Meet the Author: Chris Tomasini

What characters could you relate to the most?

I think characters in that coming of age / bildungsroman phase of life – somewhere around 20 years of age, questioning and worrying about what lies ahead, and how the future will impact things they cherish about the past.

Who is your ideal audience for your books?

I wasn’t really aware of the “new adult” genre when I wrote Festival or Close Your Eyes, but both of those books fit in well with new adult readers, especially Festival, which is very much a “in my 20s and adrift” sort of novel. The main characters in Close Your Eyes: A Fairy Tale, are also in that late teens age range, but being historical fiction and having a fairy tale quality, it also would appeal to readers of any age who want to escape into a thoughtful, semi-fantastical sort of story.

What do you hope the audience comes away with when reading your books?

Well, this will sound pretentious perhaps, but that there is hope, and that none of us are alone. I often think of the E.M. Forster line, “only connect”, and while I believe he meant something much different by it, for me it is about the necessity of human connection, and I hope people see that in my books.

What is your favorite thing about each book?

Festival has this immediately thoughtful and emotionally intimate relationship between Peter and Anne, two 20-somethings drifting far from their respective homes when they meet in London, England. I really like their relationship – and how open and vulnerable they are together.

Close Your Eyes: A Fairy Talehas a lot of nice pieces, but two things that I like about it are the cozy little family that a few of the characters form; and Sam’s constant bewilderment about how to write the story he wants to write – as a writer, seeing a narrator think things like “oh god I have no idea how to do this so I’m just going to do it this way” is pretty amusing.

Does the story come first or the characters?

Well, I’m thinking mainly of the young adult trilogy I’m now working on, and I guess my answer is the story – though now that I’m thinking about this, wow the two are difficult to separate. But with the young adult trilogy, I think I slowly thought of the framework of the story, and then the characters began as chess pieces, but came to be filled out more and more the longer I worked on the books.

What was the most fun about writing your books?

Well, this is kind of cheating, but Festival and Close Your Eyes both spring from the life I led in my twenties. Festival is based on living in London, England, when I was around 23 or 24, and Close Your Eyes had some inspiration from my time in Poland when I was about 26, and much of that book was written when I was in Japan a couple years later. SO… again… this is probably cheating… but the most fun thing about writing the books was my time abroad inspiring the books in the first place.

What was the most difficult thing to write about?

Oh, I’m not sure that any of the actual content in my books has been emotionally or morally difficult to write about. The difficulty I would say is in getting it right – the right words at the right time, the right structure of the book overall, getting books which aren’t really plot driven to have some sort of emotionally powerful “drive” to them.

What do the titles of the books mean?

Well, I would like to start by saying that titles are really difficult to come up with!! Yikes. You work on a book for who knows how long, and maybe you have some vague title ideas but nothing definite, and then after you’re (hopefully) done, and you really need to come up with your title, it’s a lot of pressure coming up with something that accurately represents your book.

But… having said that…. Festival refers to the drunken swirl of a night out in London before Peter returns to Canada, and the “festival” feeling of that night… which is later reflected in a festival feeling in a winter scene back in Toronto, which ends the book.

Close Your Eyes: A Fairy Tale implies two things: theClose Your Eyes part echoes something Tycho says many times in the book, each time he begins one of his stories; while the A Fairy Tale part is a clue to the reader that this isn’t a normal, or straight, historical novel, but something playful and semi-fantastical.

Were any of the characters inspired by real people?

Ohhhh… yes. I’m almost embarrassed to admit how auto-biographical Festival is… but if it worked for James Joyce In “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” I guess I shouldn’t be too embarrassed about it myself.

Close Your Eyes is much more pure fiction. I think readers with a sense of history will recognize some of Martin Luther’s thoughts in the Bishop character, but other than that I wouldn’t say any of the characters were inspired by real people.

What is your favorite book?

100 Years of Solitude, by Garcia Marquez, just knocked my socks off when I read it for the first time. I was just bewildered by the sheer story-telling ability happening in that book, and the magical-realist style of it – a style I’m not sure I’d read previously.

But, for emotional impact, a book that left me somewhat shattered, was The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy. The big dog-fight scene is just emotionally draining, and the final scene

which just aches with loneliness really affected me as well.