Warning: fanthem-ing ahead.
I love Erin Morgenstern. I love her work, in my opinion she has written two absolutely perfect books, The Night Circus and The Starless Sea, both filled with wonder and magic and awe and a love of storytelling. So of course I jumped at the chance to chat with the author about her work, in honor of the Folio Society’s new edition of her debut novel, The Night Circus.
Note: The following interview has been edited for clarity.
I’m so thrilled to talk to you about one of my favorite books of all time, The Night Circus. I first read The Night Circus at a really tough time in my life—I felt very stuck in a dead end job, incredibly lonely, and in desperate need of whimsy. I started listening to the audiobook (during work hours) and quickly moved to a physical because I could read faster than the narration—the story completely captured my imagination and my heart. It was exactly the magic I needed in my life at the time, and I can’t thank you enough for that.
Oh, Christina, this is so lovely to hear. I’m delighted that the book found you at the right time, I love when that happens and it always feels like magic. (And thank you for doing this interview, too!)
It’s been 14 years since the original publication of The Night Circus, and more since you sat down to write that first sentence. Looking back, do you remember the first little whisper of the story that came to your mind? What was the most surprising thing about your first novel, as it began to take shape?
It truly does not feel like it’s been that long and yet it also seems like forever ago, time is such a strange creature.
I do recall the very beginning because the circus snuck up on me when I was not expecting it. I started writing seriously by participating in National Novel Writing Month (twenty-ish years ago when it was a different sort of thing than what the org devolved into), mostly because I wanted to write but I’d never sit down to do it. I’d write single pages and hate them so I’d stop, but you simply don’t have time to do that on a NaNoWriMo pace so I had to keep going and eventually I ended up with pages I didn’t hate so much.
I never planned anything for those Novembers and one year I was working on a vaguely Edward Gorey-inspired concoction with people in fur coats being mysterious and not much else and eventually I was so bored with it all that I sent the characters to a circus. The circus was immediately much, much more interesting. So I abandoned the fur (one of those coats would turn up years later in The Starless Sea) and started writing about the circus instead.
So much of it was there, right from that first moment that it popped into my head: a multitude of tents with a bonfire in the center and I didn’t know what it was for. Poppet and Widget were in that initial circus appearance, too. They’re technically the oldest characters existence-wise.
I think that was the biggest surprise, how I sort of tripped over this story within another story and moved from one story universe into another. A lot of my writing process tends to feel like excavating, digging around with words to see what there is to find. You sometimes get that analogy of Gardener or Architect when it comes to writing styles and I always feel like both of those roles sound too much like they know what they’re doing when I’m just digging. I suppose that leans more Gardener but I’m not planting anything, I’m kicking up dirt and putting interesting rocks and bones and lost coins in my pockets.
What do you think it is about the aesthetic aspects of The Night Circus that connected with audiences? Do you remember the first visual that came to you?
That first visual was all of the tents circling the bonfire and those tents were already black-and-white, probably to fit in with a Gorey tone but also I have always been fond of a black-and-white with small splashes of red. In college I majored in theatre and I adapted and directed Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and that was the Looking-Glass color scheme with its red and white queens and my Tweedles wore tuxedos, I think that was all still in my head even though this was several years later. This is a circus dressed up in evening wear.
I’m not sure what it was exactly that connected with audiences, I pulled from aesthetics that I personally like, but I do think there’s something about a restricted aesthetic that lets the reader have more of a hand in the visualization of everything. I’ve given a baseline of black-and-white and Victorian applied to the entire circus and those are big, broad strokes to help focus everything as you picture it. And I think because the circus itself has a visual language made up of red scarves and bowler hats and chocolate mice the book gains that, too. I can knit a little red scarf for my cat and anyone who has read the book understands the meaning behind the visual. It’s simple but distinct and it’s not something I was particularly conscious of while I was writing but I think it’s one of the reasons the book has had the life it has had so far.
There have been a few special edition versions of The Night Circus now, with accompanying art. As a visual writer and an artist yourself, what is it like seeing your story illustrated? Were there any particular scenes you really wanted visuals for?
