CROPPING AND CREATING - Teresa Flavin on writing her latest novel 'The Shadow Lantern'............. by Theresa Breslin

This post is a response to request from a follower of the History Girls Blog who asked for insights into writing. It follows on from various conversations I’ve had with the writer and illustrator Teresa Flavin, and to satisfy my own curiosity and fascination with labyrinths and magic lanterns and other sic things.

 Teresa Flavin is a Glasgow-based children’s author and illustrator. Her illustrated fantasy novel for 9-14 year olds, The Blackhope Enigma, was published in 2010 by Templar Publishing and was long and short-listed for numerous book awards, including the 2011 Scottish Children’s Book Awards. The sequel, The Crimson Shard, was published in 2011 and was also nominated for several awards. The final book in the trilogy, The Shadow Lantern, was published on 1 May.  
http://www.templarco.co.uk/fiction/teresa_flavin.html

I knew Teresa first as an illustrator. Originally from the U.S.A. she moved to Scotland a number of years ago and we met at a writers’ conference. The first thing I wanted to know was why, as an established artist and illustrator, was she attracted to writing novels for young people? She replied:

I had been illustrating children’s books for some time so the idea of writing children’s stories was a natural progression. I wanted to illustrate a wider variety of stories and decided to try my hand at creating texts that would excite me artistically. I also knew of editors who were interested in seeing picture book manuscripts from author/illustrators and set out to write stories that I could present with a dummy book and one or two finished sample images. But as I worked on texts of just a few hundred words, I was attracted to many complex ideas that were far more suitable for longer stories. They began as what Tim Bowler calls “a whisper in the head”, then became an insistent buzzing and eventually pulled me away from picture books altogether. I began to discover my inner fourteen-year-old and became caught up in telling the fantastic adventures of two art-enthused teens that bore similarities to myself at that age.

So then of course, the question that many of us are asked…. Why historical? In Teresa’s books this is a thread within the stories. She told me that she doesn’t recall making a conscious choice about this, and went on to say…

Preliminary sketch of Blackhope Tower for The Shadow Lantern.

I had been reading an intriguing and spiritual book about labyrinths and they were very much on my mind. My first novel, The Blackhope Enigma,was an exploration of this daydream/question: what if a young person could walk around a labyrinth and be so transformed by the experience that he or she is transported someplace else? And what if that place is below the surface of a Renaissance painting? I have been fascinated with such paintings since I was very young and have always wondered what it would be like to enter one.

I reckoned that for such a thing to happen there would have to be enchantment involved, but I was unprepared for what I found when I poked around the history of Renaissance art and magic. I became completely lost in research for some time, endlessly reading about grimoires and memory palaces, Hermeticism and alchemical imagery. Suddenly the idea of hidden worlds below a painting did not seem so far-fetched; plenty of people in sixteenth-century Europe would have believed it possible in a world where one was surrounded by magic and wonders.

One historical path led to another and I was discovering so many amazing things that my stories acquired layers, characters and details I could not have imagined at the start. I was hooked. I wanted to unearth and weave more fantastic elements into new stories, to bring odd bits of history alive in the adventures of young contemporary characters.

Teresa’s books are special in that Art and Language are melded in the narrative and I wondered how she tackled doing this. Her answer tells me as much about her views on painting as it does about language.

I wanted young readers to see and feel the richness and strangeness of the worlds I created, but I had to be careful not to weigh them down with description. When I make a painting, I hope that it’s not overworked or leaden; it needs to “sing” to the viewer. Therefore my approach has to be simple, confident and from the heart. I’ve come to think that writing about art is the same. There needs to be just enough detail to entice and to set the reader’s imagination alight. It’s a delicate balance and involves just as much cropping as creating.

I love that expression “as much Cropping as Creating”. I also loved the first book (and the rest!) and really wondered how she'd approach any follow up story and indeed how they would be linked them to each other.

The second and third novels, The Crimson Shard and The Shadow Lantern, grew organically out of The Blackhope Enigma. There was no over-arching story, no grand plan from the start. Instead there were fascinating strands to take up and some new elements to explore, such as trompe l’oeil murals, alchemy and art forgery in The Crimson Shard. Early magic lanterns and spirit photography were inspirations for The Shadow Lantern. I enjoyed digging into these elements, putting them together and seeing what could happen.

I discovered how easy it is to lumber a narrative with too much background information! I ended up identifying with young readers who had not read the first or second book. What do they need to know? Will they become confused? How can I help them? The problem was that I was a bit too ‘helpful’ at times and there was a lot of back-story pruning that had to be done. Again, this is a delicate balance, achieved after much feedback from my editors.

