Alum and faculty member Cynthia Hand (MFA, creative writing, 2003) is a New York Times bestselling author and an Eastern Idaho native. She has earned legions of fans with her acclaimed novels, including the “Unearthly” trilogy, “The Last Time We Say Goodbye,” “The Afterlife of Holly Chase,” “The How & The Why” and “With You All The Way.”
Hand also co-authored a popular young adult series, The Lady Janie books, written with fellow authors Brodi Ashton and Jodi Meadows. The genre-bending novels reimagine figures like Lady Jane Grey, Jane Eyre, Mary, Queen of Scots and Mary Shelley with humor, magic, meet-ups between fictional and historical characters, plot turns and spirit.
Hand’s recent successes include the adaptation of “My Lady Jane” – based on Lady Jane Grey, the young woman who was queen of England for nine days before being executed – into a series streaming on Amazon Prime.
“I was on a ladder cleaning the windows at my house when I got the news that the show was greenlit,” Hand recalled. “I fell right off the ladder. It was surreal.”
Hand said she was pleased with the filmmakers’ interpretation of her work. They gave the book, whose readership is mostly ages 11 to 16, a decidedly mature spin. “The chemistry between the characters is fantastic,” she said. “I was on the edge of my seat watching, just like everyone else.”
Fortunately for writers at Boise State, Hand is sharing her talents and mentorship through teaching classes on short story and novel writing in the creative writing department.
“I love teaching as much as I love writing,” Hand said. “My favorite class to teach right now is 303 [intermediate fiction writing]. We will read a story by Joyce Carol Oates, for example, and then the students will carefully imitate the form of that story – the way a painter might try to learn by imitating Van Gogh. I always do the exercises with them. I get new story ideas and it keeps me on my toes.”
The most common question she fields from students? “How do I get published?”
“That’s a tricky question,” Hand said. “As an academic (Hand has a Ph.D. in fiction writing in addition to her MFA), you want them to ask, ‘how can I make the best art possible?’ But the short answer is, in order to be published you have to write something awesome. It takes hours and hours and hours of practice before you’re at that level. There’s no quick way to do it and no shortcuts and you have to write a lot of bad stuff first. That can be discouraging. I try to be realistic with them about the odds. But I come back to this notion that the harder you work, the better you are, and the better you are, the better your odds of being published.”
Q and A with Hand about her work
Q: How do you balance historical accuracy in the Jane and Mary books with fantasy elements in your storytelling?
A: I don’t feel beholden to historical accuracy because the stories we tell are always fantastical. We never wanted them to be mistaken for ‘historical fiction.’ We get to cherry-pick the parts of history we like. For example, “My Calamity Jane” [based on the legendary American frontierswoman and sharpshooter] includes the character Wild Bill Hickok. Ours is an amalgam of Hickok and Buffalo Bill Cody [like Calamity Jane, legendary figures of the Old West].
Our most recent book, “My Salty Mary” [a blend of “The Little Mermaid” and the true story of pirate Mary Read], includes Blackbeard, the pirate who is still much celebrated and romanticized. But pirates in general were not nice people. Not exactly heroes for stories. We wrote our first disclaimer for this book, reminding readers that our story is meant to be a lighthearted version of history. We softened, but didn’t erase, many unpleasant aspects of these characters and what it meant to live in this time.
Q: Do you have a favorite character of all those you’ve created?
A: Calamity Jane is one that comes to mind. Her voice was so fun to write. She gets to say words like “skedaddle” and “sidle.” There’s not a lot known about Martha Canary (which was Calamity Jane’s real name), but that was part of her persona. She was known as a storyteller and for telling serious whoppers, which was a blast to write.
In “My Plain Jane,” [a tale in which the fictional Jane Eyre meets up with the real Charlotte Brontë for a ghost hunt], I wrote the Charlotte character. One thing about her is that she hated to wear her glasses. She had them attached to a little stick of wood, like a wand. When she absolutely had to see, she would hold up the wand and look through the lenses. I wear thick glasses, myself, so I could relate. In writing these characters, I’ve had so much fun finding the small historical details like these and weaving them into our stories.
Q: What’s the most difficult scene you’ve ever written, and how did you get through it?
