Interview with Catherynne M. Valente
Catherynne M. Valente is the author of an awe-inspiring catalog of fiction, which runs the gamut from the best-selling Fairyland children’s books to Deathless, Russian-derived folklore for adult readers. She has been nominated for countless awards, and won many, including the Locus, Tiptree and Hugo awards. Valente has also been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. Over the years, she has lived in many places, but she currently calls Maine home, where she lives with her husband, son, and pets.
Catherynne and I were able to speak over Zoom, with regular interruptions by our respective cats. She was kind enough to ignore me shooing mine away from plants, while we discussed her oeuvre and her life as a writer.
You publish with your middle initial — under the name Catherynne M. Valente — are there other Catherynnes who spell it the same, who are also Valente?
No, there are no other Catherynnes who spell it my way, as far as I’m aware. I don’t know, why do people use middle initials? Because it sounds cool. [Laughs] So, there is a reason, my mom went through a hardcore New Age phase when I was younger. She was super into numerology, and the name is luckier with the “M.”
Do I believe in this stuff? Not really. Was I way too young to have critical thinking about it, and therefore kind of took it on board and can’t fully escape? Yes. Did I once work full-time as a fortune teller? Yes, I did. It’s complicated, but why take your chances? And, it’s been a lucky name.
What are the qualifications for working as a fortune teller?
Be good enough at it that, when you read the cards of the person who owns the shop, they cry. As far as I know, that’s how you get the job. The thing is, reading tarot cards, it’s the same skill-set as a novelist. You are telling a fifteen minute piece of flash fiction where the prompt is the person in front of you and the pictures that you put down, so I learned a lot about quick character work.
I always try to demystify it a little bit, talk about what exactly the cards mean in what positions they are in, so it doesn’t seem like I’m “communing with the other plane,” or something like that — that felt deceitful to me. It’s actually very formulaic, and then you improv the story out of it. So, it was actually the last full-time job I had before I became a full-time writer, so it was good training.
So did that influence Palimpsest at all?
Yeah, it absolutely did. I also wrote a book of poetry called Oracles. I had just graduated from college when I was working that job, and I majored in classics. I went to the Oracle at Delphi, and I had been thinking about oracles so much, and then I was one, all of the sudden. [Laughs] It’s less cool to be the oracle at Newport, Rhode Island. It really did affect a lot of my early work.
Palimpsest in particular has a lot of mythology at the core of the story — how much research does that require of you?
It really depends — is it Western mythology? None, because I’ve been studying it my whole life. I’ve loved mythology since I was a tiny child and first found D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths. I was so passionate about Greek myth, Norse myth, anything I could get my hands on.
I moved to Japan when I was twenty-three, and in preparation I read a bunch of books on Japanese mythology, which is not how you should prepare to move to another country. It was a very strange and magical early twenties. I was like, “I’m ready! I know all about Shinto, so it should be fine.” It was not fine — didn’t have a subway map, did have a book of folktales.
Is it non-Western mythology? It might take more. When I wrote Deathless, I was living with my Russian in-laws, so the research was less reading books as much as listening. I read The 900 Days, which is the definitive work on the siege of Leningrad. Honestly, I have loved fairy tales for so long, but it’s all kind of there, it’s pretty rapid access, which is part of why writing [them] is pretty easy. It’s just all in my head; I don’t have to do a lot of research. Science fiction is a lot harder for that reason. Any given paragraph, I might have to look up five things to make sure that I’m on track and where I want to go. I don’t know why I keep writing historical fantasy; it’s so much work. The Glass Town Game was so much research on the Brontës and the early nineteenth century.
What kind of writing comes easiest to you?
Well, I would say what comes easiest is when it feels like I’m just playing around. I think it’s probably no coincidence that my two most successful books were kind of accidents, both The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland and Space Opera just kind of happened.
Fairyland was written as an online serial novel during the economic crisis in 2009, because I had no money for rent. It was before Kickstarter and Patreon had really become a thing, so it was just on my website with a “Donate” button. I never intended to write that book. That was a little character moment in Palimpsest — the main character’s favorite novel is The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. It was just a little character thing, a book within a book; and, when I toured for Palimpsest, because, you know, the entire publishing industry had collapsed, and my previous book hadn’t done that well, so it was like, “Make this one a hit, or go back to grad school.” When I was touring for that, with my singer-songwriter sister, SJ Tucker, people kept asking where they could get a copy of Fairyland, and I was like, “You can’t. It’s not real. That’s not how that works. We’re postmodern kids here.” And then I got home, and my husband had been laid off from two jobs within six weeks of each other. So I figured I wasn’t losing anything, because who would ever publish a children’s book that was so connected to a very, very adult novel? I did not expect it to become this huge, viral hit. I really was just playing around, writing that book. I had no expectations of myself that it was going to be some kind of work of genius; I was just playing in a fairy world.
