Author Spotlight: Tanith Lee
Wendy N. Wagner
After I finished reading “Black and White Sky,” even the robins in my backyard looked spooky. Could you look at birds while you were working on this piece?
I always look at birds, loving them, just as I do all animals (including snakes). In fact the magpie is a favourite, as anyone who read my Venus books (especially Faces Under Water and Venus Preserved) may have seen. I did apologise to our local magpies for some of the story’s implications, but pointed out too that the ancient horrible myth about them I had attempted to rectify (in the story’s last pages). They forgave me, I think: our garden still abounds with them, as with everything else.
I really enjoyed your use of tense in this story. Some sections are told from George’s point of view, using the past tense; others are in a more remote point of view, and use the present. What led you to that choice? Do you use present tense very often?
As so often, I didn’t choose the differing use of tenses—it chose itself. I liked the effect, though, and when I’d finished, the whole reminded me of a radio play, the past tense resembling dramatic ensemble scenes, present tense being employed in that case by a narrator.
In the story, you point out—or rather, George points out—that the magpies in this story are frightening, like the birds in Daphne du Maurier’s The Birds, but that they behave very differently than the birds in that novella. Both pieces seem to be discussing human relationships to nature and our deeper symbolic relationships to birds. Did The Birds influence your piece?
Du Maurier is a genius much loved by me. Though her Rebecca is a “romantic thriller,” it coldly steams with horror(s). And her supernatural fiction—The Home on the Strand, so many short stories—are entirely terrifying. The Birds is a Master/Mistress piece, inviolable and quite uncopyable. I suspect it may well have been a dark, dark inspiration, though maturing since my early teens when first I read it. But I could hardly write a Bird-Armageddon take (nor someone like George “live” through one) without respectfully mentioning her story.
Magpies have this tremendous amount of folklore connected to them. What do you think makes them so captivating to human imagination?
They are very (extra) strange birds. Like their near-“relations”—crows, rooks, jackdaws, etc.—they’re very intelligent. They hop and lurch about on the ground like Olivier’s Richard III, but launched on air are graceful as swans, their Egyptian hieroglyphic markings profoundly wonderful. The way they got their bad, unlucky reputation seems to spring from that nasty little myth (also in Sky’s last pages) I mentioned earlier.
Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about this piece and its origins?
Well, we saw it, or a (luckily brief) example, my husband, (writer/artist) John Kaiine, and I. We were walking along the side of a road out among fields and woods and saw a magpie go up—straight up, not deviating—then, at regular intervals, another and another also rose, all single, all ascending, vanishing in the spring clouds above. About ten or twelve, I think, in all. We were both taken with this, hadn’t seen a flight quite like it before, and haven’t since. John suggested there seemed a dark and peculiar story there, given the magpie’s folkloric “form.” It seems there was.
The last line of this story (“And in the east the sun has risen, is visibly rising, like the pitiless eye of Man Himself”) is absolutely chilling. It feels like a pretty strong condemnation of our species. Is that a pessimism that you feel personally, or did it come out of something else?
Thank you. It chilled me too, rigid. Again, as I so often explain, I don’t seem to coin these observations, they just—arrive. Nevertheless, even if it is, I don’t agree with this as just criticism. Where most humans are crass, cruel, “thoughtless” and “greedy,” it normally arises from their understandable driven-to-the-wall desperation, their built in need and urge to survive. So, okay (and discounting Big Business), put us somewhere where we can so often get by through making a mess or grabbing a necessity, and then castigate us as profligate and wicked. If there is a “magpie” criticism of Mankind, it is probably more to do with our guilt-laden judgment on ourselves. If you keep piling shame and guilt on someone, they’ll often—if they believe it—give up and become what they’re accused of being. The only way we’ll ever “improve” is to stop blaming ourselves, and others, for things we cannot help, and try to sort out the rest of the muddle in good faith. We make mistakes, but we are not, most of us, bad. Just painted that way. Like the magpie.
What projects do you have coming up in the near future that we should look out for?
Projects: Launching soon, with Immanion Press (UK), a Lee Ghost Story collection—some previously published, plus original, new titles. And something like that with Telos (UK) on vampires. Some other similar projects in the offing, here and in the States. Additionally, in the not too distant future, a reprint will occur of quite a few earlier titles, in the U.S. I’m also aiming (at last) finally to write the sixth Flat Earth novel—also for the U.S., now that someone wants to print it!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Wendy N. Wagner (Managing Editor) grew up in a town so small it didn’t even have its own post office, and the bookmobile’s fortnightly visit was her lifeline to the world. Her short fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies including Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Lovecraft eZine, Armored, The Way of the Wizard, and Heiresses of Russ 2013: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction. Her first novel, Skinwalkers, is a Pathfinder Tales adventure. An avid gamer and gardener, she lives in Portland, Oregon, with her very understanding family. Follow her on Twitter @wnwagner.
Author Spotlight: A.R. Morlan
Caroline Ratajski
The voice of this piece is quite strong, and I found it carried me through the story like a river. What was your process for developing this voice, or did it simply come naturally to you?
