A Process Conversation with Aliette de Bodard

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Aliette de Bodard, Dominion of the Fallen, The House of Shattered Wings

A murder mystery set in a ruined Paris under the rule of Fallen angels, The House of Shattered wings is the first the Dominion of the Fallen series. Sweeping and evocative, Aliette de Bodard’s skill as a writer and her gift of writing immersive stories are on full display in this first book. We invited Aliette for a conversation not just around her novel, but also on her journey and her growth as a writer.

(Photo courtesy of Aliette de Bodard)

When you look back at the Aliette de Bodard who started publishing fiction in 2006 and the Aliette de Bodard who has got a number of novels under her belt, what for you are the primary standout differences that you see?

Well, the most obvious answer is that I’ve become a (hopefully) better writer! Part of it is craft: learning the building blocks of writing fiction and how to best put them to use. Part of it is confidence: I won’t say I don’t get imposter syndrome, but I’m more aware that I *can* write, and that makes me… more in control, I guess? I’d say it makes me more inclined to challenge myself, but really I’ve been doing that since the beginning–it’s just that the nature of such challenges has evolved over the years, and that the goalposts have shifted from “writing a story that makes sense” to “writing a complicated novella with four points of view that shifts back and forth in time”…

Could you talk about the ways in which your approach to writing and to the work has changed?

One of the things that happened was that I became more aware of myself and where I was coming from; and that I had been circling the writing of fiction based on Vietnamese/French culture for a while because I was worried of a. not coming across as “authentic” enough, and b. getting yelled at by family and friends. I realized that it was fundamentally idiotic to be afraid of writing my own cultures (as we said to each other: if we don’t do it, who will?), and that authenticity was a very fraught word–a policing one that had a tendency to shut people in narrow boxes of the “One Story”, and a fundamentally inaccurate one, for everyone’s experience of their own culture is going to be vastly different!

One thing I also started to do was consciously putting more of my own experience into my fiction, which was downright scary (I’ve been raised with the idea that putting oneself forward is arrogance, and it’s very hard for me to counter this narrative in my head). But I think that it’s a necessary step, in the sense that fiction needs a heart, and that the heart, in some sense, has to be about the author–about something that matters deeply to them, about something that has enough passion to carry across to the reader.

The other thing that happened, I think, is that, as I said, I got the “basic” skills of writing fiction tucked away, which was freeing in the sense that I could focus on the content and on what I wanted to achieve with a given piece, rather than worrying about how to handle too much exposition… I think the very first story where I became aware that all of these things were happening was “Scattered Along the River of Heaven”, which merges a complex timeline and structure (two intertwined storylines interspersed with poetry), with considerations that are deeply personal (war, revolution, diaspora, and what it means for the generations that follow the war).

I’m not saying I’m terribly at ease writing this sort of thing: I always feel exposed, and I was going to send “Scattered…” to a small market for a token payment, until my husband (who’d read the first draft), looked at me and said “this is the best thing you’ve ever written and you’re going to aim low?” (he does the growly voice wonderfully well, I don’t know what I’d do without him).

What were the primary influences behind these changes (if there are any)?  Would you talk a little more about them?

It’s a complex thing, I think? Part of it was merely writing a lot, reading a lot and critiquing a lot; part of it was my husband, who’s always been very supportive and kept pushing me to try out new things.

And a big part of it, too, was going back to Vietnam in 2010 for the first time: for me, Vietnam had always been a bit of a mythical land, in the sense that while I knew I had relatives there (and relatives like my grandmother who shuttled back and forth), the family narrative is one of loss; of a country that was devastated past salvaging, and of a diaspora that was doomed to remain abroad. It was… very odd to go there, and even odder, I think, to go with my husband a few years later, because I was explaining so many things to him–that was when I realized that a number of things I took for granted were actually not common knowledge. In the wake of that, my husband encouraged me to pick up Vietnamese again (my Vietnamese used to be terrible, i.e. limited to members of the maternal family and food items. Now it’s… less terrible, at least I hope so!), and I had a lot of talks with family members about history–and, again, about some things that had become family mythology, and that turned out to be more complex than I’d imagined. It certainly… made me think.

It’s been said that we change the work as the work changes us. How has the work changed you and how have you changed the work?

As I said–the work has changed a lot, because I’ve put a lot more of myself into it, and I’ve allowed myself to do a lot of things with it, to take what I would have considered very big risks a few years ago. I don’t think I would have dared to write a novel like The House of Shattered Wings in 2006: the structure is complex, but more than that it’s a portrayal of period France that deliberately includes the colonial history, and I would have felt ill at ease writing it back then.

I think the main way in which the work has changed me is that I’ve become way less apologetic about what I write: there’s a lot of writing advice about picking large-scale events, high concepts, violence-driven plots as the only way to write something successful, and I’ve realized that it’s not the only way, and definitely not the only way for me. It’s not that I don’t write such things; but I like to focus on character interactions, on emotions and familial/friendship bonds–and over all those years of writing I think I’ve finally managed to convince my brain that I should write what I feel I must write–even if it sounds weird, or out there, or completely crazy; because it’s how I write, because it’s what I feel passionate about, and because I can bend myself to the “rules”, but, having tried it, it makes for decidedly crappy stories. And yes, it’s not going to appeal to everybody; but I’ve come to realize that “appealing to everybody” is a codeword for bland, unobjectionable stuff; or at the very least for something that doesn’t challenge the reader; and, just as I like to be challenged when I read, I would in turn like to do that to my readers!

In what ways has the increase in visibility affected the way you approach hot topics such as appropriation, sexism and representation?

It’s really tricky–I was talking about it with my sister the other night: I now have over 6000 twitter followers, and a good number of people who follow my blog direct and my FB, and  it’s hard for me to realize that so many folks are paying attention to what I’m saying! I got tagged pretty early on (mainly because I ranted too much, I guess) as an “expert” on non Western Anglo SFF (which is a complicated and fraught concept, but let’s limit for the moment to stuff from outside the US/UK/Canada/Australia/NZ and other majority white, Anglophone Western countries), and this is terribly scary I guess? There’s a whole world of people out there and I certainly don’t pretend to speak for all of them, or even to have an inkling of what all of them are up to!

I’m never quite sure what to say about representation/appropriation: I sometimes feel like I’m having arguments about basic things (like systemic bias in the industry: it looks so obvious to me, especially coming from a field–computer science–which has been… not always friendly to women), and it’s sometimes really wearying to be questioned on things that I take for granted: I’m not writing Vietnamese characters in my stories to make a political statement or win awards or whatnot. I’m writing them because they ought to be there. I’m writing them because of ten-year-old me, who was so desperate for any characters in SFF that looked like her that she latched on to anyone who had dark hair (you’d be surprised how few characters fit that particular bit).

For me, being “political” shouldn’t include things like wanting people to get basic facts about my own cultures right, or insisting that stories should at the very least attempt to represent the diversity of real, lived life. And I guess that hasn’t really changed with visibility: I’m not about to fall silent or retreat on matters like these.

One of the definite plus point of visibility, though, is that I can boost others, and in particular folks that don’t get much press, which is pretty awesome.

I wanted to ask you about another aspect of your life–about motherhood. How has motherhood affected your work? What are the challenges that you face now that you didn’t have prior to motherhood? I know that women writers often face this challenge and so I wanted to hear from you what you think we need to take into consideration when we contemplate the career traject of women writers.

Motherhood has been weird. I think it’s… possible to ignore a lot of the sexism in the field and in society when you’re not a mother–but the moment you have a child and childcare comes into the equation, there’s all sorts of more or less ugly prejudices that come into play. As a mother, I’m often made to feel like a failure if I don’t live 100% for my child;and I’m expected to provide the bulk of the childcare. And I’m very fortunate in that I have a great family; that my husband doesn’t really believe any of that, quite happily supports my writing, and will quite happily take care of the child while I go off to conventions. But all the same, the societal expectations are there, and they’re pretty heavy; and they’re also so entrenched in the hive mind that it’s *very* difficult to argue against them.