One of the great pleasures of writing a trilogy was in spending more time with my main characters. At the beginning I had the daunting prospect of getting to know them, challenging them, making them grow and change. By the second book, I had a good idea of who they were and how they moved through the world; by the final book, it was a pleasure to be with them and to find out how they would approach the next obstacle I placed in front of them.

It would be great to have feedback on Teresa’s thoughts and books – please do get in touch.

I’ll leave her with the last word about writing the series, and hope that others have the same experience in their own writing.

It’s been a wonderful journey…

The Shadow Lantern has recently been published in the UK by Templar Publishing. To learn more about Teresa’s novels and artwork, visit her new websites at http://www.teresaflavin.com/



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Twitter: @theresabreslin1

LATEST BOOKS
Spy for the Queen of Scots shortlisted for the Young Quills Award
The Traveller (from dyslexia friendly publisher Barrington Stoke)
Divided City Playscript now available.

The Memory Castle

by Teresa Flavin

I am currently spending many hours a day in an imaginary sixteenth-century castle, Blackhope Tower, sending my young characters up its turnpike staircase to an eerie and magical room that houses an infamous painting, a tiled floor labyrinth and a ceiling decorated with mermaids and sea monsters. Blackhope Tower is a sort of memory castle, a construct inspired by features of places I've seen in my travels around Scotland, most notably the Borders and Aberdeenshire. But memories can fade and get a bit vague around the edges. When that happens, nothing beats a visit to the source of one's inspirations.

Crathes Castle

This is why I was so delighted to do events recently for the Aboyne and Deeside Festival at atmospheric Crathes Castle, one of the Aberdeenshire tower houses that inspired features of Blackhope Tower. On this visit the National Trust for Scotland kindly permitted me to take some photos to share here, for which I am very grateful. 

Crathes Castle gardens

Crathes Castle has, in addition to its beautiful gardens and grounds (including the rather special topiary features), some of the finest Scottish Renaissance painted ceilings in the Stair Chamber, the Nine Nobles Room, the Green Lady's Room and the Muses Room. They were painted in the late 16th century but were hidden by lathe and plaster ceilings until 1877 (the Stair Chamber was not uncovered until 1960). The decorations on the boards and oak support beams were probably made by a local Scottish artist and done with water-based glue tempera paint. The boards and beams were covered in a white base, the text and decorations were done in black and filled in with colour pigments. Artists apparently adapted images and emblems based upon European engravings and pattern books.

Judas Maccabeus detail, Nine Nobles Room

The Stair Chamber's ceiling contains text from the Geneva Bible while the Green Lady's is a collection of sayings about life, marriage, good and evil. While all four ceilings are impressive, the Muses Room and the Nine Nobles Room are spectacular. The former features descriptions and elaborate illustrations of each Muse, while the latter celebrates characters of the ancient world and the Old Testament, including Julius Caesar, Hector of Troy and King David. It's likely that the ceiling images were used not only as inspirations but as memory aids. The paintings are a feast for the eyes, graphically strong and expressive, and intensely mysterious in places.

Muses Room ceiling

After spending time in Crathes Castle, taking in its colour and atmosphere, I felt as if my imaginary castle had been cleaned, painted and given a good airing out. I returned to writing with renewed vigour and immense gratitude that I live in a country so endowed with historical riches. These days my characters are positively running up the turnpike stairs, their senses heightened because mine have been. 

I've enjoyed sharing my thoughts and sketches with you over the past year and am sad to say that this is my last post as a History Girl. I am handing the torch to the excellent novelist Karen Maitland, whose books I have read with relish. She will make a fantastic addition to the History Girls and I look forward to reading her posts from next month. My thanks to all the History Girls and to you, our readers, who have helped to make this a splendid blog.

Teresa Flavin is the author and illustrator of The Blackhope Enigma and The Crimson Shard, historical fantasy novels for young readers, published by Templar Publishing in the UK and Candlewick Press in the USA. She is currently at work on the final novel in the trilogy.

Man of Mystery: Chung Ling Soo

by Teresa Flavin

If you search the internet for images of one of my favourite historical figures, magician Chung Ling Soo, you will find him on an array of gorgeous theatre posters with his name lettered in the shapes of dragons and smoke. Among the portraits of this solemn Chinese man with a shaved head and long queue, you might also notice a photo of a Western man with a striking handlebar moustache and think he has popped up by mistake. 

