Erica Ferencik | Writers' Voices

Screenwriter, novelist, and stand-up comic, Erica Ferencik, joins us to discuss her third published novel, Girl in Ice. “The storyline is about an American linguist named Val who is tasked to go to a very remote climate research center off the coast of Greenland where a girl has been found in the ice and she’s thawed out alive, speaking a language no one understands…that’s the mystery part. The thriller part is that…her brother, Andy, was at this climate research center with Wyatt, who runs the center and the year previous, her brother, Andy, wandered outside fifty degrees below zero and froze to death.” Val, shaken and upset by the death of Andy, who everyone believed was suicidal, reluctantly decides to head to the Arctic to meet the girl in ice, but also to solve the mystery of her brother’s death.

During the conversation, Ferencik discussed the prevalence of climate change found in several of her novels. She said, “It’s a part of our lives right now and it helps us to process, it’s kinda like watching a scary movie… I think that climate change in novels, it offers a huge, I mean sad as it is, it offers a huge opportunity to explore this world that we live in.” When asked how much of herself is in her characters, she said, “I’m all of them… I’m Wyatt, I’m like the frustrated person who wants to know everything about the world, just give it to me, give it to me… I’m Val, because I’m terrified when I wake up in the morning, aren’t we all these days? I’m an extrovert and an introvert… there’s little bits of me in all of them.”

In closing, Ferencik commented, “I have this, I do have this feeling about, of awe, about the world. I’m just in love with, just the wonder that remains, the mysteries that remain, we have a simultaneous need for wonder and mystery and then this impulse to destroy it and that fascinates me.”