(and also, of course, being pregnant and breastfeeding is very time consuming, and there’s really no way to hand that off to a partner, no matter how helpful they want to be! And, beyond societal expectations, there’s points when children want their mothers and not their fathers, and it really has to be me who comforts him after he’s fallen down, or scraped a knee, or needs to go back to sleep…).

From a pragmatic point of view… well, I think it was Ursula Le Guin who said that babies eat books, and that’s certainly true. There’s less time–it’s normal, as there’s an extra person to take care of. The thing that hit me hardest was the loss of my brainstorming time: I hadn’t realized how much time I spent daydreaming or doodling prior to writing a story, and suddenly that was no longer possible because I had to keep an eye on the child. Surprisingly, actually, revisions and interviews and things that are are… more circumscribed and require fewer brain cells are pretty doable: I managed to keep a pretty fast turnaround on revisions of The House of Shattered Wings, but writing the first draft was like pulling teeth.

I’ve not had issues with publishing, actually (everyone has been consistently great), but there is a thing where writers are expected to produce regular and fairly close together work lest they sink into obscurity–and that’s clearly that much harder when you have young kids at home, and your schedule is liable to take a big hit without a moment’s notice… And there’s the issue of how you network, promote, and go to conventions if you have to stay at home with the kids, and all those things–I see it a lot with young mothers: we tend to just drop off for a while, and I’m not saying it’s a rule or that men are immune to that sort of problems, but the truth is that it’s often very different for young fathers. Again, different societal expectations and biological constraints…

I’m  interested in the kinds of complexities that you struggled with as a child of both cultures who has inherited this legacy of colonizer and colonized. Would you like to talk about it?  

It’s… complicated (yes, I answer that a lot!). I think a lot of what I grapple with is that colonialism (and its aftermath of wars) was horrible and full of atrocities, and yet that I and many other people wouldn’t be there without it; that the culture itself (the dishes that I love, the language) wouldn’t be the same; in fact that the country itself would be utterly irrecognisable if that hadn’t happened–it’s a history of bones and blood and deaths, and yet, like any history, it’s the one that led us here and made us what we are.

There’s also some mixed race issues in general: genre has a pretty horrific record. One of the only books I ever threw against the wall was one of Lovecraft’s (“The Shadow Over Innsmouth”, I think?), when the main character goes mad upon discovering he has mixed blood. Terms like half-breed, crossbreed, mutts, are being used in everyday vocabulary to refer to mixed-race people: I find them deeply offensive, and a lot of people don’t even seem to realise there is a problem being compared to animal husbandry (if not to outright abominations). I think a lot of it comes from a US perspective, where miscegenation remained a crime in some states for a long while; but it doesn’t really make it easier or less hurtful when it shows up in random books or in people’s conversations.

One of my favorite things about House of Shattered Wings is how I’m drawn in by your world from the get go. I read page one and boom…I’m totally immersed. What was the most challenging aspect of writing this work and how did you overcome it?

I struggled a lot with the exposition–this is a novel set in Paris in the aftermath of magical devastation, and much as it would have been interesting to see The Great Houses War, this isn’t what I wanted to focus the story on. I was talking earlier about the weight of history, and that is definitely a book that is front-loaded with it; where characters and events only make sense in the light of what has happened before; where it’s important to know how we got there. It’s not obvious to keep a relatively fast pace (with murders and plots and assorted backstabbing) and still juggle all of this in the background!

Who was your most challenging character and why?

I think my most challenging character was actually Asmodeus, the Fallen leader of House Hawthorn? He’s in a position of prime plot mover and in opposition to pretty much everyone. I found him deeply frustrating, because he has reasons for everything he goes, but I’m not in his point of view, and he’s certainly not the kind of person who’ll stop and explain (especially since all the point of view characters either despise him, fear him, or hate his guts). It’s really tricky to have him do what he does and have it make sense, without giving the feeling that I’m cheating the reader! It’s also difficult to render the fact that, he’s actually no better or no worse than everyone else: again, it’s tricky to do when all the point of view characters feel otherwise–and it’s been an education seeing how I can build up a mental image, even from several points of view, that can still be inaccurate or incomplete.

You talked about feeling/being less apologetic and I wanted to revisit that statement again to ask you to expand a little more on it. I know that many of us who come from a non-anglophone and non-US centric culture struggle with this issue among other things. What would you say to the young and upcoming writer who struggles not only with the challenges of getting published and gaining visibility in the field, but who also struggles with use of culture among other things?

I can only speak to my own experience, of course–but it seems to me that one of the things that people from non-Anglophones/non-US centric cultures struggle with is what to do with their own cultures. Because of hegemony, there’s a lot of baggage, and cultures from outside the “mainstream” traditions tend to be devalued even by people who are members of it. I’ve seen, for instance, lots of people set stories in the United States–and it can be totally fine to do if that’s what you want to do, but sometimes it’s simply because you are afraid that your own hometown will be too exotic, or not appealing enough; and because there is a steady stream of Western Anglophone (mainly US) media that is taking over the world and seen as edgy and cool, and that’s what you end up writing because it’s what you’ve been watching that’s wildly successful. And I’m angry–not at the writers (of course not!), but at those who complacently sail through insisting that Hollywood stories are universal, and successful because they’re good (and not because of a marketing machine and a concerted campaign of stifling local industry); as if there weren’t huge cultural biases in place.

But mostly what I would say is: your culture is your heart. Don’t let anyone tell you what to write or how to write beyond matters of craft (and again, if your writing involves writing outside of your culture: do so! Just be aware why you’re doing it, because hegemony can be quite insidious). And be aware it’s a delicate line to walk between learning the fundamentals of storytelling, and being convinced that there is only one right way to do it. You need to hone your skills and learn how to be a better writer, but not lose yourself in the process (and I realize that’s easier said than done, and that it took me years to get to this point). And, also: it will get better. The field is changing at a positively rapid pace, and there’s more and more space for people beyond the Western Anglophone world. I’m not saying it will be a smooth and easy ride, or that there will be no prejudice, or no moment when you want to bang your head against the wall. But you’ll get through this.

(and now I feel really ridiculous giving writing advice, lol)

I know that you’re very much involved in a lot of mentoring and supportive actions behind the scenes. How important are these activities to you? Do you consider them as being essential? If so, why?

I know I felt very isolated when I was starting out–I was living outside Anglophone countries, writing in a second language and coming from different traditions to the majority ones. I learnt a lot of things from the writing communities I was part of, and made lots of friends–and I want to pay that forward. Again, from experience, I know how useful it can be to have people you can turn to for advice and experiences; and I feel you benefit from them at any stage of your career (well, at least the ones I’ve seen so far. I’ll let you know when I get to super-stardom :)). I think mentoring and support are very important activities, and they’re especially primordial the more isolated and further away from the mainstream people are.

I know that we’ve spoken before on the need for support and community. What role does this play in your own writing life and career?

Well, for starters I don’t think I’d be there if I hadn’t had some tremendously supportive friends! A lot of my writing is staring at a draft and being utterly convinced that it’s rubbish and unsalvageable, and I need people to tell me that a. it’s not, and b. how to fix it. I also feel, coming back to the motherhood aspect of things, that I have to give a shoutout to my husband, who not only plods through my drafts and ruthlessly annotates them for logic problems, but also kindly takes care of the child when I need to hammer out something or urgently be somewhere.

Name five books on your bookshelf that you revisit again and again? Why these books?

