 Placelessness and Between: A TalkbyGillian Polack
Today’s interview is with writers of the fantastic. In alphabetical order, they are Alma Alexander, Catherynne M. Valente and Mary Victoria. I wanted to bring together three writers whose backgrounds and memories played a strong part in how they write, who incorporate strong senses of place and time into their work. I was interested in seeing what they said when I brought them together. Let’s start, however, with the introductions: Alma Alexander: I feel as though I should walk into a room full of fellow sufferers of this affliction and announce loudly, “Hi, my name is Alma and I am a writer”. Because it’s an addiction for me, writing, I cannot exist without it; I create, live in, and then invite visitors into, the strange and wonderful worlds of my imagination. So far I’ve done pretty well at it, with books translated into fourteen languages worldwide (including such exotics as Hebrew and Catalan). You can find out more about those books by browsing my bibliography page. You can find out more details about my YA trilogy, Worldweavers, and my latest project—which I invite you to visit—a rewrite of a novel I wrote as a fledgling fourteen-year-old writer, a work which has held together remarkably well over time, and which, with the help of a team of contemporary Teen Advisors, I am in the process of retooling into a new and shining incarnation. Otherwise, come out and hang with me at my blog. Over the course of her existence, Mary Victoria has lived in seven countries and managed to settle permanently in none. This is becoming problematic for customs officials trying to make sense of her passport. She has been at various times in her life a passable nanny, an over-anxious animator, a moody mother and an expert on French bureaucracy, and writes stories because she can’t help it—it’s in her blood. One of her ancestors started the trend long ago, spinning yarns to a certain manic-depressive sultan over the course of 2.74 years. Contrary to the tale as it is commonly told, the sultan did not fall in love with his loquacious bride but died of exhaustion waiting for the sequel to come out; and so modern fantasy was born. You can find out about Mary’s far less hazardous stories on her website. Cat Valente is an introvert who learned how to be an extrovert, a west coast girl who learned to live in the east, and a poet/actor who learned how to write novels. She has lived in Scotland, Japan, and just about every region in the US, though these days she’s pretty happy with Maine and her menagerie of beasts, including one very kind husband. She’s written over a dozen books of fiction and poetry since she started publishing at the age of twenty-five because she’s afraid to die before she’s told all the tales she knows. It takes an odd kind of girl to be afraid of dying at twenty-five and Cat is that girl. You can find out more at her website. Gillian Polack: Your backgrounds and memories all play a strong part in how you write. Your memories of places are so tangible and so essential to your writing and how you see the world: can you tell us about your memories of place and how you weave them into your fiction? Alma Alexander: Once in a biography I was required to provide for somebody or other I referred to myself as a “professional tumbleweed.” I still think of myself as one, flung hither and yon by the prevailing winds, learning new worlds and new cultures as I came to rest against trees and fences and stones. Somewhere along the line I learned to put down roots—shallow ones, easy to pull up when the next wind from the right direction began to blow, shallow enough to perhaps leave sores but not wounds leaking heart’s blood if they were ripped away. That makes it seem as though I was always a tough little critter perfectly at home with being buffeted around by the world. But that isn’t entirely true, either. I “belong” in many places. I “belong” in none. What I mean by that is that I have a handful of deeply carried things which have followed me wherever the tumbleweed winds have taken me. For example, I was born in a country which no longer exists—Yugoslavia—on the banks of a great old river with whom I've always had a very special relationship. I think of my Danube as this great big sleeping God who sometimes shares his dreams with me when I am lucky; the last time I lived near that river I was ten years old but it’s got a hold of me, somehow its muddy waters mix and flow in my bloodstream, and to this day, when I go back to visit family who still live there, the first time I glimpse my river I burst into tears. It isn’t blue. It never was. It doesn’t matter. When I hear the first trembling notes of the beautiful Blue Danube waltz my heart shivers inside me and my breath, just for a moment, is held—an act of adoration for the river god I left behind in a literal sense when I was a child but one that I have never abandoned in spirit. But I can no longer live in the place I was born, not any more. The mythology and the history and the dreams are mine to own; contemporary reality, I have long since fallen out of step with. I still speak the language, both the actual spoken tongue and the metaphors used to communicate matters on a deeper level, but somehow I don’t connect with the new people out there now, and the shared language laps the shores of memory rather than any contemporary reality I might come face to face with despite the fact that I understand this reality at face value on several different levels. I think and dream differently, changed by the world I grew up in. I learned to be silent, and look, and learn, and absorb. I am a keen observer. I will pick up strange languages—fragments and bits of them—just by listening to people in a culture that’s foreign to me actually speaking (at the Worldcon in Japan a few years ago a couple of key phrases—“Aregato,” “sumimasen”—got me a long way; it was a foreign, truly foreign, place to me, the first time ever