An Interview with Lev GrossmanLev Grossman is the author of eight novels, including the bestselling The Bright Sword, an epic retelling of the story of King Arthur. He’s also the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling The Magicians trilogy which has been published in thirty countries and was adapted as a TV show. He has degrees from Harvard and…

You’re currently working on Hulk Not Smash: Practice Mindfulness the Mighty Marvel Way. Can you tell us more about this project and how it came about?

Hulk Not Smash was put together by our extraordinary writer Amy Ratcliffe and the good folks at Chronicle Books. When they came to Marvel to look for an illustrator, I think it was my work on Marvel Meow and Lucky the Pizza Dog that got me the gig. This book teaches people about self-care and mindfulness through examples of Marvel’s fan-favorite characters, with exercises to practice ourselves. Readers will learn to not judge a book by its cover and keep an open mind like Beast, learn to face your fears with Daredevil, be in the present with Kitty Pryde, and so much more!

How would you say the concept of mindfulness fits into comics core values, especially when some readers pick up monthly issues to see fight scenes and punches on panels?

I think readers really need to read the story around the fight scenes. What I love about every Marvel character is they each have their own flaws and struggles that can resonate with a lot of fans. It’s not about punching harder to win a fight. Fights can be a metaphor for a relatable obstacle, and it takes a lot of thinking that gets them to overcome these challenges. 

You’ve recently written Sentry, who is a Marvel superhero connected with mental-health storytelling. Also referred to as the Golden Guardian, Sentry has had calming impact on The Hulk while also being a threat to other Marvel heroes. Where was the character at when you wrote SENTRY: LEGACY?

Robert Reynolds is still dead after the events of King in Black. I got to introduce brand new characters to carry the mantle of the Sentry. And while each one of them had their own everyday challenges, it was the main lead, Mallory Gibbs, who shared a close parallel to Robert Reynolds with her disability, cerebral palsy. Imagine having the ultimate powers of one million exploding suns but not be able to have 100% control of your body due to tremors. She deals with the self-doubt of not feeling worthy to have such powers, but later realizes, she needs the same perseverance as she did living with CP.

In the past, Robert Reynolds’ mental-health struggles were projected outward. Can you talk about the relationship between Sentry and the Void and how that relates to the concept of shadow self?

I barely touched on the Void in my series as its concept was a huge can of worms for a four-issue mini-series, especially when I was busy trying to flesh out the new characters. But Mallory Gibbs spends a good half of the series with her own internal struggles after a big accident when her powers unexpectedly ignited. She slowly comes out of her cocoon by practicing her powers bit by bit to good use. It’s the accidents that bring her back down in a rut. But she realizes that she has the power to help and it’s better to try than to do nothing at all.

Could you talk about how the characters in SENTRY: LEGACY explore the division in fandom mindsets regarding diversity and inclusion with mainstay characters?

I wanted to show representation for the minority in fandom who rarely see themselves in comics as the hero. Right away, I knew this initial idea would trigger backlash from some fans that want their traditional superhero to return, which was never the initial mandate for my series. I’ve seen it in the past on Twitter with other POC characters becoming successors to the classic superheroes. But Robert was at least honored through his milestone memories from his Marvel history in SENTRY: LEGACY. What made the series worth it for me was the positive feedback from fans that related to Mallory Gibbs’ disability. Editorial and I did the work and collaborated with our creative consultant Cara Liebowitz, a disability advocate, to make sure a character with CP is handled authentically throughout this series. I hope we get to see more of Mallary, a.k.a.: Solarus, in the future.

In the end, SENTRY: LEGACY is about giving yourself grace and time as you level up. Can you talk about a time when you learned that lesson in your career?

I think that was back when I finished my own self-publishing series, The Pitiful Human-Lizards. I was doing all the roles in that series for five years: writing, penciling, inking, coloring, lettering, etc. As I wrapped it up, I thought I told everything I wanted in a superhero comic. I was also burnt out and going through legal issues with a former publisher that made me want to quit comics entirely. But then my good friend Chip Zdarsky reached out to me out of the blue and wanted to collaborate on a project together. It became my second wind in the industry, and I wanted to give more than I previously did, knowing more eyes would be on this book. And that caliber of work won us an Eisner Award and brought me so much attention from other editors, and that’s when my career began to sky-rocket.

What other projects do you have coming out?

I’m currently writing the ongoing series Werewolf by Night: Red Band with artist Sergio Davila, and I wrapped up on writing for the Dazzler limited series which ends in December. There’s a bunch more that I can’t say at the moment.

If we could focus on Dazzler for a moment, antimutant sentiments are currently at an all-time high in the Marvel Universe with the fall of the mutant nation, Krakoa. What pressures are on Dazzler?

With Dazzler’s new level of success from topping the charts and selling out arenas, she’s trying to please all her fans, both mutants and humans. But when she knows her fellow mutants are being threatened and discriminated against in the world, she decides to take a stand. And that might not please the other half of her fans. So, Dazzler and her team are navigating through these pressures during the tour while villains and even a talk-show host try to villainize her for being a mutant.

How does the character’s music showcase her personal journey and what artistic roadblocks does Dazzler face?

Her songs are Dazzler’s narratives. They are another level of storytelling. I’ve fit in history about her past relationships in them and her own struggles when she was outed as a mutant by her music producers. I don’t think Dazzler has any artistic roadblocks at this point. Her album is fully produced and out in the world for everyone to hear. Some people may have their own interpretations of her songs (read issue 2), but she makes it clear what her stance is on stage. She’s a mutant, out and proud.

Antimutant sentiment comes from a place of fear that mutants are the next stage of evolution. Can you tell us how physical and verbal threats against Dazzler help her to evolve?

She looks to her PR/lifestyle manager, Wind Dancer, to navigate the dangerous tides, but for the most part, follows her own heart to do what’s right.

Where can our readers find you online?

People can find me on Instagram @jasonloomakescomics.

How did you stumble into writing? Into Fish in Exile’s writing style or another writing style that you loved embodying? What was the revision/editing process like, did you have to negotiate with the editor?

I started as a visual artist before transitioning to writing, which eventually became my focus. My journey into the literary world began with Vanishing Point of Desire. Later, as a graduate student at Brown University, I wrote Fish in Exile over the course of three years. During that time, I was in a domestically abusive relationship and needed to create a coded language to express my pain without my partner, who often read my work, understanding its meaning. The experimental and cryptic nature of Fish in Exile became a way to process that pain.

My partner was highly intelligent and perceptive, qualities I also attribute to many readers. I wrote the book in sections, often in a single breath, but the gaps between sections required lived experiences to inform the writing. It wasn’t simply a matter of drafting—it was about gathering the emotional and empirical depth necessary to give the manuscript life. While the work is deeply rooted in realism, a manuscript can’t open itself into a vector of empirical data without support, even if it is real or experimental.

How do you propose a writer get this life experience?

I wouldn’t recommend pursuing a dangerous life. Experiences, in my opinion, can be overrated. They aren’t something to chase—they should come to you naturally, like an Amazon package you’ve ordered. With deep reflection, you don’t always need to endure hardship or gather empirical evidence to gain insight. Through practices like intensive meditation or processing emotions privately, without external societal input, experiences can become secondary. Instead, the essence of your existence can emerge from introspection.

This approach seems to echo what Emily Dickinson and other successful writers did. Many introverted writers delve into the layers of their consciousness to explore experiences internally, rather than relying on external, material ones. Today, we live in a world that’s highly focused on optics and outward appearances, but it wasn’t always this way. Sometimes, the act of seeing is itself an experience—one that differs from the experiences of movement or emotion driven by the legs or the heart.

