COFFEE AT CORNELIA'S (the very first coffee)
Rocio: Instead of a monthly message, why don’t we chat? Cornelia would like to make her page closer to you, the reader on the other side of the computer. Actually she wants you to experience what we happily enjoy on a daily basis: talking with family, friends and with Looney (of course she talks. What do you expect from Cornelia’s dog? Quite a talker I may say!). We usually talk rather than post messages. Also Looney doesn’t have opposable thumbs so writing is a little harder for her! And from all these conversations comes the best of us, the mirror to our souls - or sometimes the way to our empty stomachs when they growl!!!! So let’s give it a try…
Cornelia: Yes, let’s try, Brujita! (That’s Rocio’s nickname. Not that it really fits her. She is quite a powerful and not at all a small witch, but it was her nickname as a child, and as she preserved the child inside very well, the name fits after all)
So here comes Cornelia again: We want to try this way because I realized during my world tour last year (sigh, no planes for a year, please!) that my readers are fascinated by the fact that I work with my friends. You know the saying that one shouldn’t mix private and work life. It’s utter nonsense! It is by far the best thing! We spend far too much time working so why not spend that time with the ones you like best? When I started to work on RECKLESS with someone else I was sometimes worried what my readers would think. Would they accept that a writer creates a story with a friend? Yes, they did. They were the first ones to embrace my work with Lionel (Wigram). They loved the idea that I worked with one of my best friends. So LA Brujita suggested that I show them all the other friends I work with. I met her by the way through work- that often happens to me. I start working with someone and the someone becomes a friend which is such a wonderful thing. I met LA Brujita (Rocio Ayuso in normal life) when she interviewed me for El Pais, the Spanish newspaper. Her questions were so brilliant (She is blushing right now- that looks very cute) that I suggested to have coffee together one day. Meanwhile we have breakfasts at least twice a week (Huevos Rancheros for me, Salmon for her) and when I said that I so often forget to write my monthly reports for the website Brujita suggested that we have a monthly conversation- which is far less boring than sitting in front of my computer and talking about myself. So…. here we are, with coffee and chocolate and a very good friend, who is also a brilliant journalist. With a Spanish accent!
Rocio: I guess that’s me, la brujita española, accent included, with a double personality as a journalist. My other identity includes my husband, Raul García, chef extraordinaire, the best friend you can find and the animation director you want in your life, and the wonderful company of the Triple L, Lady Lucy Loca, the “bonsai” German shepherd –sometimes Lady, most of the times Loca- that one day came to my house to fill the big, big paws Melon left in my heart when he was gone. And sometimes she does fill them. In my heart and in my husband’s heart. Even if she ate his couch on her way to his heart!
Cornelia: Yes, your husband. Another friend I work with – though I first thought that Rocio only imagined him because he often had to work in Europe. Raul will do drawings and animations for my website. We are also working on an animation project together. And there are more friends I work with. One is actually my cousin: Oliver, who tailors English clothes for my German words. Not to forget my sister and her husband (the monster, as I like to call him, and this is meant fondly, I promise!), without whom you would not be able to read all this. I am very good friend with my British literary agent Andrew Nurnberg. And with Rainer Strecker, the actor who reads with me in Germany and does my audio-books. I am close friends with my editors, with translators and publishers in many countries. That’s part of the reason why I travelled so much in the past few years- to see and visit all the friends I found all over the world. It is a wonderful feeling to get birthday wishes from Hamburg and Moscow, London and New York…But last year, during the world tour, I felt for the first time in many years, that I want to stop travelling for a while. I was tired of looking at my face in a mirror and feeling like I am looking into a camera- for very often my travels are also for promotion and not just for my friends. Suddenly I was far too often the famous Cornelia, not Cornelia, who loves to have coffee with Rocio. I said to myself: Cornelia, you didn’t decide to be a writer to be in front of a camera or tour the world. You want to be at the writing house again, for many many months, without packing a suitcase! You can skype with your friends, but skip the travelling. I had so many wonderful encounters with people all over the world that they will nourish my imagination for ten years! But that also means that I have to take the time to reflect on it.
Rocio: So… back to the cave? Cornelia is back to the writing house?
Cornelia: I rode the Year of the Tiger! I held on to his back to avoid the claws –though sometimes I felt them - and now I will enjoy the Year of the Rabbit in my burrow. It was a very strange year and I understood much later that it was as if I was laying out the map of the new book. I understood that only at the very end, when I was in Spain. I realized that all my passion for these very different places and all the different people I met would feed my story. So my one passion, the very old one, the storytelling, writing and crawling into my place suddenly was connected with this rather new passion of traveling and seeing people. Let’s see whether I find the balance between the two.
Rocio: Where did you get the first glimpse of this new inspiration?
Cornelia: Russia had probably the biggest impact because it was both very inspiring but also quite dark inspiration, very northern, very wintery, very melancholic, so different from other places and also the closest to the heart of my story that I’m now trying to explore.
Rocio: So Jacob went with you to Moscow?
Cornelia: He’s always there with me. That’s the problem with him (laughs). He mostly shows up in moments of silence, not when you encounter people. It is afterwards, back in your hotel room, when everything sinks in (that’s why the silence and the calm times are so important). In Russia it hit me while I was taking a walk with my literary agent and best friend Andrew Nurnberg over the Red Square. You, as Spaniard, may have a different association with Moscow that I have as a German with Russia.
Rocio: For me Russia means cold.
Cornelia: For me it also means threat, in a way, because Russia meant also the Berlin Wall and all it stood for. On the other hand we have been raised with the knowledge that Russia saved Europe twice, from Napoleon and from Hitler, and paid for it more than any other nation. And here I was- at the Red Square! At the (repeats in a very soft voice) Red Square! One of these places, a place of power, of darkness but also of light because of course we also all understand the dream of the socialist revolution. And we all saw the dream crushed. So you stand there and it’s so much more beautiful than you imagined, so soulful and passionate, familiar and strange at the same time. I remember going back to the hotel and that I couldn’t sleep, something that doesn’t happen that easily to me, because my head was overflowing with ideas. ‘Oh my God!’ I thought. ‘It’s not going to be 3 books! It’s going to be five!’ And the writer in me thought ‘if every book costs two years of my life that means I’ll be stuck in Reckless for ten!’ Of course that put a wide mischievous smile on Jacob Reckless’s face. I always planned that the third part would be Russian tales but I saw a character in the Red Square that I didn’t know about before. I can’t say more but I think he may be another mayor player in this story one day. Let’s see!
Rocio: And from this moment on, Cornelia Funke was also known as Cornelia the Cruel for keeping us holding our breath till the next time, when we will follow the footsteps of Jacob in the next 10 years!
Rocío Ayuso, Los Angeles February 14, 2011