In early 2007, I attended my first storytelling course, a Robert McKee Story Seminar at Loyola Marymount. McKee’s class was riveting and spawned my ongoing passion for storycraft, yet while I consider that seminar pivotal, I also left those three full days of lecture mostly confused.
Later, I discovered more accessible and straightforward explanations for how stories form, but McKee’s fancy-pants diatribes and 480-page tome were my lodestars for the next few years. To practice McKee’s principles, I started what I imagined at the time to be a simple story based on the novels I adored most as a kid: Brian Jacques’ Redwall series.
I called this story The Black Tree, and set it along a hidden stretch of Eagle Creek known well to many of my friends who attended CBF youth group in the late ‘90s. The main characters were a beaver, a river otter, a mouse, and a squirrel, and their quest was to travel upstream through many dangers and destroy a strange and poisonous tree growing from a column of stone below Metlako Falls.
The Black Tree was never a primary gig, but I liked telling the story, so I worked on it a lot when we moved to Phoenix. In 2012, after we moved back to Oregon, I sent what I had to Sandra Bishop, a literary agent who lives here in Portland. Sandra talked up my writing and the intriguing prologue, which told the black tree’s origin story by following an acorn’s journey from the Columbia's headwaters to that stone column near Metlako Falls. The issue, Sandra explained, was that publishers would want a series or trilogy. But I only had the one and no idea of where to take the narrative from there. Then life got infinitely more complicated and The Black Tree went dormant.
Then four years ago, I was looking at a map of Oregon on the wall during dinner and a new vista into this fantasyland bloomed open. I realized my characters were living in a post-human world, carving out new civilization from the old remnants. I imagined them traveling east to the high desert, west to the ruins of a great city, or all the way downriver to the coast. I imagined the factions and food and weaponry. Suddenly, I had much more than one story. I had the potential for a whole high-fantasy series. The Chronicles of Cascadia were born.
In Jacques’ Redwall universe, conflicts are drawn between “good” species (badgers, hares, otters, mice, moles, and squirrels) and “bad” species (cats, ferrets, foxes, rats, and weasels). In Cascadia, the species are true to American West, and the power blocs are more philosophical. The protagonist creatures ally under a law protecting all mammal life and the antagonists yearn to go back to the Old Way, when only the strongest survived.
This year I worked on this series in earnest, usually writing at night after Lana went to bed. High fantasy world-building is daunting, so I asked my writer comrade Terrell Garrett (Wolverton, Fear is the Key) for advice, and he directed me to Brandon Sanderson’s extremely informative (and free!) sci-fi/fantasy lecture series at BYU. Sanderson’s lessons (plus quarantine) lead me to deeper research, and I charted out a second storyline set in Bridge City (the mammals’ name for Portland).
What’s most gratifying is how this writing feels like the role of co-creation. I get to name animals. I get to look in on a world no one else but the Holy Spirit and I can see. George R.R. Martin describes this process as gardening, where the process is less about determining every detail and more about tending a land that lives and breathes on its own. I step inside Cascadia and I tap my keyboard until what I see scrolls out onto the page.
Not to get ahead of myself (as I often do), but of all the ideas I’ve had, I think The Chronicles of Cascadia has the best odds for commercial success. There’s $$$ in franchises! Redwall yielded 23 distinct books, many of which are now middle reader mainstays, and will soon be an animated series for Netflix. There are established successors to Jacques’ legacy, but Erin Hunter’s series are focused on using specific species and Colin Meloy’s Wildwood (which is also set in Portland), seems as beloved by middle readers as a Decemberists’ b-side (not fully a diss because I love this track).
Brian Jacques was 47 when Redwall was published. Aunt Debbie took us to see him at Broadway Books in 1992 and I remember being riveted by his Liverpudlian lilt and wrinkly smile. He was only 13 years older than I am now, so I suppose I’d better get rolling. At least this post establishes intellectual property, though, and cascadiachronicles.com is already locked down. Don't even try stealing my idea unless you want to write with me and build an Erin Hunter-esque collective. In that case, let’s chat.