In Part 2 of our Readercon 2013 special, we talk with authors Theodora Goss, Valya Lupescu and Nancy Hightower about their new books, their writing careers, their literary influences, what Readercon means to them, and more!
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 3, Episode 16 - Readercon - Monsters, Memories and Mythmaking
[ Music ] Welcome to the Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are listening to a podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. This episode is part two of our ReaderCon 2013 special. ReaderCon is a literary fantasy and science fiction conference that's held up in Burlington, Mass, every July. This year was the first time I've gone in about ten years since my old book Publishing Days. It was a really good event, and I've had a lot of good smart readers over that weekend. I'm thinking about attending every year, but that's going to be kind of contingent on the day job. For one thing, there's a conference every July for the Controlled Release Society, which is a far less interesting group than its name would imply. And occasionally, I have to cover that one that might overlap, but still, I'd love to get back every year. You can find more about ReaderCon at ReaderCon.org. The previous episode had conversations from that weekend with John Crowley and Scott Edelman. This time around, we have three guests. Theodora Goss, Valia Duttich-Lupeshku, and Nancy Hightower. I apologize in advance for my glibness and overall wackiness over the course of this episode. I did all five of those ReaderCon interviews pretty much consecutively on the Saturday of that weekend with a little lunch and coffee break. So if I sound delirious by the end of things, you'll understand why. But just to confuse you about how incoherent I was, I've shuffled up the order of the interviews for the sake of the episode. Our first guest is Theodora Goss, a writer, professor, and newly minted PhD. Her most recent book is The Thorn and the Blossom, published by Quirk Books. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in magazines like Asimov's, Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Mythic Delirium, which sounds awesome, but I've never read it. Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Fantasy, Journal of Mythic Arts, and more. Frankly, that's a lot more interesting than the controlled release society, but this is the job I've chosen. Anyway, you can find her site and her wonderful blog at TheodoraGoss.com, T-H-E-O-D-O-R-A-G-O-S-S. She's on Twitter under the same name, Theodora Goss. [MUSIC] My guest and our reader con special edition of The Virtual Memory Show is Theodora Goss, a doctor Theodora Goss. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. Professor at Boston University and author of, let's see, two books that I have not written down the names of. Actually, which one do you ask? Several books. Several books. Tell me how to do your books. See, don't go into the numbers because then you can, you always want to say a few or several. The first book I had published was a short story collection called In the Forest of Forgetting. And the second book I had published was actually, it's not your fault for not knowing about this one. It was pretty obscure. It came out from Aqueduct Press, but it was a lot of fun to work on. And it was a very small book called Voices from Fairyland. And what I did was collect and edit some fantastical poetry from three women poets. So one of them was Charlotte Mew, one of them was Mary Coleridge, and the final one was Sylvia Townsend Warner. And added some of my own poetry, but I wrote essays about all of them. So it was kind of a hybrid, academics, popular sort of thing, written out of an academic sensibility, but for a popular audience, which is when I write essays, that's really what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to bring my academic training to it, but right so that anybody can understand what it is that I'm writing. Because I don't want to talk to specialists, that's something that I decided fairly early in my career that I wasn't interested in doing despite the academic training. And then the third one that I wrote, which came out last year, last January, this January, no, it came out last year. Oh, did it? Yeah, this January 2013, we are in 2013, right? I hope, yeah. Even all those time zones you've been on. I've been in many, many time zones recently, and in fact, I figured out that if I take all the trips that I've scheduled this summer, I will have been on 13 airplanes this summer, which is a little creepy actually. The odd number is a bit, not even the 13 part, but you'd like to have it even, but I guess without the multiple stops. And usually not quite so many. But the third book came out last January, and it was called The Thorne and the Blossom. It was a book, but it was actually Navella length, and it was a book in what the publisher called an accordion format, which means that it's really two Navella's, two stories. And you read one by reading the book in one direction, and the other by reading the book in the other direction. And it's a love story, and it's told from the two different perspectives of the woman, Evelyn, and the man, Brendan. And the entire book, as I said, it can be read in two directions, so it opens like an accordion, and it's sold in a slip case. And what inspired you for that shape and that structure? Well, you know that's a funny question, because how much input do you think I had into that? It's funny, because people think that I did that. You just pitched it as a pair of Navella? I didn't pitch it at all. The editor asked me to do it. Oh, really? And so the editor came to me, Stephen, my friend, and he said, "I want to create this book in an accordion format, and can you write me two stories? What do you think would work?" And I said, "Oh, a love story from two different perspectives, because everyone has their own perspective on a story." And so I had to write, and I was doing this actually at the same time as I was trying to finish my doctoral dissertation, which was nuts. It was totally crazy, but it kind of kept me sane through the last days of my doctoral dissertation. And so I had to write a story in which I was telling the same story from two different perspectives, and there's information missing from each part that is supplied by the other part, which was a writing challenge, and it was a really interesting one. It was well received. People get what it is and how it works. I think so. It was received in a really interesting way in that there were people who are fantasy readers totally got it and really loved it. At least they told me they loved it, so I mostly believe them. And then there were people who had complaints, and one was, "It's too short. I like these characters, but I want to hear a lot more about them." And then there were the people, another group of people who said, "I really like the story, but the book itself, the physical book, was hard to handle." Which, I mean, it does open up like an accordion. You can drop it, and you've got paper everywhere, which is funny because we couldn't have made it longer because of the format, so it had to be the length it was. And the format was, "We made it as long as it could possibly be. I actually went over the page limit I was given by quite a bit." But it was an experiment. Is the story itself fantastic, or what was the thing about it? It has fantasy elements. It's about Evelyn and Brendan. Evelyn is an American girl at the beginning of the story. She's a college student, and Brendan is a boy who's a fisherman. Actually, he's in a fishing community in Cornwall. And she goes to Cornwall on vacation, they meet there, they have a kind of chemistry with each other, and then they separate for quite a long time and then they meet again. And so it's a love story, but you can read it as completely realistic. But there is an implication in the story that there's more going on, that they're reliving the incidents in or reliving a story that was told a long time ago about Sir Gawain and this Cornish Queen, and that they could possibly be, who were cursed, and they could possibly be these ancient lovers who are cursed to remain apart for a certain number of years. I think it's a hundred years or something like that. It's been a while since I've looked at the book, strangely enough. No, people ask me, what do you think of your stories after you write them? And they don't quite believe it when I say, well, after they're published, I don't look at them, because I've gone on to the next story. At that point, when something's been published, it doesn't belong to me anymore. It's out in the world, it's somebody else's, it belongs to the readers, and they get to respond to them. Sometimes I will go back, sometimes I'm forced to go back, because stories will be collected, or they'll be translated, I'll be asked questions about them, so I do have to look at them again. But usually I don't read my own stories, I mean I know what happened anyway, and I can't read them the way I read other people's books, because when I go back and look at my own stories, I can't read them as stories. I look at the places where I made certain choices, where I cut out certain things, so I can't read them the way you would read a book that you come to fresh. Now what brought you to fiction writing? Your bio seemed to indicate quite a not fiction writing career path before this. What are you talking about specifically? Oh, the Harvard JD and corporate lawyer thing seems a little bit non-fantasy writing, but maybe I'm provincial and small minded. You know, I didn't start out with fiction, I started out as a poet. That was the first thing I wrote, and I have a very large notebook that no one will ever see. So poetry I wrote in high school, quite a bit of it, to ex-boyfriends, old high school boyfriends. Some of it is kind of tan as Lee fan poetry. But I started out as a poet, and I found out just recently within the last year or two that I'm actually related to a very famous Hungarian poet. That's in my family line, yeah. So I wrote instinctively, I read a lot as a child, I was a reader, like most writers. Who did you read a lot? That's a good question. Who do you remember, who really jumped out at you when you were a kid? Oh Lord, I mean I read anything that had anything to do with magic. Anybody who had anything, yeah. Who jumps out at me? Well I read The Hobbit, and my reading was really a classic. But I would read Everything by Edward Eager and A Enesbit, of course, all the Enesbit books. I read all the classics, Wind and the Willows, Sword and the Stone, The End of Green Gables, and Montgomery Books, and Louise Mailcott, Gosh, Lord Alexander, I mean I literally would go home from the library with an enormous stack of books that I could barely carry and just go through them. And when I say that my reading was eclectic, I mean that I would go to the library and on the shelf, I distinctly remember that there was Willa Kather, was shelved right next to Barbara Cartland, so I would bring home my Antonia, and I don't even remember what the Barbara Cartlands were called. But I read really everything, and I read poetry as a child. And non-fiction history. So I was a voracious reader. I read trashy romances. I still remember writing to a romance writer, actually, yeah. I don't even remember what it was called, but I'm sure it had a pirate in it somewhere. And I wrote to her saying, "Oh, I thought this was a really good book." And she wrote back and said, "Oh, maybe someday you'll be a writer yourself." But here I was reading Dickens and trashy pirate romance, and I read everything, and I love mysteries. I still love Agatha Christie. So I read everything, including poetry, started out writing poetry. I always liked fantasy. I think partly because I grew up reading fairy tales, so it felt very intuitive to me. And I read some Eastern European fairy tales. I had a whole book of Eastern European fairy tales. So how did I come to fiction writing? Actually, I was always with fiction writing. The real question is, why did I go to law school? Because I wanted to be a writer when I was 12. And I was the kind of kid who wanted to be a writer, meaning I published in the college literary magazine. I mean, I was a writer. I was doing it, yeah, from early on. I went to law school because it was a very easy choice, and my family did the same thing that families always do, which is they said, "You need to have some sort of practical career." And I'm very good at standardized tests, and I did very well on the standardized test, and that's what the law schools cared about. And I had done an undergraduate degree in literature and done well at the University of Virginia, and, you know, it seemed like a natural choice. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know what to do with myself. I knew I couldn't go and go out of college and just start writing and build a career for myself as a writer. That seemed completely impractical. Plus, I'd gotten the impression, partly from my family and partly just from society, that real writers were these magical creatures, and they were geniuses, and certainly I wasn't one of those, right? So I ended up going to law school at Harvard, and as soon as I got there, I thought, "You know what? I know this isn't for me." But I went through it, I finished it. I did learn a lot, and then I was a corporate lawyer for four years, basically because I needed to pay off my law school loans. But, in retrospect, it was a very interesting education in writing. Well, I wrote contracts. So I was, in fact, writing, and, of course, I wrote emails and letters and all sorts of things, but I wrote huge corporate contracts, and the thing about a corporate contract is you can't get any of the words wrong. Even if it's a 200-page contract, right? All the words have to be the right words, because if you get a word wrong, well, it could be the wrong word that doesn't matter, or it could be the wrong word that loses your client a lot of money. Change of control clause or something of that? Yeah, never mind. Yeah, go on. Yeah, yeah. So it taught me a level of precision that your every word counts, and every word means something, and every word has a value. But I really wanted to be a writer. I knew that it would never work if I was working until two in the morning, every morning, which I was doing corporate law. I was working at quite large law firms, and I thought, "I want to be a writer, how do I do it?" And I have a tendency to over-prepare. So I thought, "I'll learn everything about English literature. How do you do that? Well, you've got a PhD." So I thought, "I'll go back to graduate school." And also, at that time, you know, this thing where you have MFA programs in popular fiction or MFA programs that really accept people who are writing kind of magic realism or slipstream sorts of things, that's a really new movement. I'm part of that because I teach creative writing, but that's come about in the last ten years. It really wasn't available when I started graduate school. There was this real sense that if you were writing non-realistic fiction, what were you doing in an MFA program? You were writing pulp. So I went and did a PhD in English literature and went to genre-specific writing workshops. I went to the Odyssey Writing Workshop, and then I went to the Clarion Writing Workshop, which were both of them were absolutely terrific. I learned different things at each. And my first professional sale came out of going to Clarion. At Clarion, there was an editor there, Shawna McCarthy, and she bought my first story. So that's how I sold my first story. But I always, I was always a writer, and I always wanted to be a writer. It's like lifelong. It's instinctive. I've been denying it for 20 plus years of my life, but starting to finally give up and surrender and actually do something. Not too well, but it's been all my time reading instead. In the same way, if I just read enough things, it'll prepare me for the grand genius book that I can never bother starting. So your family came over from Hungary when you were a child. What was it like learning English as a kid, coming from a language that's as strange as Hungarian? By which you mean amazing, right? Oh, it's wonderful. I'm amazed you have no accident at all, because every other person I've known who has any Hungarian heritage or had it spoken to child speaks with some odd inflections and tones. Because I think that language really does change human beings brains, or ours does, and we're also supposed to be like you guys. No, no, no. It's, yeah. But what did you learn from looking back, if you've ever thought about it, learning English as a, what, seven year old you said? I was about seven. I mean, I actually learned French first, before I learned English. Hungarian is a really interesting language, because it's not Indo-European. It's Finno Eugrich. And so we all came down from the steps, and we had this really strange language, and we settled in this magnificent valley, which is Hungary. And it's got some peculiarities to it. One is that when you talk about people, they don't have gender. And so there are interesting mistakes that Hungarian speakers will make in English. Like, for example, my father, who is quite fluent in English, will regularly call men she, or women he. Because his brain doesn't need to gender, and he corrects himself because he's been speaking English for years, and he's actually done work in this country. But yeah, that's one of the peculiarities. I don't know. I'm not sure how I learned. I was young, so I learned from school. I learned from television, but I spoke Hungarian. We left when I was five. We were in Brussels for a while, so I spoke French for a while. I moved to this country, and I think I learned pretty quickly. My mother has a very heavy accent. And the one thing I've been told is that when I write, I think this happens when I actually write about Eastern Europe. People have said that it sometimes sounds as though my stories have been translated. I don't know. I think it's that I'm thinking about the story. I'm trying to give the story a certain atmosphere, and so I'm writing it the way someone who is Eastern European would approach English. I'm giving it a sort of inflection. There were things I had strange problems with. It took me, I literally had to break myself off the habit of writing, of using British spellings, and I don't quite know where those came from. I think actually they came from French, because I would write program, M.M.E. armor with the U. I still cross my Z's just so I can seem strange to people. I cross my Z's and my 7's. I just don't call them Z's or anything, because then people would really just think I was a pretentious. That is pretentious. Yeah, so I don't know. I mean, people are surprised that I don't have an accent. As am I, yeah, frankly, but like I said, every Hungarian I've known, maybe it's because it came over later, held on to much more, or held on to an accent which you don't have. So what are you working on now? Are you doing short fiction or are you doing another longer? I'm deliberately not doing short fiction. I'm writing a novel which I have been promising people for a very long time. I was actually in England. I was in Budapest a week and a half ago, but before that I was in England doing research. At least that's my excuse. The novel I'm working on now comes out of a novella that I wrote that was published several years ago in Strange Horizons. It's called the Mad Scientist Daughter. And it came out of actually my doctoral dissertation. So that had some use, that 400 page thing that I wrote. My doctoral dissertation was on late 19th century literature in England, but specifically literature about monsters. So I was writing about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, about Dracula, about Dorian Gray, Carmilla the vampire who's a little bit earlier. And the way I got to it, the reason I was writing it was that I noticed that there's about a 30 year period in the late 19th century, about 1870 to 1900, when you get all the classic monsters. Everyone's writing about mummies, vampires, that's when Dorian Gray is written, that's when Jekyll and Hyde is written, all of these books, Island of Dr. Moreau, all of these books are coming out of that 30 year period. And I said, why? Why that period? Which of course led me to the question, what was happening in 1860? Well, one of the things that was happening in 1860, in the 1860s, that decade, was the development of anthropology as a discipline. But anthropology back then didn't look anything like anthropology does now. It was the study of the human people were looking at, well, really what they were looking at, and this is, you know, in air quotes, savage culture, right, but trying to sort of trace the history of human civilization. But they were doing it post Darwin, so they were doing it with an evolutionary sensibility. There was this idea that man had once been primitive and had risen from that primitive state. Now we were civilized, we were English gentlemen, right? That's what anthropology was studying. And I thought, well, why all of these monsters? And what I noticed was that the monsters were spoken about in evolutionary terms, they were evolutionarily degenerate, they were returning to the animal. So they represent a kind of evolutionary anxiety. So, for example, you know, Mr. Hyde is described as an ape, or behaving like a nape at several points in the book. And that is a phrase or that concept that could only really come in literature post Darwin, this anxiety that we will return to the primate, and that we have an inner primate. So anyway, that was the doctoral dissertation. And so one of the things I had to look at was mad scientists, right, who were creating all of these monsters. And I kept noticing that mad scientists in fiction create women, female monsters. So, for example, there is Dr. Rappachini in Rappachini's daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, and he creates Beatrice Rappachini, who's his daughter, who is poisonous. She is imbued with plant poisons, and so she kills people inadvertently. And then there is Dr. Moreau on his island. And one of the things people often don't notice is during the entire action of the book until his death, he is taking a puma and turning her into a woman. Then we've got Frankenstein, who sets out to create a female monster, he never does for various reasons. Then we've got a more obscure story called the Great God Pan, in which there's a Dr. Raymond, and he ends up kind of inadvertently creating this monstrous girl. So it happens over and over again, and I thought, well, wait a minute, nobody's paid any attention to this. Either on a scholarly level or from a kind of literary perspective, I want to know about these girls, and I want to put them all together. So the mad scientist daughter is a novella in which they've all come together in London, they found themselves, they found each other, and they formed a club, a sort of society of mad scientist daughters. And it's experimental, it's a little meta-fictional, and people really responded to it. And I thought, you know what, there's a novel here. And so what I'm doing now is I'm writing the novel, and the novel is about how they discover each other, why they were created. It's a mystery, it's a bit of a thriller, and it's set in late 19th century London, which is my excuse for going to London whenever I can. So