And Space Opera, oh, it is really the dumbest story of how a book came to be written. I was live-tweeting Eurovision, and a fan of mine in the Philippines was like “Hey, you should write a speculative fiction Eurovision book!” And I was like, “Hahaha, that would be cool.” And five minutes later I got a DM from Navah Wolfe at Simon and Schuster saying “I will buy that, right now.” My agent still calls it the fastest deal in publishing. Even as I was signing the contract, which just says “Eurovision in space,” there’s no title, there’s no nothing, I had no idea what it was going to be until the day I started writing it. Although that was harder, because I’d never written straight comedy before. But, I was still also playing around, with language, with music, with references, with comedy, with this madcap plot, so that definitely shows.
Fairy tales are super easy for me, to the point where I don’t really write that many anymore. For all that I am the fairy tale girl, because I’m always trying to push myself into something that’s not my comfort zone, and fairy tales are very much my comfort zone.
But last year, I was hired — it’ll be out in April — I was hired to write a short story set in the World of Warcraft universe. Again, I take jobs often because they seem very challenging, and there’s nothing harder than making a World of Warcraft story literary. So, I took the job, and it is as classic a fairy tale kind of story as you could possibly want, and that came very easily. I think it took me less than a day to write it, and I’m quite proud of it. But I don’t [write fairy tales] that much because I’m always looking for the thing that’s going to hurt me, which is maybe why I’m unhappy a lot of the time, but I can’t help it. I’m just always trying to grow, and not fall back on what’s easy.
We had a long conversation after The Orphan’s Tales about what my next book was going to be, and I thought that it was very important that it be Palimpsest and not Deathless, because if I wrote another fairytale book after The Orphan’s Tales, that’s all I would be allowed to do. And it’s very important to me that I not get into that rut; I have pretty severe ADHD, so I can’t just pump out the same book for twenty years. I would find that brutal.
Nothing’s easy. Some things are more fun. And I really have enjoyed lately branching out into that Space Opera, Refrigerator Monologues kind of comedic voice, that’s been a lot of fun.
Your work sometimes straddles the line between science fiction and fantasy. Do you feel the pressure to confine yourself to a genre? Do you feel that the line between these genres is hard or soft?
I think that subgenres and things like that serve two purposes. One is a marketing one. As a reader, you read a book and you’re like, “Ugh, I just want that experience again!” So, you go looking for things that are similar, and it’s very useful to have that nomenclature. And the other one is all of us as authors, fighting about it, and squabbling over it, and coming up with movements, or new names, or putting-punk or -core on the end of things, that serves the purpose of inspiring us and making us think of our work more critically, and making us want to jump into something new. I think that is good, and right, and healthy work. Does it matter, necessarily, to anybody else, unless you’re looking for a book similar to the one you just read? Probably not, but I think that part of the sort of circle of literary life is trying to found a movement sooner or later — we’re always doing that.
I have no problem with splitting subgenres down to the atom, as long as it makes you think, and makes you feel sort of tingly and inspired and on the edge of something new. So, subgenre to death. I, as far as I know, coined “decopunk.” It’s a fun word game. My whole family has been in advertising for a long time; I really have no problem with branding.
Do I feel pressure to have things be “harder science fiction” than I would normally? Yes, to some extent, because it’s still very hard to be a woman writing science fiction, and it was even harder when I started in the early 2010s; it was a very hostile environment, and just because the Hugos have been sort of AFAB-dominated over the last couple of years does not change that the readership is still largely an old boys club, and there’s a real disparity in the respect given to female and male science fiction writers. I view hard science fiction as a cute experiment I can do sometimes; I just do not care whether something is necessarily backed up, as long as it’s a good story. But once I have the good story, I do try to ground it, one way or another.
