Greetings, travelers! Every once in a while, a journey into the Otherworld introduces us to a storyteller whose imagination seems to have no interest in staying inside a single box. Emilia Ramos is one such creator. An author, performer, composer, poet, theater director, and mapmaker, Ramos has already developed a remarkably diverse creative life, and Valaztein offers readers a chance to see how all of those passions can find their way onto the page.
For Ramos, storytelling began long before Valaztein. It began with her abuela.
Growing up in the United States to Colombian parents, Ramos spent much of her childhood surrounded by stories and music. Her grandmother, originally from Montevideo, Uruguay, would sing to her every night when she stayed with the family.
“Her rhythmic stories of endless seas and long-lost loves calmed me like nothing else,” Ramos recalls. “My abuela has a voice like molasses, thick and sweet and full of grit.”
Those Spanish maritime folk tunes would eventually become an unexpected inspiration for The Siren & Her Sailor, the siren song featured in Valaztein. And her grandmother remains an important supporter of Ramos’s creative journey, attending her book events and shows and cheering her on.
The origins of Ramos’s own writing career are almost as unexpected as something out of a fantasy novel.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, when she was ten years old, Ramos was taking part in what she describes as a “middle-of-the-night trampoline hallapalooza haze.” She hit her head against the iron bars surrounding the trampoline, and in that moment, she began daydreaming about a golden dragon. She ran upstairs, typed out a scene, and hurried back down to read it to her family.
“Where’s the next chapter?!” her sister asked.
And that was the beginning.
Her first book, Crown of Scales and Wonder, was published while she was still ten. From there came another Shadow Heir book and eventually Valaztein, a much larger adventure that carries the story into new kingdoms and cultures.
Yet Ramos’s childhood wasn’t simply an isolated period of imagination. The world around her was shaping the stories she wanted to tell. “COVID re-sparked in us all a need for human connection,” Ramos explains, “and one of the most beautiful ways we’re hardwired to connect is through art.”
In the first chapter she wrote in the kingdom of Valaztein, Naomi was trapped inside the palace of her childhood, longing to hear children laughing in the streets and longing to experience the world beyond her palace. Even though Ramos didn’t consciously recognize it at the time, she now sees how much of Naomi’s story was influenced by the isolation surrounding her own life.
Since then, the world has continued to find its way into her fiction.
Ramos comes from a family of travelers. Her parents are both licensed skippers, and every year the family charters a sailboat. Those experiences became part of the foundation for Valaztein, with many of the kingdoms Naomi encounters inspired by real places and experiences around the world.
The siren grotto, for example, was inspired by the James Bond grotto in the Exumas, where Ramos herself leapt into the water. The Upside-Down Desert draws from her travels through Jordan and Mongolia. And one of the most fantastical locations in the book is based on a place that already seemed impossible enough in the real world. The Tsingy Tsingy of Madagascar, nicknamed the “Forest of Knives,” is a remarkable landscape of pointed rock formations. The name comes from the Malagasy word “mitsingitsingy,” meaning “walking on tiptoes.” Ramos wanted to preserve the wonder of the real place almost exactly as she experienced it, adding only “a touch of fantasy whimsy.” Within Valaztein, however, the formations change every day, creating a natural labyrinth where sailors washed astray by the tides can remain trapped for years.
It isn’t only places that find their way into Ramos’s work. People do, too.
“I say we all see the world through our own sunglasses, tinted with our unique shade of understanding,” she says. “I’ve met incredible folks while traveling, all of whom have gifted me their sunnies for a few weeks and taught me to look at my surroundings just a touch differently.”
That exchange of perspectives became an important part of Naomi’s own journey as she and her crew travel across the Northern Korrigram. Ramos describes her characters as amalgamations of the people she has encountered throughout her life.
Sometimes, however, the inspiration is much more specific.
While traveling through the desert kingdom of Brindim, Naomi and her crew must ride camels through the Endless Desert. One unfortunate character, Grek, finds himself atop a camel that spends the entire journey sneezing bright, gooey, viridescent snot all over him. That particular bit of unpleasantness has a real-world origin. The camel came directly from Ramos’s brother’s camel during their first experience riding the animals. As Ramos puts it, her brother’s arms ended up “deep-fried in camel snot.”
That sense of curiosity and playfulness is part of what makes Ramos’s creative work so distinctive. Her age may have helped preserve some of the wonder with which children experience the world, but she has continued to cultivate that quality across a remarkably wide range of artistic disciplines.
“There is a certain wonder and whimsy with which children interact with the world,” Ramos says, “and since I began writing from that place of ten-year-old amazement, it has stayed with me.”
That curiosity extends well beyond fiction. Ramos studies musical theater at Interlochen, an arts academy in Michigan, and works as a performer and composer. Most recently, she composed, adapted, produced, and directed Heartless the Musical, based on Marissa Meyer’s original novel.
She also founded Theater with a Heart, or Teatro con Corazón, a nonprofit organization in Palomino, Colombia, where her mother’s family is from. Each summer, the organization works with the local school to provide students with performing arts education through workshops in theater, dance, and music, culminating in a final performance.
Poetry has become another important part of Ramos’s creative development. Through classes with Karyna McGlynn and Bri Cavallaro, she has become fascinated by the construction of language itself.
“There’s so much more to a word than just its meaning,” she explains. “Our experiences with words come from their sounds, their textures, the clicks of their consonants, the rhythms of their vowels…”
That fascination has made its way directly into Valaztein. Some of the book’s sequences slip into poetry, allowing Ramos to explore how language itself can alter the way readers experience a scene. Music and poetry also converge in “The Siren & Her Sailor,” which Ramos composed for the novel and performs at different venues during her book tour.
Even the maps of her fantasy world are part of the creative process. Ramos enjoys designing custom maps for her stories, giving readers another way to explore the kingdoms that have grown out of her travels and imagination.
And she isn’t finished exploring.
Ramos is continuing her poetry studies and has recently become fascinated with dance through her musical theater training at Interlochen, where she has had the opportunity to study both jazz and ballet.
In many ways, that seems to be the common thread running through Emilia Ramos’s work. Whether she is writing a novel, composing music, studying poetry, performing on stage, designing a map, or creating opportunities for young artists in Colombia, she approaches each medium with the same curiosity.
The result is a creative world that refuses to stay in one place.
Valaztein may be the latest destination, but if Ramos’s journey so far is any indication, it certainly won’t be the last.
To learn more about Emilia Ramos and her work, visit her website at emiliaramossamper.org or follow her on Instagram at @emiramsa. And for readers ready to begin their own journey into the world of Valaztein, check out Valaztein on Amazon today!
Michael DeAngelo
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