Nicola Griffith has written Ammonite (1993), Slow River (1995), The Blue Place, (1998), and Stay (2002). She is the co-editor of the Bending the Landscape series of original short fiction. Her awards include the James Tiptree, Jr., Memorial Award, the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Lambda Literary Award (five times). She lives in Seattle with her partner, writer Kelley Eskridge.
Q: Did you enjoy WisCon? What was the highest point for you? Are there conventions that are "can't miss" for you?
NG: The stand-out moment for me, no question, was a point in the Tiptree auction when what was under the hammer was a fan letter from Alice Sheldon (in her Tiptree persona) to Carol Emshwiller. I felt this enormous swelling under my breastbone, a vast bubble of history and connection. I thought: I'm here. I'm part of this continuum, this line of writers whose focus, cares, and struggles are linked to mine. I thought: I belong.
I've never much felt like part of a community; I've been a stranger in a strange land most of my life. I've moved a lot. I was a dyke in a Catholic girls school. I had a posh accent in a tough northern city when I left home. I was a writer among drug dealers and prostitutes and bikers. I have MS in a mostly able-bodied world. I'm English in America. But right there, right then, I belonged. It wasn't a sweet, misty feeling; it was fierce, hard, brilliant. It will sustain me.
I've never really done conventions. Travel is hard for me. I tire easily. I don't like the struggle for attention, approval and precedence which is what passes for collegial discussion on most panels. I don't like that sweaty, desperate handing out of free postcards and bookmarks and fridge magnets that is supposed to substitute for publicity efforts from the publisher. I don't like the hotel food or the fight to get an elevator or the fact that the function rooms are always either too hot or too cold. However, I do love to meet readers, I love to hang out in bars and talk to other writers and editors and agents, and I love to read my work out loud and do Q&A afterwards. I really, really enjoy genuine connection. WisCon is the best I've experienced. WisCon 30 was the best of the three I've attended. So I'm considering returning.
Q: Stay is a move into the mystery genre, as opposed to earlier science-fiction work, such as Ammonite and Slow River. Was that a deliberate choice for you? How did you figure out what genre the story you wanted to tell fit into?
NG: The Blue Place, then Stay, and now (well, okay, soon: April 2007) Always are often described as crime fiction--and they are--but I tend to think of them as novels about a woman becoming herself.
As a writer, the point of Slow River wasn't the spiffy bioremediation, it was Lore's growth and change. Similarly, the point of my last three novels is the growth of Aud Torvingen (the narrator). She journeys from being *this* close to sociopathy to understanding what it means to be a functioning human being, possibly even a hero. It's been a blast to watch her blossom and grow (and kill people ).
When I first start mulling a novel, I think about place, then about character, and then let the story evolve from the interaction between the two. It's at that point that I realise, Oh, it's SF. Or, Oh, it's crime fiction. Or (a novel I've just started), Oh, it's sword-swangin', pony-riding, magic-wielding fantasy, yay! The genre is just the vehicle I pick--submarine or bicycle, kite or SUV--to cross the particular story terrain.
Q: What moved you to provide the audio casts that you include on your website? Will you be providing more? Are there audio casts by other writers that you particularly enjoy?
NG: I did it because I could. When I was building my website (five years ago now, wow) I got a new computer with all this neat recording software and I thought, Hey, I could practise for the book tour coming up and see how I sound. So I did. And I got such a kick out of it that I recorded a few things from other books. And then of course I thought, How cool would it be to have some of my old songs up there? Then it was snips of old interviews. Technology is like crack that way.
Other writers? Nah. I don't listen to stuff like that. When I'm at the computer I'm writing--I don't want other words interfering. When I'm working, I listen only to music I know well; I engage with it emotionally but not consciously. (Typing this, I'm listening to Frank Sinatra. Next up: Led Zeppelin.)
Q: Your immigration case was used in the Wall Street Journal as an example of America's declining moral standards. How have you tried to live up to such a reputation?
NG: The most amusing thing about that silly article is that since I've lived in this country I've been a model of decorum. I don't do illegal drugs (as a crip I have access to all kinds of tasty legal pharmaceuticals); I don't drink and drive (mainly because I don't drive anymore). I don't do rowdy parties at night (oh, okay, I do, but I make sure they're not at my house, so the neighbours think I'm quiet and reserved). I'm married (not in the eyes of the law, of course). Since the recent Supreme Court ruling, the sex I have is absolutely legal. My cat is clean and well-behaved (at least with people). I keep my house in good repair and pay my taxes. Yes, I am foul-mouthed; yes, I do drink too much; and, yes, I can be rather, ah, blunt. But, hey, I'm pretty much a shining example of the American Way.
