text:
Tag Archives: Gemma Files
December 16, 2015 by dereknewmanstille
Canadian SF Authors, What Are You Reading? Gemma Files
Gemma Files shares her favourite reads of 2015 with us here at Speculating Canada along with her brilliant insights about the books she has read:
2015 Reading List By Gemma Files
I read a lot, pretty much constantly, and the sad part is that I all too often forget what I've read unless I write it down or write about it, even though it all goes into the garburator that is my creative process. So these things are actually very useful for me—I'm forced to think about what I liked and why, what stuck around longest, what I'm still thinking about, etcetera.
As it turns out, the books I'm (re-)reading at the moment are all non-fiction. Two are old, and for research—Harold Schechter's gleefully trashy Fatal: The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer and Jean Plaidy's A Triptych of Poisoners, a book I've owned since I was thirteen—and two are new, for fun, about one of my all-time favourite subjects (The Canadian Horror Film: Terror of the Soul, edited by Gina Freitag and Andre Loiselle) and one of my all-time favourite movies (Canadian Cinema's spotlight on John Paisz's Crime Wave, a film so fascinatingly obscure you can't even find it on DVD, as unpacked by Jonathan Ball).
In terms of novels I read this year, meanwhile, I'll start with something I came to very late but enjoyed the unholy hell out of nonetheless. That'd be Clifford Jackman's The Winter Family, a hell-bent Western that revolves around Civil War veteran turned "Dandy Killer" Augustus Winter, who evolves from an uneducated, abused child turned soldier first into a complicatedly deadly mechanism fit for little but killing, then a creature of almost unspeakable ravenous purity—the barely humanized avatar of whatever cosmic self-destructive force drives people throughout history to hurt each other for no good reason and feed on the pain that hurt creates. The prose is gorgeous and horrifying and blackly, bleakly funny throughout, Cormac McCarthy by way of Quentin Tarantino; I bought it and devoured in a single day, then spent the weekend re-reading it over and over. There's a reason it was nominated for a Governor General's Award, is all I'm saying.
One of my backbone pleasures is the fact that powerhouse Irish author John Connolly somehow manages to come out with a Charlie Parker novel almost every other year, and thankfully, 2015 was no exception to the rule. This time, in A Song of Shadows, Parker—a Maine PI with truly horrifying bad luck/homme fatale constantly surrounded by similarly fatal people, who may also be (according to Enochian apocrypha) the vile body currently inhabited by the one fallen angel to ever regret his choice to rise against God—is recovering from his last wrestling match with evil, which left him partly crippled and almost dead. Nevertheless, he still can't manage to stay out of trouble, or at least out of proximity with other people's troubles. As ever, this is a fast, engrossing read, every word chosen for both maximum impact and deep-set creepiness. (This year also brought me Night Music: Nocturnes II, Connolly's second collection of short horror stories, which is equally enjoyable.)
As always, various friends of mine came out with amazing stuff, some through my own publisher: three ChiZine Publications titles I'd like to highlight here are Lauren B. Davis's Against a Darkening Sky, which plays like a dark, low-rent mirror of Nicola Griffith's Hild; Rio Youers's frankly excoriating Point Hollow and Kenneth Mark Hoover's Quarternity, the bloodily existential prequel to his Weird West tour de force Haxan. From other sources, Signal to Noise—Silvia Garcia-Moreno's rightly acclaimed first novel—follows three 1980s Mexican teenagers who come of age while experimenting with a very peculiar sort of witchcraft, channeling their loves and hates through music's totemic medium, while Amanda Downum's rich, strange and startlingly poetic Dreams of Shreds and Tatters replants Robert Chamber's King in Yellow mythos to the raincoast artistic scene of Vancouver, where creativity pushed to its limits opens doors to a terrifyingly inspirational parallel universe, releasing a plague of ecstatic madness that's at first spread only oneirically, yet gradually grows to infect and threaten the entire waking world.
And then there's Paul Tremblay, who—like Helen Marshall—is rapidly becoming yet another person whose brilliant brains I yearn to eat. With A Head Full of Ghosts, Tremblay manages to create a true Shirley Jackson-esque thriller for the 21st century, a multimedia commentary on the surreal truthiness of "reality" entertainment filtered through horror culture and tropes to create a story that can be potentially read from almost any direction. I don't want to go too deep into it for fear of spoiling your fun, but the nested testimonial structure builds a psychological puzzle-box that'll have you questioning every character's motivation by the book's climax; it's a sweet trip through unreliable narrator city, and Tremblay makes for one hell of a tour guide.
2015 also brought the end of a few series I've been following for years, and none of them disapointed. At the top of the list has to be Carsten Stroud's The Reckoning, "the thrilling conclusion to the Niceille Trilogy"…but seriously, if you haven't checked these books out yet, then do, stat. I once described them to a friend as a happy collision between Peter Straub and Elmore Leonard, and that continues to hold true; the characters are tough, eccentric and utterly human, the mythology rich, odd and essentially American in a way that mines all the darkest veins of racism and violence inherent in that country's willfully forgotten history (along with our own, sadly).
On a completely different note, meanwhile, Cherry Bomb brings Caitlin R. Kiernan (writing as Kathleen Tierney)'s hilariously foul-mouthed deconstruction of the received paranormal romance paradigm to a suitably slammin' conclusion. Her protagonist, Quinn, started out as a monster-slayer but became something considerably more after being bitten by both a vampire and a werewolf; she's then reduced to making her quote-quote "living" settling disputes in Massachusetts' supernatural underworld, where she spends most of her time drinking, screwing a laundry-list of bad news dames and tearing her enemies apart limb from limb. My verdict: while all the installments are worth your while, this one reaches epic depths of punk Lovecraftiana, so check it out.
I also spent some time catching up on Ben Aaronovitch's wonderful Rivers of London series, best described as a mash-up of Neil Gaiman and J.K. Rowling, whose multiracial protagonist treats magic like a science while dealing with various locus genii on behalf of the London Metropolitan Police Service. Simultaneously, I acquired and read the last three Marla Mason books, by Tim Pratt—Grim Tides, Bride of Death and Lady of Misrule—in which our favourite brute force-o-mancer deals with the literally world-rocking consequences of her total own inability to lose gracefully, which have already cost her most of her friends and control of "her" city, the tiny industrial hamlet of Felport, California. Both series are consistently addictive, rewarding, surprising and amusing, just like I like 'em.
My brain is beginning to grind to a halt, so here are some more picks, from those who want 'em: Clockworks and Alpha & Omega, graphic novel collections from IDW, finally bring Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez's epic, heartwarmingly horrifying Locke & Key series to its climax. They deliver on every possible basis.
A Daughter of No Nation by Alyx Delalmonica, second in her Stormwrack series, which provides portal fantasy with a difference. In this installment, Sophie Hansa gets to know her literally swashbuckling, potentially psychopathic birth-Dad, and surprises those around her by applying basic CSI/scientific principles to criminal investigations conducted in a world where magic is just another recognized part of the ecosystem.
Lagoon, by Nnedi Okorafor, is a fascinatingly raucous and inventive first contact story set in Lagos, Nigeria. While juggling a cast that includes shapeshifting aliens, marine biologists, hardcore Baptists and globally popular rap artists, Okorafor does things you don't expect in almost every chapter, including telling one from the POV of a spider and another from the POV of a road.
The Devil's Ark, by Stephen Bywater, hits all my old-school horror buttons—it's set immediately after World War I, and follows the excavation of an archaeological site which may contain either a shrine to or the tomb of Lilith, Adam's legendary first wife, supposedly worshiped in ancient Mesopotamia as a blood-sucking night-goddess. Similarly transportative is Jonathan Aycliffe's The Sound of Ghosts, a genteelly pitch-black ghost story set during World War II that quickly grows M.R. Jamesian resonances.
The Glittering World, by Robert Levy, is a startlingly dark first novel whose protagonist returns to New Brunswick to investigate the childhood he can't remember, thus submerging himself and his friends in a sinister mystery involving some of the least Disney-friendly fairies ever. In Christopher Buehlman's The Lesser Dead, meanwhile, Buehlman—another of my current favourite writers—applies his trope-deconstructionist's eye to the problem of vampires, conjuring a vicious generational power-struggle set against the funky/gritty backdrop of 1970s New York. And in The Damned, by Andrew Pyper, a man haunted by the malign ghost of his dead twin sister finds out first-hand that hell apparently looks a lot like downtown Detroit.
Finally, even if you haven't read her brilliantly weird epistolary thriller The Three (which you really should've, so fix that), I'll put in an equally high recommendation for Sarah Lotz's Day Four, a side-quel to the same story that's more than qualified to stand on its own, though it does plug some of the original's lacunae. It's like Lost as written by J.G. Ballard, a haunting vision of a potential future terrible enough to infect the present and taint the past; great stuff, if that's the kind of stuff you like. Which I obviously do.;)
Thank you Gemma Files for the brilliant discussion of some fantastic books.
Posted in Editorials
Tagged 2015, Gemma Files
February 10, 2015 by dereknewmanstille
Quote – Feeling the Universe Spinning Loose
"Secretly, late at night, I would feel the universe spinning loose around me: boundless, nameless, a vortex of darkness within which my life became less than a speck of dust. The night sky would tilt toward me, yawning. And I would lie there breathless, waiting for the roof to peel away, waiting to lose my grip. To rise and rise forever into that great, inescapable Nothing, to drift until I disappeared – not only as though I no longer was, but as though I had never been."
-Gemma Files, "The Narrow World" in Queer Fear II
Tagged Gemma Files, loss of self, quote, space
Dionysian
A Review of Gemma Files' A Rope of Thorns: Volume Two in the Hexslinger Series (ChiZine Publications, 2011)
Cover photo for A Rope of Thorns courtesy of ChiZine Publications.
With A Rope of Thorns Gemma Files has written a Dionysian text. Like the Greek god, the world she creates is one of fluids and fluidity – of blood, Absynthe, semen, and sap – and these are intertwined in the form of her character Chess. He is a creature of raw sexuality and transformation – a queer cowboy turned magical demi-god after his flaying in A Book of Tongues. His godly characteristics in A Rope of Thorns, given to him by a Mayan deity through his flaying, have meant that wherever he travels a weed follows, springing up on the landscape and only appeased when blood sacrifice is offered as it was to the Mayan deities who turned him into this demi-god.