in my life that I was functionally illiterate—but I found touchpoints with the culture, the things I knew, the things I learned. I went to a Japanese sword museum. All the exhibits were labelled in Japanese making any information about them inaccessible to me—but I knew enough about Japanese sword making to be rapt anyway. That’s the legacy of being of The World rather than of A Place. People who are born and grow up and die in the same street know exactly what the weather is going to do the next day through long-accumulated experience. They know the cloud patterns and the wind patterns and the tiny hints in animal behaviour all of which tell them that they should bring the plants in because there'll be a frost in the morning or to shut the windows because it is going to rain in an hour. I... can’t do that, exactly, with any given place. But I have been to so many places that I can put together a jigsaw puzzle of a guess, using the clues that the locals take for granted to create a complex and mysterious picture which they would never believe really applied to what they see as their simple world. I colour outside the boxes, and see into a deeper dimension, simply because that’s become a survival tactic. And yet... and yet... there is a certain smell of lilacs in the twilight that takes me back to a certain time and place. There’s the sound of wind in a certain kind of tree that takes me back to a moment in time. There’s a snatch of a song that will return me to a time when I was ten, or fifteen, or twenty two; the smell or a particular kind of glue or the feel of crepe paper under my fingers takes me straight back to kindergarten craft classes; the taste of chestnut puree with cream takes me back to a particular patisserie in the town where I was born where my grandmother used to take me. The scent of a votive candle in a church reminds me of my grandmother’s hands. The uneven cobbles of an old street return me to the library where I discovered reading as a kid. The smell of snow in the air makes me happy because I know winter is coming and winter meant hot thick soups and cocoa and fires lit in the old ceramic furnaces in corners of rooms and the crunch and squeak of snow underfoot. All of these are my world, and all of them creep into my stories, somewhere. Mary Victoria: I laughed when I first saw this question, because that sense of place and rootedness one gains from growing up in a specific corner of the world—details of culture and belonging a writer inevitably raids for later use—were qualities rather lacking in my upbringing. My family changed countries, languages, continents so often that when I look back nostalgically at my childhood I see a big smudge of motion blur. But then I scrolled up to your introductory caveats in the e-mail, Gillian, and saw that you listed ‘a sense ‘of placelessness’ as an additional category. Thank you. Placelessness is my country. Being a citizen of Placelessness does not mean of course that there aren’t cultural details to raid as a writer, and raid I do, with impunity. I spent part of my childhood quite close to Alma’s Yugoslavia. Between the ages of five and ten I lived in Cyprus, that long-nosed island swimming at the back of the Mediterranean Sea. Cyprus is at a crossroads both geographical and political: it sits uneasily between Europe and Asia, Greeks and Turks, Christianity (Orthodox) and Islam (Sunni). It’s within hopping distance of Beirut. If you listen closely, you can hear the sound of Israelis and Palestinians arguing with each other just across the water, disagreeing about who invented falafel first. Or drilling holes in their road-map to peace, whatever it is. Because that’s what it’s like living next to war zones: confusing. You watch, bemused. You laugh or cry. You thank your lucky stars you aren’t there, just across the water. We arrived in Cyprus just after the Turkish invasion, while civil war raged in Lebanon. All through my childhood, ‘land’ meant war to me. That’s what people endlessly fought over. It was just as well, being a tumbleweed: the opposite, being rooted, belonging, was apparently problematic. The land of Cyprus was and still is divided. There’s a Turkish side and a Greek side, a painful separation of something once organic and whole. Between the two sides there are strips of ‘no-man's land’ and a whole ghost city, Famagusta, where no-men live. Where to find balance in all this? I like Alma’s survival tactics: the idea of sidestepping the boxes, the art of being not quite this and not quite that, and treasuring what memory provides. The lilacs and the river god are certainly a mighty gift. And I have my own treasures. One of the advantages of growing up tossed like a ball between several languages and cultures is an appreciation of just how bizarre and arbitrary the separations we call “insurmountable differences” or “culture wars” actually are. A citizen of Placelessness dragging her suitcase through customs yet one more time is politely puzzled when you come to her with worries about this or that political candidate, or the funny cloth she wears on her head, or what God she may or may not pray to. I am not “of you,” I will never be “of you.” But I am you. And you are me. That’s the story I find myself telling, again and again. Cat Valente: I grew up on the West Coast, and have lived in most corners of the US as well as a couple of non-US corners, and this makes the question “where are you from” sort of meaningless. I usually say I’m from Seattle, but I am as much from California, and now that I live on the East Coast the fact of my Californian upbringing makes me iconic in a way Seattle simply doesn’t. I was never so much a California girl as when I lived in Ohio. Sometimes I infodump that my parents were divorced before I was a year old and I grew up shuttling between Seattle and Sacramento. Even that is a simplification. In the end, though, I am a Western girl, all those empty lands and mountains and twisted up pines and