It depends a lot on my mood! But I reread Dorothy Dunnett’s The Game of Kings (and subsequent books in the Lymond Chronicles) every few years, because they’re wonderfully erudite historical with a larger-than-life main character, a compelling love story, and one of the most gut-wrenching scenes that I’ve ever read (at the end of book 4, if you’re wondering). I also reread Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather, because Pratchett has been such a source of inspiration, and I think this is one of the best Discworld books–which is both a hilariously funny take on Christmas and also a very sharp and pointed one. I’ve also read Nguyen Xuan Hung’s “Tales from Vietnam” cover to cover a dozen times; because it’s a slim book, and yet one that is surprisingly packed with stories that I find myself returning to, again and again. In epic fantasy, I have a bit of a weakness for Brandon Sanderson’s Warbreaker, which tackles subjects like faith and belief and heroism (and has a pair of kickass heroines). And finally, I regularly reread Ursula Le Guin’s Steering the Craft, which is full of no-nonsense writing advice and techniques (and there’s a recent second edition that’s been completely overhauled).

(and, hum, I’ll throw in a sixth one for free: Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, which is just a treasure trove of facts about food!).

I want to thank Aliette for taking the time for this blog conversation. On the internet, you can find her at http://aliettedebodard.com. Follow her on twitter @aliettedb.

Visit Aliette’s website for excerpts and for links to stories set in the Dominion of the Fallen universe.

A Process Conversation with Zen Cho, author of Sorcerer to the Crown

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Sorcerer Royal Trilogy, Sorcerer to the Crown, Zen Cho

Sorcerer to the Crown is the first book in a historical fantasy trilogy. This novel which marks Zen Cho’s debut, while described as a cross between Georgette Heyer and Susanna Clarke is very distinctively Zen Cho. The novel might rightly be called a novel of manners, but Cho escapes being didactic and offers us a world that is engaging and brings to life the very real dilemmas that overcome those of us who must maneuver through complex situations in life.

Tor.com carries an excerpt from the novel, which you can check out by following this link. I’d like to say thank you to Zen for taking time out of her busy schedule so we can bring this conversation to you on PUSH.

(Photo by Darren Johnson / IDJ Photography)

I want to say here that I’m utterly charmed by Sorcerer to the Crown. I’m so excited by your voice and by your ability to tell a story with depth and with such a deft and light touch. It’s a rare gift and I’m glad for your voice in the world.

It’s not an easy thing to be able to balance the serious and the light in any particular work. I’ve watched you do it in The House of Aunts and here, in Sorcerer to the Crown, I see you doing it again. (You have my admiration because I don’t know many who can do this). What was the biggest challenge for you in writing Sorcerer to the Crown and how did you overcome it?

There were a lot of challenges! I was in the process of working out how to write a novel, and I didn’t really know what I was doing. That should be in the present tense, to be honest, because I still feel like I don’t know what I’m doing … But with Sorcerer to the Crown, the process of writing a first draft and then a second draft and then revising that multiple times was very new. I think the hardest thing about the proess was just keeping at it — pushing past the fear to try new things with the story, until I hit on something that worked.

Of course, there are lots of improvements that could still be made to the book, I’m sure, but you do have to step away from the work and declare it finished at some point.

With the story itself, striking the balance between the serious issues I didn’t want to gloss over and the fun stuff was definitely a worry. It was very important to me to focus on characters who aren’t usually the focus in the Regency romance genre — people at the sharp end of imperialism — but that brings along baggage. It made the story more interesting — there was never going to be a version of Sorcerer that was about a rich white guy — but of course you feel a responsibility not to seem to play things down. At the same time I was determined that it should be a fun book. The books I personally love best are the ones that put you in a good mood when you’ve read them, without sacrificing substance, and that’s the kind of book I want to write. So that was an interesting tightrope to walk!

I find myself very interested in your choice of setting as well. What were the particular challenges of setting this novel in this time period and what lay behind your choice to do so?

I just like Regency England as a setting. A lot of my favourite writers have used it: Patrick O’Brian, Susanna Clarke, Naomi Novik, Georgette Heyer … I enjoy the language especially, the way sentences are constructed, and the way you can play with the social norms.

This is a fair question, but I wonder how often white Americans get asked why they set their books in Regency England!

You have to do a bit of research when you write about a historical setting which is so familiar to fiction readers — people already have a certain vision of Regency England and you need to be careful about your worldbuilding details. I read a lot of history while writing the book, but I enjoy that so I wouldn’t call it a challenge.

Actually two things annoyed/annoy me about the setting, which are less about the book and more about me. Firstly I felt compelled to read a lot of period fiction and diaries, letters, etc. of people who lived at that time, and while this is something I enjoy, it did mean a lot of my reading time was taken up by white people. I’m quite behind on contemporary SFF because I just don’t have the time to fit it in with all my writing-related reading.

The second thing is that you can write about non-white people in Regency England, and you can even write about communities of colour in Regency London and probably other places, like Bristol and Liverpool. But the particular setting and story I chose inevitably meant that most of the supporting characters were going to be white. That’s on me, but it bothers me a bit.

I know that we all come to SFF through various means and we have varying canons. Your work has been compared to authors like Georgette Heyer and Susanna Clarke. Are they part of your canon? Who are the authors/works that mark your entry into SFF?

I don’t know if I’d call either of them canonical for me, though I like Heyer’s books and love Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. I came to them relatively young, but maybe not young enough for them to have entered my canon. That was pretty much closed after age 16 …

The authors that marked my entry into SFF are probably: Tolkien, Pratchett, Diana Wynne Jones and Edith Nesbit for fantasy; Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ and Ursula Le Guin for science fiction. And the 19th century authors I grew up reading, like Austen and the Brontes. They don’t write genre, obviously, but as a kid in 20th century Malaysia, I read them as one reads genre — as windows on an alien world.

I love that you wonder as to how many white Americans get asked about their decision to set their work in Regency England as I have read my share of books written by white Americans set in Regency England and have often wondered how true those depictions were to the setting and time. (How many Dukes exist in England? At a certain point, I wondered if the UK was made up of nobles only.) So it’s interesting to me to read about the process you went through in choosing this setting as well as the dilemma you faced. I do love that you chose to write Zacharias and that you don’t flinch from presenting to us the complexity of maneuvering through a society where he is a minority.

You wrote about your complicated feelings with regards to your particular choice of setting because of your supporting white cast. Have you come to a resolution regarding those feelings? Do you intend to address this in the following books? Can you tell us without spoiling much? 😉

The feelings aren’t that complicated — I just made a decision some time ago that I should invest most of my time and energy, as a creator, in stories that are not about white people, because I’d spent so many years before that invested in stories that focused on white Westerners to the exclusion of every other type of person. In writing Sorcerer I was obviously trying to avoid producing the latter type of story, but you can’t challenge a thing without focusing on it. So my feelings are like, “This is annoying, but I had reasons for doing it, and you can’t do everything with a single trilogy.”

Is that a resolution?

I think it’s quite healthy to live in a state of slight tension with oneself.

I’m not going to address the issue in the next books really — as I said, I think it’s something that comes with the setting and the type of stories I’ve chosen to tell, which are inspired by the tropes of Regency romance. It’ll have to wait for the next series!

Maybe this comes back to that issue of striking a balance between the serious and the fun. As I said, I enjoy the tropes of Regency romance, the elopements and the inns and the banter and the parties. And maybe playing with those tropes doesn’t fit with one of my projects, which is writing stories set in worlds where whiteness is not a bigpresence, but then that’s only one of my projects. Something like Zacharias’s story, where he’s just this guy growing up alone in a white society, without a black community, is a story worth spending time and energy on.

One of the things that I wanted to ask as well, concerns your own position as being probably the first Malaysian writer to write a major fantasy trilogy. Does this carry particular stresses for you?  We’ve spoken before of the burden of visibility and of representation or being seen as a representative. How do you feel about this and what do you think or feel needs to be addressed regarding this matter?

Am I the first Malaysian writer to write a major fantasy trilogy? If we say trilogy, maybe … there’s Yangsze Choo whose YA fantasy novel THE GHOST BRIDE was an Oprah Book of the Week pick. Heights I don’t dare to dream of!