Chess is a figure of flow and flux, constantly changing, uneasy in his personal and physical transformations.
Howver, this is no lazy Dionysian reverie, but rather a full on Bacchic revelry, complete with all of the pulse pounding drums of maenadic madness and delight in the spatter of fluids. Files pulls something from the liquid dark with this text, playing with audience desires and the twining of horror and delight.
And like a good Bacchic revelry, A Rope of Thorns is delightfully subversive, playing with the expectations of a Western novel with its hegemonic masculinity by bringing in male lovers, turning the genre on its head. Her characters are sexually fluid, changing as desires flux and situations change, not stuck in one sexual identity as many characters in Westerns tend to be.
The term Weird Western has been tossed about, but Gemma Files adds another delightful element to the western and creates a Queered Western as beautifully flexible as her gay cowboy protagonist Chess Pargeter.
To read more about Gemma Files' work, visit her website at http://musicatmidnight-gfiles.blogspot.ca/
To read more about A Rope of Thorns visit ChiZine Publications' website at http://chizinepub.com/books/rope_of_thorns.php
Tagged gay cowboys, Gemma Files, LGBTQ2, Magic, Maya, queer, Weird Western
Speculating Canada on Trent Radio Episode 18: An Interview with Gemma Files
Gemma Files and I have been on a few panels together in the past and I have always found her incredible fun to talk to, so I was really excited that at Fan Expo Canada this year she managed to have a bit of time to do an interview that I could share with all of you listeners. Our interview is hilarious and simultaneously covers serious issues, marked with laughter and also important social questions. In our chat on Trent Radio, we discuss the use of Toronto by the film industry as the "EveryCity"… and the potential for horror in that anonymity and shapeshifting ability. We talk about Queer or LGBTQ2 content and kink communities and how these have lent themselves to the development of her fantastic fiction… particularly her Hexslingers series which features gay cowboys who use magic. We discuss the use of family and history in CanLit and how these can be factors making for a speculative story that is just as powerful for questioning ideas of 'traditional families'. Gemma lends her insights about using characters who are morally ambiguous as well as the general problems with creating a 'perfect hero' and questioning of the whole social idea of 'The Hero'. Overall, we venture into questions about subversive writing and the power to turn tropes on their heads as a way of empowering readers and authors.
Gemma talks about functional bisexuality in her characters, trans characters, and the general fluidity of gender and sexuality as a way of illustrating that change is powerful and that characters do change and transform and question notions of identity over time.
As part of her discussion of the subversive potential in literature, Gemma examines the wonderful world of fan fiction and the ability of fan fiction to insert questions into narratives that may not have otherwise asked them. She explores the ability of fan fiction to assert an otherwise ignored voice or people who are generally erased. She also examines the ability of fan fiction to serve as a queer medium allowing for gender or sexual transformations for characters.
Overall, our interview is a lot of laughs, a lot of fun, and a lot of social questions. At the end of this interview, you will find yourself being fairy-led to the bookstore to get some of Gemma's books while simultaneously plotting out your next fan fiction story!
Tagged audio files, ChiZine, empowerment, family, Fan Expo Canada, fan fiction, gay cowboys, Gemma Files, gender fluidity, horror, interviews, LGBTQ2, Magic, On Air, queer, questioning social conventions, sex, sexual diversity, subversion, Trent Radio, Weird Western
Speculating Canada on Trent Radio Episode 6: Canadian Queer SF
As a queer man, do you know what I want to see:
a sci fi novel in which one of the typical space bros says "yo fags, no homo" and instantly has his head bitten off by a glitter-wearing, feather boa carrying alien, who instantly spits it out and says "No hate, bro";
or a femmbot who decides that since he has been denied the right to transition to a male robot, he is going to take matters into his own hands and solders a vibrator onto his body;
a fantasy novel in which the evil queen finally gets her princess love;
a white knight who realises that the black knight keeps kidnapping princesses to get his attention;
a horror novel in which the werewolf reveals that she is only biting women because she wants to create a female-only pack
OR a sparkly vampire… oh wait, that's been done before… and with a straight vampire at that.
There is an under representation of queer people in genre fiction, but this episode of Speculating Canada on Trent Radio explores Canadian queer, LGBTQ2 or QUILTBAG (Q – Queer and Questioning, U – Unidentified, I – Intersex, L – Lesbian, T – Transgender, Transexual, Two-Spirited, B – Bisexual, A – Asexual, G – Gay, Genderqueer) fiction.
This audio file was originally broadcast on Trent Radio, and I would like to thank Trent Radio for their continued support.
Tagged cowboys, Daniel Heath Justice, fantasy, Gemma Files, Hiromi Goto, horror, indigenous peoples, LGBTQ2, Michael Rowe, On Air, oppression, queer, QUILTBAG, resistance, rural, Science Fiction, Tanya Huff, television, transformation, Trent Radio, vampire, violence, wizard
Necrosexual
A review of Gemma Files' "Kissing Carrion" in Dead North: Canadian Zombie Fiction (Exile Editions, 2013)
Cover Photo of Dead North: Canadian Zombie Fiction
Gemma Files' "Kissing Carrion" contains the kind of gross sexuality that will mean that you will never quite enjoy sex the same way again. She sexualises the grotesque and grotesques the sexual in a journey into the taboo and forbidden. There is something about hearing about sex with a dead body and the glistening mixture of lube and puss that haunts one's nightmares for a long time after reading this short story. Files brings the reader into the taboo world of necrophiliac fetishists and to questions about life, death, and the sexual.
Pat wants to make a form of disturbing dark art, and in her desire to go to the extremes and to entertain bored ultra-fetishists, she creates carrionettes, bodies animated by wires and levers like some disturbing dead, rotting Pinocchios. When Pat meets Ray, a porn star who wants to be penetrated by death, believing that this is the ultimate interplay with universal powers, she unintentionally enters into a macabre love triangle – puppeteer, fetishist, and corpse. As the puppeteer, she is the one having sex with Ray, using her levers and pulleys to push the dead body's penis into him… but things are less easy than they seem when the body's soul, forced to watch his body used as a sex toy, an appendage on display, finally takes a leap into his desiccating flesh and decides to penetrate Ray in another way… with teeth.
Files not only brings up the disturbing image of necrophilia, but makes the body a victim of rape, a powerless spirit that has to watch his body being forced into sexual acts. Files reverses the assumptions about rape by having the victim of the rape instead of being the penetrated body becoming the penetrator, though not of his own volition or desire. Files unsettles her readers, pushing them out of their comfort zone and pulling them along on the wild fetishistic ride along with the disembodied spirit of a carrionette.
You can explore more of Gemma Files' work at http://musicatmidnight-gfiles.blogspot.ca/
Find out more about Dead North: Canadian Zombie Fiction at http://www.exileeditions.com/singleorders2013/deadnorth.html
Tagged body horror, corpse, death, fetish, Gemma Files, ghost, reviews, sex, unfamiliar body, zombies
June 19, 2013 by dereknewmanstille
An Interview with Michael Kelly
An interview with Michael Kelly by Derek Newman-Stille
I was very pleased when Michael Kelly was willing to share some insights with readers of Speculating Canada. I have been reading his work for years, and was impressed at the depth of his insights and thoughts about Canadian horror. I hope that readers enjoy our conversation as much as I did.
Author photo courtesy of Michael Kelly
Spec Can: To begin our interview, could you tell readers a little bit about yourself?
Michael Kelly: Thanks, Derek. I'm an author, editor, and publisher based near Toronto, originally hailing from Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. My work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Black Static, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Postscripts, Space & Time, Supernatural Tales, Tesseracts, and others. I've been a finalist for The Shirley Jackson Award, and the British Fantasy Society Awards.
Spec Can: What inspired you to become a horror author? What appeals to you about horror?
Michael Kelly: Horror's appeal is that it is, to me at least, the broadest and most inclusive of all literary forms. It truly has the widest canvas. If we are to categorize literature into genres, then certain works of science fiction, fantasy, thrillers, and mainstream literature can easily fit under the horror umbrella. Douglas Winter famously opined that horror is not a genre, it's an emotion. Though that is a bit simplistic, I do ascribe to that basic notion, somewhat. Horror is a mode of literature more than a genre.
When I write, I don't actually aspire to genre. I don't sit down to write horror. I just write. What comes out, I guess, can loosely be described as horror. But, if we are to categorize (and I understand people's need to do so), then I guess you could call my work horror, for the most part. I prefer Robert Aickman's term "strange stories."
Spec Can: What do you hope your readers will take from reading your fiction?
Michael Kelly: I hope they experience a shift in their perceptions, a slight subversion of the every day, a queer unease. Whether my approach is ontological or psychological, hopefully I can reveal to readers some small insight into human nature.
Spec Can: What is different about Canadian horror from that of other nationalities?
Michael Kelly: Is Canadian horror different from other horror fiction? Well, some say my raison d'etre is promoting Canadian horror. It's the reason I edit the Chilling Tales series for EDGE Publications. Volume 2 will be out soon.
Canada is certainly fertile ground for imaginative minds. What I've discovered is that Canadian writers explore the same themes as their contemporaries. Stories of corporate horror; side trips into surrealism and modern supernatural horror. Tales of loss. And the all-too-real horrors of everyday life, of existing in harsh climates, whether literal or psychological. Not unlike any good horror fiction, then. Except I sense a distinctly Canadian worldview, a disquieting solitude, perhaps, or a tangible loneliness, that permeates these stories and makes them truly chilling Canadian tales. There is definitely a Canadian aesthetic.
Cover photo of Scratching The Surface courtesy of Michael Kelly
Spec Can: What can horror do to inspire readers or challenge the status quo?
Michael Kelly: Hmmm, well, other than to entertain, much of horror fiction is grounded in philosophical treatises. Horror is, to me, so inclusive of themes and ideas, the outré, that by it's very nature it challenges the status quo. Much of it is reliant on mood, atmosphere, and the unknown. It is a mode, especially, I think, in the short form, that tests our meager existence.