lonely spaces are part of me, indelibly. My relationship with the East Coast is more of a surprising romance with someone who seemed to be stilted and old fashioned but turned out to be dark and interesting and occasionally into raising elder gods from the deep. I think the part of my childhood that is soil for my work is less place—though that is part of it, when I was thirteen my father ended his custody and all visitation and I was sent to live with my mother in California, a place which terrified me while everyone else loved it and to some extent worshipped it, Hollywood and Disneyland and surfing and all, because it was hot and a desert and strange and full of swimming pools and really, really tanned people, and to be sent to the desert at thirteen is a uniquely mythic experience—and wow that sentence got away from me. Less place than movement, going back and forth between my parents, between cold silver dark, which seemed normal and comforting, to bright warm golden which was frightening and alien, between step families and ways of being, between selves really, the self I could be with my mother and the self I could be with my father. I can’t help but think this is why Persephone is such a dominant myth for me. Of course this is a quintessentially post-70s American childhood, divorce and latchkey and stepparents and Saturday morning cartoons. But that sense of home being the place between, the airport waiting for a parent to pick you up, the drive home, home being nowhere, only the part where you are alone and traveling somewhere, unmoored and moving toward being a place you can call permanent and safe, well, that's where I turned into me. Alma Aexander: In the end, though, I am a Western girl, all those empty lands and mountains and twisted up pines and lonely spaces are part of me, indelibly. There is that, and I can see it. But you are also an Eastern girl and I can see that too—and by Eastern I don't mean Maine. I mean the mystical east. There are traces of that in your writing which are exquisitely present. <......> that sense of home being the place between, the airport waiting for a parent to pick you up, the drive home, home being nowhere, only the part where you are alone and traveling somewhere, unmoored and moving toward being a place you can call permanent and safe, well, that’s where I turned into me. I think that there is a place called Between. And I think that many of us who subsequently became writers hold permanent visas to visit that place, and are somehow given the strength to survive and endure there and even to take the stuff of Between (cold and dark and fearsome indeed, sometimes) into our hands and mould it like clay and come out of that place holding something... new, a treasure that could not have existed independently of or have been made outside of Between because it is something made from air and darkness and power and awe. We are marked by this place, somehow, we bear its stamp on our foreheads or its arcane tattoos hidden on those secret patches of skin that nobody ever sees—and it is within our power to interpret its weirdnesses and its grotesqueries and its pain for those who never go there and who can never, other than through the things that we make and we offer, understand it—but who recognise it with an instinct as deep as our concept of being human is, because Between is where all our monsters—and all our gods—live, and have always lived. And whatever you call home in this more solid realm that we inhabit—a cottage on a windswept island, a house in cedar trees, a suburban bungalow, an urban eyrie of a high-rise apartment—that’s a temporary place, a mailing address, the place where you stay when you come visit, where you bring the treasures you found while you were wandering in Between... which is home. Which has always been home. Gillian Polack: All your answers fascinate me, because all of you have writing that evokes an exceptionally strong sense of place. Even mundane journeys are evocative in all your writing. Obviously the origins of that strong sense aren’t at all what I thought. Instead of looking at your writing and making assumptions about where it comes from, therefore, I’m going to ask directly: can you explain how tumbleweed and rootlessness and the US West show through in your writing? If you could be quite specific, it would help us (readers) see what actually happens to create that sense of ‘being there’. Cat Valente: Well, I think, if you look at all of my writing, there is a strong theme of traveling, of the road, of movement, from The Labyrinth to Palimpsest and The Habitation of the Blessed, the search for a home, the loss of it, the Place Between made manifest is a huge theme for me. In The Orphan’s Tales, the girl in the garden is freed and made whole by regaining the ability to travel away from her circumstances. I’m not sure I’ve ever written about someone with a solid home life, whose evolution is not about physical relocation. Maybe I ought to try—but that is so alien to my experience! As for the West, well, it’s that edge of the known world feeling—which is of course all in our heads, the world is round and it’s not the edge of anything. But it can feel like it, being out there with your feet dangling in the sea, beyond the hedge. And I think that anyone who moved around a lot as a kid, who has lived in countries other than the one they were born in, knows a lot about what first contact feels like, a lot about what being alien and other and different is, about not being part of the tribe, with your own history that remains secret a lot of the time, and your own motivations that no one else understands. And in a way that’s the heart of science fiction. Alma Alexander: I don’t know that I can be specific, in the sense that you probably mean here. I don’t think I’ve ever consciously directly tied a place to a story as such...yet, anyway. But what gives me a sense of being there is... immersion. Even if it isn’t a spot you could push a pin into on the map, when I write about place I close my eyes and step into it—and I bring all the ‘tumbleweed’ lessons with me. First I close my eyes, and take a deep breath—and try to figure out what the scents around me are—where the wind is blowing from and what it is bringing with it, what kind of food the people eat in this place (spices? boiled vegetables? roast beast?), what kind of level of hygiene exists in this society (can I smell my neighbour?), do flowers grow here, does mold grow here, are we on the edge of an ocean in a busy harbour or are we high on a mountain where the air is thin and smells of snow and clouds...? Then, eyes still closed, I reach out with my fingertips. What do I encounter? Cool slimy things (gutted fish...?) or cool soft things (moss?) or something painfully warm to the touch (edge of cauldron? ember?)or warm soft things (fur?)