(everything she touches becomes half a life, half alive)
and water flowers, wild flowers, that come alive in footprints.
(Editors’ Note: “Radioactivity” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, 41B.)
© 2021 Octavia Cade
Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer with a PhD in science communication. She’s sold close to 60 stories to various markets, and her most recent novella, The Impossible Resurrection of Grief, was released by Stelliform Press in May. A poetry collection, Mary Shelley Makes A Monster, was published by Aqueduct and nominated for a Bram Stoker award. She attended Clarion West 2016, and was the writer in residence at Massey University in 2020.
Interview: Eleanor Arnason
by Caroline M. Yoachim
Eleanor Arnason published her first short story in 1973. Since then, she has published six novels, three short story collections, a couple of chapbooks and some poetry. Her novel A Woman of the Iron People won the James Tiptree Jr. and the Mythopoeic Society Awards; her novel Ring of Swords won a Minnesota Book Award; and her short story “Dapple” won the Spectrum Award. A collection of her Icelandic fantasies came out in 2014. She has since written four more stories about Icelandic ghosts, trolls, elves and ordinary people. This is one. “The Graveyard” is Arnason’s first appearance in Uncanny, a beautifully crafted tale that weaves together folklore and history.
Uncanny Magazine: I love the structure of this story—we are reading the account of a narrator who is hearing about the ghosts from a curator, who in turn has heard the story from Atli. Why did you choose this structure?
Eleanor Arnason: The story begins with an actual conversation I had with the curator of a historical site in Iceland. She told me about a farmer who didn’t believe in ghosts, but had to deal with them. But there was no end to her story. The curator didn’t tell me what happened to the farmer. So, I rewrote her narrative and added an ending. The layering—the narrator who is told the story by the curator, who is in turn told the story by the farmer—came out of the actual situation.
Uncanny Magazine: What was the easiest part of writing this story? What was the most challenging thing?
Eleanor Arnason: The easiest part was the beginning, since I had a real (I think) incident. The hard part was finding an ending. I wanted to keep the uncertainty. Were the ghosts real? Did the characters end by believing in ghosts? And I wanted to keep the story pragmatic: the farmer had a problem. How was he going to solve it? What’s more important than believing in the ghosts is finding a way to get rid of them.
Uncanny Magazine: “The Graveyard” has a lovely anthropological feel to it, centering on a cultural conflict and weaving together Icelandic folklore and history, which are recurring topics in your work. What other topics or themes do you find yourself drawn to repeatedly?
Eleanor Arnason: A lot of my fiction is about social stereotypes and characters who don’t fit into the roles they are assigned by society. I come out of the Second Wave of Feminism, which hit SF in the late 1960s and was very strong through the 1970s. (Theodore Sturgeon said all the good new writers in the 1970s were women, except for James Tiptree Jr.) So I do a lot with gender roles. My characters want to be something they can’t be in their society, because of their gender. Sometimes they succeed in being the people they want to be. Sometimes they don’t manage. But I give them tolerable lives. There is enough suffering in the world.
My Icelandic stories are different. Not about gender, for the most part. They are about people who get in difficult situations which are often supernatural and struggle to get out of the situations and get on with their lives. Maybe the commonality with the gender stories is the struggle to have one’s own life. Atli has to find a way to calm down the ghosts and to get the Icelandic-American businessman to stop bothering the graveyard. There is nothing epic about this: he’s not like Frodo. He just wants to get on with his life.
Many of my Icelandic stories are about history: the land is built on the past, as my curator says. A lot of my Icelandic characters are trying to come to terms with the past and the folklore of their country: ghosts, trolls, elves. I am not a fan of Icelandic elves, who seem like rich people, indifferent to the suffering of the poor. But I sometimes write about them. I like trolls, which I see as ordinary people, though very large and rock-like, who struggle to get by. Ghosts are past all effort. Though they can complain.
Writing the above I thought of the famous lines by Karl Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Maybe that’s what my fiction is about: trying to make a decent life in spite the rules of one’s society and the weight of the past.
Uncanny Magazine: Do you believe in ghosts?