Feel free to disagree, but I heard writers always loop back to write about the same topics over and over again. Different iterations, perhaps, and with different nuances, but the core of the person sometimes stays the same. Would you say this happens for your writing? What ideas or themes do you find yourself returning to?

In poetry, repetition shapes the rhythm and structure of the piece. Similarly, when fiction writers—or writers in general—grapple with unresolved subconscious issues, they may rewrite the same story from different angles to uncover a new perspective on an experience or event. This process mirrors a human tendency to seek out specific textures or emotions, repeatedly re-entering a space of trauma, tragedy, joy, or pain. It’s akin to listening to the same song on repeat, not merely to explore its narrative but to relive the texture of the experience.

This repetition can also resemble savoring a favorite dish—enjoying it again and again until the palate is dulled, until the experience reaches a point of saturation, allowing the individual to finally let go. In storytelling, this cyclic repetition becomes a mechanism for coping with trauma, indulging textural preferences, and pursuing transformation.

When transformation occurs, the writer—or individual—moves forward, leaving the repetitive cycle behind to begin anew. This shift creates space for forgiveness and renewal, where the past no longer dictates the narrative. A writer capable of crafting diverse stories demonstrates a profound ability to forgive, release the past, and embrace fresh narratives, reflecting personal growth and resilience.

What is your philosophy for teaching creative writing? And, what advice would you offer to aspiring writers looking to get into the publishing industry?

I think the process is fluid—there’s no definitive right or wrong way to approach it. That said, there are plenty of ways to go astray. When it comes to teaching, I have mixed feelings. I deeply care about my students and their futures, but I hesitate to encourage them to pursue writing as a vocation. It’s an incredibly difficult path, one of the hardest lives to lead.

If a student has a talent or background in something else, like math or finance, I’d advise them to pursue that first and create space for writing as a passion—like a mistress you visit in secret, rather than making it your primary partner. There’s nothing inherently wrong with pursuing writing full-time, but there’s a reason a mistress is called a mistress: it thrives in its own space.

I believe writing should be pursued quietly, not as a primary career. While there are successful writers, I’m speaking about the vast majority of people, not the rare authors who achieve fame and wealth. For most writers in the literary world, survival itself is expensive. Competition is fierce; when I apply for teaching positions, there are often 200 applicants for a single opening. The odds aren’t just unfavorable—they’re daunting.

This challenge extends beyond jobs to publishing. If your livelihood depends on writing, you’re at the mercy of others accepting your work, which can take years—even decades. That dependence can lead to desperation, and desperation isn’t conducive to creativity.

There’s no shame in pursuing writing if you’re financially secure, married to someone with resources, or otherwise supported. But for working-class individuals who need to put food on the table, it’s a far more precarious choice. I don’t believe suffering is necessary to create art. Struggling to survive—sacrificing your health, skipping meals, living with constant anxiety—only drains the energy that could be directed toward creativity. Having stability and meeting basic needs allows your mind to focus on art, rather than survival.

Your poem “Sitting Room and Woodshed” recently appeared in the Cassette Issue of –ette Review. How did the concept for this poem come to fruition?

It’s named after one of Frances Glessner Lee’s “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death.” Originally, there were twenty “Nutshells,” which Lee meticulously crafted. These crime scene dioramas were meant to help police officers hone their observation skills. “Woodshed and Sitting Room” had been missing for decades until 2005, when it was discovered in a storage area of Lee’s summer home at The Rocks in New Hampshire. In my chapbook, The Adorable Knife, it was my intention to honor Frances Glessner Lee’s own attention to detail in crafting these and to imagine possible “solutions” by giving voice to the stories told in the crime scenes. This poem was written for -ette Review and doesn’t appear in my chapbook.

The concept came to fruition by observing the crime scene, reading the witness statements, and imagining the poem from a fictional standpoint through the eyes of the daughter of the man who died mysteriously. He’d been an alcoholic, and the daughter had to take care of her invalid mother because he was irresponsible. The poem doesn’t “solve” the unexplained death but leaves the reader with the emotional rage of the daughter.

You mentioned it as your intention to imagine possible solutions to the crime scene dioramas crafted by Frances Glessner Lee. What drew you to these dioramas? Do you use them to hone your own observation skills?

As soon as I learned the Nutshells existed, I was obsessed. Since I was a child, I’ve always read detective stories, thrillers, and horror novels. I used to read books that presented a crime scene mystery and left it to the reader to deduce what happened based upon the information given. I look at these Nutshells the same way I would look at artwork and write a poem about it. This type of poem is called “ekphrastic,” which is a way of being in conversation with another work of art by creating a new work that describes it. I am also trained in fine art, so I have a particular connection with visual art and love to imagine what the artist was thinking when they created the work.

“Mother-Me,” another one of your recent poems, appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of Thimble Literary Magazine. The main theme seems to revolve around the way women are perceived. Did this theme develop as you wrote, or did you set out to write a poem centering around it? 

This poem came from a prompt that used a Camille Dungy poem as its basis. Her poem repeats the word “little” over and over and speaks to her unborn child. The prompt is to write a poem of repetition in which you speak to a particular person who is unlikely to reply. In the case of my poem, I used the word “only” as the repeating word to describe myself as a mother. “Mother-Me” came out of not only identifying myself through my work as a mother, but also through the ways others label and judge women for their mothering and existence as female. There is a layer to it that describes the emotional need I have to be “mothered” myself. As the daughter of a wonderful mother, the phrase “Mother-Me” is a cry to go back to my childhood when I wasn’t a mother yet and my mother would comfort me.

In addition to publishing individual poems, you’ve also written several chapbooks. How did writing a chapbook differ from writing individual poems? Do you prefer one over the other?  

Well, this is a complicated question, but the short answer is “it depends.” When I found out the Nutshells existed and that there were 18, I knew I could write a poem for each one and that would be a chapbook length work. I got most of them published individually in journals before the chapbook came out, so that’s the only one I’ve ever written with the solid intention of being a book by itself (though I didn’t know at the time it would stand on its own).

With my full-length books, I had published poems in journals and had enough I knew I could put them into a book. In fact, the book was too long, so the press (Nixes Mate) published the manuscript as two separate books: STARLAND and Sleep in a Strange House. These poems are more autobiographical.

What book are you most looking forward to reading in 2025 and why?  

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. This is a novel written by a poet I admire. It has surreal aspects and the protagonist, who is an Iranian American, struggles with addiction and grief over the loss of his mother.  

The publishing process at times can feel more daunting than writing poetry. What was that process like for you and what advice would you give to aspiring authors? 

The process can be frustrating and time-consuming, but ultimately rewarding. First you have to really practice writing, revising, and revising again. All the while, keep reading the work of other poets. Take a workshop. Find a group who might want to read and share work together. Next, submit to journals your work might be a good fit for. Reading work in a journal before submitting is a good idea. Don’t expect to make any money. Keep track of where you submit and which poems you’ve submitted. Good places to look for opportunities to get your work into journals are New Pages and Chill Subs.

Ultimately, don’t give up. As long as you find writing rewarding, you should keep trying. I have been writing since I was in seventh grade and I’m still learning new things!

Midowed: A Mother’s Grief explores parenthood, grief, organ donation, and unexpected love—when did you know you wanted to turn your experience into a memoir? Was writing a therapeutic experience or challenging at times to be close to something so emotional?