—all of these things will tell me details and nuances of the place I am in. Then I listen. Wind? Breaking waves? Howling wolves? The hubbub of a marketplace or a bazaar? The silence of a cathedral? Birdsong? Bells? Pounding of a hammer on an anvil, or sounds of clashing swords? Somebody crying softly in a corner where they think nobody will hear...? Then—only then—do I open my eyes and let the colour in. Mary Victoria: How does place, or even placelessness show through in my writing? Well, I’m very new at this and only have the three books I'm currently working on to refer to, but I’d guess the devil lies in the detail. That dusty-tiled-back-doorstep-uneasy-edge-of-Middle-East-falafel-loving childhood does creep in at intervals into my work. The shade of a little old woman in a black headscarf, busily hosing down hot paving with precious water and sweeping the resulting effluvia into the ditch, is a Cypriot widow directly transposed. Anything involving small and stubborn yellow-eyed beasts kept for milk and cheese, call them what you will, is inspired by Cypriot goats. (This is why I've always felt such an affinity for Le Guin's Earthsea. Cyprus, like Gont, is a mountainous island practically seething with goats, though unfortunately not wizards.) The sense of walking along rather steep and crumbling footpaths, ridiculously clinging to the face of a cliff—again, Cypriot mountains; the ubiquitousness of sailing vessels, whether of the sea or sky, a memory of island life. So, in my case at any rate, all personal memories of place are mined, rifled, and shamelessly transposed. The same may be done with placelessness. Varosha in Famagusta, again, provides a good example: a city-in-between, lost in the cracks. A ghost city, not really in one country or another, claimed by all and useful to none: a non-place. (You can probably tell by now that I also love Mieville’s The City and the City.) The character of the drifter, with his affiliation to between-places, former countries, non-peoples and invisible cultures, is a far too insistent trope of mine. I want to scream every time I create another homeless vagabond, but they keep appearing. Likewise, the heretics. Religion is also a place, with its wars and refugees, no-flight zones and disputed territories, where whole populations are declared non-existent and periodic attempts made to actually achieve this. The devil is the detail, and the detail is, most unfortunately, a matter of experience for many people. My family background is partly Iranian and Baha’i, a combination which some maintain does not exist. I beg to differ! This all makes me sound like a kind of photocopier in reverse, spewing out my own reality into writing, thinly-disguised as fantasy fiction. Truly it isn’t so. A writer’s whole business is imagining things she couldn’t possibly have experienced. But there are a certain set of ingredients that go into the story-mulch—a smell of wet dust on a hot day, the glimpse of a black-garbed crone, the sight of people walking miles to collect water, or buy rice, or pass a border checkpoint—that inevitably draw from memory. Gillian Polack: Cat, when you said “And in a way that's the heart of science fiction.” You set me thinking. What brought each of you into the genre? Why do you write speculative fiction and what is it about your writing that makes you think of yourself as a science fiction or fantasy writer? Alma Alexander: It’s a number of things. One, fairy tales. I cut my teeth on the original unadulterated old European and Russian fairy tales, the kind where people can and DO get hurt, the kind where the “happily ever after” is always leavened with something, a tinge of pain, perhaps. I watched the Disney versions of all of that as a kid, of course, and lapped it up—but it wasn’t until I was an adult and Ariel replaced the Little Mermaid whom Hans Christian Andersen had known and loved and pitied that I overtly rebelled against the sanitization of our heritage because of some weird sensibilities that kids wouldn’t understand the darker aspects of the fairy tales. They do, oh believe me they do. And taking that away from them, perhaps, is taking away an avenue of safety where they can come to terms with that dark side... before it ambushes them all unawares much later on and eats what’s left of their innocence for a snack tossing the shell of the person away like a used candy bar wrapper. Two, mythology. Again, I grew up with a collection of myths and legends from everywhere—it was a set of books on Scandinavian and Norse mythology, on Russian and Eastern European, on Celtic, on Greek, on Roman. I was friends with the gods and goddesses of a half-dozen different corners of the world before I was ten. Talk about acquiring a god’s-eye view of the universe—I understood on some deeply instinctive level how a deity thought, how it acted, what it would do and how it would jump at a given situation, I understood the capriciousness and the casual cruelty of the gods towards their people and also the sudden and brilliant benevolence when the mood took them—it was a rutted and uneven