"Cozy fantasy" is a literary genre that weaves together magic and the mundane for a warm, comforting read.
While the genre may seem like it traffics in the quotidian, Spokane-based author Travis Baldree is known for using it to find deeper meaning in aspects of everyday existence.
His newest book, "Brigands & Breadknives" is also an exploration of some of his own internal struggles, Baldree said.
"I'm a people pleaser and I care what people think of me. But I realized that that's not necessarily a healthy way to be, which ends up thematically being part of the book," he said. "And so I'm constantly struggling with it and constantly trying to put it to the side and to not let it subvert what I'm trying to do."
Baldree joined SPR's Owen Henderson to chat about the new installment in his popular series "Legends & Lattes."
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
OH: I'm joined now by author, audiobook narrator, Washington State Book Award finalist, and Spokanite, Travis Baldree. Thanks so much for coming to the studio.
TB: Thanks so much for having me.
OH: So your lane so far as an author has been cozy fantasy, and we'll talk a little bit about what initially drew you to that genre and why you continue to write in it, but why don't you first explain that particular niche of fantasy for the listeners?
TB: I think cozy fantasy is fantasy that uses the trappings of fantasy to talk about everyday things, things that are important to people now. None of us are going to be slaying a dragon or overthrowing an evil overlord, but we might have a midlife crisis or move to another town or open a small business, and using the fairy dust of fantasy reminds us that those things are important and worthy. And then I think the other key component is at the end of the day, when you finish the book, ideally you feel better, that it's ultimately a hopeful experience.
OH: This is now your third book in the “Legends and Lattes” series. I know you're contracted for a certain number of books, but why come back to this universe instead of exploring other worlds? What keeps you in not just the cozy fantasy genre, but the world of “Legends and Lattes?”
TB: Ideally, it's just because I have something I want to talk about. I've got a feeling I want to explore. I have something that's tugged at me in the past or presently that is an emotional engine that I can use to get my characters from one end of the book to the other, and that's satisfying for me.
I'm not going to stay in cozy fantasy, and the books have been becoming increasingly less cozy as they go on. “Brigands and Breadknives,” the third one, is the least cozy by far because I don't really have much interest in being shackled by the conventions of cozy fantasy.
The book I'm writing right now isn't cozy fantasy at all. I am writing in a genre that I narrate for a lot. A lot of people won't have heard of it. It's generally called Game Lit or LitRPG. The most recent example of that is Matt Dinniman's “Dungeon Crawler Carl” series.
Anyway, I narrate a lot of it, and I have developed opinions after narrating hundreds and hundreds of these things, so I'm writing one the way that I would write it, and we'll see how that turns out.
OH: Speaking of other books, other content, who are the other authors you find yourself drawn to fantasy or otherwise? What are you reading when or if you have the time?
TB: Were I to have the time, I am a big fan of T. Kingfisher. I really like T. Kingfisher's work, and if you enjoy cozy fantasy, T. Kingfisher sometimes writes in that genre. She's very non-genre bound, but books like “Nettle and Bone” and “Thornhedge,” I think, kind of fall in the cozy fantasy niche, although they have elements of darkness that kind of push the boundaries.
I'm a big fan of Stephen King. I will read anything he writes. I love the way that he writes people in dialogue, and he can just ramble off, and I will happily go wherever it is he wants to take me.
I read a lot of novellas because that's what I tend to get time to read. “Sisters of the Vast Black,’ I believe, was one of the more recent ones that I read that I really enjoyed.
OH: Last time we talked, you mentioned that you very clearly hear the words on the page as you are writing your stories. When you are not the author and when you are a narrator, how do you find the voices and the inflections and the delivery of your characters? Is that something that becomes apparent to you as you read a book in preparation, or is that something that you find yourself workshopping and tweaking?
TB: I probably thought about it a lot more when it was earlier in my career, but it becomes fairly instinctive. I think there's a basic like music to a book. It's almost like you watch a movie and you get a sense of the feel of the movie from the soundtrack or the voice casting.
