We’re pleased to bring you the last in a series of candid, in-depth interviews with this year’s Sirens Guests of Honor. We’ll cover a variety of topics relevant to Sirens with each author, from their inspirations, influences, and craft, to the role of women in fantasy literature as befits our 2016 focus on lovers and the role of love, intimacy, and sex. We hope these conversations will be a prelude to the ones our attendees will be having in Denver this October. Today, Andrea Horbinski interviews Laurie J. Marks.

LAURIE: Let me first explain how families work in Shaftal. Large, multi-generational families are the norm there, and nuclear families would be frowned upon, because Shaftali believe that children need many parents. Typically, a young person marries into a pre-existing family and has children with several partners who may or may not also be members of that family, although families also include pairs of monogamous lovers. The children are raised by the entire family regardless of biological relationship, though children are likely to have a special relationship with biological mothers and fathers. People who belong to an elemental order don’t belong to families, but they do treat each other as family members; and although they might have children, they don’t raise or even know those children.

In our real world, a lot of people surround themselves by intimates of one kind or another that substitute for a family they don’t want or that doesn’t want them, and I was trying to model the Shaftali families after those extended friendships and cooperative relationships. Also, I wanted to experiment with a world in which the concepts of heterosexuality (or homosexuality) and gender roles simply don’t exist. Lacking those concepts, it seems like people would not pair off into nuclear families, and instead would group together into practical, multi-generational alliances to operate a farm or business. Because these farm or businesses survive for hundreds of years, these families provide a lot of long-term stability, yet within that stability there’s a lot of room for individuals to have all different kinds of loving relationships, and for those relationships to shift and change over time. Also, in this world, the idea of family is quite flexible as well: for example, the central family in the Elemental Logic series is peculiar, because it formed spontaneously and is crazily diverse: three of its members simultaneously are in orders and nearly all of them have elemental talents; six of its members are in monogamous pairings, and its members come from four different ethnic groups and speak three different languages. Yet it is still considered to be a family because the adults live together, are raising a child together, and share a common enterprise.

 
ANDREA: Colonialism and warfare are major themes in the world of Shaftal, and in particular, the revelation at the end of Water Logic about the origins of the Shaftalese casts the previous events of the series in a very different light. Similarly, forgiveness and reconciliation and negotiation are explicitly issues that the characters struggle with and work towards. The latter set of ideas is not often paired with the former in fantasy works. How do you see the relationship between them, either in the Elemental Logics books or more generally?

LAURIE: In classic fantasy—like the works of Tolkein and C.S. Lewis—warfare was about the battle of good and evil. Certainly, both of those authors were influenced by the ancient belief that wars are won by the righteous. But during my formative years of the sixties, people became opposed to, or at least skeptical of, the idea that war could be just. From then on, I saw a lot of evidence that even in a war that could be said to be justified, the negative effect on the individuals who fought in those wars was profound, and the long-term ability of war to solve problems or even to prevent further warfare was questionable. But I don’t want to give you the idea that my books offer a realistic solution to the problems of warfare and colonialism! In fact, I’m mainly focused on stories about people who are trying to end war and violence, or who become convinced to abandon fighting. But, I’m afraid that when I talk about the books in this way, it makes them sound rather self-righteous and tedious, and they’re not. I work very hard to write exciting, fast-moving stories that have interesting and engaging characters. The ideas operate almost entirely in the background.

I worked on these books over a long time period (more than twenty years), if you look closely you’ll see that my treatment of these themes evolves from book to book. I started off thinking about how fighting for a cause, even a just cause, can turn the fighters into the thing they’re opposed to, and that idea arose from my mix of sympathy for and horror of the guerilla movements that were then prevalent in the world. By the time I was working on the second book, Earth Logic, I had started to suspect that all of humankind’s problems stem from our need to believe that our own values and belief systems are true. Nowadays, I’m thinking more and more about the importance of humility, which shows up much more in the last two books of the series.