circuit but it was a great training ground and I spent my younger years faithfully practising on the race track, not minding that I had to watch my step if I ran too fast. Three, I simply looked up, saw the stars, and fell in love. I believed in the stars from the moment I set eyes on them. Much later I found out that we are MADE of star-stuff, us humans and every other living thing out there, and somehow the knowledge simply made me whole and happy. I had known it all the time. I was a part of the stars. They had ALWAYS been a part of me. It couldn’t be any other way. Speculative fiction followed on the heels of all that, like a rainbow after the rain. You might say, I couldn’t help myself. Mary Victoria: What brought me to the fantasy genre: simply reading and loving it as a child. I remember that marvellous sense of a door opening in my mind and the joy of stepping through to a place I instinctively recognised—a place far more familiar to me than “reality,” though it could occasionally be dark or harsh. I cannot thank my mother enough for never censoring or sanitizing my reading choices as a child. She rightly championed the necessity of exploring dark and dangerous themes through story. Fairytales, of the satisfyingly truthful and rather bloody kind, were my first introduction to the world through the door. They were quickly followed by myths and legends of various cultures (a crash course on the power of symbolism), secondary world tales such as the Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien’s The Hobbit and the Earthsea novels, as well as real world/fantasy crossovers of the sort written by E. Nesbit and Madeleine L’Engle. There were also historical and myth-inspired fantasies by Mary Stewart, Mary Renault and Rosemary Sutcliff, epic fantasy of the McCaffrey and Eddings variety and eventually as a teenager gothic horror, hard science fiction and magical realism. All this was infinitely inspiring, and I couldn’t help returning to my roots, as it were, when I began writing. I wanted to give other people the gift I’d been given—a key to that door in the mind. And the story possibilities in fantasy and science fiction are endless, untrammelled by anything but the scope of our imaginations. As a writer I find that tremendously exciting. Also, it would be fair to say that fantasy and science fiction stories often provide universes where misfits, weaklings, aliens, pariahs, nerds and freaks come into their own. I won’t pretend that doesn’t appeal to me! Cat Valente: I did not originally think of myself as a genre writer. I was trained as a classicist and before that grew up on fairy tales and folklore, and in classics, witches, dragons, curses, magical stones, prophecies...well we don’t call that speculative fiction, we call that Tuesday. So it was actually patiently explained to me at some point that possibly my sentient mazes and talking animals were not, strictly speaking, realism. But once that connection had been made, I simply had no interest in telling stories about rich white people being unhappy in suburbia. I wanted to tell the kinds of rich, deep, bloody, awful, wonderful stories I knew from my own reading. I wanted to make new myths and folklores and fairy tales—and later, new space operas and ghost stories, too, because those are no less the folklore of our culture than pop rocks and coke. I do run into conflict, though, since what formal training I have as a writer was as a confessional poet, where they want you to dig deep into your own past and trauma for material, where if it’s not personal, it’s not True, and if it’s not True, it’s not good. In SFF, when I do that in a naked sort of way, as opposed to hiding how personal each and every one of my books are in layers of image and plot, some readers get very uncomfortable. So I’m trying to sort out for myself what that means for my fiction. It probably means: fuck it, y’all will have to deal with it, but I’m still gnawing on the issue. Gillian Polack: When I read your writing (each and all of your writings) all three of you present strongly visual societies and worlds. I'm curious about the role art plays in your life and writing, but also how you translate the stuff of your mind’s eye into such strong imagery. You’ve already answered this to a certain degree, so I was wondering if you’d mind exploring it a bit further? Alma Alexander: To a certain extent, it comes down to a kind of a kind of a hyper-synesthetic sense—I can “translate” sounds into colour, or texture into temperature. For instance, let’s say that I’m lying in a room in the dark with a skylight above me. I cannot see anything out of it—it’s night, it’s dark, there are no lights, it’s cloudy... and it’s raining, because I can hear it on the glass above my head. What happens inside my brain at that point is alchymical. I hear the rain, I cannot physically see it with my eyes, but I can visualise it quite clearly inside my mind. I can see it falling heavy or light, depending on the kind of sound it is making on the glass. I can see it slanting against a lone streetlight in an empty street. I can see somebody hurrying through it, umbrella-less, collar up, hunched against the elements, partly oblivious to it all because (s)he is so intent on something else, something important, something... story. Or, for instance, with my eyes closed I reach out with my fingertips and encounter something that gives beneath my touch, a sort of weird solid but with a completely ethereal space inherent in it, fluffy, soft, and yet if I close my hand around it, it solidifies into a ball... it’s snow. My hands tell me it’s snow. My fingers tingle with the cold an instant before my mind supplies the identity of the substance I’ve just buried my fingers into. It can get extrapolated in many ways. I can, for instance, hear guitar music... and place a story geographically depending on what kind of music is being played on that guitar. I see a glow on a horizon, and I can smell smoke, and