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On writing The Innamorati:

  • "I am both in love and hate with my novel. One day deliriously happy that it is all going to work out after all . . . and the next day ready to pitch it into the lake . . . not because it’s bad, but because I am exhausted with its demands. (We are getting to the 'I want a divorce' stage of the writing, the 'I love you, but I can't live with you anymore' drama.)

    "But it is getting there. And it does amaze me that the story will find a way through a plethora of ideas. I think of the story as a self-determining spirit, stubborn and insistent. I have been at impasses where the story refused my attempts because it knew better than I that I was going astray. I often do what Keith Johnson talks about in his book Impro, walking backward through the story to find the first threads that my subconscious laid down. I am always amazed at how the answer for where to go next is usually in the past, not in the foretold future of the plot. . . .

    "The interesting thing about writing is that it has an almost oxymoronic life—when we write we are locked in the 'present' moment of the book, yet the whole thing is a process that takes place over time. Our current experiences keep threading in emotional details to the work and the novel keeps ordering them out of their chaos into the form of the work. By the time the novel is done, there is, for me anyway, the strange sense of having 'packaged; my emotional experiences (or maybe 'synthesized' is a better word) in the body of the novel. It becomes like one's own snakeskin, shed in the process of growing."

    -- from Into the Labyrinth

"Midori Snyder walks in myth and magic the way some people walk city streets: with confidence and style, interested in everything."   -- Ellen Kusher




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Midori Snyder is the author of nine books for children and adults, published in English, French, Dutch, and Italian. She won the Mythopoeic Award for The Innamorati, a novel inspired by early Roman myth and the Italian "Commedia dell'Arte" tradition. Other novels include The Flight of Michael McBride (a mythic western), Soulstring (a lyrical fairy tale), The Oran Trilogy: New Moon, Sadar's Keep, and Beldan's Fire (imaginary–world fantasy, recently re–published in Vikings's Firebird line), Hannah's Garden (a contemporary faery novel for young adult readers), and Except the Queen (a contemporary faery novel for adult readers, co-authored with Jane Yolen). Her short stories have appeared in numerous venues including The Armless Maiden; Black Thorn, White Rose; Xanadu III; Swan Sister; Borderland; and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Her nonfiction has appeared in Realms of Fantasy and other magazines, and in essay collections including Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales.

Midori is the daughter of Emile Snyder, a French poet who taught in the field of Contemporary African Literature, and Jeanette Snyder, an American scholar of Ethnomusicology whose speciality is the Tibetan popular opera. Her grandmother, Jeanette Mahoney, was a Hollywood script writer, while her Breton grandfather, Pierre Menagér, was a well–known sculptor and printmaker who worked in Santa Fe and Taos in the 1940s and 1950s. Midori grew up amid visiting scholars, Beat poets, Indian and Tibetan musicians, African and French authors, and a small town population–worth of graduate students and professors. She has lived in university towns across the U.S., as well as abroad in Africa and Italy. She studied African Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin, specializing in African oral narrative traditions, although she finally received her M.A. degree (after raising two children) in English Literature and Literary Theory. Midori’s multicultural background gives her fiction its distinctive flavor, inspired by the myths, folkways, and cultures of peoples around the world.

In addition to writing, Midori is the co-director of The Endicott Studio, and runs Endicott's U.S. office. She was the co-editor and web designer of Endicott's Journal of Mythic Arts from 2003 to 2008, winning a World Fantasy Award for this work in autumn 2008. Midori has taught English at a Jesuit high school in Wisconsin; Creative Writing at the American School in Milan, Italy; and was the jury chairwoman for the 2007 James Tiptree, Jr. Awards. She currently lives in Tucson, Arizona, with her husband, Stephen Haessler. Their daughter Taiko is a poet, musician, and linguist who divides her time between Wisconsin and South America. Their son Carl, also a musician and linguist, is in the Navy.

Visit Midori's website and blog for more information on the author and her work.





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Photographs of Midori Snyder and Stephen Haessler by Taiko Haessler, Costa Rica.