Lightspeed Magazine Issue 36

by Eleanor Arnason

  I understand the new novel is called The Land: It’s Just Not That Into You.

  [Laughter] Did I say that? That’s funny. I—

  You definitely said that.

  I shouldn’t laugh at my own jokes. [Laughter.] That’s the worst characteristic of a person. I’m sorry to be such an asshole. The other joke I made too many times, which wasn’t really that funny, was that I was gonna call it Drylandia, and my sister said it was like my rebound book where I was going to go deep into the dustiest part of the past to escape the limbo space of Swamplandia!. Yeah, and I think that in a weird way, I mean it’s not, I guess it wouldn’t really be classified as science fiction but it definitely feels like writing science fiction of the past to me, or kind of having these magical interventions in America’s actual past. But I mean, what Dune does, I think is by order of magnitude is more exciting than what I’m trying to do, because I still have a lot of bedrock that’s in place to work with and I’m really working with diaries and kind of the actual literal history of the dustbowl. So I’m not sort of moving from the ground up to set up a whole cosmos that functions with its own government and its own customs and its own literature that I’m citing throughout. It’s not quite at that level. But I really do think that there’s this way that writing historical fiction, writing science fiction is not so different.

  A lot of your stories seem to involve pioneers and farmers and …

  I know. I have this total farm fetish; I think it’s because I grew up in the mall culture of south Florida. I think the first husband I imagined for myself was, I wanted to marry Charlie Brown and live on a farm. That was the saddest fantasy.

  Were you really into Little House on the Prairie or something?

  I fricking love that stuff. I love that stuff! Anything about Laura Ingalls Wilder. You know, part of it too, I think is the way kids love orphan tales, generally. There’s something about being on a frontier. There’s a kind of, you crave autonomy so much when you’re that age. You know how kids just naturally love animal stories and geek out over different creatures, and somehow I think for me the farm represented both self-sufficiency and autonomy. Kids are always pretty big protagonists in those books, because that’s why they had kids then. They were like, “Thank god, as soon you can suit up we need you to do some labor on this farm.”

  You mentioned that you kind of write whacked-out stuff, and I guess, for people who haven’t read your short stories, do you want to just talk about those frontier stories and how you put this weird spin on them?

  Oh sure. I guess, the first time I tried to do this I picked up [a book] at some discard table [called] Women’s History of the Westward Migration. [The stories] would be hilarious if they weren’t so depressing, like Wile E. Coyote or something. Because they were just really stoic accounts of suffering that shocked me, you know? These women lost everything. They lost all their children. They lost their sisters to snake bites. They say goodbye to their families in the east for the rest of their lives, and went on to Oklahoma, went out in the covered wagons. I’m reading these diaries and was thinking about, I had also been re-reading that Borges story about the minotaur, and so I had this idea to write about a minotaur father. He’s sort of a legend gone to seed. In my mind he was just this mythical figure. He’s sort of, he’s got a belly, he’s robust now. He’s retired from his rodeo days as this kind of American myth and he wants to pull his family west. So I just thought that would be one way to kind of combine two myths, to have this mythic figure that everyone relates to, the minotaur, and then really think about the myth of the west. Why that remains so seductive, you know? And also what’s dangerous to have this uncritical faith in your own abilities without any respect for your own limits or nature’s limits. And it has a kid having to contend with that. So it’s told from this kid’s point of view. I think, originally, it was told from the minotaur’s point of view. The minotaur was named Jack in some drafts. It could have gone way wrong, I think. Even wronger than it arguably did.

  I really love that story and I think that it would appeal a lot to fantasy and science fiction fans. Do you have any sense to what extent fantasy and science fiction fans have found your work?

