As a young boy, Jeffrey Overstreet would bring home library books and copy down their entire text. Soon he was making changes to the stories—and by age seven writing his own adventure fiction.
The one genre that particularly captured his imagination was fairy tales. Jeffrey recalls a conversation about fairy tales he had years ago with then girlfriend (now wife) Anne:
“She mentioned that most people seem to reach an age when they’re kind of done with make-believe and fold up their imagination in a closet. When she said that, I got a picture of a kingdom drained of color, where the people are forced to put away all their imaginative expressions, all their creative projects, all their colors.”
Little did Jeffrey know the next 15 years of his life would be dominated by trying to bring this world to life in what would become the Auralia’s Thread series. The finale is revealed in The Ale Boy’s Feast (Waterbrook Press), as the survivors of House Abascar must decide whether to merge with House Bel Amica or make a final desperate journey to find their own home.
“There are a lot of mysterious things about the world and about God,” Jeffrey states, “and we try and cast a net around those mysteries with art. That’s why I think fairy tales have a very unique place in art and literature, as they are exploring and asking questions about things that more literal or realistic forms of storytelling can’t.”