Lightspeed Magazine Issue 37

by L. Timmel Duchamp

  They belong to this family of demigods called the Celestials. Are those characters drawn from folklore or did you just make them up? Where did those characters come from?

  The characters are kind of a kind of a riff on the deities from the Afro-Caribbean belief system, which is rooted in West Africa, and you see various versions of it throughout the African diaspora, wherever African people landed up, West African people specifically. So they are sort of based on them. Beyond that, I departed a bit and had a bit of fun and used a bit of imagination, but they are very clearly—People will be able to identify who’s who.

  Could you talk a little about a couple of them and what sort of spins you put on those characters?

  Well, I have Grandmother Ocean, who is loosely based on Oshun, who is a riverine deity; she’s associated with bodies of waters, such as rivers. I made her into the grandmother of the lot, and put a pun on her name so that “Oshun” became “Ocean.” I have General Gun, who is very loosely based on Ogoun (again, a pun on the name), and Ogoun is a blacksmith, but can also be found on the battlefield, where he has a tendency to go into berserker mode. So I did a bunch of playing around with Ogoun and who Ogoun is as General Gun, that kind of thing.

  Makeda and Abby’s father had fallen in love with a mortal woman, and so they’re half mortal, and so they’re kind of on the outs with their family. Does that have a history in folklore, that that sort of thing might happen?

  Sure, there’s a history in science fiction and fantasy, the idea of the biracial savior of two races, or what a sweetheart of mine calls, “not so subtle race allegory science fiction theater,” so I did some of my own. And the idea that they’re on the outs with one half their birth family is just the kind of thing you can see in life everywhere, where the circumstances of somebody’s birth, their family doesn’t approve of it, and so decides that they aren’t really one of them and finds subtle and not so subtle ways to keep them feeling ostracized, so I sort of drew on human foible.

  The magic system in this book is called hoodoo. Is that just a variant spelling of voodoo? Is it different in any way from what people think of when they hear the word voodoo?

  It is, and it isn’t. They are related. Getting into the specifics of how they are and are not related could take up most of this podcast and needs somebody with more training in it than I have, but they are definitely related, and I think I called it mojo.

  I think both terms appear in the book.

  Yeah, I do use them. I throw in a bunch of terms, but I call magic specifically mojo.

  Is there a difference between hoodoo and mojo, or is that also too complicated to get into?

  Yeah. [laughing] Mojo feels to me like a broader word, and most of us know the blues line, “I got my mojo working.” That sense of “got game” is one of the ways you’ll hear people use “mojo,” and hoodoo is something specific that’s a specific set of practices.

  One example of the magic in this book that I really liked was one of the characters was once one of Jimi Hendrix’s guitars, and he was turned into a human being. How did you come up with that idea?

  Totally written randomly. I was writing, and I don’t do well with outlines. I have to outline in order to be able to have a project I can sell to an editor, but the outline’s always very vague, and once I’ve done that, I just start writing. So I was writing that scene and got to a moment where Makeda asks something about Jimi Hendrix, and the guy leans forward and says, “I used to be his guitar,” and that just came out of my fingers. I was just typing and there it was, and then I thought, “Okay, that’s cool … what? How did that happen? Did Jimi Hendrix even have a British guitar at any point? (Because this guy is British.) What did I just do?” So then I had to do some research and figure out a bit more about Hendrix and his music and his guitars, and it also went into and informed the story. That one was completely random.

  It’s funny, there’s a part in the book where Makeda sort of zones out and creates this powerful magical artifact, and I saw a clip with you where you said you have this tendency to sort of zone out and don’t ask you how the toothpaste ended up in the refrigerator and stuff like that. I was just wondering, is that part of your creative process? To sort of zone out and then come to and kinda look at what you’ve written and you’re like, “Where did this come from?”

  It can happen. It hasn’t happened reliably for about five or six years now, partly because I spent five or six years quite ill, and couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes, so zoning out in a creative way did not happen much. But I have ADD and part of that means that sometimes you just kind of lose track, either because you’re hyperfocused on one thing, or because you’re not focused at all and struggling to focus and sort of taking in all the information all at once, and getting too confused to make any good sense of it, and so I know the sense of—I have had lovely moments that feel like moments where I’m writing and writing and writing, and I’m quite aware of what I’m doing, then I look up, and it’s four hours later when it feels subjectively like only a few minutes. They don’t happen often enough. Because they’re fairly easy, or—they’re not easy, writing’s never easy—but they’re exciting when they happen. But I’ve heard other writers describe going into that kind of creative vortex where you sort of get lost in the work, and everything else kind of fades away for a while, and then you look up, and you’re surprised, almost, that you’re back in the world.

  A lot of the characters in this are artists and musicians and things. There’s this wonderful, I think, bohemian atmosphere to the apartment complex that Makeda moves into. Did you have a background in arts grants or something? I was just wondering if you had experienced that sort of environment or is that a sort of dream life or … ?

