THE SCOUT AND KEEPER INTERVIEWS
THE SCOUT AND KEEPER SERIES
Interview One: The World and the Whispered Word
A Conversation with K.S.R. Kingworth
Author of Carli Rockell and the Fire Seed
Book One in the Primørdiya trilogy
SCOUT: After our pre-interview chat I feel like we’re sitting at your table over lunch like neighbors. I also know you go by Kare, pronounced as Care or Carrie. For our readers, let’s begin where most authors don’t. With the moment before the book. You had an unusual experience when Primørdiya found you. What can you tell us about that?
KEEPER: I moved to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico in 2023 after life happened. I had never been to Mexico and only knew the town as a dot on a map. I had heard from an articulate man in Indian Wells, California it was known as a place for writers. I was cat sitting for a couple who were on the island of Patmos for their annual salons for soulful singer-songwriters, writers, memoirists and contemplatives.
Anyway, I was cat sitting Max, their cuddly cat who is more like a dog. We were sitting on the sofa on a street with a lovely painting of koi fish behind us… on a street whose name translates to Souls.
That’s when I heard a word whispered in my ear: Primørdiya. With the word I saw a completed puzzle hovering above my head with the stars visible beyond it. Every piece was assembled. Whole. But facing away from me.
I could only see the cardboard back of the puzzle. That felt, at the time, like a rather cruel cosmic joke. The picture — the one that would tell me what I was actually building — was facing the stars.
I wasn’t happy about it. understood immediately that I would spend years turning it around. I also saw a handprint made from red ochre clay. Days later would sketch out the island in the story, and later discover it was one version of Pangea.
SCOUT: You had been silent for fourteen years before that moment. After your first middle-grade fantasy received a starred School Library Journal review. After being on Goodreads’ most viewed profile page of all time alongside Otis Chandler, Neil Gaiman and Stephanie Meyer. Otis had asked you to start Oprah’s Book Club at Goodreads. What does fourteen years of silence feel like from the inside?
KEEPER: First of all, I failed miserably moderating the book club. I checked recently, and I’m still a moderator, which makes me chuckle.By then, Lyme Disease made getting out of bed and crawling upstairs after feeding myself a full day’s work. To answer your question, though, the last fourteen years were like waiting for something you can’t name.
I didn’t experience it as writer’s block. I experienced it as, not yet. The world wasn’t ready. Or I wasn’t. Probably both. Because when the story was given to me, I had this overwhelming sense it already existed in its completeness. It was my job to let the pieces float down from the puzzle and piece it all together until I knew it was complete, free of what I wanted the story to be.
When you’ve written an entire manuscript from bed with full-blown Lyme disease and had it received the way Secret Speakers was received, and then the forced physical silence simply arrives — you eventually stop fighting it. You learn to trust the timing of things. Mexico taught me that on an even deeper level.
I’ll admit, when the story came to me I said a bad word. I said, “[Blankety blank] it. There is no way I’m writing another fantasy novel.”
My mother called just then. I told her what happened. She said, “I’m thrilled. I just got up off my knees praying you would keep writing for youth.” My mother has always been in tune.
That did it. And here we are.
SCOUT: Tell me about Mexico. You write from a place the neighbors have a descriptive name for.
KEEPER: Funny. It’s true. They call it The Nosebleed. I live on a street too tiny for cars above a Mexican family who has taken me in as their own. High on a hill overlooking San Miguel. I have a beautiful view of my neighbor’s tile roof, lush green tree and the town that lies beyond. (She used to be a Kirkus reviewer and wrote, The View from Chepito. She jokes that my view is better than hers.)
Before that I lived for a year outside of town at a horse ranch. A blonde mare named Peppy Jack pressed her nose against my kitchen window every morning while I drank coffee. I pressed my hand to her nose on the other side of the glass and we would hold each other’s gaze through the glass for long minutes. Those moments were like conversations, and she heard a lot of my troubles.
At night she slept with her rump against the adobe wall on the other side of my bed. I spread a roll of brown kraft paper across the floor of that ranch and began mapping the world of Primørdiya. I sat on the couch until my body made a permanent depression in the cushions. I wasn’t inventing. I was receiving. [Chuckle]
SCOUT: That distinction — receiving rather than inventing — runs through everything you say about this world. The puzzle, the whispered name, the mare at the window. Do you consider yourself a mystic?
KEEPER: I consider myself someone who has learned to listen. To honor that first gut instinct of intuition. To observe. To pay attention. I have a story about that. Maybe it’s the surreal in Mexico’s air, combined with listening.
