Q&A with Erin Cotter

  

Photo by Loren Cressler

 

 

Erin Cotter is the author of the new young adult novel A Dangerous Bargain. Her other books include A Traitorous Heart. She lives in Austin, Texas.

 

Q: What inspired you to write A Dangerous Bargain, and how did you create your character Virgil?

 

A: A Dangerous Bargain was inspired by AI. I was sitting in the airport traveling to promote my second book when I learned from the Atlantic LibGen database that my book had already been pirated to train AI less than two weeks after its release.

 

I was angry and heartbroken. What’s the point of writing a book without doing any of the labour of it? How could anyone call themselves an artist when they were skipping the creative process?

 

I began to wonder if bygone artists would be as pissed about this as I was, and this turned into imagining what an age of AI would’ve looked like during the Italian Renaissance—one of my favourite time periods—and A Dangerous Bargain came from there.

 

I knew I wanted Virgil to be someone who needed to learn to be nice to himself. He has a lot of baggage in the beginning of the story—some of it his fault, some of it not—and his walls are so high, they could protect medieval Italian village from a siege.

 

His name is a chosen name because he likes the thought of being someone who can lead people through darkness—a direct nod to the fact that the famous Roman poet Virgil is Dante’s guide through hell in The Divine Comedy.

 

A Dangerous Bargain explores some heavy topics such as forgiveness, guilt, and reckoning with the cost of bad decisions, so Virgil himself goes on a personal journey through his own darkness and emerges on the other side knowing he’s worthy of love and self-kindness.

 

Q: How would you describe the dynamic between Virgil and the young Leonardo da Vinci, who appears as another character in the book?

 

A: The boys are rival apprentices in a Renaissance painting studio, and have been at odds with each other for years. Serious, buttoned-up Virgil is endlessly annoyed by Leonardo’s cocky charm and lack of respect for the rules.

 

I love their banter, the he-said-he-said of it all, and how you get a hint that if they could just communicate and figure out their own problems, they might be able to create something incredible. They respect each other, think they don’t like each other, but also can’t stop obsessing over the other. This is the most fun I’ve ever had writing a romance.

 

Q: The author Pascale Lacelle said of the book, “Erin Cotter reminds us of the inherent humanity of art—and the power in letting beauty shine through flaws.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: My first thought is that wow, Pascale is SO nice to have said that! My second thought is that this is exactly what I was trying to explore with story.

 

The humanity of art is so very important right now to me. The fast technology changes coupled with the hyper-capitalist moment we’re all currently living through feels dangerous to human creativity.

 

I don’t think outsourcing our imaginations to robots, or feeling like we can only create something if it’s profitable helps us as individuals or as a society.   

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: I once got locked inside a municipal park in Italy, and I was really hoping I could bring that anecdote into this story, but there wasn’t room. Maybe for the next one! 

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb