In Conversation with Emma Törzs

I meet Emma Törzs for coffee at Canteen in Minneapolis’s Kingfield neighborhood—her regular spot despite it being one neighborhood over from her actual neighborhood. 

“In order to actually get any work done, I have to go to places where I won’t see my friends,” the Macalester creative writing prof says, her blue eyes obscured by mirrored sunglasses. “And I don’t want my friends to see me giving an interview!”  

Törzs may be attempting to go incognito for now, but that might not be possible by the time people finish reading her debut novel. A work of speculative fiction—speculative fiction being the umbrella term du jour for genres such as sci-fi and fantasy—Törzs’s first novel, Ink Blood Sister Scribe, is, on the day we meet, about to be published by William Morrow. It’s a book about books—magical books written in and activated by human blood—and the secret society devoted to their collection. The way its meta plot about the magic of books plays against the psychologically realistic portrait of Joanna and Esther—the sisterhood at its center—makes it a contender for both prestigious literary acclaim (her Mac colleague Marlon James loves it so much that he blessed it with a cover blurb) and becoming the witchy beach read of the summer. 

Over coffee, we talk about how she emerged from the woods near Walden Pond in Massachusetts to become a writer of magical books in the first place and how, as a professor of creative writing, she wields the magic of language at such a fraught time for academic freedom. 

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How long have you been into magic?

Since I was a kid. We’re all raised on stories of magic. Fairy tales are all about magic, and one of the things you learn alongside fairy tales is what is “real” and what is “not real.” And quickly, I learned that magic was supposedly “not real.” I immediately took issue with that.

What did your parents do in Massachusetts?

My mom was a poet. She got her MFA in Iowa in the late ’70s.

Oh wow, so she’s a real poet. 

My whole childhood, she taught creative writing and mythology at a community college, and, not to say she stopped writing—she always wrote—but she never sought to get anything published. I think she had a really hard time at Iowa. Her parents weren’t alive at the time, and she didn’t have a huge support system.

And you have a sister?

I have four sisters. And a “blood sister,” so to speak, yeah. 

The witchy mixture of intense love and resentment between Joanna and Esther, the two sisters in the book, felt so real it had to be inspired by an IRL sisterhood.

Yeah. I’m super tight with my blood sister. I mean, I’m close with all my stepsisters. I grew up with them because they lived across the street—sort of a dramatic suburban scandal. They were my friends before our parents got together, so I feel lucky.

How did you decide to write a magic book about magic books?

This is actually my second book. I wrote a full literary realism novel five or six years ago, and my agent sent it out, and nobody would buy it. And I was crushed, and then had a reckoning with myself, like a “come to Merlin”: I actually just want to write fantasy. 

How did you develop the way magic works in your book?

The magic system in the book came slowly, maybe because I come from a literary fiction background. I’m a character-first writer, so the plot and the magic were always in service of what I needed the characters to do or feel. And when I realized that it was going to be a book about magic books, I got really stressed. Like, Oh, no, am I going to do that thing where I write a meta book about the magic of books? There’s already so many of those; what can I add? But it was already in my head, and I could see it unfolding, so I just figured I may as well try.

Quickly, I learned that magic was supposedly ‘not real.’ I immediately took issue with that.”

—Emma Törzs, author of Ink Blood Sister Scribe

Which characters did you invent first?

Joanna and Esther.

The sisters.

I always had the sisters.

How did they manifest in your life?

It was like a whole conglomeration of things. One, my sister, whom I’m very close to—the book is dedicated to her—always really wanted me to write a magic sisters fantasy book. She would beg me to do it. She’d be like, “Literary fiction is all very well and good, but someday you’re going to write a fantasy novel, right? A magic sisters book?” I was like, “Maybe I’ll just try it.” And then I went to see Joanna Newsom. Do you know who Joanna Newsom is? 

The harp-playing genius singer-songwriter? 

I am a longtime Joanna Newsom fan. 

Her fans are freaks for her.

Yeah. We are freaks. My friends like her, but I feel, like, a physical agony when I think of her. I actually cried when she got married.

To Andy Samberg?

To Andy. But then I researched him more, and I was like, “OK, I think he knows what he’s got.” So, we’re good with Andy.

Why do you love her so much?

Because I was learning to be a writer when I first listened to Joanna Newsom when I was 20. Ys is my favorite album, hands down. I think it’s perfect. And I really think she taught me how to write a short story. Her songs are so narratively complete—really deep and multilayered. So, I decided what I really want to do is write a novel that feels like a Joanna Newsom album. 