Spec Can: You have been instrumental in creating Undertow Publications, a small press that produces horror work. What is the virtue of small independent presses?
Michael Kelly: I am a very small press, a micro-press, to be sure. I prefer the term independent press, though. Years ago, the independent press was a vital outlet for writers; a place where you could find literate, daring, and avant-garde fiction that bucked the mainstream, and eschewed commerciality. You can still find that, to be sure, but with the proliferation of DIY publishing, and the publication of four-hundred new eBooks every twelve seconds, it's become increasingly difficult to find that fiction. It's almost not worth looking for, but, like finding that needle in a haystack, the small amount of pain is worth the discovery. There's good, bad, and terrible writing in both the traditional and self-publishing arenas. The independent press still plays a role, to be sure, and the savvy reader, whether by word-of-mouth, recommendations, or simple sleuthing, can usually find those innovative works. Hopefully, out of the morass of the DIY culture, we still have some savvy readers.
Spec Can: Could you tell readers a little bit about the anthology Shadows and Tall Trees that you edit? What are some of the key things that you hope the anthology will focus on?
Cover photo of Shadows and Tall Trees Autumn 2012 issue, courtesy of Michael Kelly
Michael Kelly: I've just published issue 5 of Shadows & Tall Trees. It's a journal of weird fiction, and strange stories. I've had the pleasure of publishing a number of distinguished authors in its pages, including Robert Shearman, Alison Moore, Steve Rasnic Tem, among many others, and Canadian writers Sandra Kasturi, Richard Gavin, Ian Rogers, and Simon Strantzas.
My focus is thoughtful, intelligent weird fiction. Fiction that gives you that genuine frisson. So far, I think I've accomplished that. It's been very well received, with praise from Ellen Datlow, and Peter Straub. Five stories from the first four issues have been selected for reprint in six different "Best Of" anthologies.
Spec Can: You have written about and published stories about ghosts. Why do ghosts inspire our fascination as a society? What appeals to the human imagination about the idea of haunting?
Michael Kelly: Most of us have a good dose of empathy. Ghosts are mostly born from trauma or tragedy. When they return, when they haunt us, we still empathize with their circumstance, their condition, whether malevolent or not. It's an interesting dichotomy — empathy for the dead. Ghosts, you see, aren't about the dead, they're about the living.
Spec Can: As a horror author, what frightens you? What inspires your fear?
Michael Kelly: I suspect the things that frighten me – loss and abandonment – are the same things that frighten many writers. My fears are less tangible, perhaps. It isn't spiders or snakes or dolls or clowns. Those things are creepy, yes, but I am not afraid of them. I fear losing my children, my wife. I fear loneliness and aging. Death. Who doesn't, on some primal level, fear death?
Spec Can: How does fear inspire your work?
Michael Kelly: It spurs me to write while I'm still among the living.
Spec Can: What mythologies inspire you? What mythical themes and ideas imbue your work?
Michael Kelly: I wouldn't say any particular mythology inspires me. My fiction is often reality based, psychological in nature, with an emphasis on characters, mostly flawed.
Spec Can: What can horror do that realist fiction can't?
Michael Kelly: Oh, gosh, that's a good question. The short answer is 'I don't know.' I think of my fiction as realist. If you say "horror," a set of readers are going to have certain expectations. Mostly blood and viscera. That's not me. My definition of horror is broad. "Alien" is a horror movie. "The Road" is a horror novel. Weird fiction that takes an ontological approach can open a new philosophy to some. But realist fiction can do the same. It's all in the writing.
Spec Can: Why is so much of horror literature fascinated with the body? What can horror reveal about the body?
Michael Kelly: We're made of blood and bone, skin and gristle, teeth and tissue. These are the fragile vessels that propel us around this fragile world. Bodies give us pleasure and pain in equal amounts. When the body is invaded and hurt, when it is mutilated or begins to erode, when disease attacks, it reminds us of our mortality. But there's also, to some, something inherently deviant and taboo about seeing unnatural things happening to our bodies. Body horror brings a new level of intimacy to our lives.
Spec Can: In what ways do you hope your fiction will inspire readers? What do you hope readers will take away from reading your work?
Michael Kelly: Other than what I mentioned further above, I just hope readers enjoy the tales, and that the themes and ideas resonate. Hopefully the stories will linger a little with the reader.
Spec Can: Where do you see Canadian horror going from here? What does the future of Canadian horror look like?
Michael Kelly: Canadian horror fiction is having a renaissance. It's definitely in a good place, thanks to publishers like ChiZine and EDGE, and authors like Craig Davidson, Gemma Files, Richard Gavin, Sandra Kasturi, Lisa L. Hannett, Helen Marshall, David Nickle, Ian Rogers, Michael Rowe, Simon Strantzas, Tia Travis, and Halli Villegas, to name a few. The future of Canadian dark fiction is bright.
Cover photo of Shadows and Tall Trees Summer 2013 courtesy of Michael Kelly
Spec Can: Is there anything further that you would like to add to this interview or any other ideas that you would like to share?
Michael Kelly: Thanks, Derek. I'd just like to point readers to Shadows & Tall Trees, the journal I edit. As a one-person operation it is hard to get the word out. I think lovers of weird and strange fiction will enjoy the journal. As a very small independent press the only way to keep afloat is to sell copies. Issue 5 is now available at all the major online retailers. I do hope you'll take a look. I guarantee it'll be worth your time and money. You can find more info and order back copies at:
www.undertowbooks.com/issues
I want to thank Michael Kelly for this incredible conversation about Canadian Dark Fiction and being willing to share his passion for the dark and the thoughts and speculations that come out of pondering the dark.
Tagged body, body horror, challenging norms, dark fiction, David Nickle, death, Edge, fear, Gemma Files, genre questions, ghosts, haunting, Helen Marshall, horror, Ian Rogers, independent press, interviews, lonliness, Michael Kelly, Michael Rowe, Sandra Kasturi, strange stories, Tesseracts, unfamiliar body, Weird Fiction
Year in Review: What is Canadian Speculative Fiction – from the authors
People are often asking if there is such a thing as "Canadian identity", something that differentiates Canada from other nations. I thought I would ask authors if they thought that there was something distinctly Canadian about Canadian Speculative Fiction or how much they felt that their Canadian identity influenced their writing.
I have provided links to the full interviews below each author's comments so you can re-read them or, if you haven't had a chance to read them yet, to read them for the first time.
Claude Lalumiere:
"I know that [my Canadian identity] does [influence my writing], but I am not sure if I'm equipped to know how, aside from the fact that Montreal is often an important setting in my stories. On the subject of my being a Canadian writer, Paul Di Filippo, in his introduction to The Door to Lost Pages, wrote, 'Claude Lalumière is not only a universal author but a regional writer. His native Canada, specifically the city of Montreal, is as much a player in these stories as the people, even when not specifically named. There's some numinous element of these tales that acts as a counterbalance to the hegemony of US fantasy trilogies. We are hearing a voice literally from beyond the lands we (we American readers) know.'"
https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/08/01/interview-with-claude-lalumiere/
Steve Vernon:
"We Canadians are champion diehard storytellers. I mean take a look at our winters. Take a look at our television network. Take a look at our mosquitoes. What else have we got to do but to tell stories to each other?
"In some ways my Canadian identity limits me – in that it is harder to find my place in the international market. But my Canadian identity helps make me the writer that I am today. Remember – I have a half dozen regional books out at this moment from Nimbus Publishing – Nova Scotia's largest publishing network. I am also close to signing a contract with another new Canadian publisher for a series of YA horror novels. My regional books have sold in the thousands – which makes me a bestselling author in Canada."
"Nova Scotians are the true storytellers of Canada. We have an even worse selection in television, bigger mosquitos, and less opportunity for honest work. Again I ask you what else can we do but sit around and spin out yarns?"
https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/08/06/interview-with-steve-vernon/
Ian Rogers:
"Is there something that makes our stories inherently Canadian? Possibly, but it would probably take someone who isn't from here to determine that. They say you should write what you know. I agree with that, but I would add a corollary: you should also write where you know. I know Canada, specifically Toronto and the GTA, so that's where I typically set my stories."
"I like to think that Canadian authors are reclaiming the "horror" word in much the same way David Cronenberg reclaimed it for Canadian film."
https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/08/23/interview-with-ian-rogers/
Nancy Kilpatrick:
"I think my work is multi-national, multi-cultural and encompasses a lot of attitudes and values that Canadians hold to like gender equality and equal pay for equal work. For example, I'll use fairness. Canadians like to be fair and that leads to that stereotyping of people from this country always apologizing. But really, it's not so much apologizing out of guilt–as the Americans imagine–as Canadians being polite, acknowledging the other person's existence and that they, too, have rights. I think my writing incorporates that even in the conflicts of the story, even when a character is obnoxious. I try to give the characters the chance to do the right thing. If they do, they are holding to my values and the values I see around me, despite how much the current climate tends to try to erode those values."
"I'd say that in general, Canadians write with intelligence, and that includes the darker genres. They are educated and that becomes clear when you read the stories and novels. Nothing here is slapped together and I suspect that's because in the past we didn't have a horror publishing industry so writers have had to work harder, knowing their English-language markets were in the U.S. and Britain, and the French markets in France."
"Besides being thoughtful and intelligent, Canadians write from their experience. Cities here are different than cities in the U.S. For example, our citizens don't carry guns. Our landscape involves a lot of nature, which is important to Canadians, and that allows for a certain type of horror that can be both visceral and psychological. Characters in the stories and novels produced in this country — and I've read a lot of short fiction for the four anthologies I've edited for Edge (two were all Canadian authors and the other two have a goodly chunk of Canucks) and the eight before those for the U.S. market — read like real people, well-constructed, with depth and lives and thought-processes which aren't stereotyped. Because the characters are intelligent, even if a tad whimsical, readers can respect them. There's nothing worse in a horror novel or story than the clichés, for example: "Let's split up!" Stories by Canadians strike me as having characters who are loners, not necessarily out of some twisted or evil past but more because of the way we live here, a kind of self-sufficiency that isn't bitter. What I mean is, you get characters who just get on with it and deal with things to the best of their ability. And most of the time they don't have arsenals at their disposal so they have to use brain-power while coping with the emotions evoked by the horrific situation.
