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The Big Idea: Blair Austin

Posted on March 21, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

Philip K. Dick once asked if androids dreamed of electric sheep; author Blair Austin wonders about the dreaming habits of another entity entirely in the Big Idea for his first novel, Dioramas.

BLAIR AUSTIN:

What if the Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Edition (1906-11) fell asleep and began to dream?

Since I was young, I’ve struggled with the gap between what happens, what things are left behind and how memory reconfigures them. There is an irreconcilable space between what came before and what comes after. When I climb a mountain and pick my building out of the bird’s-eye view, for example, then climb down, go back home and look at the mountain, there appears to be no way to reconcile the two places. The vantage place, from home, is not the same place it was when you stood there looking down at the city. It feels like a mirage. Intellectually, it is the same, but you can’t quite believe it. Sight is like a memory you can’t accept or have failed to process. This is an abstract problem at the juncture of perception and reality that I feel in my bones as a wonder and a deep anxiety. I turned to dioramas, which, though they are quite simple, lie beyond the valley of language.

Dioramas themselves are pictures of reality, constructed scenes that appear more real than life itself. What has gone on, before, to make them so—all that work from the death of the animal, to the removal of its skin, the stamping out of paper leaves, the painting of backgrounds—happens out of sight. The museum diorama contains more than what appears. I felt I could marry these two things, the unseen and the seen, by making the imaginary dioramas in my novel, Dioramas, into blank symbols. A blank symbol is a symbol in a work of fiction (or in life itself) that is destabilized, capable of carrying multiple interpretations. A transparent surface on which different ideas/anxieties may be written, the diorama waits, passive, and we project onto it our notions of what it is and what has happened to make it that way.

The problem was, how to make the scenes that lecturer Wiggins is describing have flexibility so that the diorama might stand in for the Big Ideas we would project onto it. The only way I could figure to do this was to get out of the way and let the old man, thousands of years in the future—describe them.

While writing Dioramas, I began to wonder what would happen if the Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Edition had fallen asleep and begun to dream. I wanted those wood paneled rooms, the tweed, the subject expertise of cloistered scholars, and I wanted the encyclopedia, through the medium of the diorama, to dream the endgame of its colonial project. Over time, I felt I could see a city rise four thousand years in the future, a city built on the ruins of our own cities. Wiggins’s fussy voice came out of this. Just as the scholars of the Britannica focus on the facts as they understood them, Wiggins, the narrator of Dioramas, describes the dioramas he sees. Wiggins, an expert himself, is lost in the fine details—microscopic sometimes—behind the glass. He sees them in the darkened room of his memory, too, and we see them through his eyes. 

All the while, he is trying to describe a feeling—an intuition too far down to find words for—and that he will stitch the shape of as he walks the museum halls but which he will never penetrate. He is doing this to get at the feeling of the unnameable—the thing behind the Big Idea. The big idea that would have to come from the reader by way of the book’s roadmap and that would change completely upon a second or a third reading. That was the hope, anyway. When you summited the mountain, closed the last page, what you remembered would not be what was there. You would stand and look back over the experience and not quite be able to say what the ground you’d been standing on had been. Because it had passed already and couldn’t be gotten at except by way of another read-through, which would necessarily change the whole experience once again. The feeling of that, the sense of what was gone from the world, including the moment of our own perception.

Many things can be said about this as an idea. The challenge was to write so that these things could be experienced while reading, experienced in language but also beyond language. So I felt, “literature is an experience beyond words.” Through the marriage of form and language, we feel it. Then it is gone. It has the dead-alive complexity of the diorama, resting there behind the glass to welcome anybody’s approach, till it is moved out, into the basement of the museum as in a dream, to be stored forever out of reach.

Dioramas: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

The Big Idea: Jane Hennigan

Posted on March 16, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      5 Comments

In her novel Moths, author Jane Hennigan does a table flip on the world we know to reveal some things that are truths in any world we might happen to live in.

JANE HENNIGAN:

Why did you make the men suffer so much?

Do you just hate men? Is that it? This is the sort of half-joking question I get from men I meet after they ask me what my book is about. Occasionally I get asked – what does your husband think of your book?