In the Elemental Logic series, you see that war and violence can’t be ended without a radical change in values. This is something of a queer perspective, because queer people are born into a world that assumes people are heterosexual and that biological sex and gender are the same thing; then they have to undergo a complete reorientation—a woman realizes she’s actually a man, or that she has fallen in love with a female friend, or, as actually happened to me, same-sex characters in a book I was writing insisted on making love with each other. But this loss and transformation of world view also happen in non-sexual ways, such as when a person ceases to believe in God, or in communism. You see these shifts in world-view throughout the Elemental Logic series. For example, Fire Logic seems to begin with a fairly typical good-versus-evil type of conflict, until Zanja realizes that her allies aren’t any better than her enemies. In Earth Logic, one point-of-view character is a kind and principled human being, despite being a bad guy. In Water Logic, there’s an origin story that reveals how connected the good guys and the bad guys are. And in Air Logic, a subgroup of the good guys are the story’s antagonists. So I guess I’m suggesting that in order for forgiveness, reconciliation and negotiation to happen, everyone has to acknowledge how arbitrary and plastic our beliefs and ways of thinking are. For peace to follow war, it’s not merely necessary for some people to be generous and let go of their anger. Instead, everybody has to take seriously the idea that nobody is right. That’s where the humility comes in. This certainly is an atypical way to deal with good and evil in a fantasy novel. I seem to be writing sword-and-sorcery for pacifists.

 
ANDREA: The ideas of elemental logics, and that “the way you do anything is the way you do everything,” are some of the things I love most about the series, but they’ve also given me some of the more challenging reads of my life. In particular, since I am exactly half air and half fire, I really struggled with reading and understanding Water Logic. (Earth Logic was easier, because by earth logic, action is understanding, so reading the book led me to understand it on some level.) How has your own viewpoint helped or hindered you writing the books and the characters, as they each have their own distinctive ways of being?

LAURIE: I definitely ran into my own limitations while writing Water Logic. If I were Shaftali, I wouldn’t have even a drop of water in my elemental make-up, and as a result, in Water Logic there aren’t any point-of-view characters who are much influenced by the water element. Water logic is so alien to me that I just couldn’t imagine the subjective experience of a water elemental. The story is about the overlapping of past, present and future, because that was one aspect of water logic I could get a handle on, whereas I simply couldn’t write or even imagine a novel that worked like weather or like a piece of music. Also, throughout the series I found that depicting characters who are influenced by air can be a lot of work. It was easy to portray them as bad guys, because they can be so rigid and controlling, but depicting them as valuable and necessary took some imaginative effort. Fortunately, I do value some characteristics of air, such as order and consistency, even though I don’t have a lot of those things in my life, and I admire people who have insight into how or why other people think in particular ways. I could use those values to help me to round out the characters of the air elementals, particularly Norina Truthken, who is a central character throughout the series. I found it easier to write about people who are influenced by fire or by earth, because those are the types I most understand and want to be like, but I have to be careful not to idealize them, or they stop being interesting.

 
ANDREA: Community and negotiation play important roles in your books, which seems somewhat remarkable in a genre that often defaults to stories about heroic individuals and Chosen Ones. To me, these elements (ha) feel very realistic; I think we’ve all encountered people like the farmers so stubborn the only way to deal with them was to magic their dogs. What seems unusual is the way these aspects of Shaftal often power the plot of the books. What was your thinking in making those choices, structurally or philosophically?

LAURIE: Someone once referred to the Elemental Logic series as utopian, and I was rather surprised to realize that I do seem to be depicting an ideal world that’s grounded in a philosophy. But, honestly, childish wish-fulfilment also plays a large role in my writing decisions. Nevertheless, let’s talk about the philosophy. In the same way that the lone hero type of fantasy really is a masculine story, it seems feminist to emphasize the importance of an entire community in accomplishing anything worth doing. In traditional sword and sorcery type fantasy, the story ends when the war is won, but in the Elemental Logic series, the characters engage in an effort first to convince everyone that war is only making matters worse, and then to employ the values that already exist in the culture to make sure it doesn’t flare up again. So rather than using the power of violence and dominance, it’s using the resources of community self-interest along with food and shelter, meaning, love, children, and hope, to convince everyone to lay down their weapons and start doing productive work again.

Besides this feminist take on war, there are a lot of other (rather random and ill-considered) philosophies behind my emphasis on community and negotiation. Although Shaftal isn’t purely nonhierarchical, it does rely on a consensus process, and there really isn’t much of a social mechanism by which any one individual can acquire political power, or gain control of resources, or exercise control over others. That social system seems like it would work well so long as there aren’t any problems, but I’ve also given them one person whose job it is to intervene when problems crop up. That’s how the recalcitrant farmers end up being herded by their own dogs—they wouldn’t behave responsibly, so they were forced to do so. Also, Shaftal has a kind of meritocracy, except that people with a lot of talent are expected to spend their lives in service. The people they help give them food and shelter, but they don’t pay them, so there’s no way for them to become rich or self-important. The ideals of the Shaftali people are communitarian, they value long-range thinking, and there’s a lot of traditional small town values, like helping neighbors, feeding strangers, and doing their share of the work. It seems like the ways that problems are solved has to be logically consistent with that culture as I’ve described it. A Shaftali way to eliminate the enemy would be to treat them as they treat anyone else—to marry them, for example, or at least to feed them. Of course, it’s not every family that could be convinced to marry an enemy soldier, but it is culturally feasible.

