From Stage Play to Young Adult Novel

Playwright Laurie Brooks Discusses Creating Selkie Girl

Jun 17, 2009

Laurie Brooks talks about how her fascination with Scottish myths and legends led her to write a play about the selkie seal people -- then adapt the play into a YA novel.

In her stage play Between Land & Sea, Laurie Brooks tells the story of Elin Jean, the human child of a selkie seal woman, who becomes a seal to see if she belongs to the land or sea. The play’s popularity led Brooks to adapt the play into a young adult novel, Selkie Girl, which has been nominated for the American Library Association’s Best Books of the Year 2010 List.

Suite 101 interviewed Brooks via email on June 9, 2009 to discover how Selkie Girl evolved from stage play to novel. The following is an edited version of the interview.

Brooks: My mother first told me the stories of the selkies. Most of the stories we know have a Celtic or Norse origin, but versions of these stories are told around the world. When I taught grad school at New York University, a Korean student told me the stories are told in her country, but instead of a seal, the creature that transforms into a human is a scallop!

S101: You also tell a different selkie story by focusing your play and book on the selkie’s child. Why did you want to adapt the myth this way?

Brooks: That’s right. Most of the stories focus on the crofter who takes the pelt of the unsuspecting selkie and makes her his wife. As the mother of three young daughters, I was interested in exploring the issues of a child of this strange union, her differences from other islanders and her drive to find belonging.

Brooks: In a play, the designers, the director and the actors add so much. They literally bring the play to life. In a book, it must all be on the page – the visual clues; the sounds, smells and sense of place; the feelings of the characters; and their inner thoughts. The writer must be the storyteller, but also the eyes and ears of the reader to create the world of the book.

It was a remarkable experience to create new scenes and flesh out Elin Jean’s world. My marvelous editor at Knopf, Michelle Frey, kept saying, “More, more. Write that as a scene.” That was music to my ears, rather than hearing, “Too long. Cut, cut.”

Brooks: The scene in the underwater cave when Elin Jean is attacked by sea trows is nearly impossible to replicate on the stage, so that is not in the play. In the novel I extended Elin Jean’s difficult decision about where she belongs, so there are additional scenes such as the section where Tam takes Elin Jean to the caves at Nettle Gee and the scene where she nurses her fither back to health.

S101: Did the actors’ interpretations of the characters in Between Land & Sea influence the way the characters are depicted in Selkie Girl?

Brooks: Not really. The characters in my plays live in my imagination long before they are given the gift of live performance, but the actors who played Elin Jean and Tam at Nashville Children’s Theatre fell in love during the run of the play, married and now have a son. The men in the wedding party wore kilts and the bride arrived on a white horse. Very romantic. I thought of them as I wrote the novel.

S101: You traveled to the Orkney Islands to research the play and book. How did your experiences there influence the story?

Brooks: I knew before I traveled to Orkney that the play (and book) would be set there. Orkney has a dual cultural heritage of Scots and Norse peoples, so it has a blended culture.

I was particularly influenced by the time I spent with the seals, listening to their sounds and learning about their lives on land and sea. I was able to get quite close to a seal colony. As we approached the areas where they gather, they swam out to meet us in our boat and I learned they are quite curious animals if they do not feel threatened.

In cultures where seals are an integral part of human survival, the animals take on a nearly religious importance and the stories grow out of that reverence. In Orkney, there are loads of stories of seals rescuing fishermen from the sea, and it is said that once you have looked into the eyes of a selkie you can never kill one again.

Brooks: I am currently working on two new YA books. I have been asked if there’ll be a sequel to Selkie Girl and that has been fun to think about.

The copyright of the article From Stage Play to Young Adult Novel in Myths is owned by Michael Jung. Permission to republish From Stage Play to Young Adult Novel in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.