Bath Spa and Beyond!
Ash Bond Q&A
Since graduating from Bath Spa in 2021, Ash has achieved huge success with the first two books in her Peregrine Quinn series. These epic fantasy adventures follow Oxford girl Peregrine as she enters a portal into the mythological cosmic realm.
What brought you to Bath Spa?
I’d been thinking about doing a writing course for a while, and then saw an Arvon Foundation course on Writing for Young People. Here, I met the incomparable Lucy Christopher who was the Director of Studies for the MA at the time. I found her teaching electric, and the way she talked about the craft of writing for children made me realise how radical a practice it could be. I applied the next week.
What story did you include in the anthology?
My anthology piece was the beginning of ‘Peregrine Quinn and the Cosmic Realm’, but definitely not the first part of the story I’d written. In fact, as my very patient tutors will tell you, the beginning was written and re-written maybe a dozen times. I knew the characters, but just didn’t know how they fitted into a story. Finally I realised that PQ had to defy the normal MG structure - be weirder, MUCH weirder - and when I found the confidence to write in multi POV with shorter, snappier chapters… I was off!
Tell us about your route to publication
The path to publication was… meandering as it often is, with me initially losing all confidence in my genre mash-up multi-POV manuscript and re writing in a more traditional fantasy style. Error. Peregrine lost her spark - the very thing that made her different, unique, interesting. I’d done the thing that EVERY teen movie teaches us not to - in trying to make her ‘fit in’ or popular, I’d ironed out her entire personality. Thankfully, my incredible now-agent Jessica Hare took the time to phone me and ask ‘what happened?’ and ‘where did that voice go?’. To which my response was ‘oops’.
After switching back to my original manuscript (and polishing it up a bit) I signed with Jessica at The Agency. a few months later, Peregrine was sent to editors and eventually went to auction before arriving at her wonderful home at Piccadilly Press.
What was the best piece of advice you received during your time on the MA?
I was lucky enough to have some brilliant teachers, all of whom offered me advice that I will carry with me. I do particularly remember Steve Voake saying (and I will not get this word perfect) that we are navigating what it means to live a creative life. I think about that a lot. We all do a lot of things, make sacrifices etc, in order to write.
Not even all aspects of being an author are that fun, but we do them in order to have the opportunity to live a creative life, and what a privilege that is.
Did you write anything on the course that you would like to return to one day?
One of the best things about the MA is that we get to try out lots of different voices, ages and ideas. I did get quite a way into a very witchy upper YA before switching to Peregrine, and I would like to come back to that at some point. It was very Deborah Harkness meets Da Vinci Code, and now as a working academic I think I’d be able to give the dark academia aspect a little bit more bite… and rage!
Peregrine Quinn and the Cosmic Realm is available in paperback. Peregrine Quinn and The Mask of Chaos was released in hardback in April.