 
ANDREA: I’ve read that there is at least one complete draft of Air Logic in the wild, because Rosemary Kirstein has blogged about reading it. Can you tell us what the status of Air Logic is, and what’s next for you besides that?

LAURIE: I had a pretty awful few years during which I simply couldn’t write very much. A couple of years ago, I thought Air Logic was finished. But it turns out I was wrong, and now I’m revising it again. I’m glad that I’m doing it, because I’m discovering a lot of places that I seem weirdly disengaged from my own story. Revising Air Logic has made me realize how much I was damaged—not just emotionally, but because I didn’t have the energy to maintain my friendships and connections, and so I ended up writing in a vacuum. Anyway, while I finish Air Logic, I have another book on the back burner. It’s called Cunning Men, it’s about a peculiar friendship, and I’m about halfway done with the first draft.

ANDREA: Lastly, please tell us about a remarkable woman of fantasy literature—an author, reader, agent, editor, scholar, or someone else—who has changed your life.

LAURIE: If you don’t mind, I’d like to tell you about a group rather than an individual. For over ten years, I met more or less monthly with three other women novelists: Rosemary R. Kirstein, Delia Sherman, and Didi Stewart. They served as role models, teachers, healers, advisors, problem-solvers, and, above all, as friends to whatever book I was writing. Delia has an extraordinary gift for understanding what I was doing in my work—far better than I understood it myself—and she is one of the most delightful and literary fantasy authors around, a recipient of several much-deserved awards. Rosemary has a powerful rational mind, and happily grappled with my plotting problems and anything else that perplexed me. Rosemary is the author of a science fiction series that is based in an adage expressed by Arthur C. Clarke (among others), that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Didi, a versatile vocalist and musician, is a thoughtful and pragmatic critic whose insights kept bringing me back to awareness of what my readers needed so that a story would work for them. She has written several unpublished novels that I wish were in print. Those three friends were essential to my growth as a writer, and I’m profoundly happy that after a long hiatus we have started meeting again, despite the fact that we now live in three different states.

 
Laurie J. Marks’s Elemental Logic series is set in the world of Shaftal. The elements of fire, earth, water, and air have sustained the peaceful people of Shaftal for generations, but Shaftal has been overrun, and the ancient logic of the land is being replaced by the logic of hatred. Laurie’s novel Fire Logic, the first in the series, won the Gaylactic Spectrum Award for best novel in 2003, and Earth Logic, the second in the series, won the same award in 2005. The third in the series, Water Logic, was included on the honor list for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 2007, and the final book, Air Logic, is currently a work in progress. Laurie’s other works include Dancing Jack, about a girl who is trying in vain to forget a past filled with bloodshed and rebellion, and was short-listed for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 1993; The Watcher’s Mask, about a two-souled person on a journey of self-awareness that will lead her to discover the true nature of her race; and The Children of the Triad series (Delan the Mislaid, The Moonbane Mage, and Ara’s Field), where the Walkers ruled the land, the Aeyrie soared the skies, and the Mer reigned over the seas. Laurie currently teaches writing at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

For more information about Laurie, please visit Laurie’s website.

We’re pleased to bring you the second in a series of candid, in-depth interviews with this year’s Sirens Guests of Honor. We’ll cover a variety of topics relevant to Sirens with each author, from their inspirations, influences, and craft, to the role of women in fantasy literature as befits our 2016 focus on lovers and the role of love, intimacy, and sex. We hope these conversations will be a prelude to the ones our attendees will be having in Denver this October. Today, Amy Tenbrink interviews Renée Ahdieh.

RENÉE: This is such a wonderful question! To me the transition was natural artistically, but decidedly less so in application. Writing about food and travel is about writing from a place of experience, and there’s a certain almost sensual nature to it. Even when the travel itself can be quite unromantic! Travel and food are transportive—both literally and metaphorically—and writing a book like The Wrath and the Dawn was, for me, a wholly immersive experience. I loved steeping myself into this culture. It’s the culture of my husband’s family, so there was also a personal element to it as well. Experientially, writing fiction is about depicting the nuance of emotion, whereas writing about food and travel can often be less so. For me, though, both are so much about a particular moment in time—about conveying the sentiments of that moment as honestly as possible.

