According to family lore, Eilish Fisher’s first words were a quote from Henry David Thoreau’s famous nature poem Walden, which hung on a print in the farmhouse where she grew up. It is unlikely that she cited the full text featured – “The stately beauty of the withered vegetation which had withstood the winter – life-everlasting, goldenrods, pinweeds, and graceful wild grasses ...” – or even much of it. However, as a piece of personal mythology, the way the themes of Thoreau’s poem match Fisher’s twin interests in nature and verse is certainly resonant. With the publication of her debut novel, Fia and the Last Snow Deer, a middle-grade book with a poetic power that will seduce adults as well as young readers, these dual passions are exquisitely expressed,
Growing up in rural Vermont, “animals were an integral part of my life”, says Fisher on a wet winter morning in a Wicklow seaside town. “There were horses, cats and dogs and ducks. There were wild animals everywhere. The place where I was most at home was the barn.” Poetry was an everyday part of life on the farm from an early age. Before she could read, her parents used to read to her from anthologies of verse: Maya Angelou, and Mary Oliver, and WB Yeats. The Walden woodcut was by a local artist and picture-book illustrator, Mary Azarian, whose work, including The Farmer’s Alphabet, adorned schoolrooms across the state.
Fisher herself, was educated through the Steiner system, and school was a space where the budding writer could develop her interests in both the natural world and its representation in poetry. “There was a big emphasis on storytelling,” she says. “The system was based on using mythology and art and storytelling to learn.” As she grew up through the curriculum, the mythologies shifted in emphasis and complexity. She studied stories from the Bible, Homer and the Greeks, Norse and Arthurian mythology, parsing what she learned into home-made textbooks that she drew and sewed, which were presented to her peers at the end of every school year, as per Steiner tradition.
“There was an incredible freedom learning this way,” she says. “It really fostered my independence and an ability to take responsibility for my own learning.” Fisher’s unusual education also imbued in her a deep love of myth, and after encountering the Irish mythic cycle of An Táin she became specifically interested in Irish folklore.
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“I remember being fascinated by the atmosphere of [An Táin],” she says. “For whatever reason, it was something I strongly felt I really wanted to explore further.” When the time came for her to consider college, Fisher’s parents – who have second-generation Irish ancestry – suggested she pursue her impulse to go to Ireland, so she did. Aged 18, she moved to Maynooth to study medieval Irish, language and literature. She never left.
She is based now in the Wicklow wilds of the Glenmalure Valley. Her path to professional writing was somewhat circuitous. After her undergraduate studies concluded, she took a master’s and then a doctorate in medieval Irish poetry, but then she pivoted completely. “After spending years in my head, in academia, I missed animals and that connection that I had with them since childhood. I suppose, because of my [early education] I had a kind of confidence to just follow my instincts, not to be afraid to take risks and try new things.” She had always been particularly fond of horses, so she retrained as an equine sports therapist, and was “so, so happy to get back to the animals”. After a life-changing accident with one of her equine patients, however, Fisher was forced to retreat to the other “safe space” in her life: poetry.
The transition to writing for children was inspired by a walk Fisher took one winter morning in the isolated hills around Glenmalure. “It was a really beautiful frosty morning, close to the winter solstice, and I was out with Shadow, my massive Alsatian rescue,” she says. “I had recently read an article about a reindeer bone that had been discovered in Ireland. New dating and analysis showed that there were human butchery marks on it – basically, that it had been killed and used by people. This new dating technology put reindeer and people in Ireland at the same time, and much further back historically than people would have thought before, and I started wondering about that.”
The first thing that struck Fisher was the fact that there had been reindeer in Ireland at all. She began considering “what that relationship between the humans and deer would have looked like. Would it have been similar to what was going on in the rest of Europe? I knew that there were several cultures throughout Europe that had a reindeer goddess associated with the sun and solstice, so I began to wonder what myths of the people in Ireland would have been.”
The second thing that struck her was how similar the concerns of people in this prehistoric time might have been to our own, “They would have been living in a time of huge climate change, with endless winters and everything messed up in terms of how the seasons worked,” she says. “It’s so easy to think of [people from the past] as an alien species, but they were people just like us. Humans are humans, whether it is in the ice age or now: we all have the same feelings and emotions, the same collective concerns for survival.”
The first draft of Fia’s story was written in prose, but as soon as she finished it Fisher was clear that it had to be a verse novel. She had taken a Words Ireland mentorship with Sarah Crossan, and this helped steer her vision for the book. Verse novels pose a particular challenge for the writer, she says.
“You have to be so careful with every word you choose, and that can be confining. There is so much freedom in prose, to go off and expand things and build a world up through text, while in verse you have to be succinct and sparse. You have to put your message across in a way that calls to mind the same thing a whole paragraph would, in just five or six words. But the good thing about it is there is also a huge amount of freedom in the form, and it is incredible being able to play with it.” That play happens on a word level, but on a visual level, with the placement of words on the page. Add an illustrator to the mix, and there is the potential to transform the story into a unique visual object as well. Dermot Flynn does a magnificent job with this in the beautiful hardback production, the black-and-white palette eventually warming to reflect the chink of solstice light as the story reaches its conclusion. Last month Fisher took home the award for children’s book of the year, in the senior category, at the Irish Book Awards.
For Fisher, verse has an important function for the reader. She describes how it is a gesture of inclusivity, with the potential to attract young readers who struggle with large amounts of text. “It allows them to be confident, not to be so intimidated by the words on the page.” It also gives young readers space to play a role in the storytelling, by allowing them to imagine what they are not being told. “You are trusting them to do that work, and by giving them that trust, that is confidence-building too. It’s like, ‘I’m giving you a few words with pictures to help you imagine this world, but with the rest, you get to decide.’”
As the winter solstice creeps upon us now, Fisher is thrilled to think of children around the country settling down with her book to mark the changing seasons. “When I was writing, I was thinking of the book as a sort of advent calendar. I like to think that in the busyness of the Christmas season and all that excitement, it is a way to get back to the calm primal instinct, how winter used to be, going back thousands of years ago, a time for staying still and being inside. If I can give children that sense of quiet and cosiness, I would feel that is a job well done.”
Fia and the Last Snow Deer is published by Puffin.