A: One of the hardest was “The Last Time We Say Goodbye.” It’s fairly autobiographical for me, about a girl whose brother has committed suicide. She is seeing what might be his ghost, even though she is a logical, mathematical person. It’s a book about grief, blame, and letting go. When I was writing that novel, I was teaching at Pepperdine University. I liked to write in the library. It was beautiful. It smelled like books and overlooked the Pacific. But when I got to the back half of the book, I would get emotional and have to go home to write so that I wouldn’t be crying in the library. The end of the book was not the most narratively traumatic part, but the writing got more and more difficult for me as I got to the end. I had told the story, but wasn’t quite ready to let it go.
I get a lot of emails from readers about this book. Part of the reason I wrote it was in response to “13 Reasons Why” [a young adult novel, later a Netflix series, that tries to dissect the reason a teenager ended her life]. As a member of a family that lost someone to suicide, I thought the production was well executed, but so romanticized. I wanted there to be something that showed readers the real consequences of suicide for the people left behind. Almost every week I get an email from someone who has lost a loved one and wanted to tell me that they felt they could see their own experience in my book. This is so touching to me. It made it worth how difficult it was to write.
Q: Which of your characters do you identify with the most?
A: A character in “The How and the Why.” The novel is set in Boise and Idaho Falls and has two narrators. One is a 16-year-old living in the Salvation Army Booth Home for unwed mothers [later the Booth Marian Pritchett School] in the year 2000. She is writing a series of letters and has been told that the child she’s placing for adoption will be able to access them. The other point of view is that of a girl, 18 years later, trying to decide whether she should search for her birthmother.
You would think I would relate more to the adopted child – I’m adopted – but I had a much easier time relating to the birthmother, partially because I was around her age in the year 2000, and also because I have children and knew what it’s like to be pregnant and imagining the life of my unborn child. Writing this book allowed me to connect with the idea of my own birth mother in a way I hadn’t before.
The crazy thing is that in 2020, a few years after I wrote the book, my birth mother and I found one another through Ancestry.com. She lives 15 minutes away from me. One of the first things she did after we connected was read the book. A lot of the things I had imagined about her story were right on the money. But I also got some of the details completely wrong. I thought she had been at the Booth home, but she was never there. It goes to show how your imagination around the way something might have happened can turn into a story that’s entirely different, but still, in some ways, encapsulates the truth.
Q: Have any of your characters ever surprised you by changing mid-draft?
A: Almost all do to a degree. The writer George Saunders talks about finding a character by increasing specificity, narrowing down the details of the character and feeling them out until someone unique emerges. I’m not too ‘woo woo’ about it, but I love that moment when a character I’m writing starts doing their thing and I’m just following along.
Sometimes they don’t do what you want them to. An example of this is in my novel, “With You All The Way,” which is the least sexy book about sex that you will ever read. It’s about a young woman who has decided she’s ready to have sex for the first time. Her family is taking a trip to Hawaii for her mom’s business conference. She knows other kids who will be there and decides this is the moment. Then, when I was writing, something happened between the characters that changed the arc of the book. I kept trying to force my main character to follow my outline, but she wasn’t having it. I finally said, ‘OK, we’ll do what you want.’
The story is still about the question of sex, but in a different way than I had planned. I had thought it would be like a modern take on Judy Blume’s “Forever” [a 1975 novel about youth and sexuality] but my book is more about divorce, family dynamics and the relationship between sisters. My characters determined the direction of the story.
Q: What’s making you happiest right now?
Teaching, absolutely. The students in my novel class are writing the first 50 pages of a novel, and I so enjoy watching the story open up for them as they get into the habit of writing in this long form. It’s inspiring. I’m also writing a novel alongside them, trying to keep up. My book is about wolves. And about mothers and daughters. And it’s also about activism. I’m researching wolves, but also ruminating on how we decide to take action about something we care about. It’s easy to be overwhelmed by all of the things we should care about. How do you choose what to fight for?
I also run the Dungeons and Dragons Night in the creative writing program a couple Friday nights every month. D and D is such a fun way to learn about world building. In my writing, I have considered this to be a weakness of mine. I always come to stories with a character first, but rarely have an idea of a fictional world. I’m using Dungeons and Dragons to create a world that may ultimately become a fantasy novel. And these students get to test out this world and explore storytelling of their own.
Dungeons and Dragons has become more mainstream recently, but there are still so many people who haven’t had an opportunity to play because you need a specific friend group. Now we have this official night to come together and tell a story. They are so excited. We usually have about 10-12 students at every session. It’s so wonderful to see them making connections, building narratives with one another’s characters and demonstrating their own remarkable creativity. It’s amazing what we can do when we all put our creative brains together.