I do not hate most men. Nor do I want most men going around feeling constantly bad about themselves due to the fact that they are part of the patriarchy and not at that very moment checking their biases. The fact is, I’m married to a man – a really nice guy. Likewise, my two sons, my stepson, brother-in-law, nephews – all phenomenal people.

I’m a feminist, yes – but then so are many men. I want to reply that feminism is about bringing about equality – its ambition is not to torture men.

My focus on feminism, and in particular how it intersects with class, began when I attended university to study literature and philosophy. I was thirty-four and from a working-class background where claiming to be a feminist would be met with, at best, confusion or ridicule, at worst, hostility, so the course was an eye-opener. Later I became a lecturer for seven years at a further education college (community college in the US). I taught, among other things, feminism in literature. Much of the course looked to redress the bias towards white, rich, male authors which populates many undergraduate English syllabi. Instead, we read Alice Walker, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison. 

The students were, in general, working-class women, ranging from their late twenties to early forties. Like me, having missed the opportunity to go to university the first time around due to children or work commitments – they were now taking advantage of the accelerated two-year degrees available at the college, cramming their studies into every spare minute. They’d come into class – exhausted, often straight from a job, or sometimes with a toddler in tow, clutching a copy of The Color Purple and a juice box. Then we’d discuss the themes of endemic violence, power, and why male hegemony mattered.

Initially, it didn’t matter to most of them. The idea that there was some mystical power structure that you couldn’t see, one that men had put there seemingly on purpose to keep women down – that it permeated our language and our institutions, our schools and churches, even our families, seemed ridiculous. Men just aren’t that clever! said one student, to much nodding. Add to this the third-wave ‘choice feminism’ platitude Women! you can be whoever you want to be— nobody’s stopping you—and the whole idea comes across as a bit wayward.

But those were potent books on the syllabus. The way Walker presents Sophia – her wit and strength crushed by institutionalised racism and sexism. How Atwood unpicks men’s microaggressions, and their toxicity towards women and then amplifies both in the dystopian Gilead. Angela Carter’s rewriting of the culturally engrained stories and fairytales which pass on patriarchal configurations of power. Not all the students bought into the idea of institutionalised bias, but some did. They saw their own struggles – implicit, understated, unnamed, reflected back from the pages of those texts. But also, importantly, they had men in their lives. What could they do? – up and leave their partners? Never speak to their misogynistic fathers again? Abandon their sons? They could do anything they wanted – but theoretical feminism is vastly different from navigating the world as it is right now – especially in a working-class environment.

Books that call out the patriarchy sometimes set the narrative at a ‘men are terrible’ stage – a primal feminist scream, understandable, vital even. The early timeline in Moths is exactly this – a brutal rendering of male violence against women, a look at how those men closest to women are statistically the most likely people to hurt them. But I also wanted a way of exploring other ideas – what would a modern matriarchy look like? How would women—vastly underrepresented in STEM fields—rebuild a country after its decimation, how would women, born into a world unencumbered by the male gaze, feel and act? And finally – how would women treat men, when the power dynamic had changed so drastically?

In the second timeline, women run the country and men, when they are considered at all, are valued for their docility and sex appeal. Women are the agents of the world and they treat men similarly to how men in the 1950s treated their secretaries. There is a measure of ironic tongue-in-cheek humour to this, but it’s also meant to defamiliarise the situation.

Flipping the script, replacing patriarchy with matriarchy, highlights the existing gender inequalities. Those lacking power struggle more. In Moths – that’s the men.

Moths: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Visit the author’s website. Follow her on Twitter.

The Big Idea: Mia Tsai

Posted on March 14, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      4 Comments

Victories are dramatic, but victories don’t have to be the end of the story. In today’s Big Idea for her novel Bitter Medicine, author Mia Tsai looks beyond the usual climax of a tale to find another part of the story.

MIA TSAI:

There are a lot of hooks floating around in Bitter Medicine: xianxia-inspired magic, the blend of mythologies and cultures, the romance, even its plot structure (it’s a two-act, not a three-act), but what often remains in the background is, for me, the biggest idea of all.

Today, I’d like to talk about Asian American women, mental health, and fantasy.