 
AMY: You’ve spoken eloquently about why you chose to re-tell the story of Scheherazade, but why did you choose to write your version as young adult novels? Did you ever consider re-telling Scheherazade for adults? Do you think that there’s something inherently important in writing love stories for teens?

RENÉE: I have such a deep and abiding love for young adult novels. They’re what I most often choose to read . . . when I’m afforded the time to make a choice that is, haha! Since I tend to write novels with myself in mind—and with what it is I’d like to read—it seemed most natural to write the story of Scheherazade from the perspective of a young adult.

 
AMY: How did you craft Shazi and Khalid? How did you choose their traits, their passions, their instincts? How did you craft their relationship–a relationship that, for those who haven’t yet read your work, involves a powerful man, a world-class swordsman, willing to trust his wife to take care of herself, thank you very much.

RENÉE: Haha! I love this series of questions! I’m largely a character-driven author, and when I’m beginning to craft a story, I first start with the characters. I spend a great deal of time deciding which traits I’d like for each character to embody. And—as I mentioned above—I write for myself first. It’s never a conscious decision to write a book a certain way or for a certain audience. Or even for a specific message. I tend to find feminist men incredibly sexy, so—of course—I had to write the love interest with that angle in mind. Add to that the fact that Khalid is an alpha male? Alpha males who are also feminists are definitely my jam.

 
AMY: You’ve said in previous interviews that there are no heroes or villains, only people who want different things. Would you please expand on that a bit? What does that mean to you? How does that idea manifest itself in your fiction?

RENÉE: I tend to enjoy writing in spaces of moral grey. The world in which we live is really not as black and white as we’d like to believe it to be. When I began crafting The Wrath and the Dawn, I knew I wanted my characters to be faced with impossible decisions because often that’s what we are faced with in real life. Every choice—every experience—has risk and reward. And those risks/rewards are never as clear-cut as we wish they were.

 

AMY: There are a lot of important themes and choices in both The Wrath and the Dawn and The Rose and the Dagger, which feature not only a love for all time, but an evolving bond between sisters, and a girl who risks it all to avenge her friend. Is there a theme that’s especially important to you–and why is it so important?

RENÉE: I think for me the most resonating theme—aside from the power of story—is the importance of relationships in all forms. I define the quality of my own life in terms of my relationships. If something isn’t working in my personal life—be it with a friend or a family member—that often has ripple effects through all else.

AMY: Lastly, please tell us about a remarkable woman of fantasy literature—an author, reader, agent, editor, scholar, or someone else—who has changed your life.

RENÉE: I had the wonderful experience of corresponding with Anne Rice early in my career. She gave me some of the most meaningful advice and offered so many words of support. This experience was definitely an epoch in my life, especially since some of the most formative years of my childhood were spent reading her work.

 
Renée Ahdieh is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and an active member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Her young adult fantasy novel The Wrath and the Dawn is a sumptuous and epically told love story centered around Shahrzad and her quest for revenge (and is inspired by A Thousand and One Nights). The sequel, The Rose and the Dagger, was released in May 2016.

For more information about Renée, please visit Renée’s website or Twitter.

We’re pleased to bring you the first in a series of candid, in-depth interviews with this year’s Sirens Guests of Honor. We’ll cover a variety of topics relevant to Sirens with each author, from their inspirations, influences, and craft, to the role of women in fantasy literature as befits our 2016 focus on lovers and the role of love, intimacy, and sex. We hope these conversations will be a prelude to the ones our attendees will be having in Denver this October. Today, Faye Bi interviews Kiini Ibura Salaam.

KIINI: I rely on two different resources for world-building: imagination and logic. I’ve always been a what-if thinker. As I move through the world, I’m wondering who people are, layering stories onto everyday life. I wonder what if we could fly; what if we transferred souls when we look at each other; what is this random person’s superpower? World-building is an extension of this what-if thinking. I usually start with a situation—the combination of a character and a conflict—and let my imagination go wild. But then, as I continue to go deeper into the world, I start to filter my imagination through logic. What is possible in this world, what is impossible?