that's what I'm working on right now, and I'm on chapter 14 of probably about 18, so I'm getting to the big final chapters where things will be revealed and things will happen, and I'm hoping to have this draft done by the end of the summer. The Eastern European thing, do you bring over a particular folklore? You mentioned an interest in Eastern European mythology, does that play in at all into this era for the English for that sort of? Well, so the second book is going to be concerned with a certain Professor Van Helsing, and his friend Arminius, who remember as a professor at Budapest University. So the second book may well take us to Budapest. I'm not sure yet, but I'm thinking I need to write about my city because I have a kind of great love for the city of Budapest, it's one of the great loves of my life. I miss it terribly actually, but yeah, there's a whole Eastern European component that I could put in there because it is actually there in the literature, in the original literature, and it ties together my two interests, which I guess have been two literary interests in Eastern Europe, and then also in English literature. The folklore has already come through in some stories that I've written, and I've long thought that there are several stories I've written now that are set in a kind of fictional Eastern European country called Sylvania. I started by writing a children's story there, then I wrote a story called Fair Ladies, which does in fact deal with a figure, oh gosh, I'm trying to remember the word for it. It's something like Kishasone, which I've probably mispronounced, I would have to look at it again, but they're the beautiful ladies are the fair ladies and they're like fairies, but they're very dangerous. They're sort of like fairies and they're sort of like witches, and what they do is they seduce men, they get them to dance with them, and this can have certain destructive qualities. I think we often don't realize is that part of the world, part of Hungary, but really Transylvania. We always think of as associated with vampires because of Bram Stoker, but I read in some of my research that for Hungarians, Transylvania was associated with fairies. Fairyland was located or where fairies could be found, and my grandmother's family comes from Transylvania, so I always love to tell my students this, by the way, when I was teaching Dracula. My little man's from Bucharest, so yeah, I can always throw back, oh it's why I don't show up in mirrors. There you go. Go ahead, take a picture, see what comes out. But yeah, the folklore is something that I've woven in, at least a little bit already, and I would like to do more with it. Who are you reading nowadays? Who am I reading? Oh gosh, I bought a bunch of people when I bought a bunch of people. Books when I was in Europe actually, because during the school semester, often I don't have time to read anything except what I have to teach, which is too bad. So what did I buy? I bought Jack Sipes's book on fairy tales, fairy tales in the art of subversion, and I've finished most of that. I read Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace, which was fabulous, and also the Penelope ad, which was also fabulous. It's the story of Penelope, told from her perspective, from The Odyssey, and gave me lots of ideas for how to do stories. Oh gosh, what else did I read? Oh, I was in Budapest Airport going to Brussels, and I needed something to read, and they had English books, because Budapest Airport is awesome. They also have free Wi-Fi and really good coffee. I remember literally nothing from 2004, 2005, when I went through, I don't recall a thing from that. It was a great food court. How has the city overall changed over your years of visiting? Oh, let me finish telling you what I bought. I bought Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the end of the Lane, which is fabulous, and I read that on the way to Brussels and in Brussels. Those were a few of the things that I've been reading recently. As I said, it's quite eclectic, and I'm currently reading James Woods. The fun stuff. No, it's on fiction. It's called... Not his fiction and the figures of life. It's how fiction works. How fiction works? Yeah, exactly. I was reading that on the airplane up here. Be careful with that one. I always take books on writing fiction with a grain of salt. Let us bow down before Flaubert. How has the city changed? Oh, it's changed enormously, but you have to remember the first time I ever went to Budapest. The first time I went back was when I was a teenager, and there was still an aura of danger about it. I flew in on... I probably it was still Swiss air. I always seemed to fly Swiss air to Budapest, but flew in on to the airport. There were men walking around in big boots and with really big guns. They were Russian soldiers. This was during the Cold War. Yeah, this was during the Cold War. This was before the Berlin Wall fell. I remember that I needed to register with the police. I was with my grandmother, so I was seeing my grandparents for the first time in quite some time. The city was dirty. It was it was "sudy" because there were still "trabons." Those horrible old cars that were pouring out smoke, and so the city was just dingy. It was very poor. There were stores where you could only buy things with dollars, so only tourists could shop there. Everyone was very poor. Nobody could own anything. There was no private property, really. It was still wonderful because it was Budapest, but it was very different. I remember going back after the Berlin Wall fell, and it was in the process of transformation. Parts of it had become kind of seedy. It was adjusting to a capitalist system. This time, I've been back in the last two years, and I stay quite a while. It's interesting because I fly in. I don't even need to show my passport because passport controls in Zurich. I fly in, pick up my bags. I get money out of the ATM. Are they on foreign, or is it on the Euro now? No, it's foreign. Which is great because I don't like euros. I find them very hard to use. Foreign's, on the other hand, are beautiful. It's lovely money, so I hope they stay on the foreign's. I get my foreign's. I talk to the airport shuttle service. Everybody speaks English. All the signs are in Hungarian and English. There are signs everywhere saying, "Welcome to Budapest." You can tell that this is a place that is saying, "Toris, come here." Don't just go to Prague, come here, because everybody goes to Prague now. I go into the city. It's still poor, and it's in the middle of an economic crisis, but the city has changed so much. There's a lot of... It's construction, but what they're doing, the buildings have been cleaned up, and you can see the colors. One of the things about Hungary and Budapest is that the light is different. Here, we're sitting in Boston, and there's a color to the light, and that color is gray. It's very much like England. England is very gray. Brussels is the same way. It's quite gray. You go to Budapest, and the light is golden. It's much more like... It's like walking into an impressionist painting. It's like southern France in some ways. It's like walking into a Van Gogh. I have that in Stockholm, of all places. It's the same sort of... There's a real warmth to it, right? The pictures I take in Budapest are different. They're golden. So there's that golden light. It's warm. It's very dry, which you actually have to get used to. And when you drink the water, there's a mineral taste to it, because there are mineral springs, which the city is actually famous for under the hills. That stays in the Hotel Galerit. Yeah, have you? That is a very expensive place to stay. Ten years ago, it wasn't that bad. Yeah, that's probably true. Now it's pretty expensive, but they have nice pools. So it's been cleaned up. There's a lot of construction, but what they're doing is restoration. And the things they've put in that are modern are beautifully done. And what they've realized, I think, very smartly is that the glory days of Budapest were the late 19th century, when it was part of the whole art movement that came to be known as Art Nouveau, which there is called the secession. And there was a lot of wonderful art being done. A lot of things were being built at that time. And so when they create new street lamps, they're Art Nouveau street lamps. They're beautiful. So I take the shuttle to my grandmother's apartment, which she was finally able to buy after the wall fella when people could own property again. She was actually given compensation for land that was taken away from the family. Yeah, when the gearing communist era. And so I go back to her apartment, and I stay there. And when I go downstairs, and just it's half a block from me, is the California Coffee Company, which is, it's a Budapest coffee chain, but it's called the California Coffee. Yeah, they have bagels. You can get bagels in Budapest, but they have the best coffee I have ever had. The best coffee I've ever had anywhere in my life is in Budapest. You can get it basically all over the place in Budapest. It's really good. I've been told that you can get the same quality coffee in Italy. My father has told me that the coffee is as good in Italy as it is in Budapest, and he travels everywhere. You're talking to a guy who actually brought his own beans and hand grinder here to the show because he didn't want to have to deal with Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts. So, you know, I've become sort of a coffee efficient. Okay, snob. Snob is better. Have you ever heard of coffee in England? No, I haven't been back to England. I've only gone once in the last 30 years. Okay. So, the difference between coffee in England and coffee at the average American Starbucks is enormous. Yeah. Because, I don't know, something wrong, something happens to coffee in England and it goes wrong. It becomes something else that is not coffee. They're known for tea. It's not a coffee culture. The tea there is wonderful. I had the wonderful, most, I had really good chai lattes in London. But there's something wrong with English coffee. And I love England, but that's the one thing in England that doesn't work for me. But the difference between English coffee and American coffee, that's the same difference between American coffee and Hungarian coffee. Wow. Hungarian coffee, that's the real thing. I have to go back. And it's fabulous. So, yeah, California Coffee Company, I go in, I get my, you know, my small latte, which is actually small. And the word for that is kichi. It's your kichi, kichi, coffee latte. And everyone speaks English. Everyone I talk to in Budapest spoke at least a couple of words of English. And I never had trouble getting around, even though my Hungarian is, unfortunately, not where it should be. I understand, I would say, I understand 50% of every Hungarian conversation, at least. But I need to practice my Hungarian very badly. I can ask for all the foods, which is very important in Budapest. Oh, and there is ice cream basically on every street corner, and it's really good ice cream. Their ice cream stands everywhere in Budapest. You know, have this one sponsored by the Budapest tourism council. This will be a great episode. It should be. I, you know, I'm like a cheering section for Budapest. I have to figure out somewhere to go this fall. I've got a trip to Frankfurt for business. And I'm not going to spend extra time in Frankfurt. So I'm going to find somewhere else in the general vicinity to get away to over three or four days before this conference starts. Go to Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe is, I've met a lot of kids. I'm going to call them kids because they're usually college students. I was in Brussels going