I started journaling almost as soon as I’d returned from the hospital after Dan died. I couldn’t believe what had happened and I knew I was in danger of forgetting. As a lone parent of an only child, there was no one else to share the burden of remembering. The idea of having no record of this universe-altering period was terrifying. At that point it certainly didn’t feel therapeutic, more an act of necessity. A few months later, I wanted to create a memento of Dan’s wonderful life. Once I began writing with that intention, it became more therapeutic, spending time with my Dan memories and carefully considering how best to represent him. What I wrote became the memoir.

Your book takes advantage of two timelines: navigating the year after Dan’s death and Dan’s childhood. How did you find the balance between these two headspaces and timelines?

I wrote them separately at first. I was journaling my daily life without any editorial thought at that stage. I created a Birthday Book for Dan, completed each November. It contained a photo of him on his birthday, and notes about his favorite things and notable events—friends, books, toys, holidays, etc. It was something I’d intended to complete up to him being eighteen. Well, that wasn’t possible, but it gave me instant access to the worlds he’d inhabited each year. I turned the notes into rounded tales and deepened those with reference to my old social media posts too. It was only a year and a half after losing Dan that I properly began to look at my timeline and to revisit those dark days. I knew I needed to blend the two so the reader had time to breathe between my raw pain of immediate loss and the gentler reflections on Dan’s childhood.

Midowed brings hope into the narrative through organ donation—it definitely had me welling up at times—what more would you want readers to know about Dan’s organ donation?

Dan’s organ donation legacy continues. It gave me hope then and it still does. I’m in touch with two of the recipients. Knowing they have a positive effect on the lives of their friends and family thanks to Dan’s gifts fills me with joy. Each year in the UK, only 1 percent of people die in the kind of circumstances that permit organ donation, so it’s rare and special. I’d say please let your loved ones know your wishes so if that set of circumstances arises, they can enact your wishes with certainty, because there’ll be plenty else to think about. Every country has slightly different rules about organ donation, so it’s worth having a google to see how you can best register your intent.

In the book, you briefly explore Dan’s ADHD diagnosis. How impactful was that experience on the two of you?

Dan was such a bouncy kid! People would marvel at his energy and enthusiasm and then look at me and asked how I coped. I knew he was hyperactive, but I also knew how to manage it with good food, strong routines, lots of sleep. Outside of school, it was never really a problem, Dan was bright, lively, fun. But school was so tough for Dan. Not intellectually, but in conforming to the long periods of sitting still and doing tasks he found unstimulating. I was more resistant to him being labeled, but Dan absolutely owned who he was and wanted to find ways to make school better for himself.

Midowed was published with Zsa Zsa Publishing, an independent UK publisher. Tell us more about what your publishing journey was like.

When I’d written Midowed to a point where I thought it was a solid story, I started writing to agents, but I was mostly ghosted, with the very rare, “not right for us.” Once I’d worked my way through the entire Writers and Artists Yearbook, I booked a fifteen-minute slot with an agent via Jericho Writers. She confirmed, “the pitch is good, the writing is good, but you have no platform/celebrity and are not commercially appealing.” Writer friends advised investigating indie publishers, so I sent out letters. Really quickly Zsa Zsa came back and said they were interested. I met with them in August 2023 and Midowed was published in April 2024. From zero to super speed! Indie publishing is quick, and you develop a close relationship with every aspect of the process. What you don’t have is distribution, so getting the book onto shelves is much harder, and not something I’ve achieved yet.

You’ve recently started a podcast, Bereaved Parents’ Club, creating a space to celebrate family stories and support other grieving parents. How important is a resource like this for fellow parents?

It’s really valuable. There are many organizations for bereaved parents all with leaflets and online/face-to-face support groups. But I didn’t want leaflets and I find groups overwhelming. So, for me, a podcast is a way to share stories and information in a digital space. I wanted to give voice to everyone in “the club no one wants to belong to” and offer a way for people to find out about support they might not otherwise have known about.

What future writing projects are on your horizons?

I’m currently plotting a folk-horror novel, which will give me the chance to revel in writing the macabre. And I have another memoir in mind about growing up in the alternative 80s. That should be lots of fun to write and will allow me to revisit my memories of my parents, who are also no longer alive. A romp through my childhood and teen years awaits.

What book(s) do you want people to be aware of this coming year and why?

I can’t wait to read Kate Atkinson’s new Jackson Brodie novel for some lip-smacking literary crime satisfaction. Malcolm Gladwell’s Revenge of the Tipping Point will be a fascinating exploration of how epidemics and “viral” stories thrive in our modern world. Why Can’t I Just Enjoy Things?: A Comedian’s Guide to Autism by Pierre Novellie looks insightful too. Cathy Rentzenbrink has Ordinary Time coming out soon—I love her nonfiction and am excited to try her fiction. For any aspiring memoir writers out there, I recommend Cathy’s book Write it All Down. I wish I’d read it before I wrote mine!

I had the wonderful opportunity to hear you read from your story collection, An Agent of Utopia. I was drawn to the vivid sense of place and setting in your work, especially how richly you convey areas such as Florida and the American South. From a craft standpoint, how do you envision setting? How do you find the sense of place in a story, and how do you know which setting is right for a piece?

Before I start, I’d like to dedicate this Q&A to my late friend and mentor Michael Bishop (1945-2023), a brilliant writer in multiple genres who was far more eloquent on all these topics than I am. And now, after a moment of silence, onward we go.

Setting isn’t just backdrop. It pervades, informs—no, better, infuses—every other aspect of the story. This is most obvious in certain genres, for example ghost stories, sea stories, adventures of survival or exploration, locked-room mysteries, historical fiction, and all those suspense thrillers that depend on isolation: Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None is an exemplar of that form. But it’s true across the board. Setting is story.

Many of my story ideas are place-dependent from the outset. My Thomas More story An Agent of Utopia, for example, had to be set in London, specifically in the tower, and during the reign of Henry VIII—placed also in time. All this I simply knew, first thing. “The Devil’s Whatever” is almost a parody of that approach, a story determined entirely by the many interesting places I could find that invoked the Devil in their name.

But with “A Diorama of the Infernal Regions,” I knew that once Pearleen stepped through that ticky-tacky, dime-museum canvas, she could be anywhere—but where? I wrote the story’s opening right up to that point, then stopped for a long ponder. I knew only that it definitely would not be the Infernal Regions! It was a long time figuring out that she would emerge in the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose—a place I had visited, which is always an advantage.

When you find the right setting, you know immediately. It’s like solving a word puzzle. You finally think of that obvious word that had been eluding you all along. “Duh!” you say aloud, as you write it in. It had not been at all obvious, before, but it became so, the instant you thought of it. I guess any piece of fiction is a word puzzle, in a sense.       

An Agent of Utopia is a thrilling short story collection—at once wonderfully bizarre, piercingly humorous, and infused with historical weight. I love how seamlessly your writing weaves historical details with fabulism and speculative elements; what is your process like for approaching this intersection? What role do you think history plays in science/speculative fiction?

The late Philip Klass, who wrote as William Tenn, argued that history was the only science that science fiction ever really had—certainly the only complex human field of study that science fiction was ever really about. He pointed to future history and alternate history and parallel timelines; to all those time travelers in both directions; to all those extrapolations of the California Gold Rush into the asteroid belt, or of the Roman Empire onto the Galactic Empire; to all those pirates and generals and revolutionaries in space. He always reminded us of Gene Roddenberry’s successful pitch to TV executives who had been minting coin off Westerns for a decade: Star Trek would be “Wagon Train to the stars!”

Tenn’s is one of those lovely assertions, rife in our field and perhaps in every field, that seems to explain everything, until it doesn’t. It explains a lot, though—at least to a history buff like me!

