Jordan Taylor’s short fiction has recently appeared in Uncanny and The Deadlands, and was nominated for a 2021 World Fantasy Award. Though she’s lived in cities on both US coasts, she currently resides in Seattle, where she shares a little house near the ocean with her husband, their corgi, and far too many books. “A Recipe for Hope and Honeycake” is her third appearance in Uncanny, a beautifully written tale of hardship and hope, bees, and cake.
Uncanny Magazine: You had a previous story, “Bramblewilde,” whose title character is also the protagonist in “A Recipe for Hope and Honeycake.” What drew you to write another story with Bramblewilde?
Jordan Taylor: Bramblewilde is one of those characters that’s gotten lodged in my head—a sort of wise, winking alter ego about whom I realized I knew much more than would fit in a single story. As a fairy, I imagined Bramblewilde had lived in their village for generations, interacting with a rotating cast of related characters. In fact, the first time I tried to write about Bramblewilde, the story I came up with consisted of snippets spanning hundreds of years. Although that story ultimately didn’t work, I plan to continue writing Bramblewilde stories, with the goal of one day having a book-length collection of interconnected stories—like an expansion of that one trunked story that started it all.
Uncanny Magazine: There is a beautiful conversation between Bramblewilde and the bees, in which they decide to do something to help the villagers, even after the villagers have been unkind. When you write dialog, do you already know what everyone will say, or do your characters sometimes surprise you?
Jordan Taylor: I never know what my characters are going to say! I’m an absolute pantser, which can be equal parts frustrating and rewarding. Though I may often have to switch direction or scrap huge parts of a story, it’s the element of discovery and surprise that brings me back to writing again and again.
Uncanny Magazine: “A Recipe for Hope and Honeycake” has lovely descriptions of village life, of honey and beekeeping, of gardening and wolves, and the turning of the seasons. What research did you do for this story? Was there anything you wanted to include that didn’t fit?
Jordan Taylor: I never know what to count as “research” and what not to. Though I did look up facts about beekeeping and traditional methods of processing honey, part of my research for this story was my daily life at the time. I was living in a much more rural area over the pandemic, and a huge part of my life had become gardening and caretaking tasks.
This story was really written out of a place of crippling pandemic anxiety and caretaking fatigue. I was teaching (at a school with high-needs children, at a time before we had COVID vaccines), and still working fewer hours than my also-anxious husband, which meant many home tasks fell to me. We had just bought a house with a large yard filled with garden spaces, and I was learning all the upkeep that entailed. I often found myself looking around asking “What do I need? What would help?” And yet, at a time I felt very disconnected from the “real” world, I was also able to feel closer to nature and to the passing of the seasons than I ever had before.
As I worked through “A Recipe for Hope and Honeycake,” I played around a lot with ways to bring in the perspectives of other characters and how to create a through-line for the entire year. I wanted the reader to get a sense of village life as an interconnected whole, which was difficult to accomplish. In the end, I was forced to scrap the alternate perspectives of Athena and Squire Rothchild’s son, but the bees and the lines from “Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May” provided the foil to Bramblewilde and the through-line I was looking for.
Uncanny Magazine: Do you like to bake? What is your favorite kind of cake?
Jordan Taylor: I like to eat sweets more than I like to bake them! My perfect baking recipes are loaf cakes—easy, cozy, delicious, and acceptable to eat for breakfast. Bramblewilde’s honeycake was inspired by a loaf cake recipe I found online that used almost a cup of honey and milk infused with Earl Grey tea. Yum!
Uncanny Magazine: Who are some of your literary influences? What is something you’ve read recently and loved?
Jordan Taylor: Two of the biggest influences for this story specifically were Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows and Kij Johnson’s much more recent “sequel,” The River Bank. In The Wind in the Willows, there’s a similar focus on the English countryside and the changing of the seasons, with another surprise appearance by Pan. I read it for the first time as an adult, and immediately fell in love. Over the pandemic, it became my ultimate comfort book—perfect to pick up and read a snippet from at any time of year, at any point I needed a moment of peace. Kij Johnson’s The River Bank maintains all of the charm of the original, through a slightly updated lens—and the main character is an independent mole authoress!
Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?
Jordan Taylor: I’m currently querying one novel and working on another—which means I’ve sadly had less time to work on short stories. The novel I’m currently drafting has a similar setting to my Bramblewilde stories. It focuses on a half-fae young man with a strange connection to a labyrinthine magical house in the English countryside, and is set in a 1780s England that’s intimately connected to Faerie. There’s a set of pernicious, bullying cousins and a masquerade ball and a witch who lives in a garden folly. There’s also…four? five? different point-of-view characters, which means it’s taking me quite a long time to draft!
Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
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