from the airport, which is the Charler Watt Airport, which is about an hour outside of the city. And I was in a taxi. Someone had grabbed me and said, "Oh, come take a taxi with us." A bunch of us are chipping in together to go into the city. And so I was sitting next to this girl from Poland who traveled all over the place. She was now in Brussels. And we were talking about the fact that people in Eastern Europe are incredibly friendly. They're just so nice. And I have found that everywhere in Eastern Europe, which isn't necessarily always true in Western Europe. And then my cab driver was from Morocco, but had been a cab driver in New York for quite some time. And now he was in Brussels. So it was a completely international car. Everyone in it was from different European countries. Or somewhere else. Yeah. Which is something I love about traveling in Europe. We're all migrating in South Africa. Yeah, we're all moving around. We're all traveling. And I love to be part of that. And this is part of the big reader con mega pod that I'm doing. What's been your experience here? I think Valia had said you'd been here. Is this your seventh? Something like that, yeah. What do you take away from reader con? What do you get from it? I love reader con. I always have. What I like about reader con is that it really focuses on the literature. The people here are incredibly smart. You know it's near Boston and Boston is a real intellectual center anyway. But the people who come here are people who take this literature, science fiction, fantasy, etc. This sort of literature very seriously. And they take literature seriously. They take it seriously as literature. So there are a couple things I take away from it. One is that it's always interesting to be on panels, to hear people's ideas. The panels are always really interesting. And the panelists are always saying really interesting things. So that's really nice. I always learn stuff. It's a real community. So I get to see a lot of the people who are doing the same sorts of things that I am. Writers who are writing the things, sorts of things I am. A lot of the small presses are here. So I get to see small beer press, prime books. I get to see editors of magazines like Parks World. And that's always really nice, connecting with people. And it's really nice socially. It's a really nice place to talk to people about things that interest us. I've been back in ten years and it's a pretty welcoming environment I've seen. Yeah, it is a really welcoming environment. I have former students who come here and they come for the first time. This might be their first convention. And they find people to talk to, which is really nice. It's a small enough convention that you can walk up to Patricia McKillib, or Marine McHugh, or Cat Valente. And start talking to them and ask questions and ask them to sign things. And they're accessible. Have you ever had any freak out moments seeing some author you actually really, really, really adore or anything? Have you had any, oh my god, I can't believe that's... Well, I mean, I don't really get freak out moments in any visible sense. Yeah, but even inside. But there have been authors that when I respond that way, it tends to be authors who really influence me deeply. I was just lucky. I was lucky in that way just about two hours ago in that I did a copyclatch with Patricia McKillib. And when I was a teenager going into the fantasy bookstore, sorry, going into the mall bookstore, going to the fantasy section, she was someone whose books I would look for. And I was talking about who influenced me when I was a teenager. And I had a number of different influences. One thing that was really important to me, though, was seeing women writers and women writers writing fantasy. So I would read Patricia McKillib, I would read Tannak Lee, I would read Anne McCaffrey, I would read Ursula Gwynne, of course. And it was different from reading J.R. Tolkien or reading C.S. Lewis, because that meant that literature wasn't just something, you know... A boy's club. ...created, wasn't even so much a boy's club, like a dead boy's club. Sure, sure. Literature wasn't something in the past, and it wasn't a boy's club. I actually was never that worried about that aspect of it, but it wasn't something that distant from me. It was something that living people did that... And they... I mean, that's an interesting question. Now I have to think about it again. Because I was not influenced by many of the male fantasy writers of the time. The male fantasy writers that have tended to influence me have been ones from quite some time ago, like Tolkien, which is interesting. I think that this is a time period when there were a lot of women writing fans. Well, some really prominent women writing fantasy. And I actually don't remember who was writing the male writers writing fantasy at the time. I mean, there was Terry Brooks, but that didn't speak to me. That wasn't the sort of thing. I was interested in... Don Donaldson, I think, was another one a little bit before our time, but that was still selling in our... Yeah, and that stuff didn't do it for me. It's interesting. It was the sensibility of these writers. And the fact that they were doing something poetic, they were playing with language in various ways, and they were writing lyrically. And that meant a lot to me. So it may have... it has something to do with the fact that they're women. And I looked on them as role models. And it has something to do with the fact that they were writing in a particular way that paid a lot of attention to language. I met John Crowley here for the first time. That was... Spoke to him this morning, that was... And he was a deep influence in that... He wrote one of my favorite short stories of all time, called Miss Alongie 1824, I think it was. Don't know it. Go read it. Look it up. It's about Lord Byron. It's a fabulous story. And it really is just about a perfect short story. And I had read it a long time ago. I actually forgot that he was the one who wrote it. Found it again, and then met him at a convention, and kind of was way too intimidated to talk to him. Nowadays, I would talk to him. Nowadays, I do talk to him. Have you had those sort of experiences where there are people you're just... Or are you pretty much over that now that you're a peer of sorts? I mean, there are people that I hesitate to approach because I know they're approached a lot. So I wait to be introduced because often I will find that I will have a mutual friend in common. Like, for example, I met Neil Gaiman recently, who's a really sweet guy. Anyone who meets him would say that. But he's someone people are going up to all the time. It's part of the job. And so it's... In a case like that, I don't want to be the person going up to them and saying, "Hi, I'm a fan of yours. I want a friend of mine to say, "Oh, this is Dory. She's a writer." But I actually, now that you mentioned it, I did have a moment where I did not introduce myself to somebody. Here's what happened. I was at Wiscan. Or Salugwen was the gastroenter. Okay. And they had actually put out a... There had been an announcement on the PA system asking people to please stop asking her to sign things because she literally could not walk down a hallway and people would just stop her. So there I am in the ladies room, washing my hands at the sink. I looked up and next to me as Or Salugwen. And I thought, "If this were not, if I were not washing my hands in the ladies room, I would introduce myself to Or Salugwen and say, "You influenced me so much when I was a teenager." But I don't want her to remember me as the person who introduced herself in the ladies room. You know? So I did not introduce myself to Or Salugwen. Sunday, hopefully I will meet her again and I will be introduced properly or introduced myself properly. I have no problem introducing myself to people generally. But there's certain circumstances in which, you know, I have hesitated. That was one of them. I understand. The Adora Goss, thank you so much for coming on the virtual memory show. Get back to Read or Con. Thank you so much for having me. This was fun. [Music] And that was The Adora Goss. You can find her work in Better Bookstores and online. Our next guest is Valia Dudich-Lupescu. Valia is the author of The Silence of Trees, a novel published by Wolf's Word Press. Or maybe it's Wolf's Word Press. It's all one word, so I'm not sure. Anyway, Wolf's Word we're going to go with for this one. The Silence of Trees is a historical novel about a Ukrainian woman who survives World War II and winds up becoming something of a matriarch in the Ukrainian neighborhood in Chicago. It's a really engaging study of someone who has to suppress just the totality of her life in order to raise a family but ultimately learns that she can't escape that past. The role of myth-making and folklore in the book kind of borders on the literature of the fantastic, which is what Read or Con is centered on, but it's not an explicit fantasy novel by any means. Now that said, Valia is also working on a comic book or graphic novel if that's your term of choice. It's much more fantasy-oriented. It's called Sticks and Bones. It's about essentially what happens to household gods from the old country when people emigrate to America, and both of Valia's works so far are pretty engaged in that interplay between America and immigrants' myths, which is a topic I find pretty fascinating as a first-generation American. Valia and I tried recording a podcast last December, but she had done a ton of travel that day, so we were operating at pretty different speeds, and she asked if we could do a new one sometime, and here we are. [music] So my guest in the apparently Read or Con special edition of the Virtual Memory Show is Valia Dutish Lupescu, or is it Lupescu? Lupescu. Lupescu. Okay, I've always figured I should get the Romanian thing right, given that it's sort of my heritage, but not really. You're the author of The Silence of Trees and a graphic novel, well, the beginning of a graphic novel called Sticks and Bones. Why don't we talk about your Read or Con experience so far, and what you come to the event for, and what you're getting out of it this year? Well, it's the first time. It's my first time here. Oh, it is? Okay, that's what you've been doing. No, no, I'm sort of entering this world of science fiction and fantasy conferences and conventions, so... Do they give you any good warning about it? No, there hasn't. No, no disclaimers, no warnings. It's been really interesting, because I started off with ShyCon last year, that was my first big convention, and then I went to something much smaller, which was Iqva, the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando, Florida, and on opposite ends of the spectrum. This was a little bit closer to the Iqva experience. It's much smaller, and not quite as fan-based, much more academic, and writer, and editor focus, so it's been really interesting. People here who know about your book? Only a few. Only a few. Making inroads? I am. Well, I'm kind of in the same way that I'm slowly entering into this conference world. I'm slowly re-entering the world of science fiction and fantasy as a whole, because that's where I first began. I discovered my love, or I should say discovered, my love of reading encompassed a lot of science fiction and fantasy when I was a kid, and when I was in high school, and then when I entered college in graduate school, I transitioned to the literary world, and I found Leslie Marman-Silco, and Margaret Atwood, and James Joyce, and others that were more literary, and focused on that. At that time, especially students, not as many of the professors, but genre was sort of a bad word. You didn't really