Leigh Butler, Wheel of Time blogger

Interview by Priya Chayya

1. I first discovered the Wheel of Time (WOT) in college when my roommate recommended the series to me. What was your moment of discovery?

Mine was college too! I was standing in the university bookstore one day staring in total paralyzed indecision at their sci-fi/fantasy shelf, when this random guy stopped next to me and pointed at The Eye of the World and said, “You should try that one. It’s really good.”

And I did. And the rest, as they say, is history. I always found it rather poetic, or amusing, or both, that my life was ultimately completely changed by an offhand comment made by a total stranger I’ll never see again in a bookstore in Texas. Life is weird.

2. How did you get involved with TOR and the recaps for the series?

Ah. Well, there’s a story. There’s a short version of it, but of course I’m going to tell you the longer one, because that is how I roll.

So, at the time I started reading WOT, the seventh book in the series (A Crown of Swords) had just come out in paperback. I tore through all seven then-published books in the series in approximately four seconds, and then was livid when I realized the next one wasn’t coming out for a year. And no one else I knew at the time was even into sf, much less wanted to talk/geek out about it with me, and ergo I was a very sad WOT-deprived Muppet.

So in desperation, I did what is totally common practice now, but which was a pretty novel thing for me at the time, which was to go looking for stuff about the series on the Internet. Mind you, at the time I’d only just figured out how to use email, so no doubt this adventure was terribly embarrassing for everyone involved. But eventually I stumbled onto this bizarre corner of the World Wide Web called Usenet, which most people probably don’t even remember existed by now. Also, get off my lawn.

Anyway, I somehow discovered a newsgroup on there called rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan, which is pretty self-explanatory as titles go, and after initially making a giant fool of myself I realized I had found exactly what I was looking for and had never had before – a group of people who liked the same things I liked, and more importantly, were willing to argue with me for hours about those things. Fellow geeks. I had found my people!

Some of my closest friends in my life were made as a result of that newsgroup, people I am still friends with today and probably will be for the rest of my life. One of those friends was Kate Nepvue, who among many other impressive things is a fandom goddess, and was one of the first people Tor.com recruited to blog on their site when they first got it up and running in 2008 or thereabouts. Kate wrote the very popular (and far more legitimately scholarly) Lord of the Rings Re-read for them, which you should totally read when you get the chance. (She’s also currently doing a re-read of The Hobbit!)

Right about then was when Harriet McDougal, Robert Jordan’s widow and editor, decided to complete the Wheel of Time series with another handpicked author, the very awesome Brandon Sanderson. So the folks at Tor.com, seeing the success of Kate’s blog series, decided that doing a similar re-read of the Wheel of Time series would be just the thing.

They originally asked Kate to do it, but Kate didn’t have the time to do both blogs at once, especially considering that WOT even then was four times as long as LOTR, so she had to turn them down. They asked her for suggestions on who could do it, and she suggested me, based on my time as the editor of the Wheel of Time FAQ, which was, in its heyday (i.e. before the newsgroup – and the rest of Usenet – died a lingering death), one of the most comprehensive (and comprehensible) compilations of theories, trivia, analysis, and information about the Wheel of Time series on the Internet. It was the Wheel of Time Wiki before there were such things as wikis, and I was damn proud of it even though circumstances had forced me to eventually abandon it.

But even so, the WOTFAQ remains a pretty impressive piece of writing/editing, I think. And so Tor.com came to me, and I agreed, having no bloody idea what madness I was getting into. And suddenly here we are, almost four years later. It still kind of blows my mind sometimes, the capriciousness of fate.

3. One of the things I really love about your recaps is how honest they are. You are great at pointing out positives and negatives on how Jordan pulled together his narrative. Did anything surprise you along the way?

Thank you! One of the really wonderful things about working with Tor.com on this is how great they’ve been about not attempting to censor me – or any of their writers – in either style or opinion. Which makes for a wonderfully dynamic pool of content that I think they should be proud of. It’s especially great for me because I honestly don’t think I could do it any other way. If you can’t be honest about your opinions on something, what’s the point?

Lots of things surprised me along the way. Most often (especially at first) would be the reactions some of my commentary got from the readers, both positive and negative. Probably the most infamous example was in a post during my re-read of The Shadow Rising, in which I realized that it was being implied that Perrin had spanked Faile; I went ballistic, not to put too fine a point on it. And then was (perhaps naïvely) rather astonished at the vehemence of the debate in the comments that ensued.

