Please join us in a Q&A with Kate Heartfield, author of Tapestry of Time.
I’m very excited to welcome Kate Heartfield to our BookBrowse Community Forum.
Kate is the author of several fantasy novels, including The Tapestry of Time (2024), about four clairvoyant sisters in WWII, which the BookBrowse Online Book Club discussed in September. She’s also written The Valkyrie (2023), a retelling of old Norse and Germanic legends, and the Sunday Times bestseller The Embroidered Book (2022), about Marie Antoinette and her sister Maria Carolina. Additionally, she’s the author of two works of interactive fiction through Choice of Games, and Assassin’s Creed tie-in novels. She has won the Aurora Award for Best Novel three times and was a co-winner of the Nebula Award for Game Writing. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the World Fantasy, Nebula, Locus, Aurora, Sunburst, Scribe, and Crawford awards, as well as the Ottawa Book Award, and her journalism for a National Newspaper Award. Kate grew up in Manitoba and now lives in Ottawa.
Please use this space to ask Kate questions about her work. As a reminder, to reply to an existing comment, click the grey Reply on the right side under the comment. To ask a new question, click the blue Reply button a little lower down.
Kate, thanks for being here! Please tell our group a little about yourself.
Hi Kim! I’m thrilled to be here.
This morning, I’m in my favourite coffee shop just outside Ottawa, Canada, with a latte, a friend, and my laptop. It’s chilly! I’m working on the first draft of a novel set in the 16th century. (I’ll have two other books out before that one – Mercutio, coming next year from Harper Voyager, and The Swordmaster, coming at the end of 2026 from Solaris.)
I gravitate toward historical settings, especially in my long work, and there’s usually some fantastical element as well. In The Tapestry of Time, as you know, it was clairvoyance; in The Embroidered Book, Marie Antoinette and her sister were able to enchant objects (at a cost).
As you said in my introduction, I used to be a newspaper journalist. These days, I do some freelance work for non-profits in addition to my fiction work, and I teach arts and culture reporting at a university (I have some marking to do this weekend). In my spare time, I study medieval swordplay, and I have a very sweet little black cat named Minerva.
I’m looking forward to the conversation!
Thanks again for being here. The more I learn about you the more fascinated I get! You are one busy woman!
I’d like to start with the book our group read a couple of months ago, The Tapestry of Time (link to the discussion here). For those who haven’t read it, it’s about four clairvoyant sisters during WWII and revolves around keeping the ancient Bayeux Tapestry out of Nazi hands. Where did the inspiration for this creative plot come from?
How did you develop the characters for The Tapestry of Time? Did any of them emerge as a favorite? Which was the easiest and which the most difficult to write?
I’d also love to know how you researched the book. It was very intricate and involved a lot of actual history regarding both WWII and the tapestry itself.
I think most books come from a few different places, or at least they do for me. For Tapestry, I can actually trace an initial “aha” moment: a silly social media post. It was early in 2020, and someone had posted a question on Twitter, asking people to mash up the first movie they’d ever seen in a theatre with the most recent one they had seen before the lockdowns.
This gave me Little Women: Raiders of the Lost Ark.
And I immediately thought: oh, I can actually imagine that book. Four sisters fighting Nazis for the control of an artifact with supernatural powers. I could say some things about feminine archetypes and the way fascism tries to rewrite history. (And while Kit and Max are not precisely a lesbian version of Jo and Laurie … that was part of their inspiration.)
My paternal grandfather was English and fought in the Second World War, and he shared my love of history. He also wrote an autobiography for his family, which has been such a gift. My grandmother was Scottish and served in the Women’s Land Army, but I never learned much about her wartime experiences (other than how she met my grandfather). I wanted to use this story to explore some of the many ways women fought fascism in the 1940s. And as the story took shape, it started to become a little darker than its initial inspirations.