I do feel a certain pressure. In an interview I did with David Barnett for the Independent, he calls me an “unwitting poster girl” for diversity in SFF and it’s probably just as true to say “unwilling”, haha. I feel a bit like that about my position in the Malaysian writing community, like — I’ve just been here toodling along doing mything, and suddenly there’s this whole other side of me that I don’t even have a full picture of, which is people’s perceptions of me.

I get it from both the Westerners and the Malaysians, of course. Western SFF asks me about Malaysian SFF, and I’m like, honestly, apart from the slush reading I did for Cyberpunk: Malaysia, I’ve been spending the past two years in Regency England, what do you want from me. 

The Malaysians are very supportive but sometimes they’re very annoying as well! Like any community you have disagreements and even bickering, but I don’t necessarily feel I can engage in that. Like if I’m snotty to someone on Facebook, maybe they’ll worry that I’ll turn my US/UK publishing contacts against them. (Not that I have that power, obviously, but you know as well as I do that people often have strange ideas about publishing.) But maybe I’m just being perasan (full of myself)!

To an extent any burden I feel comes from how I choose to engage with the communities I’m a part of, as much as from how they choose to treat me. I’m lucky to be able to move between worlds in this way — it’s as rewarding as it is occasionally stressful.

Talking about the issue of diversity, when you look at genre today, what do you see as being the biggest challenges facing writers coming from the margins? And what kinds of conversations and actions need to take place in order for genre to become a more welcoming and inviting space for writers coming from traditionally marginalized spaces?

I often feel the biggest challenges are internal. That probably comes from my privileges — there are serious external challenges, like illness and poverty and the stresses that come from that, which will affect the marginalised disproportionately and are a huge obstacle to creativity. Put very simply, though, you need support and resources in order to be creative — including emotional support, and resources like time and emotional energy — and being from a marginalised group by definition means you have less access to support and resources.

That’s the first challenge, to link up writers from marginalised backgrounds with the support and resources to enable them to do the work, and then after that it’s a matter of getting the work out there and getting people to read it and appreciate it. I think US/UK genre has become more open to “diverse” writers and writing; there’s a genuine interest in reading work from countries outside the US/UK and hearing voices that have been historically shut out, but at the same time, people are quite lazy. That sounds harsh, but I include myself in it — your tastes are shaped by what you’ve read and watched before, and it takes a little effort to understand stories that use a different voice, that follow different storytelling conventions, that are trying to subvert the dominant paradigm. There’s a quite large group of people who are “yay diversity” in theory, but I think the number of people who have then said to themselves, “OK, if I’m committed to this, I need to start reading outside my comfort zone and making an effort” is maybe a little smaller.

I am not an activist and I don’t really have any bright ideas for addressing these issues that other people haven’t already come up with and are doing. I think we need numbers — we need lots of writers from the margins because then at least the burden of representation is shared! And we need a couple of bestsellers, to convince the industry of the commercial viability of our work. The best way to persuade the powers of be that we matter is to have some power ourselves!

Aside from novel writing, you’ve also authored a single-author collection and edited Cyberpunk Malaysia. But before these things even happened, you’d published The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo (still one of my most memorable reads). What was it that prompted you to publish Jade Yeo and offer it online for free? What are the advantages/disadvantages (if any) of doing this?

The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo is an awkward length — it’s a non-speculative short novella, around 23,000 words — and there just weren’t that many markets to submit it to. I submitted to one digital press and got rejected, so I thought, why not self-publish as an ebook? Romance is way ahead of any other genre when it comes to self-publishing — the readers are there. And I thought it would be good training to learn how to format the file for self-publication and work out where to sell the ebook and so on.

At the same time that I self-published the story as an ebook, I posted it online for free on my blog because at the time I’d just launched my website, zencho.org, and there wasn’t a huge amount on it that was new. I felt I should offer people something so they’d come and have a look at the site.

I wasn’t looking to earn a lot of money. I expect there are other approaches that would have been better for maximising profit. There’s also not a lot of prestige to self-publishing unless you sell bucketloads, though it isn’t as stigmatised as it was before e-publishing became a thing. The main thing I wanted to do was get more readers and I think it probably worked for that. People do still buy the ebook and come up to me at cons and say how much they enjoyed it, which is really beyond my expectations.

Your single author collection Spirits Abroad won the Crawford Award. It sounds like a fabulous award, btw. What was it like for you? How did you feel when you were told that you’d won it?

Happy, of course! It’s funny in a way because these awards always feel like a bit of an anticlimax at the time I’m told about them. I immediately start thinking about how little I’ve done to deserve an award, it has been months since I’ve written a story I can be proud of, I am a big fraud and will never do anything good again, etc. etc. (I mean, not that I’ve won a lot of awards, but I had  a similar reaction when I was told I’d been nominated for the Campbell.) Of course this is way more about me and my neuroses than about the awards.

I do start enjoying the award later, once I’ve got over the reaction. And actually winning the Crawford Award was nice from the get-go, despite all the stupid voices. I just suddenly felt like I must be a real writer if they were willing to give me the Crawford.

I haven’t yet read Cyberpunk Malaysia, but I’ve heard lots of good things about it. I remember how enthusiastic about this when we were at Worldcon, but we didn’t really get to talk about it after that.  I’m really curious as to what goes into putting such an anthology together. Would you talk about the process of putting this anthology together. How do you make decisions on stories to publish? I’m thinking there must also be some difficulty if you have to turn down writers you know, how did you deal with this?  

I don’t think I quite knew what I wanted the anthology to look like when I started reading the submissions for Cyberpunk: Malaysia, but I did know what I liked, so I picked stories that I liked. It’s been impossible for me to read reviews of the anthology, actually, because I feel so tender of the stories that I get really defensive — almost worse than I am about reviews of my own fiction!

I ended up with more stories that I liked than I could use in the anthology, so that’s the stage at which I started thinking about what I wanted the focus and the flow of the anthology to be. Though I tried to avoid too much repetition, I deliberately picked stories that echoed and built on each other thematically. This is also the stage at which I started looking at the identity of the authors and the protagonists, to try to ensure a balanced Table of Contents.

I did worry about the fact that the Malaysian Anglophone writing scene is so small that it was inevitable that I’d be passing on stories by writers I know and want to support. But I didn’t find that it was a problem once I started reading the submissions. Who the writers were didn’t get in the way, because I really did just focus in on my experience of the story. I read at least half of the submissions twice, though, because I wanted to be sure that I was giving every story a fighting chance on its own merits.

Hopefully the writers whose stories weren’t included in the anthology get that it is what it is, and it doesn’t mean I dislike their work. But honestly, at the end of the day, my job was not to protect their feelings. My job was to put together an anthology that was as good as I could make it.

What are the top three things you would say to writers who are just starting out?

1. Find your joy and write the things you like. Don’t worry about the market or anything like that. There’s always space for a good story.

2. Keep going. Be prepared for long periods when all you hear is “no” and it feels like nobody cares about your work. Everyone goes through this, including the most successful writers you’ve heard of.

3. Publication is nice, but ultimately it does not matter. When rejections get you down, remember that nothing can take writing away from you.

Aside from the trilogy you’re working on right now, what other projects do you have in the works or what projects do you want to work on next?

I have a fairly demanding day job and I’m still doing some promo for Sorcerer to the Crown, so it’s enough of a challenge reserving sufficient energy for writing the trilogy! All my writing energy is going into book 2 at the moment. I’d like to write a novella at some point — I’ve got a couple of ideas that might do — but when I’ll get the time for that, I don’t know.

Finally, where can we find you on the internets. 🙂

My website is http://zencho.org — it has information about my books and where you can get them. I’m zenaldehyde on Twitter and Instagram, and zenchobooks on Facebook — my Facebook account is public, but if you’d like to be added, do drop me a message letting me know who you are.

