THE SHARING KNIFE: Passage

Passage is an adventure story, a love story, and a fantasy novel, but above all, it is a river journey. In it, newly-married farmer girl Fawn Bluefield and her Lakewalker sorcerer-soldier husband Dag take passage on a flatboat to the sea, seeking solutions to the dangerous split between their peoples. (Though finding, among other things, river pirates.)

My love of lakes grew from my own childhood, but my father's happiest youthful memories were from the 1920's at summer cottages -- I think we'd call them "shanties" today -- on a river island just upstream from Pittsburgh. His own father, for vacations, would take him and a canoe by train some two hundred miles up the Allegheny River, and spend a week or more paddling back down. I recently had a chance to read some of his journals he kept in his youth; as a late teenager, he wrote that he couldn't decide if his life's ambition was to become an engineer, or to loaf on a houseboat. He eventually did both, although by his sixties when he finally acquired his houseboat on the Ohio River, he had rather lost the knack of loafing. So when I sent Dag and Fawn on their own journey of discovery down my book's equivalent of the Ohio, I had plenty of material, having both experienced the river first-hand, and inherited my Dad's library of river lore.

American landscapes are often neglected as sources for fantasy settings. Can you imagine, fifty years in the future, what tales of your parents' time you would tell to your grandchildren? What parts do you think they would find utterly alien or fantastical?

Lois McMaster Bujold