AMY TENBRINK: You are a PhD candidate researching gender and embodiment in the early Quaker movement. What appealed to you about chasing a doctorate degree? And about your particular research topic?

GILLIAN CHISOM: I’ve actually left academia recently, for a host of complicated reasons, but I was interested in pursuing historical research because I wanted to understand the lives of people in the past, and especially people who haven’t been included in many traditional historical narratives. Even though I’ve moved on from that part of my life, I still think that it’s tremendously important work, and I’m still passionate about telling stories that haven’t been told, or have been told in a way that excludes certain perspectives.

AMY: Two years ago, you presented “Cold as a Witch’s Tit”: Gender and Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials at Sirens. Tell us something we probably don’t know about witches—but really ought to!

GILLIAN: Based on the way early modern European witch trials often appear in pop culture, people tend to assume that witch trials were about men persecuting women who were rebellious or subversive in some way, but that isn’t entirely accurate. Women were accusing other women of witchcraft more often than not, which isn’t to say that witch trials weren’t reinforcing patriarchy, but it shows that women are often complicit in policing other women within patriarchal structures. Also, the women who ended up accused of witchcraft weren’t necessarily rebellious or subversive—they were usually just ordinary women who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or who got caught up in some kind of local conflict that escalated beyond their control.

I think that part of the reason historians have struggled to come up with a singular explanation for the early modern witch hunts is that there isn’t one explanation—witch trials were usually rooted in very local circumstances, in the kind of village conflict that you have to understand in all of its particularity. There were larger forces at play, of course, but to understand a given witch trial you have to untangle the local before you can get to the big picture. Which is to say, I think that witch trials are significant because they give us a window into the kind of day-to-day problems and anxieties that early modern people were dealing with—it’s not an accident, for instance, that many witchcraft accusations arose in the context of pregnancy and childbirth, which were very vulnerable states for early modern women.

AMY: When did you fall in love with fantasy literature? What do you love about it? What about it do you find problematic?

GILLIAN: The Chronicles of Narnia were my formative fantasy series, so much so that I joke sometimes that C.S. Lewis programmed my brain. I think that the thing I fell in love with about those books was the sense of possibility—that there could be a door to a magical world anywhere. Of course, Narnia also illustrates some of the most problematic aspects of a lot of classic fantasy literature—sexism, racism, Christianity-as-default, and monarchy-as-default, just to name a few things! On a personal level, I have incredibly complicated feelings about those books now, even though I can’t escape the way they shaped me as a reader and a writer. I used to identify very strongly with Lucy as a child, and now I identify with Susan, fall from grace and all. As an adult, I’ve wrestled so much with what it means to be the girl who doesn’t go back to Narnia, who rejects the fantasy world but is also rejected by it, found wanting in some way. But there’s possibility, too, in that wrestling. I think that there’s so much to celebrate in the way that current fantasy authors are taking some of those problematic tropes and preserving the sense of possibility and deconstructing the rest, though of course we still have a lot of work to do.

AMY: You don’t write just epic scholarly tomes, you also write fantastical fiction—and you’re committed to centering queer voices in your stories. Recently, Sarah Gailey has written on what, to them, makes a story queer. What, to you, makes a story queer?

GILLIAN: I agree with Gailey both on the importance of casual queer representation and that representation alone isn’t the only thing that makes a story queer. I definitely resonate with what they said about wrestling with identity as a queer theme. In many ways that kind of wrestling has been at the core of my own experience since coming out; I’ve had to devote much of my time and mental and emotional energy to figuring out how to live with a version of myself that’s radically different than who I thought I was before. That type of struggle usually shows up in my stories in one way or another, though not always in ways that are obviously about sexuality. Found families also appear in almost all of my stories, and to me that’s also a queer theme—of course, queer people aren’t the only people who participate in found families, but in my experience there’s a lot of overlap there. Found family and community have also shaped my own experience as a queer person far more than romantic relationships, so that’s something that my work reflects. Queerness, in my experience, can carry with it the same breathless sense of possibility that fantasy literature itself does—the possibility of living and loving in unexpected and subversive ways.

AMY: Why did you decide to come to Sirens? And then why did you decide to come back to Sirens?

GILLIAN: A friend invited me, and it just happened that the first year I came was also the year that I was really starting to struggle in grad school, partly because it was such a male-dominated environment. It was such a relief to experience this amazing feminist community where I could be my authentic, nerdy self. Sirens became my refuge from the stress and frustrations of academia, a space where I could revisit the creative, passionate parts of myself that I felt like I had to suppress in my professional life. Over the years I’ve gone through some major life transitions, and it feels like the Sirens community has been there with me every step of the way, reminding me that I can be the heroine of my own story.