Silently and Very Fast is my AI story. I took programming lessons before I wrote that, because I didn’t think I could really write about AI until I had some notion of what it would be like to try and code that. That was hugely beneficial to me in writing that. There’s always that sort of jump — that leap of faith between what is realistic — and then we’re going to jump to what is not realistic and we have no idea how to do right now. That leap of faith is always there.
The science of it is irrelevant to me unless it serves
the story, so I will always choose the story over the
science. Science is very malleable and wonderful,
and full of its own miracles, and can almost always
be used to buoy whatever you’ve got on the water
I wrote a Mass Effect tie-in novel, which is, in retrospect, possibly unfortunate timing. Very, very grounded in real virology. Yep, it’s a pandemic story! It’s a “plague on a ship” story, and I know way too much about viruses now. That was very grounded in real science, to the point that I would argue with my editors about things they thought were unrealistic. I’m like, “Yeah, that’s actually how a virus works.” Radiance is actually pretty grounded in science — just not ours, sort of nineteenth-century science.
The science of it is irrelevant to me unless it serves the story, so I will always choose the story over the science. Science is very malleable and wonderful, and full of its own miracles, and can almost always be used to buoy whatever you’ve got on the water. I think that things have gotten easier, too; I think there is more tolerance for softer science fiction. I remember, at the 2010 Worldcon [science fiction convention], being blasted for having said you don’t need a STEM degree to write science fiction,
and the world has changed a lot since then. So, you know, I do my best, and I love science fiction, but the science fiction I’ve always loved has been wildly out of pace with real science, so I think I am just sort of in the tradition I have grown up reading.
Which influences inspire your fantasy? What fantasy book do you desperately wish you had written?
Little Big, by John Crowley, definitely. It’s my favorite book, and I think it’s just so, so brilliant and perfect, and I’ll never write anything that good, it’s so wonderful. I also grew up with Robin McKinley, and loved her work, and Susan Cooper as well. I absolutely adore The Neverending Story, and, I mean, my son’s name is Bastian. So, don’t we all wish that we had written that whole world? I do think that my influences are pretty widely spread. Horror was actually my first love, reading Stephen King when I was nine. But I really branched out into that eighties world of the black [book] spines in the store of Clive Parker and Dean Koontz and John Saul. I absolutely slurped up every horror book that I could find. My mother and my grandmother both were big muder mystery aficionados, so I grew up bored to tears in various apartments pulling murder mysteries off the shelf.
What books have you been using to escape reality lately?
Not to turn this into therapy, but I try to avoid feeling my own feelings right now, because it’s too much. If I feel a little, I’ve got to feel all of them, so I haven’t read much in the last year. One that I really loved is Hank Green’s series that finished last year: the second one was A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor; the first one was An Absolutely Remarkable Thing. I just really appreciated somebody putting all of their toys away, like answering all of the questions; there’s
nothing left ambiguous, you know, to be extra deep by not telling us what happened. I think it plays absolutely fair and respectful of the genre, which is rare enough these days, I think.
What genre do you love but would never write?
I do like a little literary fiction from time to time, and I don’t think I will ever write anything that could entirely happen in the real world. It’s not my gig. I would like to write a murder mystery, but it would have to be speculative in some way. I’m just not interested in writing real-world stuff. I have to live in this stupid world, I don’t want to write about it. I want to make my own stupid worlds, that are stupider, but in a more interesting stupid way.
You have some delightful made-up words, especially in Space Opera. What’s your process on that and do you have a favorite?
They’re not, though! They’re not made up, at all. So, this is one of the easter eggs in Space Opera, and the smartest thing I ever did as far as worldbuilding. So, all of those words are words in the languages of Eurovision-participating countries, every alien, every planet, every species name, they’re all words from any one of the forty or so countries that have sent representatives to Eurovision. And people notice if they speak Dutch, or Ukranian, they notice those words, but very few people have the lightbulb moment of recognizing that they’re all from Earth languages. There’s even an English word in there.
I write from the first word to the last word; I
don’t jump around. So I write quickly, and I try to
surprise myself.
I did not make up all those words. One of the loveliest things about writing the book was I had all of these pieces of paper with lists of words in each language that I was going to use, just words I liked, words with cool meanings. And I had them up all around the walls, so I could just look and pick one when I needed something. And slowly, over the course of the five weeks that writing that book took, it went from words on the wall to my friends and neighbors.
Your writing is intricately detailed but somehow uncluttered. How much longer are your first drafts than finished manuscripts?