More usefully, perhaps, anyone with even a glancing interest in history knows how partial it is, how incomplete, how biased, and how it keeps changing thanks to fresh ideas, new outlooks, and current research—just like physics, geography, economics, everything. Look at all we’ve learned in my lifetime about, say, Stonehenge, or the pre-colonial Native cities of the Americas.

Viewed in this light, any attempt to re-create the past has to involve fabulism and speculation—so it seems perfectly natural that at some point, you cross a fuzzy border and realize, what the heck, you’re writing spec-fic, so just roll with it. I would argue that it still should be truthful; but I assert that, William Tenn-like, about all fiction.

You are a graduate of the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop, and you’ve since returned to Clarion West and to Clarion at the University of California San Diego as an instructor. What role did attending Clarion West have on your growth as a writer? On the other end of this trajectory, how has the experience of returning as an instructor shaped your writing or your creative aesthetics?

A complete answer to the first question would entail everything I’ve done and thought and written and been since summer 1994, but the terse version is simply that I returned from that six-week residency in Seattle knowing that I was a writer and committed to living a writer’s life.

This seems odd to say, as I had been writing for newspapers for more than ten years at that point—but identifying as a reporter, even as a journalist, was a much narrower aperture for me than identifying as a writer. Suddenly I saw the world in widescreen and in color.

Clarion West was the making of me. And my greatest career honors are my invitations back to Clarion West or to Clarion to meet the future of the field, and to help these people however I can, including the paramount service of getting out of their way so that they can become more fully themselves.

I realize the Clarions are not for everyone—can never be, for countless practical reasons—and many other routes exist to finding oneself as a writer. I laud all of them. Whatever works, I say. But the Clarions helped me, and so I try to help them in return.

I really admire your expansive involvement in the science fiction and fantasy (SFF) community. From your participation in Clarion to your numerous publications and interviews, you’ve been an integral part of the community for years. Though the literary industry is ever evolving, what advice do you have for emerging writers as they seek to build their literary careers?

Imitate everyone; it’s a necessary part of every writer’s development, and every writer’s toolbox. Moreover, if you imitate a variety of things simultaneously, you’ll seem not imitative, but original.

The ultimate goal, however, is not to fit anyone else’s genre(s), but to become your own genre, a genre of one. The highest public compliment I ever received was in an unlikely place, an online comment thread debating whether one of my award-nominated stories fit this genre or that genre ad infinitum, and Gardner Dozois shut it down by saying: “I’ll tell you what kind of story this is. It’s an Andy Duncan story.” 

Keep reading everything, especially the work of newcomers—and when you like their work, please tell everyone, beginning with the newcomers themselves. They need the boost.  

Get involved. In addition to writing, try lots of writing-adjacent things—editing, publishing, reviewing, interviewing, organizing, publicizing, lobbying, running for writerly or artistic office, fundraising; even, bless your heart, teaching—to see which ones you enjoy and are good at and can keep doing, alongside the writing. Because your fellow writers sure can use your help, and as you help us, you’re also deepening your own experience as a writer.

Also, practice saying, whenever needed, “No, thanks, but I appreciate your thinking of me,” so that you can return to what you want to do.

Finally, I pass along Stephen King’s advice: “Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.”

You’ve been a member of the English faculty at Frostburg State University since 2008. How has working in academia shaped your writing? Additionally, is there anything you hope to see evolving or shifting in the academic sphere with respect to creative writing?

I’m a bit unusual, I think, in that my academic career and my fiction-writing career began simultaneously. When I left my newspaper job for graduate school in summer 1993—which enabled my summer 1994 Clarion West experience in the first place—I told the truth to everyone who asked: “I want to see whether I like teaching, and whether I like writing.” I thought I’d give them a try, and if they didn’t work out, I’d go back to journalism. In fact, I reveled in both, and though I would return to stints of journalism after graduation, it was always as a clear interruption (however pleasant or practical) to what I now viewed as my true path, a twinned path: I write; I teach. To me, the one shapes the other, an ongoing exchange.

Needless to add, this is not a universal experience! Plenty of teachers, even of writing, don’t write; plenty of writers, don’t teach. But to me, they seem inseparable. (I should reaffirm here what I said earlier: There are many routes. Higher ed is only one, but it was mine.)

I would love to see creative writing as a recognized, honorable, necessary component of every discipline taught on campus, which is part of my larger desire to see the arts and humanities reaffirmed as the core of a university education, and not as a gang of unwashed buskers barely tolerated so long as their sidewalk squat is kept outside the corporate gates. No problem facing the world is solely a STEM problem, and no past, present, or future student is solely a STEM product. We have to learn everything, if we are to know anything. Thanks for asking!

Recently, you released a webpage called “Weird Western Maryland,” an ongoing culmination of what you call “many years of happily random research.” These tales are so impressively sourced from a wide range of locations, materials, and historical moments. Can you talk about the process for collecting these legends, beliefs, and stories? What role did creating this project play in your own creativity or storytelling impulse?

To say that I have a “process” for collecting this stuff would make it sound a lot more logical than it really is. (The same is true for my fiction-writing “process,” I’m afraid.) Certainly, I collect and read books and articles on all these topics, and my happiest mailbox moments are when Fortean Times arrives from London. I perk up whenever anyone in conversation mentions some weirdness in their family or neighborhood or hometown. I’ve taken a number of classes via the Rhine Research Center in North Carolina. And I am a compulsive list-maker, note-taker, file-creator, document-filer and (digital) cloud-seeder; I will never run out of material, but I am always hungry for more.

After years of witnessing all these OCD behaviors, my wife, Sydney, had a brilliant suggestion as sabbatical time rolled around: “Why don’t you write up for your sabbatical the weird stuff you’ve been collecting about Western Maryland ever since we moved here?” That jump-started not only the sabbatical but the public outreach finally bearing fruit at Andy Duncan’s “Weird Western Maryland.” That it’s housed on a university website is weird in itself!

What is something you are currently reading, watching, or writing that you’re excited about?

I agree with my friend Amy Branam Armiento, immediate past president of the Poe Studies Association, that Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher on Netflix is not only terrific but the best Poe adaptation ever. There, I said it, and with scholarly backup! But I love The Great British Baking Show, too.

Form performs a large role in how the stories in Inheritors are told and the deeper themes of your collection. Why did you feel it was important to tell certain stories in form?

Form determines the shape of a story, the way a photograph frames what’s included in/excluded from the visual field; it determines how we understand the story, what it’s telling us about a history, a culture, a people, an event. Also, Inheritors includes a range of underrepresented/marginalized perspectives challenging official and popular nationalist narratives of World War II’s Asia-Pacific side, twinning the question of form and responsibility in other ways.

The main character in “I Stand Accused, I, Jesus of the Ruins,” is a World War II war orphan, a figure routinely subject to roundups in postwar Japan and often depicted as an abject stereotype (dirty, homeless, criminal). The story is written in part as a series of police witness statements because that’s where one might find more traces of his life—a fact integral to his story.

“Willow Run” is similar. For complex reasons, the interviewee’s story is rarely told, except from the male perspective. Among the only places I could imagine her story surfacing in her voice and perspective was in testimonies. To comment on this and on the complex interplay of power that undergirds the construction of testimonies, “Willow Run” is told through one side of a recorded interview.

What and whose story I wanted to tell determined the form, the “how.”

Many of the stories in Inheritors contain an element of mystery. How did you find a balance between telling the reader information, having them figure it out themselves, and withholding it?