  A little bit. io9 has been really supportive. I was so excited to get to do that reading series that you guys had me out, where we saw each other. [Laughter] I’ll start thanking you guys for more and more things you didn’t do as the show goes on. Like, that birthday party you all threw for me, I loved it. I really, sort of, love folks who are, like Kelly Link who is kind of claimed by both camps, you know, literary camps, if there’s such a thing, if those distinctions aren’t totally just a phase, at this moment anyway. I was such a sci-fi/fantasy kid. I was so excited to be asked to do this with you guys. I think those dreams really feed my work as much or more than Virginia Woolf or people who are more, who tend to be associated with the canon or whatever.

  I saw you say in an interview that you had a public/private reading split as a kid, where you would read Austin and the Brontes in public, and R.L. Stine and Frank Herbert in private.

  Yeah, yeah. Isn’t that a shame? I mean, I was the kind of nerd that wasn’t even courageous. I couldn’t even courageously claim my identity as a nerd. That’s probably even a little bit of a stretch. I’m sure that I was super private about everything I read, but especially, I remember I loved this Stephen R. Donaldson book. What was this book called? The Mirror of Her Dream? It was like a two book series. It’s this woman, I forgot the verb. He had some amazing verbs for it, but she uses mirrors to see other worlds, and then she can enter those other worlds, which is basically, you know, a lot like writing. Sort of this really concrete way to think about creation and just art as creation. And she was this mild-mannered brunette woman who could then travel to these worlds that she saw. And so for whatever reason that struck a chord with me at the time. But I remember having to hide it from, just being so embarrassed, just hot in the face embarrassed when somebody saw that I was reading that. There is some stigma. I don’t know if you guys experienced that. In Miami, there’s a stigma if you’re reading generally. That was suspicious enough. But certain of those covers, they’re not doing you any favors, you know, there’s a buxom woman in front of a dragon on the cover of your book. I think that had certain connotations, at least in my Miami high school, that I was eager to avoid.

  David: John grew up in Florida. John, what do you think about that? Is there more of that in Florida than elsewhere?

  John: I can’t speak to whether there was more anywhere else because all I knew was growing up in Florida. And I mean, I never really felt like I had to hide the sort of genre literature that I was reading, but on the other hand, I had also, sort of, I had no choice but to embrace my nerdiness right from the get-go, because I was hopeless. There was no way of getting around it.

  Well, yeah, see. If I had capitulated with that kind of wholeheartedness, then it kind of rebounds and you become cool, you know? Because you own your aesthetic and your taste, but I wasn’t there yet, just wasn’t there yet.

  Were you always writing the sort of surreal, weird stuff, and did people try to force you to write more realistic fiction?

  Yes and yes. I wrote, sort of, really terrible, earnest … it’s high school. I wrote like the song lyric writing we were all writing then, where it’s just like this spill of shapeless emotion, where it’s not even clear if there are characters or a setting. It’s just an undiluted emotion that just goes spilling onto the page, so I did a lot of that. And then I went to Northwestern. I remember my first fiction class. I wrote this story about these two boys and some albino parrot named Rufus, I don’t even remember. I remember that I kept misspelling “canon” and also that the professor encouraged me to try writing a story about fully-fledged adults, and that was the comment. It was funny, because actually that story was probably realism for South Florida. Nothing wild happened. It was just like two kids went to a parrot theme park, which you could easily do today in Miami.

 
; I’m sorry, did you say albino parrot?

  Yeah, well, this— Yeah.

  I though you said albino carrot at first, and then you said that was realism. I was like, “Whoa, Florida’s weirder than I thought.”

  That’s kind of a beautiful image. Let’s never eat one if we see it.

  Aren’t those called parsnips?

  Did you guys read Bunnicula? Do you remember that great Bunnicula joke about the minion and the little kid was like, “What’s a minion?” And they thought it was a miniature onion. I think I like, I think I tried to use that. I tried to deploy that in some fiction of my own, embarrassingly recently, until I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s that joke from Bunnicula. I’m so glad I’m plagiarizing Bunnicula at age 31.”

