In between training in ballet and watching lots of Disney movies, Alyssa Wees grew up writing stories starring her Beanie Babies. She earned a BA in English from Creighton University and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago. Currently she works as an assistant librarian in youth services at an awesome public library. She lives in the Chicagoland area with her husband and their two cats.Here Wees explains her choice for director of an adaptation of her debut novel, The Waking Forest:
When I write, I don’t picture my characters as certain actors, and even now that I’m done writing The Waking Forest, I still don’t have much of a dream cast. But I do have a dream director: Guillermo Del Toro. The wonder and darkness of Pan’s Labyrinth, one of my favorite movies, inspired the way I played with magic in The Waking Forest and thought about what it means to see into another, stranger world that no one else seems to see. For Ofelia in the movie, her fantasy world interwoven with the real one is both a blessing and a burden, and Rhea in The Waking Forest experiences a similar sense of awe as well as a weight as she discovers a realm that seems to exist outside the often rigid bounds of reality. Many of his films deal with magic and fairy tale tropes, and he has such a beautiful and haunting understanding of monstrousness that I think he’d perfectly capture the tone and themes of The Waking Forest.Visit Alyssa Wees's website.
--Marshal Zeringue
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