My literary “voice” has more or less come to me naturally, although when I’ve created works which deal with specific historical time periods, I have tried to read works generated during that era, in order to at least loosely match the narrative style common to that time period. But for most of my work, I’ve tried to just speak the way I think; I have the condition which used to be called Asperger’s, and for me, it has meant that my writing “voice” is my strongest—when it comes to trying to speak to someone in person, or on the phone, I “sound” totally different. I can’t even dictate my stories verbally—I have to physically write them down. Many people with my condition (which in itself can affect virtually every person who has it differently) do rely strongly on written vs. oral communication, and I suspect that this has also had an influence on my work. Many years ago, when I’d just graduated high school, I spent a week down in Madison attending a writer’s workshop held by the Wisconsin Junior Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the way we submitted works to be critiqued by the staff was a “blind” process (we each picked a pen name and wrote our pieces using that name, which the people doing the critiquing used to ID everyone’s work; after the pieces were critiqued, they’d be placed in a manila folder marked with the pen name and left in a box for us to pick up the next day), but by the end of the workshop, I was getting written critiques which stressed how strong my “voice” was as a writer . . . and when the people doing the critiques found out that I was the person they’d been praising on paper, it was a shock to them, since they’d dismissed me in person as something of a wimpy, tentative person who wasn’t able to withstand the group critiques of my work (the students would be placed in groups of five and would read/critique each other’s work without staff supervision, and unfortunately, these sessions usually ended up being little more than exercises in bullying, with the kids from the big cities putting down the small-town kids). The only thing the staff did mention to me about my work (which included poems, some prose, and even some attempts at nonfiction—we could write whatever we wanted to that week) was that my nonfiction tended to be a bit stiff a
nd less inviting than my poetry/prose.
Who inspired Edan Westmisley’s character, if anyone?
To answer that, I do need to digress just a bit; when I was a child, I grew up in a very abusive environment (verbal, emotional, sexual, and occasionally physical), and as a result of that, I had a lot of very horrible nightmares, some of which I can still remember clearly close to fifty years later. One of the absolute worst occurred when I was about seven years old or so. In this nightmare, I was sitting up in a balcony box seat in what looked like an opera house of some sort—the place was dark, but enough light spilled onto the seats and surrounding walls from the center spotlight to make it clear that this was some kind of auditorium surrounding a center stage—and my mother and her mother were sitting near me, forcing me to watch the figure in the spotlight . . . a woman who’d been skinned alive, who was wearing what looked like a ballgown out of a fairytale (big full satin skirt that reflected the lights, in a lavender color, an off-the-shoulder wrap-around bodice in a lighter hue, and a very tightly cinched waistline), only her body and head were shiny and bloody, like something out of one of those Hellraiser films from many years later, and she had her arms held down by her sides, fists clenched, and she was singing, loudly, but I can’t recall what she sounded like. And just before I woke up, someone near me said that she was being punished for not doing . . . something. It was so vivid I’ve never been able to forget it. That image is what the narrator sees when she opens up the envelope of photos of the sirens; I needed to get it out, but even then, I wasn’t able to go into much detail per se in the story. It was just so gruesome . . . and the worst part is, I know what made me dream something like that—ever since I can remember, my mother and her mother would constantly threaten to hurt or even kill me if I ever did anything which displeased them. Things like, “We’ll slit your throat if you ever say that again,” or, “I’ll put my fist through your face!” So the character of Edan Westmisley was inspired by the two people who kept me isolated and terrorized all through my childhood, my mother and her mother. They controlled me, they brainwashed me, they constantly reminded me, “We own you!” Both of them were control freaks in private, and subservient drones in their working lives, and they took out their frustrations on me on a daily basis. But physically I modeled the character after a fellow who was one of the administrators at the college I attended in the late 1970s; he’d had a bout of skin cancer which left his face looking much like what I’d described in the novelette—the man was perfectly nice, but difficult to look at.
This piece is tied heavily to Greek mythology. What about Greek mythology intrigues you the most, and why did you decide to use it in this story?
