Uncanny Magazine: It is fascinating to see the layers of storytelling in this tale unfold and build upon each other. With so many powerful characters and intriguing stories, how did you decide upon the narrator and framework?
Maria Dahvana Headley: I was obsessing on the notion of the hostile subject. The infamous Esquire Magazine Gay Talese profile of Sinatra “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” was written at around the same time Jungleland got auctioned down to the dirt. Talese, of course, never managed to interview Sinatra, but he wrote a powerful piece of narrative nonfiction about the man’s outlines nonetheless. I’m not sure how I started thinking that the MGM lions were like the Sinatras of Jungleland, they’re the Kings and famous only for their roars, after all, (though I suppose I could’ve made this an Elvis and Graceland story). But I did, and that’s how I got here. I wanted an outsider to tell us about the place because an insider in Jungleland would be too focused on their own role in the place’s history.
You’re right: there were so many stories at Jungleland. I wanted to be able to touch on as many as I could. I was already doing the research a reporter would and bringing a struggling reporter in as my narrator made that a bit easier. And I love that kind of classic Hollywood trope, the young reporter investigating with an inexperienced–yet–jaundiced eye, and finding something much deeper than he’d imagined. I like loss of innocence stories too, apparently. The world is wide. There are such fucking astonishing things in it. You don’t even have to dig very far down.
Uncanny Magazine: There is an underlying theme of commercialism and exploitation in this story—what the characters, both human and animal, will do for their craft, for fame and to stay relevant. As an artist do you feel a kinship to the circus atmosphere of Jungleland? Is there ever a struggle to reconcile your art with “business”?
Maria Dahvana Headley: Hmm, I guess I don’t really see a massive difference between “art” and “business.” I’ve been allowed to be a tattooed lady dressed in spangles for years, and to also be the circus girl who gets invited to parties in the mainstream world where socialites show me their own tiger tattoos, frankly.
Otherwise, I’m lucky to have a mind that has typically been quite willing to think up stories that have a gettable hook, while being very odd in content nonetheless. So, that’s fortunate in business terms! My Glitter & Mayhem story, “Such & Such Said to So & So,” was, for example, a police detective noir with talking animals and sentient cocktails, but I just described it as a story about a nightclub in which the cocktails came alive. Anyone who’s ever liked a drink too much understands the dangers of a seductive cocktail. I try to ground my bizarre plots in known boilerplate truths of human society: Here it’s “You fall for someone everyone else thinks is wrong for you, and it has to be kept secret.” But my most recent project, the YA novel Magonia, is Earth girl ends up on a sailing ship in a sky kingdom. I wrote it in a frenzy, simply because it was what I wanted to write. When I sold it, the publisher, HarperCollins, apparently had a meeting in which they declared it the weirdest, but also that they didn’t care that it was weird, and that it was coming home with them. My feeling is that you just have to be able to quickly convince readers that they want to live in your world. I think it helps, of course, to be able to boil something seemingly crazy down into an appealing one–liner. I learned that from writing screenplays and plays back in my first career.
I’d love to make lots more money, and I suppose if I wrote straight commercial things—particularly screenplays, maybe I could? But who knows? I think Hollywood wouldn’t be inclined to make “If You Were A Tiger,” into a movie even though it’s all about Hollywood! I only like inventing when my inventions startle me by exploding, though, and so, here I am.
Uncanny Magazine: This story is evocative of both Golden Era Hollywood and Hunter S. Thompson–inspired Gonzo Journalism. If you could to be whisked back in time, which era would you choose to live and why?
Maria Dahvana Headley: I like this time, despite everything that is broken about it. Insulin–dependent diabetic that I am I really like being able to have insulin, which has only been around for roughly the last 100 years. Before that you’d just die of diabetes. I like the internet, and the universe at the touch of a fingertip. I’m a gobbler of glories and to live in this moment in history means that the glories are right there for the taking in terms of thousands of years of art and words. How could I find better? The internet equalizes information access in a way we’ve never had before. I think about this particularly because I grew up broke in a rural area of Idaho, and were I to live in another time, I’d be more likely to end up without status in a place without access to arcane information, rather than hitting some kind of class jackpot and getting to hang out in the Library of Alexandria, able to read all the texts in all the languages. Besides, I can write myself into other times. That’s part of what’s great about being a writer. You can imagine yourself into all sorts of places. But the places I imagine are full of fantastical elements, so they’re better to imagine than to live in, I have no doubt.