  A little bit of everything. I grew up in—my dad was a poet, a playwright, an actor. A lot of his friends were writers or actors, some of them artists, so it’s a world I kind of grew up in, but not like Makeda experiences it. I have been in a warehouse, I’ve lived in a warehouse, but it was awful and filthy, and it didn’t feel bohemian so much as just really not any fun at all. But this is fiction, so I can have fun, and because I worked in the arts in Toronto, because I still tend to work in the arts, I’m very much used to that surround, so I was very much able to draw on it, and also had people I could ask for advice, like when I didn’t know anything about how an electric guitar works, for instance. So it’s a little bit of experience, a little bit of drawing on the experience of others, and, you know, I would love to move into a building that was never intended to be a house and make a home into it. I want to live in a fire station, I want to live in a silo, I want to live in an old church or an old mosque and make it my own. It’s a dream. I don’t think it will ever happen, but it’s been a dream for a very, very long time.

  You mentioned that this was sort of inspired in a way by the Christina Rossetti poem “Goblin Market,” and there are actually excerpts from the poem scattered throughout the book. I was just wondering, why did you decide to include those excerpts in here?

  The poem itself is gorgeous, and it manages to simultaneously be very innocent and very sexual. It’s these two sisters have such a strong love for each other that they’re physically affectionate as well as just loving, and some of the lines in the poem read like sex scenes—they aren’t, but they read like sex scenes, and I just couldn’t help but include some of that gorgeous, gorgeous writing of Christina Rossetti’s, and some of the lines that it is possible to twist, and read as perverse if you have a mind like mine.

  Well, no, I mean, I think that the sexual subtext of the scene, particularly where the two sisters smush fruit all over, and the fruit is running down—

  Sucked juice off the other’s body! I mean that’s, really?

  And there’s a scene very reminiscent of that in here where the two sisters are kind of smushing oranges on each other—

  Oh, yes.

  That was the one I noticed. Were there other scenes like that, pulled o
ut of the poem or … ?

  There is a—I don’t want to give away too much—but there’s stuff that I refer to that refers back to the poem, between the two sisters, between my two sisters that I created for the novel, and I tried to sort of evoke their closeness with the line about “like two birds in one nest,” where they’re sleeping in the same bed, so there are a few bits where I sort of refer backhandedly to things.

  The title of this book, I saw, was originally Donkey. How did that change to Sister Mine?

  That was my editor. [laughing] Editors get to change your titles. I mean, you have to agree, but they’ll work really hard to get you to agree. I called the novel Donkey because when the sisters were younger, one of them, Makeda, was a little more physically healthy and developed quicker than the other, and she would occasionally carry Abby on her back, and because Makeda is the one without the magic, she’s grown up with this notion that the family thinks that the only thing she is good for is for carrying her talented sister around. And so she thinks of herself as the donkey, and, in fact, some of the other relatives think of her that way too. So that’s what that came from. My editor thought that the title Donkey, though apt, was sort of ugly in what it referred to, and they didn’t want to turn people off the book before they had started reading it, and I figure the marketing department knows their job better than I do, so I was okay with it. The neat thing is, when I was most of the way through the first draft, I discovered a pair of sisters, black girls who were born into slavery, Millie Christine, who were born conjoined, kind of back-to-back and side-to-side, and who became singers, where one was physically stronger than the other, and actually the weaker one would sometimes sort of kite her legs up into the air, and the stronger one would walk around with her. So I went and found singing black sisters where one was stronger than the other and they were conjoined. I had not known about them before then; my friend Ellen Klages, who is also a writer, told me about them.

  Makeda collects photos of conjoined twins. Did you do a lot of research on conjoined twins?

  Yes, I did. Not so much on the modern day aspects of them, although there’s a little bit of that there, but the way they have been treated in history is interesting to me because of how they have often ended up being put on display and having to be treated as one person. When you read references to Millie and Christine, they’re called “Millie Christine” and referred to in the singular, as though they were one person. So I did a lot of research into various types of ways that human beings can be born attached to each other, and some of them were fascinating. The whole idea of the parasitic twin, where it’s not even a whole person, it’s a body part that’s sort of attached to the child when it is born—just some amazing stuff our bodies can do.

  You also have a YA book out called The Chaos, and they made you change the title for that one too, right?

  You’ve been doing your research! Yes, that one I was calling Taint, and I was getting pushback on the title from the very beginning because of, you know, some of the street names, what “taint” means on the street, and I kind of liked that meaning, so I wanted to keep it, and had tried to sort of modulate it by putting an apostrophe after the T, so that it could also be kind of a thing like “t’aint no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones.” But when I handed in my manuscript, the editor wrote me back and said, “Look, my sales managers are giggling every time, can we please change it?” So I did. That whole thing of changing titles, I’ve learned now to have second title in reserve, [laughing] because frequently I seem to come up with titles that make editors’ hair fall out.

