Author Interview w/Emily Klotz
- Laken Honeycutt
- Oct 26
- 19 min read
In this week’s Author’s Nook interview, writer and artist Emily Klotz dives deep into the myths, mysteries, and moral questions that shape her YA fantasy trilogy The Gods of Atalantis. Drawing from her background in literature, visual art, and teaching, Emily discusses reimagining the legend of Atlantis, exploring themes of faith, power, and free will, and crafting a story where belief itself can change the world.
Writing Origins & Process
You’ve been writing stories since you could hold a crayon—what has kept that creative spark alive over the years, and when did you know you wanted to pursue publishing seriously?
Honestly, I haven’t had to work hard to keep the creative spark alive. Telling stories is something that has always brought me enormous joy, and ideas for stories are constantly popping into my head and demanding to be told. It’s sometimes hard for me to mentally pull myself out of my stories so I can actually get other work done.
That said, though, I definitely run into periods where my writing slows down a lot or even grinds to a halt. I think all writers know there are days when, as much as you love your story and characters, you just do not want to write. It’s so much easier to let them live in your head and not put in the effort of trying to capture them on the page. But I think what keeps me going through those dead times is just remembering that whatever I write doesn’t have to be perfect, and no one else is going to do it; so if I don’t, then these beautiful characters and their stories will never get told, and they’d never forgive me for letting them down like that.
Publishing has been a dream of mine since I was a teenager. Even though I've been disillusioned in a lot of ways by what the process of getting published is actually like, I've never let go of that dream.
As an English teacher and artist, how does your background in both literature and visual art influence your approach to storytelling?
Ever since I was a kid, art and writing have gone hand in hand. I used to tell stories just through crayon drawings before I really got the hang of writing, and once I started writing more seriously, I always loved creating art to go with my stories. As an undergrad, I double-majored in English and Art, and a lot of what I was doing in one major would compliment the other. I think now, when I write, that background influences what I choose to emphasize & how I construct the story. My literature background means I can’t help but think in terms of themes, symbols and character arcs, even before I start writing the story. In my major I had a big focus on mythology and folklore, and I pull from that a lot. As for art, getting to not only draw my characters but also create things like maps or fantasy alphabets has helped me really flesh out the world.
You mentioned that your Atalantis trilogy began with a story you wrote as a child. What was it like rediscovering that early idea and transforming it into something new and complex as an adult?
At first it was just funny. Growing up, I kept dozens of notebooks full of my story ideas, and when I left for college most of those old notebooks got shoved into a trunk in my parents’ attic. When they moved to a new house a few years later, my dad mentioned he had this trunk of my old notebooks and asked if I wanted it, which of course I said I did! As I started going through them, I went hunting for what I guessed was the oldest one, going all the way back to about when I was in 6th grade. I opened the first page, and the first word was “Atlantis.” My mind was blown; I had completely forgotten I ever wrote a story about Atlantis. But as I started reading it, immediately it all came rushing back to me. But you know, I don’t think any of us are writing geniuses in 6th grade, and this thing was hilariously bad (in a cute way). The characters all had modern names despite the fact it was supposed to be set circa 10,000 BCE. The story was cliche and the characters were flat and... it was just bad.
So I didn’t really think of it seriously at first. But at some point it occurred to me, “Hey... maybe I could actually write a GOOD Atlantis story?” That idea also sat on the shelf for a while until I was hit with inspiration one day and did a long brainstorming session where I came up with most of the characters, the basic premise of the plot, and the first chapter, all in a single afternoon. There are some very, very small traces of that original Atlantis story in this one, but for the most part the two versions are completely different. But I’ll always love the fact that this current story would most likely not exist if I hadn’t rediscovered that older one.
The Gods of Atalantis
Your YA fantasy trilogy begins with The Gods of Atalantis, where Mireia is chosen as a goddess and must navigate power, belief, and destiny. What inspired this particular world and premise?