Before a couple years ago, I would say, not at all. In fact, my final manuscript used to be a little longer than original drafts. But, over the last couple of years, I seem to have kind of shed some of my ability to be brief. I don’t know what happened. I’m still in the middle of edits for my new middle grade book, which is called The Eight Penny Woods, and trying to pare it down. It went a little long, so I’m trying to trim it. That was never an issue for me before, so that’s kind of a new thing. I hope it doesn’t last. I hate cutting things out! I put it in there on purpose — I wanted it in there!
Do you write with an outline?
I used to not write with an outline at all, and I don’t do that anymore. Once I’ve done the research and sat with the idea for a while (or someone dares me on Twitter), then I will write the first couple of chapters, just organically seeing what comes, playing around. Then, right about the end of the first act, I will sit down and roughly outline the rest, which is usually a very interesting story that isn’t going to get written. My outlines don’t usually conform very much to what comes out. On top of that, I don’t really like to know the end. Again, that ADHD. If my brain thinks it knows the ending, it also thinks it has written the book. It’s like, “I’m out. Bye! I’m on break.” So I tend to try and obfuscate that and try not to worry too much about it, in order to keep myself interested, because I write from the first word to the last word; I don’t jump around. So I write quickly, and I try to surprise myself, to trick my brain into acting like a neurotypical brain.
Do you write every day?
No, I have a toddler; that’s not really possible anymore. I try to do something every day, but organized deadlines is how I portion my time in a more focused way. If I take too long to write a book, it’s really bad for me mentally. I have trained to output in about two months, so I need it to be that focussed time. In that span, I will be writing every day. I usually take weekends off. I want to be there for [my son] as much as I can, so I work while he’s at daycare, or while he’s sleeping. My husband and I trade off days so that we can both work.
At this point, I have to accept that procrastination
is part of my process, and things will come [along]
while I’m procrastinating that end up being pretty
vital parts of the book.
Being able to write every day is an expression of privilege. It is. At the end of the day, after a full-time job, a lot of people are too tired to put in your daily, however many words. For me, the privilege of not having a child meant that I could write on my own time, whatever time that was, and now I have to be more organized. It is what it is, and soon enough he’ll be in kindergarten. One of the nice things about being a freelancer is being able to set your own schedule; it kind of pays for the terrible things about being a freelancer. At this point, I have to accept that procrastination is part of my process, and things will come [along] while I’m procrastinating that end up being pretty vital parts of the book.
What’s your philosophy about content warnings?
I kind of see it in two ways. One, it is spoilers. It’s hard not to have that not change the way you read a story, knowing that X, Y, Z, and A are coming. But on the other hand, I do think that it’s quite valuable for a lot of readers. You know, people have the right not to be traumatized, and have something hit them out of left field. Not every reader cares about that, but you could just not read [the warnings]. I feel like the online world has really changed so much; there’s no reason not to have content warnings under a spoiler tag that you have to click, as long as they’re clearly labeled. And, if you are, say like my husband, who is a total psychopath about spoilers and would prefer that books didn’t have titles, because that is a spoiler. I have had to learn to live with that for some time now. But everybody is different, and everybody as much as possible should be accommodated. Science fiction particularly, and fantasy too, we’ve always dealt in the shocking, and if you’re going to have that, you have to accept that what is simply shocking to you might be traumatic to somebody else. We don’t want to hurt people, so what does it harm anyone for people to be less hurt?
Who is your author idol?
Helen Oyeyemi is just so amazing. She’s a British writer, and she combines fairy tale and literary fiction in just such a unique way. And it’s so beautiful, and she was like sixteen when her first book came out, and it’s unreal how good it is. I’m just kind of in silent awe of her.
And, if we’re bringing the dead in, I am an all-the-way-back fan of Sylvia Plath. I just think she’s completely amazing.
The author must die, and dies over and over again
through the course of their life as they become a
different author and a different person, as they
proceed through what is hopefully a long career.
So, you are white, and you write characters from diverse backgrounds. How do you approach that?