But I think that is a good thing. The entire purpose of art, in my view, is to provoke a response in those who experience it, and part of the reason I was so drawn to WOT in the first place was because of how much it made me think about issues that I might otherwise never have bothered to examine so closely. And it is inevitable that some of the reactions to those issues will be negative, and that’s as it should be.

I personally think we learn far more from our negative responses to things than we do from happy fluffy things that don’t bother us. To ignore those not-so-good things merely for the sake of maintaining a happy tone or whatever would render any attempt at literary criticism or commentary cheap and useless – not to mention fundamentally dishonest.

4. The recaps are also really great at pointing out connections. One of the hard things about being a fan (as opposed to an uber-fan, which is how I am with Star Wars) is that you don’t keep track of names, and faces that well. Your recaps helped me to find nuggets of information that I had missed even in the first six books which I have read about 20 times. How do you keep it all straight?

My years maintaining the WOTFAQ were an enormous help there, for sure. It’s one thing to merely read something and then retain it in your mind, but actually having to organize and write and edit it for a FAQ article does an amazing job of ironing that stuff into your long-term memory. That said, there are plenty of fans out there who far outstrip me in obscure WOT trivia; I am at best a B-level student compared to many of them.

And of course, I also totally cheat. Bob Kluttz’s wonderful Encyclopedia WOT, for instance, has saved me from embarrassing myself on the Re-read countless times, and even without having been updated for the last few books, the WOTFAQ’s References, Sources, Allusions and Parallels section is still a goldmine of yummy meta tidbits.

5. I know that one of the elements that drew me into the series was the idea of these five villagers leaving their home and all that they have known to go on a Journey/Quest. It’s no surprise that the set up reminded me a lot about The Hobbit and LOTR–with one notable exception: The ladies. Do you have a favorite female character? Has that changed over the years? Why? (Full Disclosure: Mine has always been Zarine/Faile, but in this recent re-read it may have ended up becoming Nynaeve).

You could make a strong case, really, that the Wheel of Time story could be described (especially in the beginning) as “The Lord of the Rings without the misogyny”, and that is definitely a huge part of what sucked me in and made me love the series as much as I do.

Even today, as a female consumer of speculative fiction I am often starved for depictions of female characters who are neither ciphers nor adjuncts nor hypersexualized objects, all which are different ways of saying “irrelevant”. And one thing you could never say about the female characters in WOT is that they are irrelevant. Back in the day when I first started reading the series, that was almost literally like a breath of fresh air, and even now I still savor it.

It is interesting that you say Faile is your favorite female character in WOT, because Faile has always been problematic for me, as I’m sure you’re aware if you’ve read the Re-read. Not that I can’t see her good points.

As for who is my favorite female character, it would actually be rather difficult for me to say at this point. Before I began the Re-read I would have said that Nynaeve was far and away the front-runner, but she eventually ended up with a rather delightful amount of competition for the position. Egwene in particular, for whom my feelings used to range from indifference to annoyance, rather stole my heart on closer inspection. But then again, Nynaeve is badass.

I’m just pleased I actually have a range of choices for the question!

6. Jordan’s depiction of female characters isn’t perfect. I know from your re-caps that this frustrated you at times. Now that we are one book away, do some of his choices (in terms of their decision-making) make more sense? Is there anything that you wished he would have done instead?

His choices are what they are. It’s not that they didn’t make sense, it’s that I didn’t think they always necessarily made the sense that Jordan thought they did.

Jordan was unquestionably amazingly progressive in his views on women, especially compared to many (or most, honestly) of his contemporaries in speculative fiction (and even compared to many of his successors, who really ought to know better by now). That said, privilege can be a frustratingly elusive bugbear even for those who are experts in seeing it, and Jordan made his mistakes there just as everyone does. And it is important to point those mistakes out (and to debate whether they are mistakes), but the far more relevant thing to remember is that on the “positive depictions of women” scoreboard, he hit far more often than he missed.

(And Brandon Sanderson, I am happy to say, has done a marvelous job of maintaining Jordan’s batting average, so to speak, and in fact in several areas of privilege debunking has even improved upon it.)