I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Zen Cho. Click on book covers to follow links to the books. We’re sharing both the UK and the US covers here as I think they’re both so pretty. Thank you for reading and thanks again to Zen for taking the time out for this conversation.

A Process Conversation with Anil Menon and Vandana Singh

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Anil Menon, Anthology, Breaking the Bow, Indian SF, Vandana Singh

When I was at Clarion West, I listened in on a conversation about a Clarion West graduate, Anil Menon, who was conducting a writer’s workshop in India together with the writer, Vandana Singh. Late 2012, I received an email from Nisi Shawl asking if I’d be willing to review a book for Cascadia Subduction Zone. The book is an anthology of short stories edited by Anil Menon and Vandana Singh. It was titled Breaking the Bow. A fair number of stories in this anthology come from writers of Indian ancestry. It also includes a story written by a Kanpur workshop graduate–“The Chance” by Pervin Saket.

While not without its flaws, I found myself to be quite enchanted by this collection of stories that centered on the Ramayana. Late 2013, I asked Anil and Vandana if they would be willing to do a process conversation with me about the work involved in putting together Breaking the Bow, the workshop in India, and their experience as writers in a field that’s continues to be very much Western-centric.

What was the inspiration behind Breaking the Bow and what process did you go through in picking the stories for this collection? And what were the things that you took into consideration when picking the stories?

Vandana: Well, I grew up with the great Indian epics – the Ramayana in particular has always been part of the air I breathe. Anil and I, and Suchitra Mathur, an academic in India, conducted an SF writing workshop during which one of the participants, Pervin Saket, came up with a science fiction story about Sita, the consort of Ram in the Ramayana. That suggested exciting possibilities to both Anil and me. In particular, there are many historical versions of the Ramayana, and it seemed to me that coming up with an anthology of Ramayana-inspired stories could be both a part of the tradition of multiple Ramayanas and an extension of it into new territory.

Anil selected the first crop from the initial submissions so he is best able to answer specifics about selection criteria, but we both had a similar vision, I think. We didn’t have any kind of thematic constraints as long as there was some relation to the Ramayana, but we wanted stories that engaged the original framework imaginatively, with boldness, vision, and/or playfulness — so for instance many of the stories examine issues gender, or race, or class. We divided the final stories between us and went through each in detail, with suggested edits as needed. We also commissioned a few stories from well-known authors.

Anil: It was an iterative process. We got about a hundred submissions for our open call and after setting aside the easy rejects, we spent a few months going back and forth on the rest. We’d also sent out invites to established writers; their stories were treated separately. The overall plan was to represent as many interesting new voices as we could. We also wanted an international collection of stories. I think we succeeded on both those counts.

An Interview with Karin Tidbeck

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Jagganath, Karin Tidbeck

This gallery contains 2 photos.

Karin Tidbeck is one of the finest writers I’ve recently had the privilege to meet. I remember reading Jagganath and …

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Author Interview: J. Damask

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J. Damask, Joyce Chng, Wolf at the Door

Wolf at the Door is the first in a refreshing Urban Fantasy series set in Singapore. Singaporean writer, Joyce Chng, is the woman behind the byline J. Damask. In this interview she talks about inspiration, the struggle for visibility and diversity and influences.

Would you like to share some of the inspiration behind Wolf at the Door? 

Wolf At The Door was a product of a challenge. I basically challenged myself to write an urban fantasy novel set in Singapore with a character I could resonate with and relate to. That with my love and fascination for wolves – and I was set to go. Chinese wolves, why not?

I wanted to see a character who was not your typical urban fantasy (or what the current trend for urban fantasy entails) hero with leather tights and lovers in a harem. I wanted to see a character who is now grown up, married, with kids and with a partner. I guess I am tired of the sexy heroine trope in the urban fantasy glut. I think I wanted my story to be more in line with the gentler and mystical vision of Charles de Lint. The wolves are wolves, not two-legged beasts.

That being said, I wanted to weave Chinese traditions and culture… something I know. The pack culture in Jan Xu’s family is very tight-knit and family IS important.

And I wanted to examine sibling relationships (since I do have two girls who are very articulate and know what they want – witness the fireworks at home all the time!)

Book Review: Wolf at the Door by J. Damask

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J. Damask, Urban Fantasy, Wolf at the Door

Reviewed by Rowena C. Ruiz

Wolf at the Door is a tale of two sisters: Jan and Marianne Xu. They belong to a family of shape shifting wolves who live in Singapore.   Living peacefully and interacting with the human population,  Jan Xu, the protagonist in the story,  not only introduces us to the otherworldly denizens who live in the city, she also reveals to us that among the wolf clans there are those who are unable to change into wolf form.  They are called the non-shifting ones.  Marianne, Jan’s sister is such a one.

Damask’s wolves have a  good grasp of their identity and exhibit a healthy outlook of life.  They celebrate their differentness but do not consider themselves in anyway superior to others.  They exercise caution when it comes to revealing their true selves but are not overly suspicious of others.  They have accepted and adapted to living alongside humans and other beings that occupy this space and have form alliances and lasting relationships with them.

Another aspect which I find interesting in Damask’s work is the concept of becoming a werewolf.   This happens only for non-shifting wolves and it is always a choice.   Non-shifting wolves are not ostracized in wolf society.  They are loved, accepted and encouraged to fulfill their true potential and given responsibilities and positions of trust in the clan hierarchy.  The only prohibition for non-shifting wolves is that they cannot join in the wolf hunts that are held periodically.  Thus to choose to force the change by becoming a werewolf is beyond the understanding of the wolves for not only does this bring great sorrow upon one’s family, there is also the negative impact on the whole community as well.

Damask’s book sets before us a challenge.  How do we deal with those who in spite of our love and acceptance, still continue to feel left out and out of step with the rest of society?  Is it possible to fully understand the issues that they grapple with every day?  How well do we really know each other and if we did, how would we respond?  These questions and more are the questions that Jan deals with as Marianne comes back to Singapore to visit their family.   These too are questions that each of us must deal with when we interact with those closest to us.

I enjoyed reading this book, which I understand is the first of a series.  It is a book about wolves and I found it not only to be interesting but refreshing to see that wolves living and experiencing life as we do in everyday life without all themystery and angst that usually accompanies books with shape-shifting themes .   I look forward to reading more about Jan and her adventures as a wolf living in a human’s world.

Author Interview: Karen Lord

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Karen Lord, Redemption in Indigo

Karen Lord’s Redemption in Indigo draws the reader in from the get go. The author’s voice is strong and confident and engages the reader. Both Weng and I enjoyed reading this book.

Just recently, Karen was the writer-in-residence at the Shared Worlds Writing Camp. Here, she talks about her experience at Shared Worlds, writing, and influences.

I wanted to start by asking you about your Shared Worlds Experience. Is this your first time teaching at Shared Worlds or have you taught there before? Would you like to share some of the insights/experiences from the workshop? 

It was my first time at Shared Worlds, and I loved it. After building the world, there are so many stories to tell and so many ways of telling those stories – using music, games, art, film, the oral tale and of course literature. There’s no one best way, and real excellence can be found not by merely imitating what you think is good, but by finding and developing your own unique combination of skills and strengths and using them to full effect.

A good number of writers were/are bookworms. When you were a teen, did you have any idea that you wanted to be a writer? What were you like as a teen? 

Yes, I was a bookworm, and yes, I knew I was going to be a writer. But there were a lot of things I wanted to do first because I wanted to have something to write about. My teen years weren’t particularly exciting – just a lot of schoolwork and exams and focus on doing well.

Who were your favorite writers? 

I really enjoyed Ray Bradbury then, and I have an even greater appreciation for his work now. Tolkien and Lewis were standards – a teacher read them to us in primary school. My friends and I read a lot of Asimov and Clarke. Some friends were also very much into Stephen King and James Herbert, but I could only handle some of the milder King novels. Robert Ludlum, at least his earlier work, was another favourite. X-Men and New Mutants comics were popular at school and I borrowed a lot from friends. I can’t recall the names of the writers and artists of that period, but Mohawk Storm is the definitive Storm for me.

