Interview with Diana Peterfreund, Author of Ellen Poe
Welcome to YAOTL, Diana! Please tell us a bit about Ellen Poe.
Ellen Poe is the story of a teen girl from Baltimore who has never believed her family's legends about being related to Edgar Allan Poe. That is, until she finds a coded journal in the basement of her family's historic townhouse. When she starts deciphering the writing in this journal, out pops the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe. Together, they use the clues in the journal to go on a thrilling treasure hunt around all the different landmarks of the city and the other cities where Poe once made his home. At the same time, Ellen is experiencing visions of murders similar to the ones she saw described in Poe's journal, visions that may have inspired some of his terrifying stories and even contributed to his mental health problems. To avoid the same tragic fate as the poet, Ellen has to figure out how these abilities work and solve the murders. Think one part National Treasure, one part Enola Holmes.
What first sparked the idea? Are you a longtime Poe fan?
I've been a fan of Poe for years. In fact, in the very first series I ever wrote (Secret Society Girl) one of the characters was named Poe. I have an Edgar Allan Poe backpack. But I think now it's become an obsession, thanks to writing this series.
The character of Ellen Poe was brought to me by a media producer, Ryan Wiesbrock, who knew of my love of Poe and of cryptology in my books, and I just thought the idea had so much potential, and we worked together in conversations to develop Ellen's world and the Poe-inspired storylines that feature in these books. It was a very collaborative process with the producer and my editor with a lot of back and forth and excitement about the different facets and knowledge that we were each bringing to the table. Writing can sometimes be such a solitary endeavor so it's fun to have a group project in this case!
I’m fascinated by the fact that Poe’s dialogue only comes from his actual writing. What was that process like–weaving his words into the book you were currently writing?
So. Much. Research. As soon as I learned that Ellen was a person who saw ghosts and spirits, I knew I wanted one of the spirits she saw to be Eddy, and fortunately, everyone else was on board. But when I sat down to write I got very intimidated by the idea of putting words in the mouth of this famous writer. So I thought it might be cool if I didn't do that--or at least, only used his own. But that required me to read everything he'd ever written--his essays, his literary criticism, his letters, his laundry lists. It was kind of extreme! It takes me a lot longer to write a scene where Eddy is talking because I'm always combing through Poe's works to find the perfect sentence.
Of course this had to be set in Baltimore, but why the b&b? Where did that idea come from?
Ryan was inspired by real-life shops and establishments that claim a connection to Poe, so the idea of Ellen working in one of these places was always a part of the character. Me, I love a house that serves as its own character in a story, and most of my books feature an unusual, often creepy building where most of the action of the storyline takes place, whether that's a tomb (Secret Society Girl), a temple (the killer unicorn books), a mansion (Across a Star-Swept Sea or the Clue books), or even a whole city underground! (Omega City). The brief I was given included a description of the Reynoldses being down on their luck, having tried a bunch of failing businesses, kind of like Poe's family when he lived in Baltimore. I loved the idea of Aunt Marie trying yet again with a Poe-themed business, and I had so much fun inventing all the details of the different creepy rooms. And even though I, personally, would not like to sleep in a Pit & The Pendulum themed bedroom, I actually think a business like this would do really well in Baltimore. People love a theme hotel. (Nora Roberts's Inn at Boonsboro, about an hour outside Baltimore, is romance themed.)
The novel is full of ciphers and codes. Did you design those puzzles yourself? Were any inspired by Poe’s own fascination with cryptography?
Yes, that was one of the original inspirations for the storylines and, I suspect, why I was hired for this series. I'd already done a whole series that heavily featured the characters solving codes and puzzles (Omega City), so this is a thing I like to do in books. Poe put a lot of codes in his work, and he even had a column in a newspaper where he challenged people to break his codes. (Some of these weren't broken until the invention of personal computers more than a hundred years later!) It's possible we still haven't found all the codes in Poe's writings. My series imagines not only that there are codes still hidden in Poe's famous poems, but that people used his poems as codes themselves to honor him.
Poe is known as one of the fathers of cryptography for his "Gold Bug" cipher and essay about how one creates a cipher like that, so the journal in the book is written in a cipher. This appeals to Ellen, because she loves computers and coding, and is not a huge fan of poetry. But even once you've solved the cipher, Poe's language is very poetic and cryptic, which means she can't escape the poetry part no matter what she does!
One of the most common kinds of codes Poe would use was hiding names in his poetry, like an acrostic, and that was who the poem would be dedicated to. The "unpublished poems" that Ellen decodes in the journal are those kinds, and let me tell you, even trying to write bad, never-published first drafts supposedly of Poe's work was incredibly intimidating! Like Ellen, I'm no poet.
