Author weaves 'shrouded' myths, B.C. geography into new worlds

Debut novelist Giselle Vriesen read fantasy books as an escape when she was a teen growing up on Salt Spring Island, B.C., but she never saw her heritage reflected. 

Young adult fantasy is a popular book genre, but it's often rooted in Greek or other European mythologies. 

Vriesen's background is Jamaican and Chinese, as well as European-Canadian.

So she sat down and wrote her own fantasy novel, using African, Chinese and Norse mythologies as the starting blocks for the worlds in her book. 

But first she had to learn them. 

This is Vancouver Island14:38Weaving African, Chinese, and Norse mythology — and island geography — to build fictional worlds

Debut novelist Giselle Vriesen read fantasy books as an escape when she was a teen on Salt Spring Island, but she never saw her heritage reflected. Young adult fantasy is a popular book genre, but it’s often rooted in Greek, or other western mythologies. On this episode of This is Vancouver Island, she talks about building worlds based on mythology from her own Jamaican, Chinese, and European-Canadian backgrounds — and how she couldn’t help but include some rainforests and oceans too. Her first book, called Why We Play with Fire, is out now.

She says the African stories especially were "shrouded in mystery" because of colonization and the slave trade. 

But once she learned them, she realized they weren't so different after all. 

"It was incredible to see that the things that I loved about Greek mythology and the things that intrigued me, like the vast network of gods and systems of magic and histories, are all there," said Vriesen. 

"Every different culture has that exact same level of intricate storytelling."

She used the different stories to create worlds for her novel, Why We Play With Fire, which is about a teenager on Vancouver Island who gets whisked away to a magical house where she discovers she's one of a group of young people who are descended from both gods and humans. 

Vriesen talks about the book — and about how the West Coast landscape inspired her worlds — in the latest episode of This is Vancouver Island, a CBC podcast about life on the Island.

Tune into This is Vancouver Island every Tuesday on CBC Listen, or wherever you get your podcasts.