When did you decide that you wanted to be a writer and what made you decide to be a writer? Would you like to tell us what your early forays into writing were like? ( Were they also sf/f or were they realist in nature? )

I never know how to answer that kind of question. I didn’t decide to be a writer. I enjoyed telling stories. I wrote poetry as a teenager (almost an obligatory phase). I did some world building in my late teens and tried a short story or two in my twenties (both SF). I focused on other things, learning science and history, learning to write non-fiction well.

Who would you say were your major influences? 

I usually cite Bradbury, C. S. Lewis (the later works, fiction and non-fiction), and Dorothy L. Sayers. I love seeing how Lewis and Sayers developed from their earlier work to later work (I enjoy the earlier work of Sayers as well, but I’m not that fond of early Lewis.), and Till We Have Faces is my all-time favourite book. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark is one of those ‘perfect’ books for me – economically slender, non-linear, nuanced and rich, truthful yet forgiving. The middle part of Asimov’s The Gods Themselves, where he writes aliens better than he ever wrote humans, is another work that I return to again and again.

Realism in SF is more than the depiction of evil, mayhem and destruction. I’ve read scenes of torture and loss that bored me. For me, if a story has depth and truth, the author can wound and daze you with the description of a sunny day. I pay attention to authors who can do that, find the truths that you didn’t even know could hurt you.

Since Redemption in Indigo, you’ve come out with The Best of All Possible Worlds which is so very clearly a different novel from Redemption in Indigo. Was this a conscious choice you made? And if so, why? 

It wasn’t a conscious choice, but I’m glad it turned out that way because I don’t like to be stuck in a category box. It is a different novel, but the more that I look at it, the more I see the similarities. I’ve encountered a lot of different reactions from readers, and some of those reactions do appear to be culturally determined. It’s become a bit of a Rorschach test.

Also, was there a difference between working on Redemption in Indigo and The Best of All Possible Worlds? 

Every book is different. I drafted Redemption in Indigo in 2003. Then I completed an MPhil and a PhD, won a prize for Redemption, and wrote Best in 2009. That’s a gap of over five years in time, writing and life experience. There had to be difference in approach and content.

What were some of the challenges you’ve come up against as a writer of color? How have you dealt with or overcome these challenges? 

I don’t know if that question is the right one. Perhaps it would make more sense to ask what challenges I’ve encountered as a Barbadian writer in a US/UK-dominated field. I don’t find it possible to separate my Barbadian identity from my identity as a member of the African diaspora in a country where I am not a minority. The challenge there is the obvious one … few people know my background. I have to write with a little translation programme running in my head. I tend to write two books in every novel – one that most UK/US readers will understand, and one for readers like me.

I was intrigued by what you wrote about writing two books. One for US/UK readers and one for readers like yourself. Would you like to elaborate on this more? What are the differences that exist between these two kinds of readerships and how much do you need adjust for the US/UK readership? 

The differences are too many to list, ranging from the rhythm of the speech to cultural references and in-jokes. I don’t adjust specifically for the US/UK reader. I try write so that anyone from anywhere in the world can understand what’s happening, and I leave it to the editors to adjust anything that they think I’ve overlooked.

What encouragement/advice would you give to a writer coming from a non US/UK background who wants to break into SF/F? 

Be very very good at it. Don’t quit your day job. Seek validation from your peers first, and your peers are more likely to be in your own country and of your own culture, not overseas. They know the sources you draw on, the training you’ve had, and the traditions you’re building on. Appreciate your literary influences and genre tropes, but don’t imitate. Imitators may be more easily accepted, but they are also more easily replaced and forgotten.

Are you working on anything new now? I heard that you’re working on a sequel to Redemption in Indigo…

I’ve been working on that for a while, but right now The Galaxy Game, which is the sequel to The Best of All Possible Worlds, is taking precedence.

Where on the web can we find you? 

On twitter: @Karen_Lord

merumsal.wordpress.com

merumsal.tumblr.com

www.facebook.com/Karen.A.R.Lord

www.goodreads.com/karen_lord

We hope you enjoyed reading this interview with Karen Lord. You can read Weng’s review of Redemption in Indigo here and you can purchase a copy from here.

**Photo credit goes to: Russell Watson of R Studio

Book Review: Redemption in Indigo by Karen Lord

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Karen Lord, Redemption in Indigo

Reviewed by Rowena C. Ruiz

“ A rival of mine once complained that my stories begin awkwardly and end untidily. I am willing to admit to many faults, but I will not burden my conscience with that one. All my tales are true, drawn from life, and a life story is not a tidy thing. It is a half-tamed horse that you seize on the run and ride with knees and teeth clenched, and then you regretfully slip off as gently and safely as you can, always wondering if you could have gone a few metres more.”  – Excerpt from Redemption in Indigo

Lord begins her novel with these words and takes on the role of a story teller.  Her telling is straightforward, without hype, and yet as story unfolds, a clear picture of the characters emerge.  From Ansige with his passion for food to the minor djombi who take part in this tale, they all come to life with the words that Karen uses.   What’s more, she draws you into the story so that you can see for yourself the scenes unfolding.   As I read the story, I found myself shaking my head over Ansige’s foolishness,  rooting for Paama as she tries to deal with her encounter with a senior djombi,  and hoping against hope that the Indigo Lord will not succeed in his quest to gain back his power.  In a way, Lord reminds me of another writer who wrote his stories in a similar manner – Rudyard Kipling.

Another aspect of Lord’s writing is while she presents her characters quite clearly,  she does not pass judgment on them. Instead she allows us to see them as they are and to draw our own conclusions.  Thus  we see that Ansige’s passion for food is his way of coping with  insecurity, the Indigo Lord’s insensitivity is brought about by his disappointment in humans, and Paama’s desire to help is tempered not only by compassion but with the understanding that some things cannot be changed:  that people must make their own choices and we can only help in so far as they allow us.  We also learn people and their actions can affect others and that we each have a part in influencing the choices that they make.

I also liked the fact that Lord makes no bones that her story has a lesson to teach.  Yet she does not preach or force the moral upon you.  What she does point out is that there are things we can learn not only from reading but from the people and things around us.  As she writes,

“Everything teaches, everyone preaches, all have a gospel to sell! Better the one who is honest and open in declaring an agenda than the one who fools you into believing that they are only spinning a pretty fancy for beauty’s sake.”

This is the first time I have read anything by Karen Lord and I really enjoyed it.  Not only that, I had fun reading it.  I definitely recommend that others read it and I am looking forward to reading her other books.

Rating:  5 charms.

*Clicking on the image will bring you to Amazon where you can purchase a copy of the book.

Author Interview: Kiini Ibura Salaam

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Ancient, Kiini Ibura Salaam

Ancient, Ancient is a strong collection. I love how the stories in this collection explore themes of sexuality and gender as well as power dynamics and consent. In this interview, Kiini Ibura Salaam talks about the process of putting together a collection, the inspiration behind stories and what we can look forward to. 

What process did you go through in selecting the stories that would go into this collection? Were there stories you had to leave out? Did you have to write new ones?

Publishing this collection was a very practical move on my part. It was–in a way–an act of survival. I have been battling to write a novel for years and have not yet succeeded. Back in 2011, sick of hearing myself complain about what I haven’t done, I decided to look at what I had done. I realized I had written a collection of speculative fiction stories. I gathered them up, edited them anew and sent them out for publication. (I did not include my non-speculative erotic stories in the manuscript, thereby keeping the collection genre specific.) Originally the collection contained only 10 stories, all of which had previously been published, but once the manuscript was accepted for publication, my pride got the better of me. I literally thought, “I can’t go out like this.” I put on my big girl pants and completed and/or edited three new stories that had been in the works over the years but had never been finalized. I wrote a little bit about the process of shifting my thought process from what I can’t do to what I can do here: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2013/05/guest-post-james-tiptree-jr-award-winning-author-kiini-ibura-salaam-on-doing-what-we-can/

Rosamojo and Desire strike me as stories that are complex and grounded in reality. What was the inspiration behind these stories and what challenges did you face in writing them?