AMY: Sirens is about discussing and deconstructing both gender and fantasy literature. Would you please tell us about a woman or nonbinary person—a family member, a friend, a reader, an author, an editor, a character, anyone—who has changed your life?

GILLIAN: There are a lot of possible answers to this, but the first one that comes to mind is Aerin from Robin McKinley’s The Hero and the Crown. McKinley’s work was another formative influence in my development as a fantasy reader—hers were the first fantasy books I read with female protagonists, and I’m grateful that they were available to me even though there are definitely some things I would criticize them for now. Aerin in particular stands out, though, not just because she was my first McKinley heroine, but because she had two romantic partners in the course of the book and she didn’t have to choose between them. I was probably about twelve at the time that I read it, and I’d deeply internalized the idea that there was only one true romantic partner for everyone, so the fact that this heroine I admired was allowed to love two different people felt new and radical. Also, McKinley connects Aerin’s ability to love two people with her ability to hold in tension different aspects of her identity without having to choose, and that was also a message that I really needed to hear at that time in my life.

Gillian Chisom is a recovering academic and writer. A lifelong fantasy reader, over the last several years she has wrestled with the genre’s flaws and possibilities and become committed to writing fantastical stories which center queer voices. She was a Lambda Literary Fellow in Young Adult and Genre Fiction in 2013, and her work has appeared in The Toast, Global Comment, and Specs Journal. In her spare time, she likes to make her own clothes.

AMY TENBRINK: I want to ask you everything, but that feels like such an imposition! Let’s start here: Your bio includes the following sentence: “Her areas of interest include studies in death, gender, memory, grotesquerie, and post-colonialism; she is in eternal search for the thesis topic that combines all of the above.” Tell me, how does one channel all that amazingness into a graduate degree? What is the focus of your work?

REN IWAMOTO: I’m sure my supervisor would also like the answer to that question, but to give it the old college try: Channeling ideas for me is mostly just spewing bullshit until someone says something like, “Wow, I never thought of that before!” Then I bullshit some more and suddenly I have a thesis. Right now I’m really focusing on twentieth century East Asian literature — specifically during and post-WWII — with the intent of investigating the effects of Japanese colonialism. I was raised and educated in Canada, so bringing attention to this part of history, which has dodged a deserved spot in Western mass consciousness, fully into postcolonial discourse is important to me.

AMY: Last year at Sirens, you presented, with Marcella Haddad, a lecture titled “Death in a Dress: Is the ‘Girl Assassin’ Really a Strong Female Character?” This year, you’re presenting again, this time “Fight, Loli, Fight!: Lolita Fashion, Cute Culture, and Heroic Girlhood in Contemporary Media.” How do you craft your topics and what do you hope audiences take away from your presentations?

REN: I’m growing out of the habit of uncritical love. I love many things — girl assassins and anime, for example — and for a long time I thought that because those things were worthy of being loved I didn’t need to find the flaws in them. Or perhaps more accurately: I worried that if I found the flaws in something, I couldn’t love it anymore. But that’s a lazy way to consume media, and lacking in nuance. Investigating the parts of media I didn’t want to think about before is the origin of both my papers. As with all my academic work, my only goal is to have my audience go, “huh,” and nod thoughtfully.

“Death in a Dress” was very pattern-oriented. I think stories featuring girl assassins, or girl warriors, or whatever, are often sold under the pretense of being subversive. “My heroine is strong and she doesn’t take any shit and also she’s sexy, but in a relatable way,” they seem to say. But all of them seem to say that. They all feature violence, subjugation, sex. Reading the novels, I thought that men could derive pleasure from seeing these female characters have violence inflicted upon them, and in turn perpetrate violence. So there’s really nothing subversive about them at all. That’s where the idea for the paper came from. Marcella generated a lot of questions about craft related to this idea, which I would never have even considered, so she added an invaluable dimension to the presentation.

“Fight, Loli, Fight” is actually pretty reactionary. There’s still a lot of media that equates the strong female character as either completely derisive of femininity, or otherwise she’s a femme fatale. To have a girl as hero — and I mean a girl, not a (young) woman — is many times more subversive. There is a nebulous distinction between young woman and girl that is essential here, and I hope to expand upon it in the full paper, but briefly: A girl can be feminine without being sexualized, have romance without sex, and yet their internal and external lives are still rich, nuanced, entertaining for viewers. That’s both refreshing, I think, and important. In any case, I picked on this thread because it happened to coincide with this year’s theme. So, essentially I started working on it on a whim and got in over my head, as usual.

AMY: What do you love about reading speculative fiction? What kinds of stories, worldbuilding, characters, or craft really speak to you?

REN: I think speculative fiction is all about boundaries: what’s acceptable, real, possible. All the givens of our world become mutable in spec fic, and that’s very special to me as both a reader and writer. The room for play is infinite, and the stories where I can see that sentiment reflected are my favourite.