"Don Hutchison, who was the editor of the wonderful anthology series Northern Frights, used to say he thought Canadians wrote with a sense of place, and that might be what I'm getting at. But I think it's more. I think the place shapes the person and their world view and how they cope with everything. What I like about what I'm reading by Canadians — besides the fact that they like to slide between genres, which I find fun — is that they bring themselves to the fore and that Canadianism is recognizable. In my view, we don't need the government shoving Canadian content down our throats as if it has to be protected or die out, or shoving language down our throats, ditto the reasons. These things already exist and can stand on their own. It's who we are and it shines through in the writing. When travelling, one can usually spot travelers who are English or French or German because they are distinctive. But you can also spot Canadians because we are distinctive in our way. Canadians are nice, fair, friendly without being in your face, and honest. Why Canadians don't see and appreciate these rare qualities in themselves, I don't know, but it's also in the writing and in the books we're now producing that are in the horror/dark fantasy genre and that's one of the reasons Canadian fiction stands out."
https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/09/15/interview-with-nancy-kilpatrick/
Paul Marlowe:
"If I can depart from the standards of civil debate for a moment, I would suggest that in a country where anti-intellectualism is on the rise – where anyone interested in technology or SF is branded a geek, and where a political leader such as Stéphane Dion can be discredited amongst the public by being called "professor" by that weird gang of mediocrities, cranks, embarrassing amateurs, control-freaks, spin-doctors, and corporate sock-puppets comprising the Government – the question facing Canadian SF is: how many of us want to think?"
"It's probably premature to begin identifying what, if anything, differentiates Canadian from international steampunk. If its popularity survives for more years, then a comparison might be worthwhile. In some ways, the real history of Canada is kind of like an alternate history of the United States – we were the part of British North America that chose to stay British. Those who didn't want to become republican Americans came here as Loyalists.
"Once you get past the superficial bric-a-brac of steampunk that is common in books from various countries, the Canadian angle has interesting opportunities, since it places the reader in North America, and yet also in the greatest multinational empire that has ever been.
"For a writer of fiction, the fluid, evolving nature of the empire that Canada was a member of provides plenty of opportunities to imagine what it might have become, for better or worse, had its evolution proceeded differently."
"Not being a scholar of Canadian SF, I don't know if my forecast would be any better than those of Environment Canada since their budget cuts. It looks like SF will continue to be sidelined, culturally, for the foreseeable future, since there's a sort of literary apartheid in Canada (as in other countries), which places SF down in the lowest class where it can be disenfranchised by excluding it from the grants, prizes, reviews, media attention, and the rest of the grease and hot air that lets the literary machine chug along, hoisting books out of the shadows and into the public eye.
"Some countries, perhaps, do a bit better than Canada. In the US, where every stage of the Lit Cycle from writing to reviewing to award-giving isn't subsidized by a federal or provincial ministry of official culture, there seems to be an acknowledgement that literature consists of something beyond self-conscious nation building, lyrical tales of suicide on the prairies during the Great Depression, and other dismally "realistic" but morally uplifting fare. Coincidentally, the US also has a huge SF publishing industry, attracting writers from, among other countries, Canada. And there's probably a reason why writers like Sir Terry Pratchett appear in the UK, and not in Canada. Despite there being the same tendency to pretentious literary cliques in the UK as we have here, Pratchett was knighted (the equivalent of a Companion of the Order of Canada), his works have been performed as stage plays, as TV programmes, and on the BBC, and he won this year's Wodehouse Prize (equivalent of the Leacock Medal, but with more pigs and champagne). Writing SF requires imagination, but I'm not sure that I have enough to imagine a Canadian fantasy writer being similarly celebrated by his or her country.
"Government assistance was certainly necessary here to kindle a national book industry and literary institutions. Unfortunately for many "genre" writers, it's now simply supporting an industry that does little for them but denigrate and ignore their work. Canadian literature won't be as rich and varied as it might be until the bigotry of the industry abates. I suppose the best way for that to happen might be for more people involved in Canadian SF to sit on grant & prize juries, write reviews, and speak out when they're discriminated against, not on their literary merit, but on their choice of subject matter (or choice of friends)."
https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/09/18/an-interview-with-paul-marlowe-about-the-wellborn-conspiracy-series/
Douglas Smith:
"Well, beyond the Canadian and Toronto settings in many of my stories, now that I think of it, one of the [Canadian] themes that recurs in my work, especially the Heroka shapeshifter stories, is that of the conflict between our civilization and the natural wilderness, as our resource-based industries, which feed our cities' growing hunger for timber, water, power, minerals, and land, consumes more and more of the natural world and habitats of our wildlife. Our country has always been defined by its vast wilderness areas, and yet the huge majority of our population lives in only a few highly urbanized pockets of that vastness. So there's this destructive dichotomy between us and the land we live in–we live off of the land but we don't really live in it. But for those who do live there and for the wildlife species that live there, we're destroying more of that wilderness every year to feed the hunger of the cities. This is the central theme in The Wolf at the End of the World and in most of my other Heroka stories. The Heroka are a race of shape shifters whose vitality as a race is tied directly to the vitality of their totem animal species, species that are dwindling as their natural habitats are destroyed by logging or mining concerns, or flooded for hydro-electric projects.
"Other Canadian themes in my work include a suspicion of both corporate and political power, a suspicion that I think is greater here in Canada than, for example, in the US."
https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/interview-with-douglas-smith/
Kelley Armstrong:
"I don't think [Canadian supernatural fiction] is heading anywhere different than supernatural fiction in general, which is beginning a downswing. It will never go away completely, but the market will be smaller."
"There are differences in the [Canadian versus other nations']markets. What is a bestseller in the US will not necessarily be a bestseller in Britain. That's the same for all geographic areas—Canada also has differences from both. The literature produced in our country reflects the differences in regional taste. I'm not sure it affects the supernatural aspects of the story as much as the general ones—the tone, the themes etc."
"[My Canadian identity] makes it easier to do Canadian characters and settings 🙂 On the other hand, it makes it harder to do American ones, and that's where a lot of my stories are set, for the simple fact that I can have a larger cast of supernaturals that way—it's easier to speculate that so many supernatural beings go unnoticed if the population is much larger. Beyond that, I don't feel it's had much impact on my opportunities as an author or how I'm treated."
https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/10/17/interview-with-kelley-armstrong/
Chadwick Ginther:
"I quite enjoyed blending Canadian folklore with other myth cycles. It's a sandbox I could see myself playing in for a long time. It's easy to think that Canada doesn't have a folklore unique to our borders. But I don't think that's the case. I would love to see our own folk stories and tall tales take centre stage. I would also love to see Indigenous writers bringing modern takes on their myths and folklore to the fantasy genre. Something I've so far only really seen from Daniel Heath Justice."
"Because I so enjoyed mixing myth and Manitoba, I also hope that Thunder Road can inspire readers to look more closely at their homes to find those ties to the mythological past."
"I have to be honest, I've never thought about my work in [the] context [of its Canadian identity]. I certainly didn't set out to write the Great Canadian Fantasy novel and am woefully unfamiliar with the Canadian literary canon (perhaps if it included more dragons and robots…). I suppose one could say there is an element of the immigrant's tale to Thunder Road, not a uniquely Canadian experience, but we are a nation built by immigrants. It's one of the reasons I decided not to make Manitoba Ted [the main character from Thunder Road]'s home. Having him trying to start a new mundane life in an unfamiliar place echoed his becoming a part of the Nine Worlds, and the new fantastical life that awaited him."
https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/10/22/chadwick-ginther-interview/
Karen Dudley:
"I do believe that Canadians (myself included) have a distinctive sense of humour – part bawdy British, part self-deprecating Canadian. I'm not sure an American, for example, could have written a book like Food for the Gods. Canadians also have a reputation for being nice. I'm not sure if I'm nice or not (I like to think I am!), but as a Canadian, I can't relate to the more extreme or paranoid political cultures. This can't help but inform my work, and my characters tend to display a certain tolerance and trust in their world which matches my own."
"Apart from the same way it speaks to any modern reader, I think here in Canada, we have a unique perspective on mythologies simply because so many of us come from different cultures and traditions. That's a lot of stories, a lot of different perspectives on how we live our lives. With such an incredibly rich diversity, these myths have something to say to just about anybody regardless of which cultural tradition they come from."
https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/interview-with-karen-dudley-about-food-for-the-gods/
Liz Strange:
"I try to set a majority of my works in Canada, or at least have a Canadian character represented. Our recognition in the world as peace keepers, progressive thinkers and top providers to our citizens is very important to me. I am proud of my nationality and our country's history, and come from a long line of writers, historians, politicians and educators."
https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/11/06/interview-with-liz-strange/
Helen Marhsall:
"Canada has always seemed to me to be a place struggling with memory. Both of my parents emigrated to Canada just before I was born, my mom from South Africa and my dad from England via Zimbabwe. I didn't feel a strong connection to Canadian history. I grew up reading books about European history, reading children's literature that was grounded in mythologies that seemed very distant. Stories were things that happened in other places. As a medievalist in Canada, I find I always have to explain why I do what I do. When I go to England, they get it. Because it's a part of their history and it matters to them. I've learned to live with that dissonance."
"I think the macabre in Canadian fiction accomplishes what the macabre accomplishes in all fiction: it gives us a sense of our own mortality, of the body as something that will inevitably die. It reacquaints us with fear, and at the same time it enlivens us. Does Canada have its own unique brand of the macabre? Most definitely. Canadian literature has been traditionally considered to have a strong vein of realism to it, but the macabre, the Weird—the kind of books that ChiZine Publications has championed–are doing something to open that up. That's good. I don't believe in straitjacketing literature."
https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/11/15/interview-with-helen-marshall/
Nina Munteanu:
"Canada is a truly multi-cultural country and serves an excellent fractal microcosm for writing about mixed civilizations in the universe."
