Here are my notes from Maggie Stiefvater’s talk at LibraryCon today! The focus was on Swamp Thing: Twin Branches, which is a reboot graphic novel she wrote for DC, but the audience was full of librarians who are fans of her books so inevitably her other work came up too lolol
I didn’t jot down much from the first part because I had to remotely solve a work emergency but Swamp Thing sounds really good. Stief talked about it as a story about struggling to understand other people and relate to them, as well as struggling to be a person – aka to understand oneself. In that way it’s also a story about when life stops making sense and ways to grapple with it.
Apparently in her free time during her portrait-drawing days she would sometimes copy old masters and give them silly hats, and then sell them on eBay. 👀 now I have a better idea of where she got some of her ideas for CDTH heheh
She talked about mythology and the responsibility of adaptation, specifically how to negotiate taking enough of another story to keep it recognizable while changing enough to make it an original perspective on it (which sure sounds a lot like how fandom does transformative works lmao). She has two big shelves just of mythology books!
When asked who her favorites of her own characters are, Stief said Cole from Shiver was the easiest character to write ("he's comic relief AND angsty in one character, and those are good shortcuts for a writer. But you can only do it once.")
...but Jordan Hennessy is steadily becoming her favorite of her characters right now. She said that it’s always changing though depending on what she’s working on, and a year from now maybe her favorite will switch to someone else.
She loves the cover for the next dreamer trilogy book and she’s very excited for Scholastic to release it. Someone asked about dreamer trilogy playlists and she said she would share them soon.
If she herself could do a graphic novel adaptation of one of her own books, she’d do The Scorpio Races, which is her personal favorite – but she won’t because while collaborating on a new story with an artist was one thing, adapting one of her novels into a new format seems way way harder.
If she was leaving the adapting to someone else then she thinks a graphic novel of The Raven Cycle would be fun, and she mentioned all the amazing, talented fanartists out there whose work she gets to see! :D
Honestly I’m still chuckling over painting silly hats onto reproductions of classical paintings, I think that and her description of being raised by feral librarians were some of the highlights of my day 😄