Backstory! You wan’t to talk about backstory? Okay, for “Rosamojo,” I had written a brief story about a black woman who was passing. She goes to the bathroom and a black doll pops out of her purse–one of her treasured childhood toys. She doesn’t know what to do. When she comes out of the stall, the bathroom attendant confronts her about her past. That story ended up splitting and morphing. The woman who was passing became Marie, the title character in “Marie” from the collection. In the current version of the story, Marie is not really passing, but she ends up in these default situations where an identity is assumed for her and she doesn’t correct anyone. You read the collection, so you know that I kept the element of confrontation and made the story a meld between a horror story and a tale of the crossroads. Well, Rosamojo is that bathroom attendant as a child. I asked myself what is the backstory of this woman whose office–for all intents and purposes–is the bathroom of a glitzy club and confronts people with the truth of themselves. What resulted is the story of Rosamojo. When I finished “Rosamojo,” I had planned to continue on into adulthood, but I realized I had finished an arc and stopped there. It was published in Nalo Hopkinson’s anthology Mojo: Conjure Stories. After the story was published, I brought the story to be critiqued in my first semester of my MFA program. I wasn’t ready to present my novel and had nothing new to workshop. I didn’t tell anyone it was published, because I didn’t want to sway anyone’s critique. Something really telling resulted from the critique–I had left a hole regarding the mother. Did she know what her daughter had done? What did she think of it? So the scene between Rosamojo and her mother after her father dies did not exist in the original story and isn’t included in Mojo. I realized I really had missed an opportunity and went back into the story to fill in that gap. The challenges with Rosamojo was the same as I always have–I often write in dialect, but then when I read it, I have biased reaction to the characters because I think society generally devalues people who don’t speak standard English. So I was challenged to put in enough so that you would read it in the characters, but not so much that it would be a barrier to your reading or that you would read the characters as ignorant. This story was really just me channelling this woman’s story and feeling my way through her truth.

With “Desire” I was making some conscious attempts. I wrote it at Clarion West where the instructors were challenging us to try different approaches in our writing, and also where I was exposed to what the other members of my cohort were writing. For “Desire,” I thought I’d try to write a fairytale–except I don’t really vibe with fairytales, I have a deeper connection to folktales. I used an Afro-syncretic pantheon of gods as my basis for the gods. I made the animals they are associated with part of their physical bodies. I love how those gods are not holier than thou,  but flawed and emotional, even as they are immensely powerful. I remember one of the members of my cohort was annoyed with the form of the story. He thought it was pretentious, but honestly, that was how I heard it as I started writing it. [On the page, the two storylines are represented with different margins. The human story goes all the way across the page, while the story of the gods is in brackets and right aligned.]

This rhythm of Faru, running through the bush, while all was quiet and well in the human world, just before all hell broke loose. I was challenged to find a way to keep the story moving with the two story lines without duplicating or pulling away from either story. I also just wrote too much with that story. During the critique, my fellow writers recommended where I could cut and I ignored them. Well, I entered the story into a contest and got a handwritten rejection saying it was a close contender, but ultimately it was just too long. I decided to go in and do some cutting, and what did I cut?–Exactly what my cohort recommended cutting. I find it interesting that as a seasoned writer, I’m much more willing to take on critiques than I was when I was a newer writer. One teacher–I think it was Nancy Zafris at the MFA program at Antioch LA–said that when you get a critique, the critique is probably right, but the solutions are probably all wrong. In other words, never do exactly what someone tells you to do with your work (unless it completely resonates with you), but do take every critique under consideration because–unless it’s complete hateration–there’s probably some valuable truth there.

I like how your central characters in Of Wings, Nectar and Ancestors, Malkai’s Last Seduction and At Life’s Limits come across as being not exactly like us even if they wear the face of humans. Was this a conscious choice? In At Life’s Limits, I found it interesting that Walila eventually transitions into human. Would you share some of the motivation behind this?

The trigger for writing “Of Wings, Nectar and Ancestors” was feeling like an alien in a foreign country, so yes, that was a completely conscious choice. I was fascinated by the barriers of language and culture–how as humans we are exactly alike, but at the same time completely unknowable to each other in some strange ways. Obviously “Of Wings, Nectar and Ancestors” isn’t factually true, but it is an accurate emotional rendering of my experiences in the Dominican Republic where I couldn’t be my true self because I couldn’t communicate across boundaries. I wanted to demonstrate how constricting it can be when your true identity is not known.

You’ve written about traveling a lot. How has travelling influenced your work as a writer and as an artist?

I love to travel. I have done a LOT less of it in the past few years as my daughter has reached school age and I’ve been putting my money and my attention into my career, but I feel like traveling opens you up, allows you to get to know new facets of yourself. This is essential for an artist. I remember when I got the Thomas J. Watson fellowship and travelled for 12 consecutive months–I realized at the beginning of the trip that my choices heretofore (or thentofore–that should be a word) had been completely influenced by the people around me.  A large part of my identity was being the social glue in my community.  I would make sure everyone always knew what was going on, everyone was up on everyone else’s lives, and then I was in another country and I didn’t know what it meant to get up and go out without calling people to make sure they knew what was going on. Being alone wasn’t an issue, but I realized I spent a lot of my time taking care of bonds. So now that I didn’t have anyone to do that for, what would I do with my time? An artist needs to be able to make choices outside the box as well as to know the veils we all wear as humans. Traveling takes what you think you know is fact and turns it on its head–it opens up the gates of possibility and also frees you from your own life so that your creativity and imagination is free to travel far and wide. It’s been a huge part of my life lessons and many of my stories capture an experience in a certain country.

Do you have a favorite destination or a place you’d still like to visit? If it’s not too personal would you like to share it and why you like that place?

Hmmm, I’ve not been to Africa or Asia. I really love people and I really love culture and I really love just wandering through new landscapes and finding ways to fit myself into different surroundings. So in my fantasy, I would continue traveling, selecting places depending on where I am in my life. I’ve fallen in love with places and visited three, four, or five times. Other places, once was enough. For long trips, I tend to like to go places where I can fit in and flow around unseen. On the other hand, I spent a year in Oaxaca, Mexico, and absolutely fell in love with it even though my daughter and I stood out like sore thumbs. I just don’t want to go anywhere cold, give me a plane ticket to a warm or moderately-temperatured place and I’m there!

If you were to pick someone from your collection, who is the character you’d like to have most as a travel companion and why?

Travel companion. At the risk of sounding completely insane, I’d like to travel with the woman I’m writing about now–Ava, one of the main characters from my forthcoming novel “Fate.” She is insane, which is why I would be insane to travel with her, but at the same time, she is aggressive and unafraid to be confrontational in a way that is interesting to me. I think I could probably learn a lot from her.

What’s up next for Kiini Ibura Salaam? What projects are keeping you busy?

Life keeps me busy. I’m an artist with a day job and a child. That means I cram a lot into very tiny pockets of time. Right now I am writing a short story set in Barataria, Louisiana, dealing with a swamp witch who wants to build a black utopia away from slavery, but she can’t get anyone to follow her. More specifically, right now I am slacking on editing that story. It’s due at the end of August, but I am having a hard time staying focused on the edits because I am also moving into the beta phase of my novel. After years of being unable to complete any novel, I got into this warrior mindstate and rewrote my novel in four months! This is incredible for me who has dragged her feet for years and lacked the focus to complete a novel. I’m editing that book for publication and working with beta readers to identify areas that need work (very exciting). As I said, it’s called Fate and it’s about one transformative year in the lives of four women who are thrown together in one house. It’s set in pre-Katrina New Orleans and it involves a lot of drama! Oh, and I just released “On the Struggle to Self-Promote,” the second book in my Notes from the Trenches series. It’s a nonfiction ebook series of my musings on writing–written from the perspective of someone who is in the trenches, rather than someone who has already succeeded.