But if you look closely, mentally removing the moustache and hair, you'll see a resemblance. Chung Ling Soo was really William Ellsworth Robinson, a New Yorker who was born in 1861. He began his career as Robinson, the Man of Mystery but metamorphosed into Chung Ling Soo, Marvellous Chinese Conjuror in 1900. It's said that he modeled himself on a true Chinese conjuror, Ching Ling Foo, who brought his spellbinding traditional magic show to the United States in 1898. 

The story goes that Ching Ling Foo offered a $1000 reward (possibly as a publicity stunt) to anyone who could replicate his illusion of first producing a bowl of water from a piece of cloth, then a child from the bowl of water. Thomas Edison had a go at it, on film at least, which can be viewed here. When Robinson came forward but was rejected, he reinvented himself as Chung Ling Soo, relocated to London and built a new career as a mysterious conjuror from the East who spoke no English and communicated with journalists through an 'interpreter'.

I first learned of him when I happened to see the Flying Carpet Theatre performing The Mystery of Chung Ling Soo on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2005. Only this past week, Flying Carpet put up recorded scenes from the performances and reignited my interest in the story of how Soo created and maintained the ultimate illusion over many years. 

He not only managed to keep his true identity secret but created a Chinese alter ego, Suee Seen, for his wife and stage assistant, Dottie. The portraits and photos look unconvincing in places but clearly fooled the public. Chung Ling Soo's exotic "brand", coupled with his growing arsenal of illusions, brought him fame and pitted him in a head-to-head rivalry with Ching Ling Foo that benefitted them both. 

One of his most dramatic illusions was Condemned to Death by the Boxers, inspired by the Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1901. The Boxers believed they possessed supernatural powers that would repel knives and bullets and Soo created a stunt in which he caught two bullets in a porcelain plate held to his chest. Audience members who were familiar with firearms were invited to examine the weapons and mark the bullets before Soo's firing squad attempted to "execute" him. He performed the illusion successfully for twelve years until March 1918, when the trick went tragically wrong and Soo was shot dead onstage at the Wood Green Empire theatre.

According to Jim Steinmeyer, author of The Glorious Deception, whose detailed account of Chung Ling Soo's final performance can be read here, there was much speculation that the magician had been murdered or had even committed suicide. As people tried to unpick the illusion to understand what had gone wrong (Soo's own associates seemingly had no idea how it worked), his carefully groomed identity also unraveled. After he was shot, the facade finally slipped and Soo reverted to Robinson, calling out in English for the stage curtain to be lowered.

Chung Ling Soo lives on, referenced in stories and films such as Christopher Nolan's The Prestige. The magician who hid behind seductive veils of glamour secured a place in history with his singular death and the exposure of his colourful double life.

Teresa Flavin is the author and illustrator of The Blackhope Enigma and The Crimson Shard, historical fantasy novels for young readers, published by Templar Publishing in the UK and Candlewick Press in the USA. She is currently at work on the final novel in the trilogy.

Maps R Us by Caroline (& Richard) Lawrence

Map of the Washoe (Nevada, USA)

Reading a couple of recent History Girls blogs about maps – one by Teresa Flavin and one by Katherine Langrish – I got very excited. I LOVE maps! Who doesn’t?

Maps tell us where we are… and when. But they don’t just set the scene, sometimes they are crucial to the plot. A map can serve as a talisman or a plan. They can tell us how to reach the World of Adventure or where to dig for Buried Treasure. A map at the front of a book shows a certain commitment to accuracy. (Even in Fantasy novels, where the world is invented.) Recently a map even gave me the idea for a character. 

My motivation in writing historical fiction is to travel back in time. What better way to step into the past than via a map?

On my first date with my husband-to-be Richard, an English graphic designer and historian, we knew we were ‘meant to be together’ because we were both reading and loving Patrick O’Brian’s sea-stories. There are no maps in the Aubrey-Maturin books, so I suggested that Richard write a Companion, and he did. He ended up drawing about a dozen for The Illustrated Companion to Nelson’s Navy.

Map of Ostia by Richard Russell Lawrence

For my Roman Mysteries series, I spent many happy hours wandering the ruins of Rome's ancient seaport and poring through the guide books. Then Richard and I put our heads together and came up with our own version of a map of Ostia Antica in the first century AD. I put Flavia’s house in an unexcavated part of the site and filled in blank places with my imagination. 