"[Canadian Speculative Fiction] tends to be darker and more reflective. With fewer happy endings… LOL! Who else but a Canadian would write a science fiction romance with a tragic ending? When I wrote The Cypol (Extasy Books) I discounted the protocol of the romance genre for happy endings. The Canadian publisher accepted the novelette, which says a lot. Even though the critics liked it, romance fans hated the book. LOL! I think that Canadian SF authors bring a dark edge to the genre that slides a bit into literary fiction. Again, perhaps why Booker prize-winner in literary fiction Margaret Atwood finds herself writing speculative fiction. Her works are a good example of what Canadian SF writers do best: infuse meaningful reflection and deep allegory in speculation. I think much of Canadian speculative fiction springs from our multi-cultural and northern setting."
"I feel a strong Canadian identity and I'm certain it imbues my main characters and the cultures I portray. Firstly, I make a point of using Canadian places as settings for my fiction (if set on Earth, that is).
"I like that Robert J. Sawyer, back in the 1980s, either set part of his novels in Canada or made at least one of his main characters a Canadian. This was in a time when it wasn't vogue for a large American publisher to set your novel outside the USA unless it was some place globally recognized, like Paris. Sawyer wasn't the only one; other notable Canadian SF authors who set their stories in Canada include Charles De Lint, Cory Doctorow and Guy Gavriel Kay."
https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/11/27/interview-with-nina-munteanu/
Nancy Baker:
"One reviewer called my characters "kinder, gentler vampires", which strikes me as very Canadian. I certainly felt that you could not have the kind of violent, predatory vampires in Toronto that seemed common in U.S. vampire fiction – though one New York writer I shared a radio panel with seemed appalled at the idea that I assumed you could leave dead bodies all over Manhattan and no one would care. However, I don't think there's any particular type of Canadian vampire. Mine might be "kinder and gentler" but those are the last words you'd use to describe the vampire in Michael Rowe's Enter, Night. One of the interesting things about that book is that the demons that must be confronted are deeply rooted in the book's Northern Ontario setting and in a part of Canadian history we're conditioned to think of as something boring to study in public school. The evocation of nature as a shaping, often inimical, force is one of the things that is considered traditionally "Canadian" and it works brilliantly in that book."
https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/12/05/interview-with-nancy-baker/
Gemma Files:
"In her book Survival, Margaret Atwood once advanced the idea that all CanLit centres around a massive, indifferent, rejecting physical landscape and our place, or lack of one, within it. And while I initially found that idea hard to go by, mainly because I was raised in one of North America's cities. One thing I've learned from teaching Canadian film history is that Canadian "culture" is mainly defined negatively, like in the old Molson's "I am Canadian" beer commercial: We don't eat blubber, we don't have a President, etc.
"Nine times out of ten, particularly in English-speaking Canada, what we're defining ourselves against is the spectre of America—if I had a dollar for every time a student of mine from somewhere else in the world asked me to admit there's basically no difference between us and the U.S., I'd eat free for at least a week. Before that, however, it was about wanting to still be part of the British Empire even after they didn't have any use for us, and these days it's about how our vaunted multiculturalism mainly provides a way for us to stay in insular little groups and only interact when forced to. Which does, in the end, actually stem from geography: We're a country the size of the former Soviet Union with a population the size of California spread out across a very disparate series of environments, most of whom still maintain they were tricked into becoming part of one country united by a railway and a radio-television network.
"When you get down to it, our national self-image is entirely imposed from the outside, a generalization cobbled together from dreams and guilt, then historically distributed through a Film Board put together by a socialist Scots expatriate who hated Hollywood and a Broadcast Corporation run from Ottawa. No wonder we're so unable to explain what sets us apart. I always think about the title of one of Alice Munro's early short story collections, Who Do You Think You Are?, because it perfectly encapsulates the sort of crushing self-doubt and left-over British class system resentment of the individual's capacity for change in the face of static stagnation that defines the heart of the non-indigenous Canadian experience. And while it's slightly different when set within an urban context, it's not even vaguely as different as most of us would like to think.
"Which is all a very roundabout way of saying that there's a big empty place in the Canadian psyche that takes extremely well to fantasy. Hell, even our "non-genre" literature tends to have a massive streak of surrealism and magic realism in it—think about the work of Michael Ondaatje (a poet turned prose writer, which happens a lot up here), Wayson Choy, Paul Quarrington, Derek McCormack, Michael Helm, Anne-Marie McDonald, Barbara Gowdy, Margaret Laurence, Anne Hébert, Atwood herself. But whether you're talking about Charles de Lint and Guy Gavriel Kay or Susie Moloney, Andrew Pyper and Michael Rowe, our fantasy tends to be rooted in the uncomfortable, the self-reflective, the place where power and freedom come with a price, one that must be paid knowingly, and in blood. We accept coincidence and synchronicity, but also understand hubris, and karma. We expect doom at best, failure at worst. It's bleak, but it's familiar, especially to somebody who likes horror."
https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/12/13/interview-with-gemma-files/
Jerome Stueart:
"I think Canadian SF is darker and more experimental than mainstream American SF. I think the publishing industry allows for more kinds of individual author development—we have smaller publishers with greater weight in Canada. In the States, where every microgenre gets codified and calcified, I see a lot more of the same stuff coming out for consumers. I see a lot more undefinable genre in Canadian SF. A freedom because, partly, there's not a lot of fame on the table, but also because there's a desire to create a Canadian SF. It looks like we're nowhere near nailing a specific kind of SF, though, more inviting people to play. Look at Evolve from Edge—the SF future of vampires; look at anything Chizine is doing, which is so out there! It massacres genre-expectations. It also gives authors so much freedom.
"Canada has the opportunity to show what the future of Canada will be through SF, and use our regional identities as a way to forge a truly unique version of Canadian SF."
https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/12/18/interview-with-jerome-stueart/
Tagged anti-intellectualism, apologies, Canadian history, Canadian Identity, Chadwick Ginther, ChiZine, Claude Lalumiere, Diversity, Douglas Smith, education, fantasy, Gemma Files, gender, Helen Marshall, horror, Ian Rogers, Jerome Stueart, Karen Dudley, Kelley Armstrong, Landscape, Liz Strange, macabre, Manitoba, Margaret Atwood, memory, Montreal, multiculturalism, myth, Nancy Baker, Nancy Kilpatrick, nationality and SF, nature, Nina Munteanu, Nova Scotia, Paul Marlowe, place and identity, regional, Science Fiction, Steve Vernon, story-telling, Toronto, urban fantasy, winter
Year in Review: Speculative Fiction Versus Realist Fiction – from the authors
Well, we have had an amazing year in 2012 on Speculating Canada…. one could even describe it as a fantastic year. Although Speculating Canada has only been around since July, it has been an incredible opportunity to explore Canadian Speculative Fiction and explore the incredible amounts of knowledge that authors bring into the world and lens that they place on exploring social issues.
Re-reading all of the interview posts, I am reminded of how incredible these interviews were and the gems of information and insight that writers have provided. I hope you enjoy being re-enlightened by our authors. Every interview I have done has been an incredible learning experience for me.
Author photo courtesy of Claude Lalumiere
"So many authors who work within realism do not realize that they are operating within the confines of a genre with very specific rules and tropes. I'm not a fan of realism's hegemonic stature in literature and culture in general. There's nothing inferior about romance (in the classical sense) or escapism. All fiction is literature, all fiction is art. That doesn't mean that all of it is good, but there's good stuff and bad stuff in all genres, including realism.
"Fantastic fiction (as I like to call it) does have the quality of seeming to have no restrictions whatsoever. And that journey into the unknown can be thrilling, dangerous, intoxicating, wondrous – or, best of all, all of that at once."
"My fiction tends to ask questions, not provide answers."
Author photo courtesy of Steve Vernon
"Monster stories help instill the belief that the human spirit can will out and triumph over the power of evil."
"I've long been fascinated with seeing how ordinary people deal with the face of evil. That's who my favorite characters are – just regular downhome kind of people. I like to imagine them brave and wild and romantic and full of life – because we all have that potential buried deep inside ourselves. So – when I sat down to write Sudden Death Overtime I just took the toughest people I had ever dreamed of and threw them up against the forces of darkness."
Author photo courtesy of Ian Rogers
"I've always said that if people are only interested in my work purely as entertainment, then I'm cool with that. I think every story needs to keep the reader amused as the first goal. If your story is full of theme and depth, but it's boring as all hell, then who cares how deep your work is, or how much inner meaning there is, because no one's going to bother to read it anyway! And quite frankly, if you are consciously trying to pound a message or meaning into your story, I assure you it's going to come across that way to the reader and they will be turned off. Guaranteed. The best stories with meaning or theme or depth are the ones that allow the readers to come to those conclusions naturally and on their own terms."
"When I write a story I'm trying to come up with something that, while entertaining, also makes some sort of sense. It doesn't mean I believe in ghosts or monsters, but it's important that my characters do. Part of building a world where these things exist is to cement them in the world I know."
"I've always felt that it's the little things, and the little "real" things, that truly make a story. Sometimes it's realistic dialogue, sometimes it's a strange habit of one of the characters. Whatever it is, it's usually a small touch, but it goes a long way toward making the reader feel more at home in the story, and consequently more accepting of the fantasy you're trying to give them."
"I think most people have an inherent attraction to the fantastical. Ironically, the spec fic stories I like best are the ones that are rooted in some semblance of reality. The ones that seem like they could actually happen. In terms of horror fiction, I find that sense of realism adds to the feeling of terror and dread."
"I think there's more to horror fiction that a monster or a supernatural element. Lots of things that may not seem horrific on the surface can be turned into a horror story. That's one of the great things about horror. It's insidious in the way it can sneak into a story — a story that might not be neatly slotted in the Horror section at the local bookstore."
Author photo courtesy of Nancy Kilpatrick
"We've become politically correct, which isn't always repression. Sometimes it entails a true acceptance of 'other', the 'other' being someone or something that is not us and previously was suspect and/or frightening. Because we no longer see strangers as monstrous, we no longer see monsters as strangers."