sense creatures running from a forest aflame. I can... connect. I have no idea how I do it. I have no idea how to do it, and could not attempt to teach anyone else how to try it. But that’s just the way my mind works. I’ve been known to get lost in specific pieces of music, because they paint pictures inside my head. This does mean that I have a very different reaction to music than other people might. The underlying thing might simply be... reaching out for an emotional truth that might be camouflaged by something more obvious but less ‘true’—and the vividness of the images that come through when a reader finds these scenes relies on somehow bridging, in that reader’s mind, some gap in perception that they hadn’t realised was there but which, once the connection has been made, will never again be a foreign country to them. We, the writers, read the stars and cast the tale—the reader reads the tale and is made to lift his or her eyes up into the heavens, to see and recognise the stars. It’s the storyteller's circle. Mary Victoria: Words did not tumble out of me as a child, but they did accumulate, pressing dried-leaf layer on dried-leaf layer, sensation on sensation until they would suddenly blurt out, often in the form of poetry, encapsulating some long process of sound, taste, sight, touch, emotion and eventually, story. Poetry was my first medium of conscious self-expression—that is, around the age of seven, when I sat down for the first time and tried to explain how a certain event made me feel, the natural way of doing so was in the form of a poem. The event in question was playing octaves on the piano. That particular joy of hearing a note sound out at regular intervals—the same note, but a different note, the same tone, but a different register, harmonizing and returning from one end of the keyboard to the other—was so intoxicating to me that I sat and repeated the exercise at our Suzuki upright until I must have driven my mother mad. It was with those octaves ringing in my mind that I penned that seven-year-old poem, for what it was worth. I had to find a way to get the octave-feeling out. The synesthesia was complete, because the poem when it was written turned out rather inexplicably to involve a blue fan and a corridor, an image which happened to describe that octave-feeling for me. And so the image was born of the word, but the word was preceded by a specific sound and sensation, and all three—sensation, word, image—meant exactly the same thing. In the mind of an artist, like that of a child, things are all mashed up, and wonderfully so. If there are images in my writing, it may be because I can’t keep them out. When I first started trying to write a novel-length story aimed at a young adult audience, I found I had to unlearn some of that image/sound/sensation drunkenness in order to achieve a degree of coherence in my storytelling. I did sometimes feel, when I began to write prose, that I was trying to eat slices of carefully prepared concrete. But it was a useful exercise. (For me. Many writers don’t have to go through this process and soar from poem to story in one flamboyant leap.) Eventually, when I got over my impatience at being asked to produce rounded characters and some form of plot, I realised the poetry was still there: first in the detail of the imaging, then (a step back) in the cadence of language, then (another step back) in the voices of the characters. With each book I write I take a further, furtive step back towards the babbling seven-year-old poet who saw fans in octaves and felt the colour blue. I hope to meet her face to face again very soon. Cat Valente: I’ve always said that if I weren’t terrible at drawing I would never have started writing. Everything for me is so powerfully visual. I did start out as a poet, so I still feel that everything can have the same weight of meaning that words and lines do in poems, that you can make a novel as careful and bare as a poem. I always try to. I get a lot of weird pushback for the style I use in my books but I just don’t know how to write them any other way and still have them be my books. You know, I think it’s the fault of two people—a former poetry teacher I won’t name, to protect the guilty, and Milorad Pavic. My former professor taught me to be terrified of cliché—he hated everything I wrote and said it was all clichéd and terrible, so I now constantly police my work for clichés, with him at my back. And Pavic taught me how different English can be when the speaker is not actually speaking English—when it’s a translation. Well, in fantasy and SF, most of the time characters aren’t really speaking English, they’re speaking the language of their world, and the conceit is we can read it. So I am always trying to invoke otherness in my prose, and Pavic showed me how to do it. Gillian Polack: What part do books play in your lives? Alma Alexander: When we got married, my husband’s book collection numbered in the thousands already. Books were falling out of every available space in the small house he lived in, back in Florida, the house his father had built. His father had not been such an avid bibliophile so some of the bookshelves that hubby built to hold his own collection were a little... makeshift... and in the office consisted of little more than cinderblocks with planks thrown across them. When we moved to the Pacific Northwest, he culled his book collection—there were three piles, To Give To The Friend Who Was Helping Us Pack, To Throw Out (damaged) or Give Away or Sell, and To Keep. The To Keep pile was large, and we ended up with two thirds of our moving boxes being... you know... books. I had not brought my own collection over to Florida because I knew we would be moving and I only wanted to do this once, so my own books arrived in due course at our new house. Once again, fully two thirds of the boxes of personal effects that arrived for me from my parental home in New Zealand were books. He had thousands. I had