Eleanor Arnason: No, but neither did the farmer. I am not invested in not believing in ghosts. If I meet one, I will believe in it.
Uncanny Magazine: You’ve been writing short stories since the 1970s, and have published dozens of short stories and three collections. What draws you to short fiction? Which writers or stories do you consider to be your strongest influences?
Eleanor Arnason: I think my natural length is the short story. I especially like long short stories, novelettes. But I write a fair number of classic-length short stories. I’m a slow writer and writing a novel takes forever. So I like the shortness of short fiction, and the fact that—written well—it can have a density and tightness that’s hard to get in a novel. It’s hard to write a flawless novel, though Jane Austen managed in Pride and Prejudice. But you can write a close to flawless short story.
I think Ursula K. Le Guin is an obvious influence on my work. Possibly Jane Austen as well. I have read Austen’s novels over and over. I love her wit and clear-sightedness and extreme skill as a writer. Very obviously medieval Icelandic literature has influenced me, especially the Icelandic family sagas, not only in my Icelandic stories. My brother says he can see the influence of the sagas in everything I write. (I grant that Austen and the sagas are an odd combination. But it’s what I grew up with.)
Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?
Eleanor Arnason: I have just finished another couple of Icelandic stories. Then I will take a break from Iceland. I have a story about a journalist who gets an assignment to interview the ghost of Hugo Chavez, the former president of Venezuela, to find out if he was involved in the 2020 American election. (Some of Trump’s allies say Chavez helped steal the election. Chavez has been dead since 2013, as people keep pointing out.) I’m still tinkering with that one. I think it will be difficult to sell. And I have started a story about Yu the Great, who founded the first Chinese imperial dynasty, assuming he actually existed. What I like about him is he’s credited with taming the floods on the Yellow River. Imperial China was founded by an engineer! Of course, he was a supernatural engineer, helped by a yellow dragon and a gigantic black turtle. He was also, according to the Chinese stories, an exemplary person and devoted to the common people. Not all my stories work out. These last two may or may not.
Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
© 2021 Uncanny Magazine
Caroline M. Yoachim is a two-time Hugo and four-time Nebula Award finalist. Her short stories have been translated into several languages and reprinted in multiple best-of anthologies, including three times in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy. Yoachim’s short story collection Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories and the print chapbook of her novelette The Archronology of Love are available from Fairwood Press. For more, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com.
Interview: C. S. E. Cooney
by Caroline M. Yoachim
C. S. E. Cooney is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Bone Swans: Stories. Her
short novel, The Twice-Drowned Saint: Being a Tale of Fabulous Gelethel, the Invisible Wonders Who Rule There, and the Apostates Who Try to Escape its Walls, can be found in Mythic Delirium’s recent anthology, The Sinister Quartet. Both her forthcoming novel Saint Death’s Daughter and her story collection Dark Breakers, will be out in 2022. Other work includes Tor.com novella Desdemona and the Deep, and a poetry collection: How to Flirt in Faerieland and Other Wild Rhymes, which features her Rhysling Award-winning “The Sea King’s Second Bride.” Her short fiction and poetry can be found in Jonathan Strahan’s anthology Dragons, Ellen Datlow’s Mad Hatters and March Hares: All-New Stories from the World of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Rich Horton’s Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, and elsewhere. When she’s not writing, she’s designing games with her husband Carlos Hernandez, and recording albums of mythy-type music under the name Brimstone Rhine. Cooney has appeared in Uncanny four times previously—with one story and three poems—and she now returns with “From the Archives of the Museum of Eerie Skins: An Account,” an emotionally powerful story of witches and wolfcasters, academia and art.
Uncanny Magazine: This story has so many lovely elements—a magic system of witches and wolfcasters, a university and a museum, a heartbreaking crime committed against the protagonist. What was your starting point or inspiration for the story?
C. S. E. Cooney: So, Carlos and I are designing a GM-less TableTop Role-Playing Game called Negocios Infernales. The main mechanic is a bespoke deck of cards. On each card there is a suit (seven suits in all), an image, and an idiom. Carlos and I wrote the idioms together, and we hired artist Bek Huston for the art, and worked with her to build the images and suits of the deck.