talk about those people. You didn't really write genre, except for fun. I thought if I was going to be a serious writer, I would need to embrace the literary world a little bit more in the academic world. And then I've been finding my way back home, and finding my way back to the writers that I love, discovering new writers, and just allowing myself to dwell in those worlds a little bit more, and it's been really nice. Your first novel from what I recall from our past conversations sort of evolved from non-fiction into fiction. Can you talk about that process and sort of what went into writing the Silence of Trees? Yes, I started it when I was in graduate school, and began with a creative non-fiction focus at that time, and thought I would write this brilliant essay about displaced persons and the experience of coming to America and the things you leave behind, and I had come upon this phenomenon again and again of those people of the greatest generation. Whether they were Ukrainian or German or Polish or Russian or Lithuanian, many of them had never spoken about those experiences that they had had during the war and their experiences in the camps, and here they were at the end of their lives, finally starting to talk about it, feeling like they have an obligation to talk about it or feeling as if they no longer had to fear for what would happen to the family back home if they talked about it. And so they shared with me all of these stories, and for many of them I was the first person they had ever told these stories to, and when I thought about how I wanted to preserve that and to share that, I moved away from the idea that I wanted to record it in a non-fiction way, and I wanted to create that experience, recreate that experience in a story for readers instead, and so I decided that the story that I wanted to tell was really, was really the silence of trees as opposed to something of a creative non-fiction. Now, how similar was the, well, is the story of Lydia and her family of Ukrainian immigrant in Chicago, similar to your own history and life, or your family's history? That's an interesting question. Nadia's story doesn't, it's not the story of my grandparents, it's fictional, but many of the experiences are true, or they're very much informed by the stories that I heard, but I can't say that Nadia is like any one of my grandmothers, she's really very different. Well, how much of your family experience worked its way into the book? I would say that the place you really see the most of my family is just in the large family scenes, when you have scenes like in a fact at Christmas Eve dinner, and there's this feeling of, or the poem Sunday scene, where there's this feeling of a lot of people in this very small house, and the atmosphere, and the conversation, and just this feeling of there being so much going on in one small space, so many people, that is very true, that is what, when I was a child, when I would go to my grandmother's house, that is what it felt like for me to be just engulfed in this sea of Ukrainian voices, very loud, very passionate, and really dear now that I look back at it, and it's passed. How tough was it growing up with both an ethnic identity and your American identity to kind of fuse those as a kid? I think that that experience is one of those that's going to shape all of my writing from here on out, this idea of being on the threshold between worlds, and in that way, that is the way I'm probably most like Nadia, the narrator. Growing up, I had my Ukrainian life and my American life, I had Ukrainian school on Saturdays, Ukrainian dancing during the week, and my Ukrainian friends, and then I had American school and my American friends, and I didn't think anything of it that the fact that I separated the two, of course we're living in America, everyone was an American friend, but there was that distinction, growing up my parents, and especially my grandparents, impressed upon us, and as did the teachers in Ukrainian school, that we had to keep the Ukrainian language alive, we had to keep the culture alive because Ukraine was not free, and if the Soviets were going to extinguish the Ukrainian culture, it was up to us to preserve that heritage, and so that felt this strong sense of responsibility, and I felt conflicted many times growing up. I really wanted to do things with my American friends on Friday night that I had Ukrainian dancing on Friday night, so there was this, that feeling of having one foot in each world definitely made a large impression and informed the idea in the book of Nadia as an older woman living in America, and embracing her life in America, but still trying so very hard to hold on to the history and the folklore and the treasures that she did bring with her. It seems of a recurring theme, or at least a theme that recurs in both of your fictional work so far, is that idea of the myth's immigrants carry, the things we bring from elsewhere, into America, and what it means once those things get brought into the country. One of the most fascinating passages in the book, it's a little section in the Silence of Trees when Nadia is in a hospital and sees the cleaning ladies there, the Hispanic cleaning ladies, and she remembers her own time as a cleaning lady, and then starts to wonder basically how similar those lives are and what they brought with them, which to me seems like a big sort of veiled statement about America, what it means, and how we all ultimately find some sense of redemption or some sense of our commonality in all the different things we bring with us, but that wasn't actually in the form of a question at all. No, it's true. Growing up here and not just with my own grandparents, but with friends, and I was always that kid in the corner who was listening to everyone. I was either reading or I was listening, and I loved the stories that people tell, and I've always loved the stories that older people have to share. I think it's something that we, it's undervalued in our society, and there were always those myths and those stories, and so for my grandparents who came here with very, very little because they left their homes and they couldn't take many physical objects with them, those stories are their treasures, and that was impressed upon me from a very young age, and the idea that we, these are the things that we can do that connect us with all of those people who came before. That's a real gift to be able to have those connections, and now having had both of my father's parents pass away last year, it's a really physical thing, like you can share these stories, and you will sit around the table and just sharing family stories, as if you can almost feel them there, it's palpable, the stories do keep them alive, that is a way that we can keep alive the past, so it's become really a personal experience of that. It's a treasure, and so that's what we have. You come from other places and you come to this country, and you have this wealth of history and this wealth of mythology, and I understand how people want to hold on to that, that's a treasure. One of the events in the book is when one of the granddaughters begins dating a German-American, and that really creates conflict within the family, and you yourself, Lupescu, is not a Ukrainian name, you married a Romanian-American, how was that received within the family? It was received well. My parents, of course, my parents were born in America, and while they are both Ukrainian, they didn't have the same feeling that we had to marry someone of Ukrainian ancestry. It would have made things easier, and they always have hoped that we would be able to share this. My sister and I would be able to share this with our children, regardless of who we marry, and I think for my grandparents, it was more important. Their attitudes more closely echo Nadia and her husband, of course, because they are of that same generation. They liked my husband, and they treated it on a case-by-case basis. As I look over the other cousins and friends of the family who married non-Ukrainians, if they liked the person, they would say, "Oh, it's okay." If they didn't like the person, then perhaps they would say, "Well, that's because..." If only you found the nice Ukrainian. It definitely would have made it easier, but it was not something that was really frowned upon. You talked about the reticence that people had back when you were doing the interviews for the piece. One of the things I noticed within the book was Nadia's sort of flatness or immediacy, her sense of here and now, and a lack of introspection that seemed deliberate on your part, not just clumsy writing, that she was focused on now to avoid. Thank you. So the shit novel that you wrote, you didn't know. With the flat character that nobody cares about. Probably nothing, but there are those moments where she starts to look back and the past, which we know informs her, is something that she just won't address or deal with. Can you sort of talk to that point as to how you've seen that play out in people who are coming out of that era? Yes, that's interesting. Of course, when you're reading a book, you want to see a character grow and change. You want to see some sort of development in the character. And there's a challenge when you have a character who's in her, the end of her life was in her 70s. How do you show that change? How do you show that kind of growth? And does it happen? And I would argue that it can happen. I've seen from watching other people, and they're close to the end of their life, who they discover things about themselves that they maybe didn't know. Well, you've seen that happen. There have been other stories where that's happened. That's not answering your question. And I avoid old people. Let me think about that for a minute. How do you answer that question? I play my middle class. That's okay. You wrote the novel a few years ago. Yeah, sorry. I'm still just so stuck that the character's flat. No, no, no. I'm kidding. The character's immediate. She's in the moment. Yes, she is. She is. Because to allow herself to go back to the past would be to have to deal with all of this. And she would rather dwell in the present than have to admit things to herself that she doesn't want to admit. Once she does open that door, she does have to face those ghosts. She does have to confront the idea that if she does not share the stories of the past, then her family will die with her and no one will know what happened. And so is she willing to do that? She can live in denial for many, many years. She can just ignore that chapter of her life for quite a while because she's in the present. She has her family. She has her children. She's the matriarch. That's where she lives. But now that her home is empty except for her husband. And for her, she looks around and there's more time and space in her life and in her head to be able to deal with the past. And then when this envelope comes from Ukraine, it brings that past right to her door. And then she really has to deal with it. Do you ever go back? Have you visited Ukraine? I have not. I have not. My father has gone back several times. And he brought both sets of, he brought my, his parents and my mother's mother back for the first time after having left in the 40s. And they visited their villages and the cemeteries. And I saw many, many photographs at the time I was in college and I wasn't able to go with. And I plan to go back because one of the next books I want to write takes place in Ukraine before the events of the Silence of Trees. And for that one, I'm going to need to do some research in Ukraine. And I need to be able to spend some time, the challenge is having three kids and it will be a little bit easier when they're older to be able to do