Balance—or, more accurately, information management—is such a tricky element. My intention is never to be coy, obscure, or otherwise withholding, but I’m committed to writing fiction that invites readers’ active participation by balancing critical engagement and emotional resonance.

Since Inheritors is historical fiction and based on real events, research must have played a large in the shaping of the book. What did this research look like for you?

Like most fiction writers engaged with history, I spent a lot of time with primary sources. But documents related to war are often unreliable, incomplete, and/or unavailable because they were destroyed or otherwise suppressed, repressed, or shaped, or they were inaccessible to me because they are classified or in archives scattered around the globe.

For these reasons, I spent more time looking at scholarly material around each subject and topic to understand the general field, its issues and fault lines, and its unresolved points of contention. I also researched cultural output to see how the subject and/or topic had been approached and how I wanted to respond or intervene and why.

Many of the topics explored in Inheritors can be considered rather heavy. How did you take care of yourself while writing difficult scenes or topics?

Taking real breaks from the project was essential, alongside maintaining daily physical activity to move the energy, mental and emotional. Most vital was keeping perspective and remembering the larger goal: why I’m engaging with the material and writing these stories in the first place.

Your stories seem to center the human perspective of historical events. Can you tell me a little more about this focus?

In a time of accelerated media consumption and dissemination, active conflict and polarization, when we most need to remember the human costs, it’s alarming how quickly human realities, stripped of nuance and complexity, are transformed into statistics, a news brief, a trope replete with stereotypes. At the same time, human experience is shaped by the individual’s social, cultural, and historical context. And when we focus only on the human experience, our understanding of the context is dangerously prone to fade out of view. I try to keep both in focus and integrated, their complexities squarely centered.

How would you describe the publication process of Inheritors in three words? What didn’t you expect about working on its publication?

Intense, scrambling, and rewarding. I generally try not to have expectations, and when it comes to publication, every book acquires its own twisting trajectory, contingent on myriad unforeseeable factors.

Still, the spiking fear around releasing a book into a fraught world full of unpredictable readers was a surprise. And, of course, no one launching a book in 2020 expected the pandemic.

You’ve described yourself as a slow writer and mentioned Inheritors took you almost thirteen years to write. What does being a slow writer mean to you?

Writing, for me, is 85 percent psychological. Working through doubts, fears, hopes, my sense of responsibility as a writer, and the muddy question of desire versus creative necessity, takes time. As does the reading and rewriting necessary to translate vision into written form. Sometimes, drafts stall because we lack the understanding that can only come from lived experience. Accepting my own process, understanding its merits, and trusting the accretion have been pivotal. A paragraph could take days, a story a year or more, but the work is better for it.

You’ve mentioned that you have a novel in progress! What differences are there between working on a short story collection and crafting a novel?

Each story in Inheritors required a discrete body of research, and for each I ended up doing enough research to write a novel, which had to be distilled and faceted to fit the mosaic of the collection. The novel I’m working on also traverses time and geography, but there are far fewer perspectives, and the research has been less unruly and branching. The canvas of the novel feels vast, but the project itself feels oddly more manageable, though I have to unlearn the impulse to distill—or, perhaps more accurately, learn how to allow.

In I Love You More: A Reluctant Memoir, you mention your mother wanted you to write this story, and you usually do as your mother wants. In addition to this motivation, what else led you to write this book?

I wanted to address some deeper confusions I had about my childhood. I wanted to research and understand the truth because I wasn’t confident in the stories I’d been told my whole life. Searching for the truth led to writing, and writing led to the truth. After that happened, and with my mom’s encouragement, the story took on a life of its own.

Projects will do that! I’d like to talk about your choices regarding content. This story spans many years and many miles, beginning in the Appalachians and tracing back family lines. Was this one of the ways I Love You More took on a life of its own? What was it like as a writer to decide which places, people, and events to include in such an expansive project?

Choosing the places to write about was easy because each place is a character in the story, in its own right; they each hold a place factually, thematically, and emotionally. While that wasn’t an issue, how much life to give these places was difficult. I would have given them much more, but I already had 400 pages of content. I love to write about places. Describing them is fun for me; evocative nature writing is what I aspire to, quite frankly.

In terms of events, let me address my choices in terms of structure. This was tricky for me; I struggled with how to best present everything. Eventually, I realized chronologically was the best way… it’s an easy choice for readers to follow. However, I bookended this story with the present day as the frame, in which I meet with my father and present him with my questions. It took a while for me to come to that decision. What I came to realize is it was better for both myself, and the story to let the reader know from the very first chapter that this awful thing happened. I didn’t want to be coy about it because there was already enough to tease out and develop.

Another aspect of this decision that ties into character choices was my inclusion of Trudeau, the cop. Trudeau is a major character. I struggled with this choice until it became clear to me that you can’t include a cop until you have a crime, but the crime doesn’t happen until halfway through the book. So, I had to put it in context by disclosing that I only know about many details of the crime because Trudeau gave me the information. I realized that by just telling the readers what I know up front, and why, it gives me credibility. That was a choice related to structure that was harder, but in the end, I was very happy with it. The reader came along with me on my journey.

In a different interview, you mentioned the only structure you could tell this story through was as a memoir through your eyes. Can you speak about how you came to that decision?

I came to that decision through painful and excruciating trial and error! When you take writing classes, the teachers will tell you to explore different writing styles, and even copy them, much like a painter may copy the Mona Lisa as an exercise. They’ll say, “Well, pull up Tennessee Williams and try something that he did. Try it on.” So as exercises, I “tried on” various styles and literary devices to see how they felt. Writing can be very tedious work, so why not have fun and go off on a tangent every now and then? It’s like candy! My advice to writers is to just let yourself go and don’t take yourself too seriously; see what sparks from experimenting.

While working on I Love You More, I tried writing this memoir in third person and second person, but neither of these perspectives made sense; it wasn’t accomplishing the purpose of this project, which was to get my feelings out. So, I think it was inevitable that this story be written in first person.

Did the writing process of I Love You More differ from your other writing ventures?

Yes. Before I decided to write I Love You More, I had a job which required me to write pieces that were more technical and not conducive to telling a story. I had to learn not only how to write a story, but how to structure a story. I’m not saying you need a PhD, but you need to know some principles. I realized I had a big hole in my writing education, so I went to fill it at workshops with Lighthouse Writers, who do a great job. They made me become a better reader, and it certainly helped my writing. I would encourage anyone in a similar situation to get help; Lighthouse gave me vital feedback and helped me get on track when I was flailing about.

Another important note about my process for writing I Love You More is that even though I did all this learning on how to write story, I wasn’t being deeply honest with myself. At first, I didn’t know that was the case. I wasn’t consciously trying to hide anything; I just didn’t realize that I needed to delve deeper. Erika Krouse, a mentor I met through Lighthouse, was so generous with her time in helping me with I Love You More. She was very gentle about it, but she made me realize that I wasn’t addressing the big questions raised by the book. This forced me to address those questions, and in doing so, I became honest with myself. I highly recommend her book, Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation, in which she bared her soul, which gave me the courage to be brutally honest and totally vulnerable in my own writing.

Aside from writing, you’re also an artist, working primarily with glass. I’m curious about the creative process of fusing glass, and how it’s similar and different to working with words.

The beginning of both art forms starts with a glimmer. When I see light through colored glass, it just makes me happy. It’s beautiful to witness the incredible colors of colored glass come to life when lit up. That moment is what I call a glimmer. Writing, especially nature writing, needs to start with a glimmer: a moment you have all by yourself where you witness something beautiful—or even something awful—that moves you. That glimmer compels you to take the next step, which is to preserve it, getting it down and recreating it.

