Clarkesworld Magazine - Issue 17
Page 4
I think my newest collection, A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects, will be the last for awhile.
I’ve seen that you spent time in Japan. Can you talk about how this traveling has impacted your writing?
Oh, boy. First, I suppose, it gave me time to write. My ex-husband was out of the country for 19 of the 25 months we spent there, and I was alone, without friends or family or any real human contact. That made me a little crazy, but it also got the books done.
The mythology of Japan will always be with me — the Shinto faith, the syncretic culture, the jungle right up close to the urban sprawl. Some part of me will always be there, always looking for fox-statues in the forest, watching the jellyfish suck at the sides of boats in the harbor. I will never stop being fascinated by it, and processing what it means in relation to me and my work and my internal landscape. It was a hermitage, and I learned all the things good hermits are supposed to learn: how to be alone, how to quiet demons, how to sweep the halls and keep the wolves at the door.
But now you’re living in Ohio. How’s that for an adjustment? And do you think it has impacted your work?
Ohio is a mythic landscape, too! The American Midwest is literally PLANET MARS for a girl like me, raised on the West Coast. I bet you know exactly what I mean. You ain’t from around here neither, Toby. The colors on the leaves, the snow in the winter, the viciously huge icicles, the Waffle Houses, the cornfields, the beige food! I find it fascinating here, and being adjacent to a Great Lake is wonderful. There are islands there that are completely deserted, and water that goes past the horizon. There is a strange wizardly grace to Ohio, I swear it. And when I leave, like Japan, it will stay with me, all its myth and folklore and endless fields.
I think it has made me look more closely at America as a source of fantasy, as a source of myth. It has made me look at plain things differently and taught me that every place longs to have wonderful things written about it. Even Cleveland, Ohio.
I think I’ll probably give every place I live a giant hug in the form of a book. I can’t help it. They ask so nicely.
Like a lot of writers you’ve been leveraging the internet to build your readership and you’re certainly one of them. You have a well-read LiveJournal, and have mentioned that you owe your career to this tool in some ways. How did that work?
Well, I had a blog back on Diaryland since about 2000. I used it for writing practice for years and predictably, no one cared much. I sat in my corner of the internet and played with my ball. After awhile it gained a bit of a following, but nothing we wouldn’t laugh at in today’s blogosphere. But when I moved to Japan, I was pretty intensely lonely, and figured I’d get on Livejournal and see if I could make a couple of friends — it snowballed and by the time I had any kind of book contract I had a sizable readership, and it’s grown since then, as have my books, and they very much feed off of each other now. Most of the things in my life were provided by Mother Internet: my partner, my home, my job, my friends, even some of the food in my pantry and art on my walls. I didn’t ever have a mercenary plan to sell books, I just wanted to reach out and find something genuine in the ether.
It turns out, if you send away for a life, the internet will send you one. It doesn’t even cost anything.
Who are some of the writers that have really had an impact on your writing?
Sylvia Plath, Lorca, Diane Wakoski, Anna Ahkmatova are all huge influences in poetry, which is, as referenced, the beast who made my brain. In fiction there is Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Clarice Lispector, Milorad Pavic, Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, John Crowley, Jeff Vandermeer, Theodora Goss, Borges, Lewis Carroll, Sonya Taaffe, Paul Verhelst, and Dylan Thomas (Under Milk Wood was an enormous formative influence.)
I did my undergraduate degree in classics, so I have to point out that reading endless pages of ancient Greek was probably not helpful to ever writing like a normal kid.
When you write, what kind of schedule do you keep? Any rituals or methods you use to get into the right headspace?
I am ashamed. I must confess that when I need to get a novel done, I go to Starbucks, where they do not have free wireless, and I work from 9-6 every day until it is done. It isn’t sexy. It’s not a garret. Old men stare at my chest and baristas make jokes about how much World of Warcraft I must be playing. But it gets it done.
I basically require a hard deadline to function at all. I am a fundamentally lazy person who is so determined to get things done that I’ve built workarounds into my psyche so that I can appear not-lazy. It’s a long and stupid process, but the books get written. On deadline. They get turned in at midnight like a student slipping a paper under a professor’s door, but I’ve never missed one. The key is fear and shame, I find. Fear you won’t get to keep being a writer if you don’t put out, and shame at being anything less than punk rock. It works. Somehow.
I wish I had rituals. I keep thinking I should invent some. But mostly I sit down and write until someone says I have to eat. Lather, rinse, repeat.
About the Author
Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. His latest novel, Sly Moongoose, a Caribbean Space Opera, is currently out from Tor and his first short story collection, Tides from the New Worlds, was published by Wyrm Publishing in 2009.