There are authors who write about magic as though it’s a useful narrative device. And then there are authors for whom magic is closer to a genuine metaphysical position — a way of understanding the relationship between history, place, and the human interior. Michelle Lovric is in the second category.
Her Undrowned Child series is set in Venice, a city she knows in the kind of depth that takes decades rather than research trips. When she writes about the way magic attaches to Venetian architecture, to the smell of canal water, to the specific quality of light in certain seasons, she is writing from a relationship with the city that informs every sentence.
On why Venice:
Venice has been dying for centuries, and it knows it. That awareness gives the city a relationship with time that is unlike anywhere else I know. The past and the present coexist there in ways that feel almost physical. When you walk the streets, the past is not behind you — it is beside you. That is exactly the right environment for a certain kind of magic.
On writing for children:
Children are not smaller adults. They have a different relationship with narrative certainty — they are more comfortable with strangeness, less resistant to the genuinely unexplained. Writing for children means respecting that. You cannot reassure them with false resolution. The strangeness has to be real.
On Halloween:
In Venice, All Saints and All Souls are not occasions for dressed-up fun. They are the days when the dead are particularly close. Every city has its dead, but Venice wears its mortality differently.
Author: Michelle Lovric · Books: The Undrowned Child series
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Michelle Lovric and what does she write? Michelle Lovric is the author of the Undrowned Child series, set in Venice. The interview describes her as an author for whom ‘magic is closer to a genuine metaphysical position — a way of understanding the relationship between history, place, and the human interior,’ rather than a narrative device. She knows Venice ‘in the kind of depth that takes decades rather than research trips.’
Why does Michelle Lovric set her fiction in Venice? In her own words: ‘Venice has been dying for centuries, and it knows it. That awareness gives the city a relationship with time that is unlike anywhere else I know. The past and the present coexist there in ways that feel almost physical — when you walk the streets, the past is not behind you, it is beside you. That is exactly the right environment for a certain kind of magic.’
What does Michelle Lovric say about writing for children? Lovric says ‘children are not smaller adults — they have a different relationship with narrative certainty’ and are ‘more comfortable with strangeness, less resistant to the genuinely unexplained.’ Writing for children means ‘respecting that — you cannot reassure them with false resolution. The strangeness has to be real.’
What is Michelle Lovric’s view on Halloween and Venice? Lovric notes that in Venice, ‘All Saints and All Souls are not occasions for dressed-up fun — they are the days when the dead are particularly close. Every city has its dead, but Venice wears its mortality differently.’ This reflects her broader view of the city as a place where the dead and the living maintain an unusually close relationship.
Further Reading from Authoritative Sources
- Venice — Wikipedia’s Venice article provides geographical, historical, and cultural context for the city that is the setting and central subject of Michelle Lovric’s Undrowned Child series and this interview’s discussion.
- All Souls’ Day — Wikipedia’s All Souls’ Day article contextualises the Catholic observance that Lovric references in her Halloween discussion, helping readers understand the tradition she is contrasting with secular Halloween celebrations.