Bitter Medicine, being set in a contemporary world but with a hidden magical world, offered me opportunities to comment on real-world issues while retaining the elements of a fantasy. While contemporary fiction can and does explore the immediate reverberations of critical plot events, oftentimes, in fantasy, we don’t get to see what happens immediately after those events. Climaxes such as confrontations are usually the end of a story or an arc, and if there are lasting effects, they play out in the long term. In a genre like fantasy, it’s not particularly heroic nor propulsive to have a hero laid up in the hospital, spending most of their day in a medicated haze. It’s especially not propulsive for an author to shine a light on those moments.

But I find myself curious about them all the same. The character who triumphs in battle still needs to count the dead the next day. The ferocious joy of winning can be quickly and easily eclipsed by pain and loss, by a body and mind reacting to its situation to protect itself. And that was the part I wanted to highlight in Bitter Medicine, especially with an Asian American woman carrying the loneliness of being diaspora and the burden of family trauma.

What did I do? I granted my character a pyrrhic victory, then trained my lens on her in the ringing hollow after the thunderclap, during the frozen, shocked stillness post-trauma. It’s in these moments where pure emotion carries the story. I wanted to see what happened next, because so rarely are we shown it.

So I wrote toward that. I wanted, more than anything, my character’s friends and family to step up for her, to have community care be the most effective treatment in a reality where mental health services were unavailable. I wanted to know what the other characters would do when one of their own was suffering quietly; I wanted to witness what they would do because they knew she’d back herself out of the spotlight and pretend everything was fine. I wanted to see her loved ones fight for her the way she fought for them. I wanted her to have a group of people who cared for her look at her and it’s tell her it’s their turn, now. It’s okay to rest. It’s okay to grieve what was lost.

Fantasy is, like any other genre, about human emotion. Of course, the allure of the setting beckons—anyone who reads this genre and says they hate magic and wonder is lying. But fantasy is, at its heart, about connections, needs, desires. And that’s the kind of fantasy that draws me the most—stories about people and communities that are wrapped in genre trappings.

This doesn’t appeal to everyone, and I’m sure there are readers out there who would rather the book not slow down in parts to deal with something deeply internal and sit with someone who is so clearly grieving. It can get ugly. Actually, it did; I had to revise to strip out parts that made people too upset. Sometimes, too much verisimilitude is detrimental. Regardless, there is grief and depression in this book, viewed through an unflinching camera that keeps rolling during my character’s worst, most vulnerable moments, and a community that comes together to get her through it rather than demand more of her. And that’s the big idea.

Bitter Medicine: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Visit the author’s site. Follow her on Twitter.

The Big Idea: Elle Marr

Posted on March 7, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      3 Comments

You think you know family, but maybe your family isn’t quite like the family in Elle Marr’s novel The Family Bones. And maybe that’s a good thing, but as Marr explains, this family here makes for interesting reading.

ELLE MARR:

Who among us has never returned from a family event, and wondered at their good fortune—or bad? We all have our “chosen families”—the amalgam of friends, coworkers, and followers with whom we share our deepest thoughts—but none of us has the luxury of choosing our actual relatives or the common traits that we share. We don’t know what dominant or recessive alleles in our genes will determine whether we can make that half-court jump shot or enable us to become the world’s foremost authority in basket weaving.

Perhaps more concerningly, if someone belongs to a family like the Eriksens, no one can predict if they’ll be born with a predisposition toward Anti-Social Personality Disorder—which includes sociopathy and psychopathy—or otherwise gifted with benign normalcy. How much does nature in the “nature versus nurture” debate determine our trajectory?

The Family Bones begins with this big idea, as readers are introduced to a notorious clan in true crime circles: the Eriksens. Given a legacy that includes hidden basement chambers dating back to the Great Depression, Olivia Eriksen confronts her heritage by studying psychology in graduate school. When Olivia receives an invitation to an upcoming family reunion and learns the entire—non-incarcerated—Eriksen family will be there, she must choose whether to attend with her fiancé, or take the proverbial blue pill and continue on in the safety of academia. I know I would down the blue option faster than you can say “neurodivergent,” but for Olivia—and the reader—that wouldn’t be nearly as interesting. 