thousands. In the ten years since we have been married, we have not stopped acquiring books—in fact, this Christmas past the bulk of our gift giving has been, you know, more books. Our house has a bookshelf in every room, and where there are no shelves there are books piled on the floor beside convenient bits of furniture. I have poetry beside my bed. I have travelogue in the bathroom. I have shelves and shelves of classic science fiction in the hall. I have a large seven foot tall and six foot wide bookcase in the spare bedroom that’s stuffed two and three deep with books ranging from those by Mary Stewart, Orson Scott Card, Michael Moorcock, Tolkien and Gaiman to those by Italo Calvino, Nikos Kazantzakis, John Galsworthy, Sigrid Undsett, and Ivo Andric. My armchair in the living room has a small pile of immediate to-be-read stuff beside it and this currently includes the new autobiography of Mark Twain and the new Bill Bryson book (both Christmas presents), Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay, a novel by A S Byatt, The Salt Road by Jane Johnson, and assorted books in my own native language. There’s a book on the dining room table which gets picked up and put down regularly, a dipping book, as it were. Downstairs, there are shelves of mysteries (hubby's ‘thing’) and my research shelves (books on China, on Nikola Tesla, on Byzantium...) and a collection of Ursula le Guin, and books by Glenda Larke, and books by Margaret Atwood, and biographies, and dictionaries, and encyclopedias... I’m surrounded by them, This house is built on them, and with them. Books are my life. Cat Valente: I think Alma and I have similar book tastes! Well, we are but babies compared to some. Our collection probably numbers a thousand, maybe two if you add in all the stuff still in my grandmother’s storage, which includes all my Asimov’s. See, I’ve spent most of my life moving every few years, sometimes under terrible circumstances, and I often lose my books in that move. As in my divorce, when I lost almost all of them. I had to start over—but that was OK. I’d taken the core I really loved, every time. I ran away from home when I was sixteen. I took my Keats, my Lord of the Rings, and a book of poetry by Diane Wakoski called Medea: the Sorceress. I forgot my toothbrush. I love having my books around me, even though I’ve lost them over and over. Books create safe space. They say: I’m staying awhile. And they are beautiful and smell good and it’s harder to clasp a Kindle to your chest in the rapture of reading. Mary Victoria: Books are both an anchor and a feast for me. Like many readers, I treasure the freedom a book provides, the sheer scope for thought and breadth of imagination possible in that format. From fiction to poetry to philosophy I love to meditatively chew through it all, caterpillar-style. I’m not a speedy reader but I am an appreciative one. I choose the books I want to read carefully, mumbling and chumbling over them with relish. So much for the feast. Then there’s the anchor. Mumbling and chumbling is of course the sound made by the character Odd when he eats cheese sandwiches in Angela Carter’s wonderful Miss Z, The Dark Young Lady. Miss Z has followed me in her tattered yellow 1970 hardback edition since Very Long Ago When I Was Young, across three continents, two oceans and one sea. I have quite a few other old friends of a similar sort whom I keep close, who have braved trunks and shipping containers and New Zealand customs to stay with me. If I were to lose them one day I would be sad. Not devastated, mind, but sad. Because they are my childhood haunts, my home town, my familiar signposts and my well-remembered terrain. In my family we don’t carry furniture around, we carry books. They anchor us to a place of sorts. Which brings me right back round to Gillian’s first question about that sense of place, or placenessness. Books contain place remarkably well, just in their character as objects. They are nostalgia machines. Who hasn’t picked up a well-loved book, smelt that musty old page smell and been immediately transported back to the moment it was first opened, perhaps when it was fresh and new, the spine bent back in luxurious anticipation to read? There, on that stained train seat, or that wet lawn. Somebody interrupted and coffee was spilt, a dark spot. The adolescent reading broke off to dream a little at this page. The child reading that story stretched out on a green bedcover smelling of jasmine, enjoying a delicious afternoon of distraction. The book contains all those moments, anchoring down shards of existence that would otherwise be lost. Gillian Polack: Can you recommend five books that we ought to read and tell us why they’re so important?" Alma Alexander: Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay—I can almost say that this is the best book I’ve ever read, never mind genre, never mind anything that categorises it in a pigeon-hole, the best book. Ever. That’s saying a lot, but it all comes together in here—the characters, the complex storyline, the emotional truth of it all. It is quite simply, in a word, remarkable. Lord of the Rings—I’m not sure if this ought to count as one or three but I’ll count it as one, anyway—this is the book that taught me to immerse myself in a fantasy world, to love a secondary fantasy world, how to create a secondary fantasy world. I know some people can’t get into it and that’s fair enough—but it taught me a lot about my craft, quite aside from being one of the seminal reading experiences of my life. Dune by Frank Herbert—and by this I mean the original trilogy. Again (are you sensing a theme here?) I fell in love with the complexity of it all, the undercurrents, the motivations, the characters who have to face larger-than-life troubles and trials and tribulations. I might also add that, having gone to a convent school for at least a little while in my misspent youth and having had a direct experience or two with a sisterhood