It’s a very difficult line to walk. It’s extremely difficult to not just write white stories and straight characters, and straight stories. But, at the same time, cultural appropriation is a real issue; I never want to seem as though I’m speaking from a place of authority on a culture that’s not my own. But, at the same time, I don’t think it particularly serves anyone for authors to be limited to only writing their own demographic. I don’t think the world needs another white, American, twenty-first century limited point of view. So I try — I try very hard— to write mostly about cultures I have experience in, and not just “I thought it was cool on Wikipedia”. Cultures that are deeply a part of my own lived experience. I am a woman, I am queer, I am neurodivergent, so those things come very authentically, and I think that love and sensitivity pay for a lot. If you write with love and respect and the care that you would give to any character that you wrote, as long as you’re not ignorant, and reproducing those white narratives — that’s where a lot of the problems come in, when a character is not white, but the author has just reproduced a white narrative around and on top of them. That’s absolutely not okay, and it is constant work to not do that. To truly step outside yourself. It’s a very difficult line to walk, but it’s worth it, and you get your sensitivity readers, and you do your very best.
Writing science fiction and fantasy, you’re always going to be writing experiences outside your own. And one of the endlessly frustrating things about high fantasy is that they reproduce a medieval world that is entirely white and male dominated, and that’s simply not the world as it was. So, being historically honest gets you halfway there quite easily, but it’s not easy to be historically honest, especially when we have been given these narratives. Whether you’re white or not, if you went to public school in America, you were given a certain narrative, and it’s almost certainly BS, but it takes work to step outside that narrative. We all just try our best, and we will all fuck up. It really doesn’t matter what your demographic is. Everybody fucks up. And you try to learn, do better next time.
But I don’t think the answer is just going back to golden-age science fiction, where you’re just writing people who look like yourself over and over again. So, I write my stories, and I also try to write other stories for which diversity is part of the story. Space Opera [is] profoundly about immigrants and outsiders, and people who are shunned by mainstream culture. It is frequently discussed in the book: both the narrator’s mixed racial identity and the reaction of their own culture to the “chosen one” not being a nice white boy. Is it the most authentic depiction of a Nigerian-Swedish-Pakistani-British man? I don’t know. That’s a very unique combination. I wanted it to be, because again that is part of the story.
We are all human beings. We have all had hugely varying experiences, and it does not serve anybody to pretend that someone with a marginalized identity has had the same experience as someone with a mainstream identity. But, being honest, being authentic, treating them not as a token but as a fully-realized human being, that’s a lot of it. Beyond that, you may screw up, but you can screw up anything. People do, and will, and I’m sure I have, and will. Any blowback I might receive for screwing up is pretty meaningless next to the need for authors of every identity to be putting their stories out there and for stories that are out there to show a wide variety of identities.
In a way, you play into the “chosen one” trope, but you also subvert it. What are your thoughts on that narrative?
My definitive statement on that is this scene in the first Fairyland book. [The protagonist] falls down a well and breaks her leg and has to get out of that situation. She has a conversation with this person who has been her protector, and he tells her, “You’re not the chosen one. You chose yourself.” And I come back around to that over and over again. We are the ones making choices. None of us are “chosen ones”, but some of us choose extraordinarily difficult paths for ourselves. It can look — at the end of that path — like fate was involved on some level. But it wasn’t. A person chose, over and over again, to make the more difficult choice, to do something heroic, to create the story around them. I don’t think there are any chosen ones. I think there are people who choose.
It can look — at the end of that path — like fate
was involved on some level. But it wasn’t. A person
chose, over and over again, to make the more
difficult choice, to do something heroic, to create
the story around them. I don’t think there are any
chosen ones. I think there are people who choose.
Your characters tend to have a lot of sexual fluidity. Do you think that less strict adhesion to heterosexuality as the norm is the way forward in fiction?
I mean, I would hope so. That would be nice. I don’t know. Our culture is at such a strange point right now where so much is opening up, and we’re allowed to have our own identities in ways we never were before, but there’s a really strong backlash against it. And it’s a little unclear right now what’s going to win out there. And, in a lot of ways art and film and books and graphic novels are a real battleground. You know, for the very real reason that if you can see marginalized identities in stories, then they’re valid, and so there are many people who do not want them to be treated as valid and don’t want to see them anywhere. And there are many people who exist and want to have the same experience of being able [to] experience art the same way that cis, straight, white boys have for millenia. It’s very much the front line, in a lot of ways. Books and bathrooms, I guess. I would hope that it becomes more mainstream. For god’s sake, in science fiction, aliens shouldn’t just be male and female. We don’t even just have that on earth, so why in the world would there be such strict gender roles repeated with species that aren’t even human?
