Stacy Gregg has written an awesome new book called The Last Journey about a special cat named Pusskin, his cat friends, and their quest to escape a crazy group of cat killers. Missbeecrafty asks Stacy some questions--about cats, tarot cards, and her favourite literary "children."
Missbeecrafty: As Pusskin’s Mama is a Seer, divination and prophecy are a pretty important part of The Last Journey, which I thought was really cool. I also heard that you had a tarot card reading to help you decide what to do next with your manuscript. Can you tell me a bit more about your journey with this story?
Stacy Gregg: Nick Cave made a comment once about being an atheist in his real life but religious in his work and I think I'm similar. Although the closest I have ever come to identifying with a belief system was that I once wrote 'Jedi' under religion on my census form, I often seem to incorporate spiritual guidance or supernatural elements into my fiction. Having never had a tarot card reading before, I did resort to one after I'd written The Last Journey because I wasn't sure what I should do with the manuscript. I had no publisher so I'd written the book out of contract and my agent had just retired so I was totally at the crossroads and also it was totally different to anything I'd ever written before. I have this friend, Sarah, who had just tossed in her perfectly sensible job to become a tarot reader (abundancelovejoy.com) and so I asked to give me a reading. Without her cards I never would have taken the book to Simon & Schuster London who ultimately became the publisher. They are also going to be the publisher of my next book which I've just finished writing. (By the way, I think Nick Cave has retracted on that policy and become genuinely devout which I find a bit disappointing!)
Missbeecrafty: Did your feelings about Tarot change after the reading?
Stacy Gregg: Definitely. I mean, to clarify, it's the only thing I do that is woo-woo. I'm not into star signs or anything else. But, yeah I love tarot, and I do make decisions based on Sarah's readings. I have had my cards done a couple of times since the big reading that got me my book deal. I do really enjoy watching the way the cards come out, seeing them being turned over and hearing Sarah's interpretation of them and then putting my own spin on them too. I think what I do believe is that our own energy can express itself in the universe and that how we act on our own intuition, how much we back ourselves, does influence outcomes. For instance when I went back to Sarah and asked her to do a reading for me to see if I would win at the New Zealand Book Awards for Children and Young Adults because I had lost a colossal 8 times in the past and I was fed up with turning up and being disappointed, she turned over a card that depicted an old, wizened woman huddled under blankets in the snow being shunned by society and pelted with rotten fruit, and I took that as a sign that I was going to lose again. Which is like, a valid interpretation, right? In fact, according to Sarah, the card wasn't a portent of doom, it was a residue of my own leftover bad energy - because I didn't lose at all. In fact I won the junior fiction award and the Margaret Mahy Book of the Year Award too.
MBC: I really enjoyed those mystical aspects of the story, as well as the importance of the Egyptian gods Bastet and Apep, and so on. What was your inspiration for that?
SG: It's just so fascinating isn't it? Egyptians worshipped cats, they built temples to them and mummified them and shaved off their eyebrows in tribute when a cat died. They decided that these haughty creatures must be actual gods themselves because of the disdain they had for humans and the elegance and grace of the feline form! And of course for every good god, there must be an evil counterpart. In this case, the adder. I loathe snakes (this book is also about the weird hierarchy we have of good vs bad animals.) and I got lucky that there are adders in the location where the book is set. Although is it luck? I often find when I'm writing that the research can push the story in certain directions but once you're there you're like "Of course this was always the story!" So it seems to me now in retrospect that there was always going to be a cult of snake worshipping cats on an island off the coast of Pembrokeshire who took things too far in pursuit of fertility but who truly knows how I got to there!
I know you’ve been to all sorts of places and done some amazing things while researching for your books (like tolting in Iceland!) What sort of research did you do for The Last Journey?
I think that covid is the primary reason I stopped writing my standalone pony fiction because up until 2020 I'd always travelled to the places where the books were set - Iceland (for The Fire Stallion) and Russia (for The Diamond Horse, Jordan (for The Princess and the Foal), Spain (for Angel and the Flying Stallions and Storm and the Silver Bridle) and Italy (for The Girl Who Rode the Wind). I was just about to go to the Camargue for The Forever Horse when the lockdowns began. And after that I knew I had to change tack because I just couldn't write books based in foreign places anymore. So Nine Girls involved me being in the one place I could still go - in a three month lockdown in my cousin's house in Ngāruawāhia. Nine Girls altered me as an author. After you've done a gold hunt with a talking eel then springboarding to a cat dystopia seems about right as the next move! I had set The Last Journey originally in London because I know it so well I don't need to go there, but my editor made the location a little more vague on the page. Carmarthen, where the imaginary Cat Island in the latter half of the story is located, is in Pembrokeshire in Wales which is where my literary agent, Nancy Miles, lived and I was there some of the time while I was writing. She has a wild expanse of farmland down by the estuary - lots of old stone cottages it's utterly gorgeous. Always set your books in places you want to visit!
The cats in the story are all unique, and their personalities reminded me of different cats I’ve known over the years. Have you had a lot of cats?
I have had a lot of pets full stop. Cats, dogs, birds, mice, ducks, pigs, ponies - you name it! The cats in the book came about because our house flooded really badly in the January 2023 floods and so we had to find alternative accommodation for a year while the house got re-sorted. We ended up moving to this cul-de-sac full of cats and they became my inspiration for the cul-de-sac gang. They all have unique characters in the story and I do think their breeds inform that a bit, but also all cats have unique personalities don't they? We have two of them now and they are chalk and cheese. One is a homebody and the other is out on the streets courting attention. The stay-at-home is a chinchilla tabby cross and the outgoing one is his cousin, a burmilla, so maybe the burmeseness is the factor? Is it breeding or personality? Probably a bit of both. I know other burmillas who are nowhere near as adventurous as Pusskin.