of nuns, the Bene Gesserit scared the crap out of me. This is what my nuns would have been, on steroids. The original five Amber novels by Roger Zelazny—yes, here we go again, I loved the complex interplay of family loyalties and betrayals, not to mention the demented imagination that went into the creation of the Shadow worlds. These were the books that cemented Zelazny’s place in my personal literary pantheon. The Faded Sun trilogy by C J Cherryh—once again, a meticulously built culture with real problems and with thoroughly believable alien cultures working at odds with one another because, eh, universal translators are all very well but translating underlying cultural CONCEPTS and why they’re important has not yet been perfected—also, an interesting take on individuals who experience the epiphany of suddenly understanding those untranslatable ideas and inevitably ‘going native’ because they can’t help it.. There are others. MANY others. My house is full of them all. But you said five, and I’ve already cheated by using a bunch of series, so... Mary Victoria: Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, as a character study. I love Nabokov’s work in general, but this book in particular makes me squirm with delicious delight. Pnin, like Nabokov himself, is a Russian émigré. He is a stranger in a strange land—a fussy, deracinated, oversensitive sort whose one desire is to be loved. I have seldom come across a character so lightly and expertly sketched. The novel is written as only Nabokov can write. I carry Pnin about in my heart and know him well, very well… The Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar. This novel taught me about character voice and world-building, bringing Yourcenar’s vision of second century Rome to life in a deft emotional tapestry. A vision rather than historical reality it may be, but engaging for all that. The Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic. This book breaks all the rules, throwing traditional plot and character development out of the window in favour of a mind game. It is written in dictionary format, with alphabetical entries through which we start to piece together the story, or stories. To complicate matters there are three sections to the dictionary: Christian, Muslim and Jewish. If that wasn’t enough there is a male and a female version of the dictionary, differing by one small but crucial paragraph. Fun! A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin. In fact everything by Ursula K. Le Guin. Spare, beautiful prose, compelling stories and the original boy wizard. What more could you ask for? Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis. The untold story behind the myth of Cupid and Psyche. I had a tug and pull relationship with Lewis before reading this book: I loved his imaginative energy but deplored his flat portrayals of women. Here, he gets it right. Utterly right! Character development, narrative voice, plot, world-building, psychological truth, philosophy, poetry… This jewel of a book has them all. Cat Valente: Oh, Mary, I love Dictionary of the Khazars! But my Pavic is Landscape Painted with Tea. It’s a book that’s also a crossword puzzle, and it’s strange and gorgeous and the language will utterly slay you. Pavic always writes these rule breaking books, and what comes out is just astonishing. Little, Big by John Crowley is my favorite novel—beating out Lord of the Rings just a few years ago. Every sentence is exquisite, the characters break my heart, and I find myself laughing and crying at the same time at the end—no other book has ever had that effect on me. I usually describe it as a mildly post-apocalyptic Midsummer Night’s Dream. Stephen King’s IT. Ok, this is weird, right, all these high class books and I come out swinging with the horror novel. Only IT is as postmodern and complex as anything else I’ve read, and it has stayed with me my whole life, I’ve read it and reread it and I practically have it memorized. I didn’t read Alice in Wonderland (which I am also obsessed with) 'til I was thirteen. I read IT at nine. It was my Alice in Wonderland. With very sharp teeth. The Neverending Story by Michael Ende: Yes, it’s a book! The movie ends halfway through. It’s lovely and strange and very German and so much of what I always want YA fantasy to be, which is: transformative. Medea: the Sorceress. Diane Wakoski. That book I told you about that I took with me when I ran away. It’s a book of poems and letters and maps, about physics and myth and California and Michigan. It taught me how to see my life in myth, and how to see myth in the American landscape. It’s a core book of my heart. (Also Master and Margarita!) Books mentioned in this column:
Gillian Polack is based in Canberra, Australia. She is mainly a writer, editor and educator. Her most recent print publications are a novel (Life through Cellophane, Eneit Press, 2009), an anthology (Masques, CSfG Publishing, 2009, co-edited with Scott Hopkins), two short stories and a slew of articles. Her newest anthology is Baggage, published by Eneit Press (2010).One of her short stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award a long time ago, and three have (more recently) been listed as recommended reading in international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories. She received a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship to work on novels at Varuna, an Australian writers' residence in the Blue Mountains. Gillian has a doctorate in Medieval history from the University of Sydney. She researches food history and also the Middle Ages, pulls the writing of others to pieces, is fascinated by almost everything, cooks and etc. Currently she explains 'etc' as including Arthuriana, emotional cruelty to ants, and learning how not to be ill. She is the proud owner of some very pretty fans, a disarticulated skull named Perceval, and 6,000 books. Contact Gillian.
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