We should be able to write those stories, to imagine more identities than even just cis or trans, straight or gay — we should be able to see the whole spectrum, and only now are we really uncovering the wide variety of neurodiversity in human beings, so all of that should be expressed in fantasy, and in some ways, it’s the perfect way of doing so, particularly when you’re writing for young people whose parents might not be on board with that kind of thing. But guess what? If the gender stuff is actually a centaur having gender issues or a fairy, parents tend to freak out less. It’s a really good way to present to kids that there is more out there than they may have grown up with, without getting anyone in trouble. There’s a whole brand of science in the Fairyland world called Queer Physics, and it is not an accident.
My own presence in the book is much less
important than the narrator’s, much less
important than the reader’s.
You’re a very prolific writer. How much would you say you produce annually in a normal year?
In an ordinary year, I’d probably write two novels, maybe two and a half, a novella and anywhere between three and six short stories. That would be a normal year for me. Does every year turn out like that? Nooo. I did a very bad job at that — I mean, I had a child in late 2018. I wrote one novel, one novella, and two short stories in 2019. So, I try to hold onto a little pride. I did manage to write things while he was tiny. [In] 2020, I wrote five short stories, a novella and a novel, and hopefully I’ll be back up to normal speed this year. I learned that when you’re pregnant, you actually lose grey matter in your brain, and it doesn’t grow back until the kid’s about two, which feels about right.
The unique text that is created every time between the
reader bringing their own experiences and their own
impressions to everything they read, and the text and
what it means to them. Everybody creates a unique
book out of those things. That is a magical process.
And then, of course I have my Patreon where I write essays and reviews, so I’m producing that every month. If people hire me to write things, poems, nonfiction here and there, I’ll do that. But it usually comes out to about two novels a year.
On the other hand, in 2009 I wrote Deathless, the first Fairyland book, The Habitation of the Blessed, and I think ten short stories. So, sometimes years are huge, and I produce a ton of stuff, though I will say writing those three novels in one year nearly broke me.
What does your office look like?
I have this awesome arrangement I’ve had for eleven years now. I live on an island off the coast of Maine, and during the summer there is [the] Umbrella Cover Museum. It’s a little museum for the sacks that your umbrella comes in that you lose right away. [There are] like two thousand of them in this tiny little space. She only lives here from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and the rest of the year that building is my office, so all of the umbrella covers go away (otherwise, I would feel like they were watching me).
I have this little space down by the water, and I take care of the building, and write my books there. There’s no Wi-Fi that reaches the building, so I can’t get distracted by the internet; it’s just a very plain space. I’ve had it for eleven years, I don’t decorate at all. I don’t try to make it homey, because I want to get my work done and leave. I write in a very plain, white-walled space. Sometimes, I put butcher paper up so that I can make notes on the wall.
This summer, I got to keep it because of COVID. Normally, in the summer, I have to work in my house, or cafes, or we have a library on the island. I just float between other desks, because it’s just really hard in the house. There’s every kind of entertainment; there’s the cat; and now there’s the toddler, who knows I’m here. Normally, I would be traveling to conventions a lot in the summer as well, and now, who knows? Nobody knows.
Do you subscribe to a critical theory? What are your thoughts on the Death of the Author?
I went to graduate school. I look at things with a critical view, so sometimes I take the Death of the Author perspective and sometimes I don’t. For myself, I fully do, weirdly enough. Once that book is out in the world, it no longer has anything to do with me necessarily; it belongs to the people who read it, and the unique text that is created every time between the reader bringing their own experiences and their own impressions to everything they read, and the text and what it means to them. Everybody creates a unique book out of those things. That is a magical process, and it has very little if anything to do with me.
During the lockdown from March to Halloween, I read all of The Orphan’s Tales out loud on Instagram Live, and I remembered virtually nothing that was in that book. It was like, “Oh, I forgot about this bit. I wonder if I do this thing, yes, I’m glad that I put that in later on.” Even to that extent, I started writing those books when I was twenty-two. It’s so long ago. It is another person who wrote those books. The author must die, and dies over and over again through the course of their life as they become a different author and a different person, as they proceed through what is hopefully a long career. So, you know, my own authorship means virtually nothing, as long as my bills are paid. My own presence in the book is much less important than the narrator’s, much less important than the reader’s.
RACHEL FINSTON is a writer and librarian whose poetry has been published by Indolent Books. Her essays have appeared in Bridge Eight and The Bookends Review.