For me, Greek mythology (plus mythology from other countries as well, since many of them share common archetypes, etc.) has always contained a certain, “What if this might’ve happened . . . in some slightly different form?” possibility. Back when I was in high school and college, Erich Von Danniken’s Chariots of the Gods et al. were very popular reading, and since I was also reading about mythology for my high school and later on college reading courses, I realized that many things he wrote about dovetailed nicely with the existing myths from Greek culture. After reading his speculative nonfiction and the mythology, it came to me that there was a remote possibility that the Greeks (as well as the other cultures whose mythology bore a strong thematic resemblance to the Greek myths) may well have encountered alien anthropological expeditions, perhaps visiting races who—when they realized that they were here on their own, with no chance of being censured or stopped by whoever sent them here for whatever original purpose—either went off script from whatever protocols they originally had barring visitor/native contact, or these visitors simply had a very different sort of moral compass to begin with and just started messing with the indigenous humans out of curiosity, boredom, or . . . whatever made them do the things which eventually became the core of Greek mythology. This ancient astronaut theory actually explained (at least to me) the common themes in myths generated by peoples who were, at that time, living in widely spaced geographic areas with little or no chance of contact with each other. And given the personality traits displayed by these so-called gods, it isn’t difficult to speculate that at least one of these alien observers was an Alpha male, while others may’ve been practical jokers, or rigid adherents to order, etc. It might also explain why these gods were so eager to interact with the lowly humans around them; they may well have wanted to mingle with the natives, or some of them may have been power-trippers who needed to frighten and impress their study subjects. I used mythology in this work as a metaphor for the type of power some people have in regard to their wealth and the attributes of theirs which helped them achieve that degree of wealth and power in the first place. That level of power would, I thought, culminate in a desire to not only control, but totally dominate another living creature . . . and in this situation, I thought the ultimate show of power would be to bring down and thoroughly subdue a being (or beings) more inherently powerful than the man of power. I guess it comes down to a force of will; some people have this need to not only conquer, but utterly destroy that which they seek to overpower and control. Much like I was controlled, then squashed, by my mother and her mother . . .
In celebration of the Women Destroy Horror! special issue, which female writers have you felt most influenced and inspired by, horror or otherwise?
Mary Shelley was an early influence on me; while most of the horror science fiction writers I read early on in my life were male, she was the one whose vision frightened me the most—even though she wrote only one novel in the genre, it was so perfect that she didn’t need any follow-up. Plus I was attracted to the fact that she’d had a dream about an undead creature and created a work of fiction based on that—it gave me the idea that I might be able to turn some of my worst nightmares into something more positive. Later on, I also enjoyed the work of Ursula K. LeGuin and James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon), but those works didn’t influence my own fiction as heavily.
What work do you have out now or forthcoming, and what are you working on now?
I have four upcoming short story collections in the pipeline at Wildside Press; right now they have working titles, which may or may not last throughout the actual publication process, but I can say that they are a mix of all-horror, all-science fiction, plus some mixed-bag works (one has several poems of mine, plus a nonfiction piece), with general themes like celebrities, childhood traumas, etc. The late Robert Reginald at Borgo Press had assembled them from some larger collections of more rigidly-themed works (as in, all-SF, all-horror) collections I’d assembled and submitted a few years ago, so he came up with the new themes and titles for the collections. He was in the final stages of work on one called The Second-Most Beautiful Woman in the World when he passed last November, and at that point, everything associated with Borgo Press (an imprint of Wildside Press) was in flux for many weeks while John Betancourt took over the long list of contracted works which Mr. Reginald had been working on, in addition to the projects Mr. Betancourt had been working on for Wildside. Earlier this year I got word that all the contracted collections which Mr. Reginald had assembled would be published eventually; since I am totally computer illiterate, and Mr. Reginald and his wife, Mary, had been transcribing my work into computer format (first scanning it, then typing it directly into their computers when many of my photocopies of published stories did not scan very successfully), my work has been a bit more difficult and time-consuming to get into a format which can be downloaded by the folks at Wildside. So I don’t know when they will be coming out, but I have been told they will be published soon. Since virtually all magazines and other publications are mainly online-submission only, I’ve had to stop creating any new fiction; I haven’t written any new works since 2009.
The past few years have been very traumatic personally; I’ve had problems with my mother ever since her mother passed in 1999, and a few years ago she moved out, and right a
fter that my father and his family “found” me after losing touch with me for fifty years (it turns out I’d been kidnapped after my mother lost custody of me; rather than turn me over to my father, she and her mother took me out of state, halfway across the country, and he wasn’t able to find me), which created a great deal of stress and unhappiness for me; finding out that I should’ve had another type of life rather than the constant abuse and neglect which I did end up enduring was quite an emotional shock to me. And when my father and his relatives told me that my accounts of what had happened to me were upsetting them—and subsequently ordered me to never mention any of it to them!—I ended up spending several years mired in a PTSD haze, until I finally decided to sever all contact with him and them earlier this year. I had to do it to regain my own sanity; as it is, I’m still not in a condition to begin writing again, but Mr. Betancourt and Mr. Reginald’s widow have been urging me to try and produce some more fiction, so depending on whether or not I can shake the lingering upset over what’s happened to me in the past, I might eventually try generating some new fiction.
But since it would be impossible for me to submit it anywhere, I would have to rely on someone at Wildside being able to convert it into a computer-ready format, and given all the backlog facing the staff at Wildside right now, dumping even more hardcopy material on them right now would be inconsiderate to all the other Borgo/Wildside writers who have material in the pipeline. But I am thrilled that “. . . Warmer” will find a new audience in Nightmare Magazine, and I do hope that the readers will enjoy the time spent reading it over.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Caroline Ratajski is a writer and software engineer, currently living in Silicon Valley, California, USA. Previously published as Morgan Dempsey, her fiction is available in Broken Time Blues and Danse Macabre, as well as at Redstone Science Fiction. She is represented by Barry Godldblatt of Barry Goldblatt Literary, LLC.
Nightmare Magazine Issue 25, Women Destroy Horror! Special Issue Page 25