Richard and I then worked on a map of first century Rome, (being careful NOT to put in the Aurelian Wall of two centuries later.) Nobody knows what Pliny’s Laurentum Villa looked like but architects over the years have had a go. So did we, for the fifth book in my Roman Mysteries series, The Dolphins of Laurentum. Richard also made me a map of the Bay of Naples, the two ports of Corinth in Greece, Ephesus in Turkey, the Acropolis in Athens, Domitian's villa on Lake Albano near Rome. Just to name a few.

Upside Down Egypt

I think my favourite collaborative map with Richard is our Upside Down Egypt map (right) for The Scribes from Alexandria. I’ve never seen anything like this done anywhere else. It shows how the Romans perceived Egypt. A map oriented like this explains why the delta is so called. Upside down, it really looks like the capital letter Delta: △. And it explains why you didn’t sail down the Nile from the Delta, you sailed UP it. 

Moving on to the Wild West, Richard and I had a somewhat easier job of making maps. My new period of research is only 150 years ago, rather than 2000, and there are many great resources.

Our map of the Washoe in 1862 (top of this blog) was easy. Richard just consolidated a couple of existing maps and then traced them with a dip pen, making sure to add a few realistic smudges. However, for our map of Virginia City, he put in several months work. I had a very specific vision of what I wanted it to look like. Richard would bring me a map, I would mark it up and hand it back. Sometimes he felt like a dog playing ‘fetch’ and would patiently bring the latest version in his mouth and drop it on my desk. The result of more than fifty drafts is below. 

Virginia City in 1862 by Richard Russell Lawrence

At the moment Richard and I have been researching Carson City, Nevada. It was founded in 1858 when four friends tramped over the Sierra Nevada, the mountain range dividing California and Nevada. Curry, Musser, Proctor and Green chose a random plot of flat land in the high desert, surveyed it and divided it into a hundred plots. They named the streets after themselves (you can do that when you found a city) and they ambitiously called the hamlet "Carson City" after the famous explorer Kit Carson. They chose wisely. A year later silver was discovered a few miles north on Mount Davidson. Carson City city grew and grew, and today it is the capital of Nevada. 

Blue Supper District in 1863

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I can now zoom in on high resolution maps in various archives and libraries and get a really good look. One of my favourite maps is Bancroft’s Map of the Washoe of 1862, the year my Western books are set. 

On another more crowded and less accurate map by DeGroot (above right) I spotted a district called Blue Supper near Carson City. This curiously-named region is not marked on any of the other maps I have seen. I've tried to find out more about it but failed, so I decided to make something up. Towns as well as streets in the West were often named after real people. So why not Blue Supper? In my third Western Mystery, Blue Supper is not just a place but a flea-infested hermit in a rabbit-skin robe who rescues my hero from quicksand and a blizzard.

Ormsby County Building in the 1860s

Recently I came across a wonderfully detailed map of the part of Carson City where The Case of the Pistol-packing Widow will be set, with a plan of the now-vanished County Building. Built by Old Abe Curry, one of the four founders of Carson City, this sturdy sandstone structure was used for the Second Territorial Legislature in November and December of 1862. Thanks to this superb map, I can locate the outhouse, the stairs and the alley behind the building. I can also match the map to a crystal clear period photo (above) to confirm that the saloon was the Magnolia Saloon, the barbershop had the classic candy-cane striping and the sidewalk was sandstone not boards. 

Zooming in on other areas of this fabulous map, I can see stables, saloons, banks, the carriage house next to the stables, a Chinese wash house, a cracker bakery, several gunsmiths, a fire engine house, a smoke house and even an old skating rink, not the first thing you think of in a Western town. The key to the map (right) shows that buildings were made of stone, brick, wood and 'specials' like tin or cloth. It tells us how many shutters on the windows, whether a roof is slate or tin. You can even see where cisterns lay for the use of the fire companies. 

Maps are a wonderful way of getting to grips with the geography of your period and helping your reader understand it, too. 

Caroline & Richard in Nevada

And it's always useful to have a graphic designer around the house. 

Thank you, Richard, my husband of nearly twenty years!

Caroline Lawrence's second P.K. Pinkerton Mystery, The Case of the Good-looking Corpse, for Western-loving kids aged 8 - 80, is out this week. The maps and chapter header drawings are visible in the Kindle format. .  

Lost Colonies and Phantom Towns

by Teresa Flavin

John White's map of Roanoke

Over the past month, two map-related stories caught my attention, partly because they had the words lost and mystery in their headlines. I'm fascinated by human settlements described as ghost or abandoned and have a huge fondness for maps, especially illustrated ones. 

