Interview with A.T. Balsara, Author of The Great and The Small

Thanks for visiting YAOTL, A.T. Please tell us a bit about The Great and the Small.

The Great & the Small is an illustrated urban fantasy unfolding through the dual perspectives of Fin, a young tunnel rat, and Ananda, a troubled teenager. Ananda, haunted by dreams of a buried memory and still grieving her grandmother’s recent passing, feels isolated both at school and at home. Her rare ability to connect with animals only amplifies her sense of alienation. Fin, orphaned and eager to please his charismatic uncle, the “Beloved Chairman” of the tunnels, becomes lead henchman when his uncle declares war on humanity using the bubonic plague. Fin is a true believer until Ananda rescues him from certain death and secretly nurses him back to health. Now Fin begins to question his uncle’s war, even as Ananda’s buried trauma refuses to stay hidden. As the war rages, Fin and Ananda confront dark secrets that threaten their very survival.

This mirrored narrative, steeped in the echoes of buried trauma and historical plagues and dictatorships, explores the struggle to find light in darkness and survive threats from both within and beyond.

I have to admit, I recently got back into my art about a year ago, in order to pursue illustration. I’m fascinated by author / illustrators. How do you think your art helps form some of your storytelling techniques?

That’s exciting that you have gotten back into art! Illustrating a story seems to draw from a different part of me and both writing and illustrating help me to tell a rounded story that I’ve looked at from all angles. With picture book illustration, the illustrations tell the story as much as the words do. With a YA novel, however, the writing must stand on its own. For that reason, it's uncommon for a YA work to be illustrated, but for me, one without the other feels like a story half-told. In their own ways, writing and illustrating explore light and dark. In art if you want to draw focus to a certain area, you position your deepest shadow against your brightest light. When I’m writing, positioning the light against the darkness and teasing out one or the other to create that focus, is part of why writing fascinates me.

How did you approach writing an anthropomorphic character (Fin)? It’s tricky when writing for an older audience, but I found that it offered a softer aspect to a pretty hard-hitting story. 

I must admit that ignorance is bliss. When the idea for the story came to me over twenty years ago, I didn’t know that it wasn’t common in YA. What I did know was how much I loved stories told through different eyes. The stories that have stayed with me are ones that showed me a new way of looking at the world. 

That said, the use of animals to depict an authoritarian regime has a pretty strong literary background (Animal Farm). The complex customs, language, and social structure of the animal world–not to mention the interaction between humans and animals–reminded me a bit of Watership Down. Was that a conscious nod to those books? 

I read Animal Farm in high school, and really didn’t connect to it, as I found the characters to be ciphers versus fully rounded characters that I could care about. Watership Down, however, was one of those books that changed me.  By the end of it, I felt like I’d glimpsed life from a totally new perspective, and it was thrilling to me. I wanted to do the same thing in The Great & the Small. Basically, I wrote a book that I would have loved to read.

The Great and the Small features broader themes of trust and abuse of power, which overlaps with Ananda’s trauma. I was fascinated by the exploration of those themes on a small, personal level and a larger societal level. How did that come about when you were drafting? 

Writing and illustrating are my ways of understanding the world and myself. When the first edition of The Great & the Small was published in 2017, I explored questions of good and evil, and whether someone who is born into the orbit of a Stalin or a Hitler could ever break free. This question has haunted me ever since I went through the Dachau concentration camp museum as a 10-year-old with my family. When I began writing, I didn’t have the answers to my questions—only a knowledge that somehow hope would prevail. I was dealing with severe PTSD as I wrote the first edition, from an incident of abuse that occurred when I was five. It had been so traumatic to me that I had buried the memory until it resurfaced in my twenties. But my dreams were haunted by nightmares, I struggled with an eating disorder, body dysmorphia, suicide ideation, and disassociation. When the first edition (and as far as I knew then, the only edition) came out, I felt so proud of it, until I realized that Ananda’s story lacked depth. I had been so afraid of my own story spilling into the “real” story, that I had kept her on the surface! 

In the years after the first edition’s release, I discovered energy medicine, and together with my faith, I found a greater level of inner peace and healing than I had ever known. I stopped and started a few storylines about buried trauma, but they went nowhere. Then, in 2022 when I was offered the opportunity to revise the story for a second edition, it felt like a miracle. What writer ever gets the chance to revisit a published story and revise it? No one, until now! Finally, I could give Ananda her due! I dived back in, like a scuba diver exploring my own dark depths and what it means to live with a trauma you don’t remember, but which reverberates throughout every single aspect of your life. I fictionalized my own experiences and wove it into the pre-existing story. Because both the larger societal themes and the personal trauma I was exploring were, and are, so pivotal to me as a human being, they ended up dovetailing in the story in a way that I hadn’t anticipated. It was one of those “happy accidents” that can occur when we are writing or creating. It also shows how as writers and artists, everything we create has an autobiographical element to it because we view the world through our own lens.

What was the most difficult portion of the book to write–and how did you approach writing something that was hard for you to tackle?

There’s that beautiful Robert Frost quote, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” The book gets into some scenes that were very difficult to write. While the light was always there, the dark got very dark. In particular, those scenes where Ananda is lost to herself, wanting to die, and seeking to kill herself were excruciating to write, and I found myself deeply shaken and wrung out like an old dishcloth. But because much of it was autobiographical, it was also cathartic to write. I had to take it slow, and sometimes just rest if I needed to. In the evenings after writing, I would go to bed at 7 sometimes, just to recuperate. I knew that the story would be ultimately one of hope, and that kept me going.

A really important part of the novel is empathy, especially in Fin’s development. Can you touch on that a bit?

Prejudice, bred from ignorance, is always behind man’s inhumanity to man. In the beginning of the book, Fin is a true believer in the plague war, having witnessed the suffering in the “Killing Chamber,” a cancer research lab. Fin trusts his uncle completely when he is told that all “two-legs” are evil and must die. It’s only when Fin is nursed back to health by Ananda over a period of weeks that he realizes that he has grown to love and trust someone he had vowed to kill. The veils of “otherness” have fallen away. It’s the “Dark Night of the Soul,” where everything he thought was true is a lie, and he is forced to find a new path.

I made Ananda have an intuitive ability to connect with animals, which, in our culture, is ridiculed. But she can sense their “being” and because of that, she can’t hurt them. Even while she is trying to kill herself, she can’t stand the suffering of others. It is this quality of empathy and ability to connect on a soul-level that in the end guides both Fin and Ananda back to their true selves.

The Great and the Small offers such a rich narrative with complex themes–what do you hope readers take away more than anything?

As the old rat Balthazar says in the book, “Seek truth!” Seek the truth, seek kindness, and never give up, even when you find yourself walking in the dark. We are all walking the “Hero’s Journey,” and it’s not easy. I have found, without fail, that those moments where I felt the most despair were moments just prior to exponential leaps of growth and new understanding.

What’s next?

I will continue to write and illustrate young adult books, but I also love writing and illustrating for children (under my full name, Andrea Torrey Balsara). I am currently finishing illustrations for the long-overdue second book in my picture book series, Greenbeard the Pirate Pig, about a guinea pig who dreams of being a pirate. A big shift from The Great & the Small!

Where can we find you?

You can visit my website, www.torreybalsara.com, or find me on Facebook, @AndreaTorreyBalsara, and @AndreaTorreyBalsaraAuthorIllustrator, Twitter: @torreybalsara, Instagram:@andreatorreybalsara , and LinkedIn: @AndreaTorreyBalsara. I would love to hear from you, and I do follow back!

Thank you, again for having me on your blog!

 ~

Snag a copy of The Great and the Small at Bookshop