I am frankly astonished by the sheer volume of gorgeous editions of The Night Circus. It has been wonderful to see so many different covers and treatments over the years and one of my favorite parts has been seeing artists interpret the imagery in so many different styles. I’m so visual that I have a lot of my own images and styles and ideas so I love to see where other people’s versions overlap and especially how they differ. I have pieces by Anne Yvonne Gilbert who illustrated the Books Illustrated edition hanging in my house along with circus-inspired art by Ethan M. Aldridge and Abigail Larson.
The newest edition from the Folio Society is particularly stunning and I adore Cristina Bencina’s illustrations. She does such marvelous things with lines and color and so many of her circus images have these beautiful frames of curtains or trees like you’re peeking through a magical window into the storyworld. I also love the way all of the details are incorporated into the design of the book itself, from the endpapers to the red ribbon bookmark. I’m a very tactile person, too, and it’s a beautiful book to hold.
I don’t usually have particular scenes that I want to see, I have so much of the book in my head already so I really enjoy seeing what individual illustrators gravitate towards and I love being surprised. I wouldn’t necessarily have singled out Isobel’s tent, for example, and Cristina’s fortune teller is my favorite image in this edition.
The romance between Celia and Marco is central to the Night Circus, and grows and changes over the course of many years. As a writer, what do you find most interesting about writing romance within a fantasy setting? How do love and magic interplay for you?
Fun fact! This book did not start out with a romance and stayed that way for many, many messy drafts. (Celia isn’t even in the first draft. Like I said, lots of digging around trying to unearth the shiny things, like a magpie.) Eventually I had a draft that was in desperate need of plot so I started moving characters around and ended up with Marco and Celia in potentially adversarial positions and I immediately realized that if I did that it was going to turn into a romance, and that turned out to be exactly where they were supposed to be.
This particular romance was interesting to me because I knew them both fairly well as characters before I started building the romance and as you mentioned it takes place over a long period of time. A large part of it ended up more about developing them each as separate people with their own relationships and history and experiences and seeing how they react to each other, and all the layers of complications with the competition, how Celia doesn’t truly know who Marco is for a significant period of time but she’s getting to know him through the tents he creates. These are two artists falling for each other through their art before they truly have a face-to-face conversation.
The fantasy setting allows a romance to be extraordinary, there is no standard courtship pattern for this relationship so it makes for intriguing spaces to play in. I don’t necessarily set out to write romance into stories, I start with setting and go from there, getting to know the characters who inhabit the space but magical settings allow for such interesting moments and situations that the romantic elements always find places to bloom.
Part of the joy of this book is that aside from the love story of Celia and Marco, there are a plethora of eclectic, charismatic characters. Are there any side characters you wish you could give more space to, or who you could see having their own story? (This is my official plea for a Tsukiko prequel)
One of the things I like about writing the sort of ensemble piece that all of my books seem to be is that every character has their own story so you’re only ever seeing parts of them, and more of some than others. It’s also one of the difficulties in my writing process because everything could potentially branch off in so many different directions of stories within stories and I usually end up writing bunches of them before I decide which ones actually belong in the book.
Originally I was thinking there would be more of Poppet and Widget but I ended up trying to use them sparingly, there’s probably an entire series worth of shenanigans there. I would have liked to have seen a more of Herr Thiessen on the page, I’d composed long versions of a lot of his writing but ended up trimming them down to quotations. And I do sometimes wonder what Chandresh is getting up to post-circus.
Tsukiko is very secretive so I only know parts of that particular story and so much time has passed I’m not sure I could go back there in the same way. I’m a never say never person but I think if I ever revisit aspects of the circus it would likely be in a much more tangential way.
Which of the Night Circus’s many magical tents do you think you personally would spend the most time in?
Oh, that would be hard to choose but I think for sheer volume of hours I’d probably end up in the Labyrinth more than anywhere else, purely for the amount of time it takes to navigate all the rooms and turns and dead ends. I’d also spend a lot of time in the Ice Garden and there are multiple tents that fall under the general category of cocktail parlor so I would end up in those frequently, too, getting to know the bartenders and trying all of the gins.