I’m also a very sensory writer. I like to feel what I’m writing and have a story filter in visually and emotionally rather than intellectually. To that end, I use my intuitive reaction to the words on the page to determine how much I need to say. I write what feels good, then I go back and edit based on how well the words communicate the world and guide the reader through the maze of plot. The worlds we build are tricky—they can have the qualities of a mirage. When we craft them, they can seem as solid and as glittering as the Taj Mahal. Hopefully, when we go back to edit, we can see the holes, the places where it’s more ghostly and less reliable, but sometimes both successes and failures in writing are accidents as we work through the process of refining the words on the page.

 
FAYE: Speaking of “Marie,” that story in particular guts me from head to toe. It has a mythic quality about it, not too unlike Rumpelstiltskin. Marie is forced to choose between taking away the constant pain and discomfort she experiences when others assume her racial identity for her and then payback is demanded in the form of her future child. But it’s not really a choice for her, is it? How do your experiences inform your work, in “Marie” or any of your other stories?

KIINI: Yes, in the case of Marie, she doesn’t have a choice—this decision is forced on her. In some way, she lived her life trying to avoid making a choice, trying to hide away from the inconvenience of her identity. She made her choice before the mysterious woman appeared in her life. Choice is not just about what we do in any one moment, it’s about the way we live our lives—whether through avoidance, inaction, or opposition, we are always making choices—and our choices always take shape in our futures, often in ways we don’t expect or desire.

All my stories represent my perspective on life and the challenges of navigating our worlds. Many of the stories in Ancient, Ancient were influenced by my travels. So each one is firmly embedded in a place or time that impacted me: the Dominican Republic, Trinidad, Mexico, New Orleans, New York, my experiences in all of these places found their way onto the page. The triggering events of a story often don’t appear in the story—but as the writer, I know them. I know exactly the conversation, experience, person, circumstance that sparked the characters and incited the storytelling.

 
FAYE: Your female characters burst with vitality, life, and vengeance upon the page. They’re all unabashedly themselves or would like to be, sometimes confident and sometimes angry. What makes a Kiini Ibura Salaam heroine? What interests you most about writing women, specifically women at the intersection of black, Creole or alien (WaLiLa!)? Or as a daughter, mother, young woman or crone?

KIINI: I love people who live boldly. I think we all have parts of us that want to be free. Those are the characters that fascinate me most as well—characters who have impact, who have strong identities, who are pushing against the forces that would control them. Beyond that, writing is a very personal project. I do it in my most intimate and quiet moments—so the work I create during those moments needs to feed me. Creating work that reflects me, that speaks to my own life challenges, and celebrates my courage and my personhood is essential. Consequently, I write about what’s closet to me: being a woman—at all stages of womanhood; being alien—as a traveller, as a member of a reviled culture of people, being a southerner in a metropolis; being a human being who is fighting to live a life aligned with her soul identity.

 
FAYE: You’ve mentioned in other interviews that you’re working on a novel, and that you find the short story format more natural to write in. As you know, some writers are the opposite, preferring long-form storytelling. How does the longer form of a novel challenge you—transitions? Plotting and structure? Revisions? Tell us about your writing demons and how you’re vanquishing them.

KIINI: My struggles with novel writing is all about the length. I don’t really have an issue with the actual page count, but sustaining an arc over 200+ pages has been a bit challenging. It took me forever to convince myself to even try to write a novel, and when I finally did I struggled to get a handle on its massiveness. Halfway through my career, I did a distance learning MFA with the goal of cracking the novel form. I made amazing progress and continue to get closer to completing a novel. Publishing short stories has been a way to buck the “novel or nothing” thinking. I am constantly writing stories; I love stories, and publishing them has allowed me to honor myself as a writer and the work I have done over the years, and continue to do. I have a bunch of novel ideas in development now, and I predict you’ll be seeing a novel from me soon.

 
FAYE: About the creative life, you recently tweeted, “Being a writer—or any kind of artist for that matter—is like being saddled with an additional mission from god. On top of the need to create conditions for survival, there is this thing blaring in your mind—create, create, create.” How do you balance writing with, well, everything else? Do you have strategies for when and how you work?