"I'm focused on readers first. My readers are not run-of-the-mill people. They are smart and like my dark take on material."
Author Photo courtesy of Paul Marlowe
"There was a time when it was considered normal to imagine the future of Canada, and to work towards building that future. Now, with it more important than ever to imagine alternative futures, we avoid it, because taking the future seriously would require making drastic changes right now in the lifestyle of affluence and luxury we enjoy, and would require terrible sacrifices – like driving our cars less, or not taking that flight to Florida. We've grown used to thinking of sacrifice as someone else's job.
"Speculative fiction has as one of its goals the imagination of alternative futures. It also reconsiders the past. Not infrequently it raises big questions. By sidelining it, and focusing exclusively on fiction dealing either with the present and the narrowly personal, or resuscitating yesterday's controversies, we're avoiding some of the major problems – like global warming, population, distribution of wealth, mass extinction, the ethics of technology, the role of government in pursuing the common good, the increasing alienation of people from their own governments, the individual vs the group, and threats to individual privacy – that will dominate history in the coming generations. While speculative fiction doesn't exist simply to prophesy or to provide political stimulus, it offers the opportunity for those kinds of explorations."
"By looking past immediate present experience at possible worlds, good SF can offer what is so needed but so little found: intelligent thought about the world beyond our own little rut. The problem it faces is whether anyone is interested in hearing what SF writers have to say, and whether – in the welter of distraction that we're immersed in – stories make any real difference."
"If SF is to have an influence not only on where Canada is heading, but on where humanity is heading, it will have to do something other than shock us will apocalyptic visions, since those have become entertainment. It will have to make us think."
"If the books contain thought-provoking ideas, too, so much the better. In that environment, SF is not at such a disadvantage."
"The criticism often levelled at SF by Lit types and by more literal-minded readers – that it is "mere escapism" – has less sting when directed at YA books because adults sometimes condescend to allow children the opportunity to indulge in frivolous pass-times, such as imagination."
Author photo courtesy of Douglas Smith
"I don't really differentiate between the human and non-human characters. Writing a story for me means understanding my characters and telling the story via their journeys through it. An alien may be completely different from us in physiology, intelligence, culture, spiritual beliefs, and moral code, but all sentient creatures will be motivated by something, both as a race and as individuals. It's just a matter of understanding what is important to a character."
"If there is a social issue that a writer wishes to explore and bring attention to, speculative fiction provides the freedom through its "distorted mirror" to let a writer bring whatever focus they desire to that issue. I really see no limits. Rather, I think that SF&F offer more options for doing so than within the restrictions of mainstream mimetic fiction."
"Fantasy or SF can use other worlds–future or alternate–to focus on aspects of our real world, our shared beliefs, our conflicting beliefs, our humanity, our inhumanity, our potential, our failings, to let us view ourselves through a different lens, at a slightly different angle. Speculative fiction, by the very nature of its unreality, can make us see our reality in ways that mimetic fiction cannot. How we relate to those views, which messages resonate with us as individual readers, can then tell us something about ourselves."
"I think that the [Speculative Fiction] genre's greatest power as a literature is, to paraphrase the great SF anthologist Damon Knight, to hold up a distorted mirror to our current reality, to focus on some aspect of our world which needs to change (in the writer's opinion). It's that "if this goes on…" type of story that allows SF to provide a social commentary in a way that mimetic fiction cannot.
"That's the power of SF and fantasy (and I'd put SF as a specific subset of fantasy)–there are fewer (no?) limitations to the types of stories that I can tell. The stories still need an internal logic and consistency, but I'm not bound by any concerns of matching current reality. That is wonderfully freeing for a writer."
Photo of Derek Newman-Stille and Kelley Armstrong at Trent University's Alumni House
"The supernatural can be a way of showing people dealing with issues in a larger-than-life fashion. I often have issues of identity in mine—finding one's true self, accepting the self, finding one's place in society. Having a character deal with being, for example, a werewolf lets me do that in a fun and entertaining way."
"Speculative fiction helps expand the world of possibilities. Readers—and students—see new possibilities for new ways of thinking and living. The fact that it takes place in a fantastical world often makes it easier to consider those challenges and issues, divorced from the emotional baggage of a reader's own world or experience. For example, science fiction novels often include elements of racism—how does one alien race treat another—and that allows readers to consider the issues in an abstract way and then transfer those ideas over to the realm of their own world and experience."
Author photo courtesy of Chadwick Ginther
"People call speculative fiction "escapist," as if that is a bad thing. I live a realistic life. Why would I want to spend my time writing about only the drudgery of everyday. I want things to happen. Things that couldn't happen to me. But that doesn't mean good prose has to be sacrificed for plot. With mythic fiction, and really all of speculative fiction, I can have my cake and eat it too. I can have an exploration of deep philosophical issues or the nature of humanity side by side with big, bold ideas and an action-packed read. I can't think of another art form that blends the two sensibilities better than speculative fiction does. Besides which, all fiction is fantasy. Even if a writer is basing a story on real events or real people, they are inventing thoughts and feelings and the little details. Fiction by definition isn't true, but it can hold truth—even when you're writing about the god of lies."
"I don't think Mythology will ever stop being relevant. It was our ancestors' way of trying to explain what they couldn't understand. At their core, people have the same basic desires, faults and virtues as we ever have, some of us are kind, some jealous; we'll always be able to see something of ourselves in these stories from the past. Otherwise the myths would have faded with their original tellers."
Author photo courtesy of Karen Dudley
"[Writing Speculative Fiction] can liberate you! I've written four contemporary mystery novels, and when I started to write Food for the Gods, it took me a while to realize that I didn't have to be limited by reality. Gods crashing dinner parties? No problem. Furies attacking the Athenian marketplace? Why not? It was incredibly freeing. As a writer, speculative fiction allows you to take your characters that much further. They're still human, of course (well, most of them are), but you're taking them beyond the normal human experience and seeing how they deal with it. It's a lot of fun!
"The truth is that mythology spells out all the things we want, fear, hope, and dream in pretty basic imagery and themes. These are not timeworn tales with nothing to say to us, because our fears and desires really haven't changed since these stories were born. They illuminate us, they transform us. That's why 'old' myths still resonate."
Author photo courtesy of Liz Strange
"The monster is romantic and sympathetic, because it lives in all of us. Human beings are complicated, challenging, frustrating, wondrous beings, capable of many things both inspiring and horrifying."
"I like my readers to be entertained, first and foremost, but I also like to spark some interest in things they may never have thought of before. I like to intrigue, incite curiosity and challenge people to think outside their comfort zone. The world is a big place, full of wonder, mystery, beauty and misery."
Helen Marshall:
Author Photo Courtesy of Helen Marshall
"Weird fiction, at its best, unsettles us. Realist fiction can also do that, but that isn't necessarily its goal. I love the idea of a kind of writing designed deliberately to shock, to surprise, to unbalance and unnerve. It has a kind of intensity to it, and it makes us consider ourselves from oblique angles rather than head-on."
"For me ghosts are terrifying because they are us. What I see when I look at a ghost is myself. And so if the ghost is really just an image of your own future—that is, you when you are dead, the you that you can't comprehend or imagine—then in some way you are also the ghost of your own future self. We leave things behind, and mostly those things are former versions of ourselves. It seems natural, then, that ghosts are also a figure for something that wants to be remembered, even if we want desperately to forget it."
"What I try to do is find a bizarre premise and use it as a way into something that is deeply emotional: every new oddity ought to feel like a natural extension of the rules of the world. It feels like it fits. For me, the process of writing strange fiction is falling into a world where each new revelation comes with a shock—but also with a sense of recognition."
Author photo courtesy of Nina Munteanu
"The literature of the fantastic: speculative literature, science fiction, fantasy… explore—nay—celebrate and bridge the gap between logic and imagination, the mundane and the extraordinary, the known and the strange, order and infinite possibility."
"Curiosity is a wonderful trait to cultivate. When you're curious you step outside of yourself into a wonderful world. One of the things I re-learned from my son was how to stop and look. Really look, as in bend down on hands and knees and peer close, get dirty. Curiosity feeds our souls. It slows us down so we can pay attention. It teaches us to be interested in our world, to observe and feel. It helps us crawl outside the box, peer around corners into dark alleys where thrilling adventure lurks."
"The science fiction genre is the pre-eminent literature of allegory and metaphor. By describing "the other" (what does not yet exist, what might never exist) science fiction writers describe "us". Through our POV characters and their world's reactions to the unknown.
"Speculative fiction predicts consequence to current conditions. It projects into the future or alternate reality from current paradigms in science, technology and society. Speculative fiction uses the premise, "What if?": "What if this continued?" "What if we used that this way?"; "What if this caused that?". It provides the proverbial "canary in the mine" on society. Where realist fiction makes commentary on our current society, speculative fiction takes that commentary into the realm of consequence by showing it to us in living colour. It is the ghost of future, present and past to our Scrooge. The arm of speculative fiction reaches far. This is its power over realist fiction and why, I think, mainstream realist authors like Margaret Atwood have discovered and embraced this genre (her latest three books are all speculative fiction). Speculative fiction doesn't just "tell us"; it can "show us"."
Author photo courtesy of Nancy Baker
"At its best, horror and fantastic literature can show us the darkness that humans are capable of and to reveal that the reader shares that potential. It can also show us that the "other" is sometimes as deserving of compassion as we hope that we are."
"Vampire fiction has been used to look at issues of addiction, oppression, disease, predation, and sexuality. It's also been used just to scare the hell out of us. Every new generation of readers and writers has the advantage of looking at what came before (from the classics such as Carmilla and Dracula to Salem's Lot and Interview with the Vampire to Twilight and The Passage) and reacting to it, either by emulating it or turning it on its head.
Author photo courtesy of Gemma Files
"Because I work primarily in the field of horror, the idea of the Alien—the Other—is a really integral one, one which underlies an amazing amount of human psychology. You see it all through history, and it's not like it's gone away: This impulse to say some people are different and therefore lesser, undeserving of sympathy, actively malign—people we can call animals, monsters, and feel perfectly fine about routinely trying to contain, police, punish or even exterminate. But the flip-side of this impulse is the realization that "monsters", Others, Aliens are almost never as different from you as they seem. That you, in fact, are most often a monster's "monster".
