So maybe talk me through what your perspective or point of view was when we first brought the idea to you and how you approached what I would call kind of world building for me.

Yeah.

Well, I would have to say that it felt completely normal that you would come to me with this because if anyone's got a bit of a weird, brief, a bit of like an odd thing they want to do, something that's not standard, they usually I'm the person.

And I just feel incredibly like humbled and like, like grateful and proud.

I don't know what the word is, but I'm like, I want to be known for that.

Like if you've got I'll never say that's too weird or too silly or like, why are you doing this? I'll be like, enable you.

Absolutely.

How did you kind of work through those

So

I began by wanting to retell an old Scottish fairy tale that is called Katie Crackernuts, that no one in the world but me has ever heard of, unless you've read my collection of little known fairy tales in which It's one of the stories I've worked with.

It's also one of my favourite stories to tell as a performance storyteller.

So I've worked with this fairy tale, you know, both in my writing and in my oral storytelling traditions.

But I knew it had to be set in Scotland, but when? When? And to me, searching for when, you know, I could set this story, I was very drawn to Mary Queen of Scots because I knew that the first witch hunts had happened during her time.

I'd done a lot of research and reading about it when I was working on my previous books.

And she's just such a fascinating, doomed and tragic figure.

Yes, the wonderful Pastor

Kate, over to you.

Thank you so much, Barry.

I'm just going to quickly share my screen so that you can all see inside my notebooks.

So thank you so much, everyone, to coming and joining us tonight, and welcome to Inside the Making of a Novel, in which I part the veils of mystery between a beautiful, completely published book and the wild scribbles and questions and problems that lie behind the scenes.

So tonight I'll be talking about my new novel, The Changeling, which has only been out for two weeks.

Um, and it's really an astonishingly long journey about how I came to write it.

Now, I just want to, um, reiterate to you all that, um, even though I'm talking tonight about my creative processes, every writer works in a different way, and part of your writing journey is discovering your own creative processes.

What if you offend alive family members?

As Kate points out, it was a rainy night, like the Scottish setting of The Changeling, and we settled in for a cosy Kate Forsyth story.

Thank you all so much for coming along tonight on this wild and wintry evening.

Doesn't it feel like we're in Scotland? that I've transported you 17,000 kilometres to the place of my book, and I'm about to take you back in time as well.

Now, tonight is a very special night for me, and that's why I really wanted to celebrate it.

And to explain why it is such a special time for me, I need to tell you the story of my life.

So I hope you all have a drink.

Settle back.

So there might be a common cause here?

Exactly.

So the second night, exactly the same thing happens.

At midnight, the laird's son gets up, puts on his boots, newly resoled, and gallops to the fairy hill, and Katie follows him.

Once again, she goes down with him into the depths of the mountain, and once again he dances and dances and dances like a wild, possessed thing.

But Katie creeps around with the hazelnuts in her pocket to keep her invisible, and she sees a little fairy boy sitting On the ground with a hazel wand, and he's playing, turning one thing into another thing.

And Katie thinks, "If I could get hold of that wand, maybe I could turn my sister's head back into her own bonny face." And so she rolls the little boy some of her hazelnuts and cracks them open for him, and he's starving.

I do, and I want you to tell it to me how you were told it as well.

What, what do they offer to modern life? Why do we keep coming back to them?

Well, I think it's really important to understand that, um, myths and fairy tales and fables and folklore are amongst the oldest of all narrative arts.

Um, you know, people have been telling stories, um, since we first invented human language, which, you know, is at least probably 40 to 60,000 years ago.

We were t- we were telling stories for m- m- millennia before we were writing them down.

And why, why were stories invented? Why are they the best way to pass on wisdom? And that is because they have two layers.

On one, on one level they're extraordinary stories of magic and adventure and, and struggle and triumph.

They amuse us, they entertain us, they enchant us.

Mm.

What, what is that legislation?

So it was when John Knox and the Lords of the Congregation, which included Lord James Stuart, when they forced the Protestant religion onto the Scottish people, they had three acts.

The first one was to outlaw the Pope.

The second one was to outlaw any c- Catholic idolatry, and the third one was to make sure that what they called the Scottish Law, which were the two above acts, would be the rule all over Scotland.

Under the laws that they were trying to force through, it was going to be, uh, a death penalty for all the priests, monks, and nuns.

Mary, Queen of Scots refused to ratify these three laws because she wanted to promote religious toleration.

But for John Knox and the Lords of the Congregation, they only wanted to have the one religion.

Could she not do anything about it? I mean, I d- I feel like as queen, I feel like there's a, there's a strong like off-with-his-head kind of capacity that should be engaged [laughs] there.