As for whether I wish Jordan had done anything different, I would tend to say no, actually. And this is simply because mistakes in art have their own intrinsic value. Just as negative responses to a thing are often more informative than positive ones, the mistakes we make often teach us volumes more about ourselves and the world than our successes ever do.

For instance, probably the greatest instance of “privilege fail” Jordan ever committed in the course of writing WOT (in my opinion, of course) was the way he depicted the relationship between Queen Tylin and Mat Cauthon. He obviously intended it to be a lighthearted, frivolous romp, and instead ended up inadvertently advocating some rather deeply unpleasant implications, which generated a storm of controversy among the fans, myself included.

But the thing is, that storm of controversy ended up being an enormously instructive and eye-opening experience for me, as well as (I believe) many other fans. So while none of that was fun, in the end I think the value of what I learned from Jordan’s mistake vastly outweighed any damage he caused in committing it. So in that light I cannot honestly say I wish he had never written it that way.

7. I just finished the penultimate book and it made me think about Jordan’s body of work. I remember being crushed when I heard of his passing, but for someone who had invested so much time into the series, did his death affect you in a particular way?

Robert Jordan’s death was a strange thing for me – or rather, it came at a very strange time for me. Ironically, at the time I had all but fallen out of WOT fandom entirely, owing to any number of outside factors, including (but not limited to) the pressures of my career, the gradual decline of the Robert Jordan newsgroup (which was then my main avenue into the fandom), the aftereffects of Hurricane Katrina (which devastated the homes and lives of any number of my family and friends for years afterward), and the death of my father, which actually happened shortly after Robert Jordan’s own passing. So to say I was a tad distracted at the time would probably be to woefully understate the case.

That said, I still remember the jolt I got at the news, and the deep sadness that I felt, thinking (at the time) that something that had brought me such joy and companionship and connection to others would now never be finished. I’ve always said that in terms of how it has changed my life, the Wheel of Time has always been the most profoundly influential piece of art I’ve ever experienced (something which has only become more true as the years pass), and it seemed to me a truly terrible tragedy that he did not have the chance to complete his masterwork. As a writer myself, that just offended me, on some visceral level.

At least part of why I so willingly came back to the fandom and began the Re-read for Tor.com, then, was my pleasure and relief that someone was doing what they could to remedy that injustice. All discussion of flaws or imperfections aside, Brandon and Team Jordan have done a great thing here, making sure that this story finally got told, and I will always salute them for it, and be glad that in my own small way I can help to illuminate it.

8. We are now waiting for the final book in the series. Are there any predictions/hopes that you have for this final edition?

Unfortunately this is one question I cannot give you an answer on. As has been the tradition since I started the Re-read, the folks at Tor (and Harriet and Brandon) have allowed me the wonderful privilege of doing one of the only advance reviews available for the release of the final volume, and as a result I have (a) already read the last book, and (b) vowed to keep my mouth solidly shut about it until its release date on January 8th.

Sorry! However, if you would like to read my completely spoiler-free review of A Memory of Light, it is up on Tor.com right here, and on the release date I will be doing a much fuller (and spoiler-laden) review of the book, as well. You should come read it when it goes up!

9. Finally, in your recaps you write about moments of awesomeness or moments of epiphany. When one of the characters finally makes a connection, or reaches a place where they grow. Tell me about your favorite moment. (Mine is a toss up. When Nynaeve finally removes her block, and more recently when Perrin finally takes his place as a leader and finally forges the hammer.)

Both of those are unquestionably completely awesome moments that I adored. However, for me I think my vote for “most amazing moment of paradigm shift” in WOT (excluding any reference to the final book) is split between two scenes.

On the one hand, the scene where Mat and Birgitte mutually recognize each other’s awesome in A Crown of Swords is one of my favorite bits in the entire series, to the extent that I quoted the entire thing verbatim in the Re-read. But on the other, there is the scene way back in The Eye of the World, where Rand stands before Queen Morgase and her court, and hears Elaida’s Foretelling of him:

“From this day Andor marches toward pain and division. The Shadow has yet to darken to its blackest, and I cannot see if the Light will come after. Where the world has wept one tear, it will weep thousands. […] This, too, I Foretell. Pain and division come to the whole world, and this man stands at the heart of it.”

Chills. Still, even now. Because it was a moment of epiphany not only for Rand, but it was one for me the reader too, as I realized just what the scope of this story I had embarked upon actually was. That was the moment where I was irretrievably hooked.