Dragon Castle is a book that’s very close to my heart. My family is of mixed ancestry. I have Slovak ancestry on my dad’s side. And I always wanted to write more about that. I wrote poems about that and certainly had a number of them published, and I had the opportunity over the course of a number of years to meet people from Slovakia, what was then Czechoslovakia.
They were translating my work into Czech and Slovak and publishing it in their country. And they started sending me books of traditional stories in Slovak and English or Czech and English. And I worked with a friend of mine who was named – who is named Anna Vojtech, who is from Czechoslovakia and illustrated one of my books. And I just began getting more and more interested in telling some of those stories. And I did a little serialized novel for “Breakfast Serials,” which is a newspaper series that has been out for a number of years called “Janko and the Giant,” which was a series of traditional stories built around a character who encounters these various aspects of that Slovak culture and tradition.
It’s full of proverbs and Slovak language. And having done that, I then moved on to do a longer novel, which is Dragon Castle that’s based in the medieval period and again draws on Slovak history, Slovak culture, Slovak language, Slovak cooking. And again with the help of Slovak people, I made sure that I tried to be as accurate as possible in my depiction.
And I remembered my Slovak grandmother, [unint.] Bruchac, would say, “Joseph, we Slovaks, we was the Indians of Europe.” And my father, well, married a person of Native ancestry. There was always that closeness in the family on the Slovak side to Native people from this continent. And the Bruchac family I later found out in Slovakia were known as a family for generations of woodsmen and foresters, people of the forest.
And my Slovak grandfather, for whom I’m named, Joseph Bruchac, said to me, “Joseph, I do not pray in the church. I pray in the old way, in the forest with the trees.”
