Uncanny Magazine - JanFeb2017 Page 17

  You blue as the impenetrable ocean as a depthless summer sky blue

  As the bludgeoning bulwark anvil of a thunderhead I will remake you.

  For what are we to each other if not this: a consummate retelling

  Powerful and sweeping as the weather, complete as a cosmos

  Transformational and destructive as a living heart, close as a kiss.

  ( Editors’ Note: “Except Thou Bless Me” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 14B.)

  © 2017 by Nicasio Andres Reed

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  Nicasio Andres Reed is a Filipino–American writer and poet whose work has appeared in Queers Destroy Science Fiction! , Strange Horizons , Shimmer , Liminality , Inkscrawl , and Beyond: The Queer Sci–Fi and Fantasy Comics Anthology . A member of the Queer Asian SF/F/H Illuminati, Nico currently lives in Madison, WI. Find him on Twitter @NicasioSilang .

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  Interview: A. Merc Rustad

  Julia Rios | 1237 words

  A. Merc Rustad is a queer, transmasculine writer and filmmaker. Their stories have appeared in several places including Lightspeed, Fireside, and Escape Pod, and often deal with themes of identity and transformation. “How to Become A Robot in 12 Easy Steps” is one such story, which was included in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (edited by Joe Hill and John Joseph Adams). “Monster Girls Don’t Cry” takes on these themes from a slightly different angle.

  Uncanny Magazine : You explore themes of identity in a lot of your work, and the feeling of being in some way an outcast. This story is certainly an example of that. What made you choose to write about women who are literal monsters?

  A. Merc Rustad: I’m not a woman, but growing up I was pressured a lot both in familial context and societally to conform and be seen as a woman. It was awful and left a lot of scars. Much of this story is about trying to conform to something you’re not, and realizing that you don’t have to do it in the end. You can be yourself and be awesome.

  The genesis of this story came in the opening description, which popped into my head one day, and I was intrigued to figure out what came next. Well, what came next was the entire story just exploded into words, vicious and angry and hurting. I’ve always loved monsters, and writing about them (in so many forms), so it seemed natural. I often felt, growing up, that there was something deeply and inherently wrong with me (which is a lie, but a lie small!Merc couldn’t see until years later). I chose to take those feelings of being uncomfortable, feeling wrong, and explore them in a literal context. What would it be like if you had wings and horns, but never let them grow?

  Uncanny Magazine : It can be easy to read something like monster girls as a metaphor for queerness, but you’ve chosen to go a step further and make your main character queer in a world where queerness is not by default equated with monsters. Did you do this as a deliberate choice to separate identity from orientation here, or was there something else driving the choice?

  A. Merc Rustad: The choice was deliberate, yes. I could see the story being taken as metaphor, so I wanted it to be explicitly literal as well. There are monster girls, and some of them are queer. I admit, I’m a little wary of writing something purely as metaphor very often, because I got burned on allegory growing up. I wanted stories with literal magic and monsters that was not coded as real–life elements that some authors didn’t agree with, you know? (It took me a looooong time before I figured out most of Narnia was allegory—and I was super pissed off by it all as a small!Merc.) With “Monster Girls Don’t Cry” I also didn’t want the only implication of queerness to be equated with being monstrous. I like explicit queerness on the page, so it can’t be explained away as metaphor or allegory.  It’s important.

  Uncanny Magazine : There’s a lot in this story about violence, oppression, and autonomy, both on a larger scale and in the smaller pattern of the relationship between the protagonist and her sister. Can you talk a little about how those themes developed?

  A. Merc Rustad: Autonomy is super important to me. Oppression and violence often seem diametrically opposed (foes) to self–autonomy. Oppression seeks to strip away the idea of self and one’s right to make choices; violence does the same.

  Although the story needed to be written fast and fierce, when I had a draft and was fine–tuning on revisions, I noticed that while there was a lot of oppression going on, there was not enough autonomy for the protagonist and her sister. So I looked for instances where that could be strengthened—it appeared most notably in the end, when the monster girls confront the man who wants to ruin their lives.

  Uncanny Magazine : You mention being burned by allegory in the past. I think a lot of us have had that experience at one point or another, and I note that you do often write stories with young adult protagonists and/or for young adult readers. Is that partly in answer to being frustrated by stories you read when you were younger?