You watch an animated movie, the voice casting tends to be a certain kind of way depending on the feel of the movie. Is it a Saturday morning cartoon? Is it Studio Ghibli? You can tell that the way that they approach these things are different. There's a vibe, and I think that you learn to pick up on that pretty quickly in the book, and once you have a hold of the vibe, you have an idea of like what kind of voice casting is appropriate for this.
What kind of character voices are appropriate? Is this really goofy? Is it aimed at younger audiences? Is it got its tongue in its cheek? Is it breaking the fourth wall? Is it dead serious? And these things, you get a pretty quick sense of that. You can do it by just reading a random page in the book. The blurb often lets you know.
Character dialogue is a really good way to key that in. At that point, it really does become pretty instinctive. I know what I think feels right for this kind of story, and I try to make choices, again, pretty instinctively as I'm reading based on that knowledge.
OH: I think it's fair to say there are a lot of tropes that are sort of shorthand for people who are familiar with fantasy or even the things that people tend to imagine if they're not super familiar with fantasy, the adventuring heroes, the stereotypes about tall willowy elves and the brutish orcs and so on and so forth. How did you go about building the world of the Legends and Lattes series, deciding what rules, so to speak, you wanted to keep, what you wanted to bend, what did you want to subvert? Tell me about that process.
TB: So when I wrote Legends and Lattes, I wanted it to be easy to access. I wanted you to be able to pick it up and read it without having to necessarily know anything about fantasy, not having to brush up on 500 years of orcish history to actually get to the meat of the story.
So it trades in a lot of traditional European fantasy tropes that a lot of people are familiar with. I think it uses that as a template to fill in with what I hope are real people that now break from a lot of the stereotypical behaviors you would have for those characters.
So in “Legends and Lattes,” the main character is an orc named Viv. Traditionally, orcs are nasty, brutish, and they're the bad guys in a lot of fantasy fiction. But then I subvert that because it's about the actual person and not about the stereotypes.
So it's kind of a marriage of using these stereotypes and tropes that people are familiar with and then subverting them in a way that hopefully makes the story feel like its own thing.
You know, I have my own unique elements to the books that I write. I have my own magic system. Everybody likes to have a magic system.
But unfortunately, I have a rule, which is that I don't get to talk about any of those things unless the characters care about them. So unfortunately, those only get slipped in when they're actually relevant. And hopefully that keeps it easy to access.
You aren't stumbling over all this stuff. But I kind of tuck it in at the corners, and it sort of builds over time.
OH: You mentioned, and as I read it, I found that the third book is the least “cozy” so far. And you used the word shackled earlier. Tell me a little bit about if it even was a conscious decision to push a little further outside of the safety, so to speak.
TB: So when I wrote “Legends and Lattes,’ I wasn't even aware that there was a cozy fantasy genre.
I wasn't thinking about it in those terms. It was just the book I wanted to write. But as cozy fantasy became more and more popular and people like to define rules, they like to say, ‘This is what cozy fantasy is.’
I don't want to write a book and think, ‘Gosh, should I not put this in because it doesn't fit the current mold of cozy fantasy?’ I just don't want to think about books that way because I think you're more likely to end up with something ungenuine. I have to write something that works for me. It has to be personally relevant in some way.
And as I've written these books, it's kind of gotten increasingly meta. “Legends and Lattes” was very much kind of an accidental retelling of my life, going into middle age and switching careers and finding a community of book people. When I attempted to write the sequel, “Bookshops and Bone Dust,” I failed three times.
And then the fourth book is basically a book about the failures that we encounter not actually being failures and instead being the ground upon which our future successes grow because I harvested the wreckage of those three books to write that book. So the book is almost about itself. And “Brigands and Breadknives" is about learning to disappoint people that you care about and how to say no, which are all things that are very relevant to me right now and have been for the past couple of years now.
So again, the book ends up being in a meta way about the writing of the book because one of the things I'm concerned about with the book is, am I going to disappoint the people who liked the previous books? But I kind of have to write it this way anyway. So it's almost about itself. I don't assume that all of my books will be that way, but that's been the trend so far.
OH: Travis Baldree is the author of the forthcoming book, Brigands and Breadknives. Thanks so much for your time and congrats on the book.
TB: Thanks so much, Owen.