The actual work of glass fusing is very painstaking. There’s a lot of trial and error, at least when I was just starting out. That fits my personality: I’m an organized, picky person with a strong work ethic. My mother taught me to finish what you start, and that helped with putting together the different pieces of my book, finishing it, and publishing it. Like we discussed earlier, I Love You More took on a life of its own. But once it got that life, I couldn’t let it go! I had to finish it. Even when I realized it needed improving, I never gave up; with writing, you have to tell yourself if it’s not perfect, the next draft will be better, but you have to keep going! As an author, that picky side of myself is always looking for areas to improve or wishing I wrote x instead of y. It’s important not to quit what you start, but once your work is finished and out in the world, it’s not your work anymore. You have to let it go. It’s the same with glass.

What’s the most important thing you learned through the publishing process?

It’s important to clarify your goals with selling and marketing your project. With I Love You More, I decided I would not do the needle-in-the-haystack approach where I hope and hope against all hope that somebody would notice me and I’d get an agent. I decided to go with a hybrid publisher, meaning they’re not one of the big publishing houses; there’s more independence on the author’s end, but they help you with the process.

That meant I wasn’t going to end up in Barnes and Noble or have a hardcover version of I Love You More because it goes through a different system. But I didn’t care about that; I just wanted to tell my story. The amount of control I had during the publishing process was critical to me, I designed the cover myself, using a beautiful Alaskan photograph by David Parkhurst, and the book is available on both Amazon and e-readers; these are the things that really mattered to me.

Your author bio mentions another project that you’re currently working on called Light Through Colored Glass. Can you speak about this project and how working on it has differed from writing a generational memoir?

Light Through Colored Glass is a collection of short stories I’m working on. I want to finish some of the stories I tried to tell in I Love You More but was not able to for various reasons. I also have a growing list of other ideas. I’m planning to go to Juneau for a week in May to focus on this collection. I’m making an appointment with myself to work!

Lastly, I’d like to circle back around to I Love You More. There’s a line at the end that says, “My brave mother chose happiness over despair, so that is her destiny. If I can muster the strength to choose love over anger, grace will be mine.” Did writing this book help you choose love?

Absolutely. Mother Theresa said, “If we really want to love, we must learn how to forgive”; Gandhi said, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong”; and Paul Boese said, “Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.” Although I had to absorb these basic principles on my own, all the research and writing helped me in my journey toward forgiveness. At the end of the day, what I do know is that it was critical for me to forgive in order to move on and experience the love, and the life, I wanted.

An Interview with Kelly Sue DeConnick Kelly Sue DeConnick is a comic writer and editor whose credits include Avengers Assemble, Captain Marvel, Pretty Deadly, Bitch Planet, Wonder Woman Historia: ThThe Amazons and many more. She is an outspoken and ardent advocate for expanded opportunities for women, LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and other marginalized populations within the comic book industry. Kelly Sue started the…

In an interview with Write or Die, you mentioned that you consider yourself an artist over a writer. How do you think the role of an artist differs from the role of a writer?

To me, there’s really no difference between being an artist and being a writer. My writing is part of my art. Writing is just one part of the art I make and love, so therefore I think of myself as an artist. My favorite art of any kind understands and celebrates the lineage and inspirations it comes from, so whatever I craft, whether it be writing or not, I always seek this approach.

Ren’s coming of age in your debut novel Chlorine is so heartbreaking and raw, yet oddly comforting. There aren’t many stories that describe the violence of coming of age as a queer girl of color in the US this honestly. How important was it for you to center Ren’s identity as a cultural “other” in your exploration of the pain of girlhood?

I don’t view Ren, or queer girls of color in general, as a cultural “other”—if anything, I view her, and me, and us, as the center, which includes all the complexities of who she is and who we are. If anyone wants to view her as an “other,” that’s their own conundrum to work through. I wrote this exploration centering her and her experience.

You’ve mentioned that you’re fascinated with imagery of “weird, queer transcendence,” and that this played a role in writing Chlorine. How would you compare Ren’s transcendence to Cathy’s lingering longing for Ren evident in her letters? Do you think Cathy is unable to transcend, either similarly or unlike Ren?

To me, Cathy transcends in her own way: she’s in love with someone else. To be in love is to be terrified; to be in love is to choose the terror despite; to be in love is therefore to transcend. Yet being in love with another is a common form of transcendence in the way Ren’s viscerally weird and strange transcendence is not. So, comparatively, Cathy’s arc pales.

There are at least two distinct forms of cell death: pain-free programmed cell death (apoptosis) and inflammatory unplanned cell death (necrosis). Menstruation is necrosis meaning anyone who has a uterus literally goes through a process of death and rebirth every month. Unfortunately, Ren still struggles with painful periods, even at her most dedicated to competitive swimming. Can you tell us a little more about how you sought to link the violence of menstruation with Ren’s bloody transformation?

Thank you for that interesting fact. Cell Death would be a great band name! I think there was no way for me to write a coming-of-age girlhood-driven story involving body horror without including menstruation. To me, it’s biologically violent, gushing out blood and stomach pain like it’s no big deal, and, as you said, it’s a monthly bloody transformation, so when writing fictional bloody transformations, I just can’t leave it out.

You’re also a fantastic short story author. In “Bloody Angle,” the narrator explains their vengeful cannibalism by citing Newton’s third law: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Racism plays a crucial role in “Bloody Angle” and Chlorine. When expressing your characters’ anger towards prejudice, did you ever feel pressured to justify their actions to people who wouldn’t understand?

Thank you! I never really feel pressured to justify characters’ actions to people who wouldn’t understand because I’m never really thinking about people who refuse to understand. When I write, I’m thinking about me and my friends and my community and my family and everyone/everything else I care about.

Yes, there was some need to justify the reactive acts of violence—the murders in “Bloody Angle” and the body horror in Chlorine—but the justification is more so to explain the character motivations and plot. After all, the narrator in Bloody Angle says, “If you are struggling to understand… my story is not for you.”

You’ve expressed how Chlorine came from a place of cathartic anger, while your short story collection and novel in-progress come from a place of love and understanding. How did you allow yourself space to safely express your anger without letting it consume you?

Art has always been the safest channel for my emotions. The making, the gazing, the understanding—it’s incredibly life-affirming and lifesaving. It’s because of art that my meanest inclinations and worst rages do not consume me, so just by allowing myself to listen to the art I then become free.

You have a beautifully curated Instagram account, @chlorinenovel, to share updates and related artistic influences you enjoy. What forthcoming books, movies, music, or other forms of media you are looking forward to consuming?

I can’t wait for the new Jackie Wang book, Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun, to arrive in the mail. In 2024, I’m excited to read the new Akwaeke Emezi novel, Little Rot, and the new Hanif Abdurraqib book. I’ll be seated at every new Hansol Jung play in theatres, and I’ll be the first in line at the cinema when Julia Ducournau’s next film with A24 is out.

If you could give your past self one piece of advice about the publishing industry or process, what would it be?

You can say no.

Do you have any advice for aspiring authors?

Writing and being a writer are two different things. One is to focus on the work, and one is to focus on the community, the success, the end product. Neither are wrong, and both feed into each other, but I do think deciding which path is more important to you will make everything else come easier.

Trigger Warning—This interview deals with the subject of death by suicide and suicidal ideation

Superman: The Harvests of Youth deals with the topic of suicide awareness. With all of Clark Kent’s powers, what was it like writing him in high school and his fellow students having an invisible illness which his Kryptonian abilities (super strength, heat vision, ect.) are no match against?

