'My Rock and My Refuge' Virtual Book Tour | Author Interview with Rachel Kovaciny

Hello, all!  If you haven't heard, author Rachel Kovaciny has just released the fourth full-length installment in her Once Upon a Western series, which retells fairy tales in the setting of the American Old West.  This new novel is entitled My Rock and My Refuge, and Ms. Kovaciny has been conducting a virtual book tour this week in honor of its release!

⸻

Marta knows she shouldn't feel this way toward Mr. Wendell.  She needs to keep her job as his servant, especially because her family back in Germany depends on the money she and her brother Jakob send home.

Although Mr. Wendell's face bears terrible scars, Marta sees past them to his kind and generous heart.  Still, she wonders why he never leaves his big house high in the Colorado mountains.

While Marta tries to push away her questions, others are determined to find answers.  Their efforts lead to a fresh tragedy that threatens Marta's hope of finding happiness with Mr. Wendell.  Will Marta fail her family and her new friends, or will God bless her efforts to build a happy future for them all?

⸻

I had the privilege of being an advance reader for this book, so I'll be contributing my review here tomorrow.  Today, though, I have an exciting author interview to share with you!  Further information about the book launch will be included at the end of the post, so be sure to stick around for that.

For now, let's get to the interview:

⸻

1. This is your longest published work to date! Did the length present unique challenges to your writing process?

Well, yes.  Everything took twice as long!!!  Writing the first draft took about a year instead of four to six months, revising it took eight months instead of three or four, and then editing, proofreading, and
formatting took five instead of two.

2. How much research did you have to do for My Rock and My Refuge as opposed to the other installments in the series?

I did more than for Cloaked and Dancing and Doughnuts, but less than for One Bad Apple.  It was about on par with The Man on the Buckskin Horse, I think.  Part of that is because there are far, far fewer first-hand accounts of the Chinese experience in the Old West than there are of the African-American experience.  And part of that is because I didn’t read as many books about mining as I did about wagon trains because most of the mining operations are in the background or the past, not something that we see on the page very much.

By the way, I DO NOT recommend looking up pictures of bear attack survivors on the internet if you’ve just eaten or are squeamish in any way.  I had to do a lot of that to figure out how to describe Arthur’s scarring, and it made for some pretty weird days.  My heart goes out to anyone who has endured that.

3. Which character in the “Beauty and the Beast” fairy tale was the easiest to translate into the Western setting?

The Beast was really easy because he mostly just needs to be visibly “other” in some way.  I could have
gone so many different directions with his character – he could have been an American Indian or a
mixed-race character like Hauer from Cloaked, he could have been born with some kind of unusual
physicality, and so on.  Having him be the survivor of a bear attack actually came about because I was
reading about the frontiersman Jedediah Smith, who survived a terrible grizzly attack, and that was just
the lightbulb moment of “Oh, so that’s what happened to Arthur Wendell. Got it.”

4. Which character in the “Beauty and the Beast” fairy tale was the hardest to translate into the Western setting?

Well, I didn’t manage to bring Beauty’s dad onto the page or over to the West.  I kind of had her brother step into his shoes for the whole “taking a rose without permission” thing, and for being the one who
sort of makes the bargain that she’ll live there in Beast’s house.

5. Which of your female protagonists (whether in this book or another) do you relate to the most?

There’s some of me in a lot of them, especially Mary Rose O’Brien from Cloaked and Maggie Craig from My Rock and My Refuge.  Mary Rose is a LOT like I was as a teen, and Maggie Craig is kind of who I’d like to become.

6. Which of your male protagonists (whether in this book or another) do you relate to the most?

Possibly Ness from One Bad Apple. He’s quiet, watchful, keeps his own counsel, and he’s very sensible
in a crisis.  There’s a lot of me in Arthur Wendell from My Rock and My Refuge too, though.  Just wanting to be left alone to read all day?  Yeah, that’s me.

7. My Rock and My Refuge features a more overt faith element than the other books in the series. How did that come to be?