"This is a hard lesson, but a useful one, and Speculative Fiction explores it constantly, over and over. And it does that, I believe, because people both know in their gut that it's true yet hope against hope that it's not. This tension drives almost everything, and it's testing this tension which is Speculative Fiction's most useful quality, potentially: Our ability to tell and re-tell ourselves metaphorical fables about the things that are happening all around us, set in some pleasantly distant future, past or alternative universe, which may possibly help us to make good decisions about the here and now."
"Magic is a fantasy of ultimate power in a mainly-powerless world, but our own self-knowledge quotient means that we know the shadow lurks underneath everything—that whatever good we do by magic means is bound to sour, especially if improperly paid for. We've all read most of the same fairytales, so the principles always seem familiar: Horror is fluid, and just like in folklore, the general principle of horror is not only that things can always change, but that if—when—they do, it'll probably be something that you did which is the cause of that change. Which is sort of positive, in a way…therapeutic, almost. Monstrosity is not a permanent state, or doesn't have to be, so long as one understands but doesn't excuse one's own nature and takes responsibility for one's own actions."
Author photo courtesy of Jerome Stueart
"Speculation is about seeing natural consequences, about thinking about choices and figuring out where they will lead, and about large-scale societal consequences. I think speculative fiction is the reason we don't condone cloning, or have nuclear war—science fiction showed us that there are no good ways of having those, and we believed them. Silent Spring is a "speculative novel" written as nonfiction by Rachel Carson with such an apocalyptic vision of the dangers of DDT and other chemicals we were putting on crops and in the air—with real evidence– that it scared people into regulation. Carson used speculative tools to give reason to turn the boat around.
"Unfortunately, speculation in the wrong hands can just be fear-mongering. Recent commercials against Obama speculated a world four years from now full of apocalypse! Without any evidence. It was cheap scare tactics, but they worked on some people who couldn't extrapolate from evidence, or who couldn't question the premises or the evidence. I saw that in both political parties. If we don't "produce" thinking minds—in every place in society—fear mongering will work, evidence won't count. That scares me.
"Climate Change has to find a way to alert people to change without becoming alarmist—but we have a society less-inclined to think for themselves now, and less-inclined to value knowledge and preventative measures. We're all about reacting now. We're all about consuming. We're living like it's the last days on Earth and we want our feast. Anyone who says we have to "cut back" which is the message of climate change—restraint—is taking away "our fun." We are such a Mine Culture, not a Mind Culture. We may live together, but we don't think together.
"I would put MORE speculative literature in the classroom starting with Kim Stanley Robinson's climate change series, Science in the Capital—or his Three Californias. I would teach kids to imagine their own futures—what will they be doing 20 years from now, and what will society be like. What do they WANT society to be like? And where do they see the forces in control trying to lead us? Kids can be taught to think speculatively and use it wisely. "
"I think SF can help us get ready for change, and see change as positive and desirable. We get in our ruts. If we want the Star Trek universe—we're gonna have to work for it. LOL. But I think it can examine multiple paths for us—examining all possible scenarios and showing us a positive path.
"The danger of SF, though, is that it inherently likes NOT so positive paths. They present more of what readers desire: conflict, danger, suspense. So we get much more apocalyptic SF which shows us what NOT to do, but rarely shows us HOW to get to the change.
"The challenge for SF writers is to imagine us a path to get to the change and show it as a positive one. And that I think is the most fun. Star Trek cheated a bit by shooting so far in the future that all those things like poverty, greed, violence, were all gone by the 24th century. We've been spending the last 45 years trying to figure out how Gene thought that might happen! But at least it modeled diversity for us. I recall Nichelle Nichols' wonderful story of her encounter with Martin Luther King, Jr. just before she was about to quit the show. He encourages her to stay on because he too believes that SF is the literature of change. He saw her presence on the bridge as a model for behavior and hope for a positive future beyond Race. So in this way, SF is a model for change—it models good behavior, even if it doesn't have all the answers."
"Maybe that's the greatest strength of SF—it has a wide angled lens. SF is about commenting on societal problems more than character problems. Maybe that's why the characters can be more universal, and sometimes flatter, because SF is interested in the "what if" of the story—the what if of the society. It can handle a universal character because the society is what we want to examine in SF, and the choices a society makes.
"But again, it also has a chance to be more society-scaled prescriptive—and model societal behavior and model change that realistic fiction can't. SF is the quantum reality of realistic fiction. While realistic fiction might concentrate on individuals and their changes, SF goes wide to take the choices and changes of a large group."
Noah Chinn:
Author photo courtesy of Noah Chinn
"You're not constrained by reality to get your message across. You could write a story about banning books in a realistic fiction story set in modern day, sure. But what if you wanted to take it further to get your point across? It would be of hard to write something with the impact of Fahrenheit 451 without creating a society in which all books are banned. You need to think not only of why, but what form that world would take, how people live their lives, the consequences of that culture on people's behavior, and so on. You need to create a world that doesn't exist, but you can believe could – even if only for the duration of the story."
https://speculatingcanada.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/interview-with-noah-chinn/
Tagged Chadwick Ginther, Claude Lalumiere, Douglas Smith, Gemma Files, Helen Marshall, Ian Rogers, interviews, Jerome Stueart, Karen Dudley, Kelley Armstrong, Liz Strange, Nancy Baker, Nancy Kilpatrick, Nina Munteanu, Noah Chinn, Paul Marlowe, SF versus Realist, Steve Vernon
Interview with Gemma Files
An Interview with Gemma Files By Derek Newman-Stille
Gemma Files' short stories have fascinated me for some time, and, although I have just begun reading her Hexslinger Series I am excited to read the rest of the series, but I couldn't wait to interview her and get some insights from her to share with readers. I am happy that she was willing to do an interview and I hope that you enjoy reading about the mix of life experience and love of literature that was involved in the alchemical process of creating this fascinating author. I will let Ms. Files introduce herself below.
Gemma Files: I was born in London, England (within the sound of Bow Bells, which ostensibly makes me a Cockney, though try telling that to a British person), but have been a Canadian citizen since at least the age of two, and have lived all my life in Toronto, Ontario. My parents, Gary Files and Elva Mai Hoover, are both actors. I have a B.A.A. in Magazine Journalism from Ryerson University, and graduated straight into a recession, which is why—after working as both a security guard and the floor attendant in an upscale sex shop—I only got a permanent job "in my field" by the time I was roughly 25 years old. My later career includes eight years as a film critic (for Toronto's eye Weekly) plus ten years teaching film history, Canadian film history and screenwriting at the Trebas Institute and the Toronto Film School. But all throughout this same time-period I was writing and selling short stories, five of which were turned into episodes of Tony and Ridley Scott's erotic horror anthology TV series The Hunger (1997-2000), and two of which I adapted for the screen myself.
In 2008, I lost my job when the TFS shut down, an event which coincided with my son being diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder; I spent roughly a year being depressed and acting as his intervener, writing very little except for fan fiction. My friends and professional contacts had been telling me for years that I should "graduate" to novel-writing, because that's where the money/recognition is, but it really wasn't until this particular confluence of events that I eventually decided it was time to take the plunge into long-form narrative, so in January of 2009 I began work on what would become A Book of Tongues, Volume One of my Hexslinger Series. By April I had seven chapters and an outline, on the basis of which I sold it to ChiZine Publications, delivering a first draft in November. Amusingly, I was still working off that original outline both all through the second book (A Rope of Thorns) and when I finally finished the final book of what had become a trilogy (A Tree of Bones), in February of 2012.
That said, I've always been a writer. My earliest memories are of telling myself stories about characters I particularly loved from the books I read, the movies and TV I watched, the media I consumed…serial stories, usually, jam-packed with questionable content. And though I made a few detours here and there, mainly based on some odd ideas about avoiding working freelance like my parents, I suppose I always knew—read "hoped"—that right here would be where I was going to eventually end up: Pursuing my dreams while working from home, with lying to myself for fun at last my only official "job".
Spec Can: You show a passion for horror, dark fantasy, and weird fiction in your own creative work, and in your reviews. What inspires your love of the horrific?
Cover photo of A Tree Of Bones courtesy of ChiZine Publications
Gemma Files: For me, believe it or not, it's a form of comfort food. Horror forms a far wider spectrum than most people seem to think, in general; I remember back when I was first telling people that I wanted to write horror films, they'd immediately say: "Oh, like Friday the 13th?" (this gives you some idea of how long ago we're talking about), and when I'd reply: "No, like Clive Barker's Hellraiser," they'd have no idea what the difference was. The horror I admire has always lain fairly securely at the Edgar Allen Poe/H.P. Lovecraft/M.R. James/Shirley Jackson end of things, rather than the Richard Laymon/Ed Lee/goreno-splatterpunk end—I like Peter Straub just as much as Stephen King, and my primary triptych of modern influences are people like Kathe Koja (Skin), Poppy Z. Brite (Exquisite Corpse) and Caitlin R. Kiernan (The Drowning Girl). So while my content may indeed graze some pretty gross stuff, what I'm after overall is a sort of poetry and high drama, a creeping dread and emotional punch, a love of language rooted in the appreciation of the odd. I like fatalism, not nihilism, and the idea of a world with fairly clear magical-metaphorical-moral rules in which people often work through their obsessions physically just makes me happy, occasionally in my pants. In other words, I like opera.;)
Spec Can: What can horror offer readers?
Gemma Files: Back when I was still interviewing people like Wes Craven (for his New Nightmare, if I recall correctly, the single most meta of all the Nightmare on Elm Street series instalments), I remember him saying that horror provides a safe space for audience members to play out their worst fears, to work through all life's potential traumas and emerge at the other side victorious, if only because they've done so and survived. And I do think that idea has a lot of merit—just like the way people often conflate finding horror media triggery with somehow being a morally good person is interesting to me, because its inverse implies that there's something "wrong" with those who don't feel the same way.
