Start Profile of Terry Griggs

There is a new profile of Terry Griggs up at the Start Stratford website, with some great photographs of Terry at home in Stratford. Here's how it starts:

Terry Griggs isn’t shy about her love affair with language.

“I read the dictionary for pleasure,” she said. “You can pull a whole story out of a word.”

Speaking with to two 13-year-old interviewers (and fans) about her most recent effort, a young adult novel called Nieve, she revealed that the main character’s name was found in a dictionary.

“It’s a Scots’ word meaning ‘fist’,” said Griggs from her Stratford home, “which makes it an appropriate name for a character who must deal with all the menace invading her world.”

Nieve, short-listed for the 2011 Red Maple Award, is about an observant girl who notices small faces of evil creeping into her small town. The changes she notices – spiders on her toothbrush; weeds with minds of their own; a supply teacher that seems too good (or bad) to be true – start slowly but pick up to a fever pitch until it almost encompasses her community.

Though Nieve has been well-received and her Cat’s Eye Corner trilogy written for younger children were best-sellers, Griggs is possibly best known for her adult work. Her collection of short stories, Quickening, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. Rogues’ Wedding was a nominee for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. She won the Marian Engel Award in 2002 and her books The Lusty Man and Thought You Were Dead are widely praised, with the latter on the Globe and Mail’s Best of the Year selection list.

In creating stories for different ages, Griggs doesn’t see a big distinction between the two.

“I tend to just write for anyone who might want to read the book,” Griggs said. “I sink into the world I’m creating. I get into that state of mind where the unconscious is more accessible . . . and things start to come up from the basement.”

She certainly doesn’t “dumb it down” when it comes to writing for younger audiences.

“I respect children’s intelligence too much!” she said. “One of the things that crops up in both my books for adults and for children is a respect for intelligence. Maybe I’m pushing the boundaries a bit by keeping the language rich, but kids I meet have said they’ve never read a book like it before.”

for the full profile, please go here.

Nieve: Red Maple Award Finalist

Though I have yet to find an online link to a press release, it was announced today that Terry Griggs's fabulous YA novel Nieve has made the shortlist for the OLA's Red Maple Award, as part of their Forest of Reading program. Over the next 5-6 months Grade sevens and eights across Ontario will be reading Nieve alongside the other nominated books, and voting on their favourite. The winner will be announced May 12, 2011 at the Festival of Trees in Toronto at the Harbourfront Centre.

I'll post more official information when we have it, but congratulations to Terry Griggs and her son/illustrator Alexander Griggs-Burr.

Bookmarked: Rogues' Wedding

On September 2nd, Terry Griggs's Rogues' Wedding was honoured in Owen Sound with a plaque as part of Project Bookmark, the second title in the series so-honoured, following only Michael Ondaatje's In The Skin of a Lion. The series "highlights and celebrates the stories that are embedded in our everyday geography."

For those of you who have not read Rogues' Wedding, this should serve as notice that you should do so. It tells the story of Griffth Smolders, who bolts on his wedding night after interpreting a rather odd natural occurence as an evil omen, not even waiting to consummate his marriage. When his wife Avice discovers this, she decides to pursue him to the ends of the earth, if she needs to, to have her revenge. Both embark on a flight of accidental discovery and cataclysmic misadventure -- including making what may be one of the first pornographic films.

Griggs weaves the folk stories and tales and landscapes of northern Ontario into a hilariously ribald tale, and it may be at least partly for this reason that Project Bookmark has honoured her creation. It's well deserved. We've made it clear here our admiration for Terry's writing over the years, and we're thrilled that she's getting a bit more wider recognition. Here's to hoping this leads more people to discover not only Wedding, but her other work for both adults and young adults alike. Like, perhaps, this and this and this.

Q&Q review of Nieve

Robert Wiersma reviews the new dark fantasy YA novel by Terry Griggs in this month's Q&Q:

Terry Griggs’ genuinely creepy new YA novel will thrill young readers while giving their parents nightmares.
Reminiscent of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and Michael Ende’s Momo, the story follows feisty, independent Nieve, whose parents are freelance weepers ... Nieve possesses a ceaseless flow of dangers and perils, and yet Griggs accomplishes this headlong narrative drive without sacrificing character development or emotional complexity. It’s a tremendously visual and visceral novel, with bodies aplenty (including those of babies) and human beings transformed into various household items (a chair, for example, provides a crucial clue to what’s going on).
Over the course of the novel, Griggs develops a thorough and compelling mythos, one both original and drawn from traditional lore, while also creating a realistic and immersive world. Given that Nieve is the first novel in a projected trilogy, this is crucial. Readers will want, desperately, to return to Nieve’s world, and the sooner, the better.

For the full review, go pick up a copy of April's Q&Q!

Nieve: A Tale of Two Covers

As we prepare to send Terry Griggs' Nieve off to the printer, we remain undecided over which cover to go with. The original concept was the Black City image, a painting on canvas by Alexander Griggs-Burr, which details the first view the reader gets of the Black City as Nieve and her companion leave the hotel basement to journey underground.


The second cover was originally meant as one of the many internal illustrations, though we think it makes a very effective cover. It depicts Murdeth, one of the soulless bureaucrats who do the Impress's bidding, processing the human "material." Both still need a touch of tweaking, but we're not sure what to go with: might take both to the proofing stage at the printer to see what looks most effective.

Thoughts?

First Review of Terry Griggs' Nieve

from VOYA:

Nieve's parents' business has improved, but Nieve is worried. Her parents are professional sympathizers, and although Nieve appreciates the new clothes and treats, she is worried by the increasing need for her parents' services. The world is becoming darker. Strange plants are appearing, spiders and bats are becoming more plentiful, and people are more forgetful and fractious. As Nieve begins to discover the truth, she is drawn into a world of old myths and magic.

Although complete in itself, this debut in a trilogy sets up an interesting meta-narrative to be resolved in future volumes. As the story progresses, the tone gets progressively darker, ending on a hopeful but guarded note. The tone is more than amply supported by the illustratuions, which reference both Tim Burton and Edward Gorey. Part allegory, part Irish folk tale, the novel succeeds in dropping the reader into a world both familiar and slightly off kilter. Readers looking for good fantasy will enjoy the novel on its own, but readers with a passing familiarity with the darker denizens of Irish mythology will find much to enjoy.

-- Steven Kral

Three Posters

Nieve's World

The ARCs for one of our Spring titles arrived in the driveway this afternoon and will be going out to bloggers and book reviewers and film companies and librarians and booksellers and many others over the next several days. The first new YA work by Terry Griggs since she finished her award-winning YA series Cat's Eye Corner, Nieve is a dark, haunting, disturbingly enjoyable novel. Like last Spring's Thought You Were Dead, Nieve is fabulously illustrated, this time by her son, Alexander Griggs-Burr. Over the last several days half a dozen illustrations have made it into my inbox, and I thought I'd share a couple of my favourites.