that. Speaking of upcoming works, what are you working on? Well, I have a middle grade novel that I'm working on securing representation for. And so that one is finished in its current revised draft. And I've been working on some short stories over the summer while I finish up the scripts for the graphic novel. And then after that, another adult novel. And what's the status of the graphic novel? I read the first installment back into summer. Yes, first comics is picked it up and they're going to be publishing it as a graphic novel. All four issues in one. The first one that you have is the first issue or the first chapter. And there will be four of them. And so the world that starts very small and this woman's home explodes. And you get to see not just one home and one house spirit, but the entire network of house spirits and those entities that are out to destroy the house spirits. And it's a fun story. But again, Eastern European mythology and folklore is very, very much a part of that story. Yeah, are there big differences between the comic script writing and prose writing that you can break down? I'm so new to answer that. I found it very challenging, especially because I think I have a really descriptive and sort of lyrical style when I write. And comic book writing, it's kind of like Twitter where you have to really condense and think about every word that you, at least what's going to appear in the book itself and the captions and the dialogue. I still tend to have a lot of description for the artist. And that's where I allow myself to go a little bit. But it was really challenging. And in a good way, I enjoyed the challenge because it was so new and it forced me to stretch creative muscles I had never stretched before. So it was a very good experience. Of course, I love, there's something so free and different about the writing prose or poetry. But this was, it was really good. I enjoyed it. I would like to continue to do so. And who's the artist you're working with? Madeline Carol Matts. She's brilliant. She is a Chicago artist and it has been a joy. She comes from a Lithuanian background and we have enjoyed sharing stories and comparing notes and growing up in different ethnic communities in Chicago. Were there any sort of not gang activity, but ethnic ghetto activity? Yes, the Lithuanians would come and rumble. I hear more stories from my father when he was growing up in Chicago in the 50s and in the 60s. The ethnic groups, because so many of them had come over and their parents were, they were trying to stick together. And so there would be a little bit more, I wouldn't say gang activity, but the borders between... Yes, definitely. That was definitely the experience. At least in the 50s and 60s in Chicago, much more so than now. Although there is a Ukrainian village in Chicago, and it is still predominantly Ukrainian, and there are several Ukrainian churches and Ukrainian restaurants. And the newest wave of Ukrainian immigrants that came in the 90s and the 2000s just fell right into it and took up the role that my grandparents had really revitalized the community and added new restaurants and galleries. Did they seem to bring a lot of cultural knowledge at their time, given that they had been under Soviet, you know, wrote for so long? That's a very interesting question. Yes and no. I attended a small conference about two years ago where I was on a panel and they asked me questions about the folklore in the book. Many of them said that for them it was the first time they had heard about most of the traditions, most of the myths that were in the story. It had been lost, much as my grandparents had feared. They had been stripped, so much of this cultural identity has been stripped away from them. And now they're in the process of trying to reclaim it, rediscover it. And so for them the silence of trees was really, it was almost as if they were looking at a foreign culture in some ways, even though it was theirs, because it had been lost. So it's interesting. Their influence, they've had a lot more of the Russian influence, and so a different experience. What did you read as a kid? As a kid? Everything. Everything that I could get my hands on. What influenced you in terms of who you are now, or how you write now? That's a good question too. I answered that differently depending on the day. It was just E.B. White's birthday last week, and E.B. White is a love of mine. From the fiction or the essays? Pardon? Both actually. As a child I imagine fiction. But as a child, no, the fiction. I love Charlotte's Web. It's still one of my favorites, one of my classics. But I have a really wide range of interests. I love Leslie Marmon Silko and Isabella Yanday. I like to James Joyce very much. Ray Bradbury I love, and there's current Eugene Wolf, of course, is dear, and boy. What do you read to your kids? Oh, we're currently reading The Hobbit. I read to them every night before they go to bed. I read Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. We've done a lot of Raw Dolls books. Those are always fun, slightly dark, and mischievous. Kids really like those, and they're fun to read aloud. Do you see any of them following your lifestyle choice? Do you imagine any of them as writers? A lifestyle choice. A writer of some kind, yeah. I don't know. It's too soon to tell. We're big on imagination in our house, so the kids are always scripting plays and putting on performances for any guest that happen to walk into the door. They get trapped on the couch, and the kids will recreate something or perform something. So, imagination is a really important part of their lives and our lives. So, I would be happy if they did. Alupescu, thank you so much for coming on the virtual memory show. Thank you very much for having me. There is a trail that's living. That was Valia Dudich-Lupescu. Her site, also with a really good blog, is V.D. Lupescu, and that's L-U-P-E-S-C-U. You can find the Silence of Trees in Bookstores or online. Our final guest is Nancy Hightower. Nancy and I met about 15 hours before we recorded at the opening night get together for ReaderCon. For some reason, we immediately took to busting each other's balls. I have no idea why, but it led to some pretty fun conversation. So, I asked her if she'd be interested in recording a podcast during my epic Saturday of recording. And Nancy's first novel is coming out in September. It's called "Elementary Rising" and it's from Pink Narcissist Press. I can't find the book on Amazon just yet, but you can find out more about it by visiting her site, nancyhightower.com. Or you can go to the publisher, Pink Narcissist's site, which is pinknark.com, P-I-N-K-N-A-R-C. And Nancy recently left her gig as a writing professor at University of Colorado, where she was focusing on the grotesque, which is one of those topics I just enjoy a heck out of. And she's recently moved to New York where she's writing art reviews and working on her next book. And now, Nancy Hightower. My guest on the reader con special, the virtual memory show, is Nancy Hightower, who is the author of the forthcoming "Elementary Rising" or "Elementary." "Elementary." "Elementary." Okay, you and your pronunciations. There's no accent mark over that A, so I wasn't going to know. But that's okay, "Elementary Rising." Actually, why don't we talk about the book? It's coming out in September. What can you tell me about it? It is an epic fantasy where the elements are awakening sort of in the earth, and they have a hunger. They want to reclaim the earth because they feel that humankind has misused it, someone to give humanity another chance, and two of the elements want to erase humanity and just want to have the earth as their own. So it's all about how do you put the elementary back to sleep? How do you calm the elements, which, again, is interesting given all the climate change issues that we have right now? Which elements are as pissed off at us? So basically, the earth spirits and air are both very distrustful of humankind, and so they are trying to reclaim the earth. They feel that they have been betrayed. And water and fire are on the side of the main protagonist. But again, all of them are hungry. All of them have to battle their own hunger. I mean, if you think about fire, nothing quenches it. And so, same thing with water. I mean, water is just this eternal force. Like, nothing stops a tidal wave. Nothing stops a tidal wave. Nothing stops a wildfire. And so, even if they're on the side of the humans, they can't get very close to them because they still want to consume anything that they come in contact with. How do you balance that with sort of human characters in the story? The human characters have to be, first of all, very careful of the way they interact. Part of it is trying to regain a respect for nature. I've lived on Colorado for most of my life, and so this idea of having respect for nature, when you go up to a mountaintop, you will not dominate the mountain. You have to respect it. And a lot of people will lose that. And that's why people die when they come out to go camping in Colorado. I don't mean to discolite you. We can make fun of people who died because they're not there to defend themselves. But people do die while hiking while skiing because they don't respect the force of snow. They don't respect the force of wind. And they're such dominating forces. So part of it is just learning how to respect those forces again. How do you work with them? How do you even respect the ones that are against you? So, fire and water. They're not the evil overlords. It's, again, a force that feels like it's been betrayed. You come to find out they're acting out of self-defense, basically. So there's no one bad evil person. It's, again, forces that are sort of in that kind of autonomous we need to survive. I was thinking somebody had been on Twitter right after those firemen died in, I guess, in Arizona in that quick turn and wondered why there wasn't, you know, series of movies. We've seen about firefighters to the most heroic guys out there. They're doing this great work. Because there's no villain. There's an elemental force. There's no actual, malefic thing. This is fire doing what fire does. Because that's the way... And it's what fire needs to do. I mean, I'm not with it. But the whole idea of forest fires is that those were supposed to happen. And because of domestication, they don't happen enough, basically. And again, it's this sort of mitigation of, well, no nature needs to act tame. But I believe in sort of wildness, right? And we've lost that sense of wildness and there's a cost to wildness. There's a cost to true wilderness. And I guess it's when you sort of have to bump up into the force of that. And in Colorado, you can. And you start getting a respect for just even wind in Boulder, Colorado. I want to blow like a six foot guy off the path, right? That the wind is going to be stronger than you are. So it's kind of getting back to, but yeah, there is no. Because we only see it. We only see the elements in light of human tragedy. To me, that's kind of problematic, I think. And that leads to the writing from the elements point of view? Yeah, well, in some ways you do. How's it narrated? What's the device for it? Okay, so the device is, you see it mainly through Jonathan's eyes, who's an 18 year old. But again, what happens is, I think the most interesting characters are Bryn, who's an element of fire, and he's this silvery spider, basically this giant silvery spider. The spiders live in the center of the earth, and some of them have crawled out, basically. You have Morgan, who's on the cover. And she is the daughter of Morwena, who's in the abyss, and so she travels through the river ways. And basically, they can't do that