CSFF Tour: The Ale Boy's Feast by Jeffrey Overstreet

This month, CSFF is featuring Jeffrey Overstreet and his latest novel, The Ale Boy's Feast. I interviewed Jeffrey several months back for an author profile in FamilyFiction's March/April issue (you can read the issue online here or download the PDF here).

Here are some excerpts from that interview that didn't make it into the article (or were paraphrased for space).

On becoming a writer:

I was so fond of books that I would actually copy down the entire text of books I was bringing home from the library, because I loved reading books and was just so fascinated by the whole experience of books that I wanted to make my own. Pretty soon I started making changes to the stories I was copying . . . by the time I was 6 or 7 years old I was writing original adventure stories, typing them out with one finger on an old Black Royal typewriter. I loved fairy tales especially, and that’s sort of the shape my stories have taken since then.


On the world of Auralia's Colors:

And the kingdom just becomes this gray, dull, sterile, somber place in the middle of an extravagantly beautiful landscape. Then I realized I was seeing this place over the shoulder of this character who was an artist who lived in the woods, who didn’t like what she was seeing and wanted to restore a sense of imagination and beauty to that place.


What he hopes readers take away from the story:

I hope they really enjoy their journey through this world, as dangerous as it becomes. I hope that they come away with some new questions about the role of imagination in our lives, what art does best, the many ways we try and exploit art for our own purposes, which really ends up hurting imagination.


Find out more about this book (and the entire series) on the blogs below:

Gillian Adams
Red Bissell
Grace Bridges
Beckie Burnham
Morgan L. Busse
Valerie Comer
CSFF Blog Tour
Shane Deal
Chris Deane
Cynthia Dyer
Andrea Graham
Ryan Heart
Bruce Hennigan
Jason Joyner
Carol Keen
Dawn King
Inae Kyo
Shannon McDermott
Shannon McNear
Karen McSpadden
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Eve Nielsen
John W. Otte
Sarah Sawyer
Kathleen Smith
Donna Swanson
Rachel Starr Thomson
Robert Treskillard
Steve Trower
Fred Warren
Dona Watson
Phyllis Wheeler