When giants speak

I started writing about giants in the winter of 2017, but their world and all the characters who inhabit it have been with me for a long time. I was raised in rural southern Ontario, but I have always felt a pull to head north. Now that I’m here, stories are finding me wherever I go. Perhaps the most compelling story is the one I’m telling here, through the Woodcutter’s Saga, which begins with the tale of Vedi, a young giant forced to move from his home for the love of a woman he never met.

As I wrote the first book in the series, “Nation of Giants,” I felt the deeper pull of the north clearer than I had before I put words to paper. The world of giants, Lendos, is one in which nature itself is a queer entity, as it is the great intermediary of all that happens. Events which should unfold conventionally down one path are suddenly pulled out by their roots and transplanted elsewhere, characters who set off to find love find their deaths instead, and sometimes heroes perpetuate magnificent disasters. This is the nature of the Woodcutter’s Saga and the world that pulls at me.

For now, the giants are standing in the shadows. They’re looking out from the fog and they’re watching. My hope is that you’ll hear them speak through the page as they do to me. I also hope that you feel the pull and compulsion of a nature that is misfit to all expectations and high fantasy tropes. If you do, then you’ll soon appreciate why heroes who die don’t necessarily die for good. Sometimes in their death, characters are reborn in stories into something bigger than they were before. Perhaps you’ll also grow to appreciate that sometimes stories themselves can be alive and full of the same green pull of summer and white push of winter.

R Murray Fehr,

Introducing The Woodcutter’s Saga

Welcome to Lendos, the land of Giants, and the Woodcutter’s Saga. This five book series explores a world where giants are facing extinction at the hands of the common humans and forces rooted in the oldest stories.

The five book arch follows a group of giants and various allies among the different races. The war between the giants and the common humans extends to the moon, in the threadways deep beneath the Earth, and into other realms outside known time and space.

The giants of Lendos must learn how consciousness itself is a weapon, how battles can be found with the shapeshifting forces of nature, and through the ability to be unseen in plain sight.

Giants / Monsters / Common Humans

Art by Ben Roffelsen

Giants

When my daughter was six-months old I wrote a manuscript about little people, as I had a perfect reference for the size and the possible complexities of their world. Then I had a terrifying dream one night that my daughter wasn’t a little person at all. Instead, she was a giant, standing nearly to the height of our bedroom ceiling. Not only was she a giant, she was a giant baby! She approached with the demands, mannerisms, and temperament of a six-month old. This isn’t uncommon for the sleep deprived mind of a new parent to conjure. But here she was, a breast seeking juggernaut with only me standing in her way.

I often think of this dream when I think of my source material for Nation of Giants, and the books I’ve written since then. A giant is a human, only much larger. I imagine all of our imperfections as a species, but on a much grander scale.

Monsters

I remember an interview with Guillermo Del Toro on the CBC program Q, in 2017, in which the filmmaker said ‘Monsters present themselves with transparency, you know what you’re going to get. Humans, on the other hand, can conceal their intentions.’ This quote stuck with me. I heard it after I had written the first draft of Nation of Giants, in which there was little ambiguity about the sonic nature of giants and the deceptive nature of common humans. There were, however, slivers of doubt about intention, duplicity, hubris, and frailty. These were the areas that really inspired me to look into the darker recesses of the relationship between giants and common humans, particularly in the second novel, Giant’s Sojourn.

Common Humans

When I first started writing Nation of Giants, I thought it was actually quite easy, because I had convinced myself that I wasn’t actually writing about humans. I had actually considered writing Nation of Giants without a single common human character. Common humans would be referenced as living far off to the south, having never had interactions with the giants. To me, common humans were too complex because it really means writing about us, and that was too daunting.

I quickly realized that if I only wrote about giants, I really was writing about common humans, because there needed to be a reference point to distinguish them from other races of humans. So I started teasing out some common human characters. By Giant’s Sojourn I had written a small number of chapters with common humans, and without giants or other races of human. By Giant Within, book 3, however, the common humans become the central characters moving the plot forward. But then I had to go back to my comfort zone for Seabeard and the Stone King, book 5.

Bios

R Murray Fehr draws inspiration from the woods. Originally from the densely populated Southern Ontario, he found plenty of source material in the woods of Northern Ontario. In 2011 he earned a PhD in Environmental Studies, and works as an Educational Development Officer with the Anishinabek Educational Institute on Nipissing First Nation. He is married with two girls, and now calls London home.

Ben Roffelsen loves to explore every medium of the arts. For the last few years he has been a photographer finding meaning in the streets of Toronto. His background has been very much in the visual arts, whether it be with brush, pencil, mouse or stylus. His desire to create and tell stories through the visual is evident in the works he has done. He is very thrilled to come back to the visual medium and help bring the world of Lendos to life. He lives in Whitby with his wife and young daughter.