  A. Merc Rustad: Partly! I also have a difficult time understanding age in general, so I often think of myself as inhabiting several different age ranges simultaneously (six, eleven, twenty–two, and thirty–six—the future!—if anyone’s curious). But also, I want to reach out to readers of all ages, and especially young people who are struggling. I’ve been there (often still am), and I feel that, while we all need to see ourselves in fiction, when we’re younger it is much more important. So, positive representation is always one of my goals. It matters, and I hope my work can make a tiny bit of (good) difference.

  Uncanny Magazine : You explicitly mentioned The Chronicles of Narnia. What are some other works that affected you for good or ill while you were growing up?

  A. Merc Rustad: My answer to Narnia is: “This is Not a Wardrobe Door.” ^_^

  Things I really didn’t care for… oh god, so. When I was a small!Merc, a relative gave me and my siblings a VHS copy of Raggedy Anne and Andy: A Musical Adventure . MOST TERRIFYING MOVIE I HAVE EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE. (Followed by Disney’s Pinocchio and The Brave Little Toaster . *shudder*) And let it be known that small!Merc was hardcore for horror movies (staying up late to watch stuff on TV or using the powers of a library card to check out R–rated horror). I also had access to various collections of Chick tracts and that was not fun, especially when church–going people insisted I read them and Learn From The Message. (What message that was, other than human beings are horrible to each other, I wasn’t sure…)

  For the good? TV shows like Babylon 5, The A–Team, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , and Beast Wars: Transformers ; books like The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope, Brian Jacques’ Redwall series, novels by Hilari Bell and Vivian Vande Velde, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley; Deadpool comics, various authors (naturally); movies such as Hellboy , The Iron Giant, Star Wars , Hero , Universal’s monster movies, THEM! , Galaxy Quest , a whole slew of westerns, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast , and… okay, so I won’t list my entire library, but I latched on to a lot of visual storytelling. 

  Uncanny Magazine : Finally, what else can we look forward to from you in the future, and where can we find your other work?

  A. Merc Rustad: My debut short story collection, So You Want to Be a Robot is forthcoming in May 2017 from Lethe Press! *happydance* I also have new stories coming out in Lightspeed (Feb 2017 has my superhero novelette!) and Diabolical Plots , with hopefully more exciting news to come.  I update a bibliography of forthcoming and published stories on my website: amercrustad.com/published–fiction .

  Uncanny Magazine : Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts with us, Merc!

  © 2017 by Uncanny Magazine

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  Julia Rios is the reprint fiction/poetry editor and an interviewer for Uncanny Magazine . She is a writer, editor, podcaster, and narrator. Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in several places, including Daily Science Fiction , Apex Magazine , and Goblin Fruit . She was a fiction editor for Strange Horizons from 2012 to 2015, and is co–editor with Alisa Krasnostein of Kaleidos
cope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories , and the Y ear’s Best YA Speculative Fiction series. She is also a co–host of the Hugo–nominated podcast, The Skiffy and Fanty Show , and has narrated stories for Podcastle , Pseudopod , and Cast of Wonders , and poems for the Strange Horizons podcast. To find out more, visit www.juliarios.com .

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  Interview: Maria Dahvana Headley

  Julia Rios | 2701 words

  Maria Dahvana Headley is The New York Times –bestselling author of Magonia, Aerie, and The Year of Yes, among other books. An editor, playwright, and screenwriter, she creates boldly and passionately across several genres and formats, and she’s a great favorite here at Uncanny Magazine. Once a child asked her if she was a princess, or make believe, or both, which pretty well sums up the Space Unicorn attitude towards life. Why choose just one? She’s a fierce and fabulous woman who is openly and defiantly all her own. In “The Thule Stowaway” this fierceness and reclaiming of women for themselves certainly comes across.

  Uncanny Magazine : What made you decide to take on this particular story, exploring Edgar Allen Poe’s life, his famous photograph, and also the character of Mrs. MacFarlane, an exploration of Poe’s women in fiction and in life?