As a young schoolgirl growing up in New England, I spent a lot of time drawing and colouring in maps of historical colonial territories. My classmates and I made endless maps of the ever-changing borders, choosing colours for French, Spanish, Dutch and English possessions. We mapped many wars and explorers, battlegrounds and Native American tribes. But colourful as many of these people and events were, none captured me as much as the story of the lost sixteenth-century colony of Roanoke Island. 

In 1587 Sir Walter Raleigh, who had been granted a charter from Queen Elizabeth I to establish a permanent North American colony, dispatched a group of settlers (the first to include wives and children) to Chesapeake Bay. Its newly appointed governor was John White, a gentleman artist and mapmaker who created unique visual records of the Native American societies he had encountered on a 1585 expedition organised by Raleigh. White gathered over one hundred colonists, including his own daughter and son-in-law, to make the journey and build a new settlement. 

During a stop at Roanoke Island, the ship's pilot refused to take the settlers any further and they were forced to create their colony in the ruins of the English fort abandoned there after the 1585 expedition. The small detachment of men who had been left behind to defend the English claim were gone, reportedly killed by hostile warriors. When White retaliated, killing and injuring previously friendly native people, the English colonists further alienated local tribes. 

As winter approached, White was forced to return to England and secure provisions for the colonists because supply ships had no idea they were at Roanoke rather than at Chesapeake Bay. For several years he was thwarted in his attempts to return to the colony and his family. His journey to England was plagued by bad weather and accidents. He was then unable to sail back as the Spanish Armada threatened invasion. In 1588, White set off at last but his ships were plundered by pirates and he was forced back to England. When he finally returned to Roanoke in 1590, there was no sign of the colonists. The buildings were in ruins.

The only possible message was a mysterious word carved on a tree: CROATOAN. White investigated Croatoan Island fifty kilometres away but found no sign of the settlers there. His three-year-old grand-daughter, Virginia Dare, the first English child born on American soil, was among the missing. The strange carving and vanished settlers have haunted me ever since my schooldays. Imagine my excitement when the New York Times reported in May that the British Museum had found hidden markings on a watercolour map made by John White. Patched areas on the map were imaged using state of the art technology and revealed marks indicating a nearby fort. The full article with a link to the British Museum's findings, including wonderful close-up images of the map, can be seen here.

And what of John White? He was forced to abandon his search for the colonists and returned to England in autumn 1590. The meaning of the hidden markings on his map died with him. There is ongoing speculation that the remaining colonists settled among local tribes after reports of light-haired, blue-eyed tribe members. But Roanoke will always be the lost colony symbolised by a vanished little girl, a strange inscription and now, a puzzling map.   

Site of Argleton, West Lancashire. Photo by Small-town Hero

Unlike the Roanoke colony, which did once exist, the phantom Lancashire town of Argleton did not. And yet it appeared on Google maps and online directories until the end of 2010. I only learned about Argleton last week via Twitter, which is a resource for strange and wonderful things. The tweet led me to this article. Of course, I could not leave it there and followed the Argleton trail round the internet, discovering that people had set up a now defunct website for "Argleton Village" and, as the Guardian reported in 2009, a "save Argleton" campaign on the web. The "town" even inspired a novelette and this very entertaining journey with good photos. And if you want to see what it looked like on the map before it was "virtually bulldozed", here it is. I didn't quite believe that Google had completely obliterated the town, so I clicked on a link for Argleton and found myself looking at a map of the Irish Sea.

When one enters the world of phantom towns, it's inevitable that one comes across trap streets. Clever cartographers insert fictitious places also known as paper streets to catch anyone who violates their copyright. My favourite paper town is Agloe, New York, an anagram made of the mapmakers' initials in the 1930's. The name was copied onto other companies' maps and eventually the very real Agloe General Store popped up in the phantom town's location.

Lost colonies and phantom towns are rich material for stories - and for more maps. I quite fancy making an illustrative map of Argleton showing the town's phantom cricket ground, taverns and Victorian follies, ancient church and overgrown graveyard. What would your historical Argleton map include?

Teresa Flavin is the author of The Blackhope Enigma and The Crimson Shard, (Templar Publishing in the UK and Candlewick Press in the USA) historical fantasy novels for age 9 and above. She is currently at work on the final novel in the trilogy.

En Charrette

by Teresa Flavin

I am writing this a few days after having finished the first draft of my next book. A few months ago said draft was just a synopsis that sounded fine in theory. Today it is a complete, though rough, manuscript. A few weeks from now I will have the measure of it from my excellent editors and will spend the summer rejigging and polishing it.

