Maggie Stiefvater is someone who has lived her life full of curiosities: She has been a race-car driver and auto journalist, a professional portrait artist, and a Celtic musician. She’s also an award-winning, New York Times-bestselling author of young adult fiction.
After 13 years publishing her work, she’s more than conscious that she’s writing for an audience, and she’s not afraid to call herself a commercial writer. “My step every single year is to ask myself… how can I change the mood to make [the story] more accessible, or find a way to bring mood and story closer together so it’s easier to follow?”
Stiefvater has focused much of her literary career around the fantastical. Her books are full of horses who live in the sea and rise up to eat unsuspecting people on the beach; ancient Welsh kings who may or may not be sleeping under the hills of Virginia; pilgrims who seek out modern-day saints, hoping for miracles that they desperately need and are afraid to get; fae; and werewolves. Her writing has been called dreamy and lyrical, her stories complex and thought-provoking.
“If you’re writing magic,” she said, “make sure the magic is real, and the rest will follow.
But magic is just a well-loved orange Camaro (a la the Raven Cycle) that allows Stiefvater’s characters to explore their world and themselves. Sure, some of that has to do with her character’s ages, which tend toward the teenaged years. A lot of it, though, is that with a Stiefvater novel, you can always expect the everyday, universal weirdness of navigating romance, familial strains, and the haunting question that looms over us all: What’s next for me?
Her latest release, Mister Impossible, is all of this and more. It features Ronan Lynch, a 19-year-old who has the ability to pull objects from his dreams and into our world. that’s where we began our conversation.
is the second book