Another big idea behind The Family Bones is rooted in our latest shared obsession: true crime. I grew up leafing through magazines in the checkout aisle, captivated by the stark headline du jour, and that piqued interest transferred to the small and big screens when fictionalized non-fiction became common to marquees. True crime is a newer genre of fiction, relatively speaking, that has exploded over the last decade. And while books that could be shelved under that category have existed far longer, true crime podcasts have seen their birth and proliferation within the last ten years, starting with the now famed “Serial.” 

This phenomenon drives a different storyline in The Family Bones. From the perspective of a stay-at-home-mom—much like the author of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, Michelle McNamara—my podcaster, Birdie Tan conducts her own investigations after her family goes to sleep. Birdie zooms in on Google Earth images and partially photocopied police reports to form new conclusions on cases of minority victims whose murders were never solved. Her passion draws inspiration from real-life examples of armchair detectives, such Michelle McNamara, and podcasters Sarah Koenig and Kate Winkler. These innovators are all examples of the latest big idea to capture our cultural consciousness: we are capable of more than consuming the checkout stand headlines. We can affect them for ourselves. 

As a consumer of crime fiction and a former teacher of psychology to university students abroad, I sincerely hope readers sense my love for both in The Family Bones. And, the next time readers attend a family gathering I hope they think of the Eriksens. 

The Family Bones: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s  

Visit the author’s website. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

The Big Idea: J. Dianne Dotson

Posted on March 3, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      1 Comment

In The Shadow Galaxy: A Collection of Short Stories and Poetry, author J. Dianne Dotson explores spanning multiple genres and styles within a small package.

J. DIANNE DOTSON:

Back in the 1980s, I moved to a place called Gray. Its name essentially summed up my initial ambivalence for it, until I fell in love with the slender train tracks close to my home, the expansive dairy farm next to those tracks, and the strange and tangled little path between them. This was my own private universe, full of mystery and wonder and unsettling shadows, cave-ins, wizened neighbors, and strange tiny tunnels hinting at other realms.

As I explored this rural wonderland, I took note of every leaf and stone and bird, and I came home nicked by briars and stained by vivid purple pokeberry juice (smeared with sticks on everything, marking my territory). I pelted upstairs to a little loft room and began to write. But in that same room, I also began to read more, and some of that reading included Ray Bradbury and a gold-edged book of classic fairy tales. I had a big idea, a grand one, to write an epic space opera. And I did! But I kept coming back to smaller stories.

In a way, living in the country is a collection of short stories. You live at the mercy of seasons, of neighbors either nosy or intimidating in their mystery, of quickly spread rumors, of being thought of as a weird kid (which I was). Gray was in many ways my version of Bradbury’s Greentown, and I felt a kinship to his many tales, some terrifying, some wondrous. In my boredom, I imagined magical realms and creatures, owing to the literary backbone of my book of fairy tales. (Many of L. Frank Baum’s Oz stories also seeped in.)

So in between the metaphorical margins of my space opera, I began writing stories and poetry. Some were long and ponderous, some were as maudlin as treacle, some were sharp, like a slammed door. Many of these never saw the light of day, but some of them evolved. Some of them were lost forever in my moves around the country, but I uncovered others tucked away in old college-ruled notebooks also.

I combined some of these with new stories and poems into The Shadow Galaxy: A Collection of Short Stories and Poetry. With this book, I shamelessly blurred the lines of genres. Hey, if Bradbury could do it, why couldn’t I? I wrote about fog-realms, robots awakening to love, deep-space mining horrors, an inter-dimensional mage dropping out of the sky onto, yes, a train track, and more. Some of the stories I deliberately made epiphanic. Others glide to a soft landing…or a hard one.

Short fiction seems to be undergoing a renaissance, and I relish it. It provides expansion and contraction in equal measure. It both forces you to constrain your verbosity and it engages your nimble mind to world-build within a tighter boundary. Bradbury, Baum, the brothers Grimm, and many others before me knew the power of the smaller tale. Pirouetting between and over and around genres only makes such short stories more visceral, more real. There is an entire galaxy of genres to write within, and it makes sense to write short stories to capture them all.