KIINI: When and how I work shifts based on my deadlines and the present state of my life. I have found great pleasure in managing to move the work forward without completely sequestering myself from life. It’s a total contradiction: you need time and focus to create; but myself as a writer, I need engagement and community to spark my imagination and fuel my energy. On top of which, I need money to pay bills and attention to dedicate to my child. I went through some very dark years when my daughter was young, when I couldn’t write and I tried to give writing back to God. That didn’t work! I was forced to find a way to make writing work in the edges of life—even though it is at the center of my identity and my vision/desire for myself. I edited my short story collection on the train while commuting to work. I have my work-intensive time periods, where I go straight from my house to a café and commit to writing/editing a certain page count. It’s all about math: the length of the work divided by the hours I can spare. My strategy is to be portable, to be modular, and to have faith. I’ve succeeded at continuing to write while I have all these other encroaching responsibilities by: being able to write anyway, breaking everything into pieces so that I’m not overwhelmed by the enormity of the task, and by believing that with continued, consistent, manageable effort, I can make big things happen. It’s working thus far, and it looks like I’m getting better at it. My first book was collected from years of work. My second book—When the World Wounds—was all newly written from 2013 on. It’s really like writers—all artists, really—house more than one entity inside their bodies. I have got to make the efforts to prove to myself that this is all doable. It’s my worker bee side convincing my dreamer side that together we can create magic!

 
FAYE: Lastly, tell us about a remarkable woman of fantasy literature—an author, reader, agent, editor, scholar, or someone else—who has changed your life.

KIINI: I’m not great with these “name somebody” questions. I’m a little cannibal. I consume books, ideas, inspiration and integrate it and then forget the moment of ingestion! I do write mostly fantasy, but spend a bit of time with sci fi as well. A remarkable woman of sci fi who has had a huge impact on legions of people is Octavia Butler. I love her work, her vision, and her fierce disinterest in her readers’ feelings—she is going to show you the harsh truths of the world and human nature whether you want to see it or not, but what I find most remarkable about her is her commitment to herself as a writer. Artists have to be the first and last believer in themselves. We have to believe in the value of our work before anyone else does. And when everyone stops believing, we still have to hold the torch of faith alive. No one would have ever heard of Octavia Butler if she didn’t decide to become a writer, then decide to remain a writer through years and years of anonymity and disinterest from publishers. She worked every job under the sun and did what she had to do to build her craft and develop her work. She is a self-made woman and a self-made artist. I admire that about her, but I also take instruction from it. We are not writing for the adulation of the world, we are writing to exercise our voices and fulfill the mandate within ourselves. If you believe and understand that, you’ll be okay. Through the rejections, disinterest, and lost opportunities; through being overlooked, ignored, or ridiculed, if you can remember that you are where it begins and ends, you’ll develop yourself into a writer worthy of your own company.

Kiini Ibura Salaam is a writer, painter, and traveler from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work encompasses speculative fiction, erotica, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Kiini’s writing is rooted in eroticism, speculative events and worlds, and women’s perspectives. Her speculative fiction has been included in publications such as Dark Matter, Mojo: Conjure Stories, Dark Eros, FEMSPEC, Ideomancer.com, infinitematrix.com, and PodCastle.org. Her first short fiction collection, Ancient, Ancient, was co-winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 2012; a collection titled When the World Wounds will be released in 2016. Kiini’s creative nonfiction speaks to her two passions: the freedom of women and the freedom of the creative spirit. In essays about date rape, sexual harassment, and the power of the word “no,” Kiini explores the complex layers of societal norms that negatively impact women’s lives. These essays have been published in Essence, Ms., and Colonize This! Her creative nonfiction has been included in college curricula in the areas of women’s studies, anthropology, history, and English. For the past ten years, Kiini has written the KIS.list, an e-column that explores the writing life and encourages readers to fulfill their dreams. She works as an editor and copyeditor in New York.

For more information about Kiini, please visit Kiini’s website, blog, or Twitter.

We’re pleased to bring you the last in a series of candid, in-depth interviews with this year’s Sirens Guests of Honor. We’ll cover a variety of topics relevant to Sirens with each author, from their inspirations, influences, and craft, to the role of women in fantasy literature and forms of resistance in both the craft and industry, as befits our 2015 focus on rebels and revolutionaries. We hope these conversations will be a prelude to the ones our attendees will be having in Denver this October. Today, Hallie Tibbetts interviews Rae Carson.

 
HALLIE: I’ve heard that The Girl of Fire and Thorns was originally sent to editors for publication as an adult fantasy novel, back when young adult books were truly just starting to become the business (and art) that we know today. If you’d kept it as an adult fantasy, how would Elisa’s story have changed—or wouldn’t it have? Is it possible to tell all of Elisa’s story arc in an “adult” vein? Does the trilogy bridge category gaps? And do you think that some stories demand to be told for the adult or young adult market, and not the other way around? Or is this all just an artificial divide?