All this to say: the cards, separate from the game, work really well as story- and poetry-prompts. Last year, in March of 2020, on the day that Broadway went dark, we went to visit my mom in Phoenix. We thought we would be staying just a week, but news from Queens, New York was so frightening—and my mom would start crying every time we talked about getting a flight home—that we ended up staying for three months. Carlos was on sabbatical, and my job as an audiobook narrator was certainly on pause, and so we were very, very lucky to be able to be so harbored.
During our stay, we did a lot of writing together, particularly experimenting with using our card deck—“La Baraja del Destino”—to inspire us. One of our writing exercises resulted in “Eerie Skins.” Particularly: a card that says, “You are the fuel your anger consumes.”
It’s a card from the Rayo (Lightning) suit, and it shows a person with a wolf’s head breaking out from their burst ribcage. We were doing question prompts that day, and Carlos’s question for me was, “What is hunting the Wolfcaster?” The anguish of the image, and the subversion inherent in the question (Carlos is so smart)—turning what is normally thought of a predator into prey—and having, personally, a great deal of built-up dudgeon from living in our fucked-up world, resulted in my story.
Uncanny Magazine: “From the Archives of the Museum of Eerie Skins: An Account” is a written transcript of an oral history, and it feels a bit like a fairy tale wrapped in the pelt of an academic paper. What drew you to this structure?
C. S. E. Cooney: Last year, summer of 2020, my good friend, the writer Patty Templeton, was just about to graduate with her Master’s in Library Science—with a concentration in Archival Studies. This was just so cool, and a Master’s degree is so intense, that I wanted to make sure I was feting her for many months in a manner to which she (and all my friends, really) should become accustomed. (I.e., having artists of all sorts lavish them with works dedicated to their genius.)
Also, writing it this way was a structural challenge. I often look for interesting structures in a short story, and as it’s not my strong suit, it’s something I have to work at and have an eye out for. Structure is, perhaps, especially important for a first-person account. Because there’s always that question, isn’t there, about to whom, exactly, one’s narrator is talking? Also, this archival structure was an excuse to ask Patty a lot of impertinent questions about archive-y things, all those fascinating little steps, labeling and boxing, and preservation techniques, because, really, what do I know? All mistakes are mine; Patty was a CHAMPION beta-reader.
Uncanny Magazine: I loved the protagonist’s mother, and the dynamic of their parent-child relationship. Interesting, well developed characters and relationships are a strength that features strongly in your fiction—what sources do you draw from in creating them? Do your characters ever do things you don’t expect?
C. S. E. Cooney: I’m from a big family—five brothers, the darlingest mother (all right, I admit it, almost everything I said about the protagonist’s mother can be said about my mother, and where I did or did not blur some lines might surprise you, re: claws and stuff), etc.
Long-term friendships, a close-knit community, and a municipal system in all its parts—education, peacekeeping, the arts—working together to “bend toward justice,” all of these are incredibly important to me in my real life, and I just think…I just think it’s something that should be in my fiction, too.
Do my characters ever do things I don’t expect? That’s fascinating. That’s like asking me, do you ever surprise yourself? What about your brain? Does your brain ever surprise you? …yes? All the time? I know what I am, but not what my story may be. Or how my story might then change me. I mean, sometimes I start a story and I kind of know the ending. Ahem. The story arrives as (forgive me) “AN ABSOLUTE UNIT.” But sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I just want to try something. Or I had a cool image. Or a dream. Or a feeling. Or a character voice. Or a line. Or a world in mind, but the world that is empty, and I heard Benedict from Much Ado About Nothing screaming, “THE WORLD MUST BE PEOPLED!”
So much is discovered not in the first draft—which is like choosing one’s chunk of marble for a sculpture, whether commissioned or just ’cause—but in all the drafts to come, wherein one hews out the form and figure, sometimes according to one’s own plan, sometimes according to the marble’s.