A year ago, while I was standing at my doorway looking over San Miguel de Allende, glowing salmon pink, bells ringing, I spoke in the air to my brother who had passed away.
I said, “Philip, if you’re watching over me, and you’re okay, come sit on my finger as a hummingbird.” I remember thinking, “That was an interesting thing to say.” Two weeks later a hummingbird flew into my apartment and sat on my finger. Two months after that, another one did the same. I had the presence of mind to film both visits. I journaled the song lyrics and put it on youtube. I choose to believe what I choose to believe. But I also know this — I did nothing to make those tiny creatures come other than ask. I only opened my hand and waited. There are many things I have let go of because waiting is so much more peaceful. Carli Rockell does the same thing. Her blue eye doesn’t command. It receives.
SCOUT: Carli’s blue eye sees what others can’t. She is hidden because of it, hunted because of it, and ultimately necessary because of it. Where did she come from?
KEEPER: It started with seeing her handprint in my mind’s eye. I knew she existed. Loveable, huggable Carli Rockell is every child who was ever told that the thing that made them strange was the thing that made them wrong. I was a multilingual child who taught myself ancient Greek in middle school for the pleasure of it. That doesn’t make you popular. Carli’s wound is universal. She is the child who doesn’t fit, but her circumstances are entirely her own.
She was born in a tree. Hidden for her eyes. Rescued by a bus that barrel-rolls through space. And then she arrives at Harbornacles Sanctuary of Primørdial Arts and discovers that her eyes aren’t a flaw. They are the reason she was born necessary.
SCOUT: The world of Primørdiya has its own constructed language, an original orchestral soundtrack, a magic system based on cooperation rather than command. This is not a book assembled quickly. How long did it take?
KEEPER: This is where my love of languages and showed up. And I have my sixth grade teacher for the moment she wrote and sentence on the green chalk board at the front of class and said, “We’re going to learn to diagram sentences.” I thought I had entered heaven. The Primørdian language has its own grammar, root families, verb conjugation.
Primørdian is modeled after Native language systems that use language to convey the thing, state of being, or action as ever present. Nearly three years of almost daily work. Creating the verb roots, pronouns, possessive pronouns, nouns and articles was pure joy for me. That was woven in to the countless mornings I woke up before dawn to warm what had become a sunken depression on the sofa at the horse ranch, then later my kitchen table only to stretch and eat until dinner.
The soundtrack was composed in the spirit of two men who don’t realize are my mentors: Hayao Miyazaki and Joe Hisaishi. Studio Ghibli’s stories have influenced—and calmed me—more than any other form of story. As I worked piecing Carli’s story together, I sensed music. Sound. The soundtrack I produced is the closest I could come to making certain scenes more tangible. It was a great source of encouragement during my months of the final edit.
The magic system emerged from watching how things actually work in nature. In fact, part way into writing, Einstein’s Unified Field Theory was proven. This validated how Carli and her friends are trained to wield primørdial power; a magic system that has to do more with the way nature and the cosmos actually function. Nothing commands anything. Everything cooperates. A tree doesn’t command the rain. Sound doesn’t command the ear. The most powerful force in this world, and in Primørdiya, is resonance. Things that are in harmony with each other. That’s what the apprentices learn to wield, and even use as the ultimate weapon.
SCOUT: On the morning of the solar eclipse in April 2024, the large mesquite tree at your ranch split in half. You kept a piece of the wood. What do you make of that?
KEEPER: Two pieces. One of them is the footstool under my kitchen table where I write. I make of it what I make of the hummingbirds, and Peppy Jack the horse, and the labradorite ring I bought. It turned out to have exactly the same shape as Rinath Island in the story.
Some things arrive as confirmation rather than coincidence. The tree split at the exact point where two great forces met. That’s also what happens in Primørdiya. Gravity is failing. The cosmic Tree of Life is uprooted and dying. A girl born in a tree must find the Fire Seed that can save it. I didn’t plan that echo. The best way to explain it is that I received it.
SCOUT: Last question. Hayao Miyazaki said that if he ever made another film, its theme would be — it is good to be alive. You’ve said the same about Primørdiya.
KEEPER: My most profound belief around story is that good stories are good medicine. Being glad to be alive is one of the most important themes worth writing toward in today’s world.
In fact, when I read that interview with Miyazaki three years ago, I felt a calm, comforting reassurance. Maybe it was the still, small voice. Maybe it was the knowing we are all born with. But I felt it was my torch to pick up and carry.