I always find the voice in your work to be absolutely spot-on. How did you balance a coming-of-age teen voice with more supernatural elements? Or did it happen somewhat naturally?
Oh, thank you! These days, it really helps that I have an actual teenager in my house, so I get to have their voice in my head as I write. I'm always just trying to be honest with the character of Ellen and to do her justice. I find teenagers so smart and perceptive. The world around them is just coming into focus, and it can be large and scary, whether or not there are ghosts and murders in their orbit. For Ellen, that includes a lot of really serious stuff: family issues, financial hardship, mental health struggles, grief. Things that unfortunately a lot of teenagers can relate to. But I want her to have an adventure, too, to have a crush on someone, to go to a school dance, to make friends. Ellen isn't just these terrible things that are happening in her life. It's also all this thrilling stuff.
How did you go about writing Poe himself? Was the idea of it ever daunting?
Poe was a very complicated man. There are a lot of details about his life that indicate that he must have sometimes been a difficult person to be around. He made a lot of enemies in his life, and a lot of mistakes. He also had a lot of friends and admirers. I wanted to do justice to these different facets of him, and the ups and downs he experienced. It helped a lot that I was having him speak in his own words. Poe was actually super perceptive about many of his own failings and certainly his struggles with his mental health and wrote often in his letters to his friends about what he was going through. We also have letters from his friends to each other describing Poe when he was suffering from bad mental health episodes. I think that was one of the reasons he was such a genius at writing characters who were experiencing psychosis, because he also had those experiences.
Ellen, like Poe, can be difficult and prickly, and she has her own mental health issues. She also has way better resources, as a modern person, than he did. But I also wanted to show how both Poe and Ellen had friends who stuck by them and helped them when things got rough. Mental illness can be incredibly isolating. Ellen has her Aunt Marie, and she has Gus, who is not without his own tragic backstory, but he's always there for her.
Were you ever intimidated by the idea of releasing this book to the sort of “Poe-obsessed” readership?
Uh-oh! Maybe I should have been! I came at it from the perspective of a Poe fangirl, so I thought, well, I'm going to write a book for my particular flavor of Poe obsession, and just hope that matches the freak of the other fans. There's so much research and Poe history in this book, so I can stand behind all of that!
I do have to say that it has meant a lot to me to see Poe fans responding to my book. It was such a thrill to see my book in the gift shop of the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia. I was part of a 24 hour Poe readathon in Baltimore. I'll be giving a talk at the Poe Museum in November. We all have our own Poe, I'm sure, and maybe there will be people out there who don't like my version. But I think that's the curse of any author who is writing about a real historical figure.
Conversely, what do you hope teen readers who’ve never read Poe before take away from Ellen’s journey?
I make no secret that I'm trying to create new Poe fans. I think he'd be so amazed to learn that kids are still reading his stories and poems in schools nearly 200 years later, and all over the world. I'm hoping that teens who read this go and check out "The Raven" or "The Black Cat" or any of the other famous Poe works that I reference in these books. If you've read Poe before, you can find the Easter eggs in the book, and if you haven't, you can go out and find them afterward and see what all the fuss is about.
I'm also just hoping that they have a fun time with the adventure of it. I want them to believe they can go to these places nad see these monuments, because in most cases, they can. I went to all the places in the books and added very little for my puzzles.
And of course, to fall in love with the characters the way I have. In the first book, Ellen starts very alone and by the end she has a little found family of her aunt and Gus and Eddy. And in the second book, I expand all that to her other coworkers at the coffee shop and Ellen even having a boyfriend. I think all my books are about building that community and forging those connections, because writing is itself about connecting to a reader through words. It's the whole point.
What’s next?
The good news is there WILL be more Ellen Poe! Ellen Poe: For Evermore sounds like a very final type title.... well, oops. That's all I can say for now, though...stay tuned...
Also, next April, 2027, I'll be releasing an adult novel about young adult books. It's called Ghost/Writer and it's about a down-on-her-luck YA writer who is hired to finish the blockbuster series of her deceased literary nemesis--only to be haunted by the ghost of the bestselling writer, who is not happy about how her ghostwriter wants the story to end.
Where can we find you?
My website is dianapeterfreund.com and my Instagram is dpeterfreund.
Diana Peterfreund has published sixteen novels for adults, teens, and kids. Her works have been named to the New York Public Library’s Books for the Teen Age list, the Capitol Choices reading list, the Texas LoneStar List, and the Sunshine State Young Reader Awards List, as well as Amazon’s Best Books of the Year. In addition, she’s written dozens of short stories and a variety of nonfiction essays about popular children’s literature. Diana lives in Maryland with her family. Learn more about Diana at her website and follow her on social media here.
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