I always get a little starry-eyed at the end of writing a first draft because it's still a relatively new experience.  At first the task seems insurmountable, but after many days of keeping my posterior bolted to my chair and getting the words down, somehow it takes shape and there is, hopefully, a story that will work. A novel doesn't develop on the page like an illustration, which I can see growing all at once, but it requires the same hard work and determination.  

When I was entering the last few days of writing, I mentioned to a friend that I was about to go en charrette, 'on the cart', to finish the draft. When I got a blank look, I explained that this was the term we used in art school to describe the frantic period just before a deadline. I remembered, with a mix of dread and nostalgia, these regular descents into periods of nonstop work, where day blended into night and all that mattered was having your work pinned up by 9am on deadline day so it could be critiqued. These reviews, especially at the end of the academic year, determined whether you progressed or not.

I don't recall where we learned the term en charrette but most likely it came from our professors, who had undergone the same process during their training. There was something quite exotic about having a French phrase to describe the exquisite creative torture we were all going through. It also fit in very nicely with our image of the charrette as transport to one's execution by guillotine, though the phrase actually refers to carts that carried large works from students' studios to the École de Beaux-Arts in Paris for assessment. Today charrette also can refer to collaborative brainstorming sessions held by architects and planners to involve stakeholders on a proposed project. 

In his 1886 novel The Masterpiece, Émile Zola described the activities of sixty Beaux-Arts architecture students 'who, being behind time, had to knock off the work of a week in a dozen hours' on the 'night of heavy toil'. This will sound horribly familiar to anyone who has procrastinated on a project, but the similarity probably ends when one reads that the students fortified themselves with viands and cheap wine, the companies of ladies and a smoking competition to aid them in their work. Some might argue that this sounds far more interesting than twelve hours in the company of black coffee and take away meals. When the charrette arrived, the students piled their work on it and those who hadn't finished would climb on and keep working as their fellows pushed it noisily through the streets. 

Being en charrette at art school built camaraderie and a gallows humour, but it was an experience I didn't want to repeat too often in my professional career. There have certainly been times in my illustration practice when I worked for very long hours at the end of a project and I was once caught touching up a piece as the courier arrived to ship it overseas. But the biggest lesson the charrette taught me was to break down creative projects into manageable pieces, to schedule as realistically as possible and to do the work according to plan. I don't always get it right, and sometimes life sends problems that throw plans off course, but I keep trying. 

The charrette symbolises one other important thing: the quest to make the writing or the artwork just that bit better, even at the last minute. I might drive myself slightly crazy and spend too long tweaking, but in the end it's worth every minute on that cart. 

Teresa Flavin is the author of The Blackhope Enigma and The Crimson Shard, art historical fantasy novels for young readers published by Templar Publishing in the UK and Candlewick Press in the USA. She is currently working on the final book in the trilogy. 

Easter at the Gibraltar of the North

by Teresa Flavin

On Palm Sunday small witches were abroad, carrying catkin wands decorated with bright feathers and strips of colourful tissue paper. They knocked on doors and waved their wands at the occupants before moving on. I was mystified. Why were the neighbourhood children dressed like witches and wizards at this time of year?

But then, I am in Helsinki, and along with the familiar chocolate Easter eggs and rabbits, there are other cultural traditions being played out that reflect Finland's past domination by eastern and western powers. The witches, I'm told, came from Sweden and the wands from Russia, mixing together to make an intriguing local custom where costumed witches recite good wishes with their willow wands in return for sweets.

It was cheering seeing children working their way around Suomenlinna, where I have been staying while I write my next book and learn about children's literature in Finland. Spring comes gradually to these exposed islands and the temperature has barely got up to 5 degrees Celsius. When I arrived in mid-March, the ferry ploughed through slabs of sea ice; earlier this year I might have been able to walk across the frozen harbour to Helsinki. Just when one thinks winter has gone, the snow comes again. I have thought, time and again, of how difficult it must have been on these islands during their turbulent past.

Suomenlinna, which means the "Fortress of Finland", was first established as Sveaborg when Finland was part of the Kingdom of Sweden. Today this rocky fortress is peaceful and quiet, but it was not always so. The story of Suomenlinna is an illustration of how (as my Lonely Planet guide puts it) Sweden and Russia used Finland as their "wrestling mat". Suomenlinna is comprised of small islands joined together by bridges and is a UNESCO World Heritage site as an outstanding example of an 18th century bastion fortress. For an excellent aerial view, click here. It was built by the Swedes when they were no longer a great European power pursuing the establishment of a Baltic sea dominion, and were alarmed at Russia's advance westwards. Peter the Great and his allies had challenged the Swedish empire in the Great Northern War and forced it to hand over southeastern Finland in 1721. By 1743, the frontier between Sweden and Russia had moved even further west and Finnish forts were now on Russian soil. St Petersburg, established in 1703, and its Kronstadt base were too close for Swedish comfort.

