as a handful of short stories. I’m also looking forward to my new collection, The Ghost Sequences, coming out in October from Undertow Books.
Thank you so much to Titan Books for facilitating this interview and thanks to A.C. Wise for taking the time to answer my questions.
If you’d like to find more information about A.C. Wise and her books, you can find her at A.C. Wise | Home of author A.C. Wise (acwise.net)