Jennifer
Stevenson: An Interview
Gabrielle Moss
What led you to start writing fiction?
I've always written fiction, ever since I was old
enough to read. My mother and my maternal grandparents all wrote,
and my father wanted to write; I guess it was just assumed I would,
too. Sometimes I think I'm living out their ambitions.
What inspired you to write Trash Sex Magic?
The setting is vivid and powerful, and almost a character unto
itslef. Where/what did you draw from to create this world?
I started working on this book in 1986 while on jury
duty. It started out as a short contemporary horror novel called Early
Spring. Eighteen years and many, many revisions later, Kelly Link
and I carved away everything that wasn't Trash Sex Magic. I
can't say enough about her support, her appreciation for my vision
of the book, and her writerly acuity. She talks about words in a way
that awes me.
The setting for Trash Sex Magic is drawn from
a place where my brother and I and our dogs played as kids: Wheeler
Park in Geneva, Illinois. Natives of that area will recognize a lot
of landmarks, some of which have disappeared. The trees in the park
are really there, but the houses across the road, by the water, were
very nice houses indeed. As a kid I never got to visit them or the
river. I wanted to, though. The ridge really has a railroad track
on top of it, and I wanted to sit up there at night and hear the freight
train go by. I wanted to see the river smash into the ridge. I wanted
to see a tornado hit the water. This book let me do all that. Nature
is the truest, most powerful force on earth. I wanted to keep saying
that.
Other inspirations were Carolyn Chute's The Beans
of Egypt, Maine and a Tommy Lee Jones and Sissy Spacek movie,
Coal Miner's Daughter. Without these examples before me I would
never have thought I could write about this kind of life.
Why did you choose to tell your story with fantasy?
Joe Haldeman talks about a kind of progression he
has noticed in veterans who write about their Vietnam War experience.
First they do some very autobiographical fiction, or a straight autobiographical
account. Then later they expand the scope of their stories, fictionalize
their personal experience a bit, include experiences that other people
had but they did not, so as to make the war more accessible to more
readers. Finally, maybe 20 years later, they start writing wildly
fantastical stuff with extravagant imagery and "unreal" things happening,
because the fantasy element is the only way they can express the violence
and extravagance of their emotions about the war.
For me, many parts of this book describe internal
experiences I had as a child that I couldn't talk about. In fact I
find it impossible to talk about them now, except by telling a wildly
unreal story that illustrates these feelings in a lurid, over-the-top
way.
Do you do any other kinds of writing?
I'm writing raunchy romantic comedies, erotic romantic
fantasy, some short fantasy stories, some experimental short funny
stuff that's all dialogue. Terry Bisson started doing that a few years
ago; his stories blew me away and inspired me to try it myself. Those
all-dialogue stories are bags of fun to write.
Trash Sex Magic deals with a lot
of issues pertaining to class. Did you intend to write a novel with
a political message?
Kind of. I wanted to respond to a trend I saw in
fantasy writing and in fantasy criticism that treated magic in fiction
as if it were an extension of academia. The taller your pointy hat,
the longer your white beard, the better a magician you are, right?
Sure, and your full professors are smarter than everybody else. This
is the Tolkein/Harry Potter model. In reality, tenure doesn't make
a person smarter. I felt that in fiction, magic ought to be treated
with more respect, and not as a game whose rules must have "internal
consistency"--a fantasy lit-crit phrase that drove me nuts for years--but
as an extension of the mysterious and marvelous and very real natural
world.
If you look back through the history of science,
you find the history of magic. The dividing line falls at the point
when scientists stopped thinking of nature as a lover to be wooed
(Paracelsus is an example) and started thinking of nature as a wife
to be mastered, plowed, and dominated (as did Roger Bacon). If you
squint, you can kind of see the clash of these ideas, like a battle
of mastadons in the swamp, in Trash Sex Magic.
I also wanted to point out that when the Somershoe
women use magic, they are flying blind, without training, without
vocabulary. "Internal consistency" aside, vocabulary is a good thing.
Because they have a bone-deep belief that what they are doing is "trashy,"
Rae and Gelia don't talk about it. If they were "fantasy" heroines
they would, but they're as realistic as I could make them--irrevocably
outside society and yet eternally standing at its edge, half-acknowledging
its rules, unable to ignore the rules. Stupid, maybe, considering
their powers. It could only strengthen them to talk. But they don't
have a pointy hat. No one has given them permission to be themselves;
they feel they've had to steal their powers under the noses of society.
They're half-right to hesitate: they live under the constant awareness
that their power is in the minority; their tree can be cut down; their
land can be taken; their kids can be put in foster homes. People silence
themselves all the time, and they suffer accordingly.
The worst thing these people do is call themselves
trash in their secret hearts. You can overcome that if it's from the
outside, but not if you're using that word on yourself. Am I talking
about class?
What books have influenced you?
Most deeply? Rudyard Kipling, especially the Mowgli
stories and Kim. Ray Bradbury. Andrew Lang's fairy tale series.
Georgette Heyer, Howard Pease, Terry Pratchett, Sax Rohmer, Clifford
Simak, Rex Stout, PG Wodehouse. A handful of little-known writers
whose very few books hit me hard, by luck: Jody Scott, Ruth Nichols,
Lorna Novak. Later, in my adulthood, Carolyn Chute, Maxine Hong Kingston,
John Crowley.
Some writers who hit all the same buttons for me,
but who didn't get to me soon enough to be major "influences", are
Terry Bisson, James Blaylock, Glen Cook, Nalo Hopkinson, Barry Hughart,
Diana Wynne Jones, Tanith Lee, Dan Pinkwater, Rachel Pollack, Sherri
Tepper, Gene Wolfe. I read Audrey Niffenegger's first novel last year
and flew over the moon; I'm hoping for more from her.
What are you working on now?
Two things: a romantic erotic fantasy about an incubus
and a farm girl, and a raunchy romantic comedy that's kind of a cross
between a contemporary blue-collar regency romance and a Romeo and-Juliet
farce. The erotic fantasy is hard; I keep having to redesign my heroine
because the book gets more serious the farther in I plot it, and she
needs to get stronger so she can carry that weight.
The comedy is just a blast. It's the second in a
series I'm writing about stagehands. Stagehands make wonderful alpha
male heroes. They're very physical guys, sometimes bad boys, serial
monogamists with a blue-collar form of chivalry that balances their
sometimes-chauvinistic ideas about women. They work in the glamorous
world of show biz but they get their hands dirty. Unlike performers,
they don't wear makeup or let themselves get too skinny to be strong.
They're coarse and funny and relaxed about their masculinity. I've
been married to a stagehand for 27 years and I'm here to testify.
Ya gotta love 'em.
---
Gabrielle Moss is on a
train west. Her zine is My Life as a Liar.