much. They're there more to warn. Jonathan has to find four children who are tied to the elements. They are part of a race that kind of act like the Native Americans, basically. They're akin to them. They're called a terra king, and in much the same way that a lot of aboriginal races have disappeared, have been disappeared, have been made of visible. They have been massacred, basically, and there's four children left. So you have to find... They're not a casino reservation or anything, because that would be awesome. Evil? Evil. Evil man. I come from a town in northern New Jersey that was founded in the 1740s, and the handbook that we were given every house gets when you move in. It's a little history of the Leni Lenape Indians who used that area as a hunting and gathering area. But then mentioned that with the arrival of Europeans, the Indian way of life had to come to an end. That's the euphemism we got as little kids about what happened out there. We don't think the Leni Lenape just thought, "Well, time for us to move on." I don't really think it was quite that peaceful, and we don't really go into it, though. No. Well, and I've heard of you. So my background is I went to college in Durango, Colorado, where the Anasazi ruins are. And so again, I went to school with a lot of Native Americans, and they were like, "We are an occupied people group," and kind of changed my paradigm. But also the Native Americans, the Anasazi, they don't know what happened to them. There's all these theories about why they had to move and where they had to move. But it's this idea of the landscape kind of changed in a way because of drought and whatnot. But living in the Southwest, so I've lived in the desert, and I've lived in the mountains. And both of those taught me, again, kind of a respect for nature and kind of a, I would say, maybe a spiritual connection. But also the Native Americans just talking to Native Americans and finding out how they feel about, again, this commodified, this commercialized. And especially living in Colorado, where it's like, "I want my camping experience. I want to see a bear, but far away, and I want to see a deer, and I want to pet it." And do all that in Northern New Jersey, actually. My backyard, basically. Has a bear? We have bear wandering through. Walking up the driveway. They know when it's trash day on Tuesdays, when I'm out walking the Greyhounds. It's one of those, yeah. I didn't know that bears existed in New Jersey. Oh, yeah, black bear. You never hear about New Jersey bears. Oh, yeah, another. They're pretty impressive. There's something out of a friend who was tackled by one, who had his dog attacked by one, because they happened to walk between a mother and its cubs in the town next to ours. Yeah, deer, bear, wild turkey, all sorts of stuff. I'm going to put a New Jersey bear in there. This is 25 miles from New York City, but it's another world. Wow, it is. Apparently, yeah. I did not know that. I kind of just thought of all the East Coast as... Oh, I know. All they think. People just think of New Jersey as the parkway and what they see on the turnpike and all that. Or the Jersey shore. Yeah, yeah, sadly. But, yeah, we're much more varied and weird than that. And wild, okay. Yeah. Okay, well, and so you know about black bears. You keep your distance. Again, even just the trash, you have to change your lifestyle for them. Which, again, I find is just important. So, I talk about this as an eco-fantasy, that it has these kind of... What happens, they've broken these terraking laws. The terraking people have disappeared. There's these four children that can help put the elements back to sleep. I guess for me the question is, what would it take to put the elements back to sleep here? What would it take to get in balance within climate change? Again, part of it was living in Colorado and seeing it turn it into a drought state, basically. And seeing the thunderstorms disappear. And seeing my state on fire every year now. To smell smoke in Denver almost every year is devastating to me. So, yeah, so part of it is it was this kind of loss that I've been feeling over the past ten years. The other image that helped spawn the book was I was driving home one night from Boulder to Denver. And it was snowing, but the wind was so fierce that it whipped the snow into these side-winding snow snakes. And it was mesmerizing, but there were these snow snakes that were leading me the way home. And so, one of the images is a snow snake that turns into an obsidian. So, those images from there, I suppose they all came from Colorado. And the mythology, the model for the elements essentially comes from a Native American mythos, or are you sort of coming up with a fusion of my own? I suppose of just living in the Southwest and also living in Denver. Part of it comes even from a Christian mythos. So, all different kinds of spirituality. But it is about returning to a sense of balance and respect for forces that we can't often see an assentience to them that I don't think we have. Definitely any more in a rationalized society. Which I sort of do oddly enough. I do believe in kind of this, now I want to stop talking. You can say, "Happy Trippy Bullshit, go on." No, no, no. But, I mean, it is a thing where I think we approach climate change through rationality. In some ways, we need to engage with it more with a spiritual or a mythology or something other than the way we've been approaching it. Because this way isn't working thus far. Well, we haven't done anything rationally about it. Then we recognize, no matter what we do, the Far East is going to offset that pretty well. As is the woman who drives her child in an SUV 125 feet down the street and idles her car waiting for the school bus. Which I've encountered while walking my dogs around the block where I realize nothing I do is going to offset any of the really awful behavior of normal human beings. Right. And that's what my students know. Yeah. That it's a lost cause. We should all move to Buffalo. Because apparently it's going to become very nice and temperate. And there's good wine country up there now. You did not know that. Oh yeah. One of the other interviewees I did a few weeks ago, it should be posting later. He has a vineyard up near Niagara because you can now grow wine there. And you have to have some foresight when it comes to this global warming thing. So the other question I had was your history with grotesqueery. Apparently that kind of informs who you are and what you're right. So tell me about your grotesque heritage. Okay my grotesque heritage. That happened by accident. I got a job at the University of Colorado Boulder and it was writing a composition class. But it was writing about literature so I started teaching the literature of Kafka and Flannery of Connor. And trying to find like how does this deal with theory? How does this deal with rhetoric? Right. And found this whole theory about the grotesque which only exists in terms of rhetoric. It is always trying to create a paradigm shift in the viewer. And the way that a lot of theorists of the grotesque set it up is that whatever line you have between you and the other, right? The other with the big O, so the literary theory, that oftentimes we don't see it merely in terms of difference. We see it in terms of less and more. And I tell my students, everybody no matter how open-minded they think they are, they have an other. That we always damn people. Some people damn others in the name of spirituality. Other people do in the name of aesthetics. Other people do it in the name of intellectualism. So I start listening. So I do it in the benefit of racism. I'm just kidding. Oh, I'm just, I don't want to hug you during this interview. But it is, it's a subtle racism that they don't think they have. You saw the moment the Boston bombers identities came out and turned into, "Oh, well, they're not white. They're from the Caucasus. They're different than us." And, you know, they find some way of, you know. Twisting it and making it less, and so I list off people that shop at Walmart and there's a few Snickers. I'm like, "That's your other. That's the one that you see us like." And it's the one you say, "Thank God, that's not me." So the grotesque goes after that line, right? And it wants to smash it. And it wants to trip you into the world of the other. So yeah, I teach all those kinds of literature, film, art that jars my students into another paradigm. I would say my short fiction is borderline grotesque, more than say the, I think this is straight epic fantasy, basically. Who's it being marketed? Is it YA literary adult? What's the adult? It's adult. Okay. It's like adult straight up epic fantasy. Okay. There's a quest. I'm down. No, I like it. My short fiction is, I would say, much more grotesque. It's much more head-tripping, much more surreal, not quite in the vein of science fiction or fantasy, much more interstitial. And then my poetry's much more, I'd say, horror and really grotesque. So... Is this your first reader con, by the way, or have you been before? Second. Okay. How well are you received here, I guess? Or, you know, what's the reception of your work in relation to, you know, the standard or the general body of study here? You mean my work is in like my... You're writing. My writing? I don't think I'm still known very much for my writing. Mostly because I don't get like in light speed and the big guns. I've had some poetry in Strange Horizons, but I've gotten published in semi, the semi-literary magazines, like Story South. New York Orally, it's in my poetry, so it's been falling in between genre and not genres. Okay. Yeah. But this book falls firmly into a reader con-ish sort of a... This, yeah, this is definitely just straight up fantasy. I think it's like the first actual genre thing I've written, so I'm like really... You had me nerd out moments here? Nerd out. People you've met, who you just kind of plots over? No. I, you know what it is, I met Margot Lanigan, and it's more of... We've talked on Twitter for a year, and so it's more just, "I'm gonna hug you now," and she was like, "I'm going to hug you now, too." It's not... I don't fangirl. Is that what you... Yeah, I guess, you know. No. No, be a geek out around. Not geek out, she's more like, "I'm gonna hug you now." Like the Chris Farley, Paul McCartney, S&L Skip, you know. Yeah, no. Why are you so awesome? You know, none of that stuff. Nobody's that awesome. Okay. But who influences you? Who influences you? Um, well, the standards like J.R. Martin, J.J. Right. J.R. Tolton. Good ones. I'm tired. Um, Mary Stewart. I was reading, I was reading some Jim Butcher. Um, but you know, I mean, everybody that I studied too, I mean, I was a PhD student, and my main focus was Henry James, and 18th century, and the ghost story. Where would you tell someone to start, you know, reading Henry James? I'm asking for a friend, not me. Um, yeah. Okay, so if they wanted to be somewhat genre, the jelly corner, is it ghost story? Oh, no, it's just a matter of trying to seem smarter than other people. Uh, where would you go with that? Oh, you wanted some smarter. Um, the ambassadors. Okay. That kicks ass. Mm-hmm. Again, it's for a friend, not me. Yeah. Yeah, the ambassadors is pretty good. Gold and Gold, his later stuff. How's the, your grotesque, or your grotesque teaching, um, influence the novel at all? Or did you really kind of divorce that level of it from what you're trying to do? Um, that is, you know, did you kind of pare down the grotesqueory in favor of having something that's a little more marketable? I do, and it's hard to write that level of horror in a long book. Yeah. The people I can do are probably like Ricky de Corne. And, but she writes shorter fiction. Right. Um, because