An Interview with Author Molly Haniszewski
- Zven
- 24 minutes ago
- 7 min read
When I sat down to read Molly Haniszewski’s debut, Beyond the Border Forest: Into the Prawdziwy Las, I knew I would be reading a retelling of Snow-White and Rose-Red (Schneeweißchen und Rosenrot auf Deutsch), but I did not expect the vibrant, mossy world, interwoven mythology, and lovable (and hateable!) characters. I got so immersed and often find myself picking up the book and thumbing through pages simply to experience the atmosphere again.
BTBF is a perfect example of a book I wish I could read again for the first time, so it is my honor to conduct this interview with the author Molly Haniszewski.
"The Bear Maiden carefully gathered up the feral magic and bided her time, waiting for the right person to come along.
As luck would have it, there were two."
BTBF if published by Quills and Cosmos Press
Arlo Z. Graves: thank you so much for taking the time to participate in this interview. I know you have a ton going on behind the scenes (and let me just say, I am frothing at the mouth for book 2) so many more thanks for spending some time on this.
From the first few chapters of Beyond the Border Forest, the reader is transported into a mythological fairytale landscape that feels both familiar and unique, novel and ancient. I recognize the characters who transformed from Rose Red and Snow White, and also Pagan/Neopagan figures like the Oak and Holly Kings, but others are new to me. Could you talk about the process of weaving together myths and which were your favorites?
Molly Haniszewski: Certainly! Fairytales and myths already have so many elements in common, so it’s a matter of looking through one story and finding a place where it makes sense for another story to overlap. If you’re familiar with the musical Into the Woods, that show does a great job of weaving stories together. So many fairytales involve forests. It’s a setting that can bridge so many fairytales. Red Riding Hood meets a huntsman or a woodcutter in the woods. Snow White and Rose Red enter a forest and meet a man (in the form of a bear). Thumbelina, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty—so many characters get lost in a forest, run into strange people and beasts there. The blending comes when I go, “Okay, they run into someone—and that person/creature is from their own fairytale. Which one is it? How did their tale get them here?” I’m someone who grew up on fairytales, so most of the time I knew exactly which fairytale fit in each place.
Keziah is partly based on a character from a fairytale about a boy who becomes a wizard’s apprentice, steals his secrets, and then escapes from him. At one point, the boy’s father is trying to help his son escape. The wizard says he has to identify his son correctly in order to take him home, and he shows the man 12 identical birds, then horses, then boys and says he has to guess which one is his real son. Once I realized which character and what fairytale Keziah was from, it was exciting mixing elements from his fairytale into Rowan’s.
AZG: Myths, legends, and fairytales are foundational cornerstones of culture. Characters such as the Big Bad Wolf trace their origins all the way back to early Christianity and farming expansion. Myths shape our beliefs and the words we use and BTBF is a reimagining of myth.
The cast includes a delightful variety of queer and trans characters. I’m curious if you set off to write a queer retelling, or if the characters told you who they were, or a mix?
MH: I absolutely wanted to write a queer retelling, but I let the characters come to me rather than deciding their sexualities and genders ahead of time. Celine has always been gay. I didn’t always know who her love interest was, and in the earliest version of the story, she and Rowan weren’t even sisters. But that first version just never felt right to me, so I completely scrapped it and started over, and during that round of drafting I knew they had to be sisters. Keziah was always a trans man. There was never any rewriting where he was concerned. I was incredibly stuck on the draft until his chapters started coming to me, and it gave the whole book new life.
AZG: I’m a little bit obsessed with Keziah (the handsome trans huntsman) and his relation to both a rather evil character and the forest. I have my own theories about what the forest in BTBF represents, but I am wondering if you might be willing to shed some light on the forest itself as a thematic element and even character?
MH: The forest is very much an active character. It can’t do a whole lot to change things, but it makes it clear throughout the book that it isn’t happy with the Oak King’s rule. It helps along Rowan and Celine as much as it can. Just as it does in real life, the environment shows when something is wrong, when someone is treating it badly.