  Maria Dahvana Headley: About a year ago, I went to an exhibition at the Grolier Club, which is a rare book collector’s club in NYC. The wonderful Henry Wessells is a member, and he brought me as his guest. It was an exhibition of favorite things from the members’ collections, and in it were several Edgar Allan Poe items, including a cane and a white waistcoat. I tweeted a photo, and instantly five Poe bots followed me on Twitter. So, the idea of being followed by Poe got into my brain in a very literal fashion. At the same exhibition, one of the board members of the Poe museum in Richmond, Virginia came up to me because I have the words “Ultima Thule” tattooed on the back of my neck. The association with Poe is obvious, though my version came from the history of cartography, in which those words were used to connote the edge of the known world. There’s an ink pen nib between the two words, pointing up toward my brain, my own northernmost unknown. So the idea of writing about the Ultima Thule daguerreotype, and the mysterious things surrounding it—all of it came about in a fairly prosaic fashion. But then my brain decided to have a deep dive into wildness and research, which is the usual way of things. The Ultima Thule daguerreotype is real, of course, and the story surrounding it is pretty dark and strange. MacFarlane—the person who met Poe at his hotel in Providence and took him to have the portrait taken—is a person no one has ever been able to identify. Nor has anyone ever been able to figure out why exactly MacFarlane took a despairing, raving Poe to be photographed. Poe was four days post–suicide attempt, and he was in dire straits. He was frantically seeking a wife and failing miserably. As the story goes, Poe turned up alone post–portrait session, to the home of Sarah Whitman, the woman who’d rejected his most recent proposal, saying he was doomed. He is reported to have been screaming and clinging to her garments. To my mind, this could mean only one thing, in the context of Poe and of the mythic history of photography: that his soul had been compromised by the taking of the portrait. This was 1848, and the notion of one’s soul being trapped in a portrait was very much part of the culture. As well, the rather beautiful idea that a photo was essentially a depiction of a ghost. I set about Poe–esque circumstances for the portrait, using the narrative of his poem “Dream–Land,” and the outlines of both his life and art.

  Uncanny Magazine : Wow, I wasn’t expecting a tattoo to factor into your answer! That’s very cool. How much were you immersed in Poe’s work before attending the exhibition last year? Was he always an author who drew you, or is that interest and rabbit hole of research all new?

  Maria Dahvana Headley: The short answer is that Poe pisses me off, and tempts me at once. The main thing I knew about Poe’s life when I was younger was his marriage to his way–too–young cousin Virginia, probably because I first encountered Poe’s work when I was about her age. I imagined my 12–year–old self marrying a 25–year–old person, and I felt deeply creeped out, particularly as by the time I was 13, grown men were hitting on me all the time, trying to justify it by telling me that I was really smart, really mature, and really *special*. That took me off Poe for years.

  When I survived to a point where I was more Poe’s age than that of any of his young women, I went back in. Honestly, this is sort of what I do in regard to eating meat, too. I’ve always had problems with it, but I try it every few years, to see if my feelings about how it tastes have changed. I check on my deep freezer full of Great Men of Literature every few years as well, to see if there are new ways I can prepare them for cooking. I’ve been turkey–dressing the corpse of Nabokov for years in my writing kitchen, and the same goes for Richard Yates, John Gardner, and the bro–tastic narrative of Beowulf. My battle with those ingredients made me write a whole book based on a combination of Beowulf , Grendel, and Revolutionary Road ( The Mere Wife ) which is coming out next year, so yeah, this kind of writing–gnashing–research–diving into acceptably famous things I find maddening isn’t new for me.

  “The Thule Stowaway” takes place when Poe is 39, the same age I am right now. He died at age 40. He’d been publishing the same number of years I’ve been so far, so this was also a good opportunity as a writer to look at another writer’s 20 years of worldbuilding. It was interesting to delve into the burden of one’s own creative work after years of writing. The influence one’s had, the things one’s made. Whether or not you’ve created them responsibly. What you regret making. What you’d want to rewrite, if you knew you were going to die.

  I hadn’t read any Poe for a long time before I started fiddling with this story. He’s one of those authors, though, who seeps into everything if you’re at all concerned with horror, discomfort, and weirdness. Like that of Lovecraft, the influence of Poe is undeniable—and perhaps he is as interesting because of the problematic aspects in his life as because of his work. Victor LaValle has lately delved very effectively into the Lovecraft version of this, with The Ballad of Black Tom , wrestling vividly with all the racist elements of a Lovecraft universe. Same with Kij Johnson and The Dream–Quest of Vellitt Boe .

  Rock the fuck on, I say. Bring in the rest of the world. Enflesh those sentence–skeletons. Give them the hearts they should always have had.

  Uncanny Magazine : Poe is famous for his women. Lenore and Annabel Lee and Madeline Usher and so on. Scholars of his life also tend to find his relationships with real women fascinating. As someone who’s a very strong and independent woman, how do you feel about his women? Is your MacFarlane reclaiming those women as people in their own right instead of as sort of property of Poe?

