I wish I'd had the opportunity to collaborate with Janet Kagan. She wrote wonderful, warm, joyful stories, full of life and determination and heart. I've joked about teaming up with Seanan McGuire one of these days… the results would either be awesome or terrifying. Or more likely, both.
I wanted to touch a little bit upon your activity outside of writing. You are very outspoken and a big supporter of equal rights and fairness, and a strong opponent of violence, especially against women. Tell us a little bit about that and feel free to post any links that you think might be helpful to people who are trying to get more involved in these causes.
I volunteered as a rape/crisis counselor in East Lansing before I ever got published as an author. I've also worked as the male outreach coordinator at a local domestic violence shelter and program. When my writing began to take off, I realized it had given me a bit of a platform, and that there were people out there who actually wanted to follow my blog and my Twitterings and so on. It was a little weird, but I wanted to use that platform to talk about the things that were important to me, including continuing to speak out about rape and other societal problems.
A lot of those problems are easy to ignore if they don't affect you directly. Sometimes it's malicious, but more often I think it just comes down to ignorance. Growing up a white man in the suburbs, I had no idea how much racism still existed. Likewise with sexism, homophobia, etc. I think we need to actively listen to other people's stories and experiences, and to recognize that there's still a lot of work to do, whether it's "Best of the Year" book lists dominated by male authors, sexual harassment at SF/F conventions, whitewashed cover art, books being rejected because a character was gay, and so on.
It's a broad question to try to provide links for, but there are a lot of groups and individuals talking about these problems and working in various ways to change them. The Carl Brandon Society (http://carlbrandon.org/), The Hawkeye Initiative (http://thehawkeyeinitiative.com/), and the Backup Ribbon project ( http://backupribbonproject.com/) are a few of the places doing good work.
What's next for you? Is there anything else you'd like to add?
Unbound just came out, and I'm currently working on book four in that series, Revisionary. I've got two anthology projects to write for in the coming months as well. There should be at least one more book out this year that I'll talk about as soon as it goes public, and a couple of other projects I'm hoping to do, including a sequel to Invisible, a collection of essays I edited last year about representation in science fiction and fantasy. Also, I want to try to see and photograph Comet Lovejoy this week, assuming the weather allows it.
Also, for the past year or so, I’ve been hinting about a Secret Project I've been working on. The contract prevented me from talking publicly about the details ... until now! FABLE: BLOOD OF HEROES, a tie-in novel for Fable Legends, has started showing up on Amazon and other online retailers. My publisher gave me official permission to share some of the details on the blog.
Jim, thank you very much for sharing your thoughts with us. I can't wait to read the new installments in your series!
Interview with Author Sarah Avery
Sarah Avery is an escaped academic who taught way too many sections of freshman composition. After earning a doctorate in English with a dissertation on modernist poetry, she spent a few weeks driving around the Adirondacks blasting Tori Amos on the car stereo and asking herself, What would happen if I stopped holding back? The answer turned out to be a return to her first literary love, fantasy fiction. As a mildly entrepreneurial private tutor, she's able to get almost all the best parts of teaching with almost none of the annoying parts. She has a collection of novellas, Tales from Rugosa Coven, published by Dark Quest Books, and she coedited a themed anthology, Trafficking in Magic, Magicking in Traffic, with David Sklar. Her short fiction has appeared in Jim Baen's Universe and Black Gate.
Q&A
Iulian: Sarah, I am very happy to have had the opportunity to meet you in person through our common critique group, Writers of the Weird. But as much as I got to know your works, I haven't had a chance to learn too much about you. Can you tell us some cool stuff? Where are you from, how did you grow up, have you ever imagined you'd be doing what you are doing?
Sarah: I grew up as an Army brat, so I spent several of my early years in Japan, Korea, and Germany. The biggest contiguous chunk of my childhood was in the suburbs of Washington, DC. That's where I met my high school sweetheart, to whom I've now been married for almost 21 years. Hm, how random an assemblage of cool stuff would you like? I was the worst varsity fencer at Vassar College—I had a quick eye and a quick mind, but a slow hand. I can knit in perfect darkness for three days and never drop a stitch. One year I read so many sonnets, I regularly dreamed in iambic pentameter. Still do, on occasion.
I knew I wanted to write, and which genre, when I was 11 years old. I was misdiagnosed with a terminal illness, so I took up writing fantasy to create through language a world where I was not going to be dead within five years. School seemed kind of futile—all that preparing for a future I supposedly wouldn't live to see. Writing for my own joy felt like the most purposeful part of my life. As Samuel Johnson said, "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully." By the time it was clear the doctors were wrong, the writing habit was deeply ingrained, and I was getting pretty good.
I'm not sure whether it's surprising or not, but I made better career choices when I thought I wouldn't live to see twenty than I made in my twenties, when suddenly it felt like I would have forever to pursue my dreams.
