It was something I thought about later-that I wanted riddles and trickster tales and some form of fortune-telling, etcetera, and how nice that I already had something in verse. (In my head, I imagine there's traditional music for it somewhere in Nagspeake.) But if I'm honest, I don't think I was thinking about all that exactly, when I first sat down to write the poem.

Plus, since one of the things I wanted to do with Raconteur's was represent a wide variety of different types of folklore, it would've been a bit of an omission not to have included something like a poem or a ballad. I *think* my thinking at the time was that I wanted to write something that would be as haunting as the idea of this character was for me, and I love ominous old poems and ballads. Kate Milford: It was actually one of the first stories I wrote for the book-I think the first three were 'The Yankee Peddlers,' 'The Devil and the Scavenger,' and then 'The Hollow-ware Man.' I wrote the first draft of it back in 2014, when I thought I would be self-publishing The Raconteur's Commonplace Book. Sita Welt: Why did you decide to write “The Hollow-Ware Man” in verse? This book within a book is The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book, which readers can finally read for themselves.īelow is a lightly edited version of my Q&A with the author Kate Milford.

One of these strange guests has with her an old book which Milo ends up reading and the book even ends up driving some of Greenglass House ’s plot. In fact, in Greenglass House, the story’s main character Milo’s peaceful winter vacation comes abruptly to an end when unexpected guests start arriving at his parents’ inn. It takes place in the 1930s, in the fictional city of Nagspeake, the same city in which Milford’s novel Greenglass House is set. that eventually reveal more about their own secrets than they intended.” Each story told in the tavern stands on its own, but an overarching story emerges from all of the tales, making the book feel like a short story collection where each short story indirectly contributes to the overarching one. In it, strangers are trapped together at an inn, and as the blurb so eloquently puts it, “to pass the time, they begin to tell stories. The Raconteur’s Commonplace Book was released February 23, and, unsurprisingly, it was very engaging and altogether wonderful. Since I had already written a blog post on her other books, I decided that instead of a review, I could interview her about the book and her writing in general. I have always been a big fan of Kate Milford’s books, and so when I heard she had a new book coming out I very quickly knew I would want to write about it.

Greenglass house book 2