The world of course is inspired by the legend of Atlantis, which I did a lot of research into once I had decided to seriously start writing about it. Plato was the first we know of to write about Atlantis, and if you read his dialogues it’s pretty clear he was probably not referring to a real place but was using it as a device to teach a lesson about how materialism, greed and hubris can topple a thriving empire. I wanted to stay true to the spirit of Plato’s dialogues, while also making the story my own and incorporating more elements relevant to our current world. My research also led me to dig into a few Victorian “mystics” who repopularized the myth of Atlantis in the 1800s, such as Ignatius Donnelly and Edgar Cayce. Some of these writers added new elements to Plato’s story, such as the concept of crystals as a power source and reincarnation (both ideas which I incorporated into my version). Unfortunately these Victorian writers also often veered into racism territory, theorizing that Atlanteans were some kind of original master race who taught the Mayans and Egyptians how to build pyramids (because how could they have possibly figured that out on their own!). Discovering this aspect of the lore really shaped how I decided to tell the story, since I very much wanted to, first, make it clear that the Atlanteans in my version are not inherently superior to other people, and second, portray racism/imperialism as a major element of why ultimately the island gets destroyed.
Also, to be clear: ATLANTIS WAS NOT A REAL PLACE. I feel a responsibility to emphasize this.
For the premise of the plot, it came to me partially out of my research and partially as an evolution of my original story. In my original 6th grade version, the protagonist was just an ordinary girl who goes to work as a servant in the palace and catches the eye of the prince. In the new version, at first I wanted the protagonist to end up in an arranged marriage with a prince, but then fall for someone else. However, I couldn’t think of a reason why an ordinary girl would be chosen to marry a prince, unless people believed there was something special about her. The idea that maybe she was thought to be an incarnated goddess was what I settled on, and later changed it so that instead of being betrothed to a prince, she is paired up with a boy who is also thought to be an incarnated god & her divine counterpart. The goddess Mu’u, aka the “Sea Mother,” Mireia’s goddess persona, got her name from the word Mu which comes up a lot in Atlantis lore. Sometimes it refers to another lost continent, sometimes it seems to be a different name for Atlantis itself, and sometimes it refers to a queen of Atlantis. I took the word and decided it would be the name of the goddess who is viewed as the mother of Atlantis. I liked the idea that even though Mireia is forgotten, her title still lingers in humanity’s collective memory to the present day.
TL;DR, the premise and world grew naturally over time out of the research, and from there the themes of power, belief and destiny just became obvious.
The story explores faith, power, and narrative control—how people shape belief and how belief, in turn, shapes them. How do you approach writing about belief systems with nuance, especially given your own background in deconstructing faith?
The complexities of belief, faith & narrative are something that’s present in pretty much all my stories, and probably always will be. In this story, tackling the idea of belief and narrative just made sense. First, because the main characters Mireia and Kena are allegedly gods; and second, because the concept of Atlantis itself sits in a kind of blurry space between myth and reality, where some folks out there do genuinely believe (or want to believe) it was a place that actually existed once.
My goal was that it wouldn’t be completely clear one way or the other if Mireia and Kena actually are gods; I think there are parts of the story where it seems like they must be, and other parts of the story where it seems like they’re surely just ordinary humans chosen to play a role. That ambiguity asks the reader to decide what you think. And what you decide to believe depends a lot on what you want to believe.
In the story, what ultimately matters is not whether Mireia and Kena actually are gods, but that the people believe they are. It’s the narrative about them and their love that sort of holds the whole society together, and when some antagonists come along and challenge that narrative, that’s when things start to fall apart. For Mireia, she doesn’t fully become the Sea Mother until she chooses to believe it, even while knowing it might not be true, because she comes to understand that it’s the story itself that has power. By embracing the story, she makes it true, and thus allows it to change her.
Personally, I think faith can be a beautiful and valuable thing. As is said a few times in the story, people need to believe in something, because it helps us get through our day-to-day lives. But there’s a dangerous side of faith too, where it can be used to justify harm toward others, or where powerful people can twist the narrative to fit their own ends. We see that happening very dramatically in our world today, and it’s one of the things that drove me to deconstruct my own faith years ago. I hope this story can show both the good and bad sides of faith: how the narratives we believe in can give us strength and comfort and purpose, but also how they can be the source of great harm in the world. It’s just like Atlantis itself: is there anything wrong with believing Atlantis was real? In theory, no; it could even make the world seem a little more magical. But then, you know, it’s also been used in the past to justify racism... So we have to think about why we believe what we believe, and be aware of how easy it is for bad actors to manipulate beliefs to justify cruelty and oppression.
The dynamic between Mireia and Kena plays with the “fated lovers” trope. What drew you to that idea, and how did you balance the mythic romance with questions of agency and free will?
So funnily enough, this element actually came indirectly from my 6th grade story. In that story, the main character falls in love with the prince, but as I was reading it as an adult all I could think was He’s so boring! They have no chemistry! You’re just putting them together because you feel like that’s how it has to go!