I’ll say this: every child who has ever felt wrong, different, forgotten, unnecessary — which is most children at some point — deserves a story that tells them the truth. Not that everything will be fine. But that they are necessary. That the world they live in is stranger and more beautiful than anyone told them. That their particular way of seeing — their blue eye, whatever it is — is not a flaw to be hidden. It is the thing the world has been waiting for.
Some children are born ordinary. Carli Rockell was born necessary.
THE SCOUT: You use the word ordinary in your tagline. Some children are born ordinary. Carli Rockell was born necessary. Does ordinary diminish what it means to be a child?
THE KEEPER: That is exactly the right question and I sat with it for a long time. Ordinary is not a diminishment. It is the word the world uses for children it has not yet learned to see. The child who draws every blade of grass before anyone else runs outside. The child with the blue eye everyone tells her to hide. The child pressing handprints on a wall because she needs proof she exists.
The tagline takes the reader from a universal experience, feeling ordinary in the way the world has defined that word, to a specific revelation about one child. And what I hope happens, what I believe happens when the right reader finds this book, is that somewhere between the first page and the last they stop identifying with the ordinary the world assigned them and start recognizing the necessary they were always carrying.
They do not want to be Carli. They realize they already are.
I will also tell you something that surprised me. I have fallen in love with the feeling of being ordinary. There is nothing I enjoy more than an ordinary day. Just being at one with everybody else on this planet. Unremarkable. Present. Breathing.t the same time I hold another truth alongside that one. We are a civilization of walking miracles. Every single one of us. Which makes ordinary and extraordinary not opposites at all. They are the same thing seen from different distances.
So the tagline is not asking the reader to choose between ordinary and necessary. It is asking them to look more closely at what they already are.
SCOUT: One last thing. What are you most excited about right now?
KEEPER: Honestly? That Carli exists in the world at last. After three years of 5am mornings and a horse and kitchen table that have heard everything — the doubts, the discoveries, the moments when a piece of the puzzle finally turned around and showed me its face — she is ready.
And I am already deep in Book Two and Three. I wrote the ending long ago. I’m excited that I have found my peaceful place inside me no matter where home is. And that the world of Primørdiya is very much alive and it’s puzzle puzzle pieces are floating down. I’m enjoying seeing the picture for Book Two and Book THree fall in to place. The rest of the trilogy is beautiful, scary, filled with whimsy and wonder, funny, and most of all? It’s hopeful.
________________________
SCOUT AND KEEPER SERIES
Interview Two: The Blue Eye and the Mostly Yellow Page
SCOUT & KEEPER
A Conversation with K.S.R. Kingworth
On Neurodivergence, Language, Threshold, and the Child Who Needed to Draw Every Blade of Grass
SCOUT: Our first conversation was about the book and the world it came from. This one begins somewhere earlier. With the person who was capable of building that world. You’ve described yourself as neurodivergent. That word means many things to many people. What does it mean in your life?
KEEPER: It means I was probably six or seven years old, lying on the floor of my grandparents’ basement with the neighborhood children, and we all wanted to build a fort in the field next to their house. And I said, “First we need to sketch it out.”
I started drawing. Every board. Every nail. Every blade of grass around the outside. And the other children looked at me and said, “Stop already. Let’s just go build it.”
I remember that moment clearly. Not as a wound, exactly. More as the first time I understood I was assembled differently. I didn’t have a name for it until I was a grandmother. During the pandemic, one of my children sat with me in front of a Netflix series they picked, called Love on the Spectrum. Partway through several episodes, I got very quiet.
I said, “I don’t know how to say this, but I feel like I’m watching my life on this screen.” My child said, “I know. I thought you might.” And then, “You might want to look up adult women on the spectrum.”
I found a checklist. I copied it into a Word document. It ran to six single-spaced pages. When I was finished highlighting everything that applied to me, the document was mostly yellow. I remember thinking, “So that’s why I have had to work so hard to practice looking at people’s eyes instead of their mouths all my adult life.”
SCOUT: What was that moment like for you?
KEEPER: I wept.
SCOUT: Adult women on the spectrum are notoriously difficult to diagnose. The profile doesn’t match the textbook.
KEEPER: We learn to perform. We learn to read rooms, mirror people, laugh at the right moments, ask the right questions. We become, in public, very good at appearing to belong.