  So you were encouraged to write more realistic fiction. I mean, a fair amount of your output is fairly realistic.

  I think all of it is. I mean, arguably, it’s a really weird distinction for me to try and talk about because I think often, it’s not even, I don’t know what to call it. It doesn’t feel, when I’m writing it, like magical realism. Certainly, I always associate that with a real particular moment in Latin American literature anyhow. I also don’t think it’s magical thinking literature, you know. Like, magical thinking or wishful thinking, or often, if it’s fantasy, it’s some fantasy come to life. I have this one story, another farm frontier story set in Nebraska in this new collection, and the monster, or whatever, I just imagine there’s this zombie homesteader who’s been trying to prove up his land for, we don’t even know how long, in various forms for centuries possibly, and I was thinking that this is kind of like an animated hope that has, sort of, outlived or outlasted any possibility of its fulfillment, right? So I guess that’s spec fiction, because it’s not often you see an undead homesteader in some spooky woods or whatever. I guess the one thing I’ve started saying—you guys tell me how this sounds, because I never know how to talk about it in a way that feels true to how I think about it myself as I’m writing these stories. So one kind of realism you sacrifice, not that because you’re going to write something that’s so extraordinarily untrue or different than life as we experience it on this planet, it’s that you’re going to sacrifice a memetic representational realism to tell another kind of truth that’s normally obscured, or we’re inured to it on a regular Tuesday that we can’t see it. And that’s how I feel about people that I really love, like Kelly Link’s stories: impossible things happen in them, but it’s always a way, it’s like it’s an optical trick to let you see something that was invisible before you read the story. You know, something about our nature that you might not be aware of if you were reading about the same plot set in a mall in New Jersey or whatever.

  You mentioned that you have this collection out; it’s called Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Do you see it as different? Do you see your stories changing in any way between your first collection and this one?

  Yeah, I think so. I don’t know that I’m even the best person to really weigh in on that, in some ways, right? Because I’m stuck in my own dumb perspective, and I never feel—that’s kind of the sad thing about writing, right? As my friend was saying, it’s sort of like you build a house and then lock yourself out of it. So then you’re like, “Hey, how was it in the house?” You can’t experience it as a reader, exactly. I left Florida, so that felt like a conscious kind of striking out. And I think that was important in a way, because if left to my own devices, my imagination lists back to South Florida. For better or for worse, the voice that I always feel comfortable channeling is some completely bewildered adolescent.

  You mention that you sort of left Florida for this. For example, you went to Meiji-era Japan. There’s so much detail in a lot of these settings. What sort of research process do you use when you’re writing about some faraway real place and time?

  I guess that’s another, that was a big difference from the first collection called, Saint Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves. I can’t say that I really hit the stacks to research that collection. A lot of them really deal with adolescence and with [that] particular threshold. And a lot of them are set in some kind of whacked-out Florida, and I know that’s a landscape that I know pretty well. A lot of those stories are contemporary, so it wasn’t as big of a time traveling leap. I think that’s why it felt like writing science fiction, because it is sort of, you’re doing this weird time travel to get back there. So with that book I just read about the Meiji era in Japan. There’s a book called Factory Girls [by Leslie T. Chang]. It was about this really strange moment when, after two hundred years of isolation, Matthew Perry shows up and they sign unequal treaties with Japan, basically force them to trade, and they’re sort of shunted into the world of Western-style capitalism. Blue-eyed foreigners flood their ports and suddenly there’s this really violent seismic period of industrialization where Japan is trying to catch up with the rest of the world, basically, and compete with them. David Graper had this book about debt, and there’s sort of a horrifying section about female debt slavery. And there was some reference, a short reference, to these silkworm workers in Meiji era Japan.

  What were the real silkworm workers? I assume they’re not like in your story.