Truly, I think I would like to walk around a lot without staying too long in any particular location. It’s one of the design features of this circus: it’s not a single big top but many different tents to experience. This is possibly a commentary on my own attention span but I’m always drawn to self-directed entertainment, where you choose where to go and what to see and when, the way you might navigate a museum finding different things to wonder at. An entertainment to explore more than just to watch.
I’d love to just poke a little bit at what you’re working on next—you recently posted that the new project was a simmer pot of cherry blossoms, old bones, and black silk that smelled like champagne and cemetery dirt. That’s an incredibly evocative vibe and I have since been on the hunt for a perfume that smells like champagne and cemetery dirt. What would you say The Night Circus and The Starless Sea smell like? If they were perfumes, what notes would they have?
I have a long, messy writing process so I never want to say too much about what I’m working on because it changes so much. This one in particular has changed shape a great deal over the years, it started out as one thing and became another and now I think understand what it really wants to be. It’s getting there, slowly. It’s like being in the middle of a maze: I haven’t found the way out yet but I can see ways to progress and I know how it feels even if I can’t really say what the whole thing looks like from here.
It definitely smells like cemetery dirt and excessive amounts of champagne, though, and if you find such a perfume please let me know! Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab has a Graveyard Dirt scent and also a lovely champagne note that turns up from time to time, perhaps layering would work. I might have to experiment.
The Night Circus would need the scent of crisp evening air/dead leaves/bonfire smoke laced with caramel and probably a vanilla cream situation (possibly leaning a little marshmallow-y?) with cinnamon-heavy chai spices and maybe a hint of cayenne and wool to wrap a red scarf around it.
The Starless Sea would have honey, of course, but also beeswax candles and old book pages and worn leather and that enclosed absence of scent that caves have, like stone and too-dark darkness, and a touch of the way the air smells just before it snows.
All of these are scents that glow in the dark, I’m noticing. Chiaroscuro scents.
You’re a big gamer and games played a central role in your second novel, The Starless Sea. What are you currently playing, or are there any upcoming game releases you’re excited about? What books are you reading now?
I’m still not really sure how I went from “I don’t know if I really play enough to consider myself a gamer” to “I’ve played over 300 hours of Elden Ring” during the last decade or so but here we are. I like to think it counts as research, though, because I find inspirations and ideas in all sorts of games and I’m particularly fascinated by all the ways you can play with narrative in video games.
I must take a moment to rave about Blue Prince, which I have only recently started and I adore so far. It’s a gorgeous puzzle game where you unfold a sprawling mansion room by room to find clues and bits of history and mysteries and everything resets at the end of the day and you do it all again. Wandering a giant mansion stuffed with secrets is pretty much my ideal game experience so it’s like someone made a game just for me and I am very grateful. I have also been playing Assassin’s Creed Shadows and by “playing” I mean “decorating my hideout with multitudes of adorable (pettable!) creatures and an inordinate amount of sakura trees.” I am probably supposed to be doing more stabbing but there are tiny kittens and baby foxes and I have my priorities.
I unfortunately have trouble reading while I’m writing and I’m the slowest at both of these things which is not helpful. Over the last while I’ve been trying to read more older books so I’m currently reading Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott which was originally published anonymously in 1929. I’m also at the phase of writing where I feel like I don’t know how to do anything (again) and I go back to reading craft books so I’m in the middle of Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative by Jane Alison. And I just got an early copy of Chuck Wendig’s Staircase in the Woods which I am very much looking forward to sinking into. Climbing up? One of those.
How is Vesper doing? Please tell her I love her.
Vesper is doing well! She was sick for a bit and has to be on a fancy diet now but she is back to her regular fluffy self. She has developed a rather adorable habit of putting her paw on my hand (or my face) when she wants to be petted which would be even more adorable if she didn’t tend do it at 3 o’clock in the morning. I have expressed to her your love and she has flopped over on the floor which is a very favorable reaction, she is always appreciative of adoration.