I am what you might call a gregarious introvert. I have trained myself to look into people’s eyes, to walk into a room and talk with anyone — from the humblest person in a rural village to the titled and well-known. It makes no difference. We’re all the same. I can make people laugh. And then I go home and learn, again, that I was not invited to the party. That I was asked to sing at the event next door but not asked with the same group the next week. That I am useful, even delightful, but somehow not quite — held.
You begin to understand that you are sometimes experienced as a prop rather than a person. That is a particular and quiet kind of loneliness.
SCOUT: And yet the same wiring produced something rather extraordinary.
KEEPER: That is the mercy of it. The child who had to draw every blade of grass before she could build the fort grew up to construct an entire world with its own language, its own physics, its own orchestral soundtrack. Nearly three years of daily work. Waking before dawn. Not getting up from the kitchen table until my body insisted.
Writing Carli Rockell wasn’t discipline. It was air. It is the way a neurodivergent mind works when it finds the thing it was made for. You don’t choose to go deep. You simply cannot go any other way.
SCOUT: Language has been a recurring thread in your life. Tell me about that.
KEEPER: In ninth grade I taught myself to read ancient Greek. Not because anyone asked me to. Because I found a Greek-English dictionary in our massive home library that was three inches thick. I held it to my chest like I had been handed a treasure. I kept that dictionary for years. Into young motherhood. My most precious possessions were the three-language dictionaries with parallel columns. I would pour over them.
Every time my mother took us to the East Millcreek Library I went straight for the language section. Japanese first. Then Hawaiian. Then Native American hand signals and smoke signals and codes. Later, Sanskrit. As a young mother driving alone through the green mountains of Vermont, I sang the Gayatri Mantra. Over and over. To find peace. I can still sing it from memory.
I am a philologist by nature if not entirely by training. I have always understood, at some level below conscious thought, that language is not just communication. Words are the structure through which a world becomes real. That is why Primørdiya has its own language. It had to. Carli’s world would not have been true without it. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it also meant our world isn’t true without it?
SCOUT: Carli Rockell was born in a tree, hidden for her eyes, rescued by a bus that barrel-rolls through space. She is the child who doesn’t fit. That is clearly not accidental.
KEEPER: Probably not. Carli is every child who was told that the thing that made them strange was the thing that made them wrong. I know that child. I was that child. I didn’t know it when I was writing, I only knew I was writing for that child. Not to tell them everything will be fine — that would be a lie, and children know it — but to tell them that they are necessary. That their particular way of seeing is not a flaw to be corrected. It is the thing the world has been waiting for.
Carli’s blue eye doesn’t command. It perceives. It receives. That is also how I write. You do not force the world into shape. You wait. You listen. You draw every blade of grass until you understand what you are actually building.
SCOUT: You left the United States and came to Mexico. That was not a small decision.
KEEPER: It was a life-saving one. I had witnessed something that changed everything. The laws in my home country around who may own and use a firearm make certain kinds of loss not only possible but predictable. I could not remain in proximity to that reality. I needed distance. I needed a different relationship with time and threshold and ordinary life.
Mexico gave me that. I live high on a hill in San Miguel de Allende, in a place my neighbors call The Nosebleed. One couple calls it The Chicken Coop.
I call it a novel waiting to be written.
I have learned to stand at the threshold between the interior of my home and the world outside the way Mexican families do — at the doorway, not rushing in or out, simply present to the changing light.
There is a reservoir at the end of my street. Every morning, the moment the sun clears the mountains, the egrets fly toward me. Every evening when the light begins to fall below the far horizon, they fly back. I have learned to find my bearings by watching that. By trusting that the light will change, and the birds will know when. I may not be in Miexico much longer, due to not meeting residency requirements. I’ll be off to bloom where I’m planted in Europe. I’m quietly devastated. I’m also delighted I”ll be within a short flight to two of my three children and grandchildren who live on the continent. I also know enough about life, impermanence and surrender, and faith to trust the process.
SCOUT: You mentioned a faith leader whose words gave you permission to trust yourself. You’ve said those words are yours alone. But something was given to you.
KEEPER: Yes. In 2007, a leader in my church called me into his office in downtown Salt Lake City. He was a German speaker. A man of precision and weight. What he said to me — and I will keep the content of it — gave me a foundation I have returned to many times since. I knew I had a work to do with youth. At the time, I had no idea what it meant. These last three years, the words spoken to me echoed, as if to say, “You figured it out.”
I returned to that foundation in the years of illness. In the silence after my first book. In the 5am mornings with Carli. There is a phrase in my tradition: line upon line. You receive what you need when you are ready to use it. I believe that. I have lived it.
