The Sun: So, you’re doing a talk here on Thursday about your most recent book, Faery Tale. Would you like to give us some insight on the general premise? 

Signe Pike: Sure — so I was working as a book editor in NYC when my father passed away. I lived in this in this really cool old apartment building on the Upper East Side. I became friends with this very spiritual lady who lived down the hall from me and she told me that my apartment was absolutely filled with faeries. I just felt like I was really impressed that this woman could have retained this childlike innocence about her belief in faeries when I didn’t really have anything to believe in anymore. I decided it would be really funny, from a journalistic perspective, if I went around interviewing people that I could find that still believed in faeries.

Sun: How did you first get into publishing? 

S.P.: I once interned for Roger Straus and he once told me, “Baby, newspapers are for wrapping fish. Books, books are forever.” Here was this huge successful publishing icon saying that to me. The thing that appealed to me so much about it is that it was so much an apprenticeship; it was like learning how to make a really beautiful pair of boots. You work for your editor and then they take you under their wing and start teaching you about editing, which is a really difficult art form.

Sun: What would you say to all the people who are skeptical about publishing’s future?  

S.P.: I think that several hundred years of history will counter that argument. I think that as people, we’re storytellers, we’re always going to tell stories. So I think that there’s always going to be a purpose for publishers because if anyone’s able to publish anything, then there are no gatekeepers anymore. If there are no gatekeepers, then it’s the readers themselves who are going to cry out. It’s too much, it’s almost like the fabric of our culture would come apart at the seams.  

Sun: What’s your take on the Kindle and the e-book revolution?

S.P.: I sort of think that something in us will always want to keep hard copies alive. In one of the interviews that I did for Faery Tale, I talked to this one Irish guy and he said to me “If we don’t have our stories, we have nothing,” and I really agreed. But there is a definite practicality to readers; I think they’re absolutely invaluable. 

Sun: What did you learn from your experiences and travels? 

S.P.: It’s kind of embarrassing when you’re first trying to be a faery journalist, but what I found is that it’s just really eerie how all of these separate cultures came up with this same kind of endemic belief in faeries. One of the things I was realizing is why do people believe in God and then say that faeries don’t exist? Magic is magic, whether its religious magic or another type of magic. So it kind of struck me as interesting — if you believe in one magical thing then who’s to say that other magical things don’t exist?  

Sun: So, the question on everyone’s mind — do you believe in faeries? 

S.P.: I think that my experience led me to believe that there is so much more that goes on kind of behind the curtains, what that is, I don’t know and I don’t think that we ever really know. My job is being a person who earns my readers’ trust and I’m going to continue to explore the unseen.