RAE: It’s true. The Girl of Fire and Thorns was initially sent to editors of adult fantasy. I had a small offer from one of them, but it was roundly rejected by everyone else for being too difficult to market.

The editor whose offer I fielded wanted more sex, and she wanted it sooner in the text. I would have happily complied. It would have been a slightly different story, but it would have been an interesting one, I think.

“Young adult books” as a reading category is wholly artificial, but it’s useful as a marketing tool. As a reading category, it erroneously assumes a few things: 1) There are specific books only teens want to read. 2) There are specific books only adults want to read. And implicit in those two assumptions is 3) Some kinds of books are better/more valuable than others.

Teens are perfectly capable and desirous of reading books for adults. And vice versa. From a marketing standpoint, though, it makes sense to identify books that are generally about coming-of-age issues. So when readers want that specific subject matter, they can browse in a ready-made section of the bookstore.

Some have argued that all books are actually marketed to adults, because adults are the ones with buying power. So, teen novels are books that grown-ups feel comfortable putting their moral imperative behind and pushing on children. If true, this further justifies the existence of a marketing category, but it’s a shitty lifestyle choice, if you ask me. It takes away agency from teens who are highly qualified to determine their own reading choices.

I must add that I wholly support having a young adult marketing category. It’s an excuse for publishers to produce tightly plotted books with wonderful covers and epic stakes—without apology. It’s a way for teens to find books that treat them like valid human beings. And because young adult novels are officially “children’s books,” it means that society has deemed it acceptable for women authors to be successful writing them.

I can’t emphasize this last point enough. Just like with The Girl of Fire and Thorns so many years ago, adult publishers of epic fantasy are simply not as welcoming to manuscripts written by women. When they offer for books, those offer amounts are often a fraction of what a woman can get from a young adult publisher. When those books get published, they too easily disappear, drowned in the deluge of marketing support, store placement, and review coverage of their male-authored counterparts. Invisibility is the most difficult issue facing female authors of epic fantasy today.

Obviously, I would prefer to live in a world with gender parity. Failing that, I’ll take “young adult” as a marketing category, thank you very much. In the meantime, Kate Elliot and I have promised ourselves a commiserating drink over this exact issue. You’re all invited.

 
HALLIE: When I first heard about The Girl of Fire and Thorns, I had an “Oh, ha ha, magical bellybutton girl” reaction—that, in retrospect, makes me feel appropriately ashamed and regretful, since when I read it, I was hooked from the first sentence. Also, an advance copy of The Crown of Embers showed up at my house the same day I acquired a stationary bike, and I thought I’d just pedal while I read a chapter or two, but I ended up biking for almost three hours because that’s how long it took to finish the book. Have you had any reading experiences that completely absorbed you? What makes you as a reader happy and satisfied with a story?

RAE: I’m glad The Crown of Embers gave you such a good workout!

Recently, I was completely absorbed by Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves. Which is odd. Usually, there must be a character I empathize with, someone who feels so real and compelling that I can’t stop turning pages. Seveneves, on the other hand, is only fifty pages of character and plot shoehorned into a 900-page dissertation on orbital mechanics and sustainable space habitats. I couldn’t get enough.

So I suspect my actual answer is that I don’t always know what’s going to click. Books are so subjective and unpredictable. But it’s one of life’s greatest pleasures when a book surprises and delights me the way Seveneves did.

 
HALLIE: One of my favorite things to read (and watch and explore) is the concept of a “found family.” Walk on Earth a Stranger is exemplary of that. What drew you to writing about it, and were there times in your life when you went through a similar experience (though hopefully not as a result of a dastardly uncle)?

RAE: I did go through a similar experience, and alas, it was a result of a dastardly uncle. Forgive me if I don’t go into detail about it. Suffice it to say that my family betrayed my trust in the worst possible way, and I have found power, healing, and acceptance with friends who are precious to me beyond words—my new family. So the theme of “found family” is very close to my heart, and I will probably continue to write about it for the rest of my life.

 
HALLIE: Would you please describe some of the research you did for Walk on Earth a Stranger. The details were so realistic that I was in that caravan with Lee: the rocky route west, with its dwindling food supplies and lack of medical care; the social attitudes of the time towards Native Americans, African Americans, and gay men; the German migrant families; and issues of wealth, labor, and religion. What were some of your sources?

RAE: My elementary school history textbook was titled My Country ’Tis of Thee, and the cover was an inelegant mishmash of the American flag, George Washington, and the Christian cross. Because of my cloistered upbringing, it wasn’t until the college years that I realized how whitewashed and Christian-washed our history is.