While I was in grad school, my husband and I kept a Crazy Dream List of things we wanted to try if we ever got free of my dissertation and his master's thesis. A year and a half into my first teaching gig after the Ph.D., the university budget crashed, and I was blessed with a layoff—every full-timer in my department who had health insurance but wasn't tenure-track got the axe on the same day. My first two thoughts were simultaneous: "Oh, no, the mortgage!" and "This is the best thing that ever happened to me!" When that semester ended, on my last day as a classroom teacher, I turned in my students' grades, and then went to Starbucks and started writing a new fantasy novel. That first year, I wrote 300,000 words and was truly happy in my work for the first time in a decade.
You call yourself an escaped academic. How was your experience working in that field? Regrets? Accomplishments? Did you leave it due to disappointment with the academic field in general, or was it just a natural, conscientious step for your career?
My teachers in college had all been tenured since the 70s, and they had the kindness to wish for me the same kinds of jobs they had: they got to read and write and talk, and teach two courses a semester to small groups of students who wanted to work hard, and somehow they got paid for all that fun. They didn't realize jobs like theirs didn't exist for my generation. Tenure was under attack, and even where younger professors were still being hired in tenure-track positions, their teaching workloads were usually much higher. The process of getting a doctorate had changed, too, with grad students carrying such high teaching loads that the average time to degree in English reached ten years, and the average dropout rate reached 75%. And of the ones who do finish, only half get stable jobs in the field. But we were at a small liberal arts college, so I didn't know any of that, and my professors had no graduate students, so they didn't really think it through. (The take-away for writers considering grad school: Don't do it!)
I wanted to write, but I also truly love teaching. As long as I thought teaching would support me as a writer, getting a degree to teach with seemed reasonable. By the time I understood that life as an academic would never allow me enough time to write, and would never allow me the freedom to write as I pleased, I was so close to the end of the doctorate that it would have been silly to give up.
Several things kept me going at that point. My husband made a lot of sacrifices to support my degree—the fact that he followed that up by making more s
acrifices so I could walk away from academia and write fiction is a testament to his awesomeness as a spouse and as a person. I had a wonderful circle of friends and mentors, people I would probably never have met if not for grad school, and I'm so glad I still have those people in my life. And I had my dissertation director, the wonderful poet-scholar Alicia Ostriker, who taught me things about writing large-scale projects that I still use in writing fiction. Alicia once said to me about a chapter draft, "Every paragraph of this has its own separate set of organs, with a head on the front; you have written a tapeworm. You need to learn to write a whale. Write something with a liver as big as your car. For a book, every structure scales up."
Since you have a doctorate in English, this question might be moot, but I'll ask it anyway: did you participate in any kind of writing seminars and workshops, especially geared toward SF/F, or was it all just very natural to you? Would you recommend young writers to attend such venues (especially if they don't have a doctorate in English!)
My first writing seminars were in summer camp in my teens, because that's the kind of geek girl I was. I spent three summers at a writing camp. In college I took creative writing of various kinds, just about every semester, and auditioned my way into the senior seminar that allowed me to write poetry for my senior thesis.
Actually, I tried to write a fantasy novel for that thesis, but at twenty-one I had no idea how to pace myself for a project that long. Even with a genre-friendly advisor, it would not have gone well for me. And the advisor I had was quite hostile to fantasy. "Nobody wants to read that," he said of the entire genre. Years later, I found it immensely gratifying to learn that fantasy and science fiction sell twice as many books as literary fiction. Nonetheless, I let myself get badgered out of fantasy.
For a solid decade after that, poetry was the only creative writing I did. I got into an MFA program at Johns Hopkins right after college, and spent a year doing that part time while working various clerical jobs. My advisor was wonderful, my classmates were wonderful, but I began to suspect that what one does after earning an MFA looks almost indistinguishable from what one does before earning it. If I walked away from schooling of all kinds and set up a card table, perhaps with an optional pizza on it, and invited some writing friends over to workshop drafts, would I really be missing anything I needed?
That was the right question. The answer was no.
So I switched to a degree I thought would be more useful for a teaching day job. Oops.
I had a wonderful dissertation workshop group that helped me learn how to think a 300-page thought and articulate it in a way that made the 300 pages worthwhile. For a while I also belonged to a goals-focused group of poets—we didn't workshop drafts, but we witnessed each other's monthly commitments to send out work out to presses and magazines, and we helped research markets for each other's work.
Ultimately, the writing workshop that has helped me most with my actual writing has been the Writers of the Weird, where I met you. It turns out a big table in a friend's basement is better than an MFA seminar, if that friend has invited enough committed writers.
The workshop that helped me most with the business side of writing—which nobody talked about at all at any school I went to—is now called Cascade Writers. It's a small annual writing retreat in the Pacific Northwest. For three of the four years I traveled out to Seattle for it, it was a larger conference called A Writer's Weekend, run almost entirely by Karen Junker. To make it sustainable, Karen scaled it down and found people to share responsibility with, and that version of her vision turned out beautifully, too. Almost every clue I have about writerly professionalism I either learned at A Writer's Weekend or realized I needed to learn because of my experiences there.