  So in my story there are these girls that drink a toxic tea, and they’re converted into these hybrid silkworm/women creatures. That’s sort of, that sounds so insane, but that’s basically the trajectory for these actual girls. They were often recruited from rural areas—rural areas where they were the daughters of these tenant farmers who are in terrible debt—and they were called female dekasegi workers. You left your home and you went to these factories that were touted as these incredible places where the daughters of samurai and aristocrats also worked. And you would learn a trade and you would be working on these Western-style machines, you would be trained in these new technologies. And the conditions were miserable in these factories. There’s an argument that the birth of feminist consciousness in Japan begins at this moment, because these women bind together to revolt against these conditions. They sort of do factory protests, completely female factory protests. These places were riddled with tuberculosis. They basically held the women hostage. They were essentially slaves in many cases, and they worked 10-hour days, 11. And the scary thing is that this isn’t some human rights horror story from the distant past that isn’t ongoing, that’s the situation still today for a lot of textile workers. So it’s a real horror story, and I think to do that conversion and make it about some kind of monster metamorphosis where the women become these hybridized animal-machines, I think that in a way, was a way for me to think through what that must have felt like, when production gets mechanized and suddenly time ceases to function the way it did before. The factory workday is in place and these women’s bodies became cogs in this larger machine.

  This kind of feels like a horror story, and you mentioned your story “Proving Up,” about the zombie homesteader, kind of has a horror feel to it. Also, your story “The Graveless Dolls of Eric Mutis” almost reminds me of Stephen King’s “The Body.”

  Oh, thank you, what a compliment!

  Do you see these stories as horror stories? Was that something you were trying to experiment with?

  Yeah, I think in some ways … with “Reeling for the Empire,” one of the things that felt like a big risk or just a change for me was that story is not funny at all. Maybe there’s one half of a joke in that story. And I think a lot of the St. Lucy stories and also Swamplandia!, you know, sometimes I think it’s so great to have comedy in there because it’s a kind of humility or it’s a relief or whatever. So, tonally, that was interesting, to really commit to horror as a tone, and to try to work a story where there’s suspense, but the suspense that drives it is psychological, but also maybe there’s genre elements, too. That was a goal. I wonder if I could find a way to make something that’s genuinely scary on one level, and also engages with these real life historical horror stories. To me, one of the reasons I’m writing about the Dust
Bowl drought now and one of the reasons that I love, well, love is the wrong verb, but that it’s interesting to me is the horror story of how could you lose so much? How could they bear it? What was it that made them stay in this place? What made them commit to this particular future? When did their optimism turn into delusion, you know? So for “The Graveless Dolls of Eric Mutis,” for me, I was just thinking about the way a haunting works. That’s a pretty shallow burial. There’s a group of bullies, and one day they find a scarecrow tied to a tree in a park, like an urban scarecrow. And there’s something familiar about it, but they can’t quite put their finger on it and someone remembers, “Oh, that’s Eric Mutis. He’s this kid that we bullied and we had forgotten him so completely.” And I just think, that’s when the ghost comes back, right? When there needs to be a reckoning with the past, or when there’s something to be done, or there’s a really shallow burial that didn’t function.

  You mentioned “Reeling for the Empire.” Are you making any kind of political statement in that or any of your other stories?

  I don’t think I ever sit down to write a story with a clear agenda in mind. I think if you have a statement you can excise from your story, then maybe it should have been an op-ed. Or maybe a story is not the form for it if it’s just didactic, or if there’s one statement. But I guess, with that one, I was thinking a little bit about, you could argue that those girls, they have kind of their class-consciousness moment. There’s this real resolve there where they alter the machine so they can, I don’t want to give it away, but there’s a sort of revolutionary energy, I hope, to the end. And I guess, if there’s a political statement, I think it’s also connected to a statement about the character in that particular story, it’s that she kind of finds a way to become an agent. She’s been sort of a passive victim and she’s part of a machine for most of the story, and then she kind of recovers a sense of herself as a creator and an agent and revolts. But I don’t know that that’s my Occupy Wall Street story, or whatever.