What drew you, personally, to the idea of interstitiality?
Dora: I should make clear that I love genre fiction. I read lots and lots of detective stories, and I teach a class on gothic literature, in which the conventions are so important that you see the same scenes repeated in story after story. But the space I'm most interested in, the space my own writing seems to inhabit, is the space where those conventions are—bent, broken, brought together with other literary forms. The way Angela Carter writes fairy tales, using gothic rather than fairy tale conventions. So, my interest in interstitiality is a selfish one. I wish someone else would publish an anthology of interstitial fiction, so I could submit a story!
Delia: For me, the best genre fiction is work that pushes the edges of convention while adhering to it. I love watching a real artist claim the tropes and tame the conventions of a traditional genre. Look at Shakespeare. Many of his plays are written within the conventions of their genres: Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2 are chronicle histories, The Comedy of Errors is a classical comedy, Othello is a tragedy. But I wrote my master's thesis on King Lear, about how Shakespeare used the tropes of prose romance and fairy tale to play with his audience's expectations, see-sawing our emotions back and forth between hope and despair until we are as vulnerable and disoriented as Lear himself. I think my love of genre has led me to recognize and appreciate what occurs when an artist contemplates breaking a given rule, or combining it with one drawn from somewhere else. It's certainly what I did when I started writing.
What did you learn in the process of editing the anthology?
Delia: I learned to read really fast. I learned to let a story teach me how to read it without trying to analyze it as I went along. I realized that the reason I don't enjoy a lot of short fiction is because it isn't interstitial: whether it's Anne Tyler's domestic realism or Isaac Asimov's hard SF, I have a low tolerance for straight up genre short fiction. But I loved reading nearly every submission for this anthology. I guess I'm just most comfortable in the spaces between.
Dora: What I learned is that interstitial stories may work differently, but they still have to work. They still have to appeal to a reader. One criticism of interstitial stories is that they are more interested in formal experimentation, in breaking genre boundaries, than in telling a story—in appealing to a reader. Although some of the stories we have chosen experiment with form (look at the formal experimentation in “Pallas at Noon,” for example, in which the end of the story is really its beginning), I think they all appeal to readers emotionally. I identify with the narrator of “Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom,” who has to choose between the fantasy she has created and a reality over which she has no control—a reality that is itself fantastical. That's the ambiguous reality I live in. The choices made in stories like “Alternate Anxieties,” “Pallas at Noon,” and “Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom” are choices I have to make. Recognition and disorientation—for me, that's the experience both of reading these stories and of living in the twenty-first century.
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About the Editors
Delia Sherman considers herself a “recovering academic.” She got her PhD in Renaissance Studies and taught at Boston University and Northeastern, during which time she wrote her first novel, Through a Brazen Mirror. She left the academy in 1993 to write and edit full time, co-editing anthologies of science fiction and fantasy with Terri Windling and Ellen Kushner and serving as a consulting editor at Tor Books. Her other adult novels are The Porcelain Dove and The Fall of the Kings, written with partner Ellen Kushner. In 2006, Viking published her first novel for young readers, Changeling. Her short fiction has appeared most recently in The Faery Reel, Salon Fantastique, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Coyote Road, and Year's Best Fantasy & Horror. She satisfies her continuing desire to teach by serving as an instructor at various writing workshops in the U.S. and Europe, including Odyssey, Wiscon, and Clarion. A founding member of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, she lives in New York City.
Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. She is completing a PhD in English literature at Boston University, where she teaches classes on fantasy and the gothic. Her short story collection, In the Forest of Forgetting, was published in 2006 by Prime Books. She lives in Boston with her husband Kendrick and daughter Ophelia. Visit her website at www.theodoragoss.com.
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Contributors
Karen Jordan Allen spent her mostly happy childhood in rural Indiana. She now lives in Maine with her husband and daughter, a cat, and a rabbit. Her fiction has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including Century, A Nightmare's Dozen, Bruce Coville's Strange Worlds, Black Gate, First Heroes: New Tales of the Bronze Age, and Asimov's Science Fiction.
Christopher Barzak spent two years in Japan, teaching English in a suburb of Tokyo, and returned home to Youngstown, Ohio last year. His first novel, One for Sorrow, will be published by Bantam Books in Fall of 2007.
K. Tempest Bradford is an Ohio native and alumna of the Clarion West and Online Writing Workshops. She currently lives in New York City (at the very tip-top with the ravens). She spends most of her time trying to find a place with free tea and Internet where she can write.
Matthew Cheney's work has appeared in One Story, Locus, Web Conjunctions, Rain Taxi, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. His weblog, The Mumpsimus (mumpsimus.blogspot.com), was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2005, and he is the series editor for the annual Best American Fantasy anthology from Prime Books.