The Shadow Galaxy: A Collection of Short Stories and Poetry: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s Books|Mysterious Galaxy Books

J. Dianne Dotson’s website. Follow Dianne on Twitter and Instagram.

The Big Idea: Karen Katchur

Posted on March 2, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi

Most people say that humor is subjective, but for author Karen Katchur, it was a craft that needed to be studied. Come along in her Big Idea to see how she studied comedy to write her newest novel, The Greedy Three.

KAREN KATCHUR:

When I was a kid in the late 70s, we played a lot of games outside. While most kids picked who was going to be “It” by using the method of “one potato, two potato,” where I came from, we said, “My mother punched your mother in the nose. What color was the blood?”

So it’s no surprise that when I started writing years later, my stories would lean toward the darker side. When I came up with the idea for The Greedy Three, I knew I wanted to make it funny, and of course, it would have to be darkly humorous. The problem was I never wrote anything comedic before and I had no idea how to do it.

I would like to preface here by saying that I was not under contract when the idea came to me, and this gave me the freedom I needed to try something new. At the time, I was struggling creatively. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to continue writing at all. But I started watching rock-n-roll documentaries on streaming services, and I found myself inspired. I listened to musicians talk about the ups and downs of their careers, and I was in awe of their talent and perseverance.

Then I stumbled upon a book written by Questlove called Creative Quest. In his book, he talked about what it means to live a creative life. I finally understood what that meant, not only in terms of my own life, but also how it translated not just for musicians and writers, but for all creative types. I bring this up only because I’m not sure I would’ve written Greedy if I wasn’t in a mindset to embrace my own creativity and run with it.

I always wanted to write a novel with the central theme being greed, and the timing felt right. On the surface, the definition of greed is simple. It’s an insatiable desire for money. If you believe the Gordon Gekkos of the world in the famous line from the movie Wall Street then:  “Greed is good.” But is it really? On a subterranean level, the addiction for wanting more money is a never-ending quest that can’t be satisfied. It’s a relentless need to fill a void in a person’s life of which they may not even be aware.

This is the part I can’t entirely explain, but it’s in these voids that the characters in Greedy revealed themselves to me. I suppose they were there at the inception of the idea, percolating somewhere in my subconscious. By peeling back the layers of each character, I learned their greedy nature wasn’t about money at all, but about grief and loss and needing to fit in. And for one character, it was about freedom.

Greed and humor became the tools I utilized to tell the true heart of the story. What could be funnier than a cast of characters who will stop at nothing to get what they want, even to their own detriment and potential demise?

But like I said, I had never written anything funny before, let alone darkly funny, but I wanted to try. Since I had to start somewhere, I began at the beginning where my love for dark humor originated. I rewatched some of my favorite crime dramas like Fargo and Ozark. Some of the funniest scenes came when I was surprised and shocked by the characters actions. I found myself shouting at the screen. They did not just do that! That did not just happen! Until ultimately, I laughed.

Watching dark humor unfold on the screen isn’t the same as writing it. I did more research and purchased a couple books about how to write jokes and satire. They were helpful, and I found a whole new level of respect for comedic writers. They are brilliant. I’m not a joke teller by any stretch and I never will be, but as with any project, at least for me, the best way to start is by jumping right in.

I kept two quotes on post-it notes on my computer to keep me on theme. One quote made the book. (The funny one!)

“To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it.”

~ G. K. Chesterton

The other didn’t.

“Indeed, greed, by any name, is the mother and matrix, root and consort of all the other sins…”

~Phyllis A. Tickle, Greed, The Seven Deadly Sins

Every book presents its own challenges, and Greedy was no different. I had to write several drafts and sometimes different versions of the same scene so that every action by the characters not only aligned with their internal motivations and goals, but also met the criteria of being weirdly offbeat. There was one chapter ending with two characters speaking no more than ten words to each other that took me months to get exactly right. Months!

After several more drafts and restarts, I listened to the book using an AI voice on my Mac, and I understood there were more changes that needed to be made. This time I concentrated on rewriting the scenes specifically for audio. I could hear the nuances in the characters’ voices and how a real-life narrator could play up each character’s quirkiness and infuse the black comedy for which I was aiming.

I can honestly say that I had the best time writing Greedy. It was the most fun I had writing anything ever.

The Greedy Three: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Indiebound 

Visit the author’s website. Follow her on Twitter and TikTok.