I didn’t know the end of this story when I started it. About halfway through the first draft, I drew another card from our Destino deck. (Carlos was also writing a short story; we drew together, and asked each other questions again, based on our cards, but this time, also based on whatever text we had already originating from the first draw). I don’t know when I knew the story would end with performance art. Not till the near the very end, I think. Any reference to the end at the beginning of the story went in at a later draft.
…This is a very whirligig, widening gyre-ish sort of answer, and maybe a bit ambiguous. I don’t mean to be coy. It’s just…stories surprise me. First they don’t exist, and then they do, and it’s all our own fault. Thank goodness for the drafting process.
Uncanny Magazine: If you lived in the world of this story, would you rather be a wolfcaster or a witch?
C. S. E. Cooney: Oh, WITCH ALL THE WAY. I have a huge soft spot for my witches. Wolfcasters are a new discovery, and I have to get to know them a little better. I admit I’ve spent a bit more time with this world’s witches in my novella “The Witch in the Almond Tree,” and also a little bit in my story “Witch, Beast, Saint.” The witch Mar, who has a cameo in “Eerie Skins,” is the main character in “The Witch in the Almond Tree.” Her fellow archivists are also characters in that story.
FWIW: Doornwold itself (and its plague) is mentioned in my novella “The Bone Swans of Amandale” by the rat Maurice, also a skinslipper—so I gave a little nod to him in “Eerie Skins” in that bit about rats. (Blink and you miss it!) I always meant to write another story with Mar and friends that takes place during the Plague of Doornwold and the reign of the Witch Queens. Now, if I do, I have another character—Firi, my main character in “Eerie Skins”—to play her part as a supporting character.
Whether or not that ever happens on the page, who knows? But it’s happening in my brain! Most of my stories are linked, at least b
y a single sentence, often more, but I like to be a little sneaky about it sometimes.
Uncanny Magazine: You have a strong background in many different arts—poetry, theater, music, prose—and I love that the climax of this story hinges on a piece of performance art. How much do your other art mediums seep into your fiction? Do you find that your prose writing influences your approach to other types of art?
C. S. E. Cooney: Well! Take “Candletown” for instance. Candletown Coal Company started life as something I mentioned in “The Canary of Candletown,” a short story I wrote for Steam-Powered II: Lesbian Steampunk Stories. It went on—in Ballads from a Distant Star, a concept album I’ve been working on—to be the location whence a bunch of miners and their families are abducted by aliens (with the permission of the company bosses, in exchange for alien tech), and taken to mine on a distant planet. Particularly it’s mentioned in the song “Sisters Lionheart,” which I wrote with my friends Dounya and Amal El-Mohtar in mind, and “Little Man Jamie.” Later, Candletown Company features in Desdemona and the Deep, my novella published by Tor.com as the name of the coal company owned by Desdemona’s father, and the site of the story’s central disaster. So, that’s one example. But in general, I’d say, yes. Seepage. Seepage everywhere. I’m a seeping sort of artist. (Eww.)
Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?
C. S. E. Cooney: THANK YOU FOR ASKING! I am currently working on my Dark Breakers manuscript for Mike Allen at Mythic Delirium. It collects the first two novellas set in the same world as Desdemona and the Deep, as well as three new short stories and novelettes set in that world as well. It comes out next year, around the same time as my novel Saint Death’s Daughter.
After that, I have two novellas (which are probably actually short novels, but they’re still in their first drafts so it’s hard to say) that I drafted in the latter half of 2019 that I am very eager to get back to. One’s called Fiddle and one’s called I Will Make a Ruin of Myself. I’d love to have those up and on submission by the end of the year. Carlos and I were asked to collaboratively write two short stories for two different anthologies and magazines in the meantime. I also have this very odd short story “Kissing Babies” I’ve been dying to write. Carlos and I are continuing to iterate our Negocios Infernales TTRGP game throughout the end of this year. Our publishers want to start crowdfunding for it in February 2022. And I’m wanting to get back to my Distant Stars album; I’ve been working on it for years! And also I have this shared-world collaborative poetry project in mind, and the main poet I wanted to collaborate on it with me has JUST AGREED. So YAY! And a few other things…
Uncanny Magazine Issue 41 Page 15