The idea often seems to be that by consuming horror, you're damaging yourself somehow, stamping out your softer feelings, making it impossible to get the same charge out of milder stuff. I don't believe that, however, any more than I believe consuming romance either develops or retards a reader's understanding of love—entertainment and experience are two completely different things. And again, if you're taking the entire spectrum of horror into account, there are just as many admirable people in it as terrible people, not that I necessarily think finding or creating role models is the point, in terms of storytelling.
In the end, I guess, to me it's like having the guts to call the yoga pose savasana "corpse posture." Horror makes us think about things we'd often prefer not to, like mortality, impermanence, responsibility, randomness, the darker emotions we all share—to look at these things head-on, consider them and then realize they're neither the be-all nor the end-all of human existence. Or just enjoy watching the blood spray for a while, whichever comes first.
Spec Can: Your work shows an intense interest in the monstrous. Why are monstrous figures so fascinating for readers?
Gemma Files: Because we all hope we're not monsters, while simultaneously wishing that we were. Magic is a fantasy of ultimate power in a mainly-powerless world, but our own self-knowledge quotient means that we know the shadow lurks underneath everything—that whatever good we do by magic means is bound to sour, especially if improperly paid for. We've all read most of the same fairytales, so the principles always seem familiar: Horror is fluid, and just like in folklore, the general principle of horror is not only that things can always change, but that if—when—they do, it'll probably be something that you did which is the cause of that change. Which is sort of positive, in a way…therapeutic, almost. Monstrosity is not a permanent state, or doesn't have to be, so long as one understands but doesn't excuse one's own nature and takes responsibility for one's own actions.
Spec Can: The Hexslinger series that you have published with ChiZine is in the Weird Western genre. What got you interested in Weird Westerns? What brings the magical and the West together?
Cover Photo for A Book of Tongues courtesy of the publisher
Gemma Files: In the case of the Hexslinger Series, it just so happened that I had spent the previous year doing a fair amount of research on life in 1860s America just before, during and after the Civil War, mainly because the last two fandoms I'd passed through were for Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York and James Mangold's remake of 3:10 to Yuma. The latter is the reason that I've never made any bones about Chess Pargeter's physical template being Charlie Prince (as played by Ben Foster), the ambiguously gay sidekick of Russell Crowe's villain-turned-antihero Ben Wade—though his personality became all his own very quickly, since even just making him aware of his own sexuality means he's light-years ahead of where poor Charlie was.
But I've always liked Westerns, and I love the idea of adding magic to them, because it doesn't seem so out of place. I think it has to do with the general feeling of infinite expansion and preordained diminution that comes along with the whole Western package—these stories take place in an indefinite space, where the outside is mammoth and the inside cramped, and nothing is (as yet) fully fixed. So why not posit that you're just as likely to meet zombies around the next mesa, or werewolves, witches, vampires, mad scientists, anaye, Mayan-Mexica gods? Even technology was pretty suspect; the revolver must've seemed like magic, just because you no longer had to reload for six whole bullets.
Spec Can: Your Hexslinger series deals with a gay couple and many of your short stories deal with LGBTQ2 characters? What inspires your interest in queer characters?
Gemma Files: Again, I've always been pretty clear about the fact that my interest in two guys together is a genuine fetish. I've had it since I first began fixating on things sexually, and it forms the cornerstone of my own understanding of desire. Which is, grantedly, a bit weird, since I'm otherwise a functionally heterosexual, cisgender female, but God knows, the Internet has long since proven that I'm hardly the only one out there.
However, I am also very interested in the idea of inclusion, of representation, because—like a lot of people who fall intersectionally against the mainstream default—I'm tired of a world of media which concentrates exclusively on the concerns and interactions of white heterosexual males. When I was younger, I used to react against the fact that the female characters in any given narrative seemed to always be very securely restricted to supporting roles only—the wife, the child, the lure, the obstacle/bitch, the traumatic inciting incident—by recasting male characters as female in my mind, but as I got older I realized you could, in fact, start recasting everybody if you wanted to, thus "fixing" the multitude of similar clichés mainstream storytelling routinely perpetrates on different types of people.
I was also somewhat inspired by proudly gay SFF author Hal Duncan's remarks about Brokeback Mountain, in which he essentially said he just wanted to see a story about two bad-ass gay people being bad-ass together, having lots of sex and not dying for it. And while I may have slipped up on the "not dying" part a time or two, I feel like in the Hexslinger series—particularly as per Chess and his homme fatale lover, faithless preacher-turned-outlaw magician Reverend Rook—I really did try my best.
Spec Can: What can authors be doing to further 'Queer' Speculative Fiction?
Gemma Files: Try writing not queer characters, so much, as characters who happen to be queer, along with all the other qualities that define them. Try to see queer characters as being not the exception but actually the rule, in terms of human diversity—I mean, even going by the classic "7% of everyone you encounter is probably gay" rule, that means that any one of the characters you may have loved and wanted to emulate might have been the sort of person mainstream media teaches us is weird, unnatural and unlikely. So run with that thesis, and see what happens.
But then again, as I've said, I have no huge interest in role models; I like a full range of human capacity, with characters who run the moral spectrum and don't necessarily stay where they're put. In terms of Chess, for example, I've had readers decry the fact that he's a violent, unforgiving man who tends to shoot first and like it, exulting in his enemies' pain, but no one's ever complained about the pride he takes in himself and his unapologetic zest for life, as well as the verve with which he pursues his desires. This is a guy who starts as a villain and ends up as an antihero at best, but discovers himself capable of far more kindness and sympathy than he'd ever been led to believe he could muster. Even his innate perversity, that contrary impulse to do the opposite of what other people think he's likely to, becomes a virtue rather than a fault when it's used to others' benefit rather than in the service of his own selfishness.
In other words, don't feel as though representation "has to be" positive or negative. Avoid hagiography and demonization. Just let the people you write be who they turn out to be, and enjoy the result.
Spec Can: How can Speculative Fiction open readers' minds to further diversity?
Cover photo of A Rope Of Thorns courtesy of the ChiZine Publications
Gemma Files: Because I work primarily in the field of horror, the idea of the Alien—the Other—is a really integral one, one which underlies an amazing amount of human psychology. You see it all through history, and it's not like it's gone away: This impulse to say some people are different and therefore lesser, undeserving of sympathy, actively malign—people we can call animals, monsters, and feel perfectly fine about routinely trying to contain, police, punish or even exterminate. But the flip-side of this impulse is the realization that "monsters", Others, Aliens are almost never as different from you as they seem. That you, in fact, are most often a monster's "monster".
Spec Can: What mythologies influence your work and how does mythology continue to be fascinating to readers? What does the mythic add?
Gemma Files: Well, for myself, I've just always loved it. I'm a huge fan of folklore from around the world—some of the first books I remember loving as a kid were the D'Aullaires' Book of Greek Myths and Norse Gods and Giants, along with books about Ancient Egypt and other archaeological finds, including stories of the Mexica (then called the Aztecs) and Maya.I wasn't raised with any sort of religion, so it's all grist for the mill to me, equally accessible; again, I can only think we tell ourselves these tales of gods and heroes, monsters and villains and the many ways one can blur back and forth into the other for a reason, which is why—especially in an age of fandom—we can be equally passionate about The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars as we are about the Qu'ran or the Bible. Thus making every story a sort of myth, really.
Spec Can: Is there something distinctive about Canadian Speculative Fiction? What is distinctive about it?
Gemma Files: In her book Survival,Margaret Atwood once advanced the idea that all CanLit centres around a massive, indifferent, rejecting physical landscape and our place, or lack of one, within it. And while I initially found that idea hard to go by, mainly because I was raised in one of North America's cities. One thing I've learned from teaching Canadian film history is that Canadian "culture" is mainly defined negatively, like in the old Molson's "I am Canadian" beer commercial: We don't eat blubber, we don't have a President, etc.
Spec Can: Where do you see Canadian horror going from here?
Gemma Files: Well, it certainly helps that some of my best friends and colleagues are horror writers who happen to be Canadian, but I see it becoming more and more prevalent. The success that CZP has had since Brett Alexander Savory and Sandra Kasturi started it up is nothing short of amazing, and while they don't deal entirely with Canadian authors, the work they've done to increase our visibility world-wide cannot be undercut. Similarly, I can't think of anyone who would deny that David Cronenberg created an entire school of (cold, minimalist, body-based) horror that is still influencing new filmmakers today—I'd love it if any given Canadian horror author could have that sort of genre-wide impact. Actually, I'd love to be that author, though I think it highly unlikely.
Spec Can: What frightens you most and how do your fears influence your fiction writing?
Gemma Files: I'm afraid of the same things that everyone else is, probably—death, pain, bodily decay, the loss of love, the uncertainty of the future. I fear for others, especially my son, who has special needs; I fear what I'm capable of, and incapable of, in almost equal measure. And yes, I'd say that all these fears are played out in my writing. It's a safe enough place for it.
Spec Can: Do your characters ever take you to places that you didn't intend to go? Do they take on personalities of their own?
Gemma Files: Always. Writing is an alchemical process, a process of exploration. I love it when things shift on me. A lot of the time, I have a very clear idea of where a story starts and where it ends, but almost no idea of not only how to get from one point to the other, but why these things have to happen. And those questions are almost always answered by the characters themselves. So long as I can stay true to who they are, and not "make" them do anything false to their own natures, I'm satisfied, no matter the outcome.
Spec Can: Is there anything further that you would like to add to conclude our interview?
Gemma Files: Not really. Thank you for the opportunity to introduce myself, and speak at (no doubt) tedious length about the things which move and drive me.
I want to thank Gemma Files for this fantastic and insightful interview. I really appreciate her insights on LGBTQ2 characters in literature, the future of Canadian horror, and her willingness to really describe herself. You can find out more about Gemma Files at her websites https://sites.google.com/site/thegemmafiles/ and http://musicatmidnight-gfiles.blogspot.ca/ .
Tagged Canadian media, ChiZine, Diversity, fan fiction, Gemma Files, horror, interviews, LGBTQ2, myth, queer, sex, teaching, Weird Fiction, Weird Western