Sarah Arthur, whose nonfiction titles include A Light So Lovely: The Spiritual Legacy of Madeleine L’Engle, Author of A Wrinkle in Time (2018) and The Year of Small Things: Radical Faith for the Rest of Us (2017), offers her recently published debut novel Once a Queen: A Novel (WaterBrook), a young adult "portal fantasy" that follows 14 year-old American Eva Joyce, who unexpectedly finds herself spending the summer at the mysterious manor house of the English grandmother she’s never met, she soon discovers that her family, the manor staff, and even the house itself are hiding secrets. PW caught up with Arthur to talk about her switch to fiction, and her love of fantasy.
Tell us about portal fantasy.
Portal fantasy is when the possibility of other worlds breaking in on this world is present. Once a Queen is portal fantasy as American teenager Eva Joyce spends the summer at her English grandmother’s estate and begins to see her favorite childhood stories coming alive. She searches for a portal into that fantasy world. The Narnia stories of C.S. Lewis, Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, the stories of Madeline L’Engle, the classic tales of E. Nesbit, the sense of magical realism in The Secret Garden, and even the tales of Neil Gaiman capture that possibility of other worlds.
Why the move from nonfiction to fiction?
Fiction is my first love. As a child I was writing stories longhand and drawing pictures, telling my own stories. My book A Light So Lovely came out in 2018, the same year I was diagnosed with breast cancer. In fact, I turned in the manuscript six hours before receiving the diagnosis. That diagnosis was the catalyst for me to get serious about that sense of call to fiction. So I finished the novel—I had been working on it for 20 years while writing nonfiction, going to grad school and having children—and gave a spiral-bound copy of it to my husband on our 22nd wedding anniversary, a week after my second surgery. I asked myself: "When the future is suddenly uncertain, why am I not pursuing the things I love?"
Why do you think fantasy and science fiction has been overtly condemned or quietly ignored in the evangelical community?
There has been resistance linked to a historical posture of anti-intellectualism in certain branches of American Christianity, and a historical suspicion of imagination as unreliable, as human. In the 1980s and ‘90s, there was real resistance to false teachings, and anything fiction was considered lies. But fiction can be a vehicle of truth. Jesus’s parables sink into your imagination and probe at it. Yet the parables are deeply and profoundly true. Jesus chose a narrative vehicle that pushes past our resistance to go into the bald facts of our lives.
What role does the imagination play in our spiritual lives?
Imagination sees meaning and looks for patterns of meaning. It sees patterns of meaning in the stories of Scripture, which gives meaning to our lives. In fact, the spiritual world is always right here in our midst for those who have ears to hear. There is a great spiritual battle being fought, and a spiritual longing is there in all of us. The role of narrative and the imagination are evident in spiritual formation as well. The same ways we investigate literature as a world we get to inhabit, we can investigate Scripture as well.
What comes next for you?
Once a Castle comes out in 2025 and Once a Crown, the third in the trilogy, in 2026. My mission is nurturing the imagination, my vision, to echo Katherine Paterson, is to be "a spy for hope." You would have to chain me down not to write stories.