Of course I’d like to have a visit to Elizabethan England to see the first performance of The Tempest, but if I was whisked there and was me, a thirty–something woman, I’d most likely be very busy running around wrangling pigs and small children. Truth is that throughout a lot of human history, no matter what my brain was like, I’d look like a woman undeserving of knowledge. I realize that to lots of people all over the world, women still look that way, and it makes me furious. I guess the good news if I’d time traveled is that maybe I could have fought for earlier access to the vote/education/reproductive rights for women. But then I’d not likely have had time to write.
Uncanny Magazine: “If You Were A Tiger, I’d Have To Wear White” is set in the recent past. The recently released novella The End of the Sentence, co–authored with Kat Howard, also has a contemporary setting. As a SF/F writer, are you more attracted to stories set in our very recognizable world or world–building your own universe? Do you find one to be easier than the other?
Maria Dahvana Headley: If there’s an equivalent, it’s that I’m a mixologist. I like to tilt our world ‘til three parts of it spill out, and then pour in three shots worth of something else entirely, some bitters, some sugar, and shake it. I usually want our known surroundings in there as the main ingredient, though, by which I mean, most of my stuff takes place on Earth, in human history somewhere. Even “Dim Sun,” which was in Women Destroy Science Fiction, and is set in a sort of Douglas Adams–y outer space, goes deep into the memories of the characters and their time on an odd version of Earth. I love grabbing and scrambling history from deeper than the last 100 years, of course: Classical Rome, 19th century Germany. I’ve done both of those.
The people I know who invent entire worlds, they rock my brain. It’s like they’ve made a new kind of whiskey out of some astral ingredient. I don’t know how they do what they do. Even though I do some alternate world–building myself in things like Magonia, I’m so attached to Earth, to its oddities, to its tender strangenesses, to its particular flaws, pains, and glories.
I was just reading Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and I tweeted that it was like a book–length version of my favorite part of Our Town, the speech when a newly–dead Emily Webb says good–bye to everything in her living world. That speech takes me down (who am I kidding—the whole play gets more genius every year older I get) because it’s the common things she’s listing: It’s clocks ticking, it’s coffee. Everything I write has a little of that in it because I first read it when I was 15 or so and it hit me hard. I look at Our Town now, and of course, it’s a fantasy. It has ghosts and a Stage Manager narrating life as it goes along. It’s marketed as being naturalistic, but it’s totally stylized fantasy, set on earth, amongst humans. So, that’s one of my touchstones.
I could probably keep diagramming the wonders of this world forever and then garnishing them with almosts and maybes and I wishes. I mean, in this story Siberian t
igers named Satan are both animal show performers and famous for acting in Chekhov’s plays. So, clearly? I muddled our known world together with some talking tiger liqueur and some Russian bitters.
Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for chatting with Uncanny Magazine and sharing the fascinating photos and links related to your amazing story!
© 2014 Uncanny Magazine
Deborah Stanish the co-editor of the Hugo nominated Chicks Unravel Time: Women Journey Through Every Season of Doctor Who and Whedonistas: A Celebration of the Worlds of Joss Whedon by the Women Who Love Them. She’s had essays published in Chicks Dig Time Lords, Time, Unincorporated Volumes II and III, Outside In: 160 New Perspectives on 160 Classic Doctor Who Stories by 160 Writers, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Apex Magazine andThe Liverpool University Journal of Science Fiction, Film and Television. Deborah is also the moderator of the Hugo nominated Verity! Podcast where six women from around the globe debate and discuss Doctor Who.