  Sister Mine is very sexual, and I would imagine a book called Taint might be as well, although it is a YA book, so I think maybe I wonder … is there sexuality in The Chaos and what sort of—

  There is. The protagonist is sixteen; she is sexually active. That’s barely there in the story. I mean, it’s obvious that it is, but I don’t make a whole lot of it. For me, part of what was going on in The Chaos is that when she was younger, before she was sexually active, she was in a different school where she was being slut-shamed by the other girls in the school, you know, that kind of phenomenon where girls will spread rumors about each other, or they’ll find one of their own to pick on and spread rumors about awful things they’re doing with the football team, or sometimes will physically attack them as well. I wanted to talk about that, because it will happen regardless of whether the girl they pick on is actually sexually active, so I have a moment where my protagonist in The Chaos remembers the other girls sort of passing around notes or something that said that she had been giving blowjobs to the whole football team, and she’s at this point maybe thirteen, she doesn’t even know what one is, she just knows it’s not good. So I wanted to talk about that phenomenon and what happens to her, what happens to girls who have this visited upon them, because often they’re the ones who are for some reason cast as an outsider. They might be different in some way, or they might be newly come to the school when all the others know each other already. There’s usually something like that going on, and I did a lot of looking into the lives of girls who had been slut-shamed.

  Well, actually, one of the Amazon reviews complained specifically about that line about blowing the football team, that it was too graphic or something. Have you gotten—

  Yes, but that review … I sympathize with the reviewer, she’s a woman who has two girls, two daughters of her own, and she’s sort of alarmed at the notion they might be reading stuff, not even about blowjobs, I don’t describe a blowjob, I don’t … there’s no sex onscreen in the book at all, but the notion that they might be reading words like that, and she was also alarmed that my protagonist often disobeys her parents—that one made me smile. I mean, I have sympathy for the woman, but the fact is her girls might be dealing with this stuff as we speak and they’ll need to be able to come to her and tell her. They need their parents to be allies, not so afraid of the world that they won’t deal with it. So I’m of two minds, and it was how I was going to write it anyway.

  Back in episode seventy, we interviewed Junot Diaz, and I asked him if he was familiar with your work, and he said, “Of course, I mean, Nalo’s my girl. I saw Nalo just a couple of days ago,” so I was just kind of curious how you guys know each other and how often you hang out and stuff like that?

  Well, I knew his work because he was making such a splash for himself with his very first short story collection, Drown, and I did not know him, but turned on my email one day to an email from him, basically saying hi, how much he loves science fiction, and how much he wanted to write it, and we kept in touch. We finally met, oh, I can’t remember the year, but he and Joe Haldeman, who both teach at MIT, engineered having me go to visit MIT, and that’s when I met Junot. I’d known Joe before because Joe was a teacher at the Clarion I attended, so that’s when I met Junot in the flesh. We’ve kept in touch. We tend to see each other across crowded rooms where two thousand people have gathered to hear Junot speak and we wave. He’s a wonderful, wonderful man. I teach his work in my creative writing classes now, to give students a sense of voice and language and just fierce honesty in your writing.

  Yeah, could you talk about that? You started teaching fairly recently, right, at UC Riverside?

  I’ve been teaching all my entire writing career, off and on, but usually one-off things like a Clarion or that kind of thing, and I mentored at Humber College in Toronto, where it was an online mentorship, but a few years ago in 2009 I was offered a position teaching creative writing, specializing in science fiction and fantasy, at the University of California, Riverside. I don’t think there’s another job like this in the world. I mean a lot of people teach science fiction and fantasy, but they’re usually not in a creative writing department, or there isn’t a position created specifically for it. This university has the Eaton Collection, which, I’m told, is the largest science fiction archive that is open to the public. It’s a glorious, glorious collection, and there are three profs here
who are part of a research cluster, a science fiction research cluster, and a lot of our work is sort of centered around the Eaton Collection. I’ve been to the Collection and sort of touched some second editions of Thomas More’s Utopia and first editions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. For science fiction writers, it’s like going to church.

  You mentioned that you’ve had health problems. I saw you said that you hope this job will provide you a bit of economic security, and I think some of our listeners were just sort of wondering just how you were doing.

  Oh, bless them. I love science fiction. There are ways in which this community kept me and my partner alive through some very, very bad years, and I will always acknowledge that, so thank people for asking. I’m doing a whole lot better. A regular paycheck is magic. It’s a pretty decent paycheck, though I’m still struggling with a lot of stuff. Climbing back of out of a hole of not just poverty but homelessness takes a whole lot, but I am starting to believe it’s going to hang around, that the good stuff that’s happening is going to hang around, my health is coming back, my creative focus is growing again, I’m making a home for myself here. I’m not forgetting Toronto and keep making a home for myself there, but basically I am now eating regularly and back on medication I need to be on, and doing better and better every day.

  Ah, that’s great.

  Yes!

  Another book you had just come out recently was that you were one of the featured authors in Terry Bisson’s Outspoken Authors Series. Can you just talk about that series and how you got involved with it?