the grotesque is not just horror. It's this horror and this beauty that you have to keep in juxtaposition with each other. No, it's the, uh, the dinos in, in Greek, the, uh, uh, terrible, awesome beauty. Oh, yeah. It's, it's exactly, but they have to be like in perfect tension. That is really hard to do in a really long work. Mm-hmm. I think, I've never, I've never read like a grotesque novel, I would say. That can sustain that. You haven't read Samuel Delaney, huh? Yeah. I know. I know. I'll, I'll drop a copy of The Mad Man on you. Okay. Yes. Thank you. Yeah. It's, uh, yeah, it's grotesque. But, um, what brought you to New York from Colorado? I wanted to give up my car, um, literally because I, and because it, it seemed more bent on recycling. Part of it was the environmental concerns. I know it sounds weird to go to land of pollution for, and to leave the blue skies of Colorado. Um, but I wanted to give up my car. I hate living in a city where I have to drive everywhere. Um, especially when I'm concerned about the environment. And it doesn't feel like there are enough cultural things in place where I can participate in that. Yeah. Um, whereas it's like, okay, I'll never have to drive again. Um, I can walk everywhere. I don't even take the subway that much. I like walk everywhere that I possibly can, which I think is healthier. Um, part of it is the art scene because I write, um, the art columnist for Jeff and Ann Vandermeer's Weird Fiction Review. And so I've got to go to shows and exhibits and write about that art. So, um, and then I'm going to write the sequel to the novel. Is it, uh, series, series or just two? It is a series of three for this time. And then there's another series of three that's built in the future, specifically on Denver, and what happens to like the national parks and thermonuclear energy. Well, don't give anything away. Oh, okay. I thought that you're about to give away some critical plot point for a book that'll come out five years from now. I don't know. No. Okay. I mean, I'll throw the crap in the plot point for her. No. And what else are you working on? Um, short stories, a book of short stories, um, since I've gotten some published, um, more poetry, which is, that's grotesque and it's built off biblical mythology. So I go back through the Old Testament and find those short stories and kind of relate them to modern day culture. Um, so I've been getting those published lately, like in the Strandtrizans and neon and liquid imagination and a whole bunch of cool places. Yeah. What, what, what would a grotesque, what would the curriculum look like? Oh, okay. So we start out with Rob Alay. Um, and then the first thing we do is this Rob Alay piece where, um, Rob Alay, uh, gargantua finds an ass wiper. Um, so he's a giant baby and he has to find all the different things to wipe himself with. Um, and he had, he catalogs them all right. Um, and he, he ends up going from like a ladies' veil and everything to, um, like a small chick and a, you know, all these different animals and he ends up with a goose cause he's a baby who's a giant, right? And he ends up with his goose. Like, then he shows it up, basically. My students at this point start looking horrible. This is the first day of class. Yeah. And again, the whole idea is that it's rhetoric, it's paradigm shift. And, and they're like, and I'm like, how does this, you know, attach to us today? One of the things we do is we go through the catalog of what does he wipe himself with first and it's all the stuff from the head, right? And the head was supposed to be closer to have him closer to God. So he's cataloging all the cultural norms, right? But the second thing is I'm like, what is used to sell toilet paper today? And they're all like puppies and bears. Bear in the woods. Bear in the woods. But it's all about the sensuality of the anus, which my kids think that they can talk about sexuality and the booty and the ass and everything. I'm like, you all? No, no. They're all Puritans. They just don't understand how puritanical they really are. And that's my job. And that's why you go to college. Yeah. Like Chef tells us on South Park, you know, there's a time and a place where everything, children, and that's college. You know, and that's, you know. It is. So we talk, and I'm like, we're going to talk about juices in this class. We're going to talk about body parts and we're going to talk about how the natural body is different than the normal body. And they've been sold that the normal body is the natural body. That's another thing I hate is everything is sold as natural. It's all natural. And very few things are natural. And I hate the way we believed that lie. Don't look at it. To get back to the environmental thing. Yeah. So, but the grotesque is we start with Rob Olay. We do some Charlotte Perkins Gilman. We do a lot of international authors like Carlos Fuentes, Octavia Paz, Kanami Ego. A lot of stuff that you can't Wikipedia. They actually have to read it. They experience it. They keep the stories for years after. They send them to their parents. Look what you're paying for. They do. They really do. But you get the kids who are free thinkers. Basically, you know, what I was coming out of high school. Oh, he's one of the weird ones. Send him to Hampshire. Like, were you getting the oddball students who parents might not freak out as much as? Not always. Yeah. Some of them just signed up for a writing class. And they were surprised. They were surprised. Yeah, because they were like, well, think about this. If you think about a composition class, what do you envision? A very, very boring blue book and, you know, a very special vacation. Do you imagine watching Laura's Adventures Antichrist? Or Jitaroski Santa-San Gray, which I show in both my classes? Yeah. It is. It is. Just like, hahaha. Right? And so I teach them how to read intertextuality, right? So what we do is we watch Laura's Adventures Antichrist as an updated version of the old wallpaper. Anyway, if I comment upon mental illness, education, the different paradigms of men and women. Cool. And what's your gig in New York now? Gig in New York is write the sequel to the book. Write a book of short stories. Okay, so your unemployed is what you're saying. I'm going to blow it. You're unemployed. Oh, you know, I quit my job. Okay. As I wasn't sure if you had some teaching gig here that, you know, okay. So you're reducing your footprint and every level until you're homeless. This is what you're getting at. That's right. I'm going to be on the street. That's, you know, cardboard box, small, you know, it's recyclable. So that's great. It is the best kind of pressure to have is that you only have a year's worth of money. And you have to find a way out of that hole. So that's what it's because I don't, I don't have a partner. I don't have parents. This is like, it is me or the street. I have faith in you. I mean, I met you 12, no, at most 12 hours ago. But yeah, I have faith you're going to make it. Or at least that you're not going to call me for money. It might still happen. Yeah. I got a garage space, but you have to share it with a bear. So, so that's an issue. I've come from Colorado. I can share it with a bear. I've read Marguland against Tender Morsel's, which is the most awesome book ever. Yeah. So I will plug Marguland. I'll say if I can bring her upstairs to record next. I don't know. Oh, she, she's, her work is amazing. And I have my students write on her books in my class. So, yes. Definitely she writes. That was a grotesque novel. Okay. So I was run. She was able to sustain it for a decent. She was. Yes. And it hurts. I have faith in you. You'll be able to sustain the grotesque yourself someday. I, I believe it. Epic. I like it. I like it. I like it. It's cool. Did you read, as a kid, that was, you know, mainly the Tolkien type stuff? What were you doing here? No. I accidentally read Grimm's fairy tales. Like the original tales. When I was like 10. Which is not the time. Yeah. My parents took me to see history of the world part one when I was nine years old. Okay. Yeah. See, you know, they just didn't quite get the appropriate age for kids. Dense you. Yeah. It sort of changes the way you, you see the world. Um, I read, and this and how I read, also read like Trixie Belden and crap like that. Um, uh, yeah, Tolkien sees Lewis. Just sort of the stock kind of, you know, even though they're sort of that westernized, um, cannon. Um, so happy to see that the cannon is changing. That was Sophia, Salmatars, like a stranger in Alexandria. Um, and, um, Saladin, Ahmed's, um, throne of the Crescent Moon. And so I'm really glad to see that the landscape is changing in, in terms of that. Um, I wish I had been around when I was reading, reading sure. But it was grim. It was, uh, you know, and I found this world of fairy tales that was always sort of dark and grotesque. I said that the Disney version always felt fake to me, which probably is why I teach the grotesque now is because I accidentally found it when I was. You were bent as a child. Chat. So this is just for you and for fun. No, this is just for fun. Okay. But my dad worked for three televangelists. And my PhD dissertation was called, Jesus is my boyfriend growing up in the Evangelical South. Um, my dad took me from inner city Philadelphia where I saw a gang war when I was five years old to go work for Jim Baker and Tammy Fay. Um, and then we moved to Texas to work for Bob Tilton, and then we moved to Denver, Colorado to work for another televangelist. Um, so I also lived in Flannery O'Connor's world. Uh, except she was coming from the Catholic side of it. She's coming from the Catholic side of it, but she was also lost in... Oh, yeah. But, yeah. I mean, I've always thought that she wrote nonfiction based on, because I did that and there was a whole bunch of religious madness and crime in my family. So, yeah. So you moved to New York? Some of you moved to New York, where all the... Yeah, everything's nice and stable and normal there. I fit into that crowd. Very good. Yeah. Cool. Nice to see you. Hi, Tower. Thank you so much for coming on The Virtual Memory Show. Thank you for having me. ♪ ♪ And that was The Virtual Memory Show. There'll be a new episode every other Tuesday. If I have anything to say about it, then the next one will feature a conversation with David Rothenberg, the author of Bug Music, How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise. You can find out more about this episode's guest by visiting their sites, theadoragoss.com, vdloopescu.com, and nancyhightower.com. You can subscribe to The Virtual Memory Show on iTunes by searching for virtual memories and clicking through to the show's page. And if you go there, do me a favor and post a rating and review of the show on iTunes. I appreciate any and all feedback I can get from listeners, and it sort of helps my ranking with iTunes to get some more attention there. The Virtual Memory Show is also available at our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm. If you visit the site, you can also make a donation of a show via PayPal, which would help offset my web hosting, travel costs, new microphones, things of that oak. If you make a donation, you'll get a shout out on the next show, and I'll send you a copy of a short story I wrote so you can laugh at me. I might start putting some merchandising up there also if I can come up with a good logo design for the show. And we're also on Tumblr at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com on Facebook at Facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow and on Twitter at VMSPod.com. Until next time, I'm Gil Roth and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [Music] [Applause] (audience applauding)