AMY: And you’re a poet! You’ve described writing poetry as “Mostly, I just unleash a demon I have trapped in a rosewood box, and it does the work for me.” What about poetry as a medium appeals to you? Is it the demon?

Editor’s Note: We’ve included a selection of Ren’s poems at the end of the post. Please click on the titles to read their full text: Fruit Scissors; Obento; All-Saints Day.

REN: It’s the demon. The demon has special powers and makes me think that every day I’m alive fucking sucks, and tries to keep me in bed all day without eating or sleeping or anything, but that really doesn’t work for me. So we have a deal in which I’ll write poems as if every day I’m alive fucking sucks, but in reality I will live as happily, determinedly, uncompromisingly as I can.

As a medium—I’m very lazy, and a scrooge, when it comes to both writing and reading. To me, good poems are distillations, and say the most in the fewest words possible.

AMY: Why did you decide to come to Sirens? And then why did you decide to come back to Sirens?

REN: I was at a writers’ retreat run by Natalie Parker three or four years ago. Justina Ireland was there and said something to the effect of, “Sirens is the only conference I give a fuck about.” Last year I was finally able to scrape some funds together to attend, and now Sirens is the only conference I give a fuck about. It’s kind of like when you go to a party where you don’t know anyone, and you’re like, Ah, shit, but then you see someone wearing, like, a pin from a show you like. The relief you feel as you go to strike up a conversation! Sirens was like that except everyone was wearing a pin from a show I like.

AMY: Sirens is about discussing and deconstructing both gender and fantasy literature. Would you please tell us about a woman or nonbinary person—a family member, a friend, a reader, an author, an editor, a character, anyone—who has changed your life?

REN: [Content warning: suicide mention]

Not to sound like a total Leo, but I change my own life. I tried to die twice! And yet I’m still here helping my friends out, writing poems, getting money, educating myself, and transmogrifying into something unspeakable beneath the light of the full moon! Isn’t it radical, equally destructive and constructive, for me, someone with one foot in Woman and one foot in Other, to keep living? This isn’t to say I didn’t have help — my parents, my therapist, my friends — but I’m the one who put in the work. It was me. It continues to be me.

Ren Iwamoto is a Japanese-Canadian grad student from the tenth dimension. Her areas of interest include studies in death, gender, memory, grotesquerie, and post-colonialism; she is in eternal search for the thesis topic that combines all of the above. Her poetry has been featured in multiple publications.

FRUIT SCISSORS
[Bywords Magazine, bywords.ca, August 2018]

i trace a line
of blood up
my thigh touch
pulpy red
meat a grapefruit
between
my lips

my legs cut
across streets
swiftly scissoring
towards a women’s
clinic my pants
are black they
show no
stains

like rotten
plums my body
invites parasites
i pinch their
tender pink heads
their undeveloped

heads and
pull them out
in a burst of blood

my legs cut
across streets
swiftly scissoring
away from a women’s
clinic my pants
are black they
show no
stains

OBENTO
[In/Words Magazine & Press, Issue 17.1, February 2018]

When Mama and Papa go to work
my obaa-chan makes me lunch. Rice,
pickled plum and radish, hardboiled eggs
marinated in shoyu and mirin.
Cucumbers cut into stars.

Some hakujin says, “Why are your eggs
black? Looks gross.”
I say, “Eat shit, Sarah. You have a
cheese sandwich every day. Look at this:
my grandma cuts my cucumbers into stars.
Shut up and drink your Five Alive.”

Detention (again).

At home: tuna sashimi,
red as an open wound.
Cold buckwheat noodles.

When Mama and Papa go to work,
my obaa-chan makes me lunch. White
bread. Juice box. Sarah keeps her mouth
shut; who’s eating shit
now?

ALL-SAINTS DAY
[above/ground press, GUEST Issue 1, November 2018]

my bones do not belong to me
alone like all saints
I donate this still-breathing
corpse to the faithful
may my blood be crystallized
tempered into glass
there you see my image
rendered in red casting
cursed light upon the praying
upon the back of the pastor’s neck
upon all the other holy things

the catacombs of my body
are for god alone to excavate
exhume my ugliest
pieces and gild them for display
under blessings and
the public eye
under the hands of popes
and preachers perhaps I
will become lovely

my ghost too
is a victim of love
chained down by devotion
caught in a jam jar
call me down like lightning
to pass through the veil
and inhabit your rivals
I will walk their bodies
into graves
into your arms
into a chapel done up in gold
and blood-colours
only the most loyal
servants haunt
their masters like I do

after death
humans are like empires
they collapse inwards
and disintegrate
I have seen the face of god
and it looks like your face
if you had seen a hundred-thousand
disappointing years