The Big 4 Interviews - Margo Lanagan
Margo Lanagan lives in Sydney. She writes short stories and novels—mostly fantasy, but some science fiction and horror, and some occasionally, accidentally, literary mainstream. Her short stories have done about as well as short stories can do without being by Nam Le; she’s been given a bunch of prizes and shortlisted for a bigger bunch. She’s won three World Fantasy Awards, been twice shortlisted for the Tiptree Award and twice for the Shirley Jackson, written two Printz Honor books and had her stories translated into Finnish, Korean and Catalan, among other languages. Her short story collections are White Time, Black Juice, Red Spikes and the upcoming Yellowcake. Her novels include Tender Morsels, and The Brides of Rollrock Island, due out in 2011.
1. Your work often inspires intense responses, mostly positive…but occasionally negative. Does the fact that you sometimes shock critics entertain or annoy you?
I think readers’/critics’ taking offence surprises me in a what-rock-are-they-living-under kind of way. Shocked reactions say more about the reactors than the reacted-to, and there are a lot of very well-protected and fearful people in the world. I’m not saying that their fears aren’t perfectly legitimate, but venting them at books—rather than at movies, or really dangerous situations, or in the form of teaching young people to think for themselves and protect themselves—seems to me a bit pointless.
Looking at my blog (especially the entry I posted today, 18 May!), you’d have to say I find it entertaining to poke at people’s sensitive areas and watch them squirm. But this is not what I’m doing when I’m actually in the process of writing the story. It’s all perfectly serious then. Then I’m poking at my own deepest uncomfortable places, and seeing what crawls out. And trying to see it from all sides, not with my intellect, but with the instinctive story-making part of my brain. Trying to make something that represents stuff I can hardly see, but that I know matters, right down deep.
To be annoyed by people’s reactions, I’d have to accord their judgments of my work a higher place than my own. But I don’t; I put them and me on the same footing. They’re entitled to whatever they think and feel, even if it means ew-yucking and telling people to recommend my novel to NO ONE. Clearly I don’t happen to share their particular ew-triggers—and clearly a lot of other readers don’t either. (It’s of course easy to be entertained-rather-than-annoyed when there’s a second stream of reviews flowing in that’s all ‘This book killed me—in a good way; this is in my all-time top ten; I carried this book around with me for three weeks after I finished it because I didn’t want to put it down.’ Many of the people who do like my stories seem to like them a lot. Which puts me in the happy position of lounging back in the arms of my supporters while I decide whether and how to respond to the more squeamish critics.)
2. You’ve written a number of novels and short story compilations. Do you find it more challenging to compress a narrative for a short story or to extend and maintain it over the duration of a novel?
*falls off chair laughing hysterically*
*composes self* I think a novel is a bit harder.
You’re talking to someone who had ten years between novels, during which she was constantly trying to pull off a big fantasy brick, or a junior quartet, or just, please, gods, could it be given to me to manage one slim YA standalone? Actually, my problem wasn’t so much trying to stretch out a narrative over the length of a novel (although there were elements of that; there were elements of all the ways-you-can-go-wrong-with-novels in those ten years) as always trying to fit the whole world into a novel and then finding that I couldn’t control the novel in exactly the same way as I couldn’t control the whole world. Surprising. Well, it surprised me every time.
The reason I started writing short stories was because I was mired in that big fantasy novel. I wasn’t looking for a solution in them; I was looking for distraction, and a new novel-avoidance strategy. And they taught me (or re-taught me, because I must have known this at an earlier stage, if I got all those novels written in the 90s) how to break off a little bit of the world, and use that and only that, and let a story grow up around it that I could see all the parts of at once and keep track of them, and know how this part would have to change if I nudged that part in a particular way.
And then I worked out a way to write lots and lots of short stories around the same uber-story, and paste them together, and I called that a novel, and *whispers* people seem to have been taken in!
Also, I’m not sure that I do compress narrative when I write a short story. I just cut all the extraneous bits off the climax of what might well be a novel if I let it have its head, and call the poor stumpy, bizarre bit that’s left a short story. J
3. You inspire so many readers. Who are some of your own literary heroes?
Oh, other stump-carvers and weirdwrights. The lushest, harshest, wonderfullest, most difficult reading experience for me in recent years has been Greer Gilman’s Cloud and Ashes. A writer who inspires Greer and me is Alan Garner, and the late William Mayne touches off the same sensations for me, at his best, of having the true, dense meaning of the story just at my fingertips, but being so busy enjoying the telling that I’m not quite getting everything as I go.
Ursula K. Le Guin—her steady wisdom and the kindness and beauty of her writing are always lovely to encounter. Michael Cunningham cannot put a foot wrong, in novel or interview; he’s wise too. George Saunders’ short stories, and Kelly Link’s, and Ellen Klages’—they’re all wonderlands. W. G. Sebald—how could he make his miserable wanderings around the countryside so fascinating to read? Kate Grenville’s The Secret River; Tove Jansson’s Moomin books, for their combination of matter-of-factness about their world, neat characterisation, and strong atmospheres; and I’m just finishing John Crowley’s Little, Big, which is full of pretties and weirdness-half-glimpsed.
I’m not a very systematic reader; I just crawl all over the place and occasionally find treasure. And I don’t waste time reading to the end of books that aren’t giving me anything, so for me to voluntarily finish a book is usually a recommendation in itself. (That indicates the kind of brutality that comes from being extremely reading-time-poor, not an inability to stay on task.)
4. Which of your many characters Burns Brightest in your mind and why?
My old-hag characters are the ones I’m enjoying the most as I progress into old-hagdom myself. I started off with a really unpleasant mudwife, in a short story called ‘The Goosle’, who originated from the witch in ‘Hansel and Gretel’. She was a nasty, sexy old cannibal, with no redeeming features.
But then in Tender Morsels she metamorphosed into Hotty/Muddy/Lady Annie Bywell, née Hornblow, and grew a sense of humour and a conscience, and she and Collaby Dought, her friend from orphanage days, were my favourite characters to write about, they had such energy, and they were so bluntly-spoken; neither cared what people thought. Every time I put them in a scene they’d say something unexpected, and usually rude and funny and true.
And in the next novel, The Brides of Rollrock Island, there’s another of these mudwitches—although she’s more of a sand-witch, ha-ha, because her magic is all about the sea and selkies and fishing. Messkeletha is her name. She gets the first third of the book entirely to herself and her youth, and she turns up fully the horrible hag in the other two-thirds of the story too, smelling bad, saying what she thinks and doing as she pleases.
Apart from the mudwives, I think the characters I most like writing about are babies and small children. I think that’s a reflection of the fact that I’ve now got two nearly-grown-up sons, and while I do admire how tall they’ve grown, I can’t help remembering how sweet it was to carry them around when they were only an armful, and conversing with them as they learned to talk.
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