Interview with David Anthony Durham

Q: In writing Acacia: The War with the Mein, what elements of our histories came out strongest to you while writing it and later while revising the finished drafts?

Oh, the elements of our world that affect the Known World are many and varied, and they’re also so mixed up as to make most direct comparisons flawed. There’s a bit of feudal Europe in it, as well as tribal Africa, Imperial China. It has elements of the Mid-Atlantic slave trade, modern globalization, subcontracting of military forces. I just wanted to create a world like our own, but where all the old bets were off, where I – and readers – could explore issues playing out in ways that are both familiar and unfamiliar, depending on the puzzle of a new world.

Q: Something that really struck me about the book was the power of myth. In the beginning, the characters seemed to see the mythic stories from the outside, by the end the reader was watching the myth of the Akaran family. Was this a dichotomy you set out to explore or something that grew in the telling?

Cool. I love the way you phrased that – "watching the myth of the Akaran family". I was really interested in that dynamic. I don’t think it gives away too much to say the Acacian Empire has an intricate mythology that explains who they are, that justifies their status and purports to demonstrate their morals. Thing is, as we learn more about them we see those myths challenged. Some actual history has been altered. Some of it is outright lies. Some is religious belief that it’s hard to know how to pin down or believe. Some may just have been lost in translation at some point…

I love it that the Akaran children have to discover this firsthand and try to make sense of things when their history and mythology – and their own identity – is revealed as something other than they’d been taught. But at the same time they are creating new myths with their actions. They’re meeting incredible challenges and rising (or not) to situations that future generations may immortalize. But how much of what we’re seeing will survive accurately for those future generations? Depends on who is in power, doesn’t it? I love having stuff like this swimming in the mix of the novel’s themes.

Q: The first section of Acacia: The War with the Mein is set a number of years prior to the following two sections and specifically contrasted with the difference in the ages of the Akaran children between the two time periods. How did you decide on this as your introduction to the trilogy? It had to be tricky to navigate.

That’s the result of making choices – something we do as authors all the time – in order to deal with the entire narrative arc of the book in one volume. I knew where the story began and I knew where it ended, but I also felt that to get all the way there in one book I was going to have focus my attention. The set up in necessary for what comes after, but then once the children are scattered to the four corners of the world I felt it was time to get to the crux of what they were going to do about the hand that fate (that’s me) had dealt them. This did mean cutting a lot of material out. There are scenes in my head about those intervening years that others will never read about. But that’s always the case. For all my books I write a lot more stuff than I actually use. A lot of what was cut was dear to me, but so be it. I think the novel kicks into a higher gear as it transitions into the second part, and that’s a good thing.