Pusskin is inspired by your own cat, isn’t he? What about the other cats from the cul-de-sac clan?
Probably the cats are inspired as much by people as they are by real cats. Freddie the British Blue has a bit of Nigel Farage about him -albeit with more redeeming features by the end. Pixie, in my mind was based on like a gobby sort of London girl like a young Lily Allen. Monster is my favourite - he's kind of a loner, a fighter, and rough around the edges but there's this big soft marshmallow inside of him and he hates how much Pusskin gets away with and all his smarmy charm which is fair. Pusskin is a cat who never wanted to lead and that's what makes him such a great leader. I think any politician who wants to be in charge in a desperate way is already a liability. Heroes are defined by selflessness and I'm finding that quality a bit thin on the ground lately everywhere I look.
Can you tell us a bit more about your own pets, feline or otherwise?
My own relationship with my own real-life Pusskin very much echoes the one that Lottie has with her Pusskin. You know when she's asking her mum why Pusskin always has to go out and charm the whole neighbourhood, and she's basically saying "why aren't I enough for him?" That is me with my Pusskin. He is a hard cat to keep on the porch! He considers himself the UN ambassador for the whole street, out winning over every single household and being adorable. And I'm sitting at home at the window wondering when he will come back to me. It's pathetic really. He runs roughshod over my heart. And I am a total helicopter parent - the Black Hawk Down of helicopter parents in fact. It does my head in. I've learnt to live with it but sometimes if he is missing for too long I lose my cool. I put leaflets in mailboxes up and down the street the other week asking if anyone had seen him and 3 houses phoned me to say he'd been living with them!
Can you tell me more about Cecil, the ghoulish goat? He really seems like a devil incarnate with his horns and cloven hooves and his evil tyrant persona!! It made me wonder if you’ve had some kind of run-in with a vicious goat somewhere along the way!?
Actually no! I love goats. I have had several as pets and they are very sweet creatures. The opening sentence of my book Nine Girls says "I was six years old when my goat left home to go work for Santa". True story. Or at least true to the extent that in real-life that was what my parents told me had happened. The problem with the long con is that it backfired horribly on them and every Christmas they had to continue the ruse that my Twinkle was pulling the sleigh.
The Last Journey reminded me quite a lot of Watership Down (I thought that before I read that you told people it was like a cross between Watership Down and Logan's Run! I read Watership Down for the first time very recently--having been rather traumatised by the movie as a child!--and absolutely loved it!) Is Watership Down a favourite of yours?
I think Watership Down is the GOAT! The book obviously. The movie is a bit dark and loses the magnificent detail of the story. Having said that, even the book would have trouble finding a publisher these days I think; it's simply too long and languid and although I still adore it, it would be hard to get through the goalposts with the modern child's attention span being what it is. But yes, I loved Hazel and Fiver and Bigwig and I also share Richard Adams' admiration of the work of Joseph Campbell who wrote The Hero With A Thousand Faces - which is a book about myths and fairytales and the universality of stories throughout time and in various cultures. George Lucas was also a big Joseph Campbell fan as it turns out - and I am a huge Star Wars fan.
Do you have a favourite among your own books? Or is that a bit like asking if you have a favourite child? 😉 (I haven’t read all your books, but I have read quite a few of them. I especially love the Mini Whinny books, and the Princess and the Foal).
The Last Journey is my 39th book and I honestly think it's me at my peak and using all the skills and the dirty emotional tricks I have amassed over the years as a middle-grade writer to create the story. It's definitely the most technically powerful book I've ever written. And it is the most heartbreaking. There's one scene that I wrote that I blubbed so hard I couldn't see the keyboard and it took me weeks to pull myself together afterwards. And also I adore the publishing values that S&S have brought to it, Susie Mason's genius illustrations throughout the text. I think this is where middle-grade needs to go now, that we have to make books such wonderful things that kids get drawn in and cannot resist them. It is our job as authors and publishers to make reading a book for pleasure more alluring than scrolling on some dumb device and I am here for it!
What have you read recently that you really enjoyed?
Rachael King's The Grimmelings is a fantastic read. She's a totally different writer than me but I love her work and I think she's at the top of her game right now. I love Catherine Chidgey in general and The Book of Guilt is totally a page-turner. Nicky Pellegrino's currently working on a Palio book and I've seen an early draft and it is awesome. I have written a Palio book myself in the distant past (The Girl Who Rode The Wind) and I love hers because it's so different but I'm still transported to Siena - I think it could be the best thing she's written yet. Anna Jackson's new book Terrier Worrier, a poem in five parts, is my favourite thing she has written too, she is so funny and so smart. And The Bookshop Detectives series. The cosiest of crimes and totally deserving of every bit of success.
Can you tell us about anything you’re working on at the moment?
I'm just wrapping up the manuscript on The Pack so I can't give too much away as it won't be out for another year. It's kind of an exploration of similar themes to The Last Journey, but this time it's about a pack of dogs who get hopelessly lost in the forest. I'm a bit obsessed at the moment with the battle that exists silently inside our pets between the cultivated expectations of domestication and the reality of the beast that lurks inside. And once I send that off to my editor next week hopefully after that I'll be back at work on the new series of My Life Is Murder. I've been a writer on the show for 3 seasons now and it is my happy place to be in the writer's room coming up with ways to kill people. My episode in the current season stars Rhys Darby and a falling gargoyle although I think my NDA prohibits me saying anything more…
The Last Journey, by Stacy Gregg $20.99 RRP is out now from Simon & Schuster
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