Interview: Beth Meacham on Jay Lake
by Lynne M. Thomas
This interview is with Beth Meacham, Senior Editor at Tor Books, which published Jay Lake’s final collection, Last Plane to Heaven, from which this month’s reprint is drawn.
Uncanny Magazine: How did you first meet Jay? What struck you the most about his work?
Beth Meacham: I first met Jay through his work—I’d noticed some short stories of his, so when Jennifer Jackson, his agent, submitted his novel Mainspring to me, it went to the top of the reading pile. It was one of those manuscripts that, once started, I didn’t want to stop reading—this is always a good sign in a book! And I found myself making notes as I read, also a good sign. They were moderately extensive notes, so I sent a long email along with them, asking if the author was willing to do this much work on the book. Some writers, you know, are not willing to really dig into revisions. That was a Thursday. On Monday, I received a revised manuscript, which pretty much answered that question! Jay included a note saying that if there was anything else, I should let him know.
I made an offer on the book a few days later.
I didn’t actually meet him in person until after that, when we were at a Locus Awards. Jay was the hardest working writer I ever met. Everyone knows Party Jay, loud Jay, fast–moving object Jay. But he worked at his craft and he worked hard. He wrote every day, fluidly and fast. I think my biggest contribution to his work was getting him to slow down and dig deeper, and recognize when good enough wasn’t good enough.
Uncanny Magazine: What was the story that drew you into his writing, and what about it appealed so much?
Beth Meacham: I loved Mainspring. I loved everything about it. The world, that crazy alternate clockwork universe that he so brilliantly figured out. The history of the world, the politics, the theology, the construction of the planet. And I loved Hethor, the main character—so bewildered at being the chosen one, so willing to try, so uncertain of success. I’ve always thought that the most endearing characteristic of Frodo was his sense that he didn’t know why, but if it was up to him, then he’d try. Hethor is very much like that. You can only get motivations like that in a world where the deity is manifest.
Uncanny Magazine:Last Plane to Heaven contains only a fraction of Jay’s publications. How were the stories selected, given how prolific Jay was?
Beth Meacham: They’re a combination of Jay’s favorites and mine, and I’m sure we had different criteria. A lot of it was determined by the decision to go with the angels motif, which was really surprisingly prevalent for the work of an atheist.
Uncanny Magazine: Did you have a specific plan for the ordering of the stories? Does it vary from collection to collection, or do you typically use a relatively standardized method of organizing the stories?
Beth Meacham: You know, I can’t really answer that. I do it by feel. Does this feel right? Does this order resonate in that deep sense of thematic rightness? Do you the reader move from story to story in a pleasing way? I have no standard method, no system. Also, in this case, I deferred to Jay in the grouping of the stories. He knew what he wanted to say to to the world.
Uncanny Magazine: Is there one experience with Jay or his work that, to you, epitomizes who he was within the industry?
Beth Meacham: It was only after his death that I know the answer to this question. And that is discovering how many writers, all across the country, he helped financially when they were in need. He paid for workshops, and classes, and helped with medical bills or rent. He never told anyone, he never permitted public thanks. He wasn’t a rich man, he didn’t make a huge amount from his writing, but he made a good living at his day job. He took care of his family, and whatever was left he gave away. Jay cared about others in a very concrete kind of way.
© 2014 Uncanny Magazine
Three-time Hugo Award winner Lynne M. Thomas is co-Publisher/Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny: A Magazine of Science Fiction & Fantasy with her husband Michael Damian Thomas. The former Editor-in-Chief of Apex Magazine (2011-2013), she co-edited the Hugo Award-winning Chicks Dig Time Lords, as well as Whedonistas and Chicks Dig Comics. She moderates the Hugo Award-winning SF Squeecast, and contributes to the Verity! Podcast . In her day job, she is the Curator of Rare Books and Special Collections at Northern Illinois University, where she is responsible for the papers of over 70 SF/F authors. You can learn more about her shenanigans at lynnemthomas.com.