So my goal in writing this book was to find lost voices, those people whose stories have not been represented by mainstream history. I relied heavily on pioneer journals, particularly those written by women. I visited museums all throughout gold country; my favorite of these was the Chinese Historical Society of America in San Francisco. My best discovery of all was John Russell Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms, published in 1848. Never has a dictionary been so full of bigotry and condescension. It was delightful to read, and it gave me a wonderful—and disturbing—view into many of the social attitudes of the day.

From a hands-on, practical standpoint, my uncle (the not-dastardly one!) took me into the Sierra foothills and taught me essential gold panning skills. I ended up with a sunburn, a backache, mud stains, and memories—but only a few tiny flecks of gold.

 
HALLIE: What I admire about your heroines, Elisa and now Lee, is that even though they have amazing powers (magic bellybutton, ability to sense gold) they’re so practical. Even though Elisa’s a princess and Lee could be as rich as she wants, they have such real struggles—eating, managing their reputations, escaping caretakers, and walking for a really, really long time. What draws you to writing such practical heroines? What were some of the inspirations for their struggles? Why is it important to write female characters in these roles? You could have simply written a king with a Godstone or made Lee an actual boy instead of a girl dressing as a boy for most of her journey.

RAE: My most embarrassing moment happened during my senior year of high school, when I was called to the blackboard to write out a French conjugation. The chalk was in my hand, and I was stretching up on my tip-toes, when I heard whispering and giggling behind me.

I turned. The girls in my class were signaling frantically in the direction of my plastic chair, which was smeared with blood.

I had gotten my period in front of French class. Brightly and indisputably.

Casually, as if nothing were the matter, I took off my jacket and wrapped it around my waist. I finished my conjugation, sat back down, wiggled back and forth in my seat to wipe up the blood with my jacket, then excused myself to go to the bathroom.

This incident should have been socially disastrous. One of the girls who signaled frantically was my personal nemesis, someone who had tortured me since the sixth grade. I expected her to crow about it for days. But she didn’t. In that moment, as crimson was soaking the crotch of my jeans, my nemesis had my back.

That story might make some readers uncomfortable. Smearing menstrual blood on your chair? Crotch!? For heaven’s sake, Rae.

We have a lot of hesitation about some of life’s most practical details, especially those details considered feminine. Not all of us want to be reminded that a girl can be hyper-aware of her fat body, or that she might run out of menstrual rags, or even that walking a really, really long time is really, really arduous.

But we all experience those things. Moments when life’s practicalities threaten to ruin our day, or even our lives. Moments that surprise us. Moments that become tragic when they shouldn’t, or add up to nothing when they should be tragic.

I’m not a literary writer. I don’t think stories are wholly found in those details. Give me dragons, explosions, rebellions, and world-altering stakes any day. But I do think that a rebellion is much more interesting if all the girls in camp get their periods regularly and if their thighs ache from walking so much.

 
HALLIE: Lastly, tell us about a remarkable woman of fantasy literature—an author, reader, agent, editor, scholar, or someone else—who has changed your life.

RAE: I’m going to depart from the question a little, simply because I didn’t encounter a lot of women involved in fantasy literature for a very long time. Appalling, I know. See above about the invisibility of female authors.

I will give a hat tip to my editor, Martha Mihalick of Greenwillow Books, and my agent, Holly Root of Waxman-Leavell. Together, these two fabulous women changed my life by taking a chance on me and tirelessly championing my work.

But the fantasy female who was most formative was fictional: Princess Leia.

I mentioned before that I grew up in a cloistered, religious household. From an early age, I was taught that women had a supernaturally ordained role—raising children, keeping house, supporting the big, strong, money-earning men. It never set right with me. And while I think women ought to be able to choose whatever lifestyle they want—even a supportive, house-keeping, child-rearing one—I always knew that it would be an awkward fit on me, like walking around in scuba flippers instead of sneakers.

Along came Star Wars. I loved everything about that movie, but I loved Princess Leia most of all. Like, her I wanted to be a princess. Like her, I wanted to shoot a laser blaster. And these two were not mutually exclusive. Unlike Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, Princess Leia was a leader. She wasn’t always kind. She didn’t exist to make the men around her feel good about themselves. Yet she was loved and respected. Did I mention the laser blaster?

I’ve been playing with this juxtaposition of ideals in my own fiction ever since.