So when I started trying to rework the story into something new, my first idea was that I was going to troll my 12 year old self and have the main character be paired up with a super boring guy that everyone told her she was “destined” to marry, but she’d rebel against it and end up with someone else whom she actually had a spark with. But, as I was trying to develop the story, I absolutely could not get this idea to work. Every way I thought of it felt wrong. So finally I realized, she was going to end up with the “destined” guy after all. But if that was the case, I swore to myself that Kena was not going to be boring or shallow; he had to be the best dang character in the whole story. Once I decided on that, everything just kind of clicked into place.
The idea that Mireia and Kena are “fated” to be together is another way I play with the theme of how belief and narratives shape our lives. Since Mireia is naturally rebellious, she resists the idea of falling for Kena purely because everyone keeps telling her they’re meant to be. But she ends up eventually falling for him in spite of herself, and it’s left an open question: were they really “fated” to be together, or did they fall in love as a natural result of their circumstances—two attractive kids chosen for their compatible personality traits, forced to spend a lot of time together in high pressure situations, while their entire culture is shipping them together...? Maybe it wasn’t fate so much as the belief in the narrative that led it to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
OR, maybe they really are reincarnated lovers destined to choose each other in every lifetime! It’s up to the reader to decide.
One of Mireia’s strongest values is freedom, but when she starts off she doesn’t have a clear idea of what that really means. As she gets older, she develops a more nuanced view. Nobody has pure free will; we’re all shaped by our circumstances, one way or the other. But what really matters is what we choose to do within those circumstances. When she finally gets together with Kena, it’s because she’s chosen to do so, because she can admit it’s what she genuinely wants and not just what “fate” has forced her into.
Themes & Symbolism
You’ve said your work often examines fate versus free will. Why does that tension resonate with you as a storyteller—and how do you explore it through character choices rather than just plot events?
Fate vs free will is a theme that’s fascinated me for a long time, and I think that also goes back to my roots in fundamentalist Christianity. If you read the Bible and take it seriously, you eventually run into tricky questions about whether God knew what people would do in advance, and if he knew then did the people have any real choice about it, and if they didn’t have a choice then how could it possibly be fair to punish them...? This is a logic knot that can really mess you up if you think about it for too long, which I did. Even later in life this topic popped up in other non-religious places, like Stephen Hawking’s writings about determinism. The idea that our actions might all be predetermined is weirdly both scary and comforting, because it means you have no real freedom but also no real responsibility for your actions, and to me that’s a topic that’s rich to explore. My real beliefs are that we aren’t all predetermined to make certain choices, but we also can never have true freedom; our choices are shaped by outside forces we may not even be aware of. And I’m also conscious that, as interesting as I find the topic, it can get a little navel-gazey.
Early on in the story, Mireia makes a lot of decisions in which she is consciously trying to assert her free will and rebel against what she’s expected to do. But the irony is, in doing so, she just ends up going more and more down the “predictable” path. I think by the time the trilogy is done it will be clear that acting contrary just for the sake of it is still not freedom; Mireia is still letting her choices be dictated by outside forces (people and narratives), just in a backwards way. As she gets older, she starts to realize that what she genuinely wants should matter more than what’s expected of her; so if she genuinely wants to be with Kena, it’s okay for her to pursue that relationship, even if it might be the “predictable” path. Ultimately she realizes that her own preoccupation with “fate vs free well” is, to an extent, pointless navel-gazing, and what really matters is just that she does what makes her happy here in this life.
Power and narrative are closely linked in your stories—how those in control shape the stories others believe. How does that idea manifest in The Gods of Atalantis?
Atalantis (my spelling in the book) is basically a utopian society, or as close to one as you can get, and it’s a society that only functions the way it does because everything is centered around powerful and universally accepted narratives—about the gods, about the people, about the elite families and the monarchs, etc. The narratives themselves are power. So it’s no big surprise that those who want to seize power use narratives as their main weapon. They understand that if they can control the narrative, they can control the whole culture.
Many of the antagonists of the story are part of a cult that believes Mireia is not the true Sea Mother, and they use narratives against her to try to rob her of her power. Some other antagonists are colonizers who seek to spread narratives that they are the superior breed of human with a right to conquer the “barbarians” of other lands. Mireia’s identity as a mixed-race girl with the goal of ending slavery challenges this particular narrative in ways the villains REALLY don’t like. Mireia and Kena both quickly come to understand that everything is controlled by narratives, and that they themselves—as the main characters in The Narrative, the love story of the gods—have massive power because of that, if they can learn to use it.