I’m not trying to cop out here, but a lot of that is Marta’s fault.  This character has extremely strong
opinions about many things, from bread to salvation to etiquette to the proper way to scrub a floor.  In
the first draft, I kind of kept reining her in on a lot of things and trying to make her seem less outspoken.   And then a couple of my beta readers told me that they noticed that I was doing a lot of “telling” and not “showing” with regards to Marta’s religious beliefs – I would have her say they were important to her, but she didn’t actually put things out there in the open much.  One of them suggested I try to make her faith an integral part of the story instead of kind of this interior thing she keeps inside, and that was revelatory, really.  When I started rewriting, there was no holding her back.

Another part of that answer is that I have been sad for years that there isn’t more distinctly Lutheran
historical fiction in the Christian fiction world.  And I realized that, hey, I’m a Lutheran and I write
Christian historical fiction, so why in the world am I not writing the books I want to see on the shelves?
 Why am I writing “generically Christian” fiction like everybody else?

And, lastly, I’ve seen a massive rise in anti-Christian sentiment over the past couple of years.  It’s been
growing in our culture for years, of course, but it’s becoming so much more blatant now.  And, as a
Christian, if I’m going to use my gifts to glorify God and benefit my neighbor the way I’m supposed to – to me, that means I should be writing distinctly Christian books and not hiding my light under a bushel or even kind of keeping it dim.

8. Marta’s and Jakob’s family play an important role in the development of the plot. Did you always know that they would be involved?

Yes.  Several years ago, when I was chosen to be an ARC reader for the anthology of “Beauty and the
Beast” retellings Five Enchanted Roses, I read the version by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont and
discovered that Beauty had a whole family, with these awesome brothers and snotty sisters.  And I knew I wanted to incorporate them somehow, because so many retellings have her be a single child or an
orphan or whatever.  And a Beauty with at least some supportive and loving siblings is way more
interesting to me, because I love sibling stories.  When I started preparing to write this, I went back
farther than de Beaumont and actually read Madame de Villeneuve’s original story, which is kind of wild and surprising in some ways, but the siblings play an even bigger part in that – in fact, Beauty’s brothers try to take her place as Beast’s captive.  And Jakob grew directly out of that.

9. Was it difficult to evoke the immigrant experience in this book?

Not really, because all my great-great-grandparents on my dad’s side immigrated here from Germany in
the late 1800s, and all my great-great-grandparents on my mom’s side immigrated here from Holland
about the same time.  So I’ve grown up hearing stories of their experiences that were handed down
through both sides of the family.  I’ve also read accounts of other immigrants, which helped a lot too.

I actually based Marta a little bit on my Great-Great-Grandma Peters, who came here from Germany in
the late 1800s and went to cooking school in New York City, then worked as a chef there until she met
my Great-Great-Grandpa, who was also a German immigrant.  Great-Great-Grandma Peters taught her
daughter Augusta how to make what has been described to me as the most amazing bread and pie that
anyone has ever tasted.  My Great-Grandma Augusta lived with my dad’s family when he was growing
up and did most of the cooking and baking for them, and he has never had fresh bread that matches his
memories of hers.  So, all of that was kind of the germ for why I created this German baker.

10. Have you ever been to Germany? If so, what are your favorite memories from the country? If not, how high is it on your travel bucket list?

Nope, not yet.  It’s pretty high on my list, though – right under Alaska and Great Britain, probably.

⸻

For more information on the book launch for My Rock and My Refuge, click here or here.  These links will take you to blog posts where Ms. Kovaciny explains all about the giveaway she's hosting in celebration of the release, AND about the opportunity to get a package of free book launch goodies along with your purchase of the novel, if you order during the month of November!  Definitely check that out.

Finally, here a bunch of handy links you can click on to get to know Ms. Kovaciny (you definitely should; she's pretty cool 😉), to learn more about her fiction, and to explore her literary and cinematic blogs:

Website
Author Newsletter Signup
Instagram
Goodreads
Amazon Author Page
Main Blog
Book Blog

⸻

Congratulations on the book release, Ms. Kovaciny!