I would absolutely recommend to young writers that they go to shorter, more focused workshops, rather than degree programs. Odds are, they'll need to have day jobs anyway, even if they succeed madly at writing. Unless they already love teaching, an MFA won't help get a day job that would work for them. For a person who's interested in a program like Clarion or Odyssey, I recommend doing it as early in your life as possible, because if you have children, the possibility of a six-week residential writing workshop away from your kids is simply out of the question for several years.
Ultimately, though, you don't need schools or courses or retreats to write great fiction. A critique group of like-minded people who are serious about writing and have enough social skills to critique usefully is the main thing you need.
The other thing you need is a set of procedures that works for your group. It's easy to find out all the procedures that make up what's called the Clarion method—though it always tickles me to hear it called that, since nearly every procedure I've heard of that falls under that name is absolutely standard in almost every creative writing class I've ever taken. Those procedures are a fine starting point. Tailor them as needed.
What do you consider to be the defining moment in your writing career, the moment when you knew this is what you will do for the rest of your life? What story, market, or anthology had a part in that?
I was about 100,000 words into the first draft of the first novel I ever finished, the one I started right after leaving academia. I realized I'd been happy every day for months. Not just pleased with one or two dimensions of my life, but consummately happy, and happy particularly with my work. Every morning, I woke up and I couldn't wait to start writing. Every night, I went to bed excited about the next day's writing. All night, I dreamed about my writing. I was putting in four to eight hours of pen-to-paper time every day, and two or three more in the evening to type up what I'd keep of the day's longhand work. My draft was rough—I had a lot to unlearn—but I could see the bones of the story, and I knew they were good.
Writing novels was no longer a thing I dreamed of doing, or tried to do. I was doing it. It was even better than I had ever imagined.
The time of year came when I was supposed to be applying for a new teaching job for the next school year. I said to my husband, "What if I didn't go back? What if I found a day job that actually let me write? Because I'd rather be a barista at Starbucks and come home free to write as I damn well please than be a tenured professor and write scared."
My husband might have said many things. What he said was, "That's quite a leap of faith. Can I take one, too?" So he left his big corporate software employer for a start-up, and I took up part-time tutoring instead of looking for a full-time gig, and as a family we took about a $40,000 pay cut. Never regretted it, even though the start-up never did take off.
The moment I knew we were in it together, I knew I'd always find a way to keep writing.
The other defining moment was when I knew my stories did the deep things I wanted them to do. Stories save us in hard times—stories have saved me more than once, and I think most people have had that experience.
I see two main ways that stories do this. Of course, in conversations about fantasy, escapism comes up, and that's a valid, important function. When you're suffering, sometimes you need to be lifted out of that moment in your life so that when you come back down you have the strength to face it.
The other way is the Emily Dickinson tell-all-the-truth-but-tell-it-slant way. A story can take you into the core of the hard experience you're having, as long as it takes you by a different path than the one you're on.
I found out my writing could do both of those things during the time that produced the Grail story you're publishing in this issue. My friend George, who was a central organizer and much-beloved person in my local Pagan community, was dying. Those of us who could travel into New York to keep him company at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center took turns making the trip. Two of my coven-sisters worked in the same office. Sabrina was about to take the train in to see George. Jen handed her a copy of my working draft of "Closing Arguments" and said, "Read this on the way—you need it more than I do." And Sabrina told me afterward that the only way she could manage her own anticipatory grief at los
ing George, so that she could bring some strength to him when he needed it, was by devouring my novella and escaping into it.
In George's last days, I started the Grail story as a form of spell-prayer on my blog. Many of George's friends, including some I'd never met and some in other countries, started reading the story as its episodes came to me. For all its flourishes and funny moments, it's a story of shared heartbreak. And the vast rippling circles of people who loved George were as desperate for ways into that heartbreak as they sometimes were for ways out.
After seeing how people used my work to do the most important things humans to with stories, I had to grow out of the self-deprecating false modesty I had allowed myself. The decades I had spent honing my craft had resulted in an actual ability to be of service to the world through my art. Pretending not to be there yet, just because it's awkward to be a writer with no impressive professional sales, wasn't doing anybody any favors. As I knew when my husband and I committed to reinvent our lives that I would be a real writer, I knew after the Grail story that I had finally become one.
Some of your work has Wiccan influences. How did you get involved with Wicca and what does it mean for you? What motifs do you use in your fiction, and are there other inspiration wells that might not be as obvious?
My parents accidentally raised me Shinto.
For three years we lived on an Army base in Japan. Just about every weekend for those three years, we set out for Avery Adventure Day and went to see different cultural sites. My parents tried to explain to me what all those shrines and temples meant to the Japanese people around us. Being seven years old, I thought my parents were explaining how the universe worked. So for me, everything in the universe was alive, with an indwelling spirit. All of nature was sacred, and nothing in nature could be evil. The Gods and ancestors were all around us.
Boy, were my parents surprised three years later when they realized I'd settled comfortably into an approximately Shinto worldview, but I didn't know what the Lord's Prayer was. When my father got orders for a new post in the States, my parents started looking for a church that suited them both. They found a lovely one, a congregation I still regard with love and gratitude. But despite my best efforts at monotheism, I was irrevocably animistic.
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