  Maria Dahvana Headley: I think my career these days is often a lot about writing the hero stories of girls who’ve already been written as iconic victims, as monsters, as ruined. Tilt the story over and it almost always turns out that the woman who has been written as instigator of a man’s hero story is a hero herself. I’m interested as well in literal rebellion of inventions. I have a story coming out soon in a Subterranean Press anthology called The Weight of Words , in which a historical female golem made of wood completely rebels against her maker. My own history, like that of many women, includes dark episodes of men claiming they’ve invented me, and then trying to destroy their invention when it proves to have agency. I’m interested in the foul trope that says providing someone with care, even with love, means that you made her, own her, and own her gifts.

  Cue up me, on loop, shouting Nope, Nope, Nope.

  Also feel free to cue up the soundtrack to this section: “You Don’t Own Me,” as done by Lesley Gore. Now imagine Annabel MacFarlane in her silk dress suddenly bursting out in song with “You don’t own me, I’m not just one of your many toys,” and Edgar Allan Poe trying to rap out a response. And failing.

  This is what it is like when you live in my brain.

  When I was younger, I could clearly see mys
elf in Poe’s girls and women, who tend to be precocious, smart, nurturing, and fucking doomed. All those qualities make them excusable partners for our inappropriately aged hero. They are special and mature, and extra precious, thus SHOULD be partnered with older men, who will appreciate them. You have no idea how many men told me variations on this theme when I was a teenager. My identification with Poe’s girls made it impossible for me to see how all of this was a creation, that all these women were part of, essentially, his Thule, and not really women at all. They’re all hollow–centered icons, even the ones who were real. That made me inclined to dive in and see what I could reshape, both in the man’s own history and in his creative work. He was constantly questing for nurturing and epic attention from women who were either inappropriate or who were already fully established as their own masters, and therefore rejecting his panic–proposals. It will not shock anyone to know that this drives me berserk.

  “Just let me be myself, that’s all I ask of you. You don’t own me.”

  In this story, I wanted to reclaim all Poe’s women, both fictional and factual. I wanted them to get LARGE. And they do. Annabel MacFarlane is half invention—the original story calls the person who took Poe for this photo “A Mr. Macfarlane,” so it seemed very reasonable to me that this person would be one of Poe’s women, half invention, half reality. And that she would turn into something major, powerful, and free of the strictures of the Poe–invention.

  Uncanny Magazine : Is this level of research usual for you when you get a story idea? Do you have a typical writing process?

  Maria Dahvana Headley: Yeah, this is typical. Everything I’ve written for Uncanny has been like this for sure, and also everything I write usually is. I love detail, and I love history. As far as this story goes, I love mystery death. Shortly before Poe died, in 1949, he was found at a polling place in Baltimore, dressed in clothes that didn’t belong to him, delirious, and feverish, unable to explain anything about how he’d ended up there. One theory is that he was a victim of cooping—as in, he was kidnapped, dressed in other people’s clothing, made to vote multiple times under different names, and given a lot of alcohol with each vote—which would mean he was a victim of voter fraud. That one is particularly relevant to the modern imagination, and if I could have figured out how to work it in, I would have. A theory that Poe died of rabies came out in 1996, and it was a big deal—I think the doctor makes a major case for this being what happened to Poe, though in the moment this story takes place, that would not have been the problem. Rabies has a very short incubation period. As an explanation for Poe’s last illness, though, it’s very solid. The story of the Ultima Thule daguerreotype, to the eye of a fantasy writer, offers yet another explanation for Poe’s decline: the loss of one’s soul to a monster of one’s own making. I always do tons of research, looking for the gaps in the history, the mysteries. Then I fill them in. My usual process is me having a crazy idea, and then the research is me finding ways to support the idea. In this way, frankly, I’m much in the vein of a conspiracy theorist. Luckily, though, I get to theorize in fiction form. The goal, though, is always to make it feel like this could really have happened, that there really might be a ghostly starry presence in the daguerreotype, and that it might have been mostly brushed away, that there might be a creature creeping from Poe’s work and into the waking world, and back into his imagined, freestanding world again. I always try to support all the fantastical detail with a firm grounding in maybe. That’s what’s fun about this process. Braiding Definitely, to Maybe, to WTF?!