This is terrible phrasing, but it was so much fun writing about a superhero tackling issues he can’t punch his way through! From a creative standpoint, I always struggle with being the writer who comes up with the coolest, most inventive fight scenes. Being in touch with my emotions and writing about people finding ways to connect with each other? I excel! This is to say, I felt confident going in and telling a story about people getting lost right under Clark’s nose and how he takes these lessons to become the greatest superhero of all time. A do-good teen like Clark wants to run directly at every problem and fix it right away… that’s not always the best move (even in fight scene situations), so putting him in these delicate and vulnerable situations felt like a great place to do my best as a storyteller.

After a decline before the Covid pandemic, The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the United States has seen a 4% increase in the rates of completed attempts in deaths by suicide in 2021. Since the CDC’s 2022 percentage still shows an increase in this percentage, how does Superman: The Harvests of Youth address the topic of suicide awareness in a comic book universe where the main character of Superman symbolizes Hope?

In making Superman: The Harvests of Youth, I tried my best to portray the reality of loss and similarly what it’s like to feel lost. There’s a song by Sleater-Kinney called “Reach Out” that was incredibly inspirational during the production of Superman. Even though the song was released before the pandemic, it so terribly captured the desperation we all felt during lockdown. I stayed focused on real emotions, and then used the characters to find different ways to say things I would have wanted to hear (or, in some instances, say) in those moments. Giving space and normalcy to these big, dark feelings… that was sort of the best I could do without becoming preachy. 

I started writing this book in May 2020, and turned in my last page of art in November 2022. Every beat of this book was made in the confines of my home, where I think there’s a subconscious infusion of my own tug-of-war between desperation and hope. I was creating the most difficult and upsetting book of my career, but I was making it with the hope that it would see the light of day, that publishing and comics would be on the other side of an industry-wide shutdown. 

Clark is not the only person looking for what to say as a way of supporting other characters in Superman: The Harvests of Youth. How was it writing Jonathan and Martha Kent scenes particularly when Jonathan is trying to find the words to guide his adopted son with alien superpowers when Clark is looking for human answers?

My main goal with the book was to show all the different ways people struggle and how “not succeeding” doesn’t mean “failure.” Pa Kent is usually portrayed as having the answers, so I really loved putting him in a position where instead of giving Clark terrible advice, he’s kind of like “I’m stumped too.” I also wanted to capture that moment in adolescence where you realize your parents don’t understand or aren’t the ones to turn to when the challenges get big. Clark’s parents really were my favorites to write, just because they volleyed off each other like a real couple… quibbles and all. Without spoiling an interaction at the end, they show what compassion looks like in terms of taking someone for where they’re at and not pushing them harder than they can take.

The graphic novel deals with the ongoing issue of cyber bullying that students face today. Could you talk about writing Clark facing an unseen adversary which does not comes from outer space but is fellow students he walks with in the same school hallways and fellow community members he unsuspectedly passes on the local streets of Smallville? 

When I started making this book, I wanted to give love and humanity to issues that I’ve faced in my own life. It seems easy for folks to fall into some rabbit holes online, or jump onto bandwagons where they’re not quite understanding the impact of their actions. Humanizing that stuff made me find some of my own peace in terms of recognizing that these people are finding community of their own… albeit at the expense of my mental health. I don’t think there’s any point in trying to challenge cyber bullying online, but making more of an effort to reach out to people in everyday life feels like a good first step. 

In the graphic novel, Clark Kent also discovers an online hate group operating in his midwestern hometown of Smallville. What increase of hate speech have you noticed on comic book websites and message boards as the industry grows to be more diverse in its audience representation?

I’ve noticed a lot of misguided anger proliferating in our industry. From my own personal experience, things were hitting a boil around five to seven years ago… it seemed like people thought the best way to get what they wanted (less of the books they disliked?) was to demoralize and relentlessly attack individuals. I’m sure the rhetoric and activity is still happening to the same degrees as I experienced when I was promoting my Iceman book at Marvel, but nowadays I just post and walk away from platforms where that chatter goes on. I think the thing I’m noticing too is that it’s really only focused on the “floppy”/ direct market side of comics. 

Superman is a character who is limitless in his ability but what guardrails come with writing Clark in this story as opposed to stories you are able to tell with your independent comic book characters Rockstar and Softboy?

When it comes to writing a character as beloved as Clark Kent, I just have to be sensitive about how the character interacts with potentially amoral or “naughty” things. In my book, Clark is a teenager, so when Lex Luthor is seen drinking in the book, I had to make it abundantly clear that Clark wouldn’t participate in or condone underage drinking. It wasn’t a problem to spell out what I believe is the character’s DNA, and I think the same is true in the other direction with Rockstar and Softboy. Those boys are bawdy and aggressive in their pursuit of gay hijinx, so I took great care spelling that out in their dialog and actions. 

Where can our readers find you and your work online?

Nice thing about my name is that I have a pretty firm hold of @SinaGrace on all platforms! Instagram is my fave place!!

Chloe, what inspired you to write this book?

Immortal Longings is my adult debut. So there were a lot of big thoughts I was having about what is it that makes an adult concept different to a young adult concept. I had to make a conscious decision to make the switch. My instinct growing up and writing books was always to go for young adult, because it was what I was reading. It was the type of genre categorization that I knew best. Whereas when the idea for Immortal Longings first struck, it was the first concept I worked with that I knew that didn’t really fit into that coming-of-age story arc. There was nothing about it that felt like a teenage story anymore. I think that was because I came up with the idea when I was in my senior year of college. It was still the midst of Covid. So, I had come back on campus because doing zoom school was horrifying and bland. And the time zone was terrible; I didn’t go to class. My professors let me skip class because my professors were like “oh you’re in New Zealand.” And it also meant I was not learning a single thing. So, I came back for senior year and during winter break I was alone in my school housing apartment because everyone went home for the holidays. It gave me the idea of working with a very dense city setting, I guess because I was so isolated. Thinking about what it means to live with people literally breathing down your neck, that presence of breathing down your neck at any point. It was that feeling that first came to me as a story idea.

I had always been very inspired by the Kowloon Walled City that was torn down in Hong Kong in the 1990s. I had always wanted to work with some sort of fantastical story to do with that. I had originally been playing with a portal fantasy that didn’t work and then some other fantasy in YA that didn’t work, and I threw them out. Finally, for this I was thinking what if I made an adult setting because I am exploring a dense city setting and the bad aspects that come with it if there is a system ruling over it and the very human things that come with trying to survive in a place. That just kind of erupted into the world and then that joined up with the fact that I had debuted into YA with Romeo and Juliet and I had taken a Shakespeare class sophomore year, where I really, really loved studying Antony and Cleopatra. I thought there’s something very meta about using the two star-crossed lovers of Shakespeare tragedy cannon, but Antony and Cleopatra are so firmly adult. They are about power and obsession and grappling with the sort of the tug and pull of love. So, there was a lot of like, “ooh, I am going to make this so that the books are in conversation with each other just like how Shakespeare’s plays are in conversation with each other.” 

Very early on in the book when you’re describing the setting it’s as if the setting is its own character. I found it fascinating that you built the city where it is so tight and there’s suffering, but there’s no relief because there’s not enough oxygen to create relief.

Given that San-Er was kind of based on the Kowloon Walled City, it is the exact same kind of thing, because there is no space for civil unrest, it is another arm of an oppressive system that just kind of goes “well, that’s too bad.” 

What was it like to grapple with an inspiration that is so unruly that critics can’t even decide what it is about.