Interview: Christopher Barzak
by Deborah Stanish
It’s been a banner year for Christopher Barzak, winning both a Shirley Jackson Award for his short story collection Before and Afterlives and watching his novel, One for Sorrow, turned into a Sundance Feature Film. His work, which has been widely published in speculative fiction anthologies, as well as publications such as Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and Apex Magazine, weaves stories of love, loss, identity, and sometimes, dancing. In “The Boy Who Grew Up,” Mr. Barzak examines a world where childhood stories turn into something fiercely magical and where the hardest decision can be simply to stay. After living in California, Michigan, and Japan, he returned to Ohio and is currently teaching fiction writing in the Northeast Ohio MFA program at Youngstown State University. In between teaching, writing, and waiting for the 2015 release of his next novel, Wonders of the Invisible World, (Knopf) he is passing along his super powers to the next generation as the faculty advisor for the student literary magazine, Jenny. To learn more about Barzak visit his website at www. christopherbarzak.com .
Uncanny Magazine: “The Boy Who Grew Up,” a variation on the Peter Pan story, is not the first time you’ve visited classic tales and mythos. For example, you played with fairy tales in “Sister Twelve: Confessions of a Party Monster” (Glitter & Mayhem) and delved into the world of Edgar Allen Poe in “For the Applause of Shadows” (Where the Dark Eye Glances). What is it about these established stories and universes that call to you as a writer?
Christopher Barzak: For most of my writing life, I’ve been writing original fiction, and by that I mean fiction that comes wholly from my own imagination, not someone else’s. But a couple of years ago, I reread H.G. Wells’ novella “The Invisible Man” and was surprised to find it riddled with caricatures of the working class villagers that populate most of the story. I’d read the book as a teenager and hadn’t noticed this then. But as an adult reader with years of developing critical reading skills behind me, it all felt glaring and in many ways demeaning in a cheap and unnecessary manner. One character in particular was caricatured very badly, Milly, a teenaged girl who was a sort of maid of all work in the inn where the Invisible Man stayed for several months. I felt like she deserved to be treated realistically and humanely, as most likely her life in that time and place would have been incredibly limited, and that some compassion would have been more appropriate than making her life into a farce. So I ended writing a novelette in her voice, retelling the story of the months the Invisible Man stayed in her inn, and really told her life story in the process, trying to give her back some of her digni
ty, hopefully. The story was published in Eclipse Online, later reprinted in Gardner Dozois’ Year’s Best Science Fiction, and went on to become a finalist for the Million Writers Award that year. It was my first conscious retelling and I was really hooked.
I went on from there to play around in the stories and novels of other classic genre fiction writers, to right what I thought were some wrongs in the originals, or to emphasize aspects that might have been difficult for the original writers to address in their own times and places.
Uncanny Magazine: Both Colin and Peter longed to return home, not just the physical place, but also the emotional place where they felt safe and loved. In addition to home, this story delves into themes you’ve touched upon in other works such as longing, sexual identity and a return to innocence. Yet, this story feels fresh and new. Why, as a writer, do you find yourself coming back to these themes and why, as readers, do you think we’re drawn to these stories?
Christopher Barzak: “The Boy Who Grew Up” is my ode to Peter Pan, who, in his original appearance (in a novel by J.M. Barrie called The Little White Bird, later reprinted as a children’s book called Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens) is quite eerie and sad and weird, and is more like a toddler than the adolescent we all know from the play and the novel that Barrie later wrote for that character. I wanted to retell this particular bit of what seems a somewhat lost narrative, buried under by the more popular renditions of Peter Pan (the play, the novel), but I also wanted to direct attention to the gay undercurrent that I’ve always found running through Barrie’s depictions of Peter Pan and his Lost Boys by making the lost boy in my story overtly gay, and dealing with a mother who has, to some extent, made him feel rejected because of being gay, the same way Peter in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens feels rejected by his mother when he returns to the window he flew out of and finds her with a new child, already moving on from the grief of his disappearance. Dealing with rejection, especially of this kind—this core rejection of an intrinsic part of one’s self by way of sexual identity—is incredibly difficult.
Uncanny Magazine Issue One Page 15