Michael J. DeLuca would like to tell you he lives in a cave in Western MA, pronouncing false prophecy in exchange for such essential sustenance as food, water and wireless internet. Unfortunately such caves are few and far between, and often occupied by fearsome squatters, so he advises that you not go looking for him and visit his website instead (www.michaeljdeluca.com).
Adrián Ferrero was born in La Plata (República Argentina) and attended the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, where he is currently doing his PhD. He has published academic articles in compiled editions and journals in his country, the U.S.A., France, Germany, and Spain. Fiction publications include Verse, a collection of short stories, and Cantares, a book of poetry. He is also co-editor of the digital magazine on creative writing Diagonautas (www.diagonautas.com.ar).
Colin Greenland is English: born in Dover, educated at Oxford, with homes in Cambridge and the Peak District. His books include Finding Helen and the space opera trilogy that began with the multi-award winning Take Back Plenty. He lives with Susanna Clarke, author of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.
Csilla Kleinheincz is a Hungarian-Vietnamese fantasy writer living in Erkel, Hungary. Besides translating classics of fantasy, such as Peter S. Beagle's works, she works as an editor at Delta Vision, a major Hungarian fantasy publisher. Her first novel, published in 2005, and most of her short stories are part of Hungarian slipstream literature.
Joy Marchand lives in a lopsided, historic rowhouse in Salem, Massachusetts. In the last two years she's shifted her focus from short stories to longer works, and she's currently writing a series of linked urban legends for her interstitial novel-within-a-novel set in the Chihuahuan Desert of West Texas. Please visit her website at www.joymarchand.com.
Holly Phillips is the author of the award-winning story collection In the Palace of Repose. She lives in the mountains of western Canada.
Rachel Pollack is the author of 30 books of fiction and non-fiction, including the award-winning novels Unquenchable Fire and Godmother Night. She is also a poet and a visual artist, creator of the Shining Tribe Tarot deck. She lives online at www.rachelpollack.com, and offline in New York's Hudson Valley.
Veronica Schanoes is a write
r and a scholar with a particular interest in fairy tales and genre theory. Her work has appeared in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Trunk Stories, Endicott Studio, and Jabberwocky.
Léa Silhol was born in Africa and grew up in Europe, but considers herself a “citizen of the world.” She is considered one of the leading writers in Fantasy in the French language, with four short stories collections and a novel, La Sève et le Givre, which won the Fantasy Merlin Award in 2003.
Jon Singer grew up in Brooklyn, NY, wanting to be a scientist. That didn't work out, but he is now semi-officially a Mad Scientist, which may even be better. You can find some of his work at www.jossresearch.org.
Vandana Singh is an Indian speculative fiction writer born and raised in New Delhi. She lives in the Boston area, where she also teaches college physics and has published a children's book: Younguncle Comes to Town (Viking 2006).
Anna Tambour currently lives in the Australian bush with a large family of other species, including one man. Her collection, Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales &, and her novel, Spotted Lily, are Locus Recommended Reading List selections. Her website, Anna Tambour and Others, is at www.annatambour.net, and she blogs at medlarcomfits.blogspot.com.
Mikal Trimm has sold works of speculative fiction and poetry to a number of venues in the past few years. Recent or upcoming stories may be found in Weird Tales, Black Gate, Postscripts, Polyphony 6, and Shadowed Realms. He maintains a web presence (for no apparent reason) at mtrimm1.livejournal.com.
Catherynne M. Valente is the author of the Orphan's Tales series, as well as The Labyrinth, Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass-Cutting Sword, and four books of poetry, Music of a Proto-Suicide, Apocrypha, The Descent of Inanna, and Oracles. She has been nominated for the Rhysling and Spectrum Awards as well as the Pushcart Prize. She was born in the Pacific Northwest and currently lives in Ohio with her two dogs. (www.catherynnemvalente.com)
Leslie What is a Nebula Award-winning author who writes short stories, essays, and novels. Visit Whatworld at: www.sff.net/people/leslie.what
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Acknowledgements
For advice on anthology etiquette and procedure, the editors would like to thank Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling, Deborah Layne, and Kelly Link. For exceptional proofreading and publishing, the editors would like to thank Robert Legault, freelancer, and Jedediah Berry and Gavin J. Grant of Small Beer Press. For critical assistance with the Introduction and the Afterword, the editors would like to thank Deborah M. Snyder and Veronica Schanoes. Delia thanks Ellen Kushner for all of the above, as well as moral support and cups of tea. Dora thanks Kendrick and Ophelia Goss for their humor and infinite patience while she read manuscripts.
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The Interstitial Arts Foundation is extremely grateful to the many donors who supported the creation of this volume, and particularly thanks Patricia A. McKillip and Patrick O'Connor for their generous financial assistance.
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Visit www.lcrw.net for information on additional titles by this and other authors.
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