I started out with four basic archetypes, very loosely based on the sisters in Little Women. The idea to bring in clairvoyance came from a couple of directions: a few half-remembered scraps of family lore from that Scottish grandmother I mentioned, and a desire to dig into the theme of “knowing” as it relates to politics – the politicization of historical knowledge, and the potential for abuse of ideas like “common sense.” And, of course, political ideology is fundamentally about envisioning one future rather than another.
Once I started thinking about clairvoyance in relation to the Sharp sisters, I asked myself how they would each relate to that kind of ability if they had it. And I asked myself what kind of war work each of them would do.
Kit is probably the most like me, in the ways that she is stubborn and intellectual and tries to take things on herself. So I found her pretty easy to write. But I’m also quiet and introverted like Rose, and I’m a mom, so that aspect of Helen’s life was easy for me to understand.
This might sound silly, but the way I identified with Ivy is that I’m blonde – and I’ve been underestimated in many of the ways she is. When I started writing, I didn’t plan for her storyline to take up as much of the book as it does – but it soon became clear that her story is the engine of the novel. I did find her sections difficult to write – not intellectually, but emotionally, because of the research I had to do to portray some of the things she goes through.
I think it’s hysterical how you came up with the concept. Now that you’ve mentioned how it came about, I can really see those elements in the book.
You mention that it came out darker than one would imagine a “Little Women/Indiana Jones” mashup might be. Do you start with an outline when you write, or does the story just form as you go along? Did the plot make any surprising turns, or did you run into any roadblocks along the way?
Ivy certainly had a tough go of it! Thank you for letting her have a happy ending; I was really pleased she got together with Grady. And the same for Kit & Max!
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Research is one of my favourite parts of the process, and I definitely learned a lot while researching this one. I read several books about the real women who were agents in the Special Operations Executive – there are so many fascinating real-life stories, some of which inspired different moments in Ivy’s storyline. And I read a lot about the women who were part of the codebreaking work at Bletchley Park.
I’ve written in different historical periods, and I usually don’t write history as recent as WWII. The upside of writing in a WWII setting is that there is a lot of readily available research. The downside is that every minute of every day is well known and accounted for, so there’s a lot less empty space to imagine into, if you’re trying to fit your story into known history (as I was in this book). I also found it somewhat daunting to write about so recent a time because I did not want to be inventing things about the real great-grandparents, grandparents or parents of people who are alive today, so most of the characters in my book are invented.
The real history of the tapestry itself is fascinating, and I really enjoyed delving into the scholarship about the tapestry’s possible origins, and the mysteries in its content. The tapestry really was the subject of a struggle in the summer of 1944, and we’re lucky that it escaped unscathed.
I was able to see it in Bayeux a few months ago – and now it’s on its way to the British Museum on loan.
A couple of book recommendations: Eleven Days in August: The Liberation of Paris in 1944, by Matthew Cobb, was absolutely fascinating and informed a lot of my novel. Another one of my main sources was The Bayeux Tapestry: The Life Story of a Masterpiece, by Carola Hicks.
I do start with an outline, but I never stick to it strictly. I always find that the story grows and changes as I go. And I always revise pretty heavily.
With Tapestry, I ended up with a big headache as I did the last big revision of the final third, just because there were a few different ways the plot could go and some of the initial ideas I had for that section weren’t working well (the tension was flagging and my plotlines weren’t coming together.)
It’s one of the more difficult revisions I’ve done, but I was happy with the result. I had a lot of guidance from my wonderful editor, Jane Johnson, who always asks the right questions!
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It’s great you’ve got such a terrific editor, and I see you also thank Linda McQueen, your copy editor, and two early readers (Colin Lindsay and Ember Randall). You also mention the Codex writers community. Please tell us a little more about them! And I wondered at what point your family gets involved in your work. It sounds like your son, Xavier, is an integral part of your writing process.
It seems like you started your career as a journalist. At what point in your life did you decide to turn to fiction? What was the process like to get your first novel into the hands of a publisher? Did it take a long time or did you have success right off the bat?