SCOUT: What would you say to the child still lying on the basement floor, drawing every blade of grass while everyone else has already run outside?
KEEPER: I would tell that child, “Keep drawing. You are not slow. You are not wrong. You are not broken. You are building something the others cannot yet see. The fort they build today will fall apart by Thursday. Yours is still standing. Some children are born ordinary. Carli Rockell was born necessary. So were you.”
SCOUT: Thank you for this quiet glimpse into your inner world. Sometimes it is the why behind the what that helps us understand what is really going on.
One final question: What do you see yourself doing when the trilogy is complete?
KEEPER: Nothing, in the very best sense of the word. Giving my grandchildren the love and snuggles they deserve. I haven’t been there for them as much as I’d like. Especially the last three years. I see myself living in a charming little home with a stream, a garden, mountain views, trails for walking. A place to hang up my laundry. A village where people gather to laugh and tell stories in the local cafe.
SCOUT: My sense is, that home is already waiting for you.
KEEPER: Mine too. Thank you for this kind, respectful visit. Blessings.
SCOUT AND KEEPER SERIES
Interview Three: The Dog Who Stayed. Composting.
THE SCOUT AND THE KEEPER
A Conversation with K.S.R. Kingworth
The Dog Who Stayed. Composting
THE SCOUT: You published Secret Speakers in 2010 and then didn’t publish again for fifteen years. What were you doing?
THE KEEPER: Not what people expect. I didn’t plant to write middle grade fantasy again. I experienced it as — not yet. Needing more life experience. Or life and death experience. Perhaps the world wasn’t ready. Or I wasn’t. Probably all these things.
I wrote Secret Speakers from bed, during the deepest moments of living with Lyme disease. I finally found treatment. Then life happened. I moved to Mexico. I lived at a horse ranch for a year and spread brown kraft paper across the floor and began mapping something I couldn’t yet name.
Then one day in July 2023, cat sitting for friends on a street whose name translates to Souls, I heard a word whispered in my ear. Primørdiya. I understood immediately that I had been composting for fifteen years without knowing it. That everything I had lived and lost and learned was already in the soil. The story had been growing underground the whole time. I just hadn’t been given permission to see it yet.
THE SCOUT: And when you finally could see it, did you recognize it?
THE KEEPER: Yes. There is no way I could have invented it: a girl born in a tree, hidden for her mismatched eyes, swept to a sanctuary where primørdial arts are taught. I didn’t want to write it at first. World building takes years. About a year into putting the story to words, I realized the trilogy was the outline I had drafted fifteen years earlier for Secret Speakers. I was stunned.
Then months after I finished the manuscript, in a conversation with myself I wasn’t expecting to have, I understood something that took my breath away. I had written this story before. Not the same story. But the same truth. Fifteen years earlier, in a different book, with different characters, I had written toward the same revelation without knowing I was doing it.
THE SCOUT: What was the revelation?
THE KEEPER: That something ancient and vast has always known who we are. Not because we earned it. Not because we proved ourselves. Simply because we always were worthy of being known. Of being held.
In Secret Speakers there is a dog. In Carli Rockell a dog is hinted at in book one. They are not the same dog in the way a reader would notice on first reading. But I now know — and I say this with complete certainty — that they are the same soul. The same presence. Waiting outside the door in both stories. In one book, present and comforting. Sacrificing. In the other, absent but never truly gone.
I didn’t plan that. I received it across fifteen years without knowing I was receiving it. I did realize two years into writing Primørdiya that this was the continuation of the series I had outlined fifteen years earlier that ended with the earth shifting into the Crystal Era. I was shocked. And also shocked to realize the dog had slowly reappeared in Carli Rockell’s story, like a revelation.
THE SCOUT: What does a dog know that we don’t?
THE KEEPER: Everything that matters. A dog does not wait outside your door because you deserve it. A dog waits because that is what love does. It stays. It keeps its feet warm. It is there on the worst nights and the ordinary ones. Not because you earned the company but because you were always the company worth keeping.
That is the medicine at the center of both books. It took me fifteen years and two novels and a conversation I wasn’t prepared for to understand that I had been writing it the whole time.
THE SCOUT: What do you want a child to feel when they close Carli Rockell and the Fire Seed for the first time?
THE KEEPER: That something has always known them. Before they could speak or read or prove themselves in any way at all. Something patient and ancient and warm has always been just outside the door. That they didn’t have to earn it. They are worth staying for.