And now I’ve said the word “narrative” so much it doesn’t look like a real word anymore.
You also focus on writing healthy relationships between men and women and positive examples of masculinity. Why is that important to you, especially in the YA fantasy space?
I’m gonna try not to sound judgy here, haha. I really like the genre of YA fantasy and romantasy in theory, but I get frustrated when a lot of the most popular books—ones being often read by quite young people—feature romances where the male love interest (because let’s face it, these are mostly hetero romances) is toxic and manipulative, but still gets framed as a dream boyfriend for the female protagonist. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with having toxic and manipulative characters, even as love interests! But I think what bothers me is when the authors present these guys as extremely sexy and romantic, and brush all their red flag behaviors under the rug. Not to be all “won’t someone think of the children,” but I can’t help worrying how these books can shape young peoples’ views of romance and relationships, how they should expect to be treated in a relationship, what kind of standards they should have for a partner.
When I was a kid growing up, my fictional dream boys were the love interests in Ella Enchanted and Anne of Green Gables: kind, supportive, cinnamon roll boys who had massive respect for the female protagonists and developed healthy relationships with them where they actually liked each other as friends as well as romantic partners. I think it’s easy to assume that a pure wholesome relationship like that is not as interesting as a crazy dramatic toxic one, but I really disagree. When I was crafting Kena’s character, I very deliberately approached it with the idea that he was going to be the opposite of toxic masculinity. He’s a kind, insightful, respectful character who brings joy to others, and is more nurturing than aggressive; but at the same time, he’s not weak or unmasculine. His strength is that of resilience, of choosing to still try to be good even though the world has given him every reason to become bitter. As Mireia eventually comes to realize, Kena’s kind of strength is much more genuine than the aggressive bluster of other characters who represent the more toxic side of masculinity. When she first meets Kena, she thinks of him as weak, but he’s not weak at all. In fact, he is the peak masculine figure of the whole culture! He’s the Sun Father, giving life and hope to others—the sort of role model everyone should want to have in their lives.
I really want to see more male characters like Kena out there in the world, and more M/F romances where the two are equals who respect each other and can laugh together. So I figured, might as well do it myself!
Craft & Tropes
You mentioned enjoying the use (and subversion) of tropes. What do you think makes a trope effective, and when does it become limiting?
There’s a reason people love tropes so much: they hit those emotional buttons we all love and speak to us in ways that resonate. I think where they can become limiting is when they are overused, or when people feel pressure for marketing reasons to include tropes that they aren’t really interested in exploring. When people include tropes just because they are expected, and not because they genuinely want to do something new or interesting with them, that’s when the tropes get stale. In my book, I play some tropes straight and I tinker around with others, and for me that’s a good mix.
How do you decide which tropes to embrace or challenge in your work, particularly in a story as layered and symbolic as your Atalantis trilogy?
There are some I knew I wanted to do from the start, such as “friends to lovers” between Mireia and Kena, which I play pretty much straight. Same with the “arranged marriage romance,” although technically Mireia and Kena aren’t being forced to marry each other, just peer pressured into it, so there’s a little difference there.
The “fated lovers” trope is one I don’t play straight, but don’t completely subvert either... I don’t like the way “fated lovers” is often done where the two characters are essentially robbed of their agency and end up together just because the universe has declared it so. In Mireia and Kena’s case, they end up together only after a long slow-burn of getting to know each other as friends, coming to respect each other, supporting each other as partners through various challenges, etc. They choose each other because at that point, they know themselves and they know what they want. But at the same time, they probably wouldn’t have ever had the opportunity to choose each other if not for the narrative that they are reincarnated lovers destined to be together in every lifetime. I was hoping to have a best of both worlds here, catching the romance that people enjoy about the “fated lovers” trope while also giving the characters their full agency and showing readers why they should be together—not because “fate,” but because they are so obviously good together.
Can you walk us through your worldbuilding process—how you blended myth, politics, and divine influence to create Atalantis as both a physical place and a metaphorical one?
So even though ATLANTIS WAS NOT A REAL PLACE, obviously the “what if?” part of the legend is a big aspect of its appeal. It wasn’t real... but what if it was, though? When I started worldbuilding, I wanted as much as possible for this to feel like a place that could have been real. It’s of course fantasy, but I wanted it grounded in the real world. I wanted it to feel like a real ancient culture, relatable in some ways to our own but also very, very different. So I had to think, alright, if there was a powerful empire that had existed circa 10,000 BCE, what would that look like in real life?