In 1747, Sweden decided to locate its main base at Helsinki, a small town of 1500 inhabitants, with the Sveaborg island fortress protecting the waterways. This became the kingdom's largest building project with financial support from France, which had an interest in fortifying Finland against Russia. Sveaborg was built under hard working conditions by Swedish and Finnish soldiers, prisoners and artisans using local materials as well as sandstone and coal imported from Sweden and England.

The mainland fortifications at Helsinki were not completed and Sveaborg became the depot fortress for the army and navy. It accommodated 1800 men in peacetime and by the end of Swedish rule, over 7800 could be housed there. Over the last decades of the eighteenth century, living standards at Sveaborg had developed so much that upper class ladies moved there, bringing Stockholm's society customs with them. The fortress became something of a cultural centre, enjoying literature, music and ideas of the Enlightenment. Some military men even cultivated their artistic sides, most notably Lieutenant -Colonel Augustin Ehrensvärd, the man sent from Sweden to oversee construction of Sveaborg. One of his paintings of Suomenlinna can be seen here.

Sveaborg built up a reputation as the "Gibraltar of the North", thanks to travel books of the time and gave the impression that the fortress was impregnable. Sveaborg had, however, never been completed and was vulnerable from unfortified areas on the mainland. In 1808, the forces of Russian Emperor Alexander I attacked Finland. Sweden, which had concentrated its defences against Denmark, was unprepared and Sveaborg was forced to surrender when the Russians laid siege to it. After centuries of being under Swedish control, Russia annexed Finland and made it a Grand Duchy.

Sveaborg was now a Russian fortress and its mission was to protect the waterways to St Petersburg, but during the first half of the nineteenth century, it was neglected. With the outbreak of the Crimean War, Russia attempted to bolster the islands' fortifications, but in August 1855 the Anglo-French fleet bombarded Sveaborg for two days before sailing off. Sveaborg was rebuilt and went through the rest of the century unscathed. The fortress was now a place where several cultures and religions mixed. A Russian Orthodox church and school were built, along with military hospitals and barracks.

Finland declared its independence in December 1917 and was acknowledged by the new Soviet leadership soon thereafter. A four month civil war followed, pitting Red Guards against Whites and ending with the arrival of the German Baltic division, who occupied Sveaborg in support of the victorious Whites. The fortress was renamed Suomenlinna in May 1918 and became a prison camp for Red prisoners, over ten percent of whom died from starvation and illness before the camp was closed later that year.

In 1919 two of the islands were declared ancient monument areas and care has been taken since to look after the fortifications and preserve their history. Suomenlinna subsequently housed units of the Finnish army and the submarine fleet and served in Finland's air defence during World War II. In 1973 the islands were turned over the civil administration to be maintained as a historic monument as well as a thriving residential community that includes many artists.

It is impossible to escape the hardware of war here. There are 105 guns or barrels on Suomenlinna, both Swedish and Russian. The ramparts feature huge 19th century breech-loading Russian cannons and a 1930's Finnish submarine sits on the shore. The stone walls are full of dark entrances, tunnels and doors built into hills, some of them still blocked by snowdrifts. To get home I must pass under an arch with a network of open cells on either side and at night it is a creepy journey. One or two Finns have alluded to ghosts on Suomenlinna but wouldn't say any more than that.

There is certainly an atmosphere in some places and at sunset, when the shadows are long, it's easy to imagine a presence nearby. Perhaps it's also because the trees are still bare and the land is a mix of mud and snow. There is a traditional belief that trulli (witches who are the spirits of unmarried women) come out at this moment between winter and spring, flying down from Kyöpelinvuori, Ghost Mountain, to play tricks on humans and take cuttings of cattle fur for their evil purposes. If one stands at a crossroads on Easter Saturday, the witches will apparently whisper one's fortune as they pass by in mid-air.

No wonder the Finns would light bonfires on Easter Saturday to chase the witches away. If it weren't forbidden these days, the Suomenlinna bastions would be perfect locations to build great spring fires. By the time you read this, I will have been up walking on the ramparts, welcoming Easter and shaking my fist, not at the flying witches, but at the falling snow!