Every book is a team effort, for sure! I’ve been very lucky. And I don’t know where I would be without writer friends to commiserate with, to trade critiques with, to cheer on. A lot of my writer friends are farflung and I have gotten to know them online, but here in Ottawa we have a very healthy community of writers, so we get together in person a lot.
My son is definitely my main brainstorming partner, and he’s very knowledgeable about history, which comes in handy! Other than that, my family doesn’t get involved until it’s time to read the finished book. They’re all very supportive, which is another way I’m lucky.
This is a long tale! Let me see if I can tell it without rambling on too long.
I’ve always been a fiction writer, since I was a child, and it was always my ambition to be a novelist. I absorbed early on that one did need a backup career, and I ultimately chose journalism, which is not the most stable backup career, ha, but it had the advantage of letting me work with words and learn new things. I did my undergrad in political science and my master’s in journalism, and then I worked at a newspaper until I quit in 2015.
In the meantime, I was writing and trying to get published, from about 1999 to 2013, with not much success. I wrote and queried four novels before I signed with my agent, and I have a fifth novel (the one that landed me my agent) that has not been published. I wrote and published some short fiction occasionally in the 1990s and 2000s, but I only got serious about writing and submitting short fiction in 2012, and had about half a dozen stories published each year until recently (I haven’t been writing short fiction as much over the last couple of years.)
I signed with my agent, Jennie Goloboy, in 2014, and we’re still working together. My first published novel came out from a small Canadian press in 2018. I also had a few novellas published around that time, and two long games, and then my first book with HarperVoyager was The Embroidered Book in 2022. Now at age 48 I’m getting to the point where I have to count my published novels on my fingers to remember how many there are, so I hope that my story is a hopeful one for anyone out there who’s querying and submitting and not having much luck. If you enjoy writing, keep at it!
You’ve written several standalone novels set in different time periods. How do you choose which parts of history to investigate?
You mentioned that WWII presented some unique challenges, since it was so well documented. Do you see yourself returning to that time period in future novels? What’s been your favorite time period to write about?
You’ve written a novella for the Mostrous Little Voices series, a collection of five short works inspired by Shakespeare’s plays, each by a different author. How did that come about and what was that experience like?
It’s pretty rare that I choose a time period and then go from there to develop an idea, although it does happen (for example, for my Assassin’s Creed books, I knew that I had to develop an idea in the 19th century that fit within that canon, but I didn’t have much more than that to start with.) Usually, it’s the idea itself that grabs me, so I’ll happen upon a mention of some historical event and it’ll connect with some theme I’ve been thinking about, or trigger a question or a storyline. Tapestry’s a good example: I didn’t begin by thinking “I should write about WWII” but with that tweet that triggered the idea.
One consequence of following my ideas where they take me is that I typically have to do a lot of fresh research for every book, but that’s OK. I love research.
I don’t think I’ll return to WWII soon, but I do have another 20th century idea in the works, at the end of WWI. Again, that was a matter of an idea grabbing me – which goes to show why it’s always a bit hard for me to say what periods I’ll write in.
I do feel most comfortable writing in the late medieval period (say 1100 CE to 1400 CE), just because I’ve always been interested in that period and feel at home there, and I’ve found it a fruitful setting to explore some ideas that interest me (my novels The Chatelaine and Mercutio are set in the 1320s and the 1290s respectively). I have recently drafted a couple of novels set in the 16th century, and that feels pretty comfortable too.
And I’ve written a fair bit in the 18th century: two novellas about a highwaywoman (Alice Payne Arrives and Alice Payne Rides) and my big novel about Marie Antoinette, The Embroidered Book.
I seem to be drawn to periods of change and revolution in one form or another. So far I have set my books in Europe, partly because it’s the history I know best, but I’m also working on a book set in Canada, where I was born and still live (and a history I also know well.)