So I built things like the language, the architecture, the customs, the mythology, with elements of various real cultures—particularly ancient Egyptian, Mayan and Moroccan. But here I had to be careful not to fall into the trap of the racist Victorians, portraying it as though these other cultures got all their coolest ideas from ancient Atlanteans. Instead, my idea was that after the destruction of the island, survivors would have fled all over and integrated into other people groups around the Atlantic/Mediterranean. And over thousands of years, there would be nothing left of their original culture except the faintest traces. Therefore, whatever elements I borrowed from Mayan or Egyptian cultures are not copied directly but more just used as inspiration, and I tried to evolve it into something that felt related to those cultures but still unique and distant in time. Not taking away from the beauty and genius of those cultures, but rather realistically portraying the way humans have always moved around the world and influenced each other’s ways of life.
The political structure of Atalantis actually came directly from Plato, believe it or not! He described the island as being divided up into several regions ruled by 10 separate monarchs, with one of them being the head over the others, and I just copy/pasted that directly into the worldbuilding. But of course, Plato didn’t go into much more detail about it, and I did. The way I expanded on his ideas is, I hope, pretty unique and leads to some really interesting political plots.
As for the metaphorical aspect, Atalantis is also modeled after many more modern empires in the way they use their vast wealth and technological advances (the result of good luck and circumstance, not an inherent superiority in the people themselves) to justify racism and oppression against other “barbarian” races, with many of the elites fully on board with colonization and slavery. In the second book of the trilogy, it’s also going to be revealed that the advanced technology they rely on—the kaana crystals—is showing signs of failure, but the peoples’ luxurious lifestyles demand they keep producing more and more, even as it potentially threatens the geological stability of the island. Although many of the leaders know this could potentially be catastrophic, they’re not willing to change their ways of living in order to stop it. I think people will find this scenario sadly familiar in today’s world where climate change feels unstoppable.
Reflection & Future Work
Many of your stories seem to explore how belief systems can both heal and harm. What do you hope readers take away from your exploration of faith and power?
I really hope people take away a nuanced message, that faith/belief can be unifying, comforting, and inspirational, but that it can also be disastrously dangerous when turned against other people or manipulated by the powerful for their own ends. And power itself also can be a good thing when wielded for the benefit of humanity, but obviously should be treated with caution and wisdom lest it become a tool of oppression.
You’re also working on a dystopian mystery set in an infinite Tenement building—can you share a glimpse of that project and what excites you most about it?
Tenement is the next project I hope to have finished by the end of this year! It’s about a teenage boy named Noah who lives in this bizarre infinite building, while outside there is only a black void. His mother disappears when he’s a little kid, and his obsession with finding out what happened to her leads him to start unraveling the mysteries of the world itself. The world of the Tenement is an extremely bleak and oppressive one, where everyone is expected to follow strict rules and pay their rent under threat of “eviction” (i.e. banishment into the infinite maze). But as you might guess, nothing is really quite what it seems. This is a story that’s been living in my head for a very long time, and I’m really excited to finally put it out into the world. Noah’s story in many ways reflects my own journey of realizing that the beliefs I was raised with—both about religion and capitalism—are not just the “natural” way the world must be, but that other better worlds could be possible, if we are willing to fight for them.
Looking ahead, what kind of stories or themes do you see yourself exploring beyond the Atalantis trilogy?
I’m already planning to return to the theme of fate vs free will in a future adult fantasy series called Charagma, which is based on the premise “What if Calvinism were literally true?” In other words, it’s a fantasy world where some people are “saved” and others are “damned,” and the saved are born with a special mark on their head. It’s also going to be very bleak and probably a bit controversial, but I think that’s inevitable with the subject matter. I imagine I will probably always come back to these themes of faith, free will, narratives and power, because they mean so much to who I am as a person and my understanding of the world. I hope readers will always end up taking away a nuanced view of these topics from my stories.
Emily Klotz is an English teacher with over fifteen years of experience who has been writing and illustrating stories since she was old enough to hold a crayon. Born and raised in Texas, she earned her bachelor’s degree in English and Art in Houston and later lived in Fairbanks, Alaska, while completing her master’s degree. She is currently working on a YA fantasy trilogy set in Atlantis, which is set to be published in 2026 by Hook & Quill Press, an independent publishing company she helped start with several colleagues. Hook & Quill Press is set to launch later this year!
How to connect with Emily
Instagram: @professor.emily2442