Did you research what herbs and cauldrons actual witches use?

Yes. I have herbalist friends, and I do have a background in earth-based magical practices.

Do you have powdered calendula in your pantry?

No, I don’t really practice currently.

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Three things about Emma Törzs

1. She feels like she found her artistic community in the folks she met at the Clarion West writers’ workshop. “I’m obsessed with the friends I made out there.” 
2. She waited tables at Lucia’s, Kado no Mise, and French Meadow. “The only time I’ve ever been fired from a job was at French Meadow,” she says. “But I still eat there.” 
3. The book’s sisters were originally named Joanna and Emily, after a Joanna Newsom song about her sister. “Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this,” she says. “It’s creepy!”

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Plants and nature always feel so magical to me, but maybe that’s because of my ignorance of the science behind plants and nature.

Totally. I think that’s what a lot of magic, to me, is as a grown-up—it’s what I still don’t understand. And some of science seems pretty magic to me. I find plants very magical—even if you can explain why the compounds do what they do, it’s still amazing to me. But I didn’t want the magic in the book to be like an A-to-B Wiccan herbary; I wanted it to be its own thing and not rooted necessarily in one specific spiritual tradition. So, the herbs have multiple ways that they function in the book. 

How deeply immersed are you in this world of speculative fiction? I know you started there as a kid, but do you feel like this is where you belong?

That is a complicated question. I feel more at home in the speculative world these days than I do in the literary world, especially in terms of community.

Does either community snob out about the other community?

Big time! Yeah. I think both communities are confused by the other in some way. Just thinking about all these stereotypes that the different groups have about the other—I think the speculative take is that literary fiction is boring, straight rich people having a fight in New York. I think literary people think that speculative fiction is sexy dragons and elves and hobbits. There is some of that—I love a sexy dragon story, and sometimes I like a straight-people-fighting-in-New-York story, but I think that there’s just so much more to both. My favorite is when the two merge a little bit and you see the best of both worlds coming out in one story.

I think that’s what your book is.

I was trying. I’m glad that you think that.

Your day job is a creative writing professor at Macalester. It feels like maybe the most intense time to be a college professor in the history of our country.

Yeah. Thank you for that recognition. 

Language feels like such minefield—you can either cast a spell with it or be cast out. How intellectually dangerous does it feel teaching these kids?

I think as hard as it is to be a college professor right now, it’s harder to be a college student. To be honest with you, I’m very anti–social media. I really worry about the impact it has on my students’ mental health. And they’ve all spent two years in a pandemic only relating to other people via social media. And I think that has taken a toll on young brains that we can’t understand, and I really feel for them.

But I heard so much about the effects of marijuana on young brains this legislative session.

Oh my God. I wish they were smoking more weed and using less Instagram. 

The dopamine rush of social media is a powerful drug.

Totally. And, I mean, I’m quite lucky. I really like my students for the most part, and I’m not scared of them. I think one thing that social media takes away is the ability to approach things in good faith and with trust. Trust is something that you earn via real human interaction, not via the internet. And I hope that my students trust me, because if I do say something fucked up—which I very well might, because I’m a 36-year-old white woman who’s barely on the internet—I hope they would talk to me about it or give me the benefit of the doubt before they appeal to a higher authority. But who knows? I’m not scared of my students. They don’t frighten me. 

Are you tenured?

No. I’m contingent. They totally have power over me. But I really like them. And that might be different at a different institution. Also, the worst thing that could happen is I would get fired, and I would probably still have a good life somehow. I don’t mind being a waitress again; I loved it. I miss it sometimes.

Our political moment is so intense, with both sides jockeying for power over our language. What’s first: the world with language describing it, or does language subconsciously dictate our world’s reality?

Oh, man. I think other, smarter people have said way more on this than I ever could.

But you’re a professor who just wrote a book about magic books.

I think they come together at the same time. There are certain things that you physically see in the world and you have to put a word to it in order to say what you need to say. But then there are abstract concepts that we still are searching for words for, and we’re going to keep making up different words as our perception of the world changes. I think there’s a fear, probably induced by social media, about using all sorts of language. 

We’re told so often about what we can’t say that we’ve forgotten about language’s power to connect.

We can still say the majority of things with language. 

Sure, you can say almost anything if you say abracadabra in the right order.

It’s not that you can’t say something; it’s that the way that we are saying things is changing. You just try to keep up. And if you say it wrong, hopefully a kind person will tell you, and then you can fix it quietly and learn. 

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.