An Interview With Robin Kirk
Thank you so much for sharing your book with me and agreeing to do a Q&A for my readers.
Give us a quick summary of The Hive Queen!
The Hive Queen follows Fir, a warrior created by his mother to fight. Readers of the first book, The Bond, will remember him as the warrior that Dinitra, The Bond’s heroine, fell in love with. At the end of that book, Dinitra helped free him even though she knew this means they’ll be parted. The book starts as Fir and his brothers escape a ravenous pack of hybas, a lethal cross of battle dog, tiger, hyena, and baboon. They’re trying to reach a mysterious city of men to the east and are willing to brave many dangers to get there. But along the way, Fir meets the Hive Queen, Odide, part human and part honey bee. She’s desperate to have him stay with her and create a new generation of human-bee mutants. I’ll leave the rest of the story to readers – if Fir can escape her and if he’ll ever see Dinitra again.
This the second book in your Bond Trilogy. Did you have any specific hurdles with writing and publishing this book as opposed to your first?
I didn’t have hurdles in terms of the publisher, the wonderful indy, Blue Crow Books. But it was challenging to write a second book that both continues Fir and Dinitra’s story and can be a stand-alone. Once I managed that, I took on the challenge as a gift. I found out so much more about the world I’d created for The Bond. I also got to play a lot with the terms of this world, specifically the whole category of genetic engineering. Like any good fantasy/scifi, my series takes real things—like genetically mixing animals with plants and the way we think about soldiers’ relationship to their countries (the “Motherland” or “Fatherland”)—and pushes them really hard. I’d often write myself into a corner then realize that the corner had provided a lovely, meaningful twist.
The first book in your series, The Bond, did very well and even earned an INDIE award. Can you talk a bit about what that success has been like?
It’s been wonderful! I’m so grateful for the support of many in the book community. And I’m especially grateful for readers. It still astonishes me when someone comes up to me to ask about this or that character or what I “really” mean by this or that plot twist. I love it that these characters, who I adore, and this world (ditto) actually in some ways exist outside my brain.
While The Bond leaves the reader expecting a sequel, was it your intention from the start to make this a trilogy? Or did the series unfold as you worked on the first novel?
That’s a great question! I finished a very early draft of The Bond when my son was still small. At that time, he was a great reader and had a fine eye for story. He said something very wise. More or less, girls are more adventurous in their reading than boys, who tend to want to know what they’re getting into and if it’s worth it. He asked, why not write a series? At that point, I was one and done. But the more I got to thinking, the more ideas popped into my head.
This book changes point of view from Dinitra, the protagonist of The Bond, to Fir, her love interest, a switch many readers may find unsettling, but you pulled it off well! What made you decide to take that risk?
Simple answer: because I love stories that see the same world through different perspectives. One of my all-time favorite examples of this is Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, which switches from Lyra to Will between Book I and II. In adult reading, I also love the way George R. R. Martin gives us such a rich world from his cast of characters in Game of Thrones.
This is your second book published with Blue Crow Publishing. Can you share what your experience has been like working with them on this series?
Publisher Katie Rose Guest Pryal has it all: amazing writer, publisher, and editor. Together with the equally multi-talented publisher Lauren Faulkenberry—who both contributes to the editing and designs the books and covers—I feel very fortunate. That said, publishing with an indy demands a fair amount of work on the part of the author, particularly in terms of marketing. But that’s not a bad deal. Many big-time publishers promise marketing they don’t deliver. Blue Crow is upfront about authors having to put time into this.
In this book, the sign language that many of the characters use to speak is expanded upon from the first book in the series. Is your sign language based on any other variation that currently exists? If not, how did you come up with the gestures?
I have always been in awe of sign language. This includes American Sign Language as well as the language soldiers learn before they deploy. The gestures have their own beauty, strength, and poetry, like any language. I hope I haven’t replicated any existing words in a known language. If you saw me writing, you’d have glimpsed me thinking out an action or a circumstance and trying to feel the gesture in my body—and not repeat myself.
While you are a well-established author and writer, your background is in Culture Anthropology. Have you found that your experience affects your writing and storytelling?
I do teach human rights from the Cultural Anthropology department (at Duke) but I’m trained as a journalist and human rights advocate, pursuits that do benefit on a close observation of how human beings think and act. I think this does give me a powerful sense of the breadth of human experience, that so much of what we take for granted as “normal” or “natural” is in fact learned from our cultures. For instance, the idea that females are more peaceful or community-minded than males is (sad to say) not inherent in any species. But our assumptions about that did provide me with a lovely way of starting to complicate familiar stories with interesting twists.
Your new book also comes with a beautiful new map. How do you feel providing maps for readers affects their enjoyment of fantasy novels?
I am such an enormous fan of maps in general: real ones, fantasy ones, conceptual ones. This is pure joy from my perspective. Let me add that I am in awe of Travis Hasenour, who developed this map based on my miserable scratchings. To do this well, you need a grounding in map-making, a real creative sense, and an excellent listening capacity. Travis has all of these. Take a look at all of his maps. They become a powerful and enriching part of the story.
Human rights and the question of “what is humanity?” continue to be weaved (no pun intended) throughout this book from the first. Does incorporating some of these real-world issues come naturally to you as you write or do you struggle to keep them relevant to the story?
I started on this project because of a very different book, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. I don’t want to ruin this classic for anyone, but I will say that it’s one of the most powerful human rights stories I’ve ever read. In my small way, I wanted to be able to do something similar, use fantasy to invite readers to struggle with human rights dilemmas. In The Bond, it’s genocide. And in The Hive Queen, it’s how formerly enslaved people come to think about freedom. The best way to learn about these things is, I think, story.
The Hive Queen, the second book in The Bond Trilogy is available now. What are you working on next?
Book III of The Bond series! Title TBA, and focused on yet another main character: Sil, who you meet in The Bond and see in The Hive Queen. Like Dinitra and Fir, Sil is genetically engineered and has characteristics of a human and a frog. Sil ends up leading refugees away from the war and into The Deep, the vast jungle in the north. Adventures ensue!