Interfictions (41 page)

Dora: We could also include Colin Greenland's “Timothy” in the list of stories with fairy tale elements. Remember all the fairy tales in which men turn into animals, and animals turn into men? The most familiar example is probably “Beauty and the Beast.” You could read “Timothy” as a modern “Beauty and the Beast,” in which Beauty is a suburban housewife and the Beast is her household cat. I give this example to show how a story that seems so different from a fairy tale can still carrying the memory of a fairy tale within it—at least for me. And I agree with Delia that neither “Rats” nor “Black Feather” reminds me of other fairy tale retellings I have read. To the extent that fairy tale retellings have become a sort of sub-genre, these stories play with its conventions.

Why did you think it was important to include stories from writers outside the United States?

Dora: If we were going to cross borders, I thought we should certainly cross the most obvious ones—geographical borders. In a way, writing interstitial fiction outside the United States may be easier—there are national traditions of fiction that could be considered interstitial, exemplified by writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, and Milan Kundera. If we have that sort of tradition in the United States, it seems to me underdeveloped and undervalued. But publishing interstitial fiction may be harder, particularly if you're writing in a language spoken by millions, not billions, of people. I was thrilled to receive submissions from Hungary, where I was born, and to include a story by a Hungarian writer, Csilla Kleinheincz. Even before I read “A Drop of Raspberry,” I was intrigued by the description, in her letter, of a story “about love between a man and a lake, and the futility of keeping up long conversations with someone who freezes over in the winter.” This description points to what I perceive as the story's interstitiality: the way in which it functions both as metaphor and as an absolutely realistic description of the problems you might encounter if you fell in love with a lake. I don't know if other readers will hear this, but for me, “A Drop of Raspberry,” “When It Rains, You'd Better Get Out of Ulga,” and “Emblemata” all have particular sounds, as though you can hear the languages they were written in through the translations. I think you can hear it in the way the sentences are structured. I've been going on about stories in translation, and I haven't mentioned stories in English but by writers from countries other than the United States. Holly Phillips is Canadian, Colin Greenland is English, Anna Tambour is Australian, and Vandana Singh is Indian, although she lives in the United States. I think that geographical diversity makes the anthology richer.

Do the stories you chose have anything in common, other than being interstitial?

Delia: Two things, really, which became clear to me only well after the fact. The first is that almost all of these stories deal in one way or another with process, journey, the space between life and death, certainty and uncertainty, the time-bound and the eternal: what Heinz Insu Fenkl calls liminality. Joseph in Rachel Pollack's “Burning Beard” is an old man on the edge of death thinking about his past and the future he has seen in visions, trying to make sense of a life lived in the shadow of prophecy. Anna Tambour's “The Shoe in SHOES' Window” focuses on a shop window, a space that brings what's inside to the attention of people outside, as a story can bring attention to the obsessions and concerns of its creator. The second is that the way these stories is told is as critical to their effect as their content. Catherynne M. Valente's “A Dirge for Prester John” and Matthew Cheney's “A Map of the Everywhere” are as much about their language as about their narrative. Even the ostensibly plain-spoken stories, like Joy Marchand's “Pallas at Noon,” Holly Phillips's “Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom,” and Vandana Singh's “Hunger” build powerful metaphors, sentence by sentence, that end up defining the meaning of their narratives.

Dora: One connection I see is a sort of awareness. All of these stories seem aware of their interstitial status. They are not only stories in between, they are also stories about in betweenness. For example, in Leslie What's “Post Hoc,” the narrator ends up living in a post office. You could think of a post office as an ultimate liminal space—always between destinations, never the destination itself. We send mail through, not to, the post office. So, “Post Hoc” is an interstitial story about an interstitial life, about a woman who makes a home for herself and finds happiness betwixt and between. And “A Dirge for Prester John” is about a liminal country. All of its inhabitants are somehow betwixt and between, even the narrator, whose face is on her body (like certain Magritte paintings, conflating two categories that we certainly think of as separate). It is a place of hybridities and ambiguities, but to the narrator it is home, and even Prester John eventually accepts his life there. So, strange as it may seem, since What's and Valente's stories are so different, Prester John's country is like the post office—both are liminal spaces that are nevertheless where the characters manage to create homes for themselves. I think that's what interstitial fiction is about: finding yourself at home in ambiguity, hybridity, liminality. Inhabiting the space between.

What drew you, personally, to the idea of interstitiality?

Dora: I should make clear that I love genre fiction. I read lots and lots of detective stories, and I teach a class on gothic literature, in which the conventions are so important that you see the same scenes repeated in story after story. But the space I'm most interested in, the space my own writing seems to inhabit, is the space where those conventions are—bent, broken, brought together with other literary forms. The way Angela Carter writes fairy tales, using gothic rather than fairy tale conventions. So, my interest in interstitiality is a selfish one. I wish someone else would publish an anthology of interstitial fiction, so I could submit a story!

Delia: For me, the best genre fiction is work that pushes the edges of convention while adhering to it. I love watching a real artist claim the tropes and tame the conventions of a traditional genre. Look at Shakespeare. Many of his plays are written within the conventions of their genres:
Henry IV, Parts 1 & 2
are chronicle histories,
The Comedy of Errors
is a classical comedy,
Othello
is a tragedy. But I wrote my master's thesis on
King Lear
, about how Shakespeare used the tropes of prose romance and fairy tale to play with his audience's expectations, see-sawing our emotions back and forth between hope and despair until we are as vulnerable and disoriented as Lear himself. I think my love of genre has led me to recognize and appreciate what occurs when an artist contemplates breaking a given rule, or combining it with one drawn from somewhere else. It's certainly what I did when I started writing.

What did you learn in the process of editing the anthology?

