Today’s first Pride Month interview is with author Ellen Kushner:
Hi, Ellen! I hope you’re staying safe and healthy during urrent events. What are you doing to stay creatively motivated in these unusual times?
I’m having the most incredible experience! My wife Delia Sherman and I always leave our apartment in NYC in late February to stay with friends in the magical city of Tucson, Arizona, at the edge of the Sonoran desert, to take a couple of weeks’ retreat to work on our novels. Our friends there have a little guest house, and a big yard with a wall around it to keep out the desert creatures that live all around us and will come in and wreak havoc if they’re not kept out. We were here when the pandemic hit, and decided, wisely, not to go back to New York City. We’ve been here ever since – and for the first time, I’ve seen the desert wildflowers come up after the spring rains, then the cactus flowering, and even a baby monsoon. It’s incredibly stimulating, being somewhere so completely and utterly different from anywhere I’ve ever lived before. I finally understand why Terri Windling wrote The Wood Wife when she lived out here. (We visited her a lot, but never for enough time to see the year turn like this.)
I’m now working on the garden, learning the ways of decorative desert plants in the amazing heat (it hasn’t been under 105F all week! But neither has the humidity been over 12%), as well as what familiar ones like tomatoes and basil will do under conditions that couldn’t be farther from my last garden in Massachusetts. We’ll have to go home eventually…but I hope I get a couple of little tomatoes first!
If by “creatively motivated” you mean “working hard on your overdue novel,” well, I’m not sure any of this counts. But I’m definitely re-filling the well. And working on the novel….some. I love looking out at the mountains when I work.
Since June is Pride Month, I have to ask: how has being lesbian influenced or informed your writing?
Well, for one thing, I find it incredibly awkward to write about women having sex. It’s far too personal. But then, fantasy literature in particular mediates between raw experience and subtle art . . . . My work tends to be very sexy; I just inhabit all the roles. At this point, I’m coming to realize that I’m not merely bisexual, but genderqueer as all getout. I dislike labels as a rule, and have resisted them all my life; but this one, being so protean, is actually kind of a relief.
As you know, The Fall of the Kings, which you co-authored with your wife Delia Sherman, made a huge impression on me. It was, I think, the first fantasy novel I was able to see “myself” in after I started my coming-out process. So thanks again for that. Over the years from Swordspoint to The Privilege of the Sword to The Fall of the Kings and the four seasons of Tremontaine on Serial Box, plus countless short stories, you have populated the world of the Riverside district and the City that surrounds it with such a wide range of LGBTQIA characters that I think every reader can find themselves. Did you imagine the world growing so expansively when you were writing Swordspoint?
Not at all! In fact, I planned never to write a sequel to the novel. And so my next book was Thomas the Rhymer (which did win some awards, so that was nice). But I found I missed my imaginary city, as well as my characters, and wanted to see how they were progressing. And so I made a rule that I was allowed to return, as long as I kept playing with viewpoints and styles, so it didn’t get stale or repetitive. I hope you can forgive me.
Tremontaine was an adventure in “shared world” writing: we gathered a group of mostly gay and lesbian writers together to write a collaborative prequel to Swordspoint. There’s almost no one straight in the entire four seasons of serial stories we wrote for Serial Box! The only one I can think of, in fact, is one of the villains. But only one: in Season Two, for example, Tessa Gratton created the most chilling pair of rogues imaginable, who are always having spontaneous hot sex up against a wall when they’re not trying to murder someone. And even most of the “straight” people turn out to be bi, which is very much in keeping with the series as I first imagined it. Of course, I never, ever imagined a project like this growing out of my first novel! But Serial Box invited us, and we had a blast. I’d do it again in a heartbeat – especially with colleagues like Tessa, and Joel Derfner, and Malinda Lo, and Karen Lord.
That was such an amazing crew of writers. I loved every minute of the series, and I wish Tremontaine had continued beyond Season 4, and that sales had supported print versions of seasons two through four. Rumor has it there’s more Riverside/City/Land books coming. What are you working on now and what do you have coming out soon?
My WIP is another novel written out of order in the Swordspoint/Riverside/Tremontaine sequence: It takes place fifteen years after The Privilege of the Sword, and is the story of Jessica Campion, Alec’s bastard daughter, the angriest teenager in the world.
Currently online is a little fantasia made up of some of the child Jessica’s flashbacks to her visits with her father and Richard St Vier on their island of exile: It’s called “On the Island,” and it’s part of Jo Walton and Maya Chabra and Lauren Schiller’s wonderful Decameron Project, which they began the minute the pandemic hit. They have a spectacular array of work up there, ranging from unpublished chapters from the WIP of lesbian genius Laurie J. Marks and SF writer Rosemary Kirstein’s “Steerswoman” series, to work by Usman Malik, Laurie Penny, and many, many more.
I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Coming in November is a story I wrote for Silk & Steel: An adventure anthology of queer sf&f with high femmes & dashing women. It’s another Tremontaine story, featuring a challenge by a new Riverside sword, a woman named Angwar Bec, who loves pastry almost as much as she loves steel. It was a lot of fun to write – and thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, I’m even getting paid for it!
I’m always happy to have more Tremontaine/Riverside/The City in my life! Finally, where can people find you and your work online?
I’m over-active on Facebook and Twitter (@EllenKushner), under-active on Instagram. I have a website, which I try to keep reasonably up to date: www.EllenKushner.com If you got to my Bibliography page, you’ll find links to a lot of the short stories that are up online.
Two recent interviews that are very thorough but not yet on the website are:
https://fantasy-hive.co.uk/2019/11/interview-with-ellen-kushner-swordspoint/
http://locusmag.com/2017/01/spotlight-on-ellen-kushner-tremontaine/
Ellen Kushner usually lives in New York City with her wife, writer Delia Sherman. They also spend a lot of time in Paris, which hardly influences their writing at all not even a little bit, no. During the CV-19 lockdown, they are sheltering in a friend's guest house in Tucson, Arizona, where they happened to be on a writing retreat when the Virus hit the fan. Kushner's novel Swordspoint introduced readers to the city to which she has returned in two more novels (one co-written with Delia), a growing handful of short stories and the collaborative serial prequel, Tremontaine (SerialBox.com). A longtime performer and public radio host, she narrated all three as audiobooks for Neil Gaiman Presents. Her award-winning Thomas the Rhymer is a Gollancz “Fantasy Masterwork…..” But wait! There’s more! EllenKushner.com