Patricia Briggs SoSe 14

In the summer semester 2014, students of the seminar, The Wild, the Weird, and the Furry: Legend and Lore of North American Fantasy, had a chance to sink their teeth into theory as well as practical applications of their writing skills. First, they learned about the genre Urban-Fantasy (vampires and werewolves exist and are probably your next door neighbors) and how to write an academic essay.

After completing these tasks, the students earned their reward: interviewing Patricia Briggs, a best-selling author. Here they had to focus on their spoken language and decide which of their many questions they would ask. Next they had to write a short blog-like entry. Here are the results. We hope you enjoy this as much as we did. Before you start looking at the student interviews, you can watch Patricia Briggs’ uncut public lecture.

Hello out there!

If you are interested in urban fantasy you definitely should watch our interview with the author of Moon Called, Patricia Briggs! When we heard that we had to do an interview with her in our English class, we got very excited because we read some passages of her book, so we could ask Patricia for some background information. Although we are not the greatest fantasy fans and it's not that popular in Germany, Patricia and her open minded and personal answers were very impressive to us. For example, we didn't know about the fears authors have when it comes to making a film of their books. We mainly talked about Twilight and the inspiration for her writing. The results were surprising answers and a lot of laughing. So be excited about the highlights of our interview. We wish you a lot of fun!

Hello to all Urban Fantasy fans, students and Leuphana staff,

Probably one of the most interesting questions is: where does an author get his or her inspiration from? Our guest was willing to give us an insight into her private life and her sources of inspiration. Especially her family and her closest friends function as a basic idea for the characters and the content of her books. Do you think it is surprising that a bestseller author uses impressions even from her everyday life? Well, we didn't, but the fact that normal situations can be part of a supernatural story was an overwhelming fact even for us. Maybe we could use this in our next essay. Another interesting theme in the interview was the social issues, which Patricia likes to work with in her books. What kinds of issues are important to you? We asked Patricia about racism, homosexuality and war.

There are many issues in society and in oneself that she represents and integrates into her stories which are not always obvious. We think it is awesome that even an urban fantasy author is able to project serious topics into fictional story lines.

Hello to students and writers,

What happens when the ideas don't flow and everything you wrote before seems to be wrong and time goes by while your fans wait for your next book to be published: Probably every author knows about the struggle with a serious case of writers block, and likely every student has felt like this in his/her life, too. For a student this means that the deadline to hand in your work comes closer and the ideas in your head fade away with every hour you sit in front of a blank word document, filled with nothing but the date. But how do you overcome this hurdle? Patricia Briggs, known for her Mercy Thompson series, shared her strategies with us. After 23 books, she should know about how to be creative and handle the problem of not being satisfied with your work at the same time.

Hello to students and all supernaturals,

We had the honor of having a very interesting and funny chat with best-selling author Patricia Briggs! She took her time to visit Germany and answered a lot of questions from interested students in Lüneburg.  Her urban-fantasy series "Moon Called'' is very successful and we all know why! We really enjoyed getting to know this very lovely and sympathetic person. Our conversation with Patricia brought out some very interesting, but also some spooky information. Did you know that she lived in a haunted house? Or that her favorite time to write on her books is at night? Who else could live with supernaturals around and inside their own house - a best-selling author about urban-fantasy. And would you like to know the answer to the question whether she believes in the supernatural or not? If yes, listen up! 

Hello everybody,

The interview was really fun and Patricia was a great person to meet. She gave us insights into her work as an author and the development of the Mercy series. We never gave thought to the job of an author before and came to the realization that it isn't as easy as we expected it to be. An author is equally affected by mood and time pressure, so it is definitely like every other job!

Although she is well-known, she was so normal and had no star attitude at all. It was obvious that Patricia just loves what she does, as she told us about the magic of Urban Fantasy. We even had a “Poltergeist” join us who switched the lights on and off, very scary. So to find out more, check out the video with our favorite parts of the interview!