I think I decided I wanted to pluck out the character study between Antony and Cleopatra first and foremost. People can’t even agree if it is a tragedy. Is it historical? There are so many aspects about it. Shakespeare is doing so much in the play. It’s not like Romeo and Juliet where the themes are blatant. I was fascinated by comparison essays I was reading about Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra. That led to an idea of meta type engagement as well, because I was reading an essay about how Antony and Cleopatra are essentially the adult versions of Romeo and Juliet but, as what happens when you reach adulthood, things suddenly become so much more complicated, right? Not that children’s lives aren’t complicated, but in a way, your coming of age is very much funneled down into one simple sort of self-discovery type goal. Whereas you reach adulthood and it’s suddenly about nation, it’s about interpersonal relationships, it’s about everyone around you. So, it was the characters of the play that fascinated me the most. 

Not to say I don’t love the intertwining of history as well. Like I really love the rise of the Roman Empire, which is why there are kind of bits and pieces that find their way into the world building of Immortal Longings. Whenever I pitch it, it’s the 90s of Hong Kong meets the rise of the Roman Empire. People are like, “what does that look like?” Well, we’ll see! You know so history made its way in through those aspects, but as far as the inspiration of Antony and Cleopatra is concerned, it gravitates towards the interpersonal relationship between Antony and Cleopatra or how the other characters, it’s not in the play so much, but Octavia the wife he left behind and his relationship with Augustus and then Octavian and Cleopatra’s serving woman and all those little character interactions are my favorite parts of the play. When I wanted to adapt it, it was like “how do I make those little characters feel like the source material but plucked in a completely new environment?” to kind explore, like, what would they become if you completely merged that around.

Talk to me about your writing process. Are you the kind of writer who is like “okay, I’ve gone through the entire play, I’ve outlined exactly how it’s going to line up with my new plot and then I sit down.” Do you sit down and let the characters come to you? 

A bit of both, I think. I’m a very chaotic writer, but I’m also very orderly. By that I mean, before I get into a first draft, I have everything very organized. My planning document for Immortal Longings is 20 pages long, because it’s the outline of the play, outline of my story, outline of every inspirational subtext that I’ve got going on, and then it’s basically the outline of everything I want to have happen in the further series. But then I’ll write the book, I’ll get everything into its base shape, and then I throw it all out. I need to do it first just to see what works and what doesn’t. Because when I visualize it as an outline, sure it works, it kind of makes sense to lay it all out, but the magic I love about writing is that sometimes things just work and sometimes they don’t. You don’t know what that will be until you do it.  I don’t really discover what the story is trying to say until I’ve done it once, and I see that things are not corresponding as they need to. And I kind of rip it up and do a second draft. And that second draft tends to be what I’m trying to say, and then the further drafts I’ll clean it up, and so on and so forth. But I need that chaotic tearing a book apart stage most times, sometimes there’s a structured book, and I don’t tear it apart that much, but I find that’s rarer than not.

How much of that first draft do you actually end up keeping?

I tend to start fresh. I open a new document, but I’ll put the old one next to it. So, I will pull lines and paragraphs. Because the writing is still there. But I need the new document, so I don’t feel married to the old structure. Because I found that if I keep that old document in and edit within it, I will kind of wimp out sometimes and just let the things sit in their old structure. But if I open a new document, I can be like well these chapter orders don’t work at all. So, I’ll tear it apart and start again.

Your word-by-word writing is extraordinary, it’s lucious, it pulls you in. Is that something that comes through in the first draft and you know your voice immediately?

I do think my word by word tends to mostly come in the first draft. I think partially because I have been writing for so long now that it is a bit easier to get what I want to say out there into the sentence level form. When I was first setting out when I was much, much younger there was kind of a discrepancy between what I saw in my head and what eventually I put on the paper because I just wasn’t as practiced yet in describing the things that I saw in my head. But now that I’ve been doing it for so long, I think, the first go at it gets a bit close. There will be bits where there are just pieces missing, where I’m like “that doesn’t sound quite right but let me just put it down first.” So, when I do the second draft migration I tend to go back, I’ve got a fresh pair of eyes, because of the first draft. I’ll never go back and edit the first draft, I’ll either do it all again and I’ll go back. So, by the time it’s the second draft it’s probably been a few months since I’ve seen it and I can see what I was saying there now and I can kind of adjust the words slightly. But I would say that most of my wording, if I am keeping it, probably remains as is. 

You mesh so many genres in this story, you have historical geo-politics to fantasy to monarchy systems to sci-fi. Did all of those ideas come together in outlining? 

I’m a cross genre writer. Even with my young adult books I have always been doing that. So, with These Violent Delights I originally pitched that as just a historical and it was later on that I was talking to my agent and she was like “no, we can cross this as fantasy, you have a monster rampaging the city.” And I was like, “yeah, yeah, you’re right.”  These Violent Delights is historical sci-fi, and then Foul Lady Fortune, even more so, is a historical sci-fi thriller, which, I found that when you throw too many genres at people, their eyes kind of glaze over. So, we were like “yes, this is YA fantasy” to kind of tidy things up. It is kind of the same with Immortal Longings. It is pitched as my kind of official adult fantasy debut, but there is so much about it that is, it feels different than what you expect when you say, “I’m picking up a fantasy novel.” I knew from the get-go that I wanted the world to feel like something 90s inspired, there was technology, but there is not technology that we recognize for our modern day. There is a magic system of sorts, but it’s not magic, it’s genetic. It’s something just that is part of their world. So fantasy is kind of just the little slot that it falls into because it has the sort of archetypes.

So much of your work is deeply tied to what makes someone them. How does identity exist in this world? And what was it like to explore identity when you can literally discard your body? 

To me it was this investigation into how different people value their identity as it ties to personhood. It’s a reflection of our world where people don’t jump around, you just have one body, but I still think that sort of spectrum exists and is reflective of how people perceive themselves. Some people think of their mind as who they are, and they don’t care about outer perception. Other people are very very sensitive to external perception.

What do you think you would do if you could jump bodies?

I don’t know if I would. I might be a Calla. I might be somebody who is really stuck to myself. If I had to, would jump into any random man in the street, I just want to see what it was like.

Do you think you would choose a stranger over someone you knew?

If it’s someone I knew, I’d be controlling them, and that’s weird. A stranger, they never have to know.

How did the transition to adult feel for you as a writer, versus your preliminary work? Did it feel easier? Was it harder? Was it unexpected? 

On a craft level, I wrote the book in my usual voice. So, I don’t think it was particularly harder than any of the other manuscripts that came before it. But on an emotional level, it was hard, because I had a lot of self-doubt. Because I switched to adult and since I was still writing it at 21, it gave me a huge, crippling sense of imposter syndrome. But I was just really, really going through on a personal level, like, am I enough of an adult? Do I know how to do my taxes?  Which led to this new step in my career, where I was like “oh god, am I going to be able to do the adult genre?” So, I just had to do it; I just had to take the dive. I knew the story couldn’t be young adult, it just wouldn’t work, that kind of atmosphere is not something that feels like a teenager would care about it. I think it’s something very many adults care about more. So, I need my audience to be adult. Otherwise, it was a lot of fun getting that freedom to write for adults. I love writing for young adults, but there’s always a little box that I kind of refuse to step out of, because there are certain things that I don’t think are as interesting to teenagers. When you write for an adult sphere, and you can get a bit more morbid. The same way that growing up kind of unlocks a box for you to think of the world a different way. It was a lot of fun but also very scary.

Want to read what we thought of Immortal Longings? Check out Marizel Malan’s review.