Q: In the joint essay with Kelley Eskridge, "As We Mean To Go On", which is posted on your website, you have a wonderful love passage where you describe meeting Kelley for the first time:
There she was, limping down that corridor--I could barely breathe it was so hot; the air was like warm potato soup--and I saw her and thought, Oh. Every single cell in my body lined up like iron filings and pointed at her. She is my magnet.
What are the love passages in your reading that moved you in the same way - the moments where you think the writer has captured that same degree of passionate recognition?
NG: I find my mind has gone supremely blank. I can't think of a single fall-in-love paragraph I admire. The most moving recognition passages I've read have been about landscape, not romance--about that moment of belonging to a place and a cultural history. I feel it every time I'm back in West Yorkshire; it's a keen-edged thing. In fiction I've encountered it mostly in extremely good historical novels, for example Mary Stewart's Arthurian cycle, or the best work of Rosemary Sucliffe or Henry Treece. I've found it in Tolkien and Thomas Hardy; the poetry of Shakespeare to Masefield, Sappho to Mary Oliver. It's about the land and the lakes, the birds and the clouds. It tastes of elegy and loss. One of these fine days I'll start the novel I was born to write, set in seventh century Britain.
Q: What are you currently reading? What sort of books do you look for when searching for travel reading?
NG: I tend to have three or four reading strands going at once. One is periodicals--The Economist, The New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, British Archaeology. Then there's the non-fiction connected to future writing. Currently, that's Elements of Old English; I'm toying with the notion of teaching myself Anglo-Saxon. Then there's usually some new (to me) fiction--I've just started Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian and gobbled up Douglas Preston's Tyrannosaur Canyon--a deliciously cheesy thriller, an utterly predictable story that, nonetheless, goes like the clappers. Finally, I usually like to have some no-brainer old-favourite on the go. Last night I finished (for about the tenth time) Alistair Maclean's Ice Station Zebra. I love that stuff: no angst about anyone's mother or paying the mortgage, just the fate of the world at stake with some dodgy pseudo-scientific gadgets.
Travel reading. Umph. Light--as in carrying weight--and disposable. So generally mass market paperbacks. Crichton, Francis, Gerritson, or some whonking big fantasy that will stop me thinking, There's no oxygen on this plane, or, ****, when will the party animals in the room next door shut up?, or, Dear god, does *everyone* on this boat have salmonella?!
Q: You talked in the Gender and Speculative Fiction panel recently about writing a memoir. How is the process of writing a memoir different - or similar, for that matter - than writing fiction? How do you go about assembling it - do you pick a specific moment in time and jump around from there, or is it a chronological act of writing?
NG: I can't speak to writing a normal kind of memoir--a linear narrative, say, or a series of personal essays--because what I'm writing is a weird hybrid: part commonplace book, part juvenilia, part anecdotes.
I'm working with a new publisher, Payseur and Schmidt, and the plan is to create a multi-media taste of my life in England, that is, my life before 1989, when I came to the US to live with Kelley. The book itself will be a limited edition hardcover, with colour illustrations and b&w photos, a CD of my songs--with and without my band, Janes Plane--scratch 'n' sniff panels and, as a removeable insert, a full-colour reproduction of my first book--made when I was three and a half.
The photos are of me aged six months through my early twenties. There will also be about thirty poems, none previously published. Also diary entries from my early twenties (see me struggle over rewriting my first, unpublished novel at age 23 and puzzle over why I have a hangover after six pints of beer--no, you're right, I never learn). There are three short stories, one of which I wrote at Clarion for Kelley, and which will never be available anywhere else. Plus all sorts of odd, unclassifiable bits and bobs: my first collage, my list for Santa when I was seven, facsimiles of the notes I made to myself on the journey to Clarion and then again on the way home. But the heart of the matter, the real reason I'm doing all this, is the text: a book-length series of anecdotes, essays and mediations on what it all meant, how I felt, how it ties into and influences my current work, and so on.
I'm learning some interesting things about memory and truth: finding out, for example, that some of my most cherished memories cannot possibly be true, and that often my chronology is confused. It's a real lesson in subjectivity.
Q: You said in "Writing From the Body" that "All fiction is to some extent emotionally autobiographical." Do you think that a writer can choose specific sections of their lives to mine for material, or is its emergence more of an unconscious process? Are there sections of your life that you tend to mine more than others - or ones that are strictly off limits?
NG: This is an enormous question. I think I'll probably have a better idea of the answer when I've finished my memoir.
Before I started working on the memoir (working title: AND NOW WE ARE GOING TO HAVE A PARTY), I might have said I've mined my life pretty thoroughly for my stories. But it turns out there are vast areas I haven't touched, at least not consciously. I've never thought of any of my experience as verboten--except those moments that are deeply intertwined with someone else's private experience. I won't, for example, be looking at any of my previous or current relationships through a fictional lens.