AZG: Food, and a special coziness around food, plays a huge role in BTBF. I also follow (and drool over) your baking Instagram. As a reader, it was especially wonderful to see queer and trans characters, not so different from me, enjoying these cozy, comfortable moments amid magical upheaval. The queer and trans characters face major oppositions in the book, and I interpret the quiet moments sharing a deliciously described meal as an act of resistance. Did this play a role in your crafting of the book?
MH: Yes, absolutely. I really wanted queer and trans characters to be the ones experiencing all the cozy fantasy goodness, even though they live in a world that doesn’t truly accept them. Fantasy and books in general relegate queer and trans characters to the background so often—they’re only there to tick a diversity box but never get the spotlight, the adventures, or the fun for themselves. I wanted to change that.
AZG: for aspiring writers reading this, would you be willing to talk a little bit about your creative process and what it looks like?
MH: My creative process is less a process and more just pure chaos. I only became a proper writer after I had a baby, so I have never had much free time or the ability to set up a firm routine. But luckily, as an AuDHD person, the inconsistency kind of works for my brain. I have to change up what I do constantly, or else I get bored and can’t motivate myself. What tends to work best for me is letting myself write what I’m excited about. A scene for one of my books will just pop into my head and I’ll spend hours writing it. Then I can easily build off that momentum and keep going. And if scenes come to me out of order, I let myself write out of order. Forcing myself to write only chronologically has never worked. But sometimes, when I lose motivation or inspiration but still want to keep the momentum going, it helps to write out on notecards every single scene I have written, as well as every single scene I can think of but haven’t written yet. Then I lay out those notecards in order and figure out what’s missing or what is throwing the story off. I’m constantly dancing between pantsing and plotting, constantly shifting from spontaneous and inspired to planned and disciplined. It makes for an incredibly inconsistent writing schedule but it’s helped me write five entire manuscripts.
I also try to look for inspiration in other types of media. The most obvious one is reading—if I’m wondering if a certain book would make a good comp or I’m looking for a way to blend romance into a fantasy book without overwhelming the fantasy plot, I’ll dive into reading. I also spend a lot of time listening to music and building playlists for my WIPs—music really helps me capture the energy and vibes I want for a specific scene or a manuscript in its entirety. And I spend a great deal of time building moodboards. I used to do a lot of Pinterest board-building, back before AI flooded it with gross fake pictures. I still do use Pinterest but not nearly as much, now that I can’t trust that the art and pictures I’m seeing are real and human-made.
AZG: you have an upcoming novel with Dragon Bone Publishing, The Soul Thief, is it too early to give readers a teaser for that project?
MH: Not at all! The Soul Thief is an urban fantasy that imagines what our world would look like if all the demons and spirits from mythology, fairytales, and legends were real and part of our society. It follows Marlee, a thief of magical artifacts, and Zeb, a man possessed by a demon. The two meet when Zeb beats Marlee to the most important theft of her life and steals the gem she’s after. Comps for this include Book of Night by Holly Black, An Unlikely Coven by AM Kvita, and Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo. I’m sooo excited for this book to be out in the world. It’s very different from Beyond the Border Forest but just as magical.
AZG: For fun, is Snowbelly a figure from a myth or did you invent him? In any case, I keep trying to imagine him and end up with these silly Loony Toon mental images somewhere between an elegant weasel and Wile E. Coyote (I’m so sorry, Snowbelly).
MH: I 100% invented him! And the Wile E. Coyote comparison is actually very accurate! He’s got that droopy snoot, for sure. I genuinely don’t know how or why he came to me, but he definitely added a certain energy and danger to the book (like the R.O.U.S. in Princess Bride).
AZG: Before we sign off, I would like to thank you, Molly, for choosing to write queer joy and empowerment. The metaphorical woods can often be a dark and harrowing journey for queer and trans folks, and Beyond the Border Forest provides a hopeful and guiding light through the gloom. I hope your work finds all readers but especially queer and trans folks looking for that beacon in the dark. Thank you.