An Interview with Ferne Arfin

Ferne Arfin is an American writer in London. Her short stories have appeared in The Literary Review (Fairleigh Dickinson), The Arkansas Review, Wild Cards: The Virago Writing Women Anthology, and other literary magazines. She has worked as a travel writer, an actress, and a creative writing tutor in British prisons. She earned an MA in creative writing from The University of East Anglia. Her first novel, Tunnel of Mirrors, was published in 2022.

Who/what made you want to write? Was there a particular person, or particular writers/works/art forms that influenced you?

I’ve always had a love affair with language and words – the rhythm of words, the music of spoken words, the way that words themselves make the stories they tell. I love lyrical writing. I also like character-driven fiction. Perhaps because I trained and briefly worked as an actress, I usually “hear” characters speak as I write.

With that as a starting point, I’ve been a writer of one sort or another since childhood and I’ve worked as a journalist, a copywriter and a travel writer all my life. I started writing and publishing short stories in my twenties.

When I began writing, I envied writers who could mine their childhoods and their family lives for material. As far as I could see, my own family was a conventional, middle-class American family with the nineteenth-century immigrant roots that a lot of New Yorkers have.

We were a family of talkers and I guess it was natural to turn everyday experiences into narratives – I’ve often been told that when I talk about ordinary things I “talk like a writer”. But my parents and grandparents didn’t share very much about their own early lives.

Then, near the end of her life, my grandmother told me about something that happened to her as a young woman. She had cursed a wedding and the bride died. She was a superstitious woman. I think the experience, when she was eighteen or twenty years old, changed her life. She believed her curse had actually caused the death. Her story haunted me. Was this how she became the bitter, unhappy woman that I knew as an adult? And could I write her story with a different outcome? To do this I had to introduce a different element into her story.

It took me a long time but I finally found it in Irish folklore and poetry. I’ve long been interested in folk stories and the way different, unrelated cultures share the same superstitions, folk tales and origin stories. While researching this at the British Library I began to notice similarities and connections between Eastern European and Irish folk beliefs. In the end, it has a lot to do with the way that people tell stories and the way they shape their personal histories with the stories they tell. They are both cultures where, traditionally, everyday ordinary life can be infused with the strange and mysterious.

An Irish relative took me to Rathlin, the only inhabited island off the coast of Ulster. The island, with the birds and seals that visit it and its tragic ancient history, is a magical place. There I listened to stories. At the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum I read transcripts and listened to recordings of Rathlin Islanders who lived in the early part of the 20th century, when my book is set. The hero of my story, the one who brings the extra element that changes Rachel’s trajectory, is, among other things, a Rathlin Seanachie – a traditional Irish storyteller, who grew up in a world where myths and magic were a way of explaining the world and were the commonplace currency of everyday life.

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

I’ve always been a writer of one sort or another – journalist, copywriter, short story writer But I also trained as an actor and worked, briefly as an actor in London in the 1980s and 1990s. I think that training has given me a feeling for the rhythms and music of speech and has made my dialog particularly important in my stories. Perhaps my feeling for the spoken word is what attracted me to train in speech and drama at University in the first place.

Tell us the story of your book’s title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?

I spent forever finding the title. Originally my title was a biblical quotation from the Old Testament love poem, “The Song of Solomon.” Unfortunately, there were several books using that title, mostly books of poetry, scheduled to come out around the same time as my book. So I had to change it.

One element of my story – a sort of underlying backstory – is the idea that love is eternal, or, better put – life is finite, love is not. I had the idea of two souls destined to be soul mates, chasing each other through time and never quite being in sync. This is not anything explicit in my novel; it was just an idea that informed a lot of my choices as I wrote.

Connected to this was a visual memory. My grandmother had two low, vintage 1930s-style dressing tables with mirrors – what would have been called peerglasses – that faced each other in her bedroom. The effect of the two mirrors, reflecting each other. created a tunning of repeating reflections – a tunnel of mirrors. When I was a small child, I would stand in front of one of the mirrors and turn really quickly to see if I could catch a glimpse of the other little girl in the mirror. But no matter how fast I moved,she always vanished before I caught her. Yet – and maybe this was my imagination – I could have sworn that I saw a flash of movement as she ran off into the mirror frame.

That image stayed with me when I thought about Ciaran and Rachel, the protagonists of my book and that’s where the title came from.

How did it feel when you first saw your book cover? Or when you first held your book in your hands?

It took a long time to get a cover. The artists employed by the publisher I worked with were low budget, could not be bothered to read even a few chapter of the book. I mentioned that my book was “lightly touched with magic” or sometimes I used the term magic realism. Somehow, the parade of artists kept producing covers suitable for children’s books or vampire series. I was thinking more along the times of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Isabel Allende. The covers were one disaster after another.

Finally, I decided to bite the bullet and shell out some significant money. I chose Laura Duffy through the publishing marketplace Reedsy. She actually read my whole book and then produced a cover that was near perfect from the word go. All we did to change it was move the position of the title a little bit. When I saw her cover, I fell in love with it. And when I received my first hardcover copies, I was thrilled. The cover translated beautifully to paperback, Kindle, and audiobook as well.

What was the most rewarding/meaningful part of publishing your book?

The response from readers and reviewers on Amazon, Goodreads, and Instagram has been really wonderful. I also enjoyed casting and working with a wonderful and flexible British narrator on the audiobook.

What new writing projects are you currently working on? Or, other projects that are not writing?

I’m working on a coming-of-age story set in the USA in the second half of the twentieth century. I’m also hoping to collect my published short stories into a single volume and publish within the next year.

Are you a writer, too? Submit your manuscript to Atmosphere Press.