Delia: I learned to read really fast. I learned to let a story teach me how to read it without trying to analyze it as I went along. I realized that the reason I don't enjoy a lot of short fiction is because it
isn't
interstitial: whether it's Anne Tyler's domestic realism or Isaac Asimov's hard SF, I have a low tolerance for straight up genre short fiction. But I loved reading nearly every submission for this anthology. I guess I'm just most comfortable in the spaces between.

Dora: What I learned is that interstitial stories may work differently, but they still have to work. They still have to appeal to a reader. One criticism of interstitial stories is that they are more interested in formal experimentation, in breaking genre boundaries, than in telling a story—in appealing to a reader. Although some of the stories we have chosen experiment with form (look at the formal experimentation in “Pallas at Noon,” for example, in which the end of the story is really its beginning), I think they all appeal to readers emotionally. I identify with the narrator of “Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom,” who has to choose between the fantasy she has created and a reality over which she has no control—a reality that is itself fantastical. That's the ambiguous reality I live in. The choices made in stories like “Alternate Anxieties,” “Pallas at Noon,” and “Queen of the Butterfly Kingdom” are choices I have to make. Recognition and disorientation—for me, that's the experience both of reading these stories and of living in the twenty-first century.

Delia Sherman considers herself a “recovering academic.” She got her PhD in Renaissance Studies and taught at Boston University and Northeastern, during which time she wrote her first novel,
Through a Brazen Mirror
. She left the academy in 1993 to write and edit full time, co-editing anthologies of science fiction and fantasy with Terri Windling and Ellen Kushner and serving as a consulting editor at Tor Books. Her other adult novels are
The Porcelain Dove
and
The Fall of the Kings
, written with partner Ellen Kushner. In 2006, Viking published her first novel for young readers,
Changeling
. Her short fiction has appeared most recently in
The Faery Reel, Salon Fantastique, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Coyote Road
, and
Year's Best Fantasy & Horror
. She satisfies her continuing desire to teach by serving as an instructor at various writing workshops in the U.S. and Europe, including Odyssey, Wiscon, and Clarion. A founding member of the Interstitial Arts Foundation, she lives in New York City.

Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. She is completing a PhD in English literature at Boston University, where she teaches classes on fantasy and the gothic. Her short story collection,
In the Forest of Forgetting
, was published in 2006 by Prime Books. She lives in Boston with her husband Kendrick and daughter Ophelia. Visit her website at www.theodoragoss.com.

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Karen Jordan Allen
spent her mostly happy childhood in rural Indiana. She now lives in Maine with her husband and daughter, a cat, and a rabbit. Her fiction has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including
Century, A Nightmare's Dozen, Bruce Coville's Strange Worlds, Black Gate, First Heroes: New Tales of the Bronze Age
, and
Asimov's Science Fiction
.

Christopher Barzak
spent two years in Japan, teaching English in a suburb of Tokyo, and returned home to Youngstown, Ohio last year. His first novel,
One for Sorrow
, will be published by Bantam Books in Fall of 2007.

K. Tempest Bradford
is an Ohio native and alumna of the Clarion West and Online Writing Workshops. She currently lives in New York City (at the very tip-top with the ravens). She spends most of her time trying to find a place with free tea and Internet where she can write.

Matthew Cheney
's work has appeared in
One Story, Locus, Web Conjunctions, Rain Taxi, Strange Horizons
, and elsewhere. His weblog, The Mumpsimus (mumpsimus.blogspot.com), was nominated for a World Fantasy Award in 2005, and he is the series editor for the annual
Best American Fantasy
anthology from Prime Books.

Michael J. DeLuca
would like to tell you he lives in a cave in Western MA, pronouncing false prophecy in exchange for such essential sustenance as food, water and wireless internet. Unfortunately such caves are few and far between, and often occupied by fearsome squatters, so he advises that you not go looking for him and visit his website instead (www.michaeljdeluca.com).

Adrián Ferrero
was born in La Plata (República Argentina) and attended the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, where he is currently doing his PhD. He has published academic articles in compiled editions and journals in his country, the U.S.A., France, Germany, and Spain. Fiction publications include
Verse
, a collection of short stories, and
Cantares
, a book of poetry. He is also co-editor of the digital magazine on creative writing
Diagonautas
(www.diagonautas.com.ar).

Colin Greenland
is English: born in Dover, educated at Oxford, with homes in Cambridge and the Peak District. His books include
Finding Helen
and the space opera trilogy that began with the multi-award winning
Take Back Plenty
. He lives with Susanna Clarke, author of
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell
.

Csilla Kleinheincz
is a Hungarian-Vietnamese fantasy writer living in Erkel, Hungary. Besides translating classics of fantasy, such as Peter S. Beagle's works, she works as an editor at Delta Vision, a major Hungarian fantasy publisher. Her first novel, published in 2005, and most of her short stories are part of Hungarian slipstream literature.

Joy Marchand
lives in a lopsided, historic rowhouse in Salem, Massachusetts. In the last two years she's shifted her focus from short stories to longer works, and she's currently writing a series of linked urban legends for her interstitial novel-within-a-novel set in the Chihuahuan Desert of West Texas. Please visit her website at www.joymarchand.com.

Holly Phillips
is the author of the award-winning story collection
In the Palace of Repose
. She lives in the mountains of western Canada.

Rachel Pollack
is the author of 30 books of fiction and non-fiction, including the award-winning novels
Unquenchable Fire
and
Godmother Night
. She is also a poet and a visual artist, creator of the Shining Tribe Tarot deck. She lives online at www.rachelpollack.com, and offline in New York's Hudson Valley.

Veronica Schanoes
is a writer and a scholar with a particular interest in fairy tales and genre theory. Her work has appeared in
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Trunk Stories, Endicott Studio
, and
Jabberwocky.