Where on the internet can we find you?

My website is kiiniibura.com. The site features some of my essays, some fiction, as well as the posts about writing that I’ve been penning for over ten years now. My twitter handle is kiiniibura and I share some of my missives from the trenches, as well as interesting posts I come across about writing on my Facebook page at: www.facebook.com/kiiniibura

We want to thank Kiini for her time and for her generous responses. We hope you’ll take the time to check out Ancient, Ancient. It’s a fantastic collection.

**Photo credit: Regine Romain

Book Discussion: In which we talk about Kiini Ibura Salaam’s Ancient, Ancient

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Ancient, Kiini Ibura Salaam, Tiptree co-winner

Chie: I first found out about Ancient, Ancient from an announcement posted by Cheryl Morgan who runs Wizard’s Tower Books. It looked interesting, and so I thought I would check it out. A little later, I heard that it was co-winner of the Tiptree Award, which is a prize given to books/stories/collections that explore gender in new ways or look at gender or make us look at gender in ways we haven’t done before.

I tend to be biased in favor of books like these, so I wanted to talk about it with Weng who is much more distanced from the SFF field. I also wanted to see how a reader who isn’t immersed in genre would respond to stories that don’t feel Western in their orientation.

Weng: From my reading, the stories are about women and their sexuality as well as women empowerment.  I think that’s the take that Kiini took.  Some of her stories are pretty straightforward, while others need some analyzing.  There were about three stories I think that I am not sure as to what is being talked about, or it might be I have some tentative thoughts about them but am not quite sure if I’m correct.

Chie: These stories are quite different from your run-of-the-mill SFF stories. One of the things that struck me most, for instance, was how her aliens really read like aliens. In her stories, I get a strong sense of the characters being truly other, which I recognize and appreciate. I also get a very strong feeling of energy that comes from being connected to the earth as well as a sensitivity to what is unseen.  

Weng: I agree with you there.  They are quite different.  That’s one, also I think it’s because (I’m not quite sure about this) she makes use of legends and folklores that aren’t familiar to us. I think that’s why I don’t get some of her stories.  I need to learn a bit more about where she’s coming from.

Chie: That’s true. I remember how even Filipinos who are unfamiliar with indigenous belief, thought I was writing a fantasy when it was simply a presentation of what is.

Weng: Anyway,  to get to those stories that I understood.  One that most stood out for me was “Rosamojo.”  It’s a story about child abuse and the culprit is her father.  However, as the story progresses, it’s not just the father who’s at fault.  Rosa’s mother in some ways has abused her child.  However, her method of abuse is more painful because she denies that the abuse has happened and blames her daughter for her husband’s death.  

 That’s why Rosa finds it hard to forgive, because the two people who should have been protecting her are the very people who let her down.  Those are wounds that are hard to heal and the scars remain.

Chie: Rosamojo is an interesting story because it forces the reader to acknowledge that this exists and we can’t just tell people to forgive and forget. This is something I find so very jarring–how people tell those who’ve suffered from abuse that they should forgive or get over it. It’s a failure to understand how long it takes for that kind of wound to heal.

Weng: That’s true.  Forgiving is not an easy thing to do when the wounds are deep.  It is a process and can’t be done with a snap of the fingers.  People need time to heal. It may take a lifetime – and we must also acknowledge that they have a right to the emotions that they feel because of the abuse that happened to them.  If we don’t allow them to do this, we are in some way condoning or perpetuating the abuse, or as you said, we are complicit in the abuse that has happened.

Chie: Definitely. I think it’s more harmful when people say: you’re too angry or too bitter or you should move forward. It’s a refusal to acknowledge the pain of that betrayal.

What other stories would like to talk about?

Weng:  I liked most of the stories.  “Desire” talks about the role of the women in a marriage/love  relationship, which is first and foremost, she is wife and lover.  Her actions dictate how the relationship and home turns out to be. Sene when she experiences renewed desire, looks for her husband.  When she finds him, she fights for him and in so doing, not only preserves the home but saves their relationship.   

Chie: I found that to be an interesting story. Particularly since Sene is with child when this happens. It was interesting to me, because we also have these stories that circulate regarding husbands and infidelity during pregnancy. It makes me think of the connection between motherhood, pregnancy and desire.

Weng: I don’t have any experience in that area, so I can’t comment on it. But sex is only one aspect of that story.

Chie: There’s quite a bit of symbolism going on in that story.

Weng: Yup, there is.  The god of desire is a goat and the goddess of desire is a crocodile, and the god who gives disease is an elephant.  Quite a lot of symbolism and representation going on in the story.

If you want symbolism, the crocodile representation is quite apt because they are known to be predators.  

Chie: What about the stories that you said, you had to think twice about?

Weng: We’ll I didn’t quite get what the point was in the butterfly stories.  I tried to have a tentative guess about “Of Wings, Nectar & Ancestors,” but I’m not quite sure if that’s the right take.  Basically WaLiLa and her kind gather nectar from humans.  WaLiLa’s choice is to gather the nectar during lovemaking.  In return she heals George and gives him a sense of wholeness.  The best I could do there was that the sexual act is one of give and take.  It is not a tool to be used for our own personal gratification or motives.  So tell me, what do you think?

Chie: I find your thoughts on it to be quite intriguing. I was probably more attracted to the alienness of WaLiLa. I like what you said about the sexual act not being a tool. What interests me here as well is WaLiLa as being the initiator and how sex is a choice she makes. She is in control. Her body is hers and she decides what to do with it. 

Weng:  Well, WaLiLa is successful in that encounter but in “At Life’s Limits”, she fails in her task and becomes a human being.   Essentially, she is supposed to die, but because she has ingested smoke (which is poison to butterflies), she is transformed from an alien to a human being.  In that story however, there is no sexual encounter of any kind.  

It would be interesting to find out what the butterflies symbolize and what they represent to the author.

Chie: As a reader, I found Kiini Ibura Salaam’s work to be very fresh and unique and also a joy to read.

Was it easier/harder for you to read? Did you feel like you needed to know more?

Weng: It was not really a hard read, but for those particular stories, it would help to know a bit more. I  did notice that in these stories there is a love of dance and the use of body movements to express emotions and feelings.  

Chie: Would you be willing to read more from this author?   

Weng:  Yes.  The more you read an author’s works, the more you get a feel of where she’s coming from.  

Chie: I would be interesting in hearing more of your impressions–how you experienced the whole collection. Was it a satisfying read and would you recommend it to other readers.

Weng:  Overall, the collection was a good one, I enjoyed reading it.  It reflects the range of emotions that we as women go through, how we respond to situations and circumstances in different ways.  They may not always be the “right” emotions but they are real and should be acknowledged. Kiini’s work challenges society to see women as real, living, breathing human beings, with hopes and aspirations.  We are not objects or silent shadows, we are capable of doing great things and should be regarded as partners and equals in this race that we call life.   I believe that we are all created equal, it’s something that we need to acknowledge..  

I also think that publishers should really pay attention to this kind of work because it contributes a lot of diversity to the genre.  We should not get stuck in one groove because there’s still a lot of stories that haven’t been heard. The science fiction genre is an avenue for diversity because there are so many possibilities that can happen in this type of literature.  If they don’t pay attention to these kinds of work, then they’re losing out on a lot.

Finally, I want to encourage others to read this collection. My rating would be 4.5 charms.

You can purchase Ancient, Ancient from any of the following outlets:

Wizard’s Tower Books

Aqueduct Press

Amazon.com

Please feel free to send your comments to us at chieandweng at gmail.com or leave a message here on our blog. If you’ve read Ancient, Ancient, we’d also be happy to hear from you about it.