Teresa Flavin is a currently a resident at HIAP/Suomenlinna where it has been so cold and snowy she wasn't able to make the outdoor sketch she wanted to for this post. She is working on the final book in her children's historical fantasy trilogy. The previous books are The Blackhope Enigma and The Crimson Shard, published by Templar Publishing in the UK and by Candlewick Press in the USA. You can read more about her Helsinki stay here and here.

From the Sketchbook: Stealing History

By Teresa Flavin

When a bronze head was stolen from Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Museum on a Sunday afternoon last month, I was taken aback. The Kelvingrove buzzes with visitor activity on weekends and the idea of someone swiping the late Gerald Laing’s Dreaming from under the noses of so many people seemed ridiculous. But it happened.

One wag suggested that the thief was on his way to visit scrap metal dealers with the head in a bag, but only a few days after the incident, police were given an anonymous tip off and the sculpture was found near the museum. I visited the Kelvingrove when I heard that Dreaming had been rescued, hoping to see it for myself, but was told that it wouldn’t be back on display until it had been cleaned and checked over. There was a bit of speculation that the theft had just been a prank. Whatever it was, at least there was a happy ending.

This cannot be said about countless other thefts of art and objects around the world. Interpol’s December 2011 poster for “The Most Wanted Works of Art” lists six items stolen between July and October last year and provides a chilling snapshot of “cultural property crime”. It includes a painting by Jan Brueghel the Younger from a Paris gallery, a Renoir from a private home in Washington, D.C. and a statue from a museum in Damascus. One can imagine thieves planning these “capers” and executing them, Hollywood-style, despite guards and high-tech security systems.

We are familiar with the brazen thefts of famous paintings like Edvard Munch’s The Scream (one version was stolen in 1994 and the other in 2004) and Cezanne’s Auvers-sur-Oise taken from the Ashmolean Museum on the eve of the Millennium. As a former Bostonian, the crime that still haunts me is the unsolved theft of thirteen masterworks from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Every time I visit, I am drawn to the empty frames kept on display and mourn the loss of the Rembrandts and Vermeer’s The Concert. We know and love these paintings; their disappearances make headlines, not least because of their popularity and huge commercial values, but also because the public enjoys an unsolved mystery.

Looking at the rest of Interpol’s “Most Wanted” list, one might be surprised at the other three crime scenes; an icon and a statue were taken from monasteries in Athens and Ulaanbaatar and the magnificent Codex Calixtinus manuscript vanished from a safe in a Spanish cathedral.

If you search the “Recent Thefts” section of Interpol’s website, you will find photos of a cuneiform tablet from Iran, an imperial order from Suleiman the Magnificent in Turkey, ornate French clocks and many ancient oil lamps, wheels, figurines of bulls and horses stolen from the Museum of History of the Olympic Games in Olympia. These items may not have the cachet of a stolen Vermeer or Munch, but they deserve their share of attention.

There is further sobering viewing under many sections devoted to stolen Iraqi and Afghan items. War and deprivation have brought not only the tragedy of lost lives but of lost history. Greece is suffering the theft of artefacts as its financial crisis worsens and staff cuts have left its collections vulnerable. The authorities recently decided to stop excavating some antiquities, and to rebury others, in order to protect them.

Last weekend the heart of St Laurence O’Toole, preserved since the twelfth-century in a heart-shaped wooden container locked inside an iron box, was stolen from Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin. This relic of Dublin’s patron saint has attracted pilgrims since medieval times. The thief is believed to have hidden overnight so he could do his dark work undisturbed. Uninterested in the church’s gold chalices or candlesticks, he cut through iron bars to get at the heart and take it away for his own, or someone else’s, purposes. It’s a powerful and disturbing image.

Cultural property crime is estimated to cost $6 million annually. But the loss goes beyond money. When a unique object vanishes, it’s as if one small part of our human memory goes with it. The twelfth-century Codex Calixtinus tells us the story (and shows us illustrations) of pilgrimages to the tomb of St James the Apostle. The nineteenth-century wall clock teaches us how clockmakers innovated and perfected timekeeping. That simple clay oil lamp connects us with makers of the past and opens up our imaginations.

Teresa Flavin is the author of The Blackhope Enigma and The Crimson Shard, art historical fantasy novels for age 9 and above. This month’s charcoal sketch is of one of the stone lions inside the Boston Public Library, which Teresa hopes is far too large ever to be stolen. She is currently working on the final book in the trilogy.