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The Big Idea: Courtney LeBlanc

Posted on April 5, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

While strong emotions like sadness or grief can be powerful motivators for writing, author Courtney LeBlanc was determined not to let the heaviness of her poems overwhelm her reader, and turned to a fellow poet for help. Come along in her Big Idea to see how she solved her problem, and structured Her Whole Bright Life.

COURTNEY LEBLANC:

I’ve been writing poetry since I was a teenager, using this medium to work through whatever I’m dealing with. In my teen years it was angsty, emo poetry—which is perfectly acceptable and appropriate for a teenager, no matter how cringe-worthy it is when you read it twenty years later… As I matured, both emotionally and in my writing, poetry began to take a more prominent role in my life and in how I dealt with emotional situations. My newest collection, Her Whole Bright Life, proved no different. 

When I’m pulling together a poetry collection the themes usually become apparent pretty quickly and this was true for Her Whole Bright Life, winner of the Jack McCarthy Book Prize, published by Write Bloody. But with two heavy topics—my father’s death and my disordered eating—the challenge was how to not drown the reader. Even if these are topics many people deal with at some point in their lives, how to keep the collection from dragging down into the Mariana Trench of emotions? Enter Aimee Nezhukumatathil. 

I had the fortune of spending two glorious weeks on the island of Crete, Greece in summer 2022, where I went for runs through the olive grove each morning, laid by the infinity pool in the afternoon soaking up the sun, and spent hours writing and editing under the mulberry trees in the courtyard of Dalabelos Estate. There I worked with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, a poet and essayist whose books have won countless awards and honors. I presented my problem to her: how to structure the manuscript?

Already the manuscript was divided into two groups of poems: the ones about my father’s death and my disordered eating, which wove together and couldn’t easily be parsed apart, and poems about other, perhaps lighter, and happier topics. Aimee made a simple suggestion that was the breakthrough I needed: break the poems into three sections, with the middle section being the “lighter” poems. This will allow the reader a chance to pause, to breathe, to come up for air. With this advice I printed every poem in the collection and set about rearranging them. 

Aimee’s advice was perfect, of course, and this structure became the framework for the collection. Broken into three sections, the middle section is a break from the heartache, grief, and trauma of sections one and three. The end result is an emotional collection that doesn’t overwhelm the reader. And, I hope, it’s a collection that speaks to readers, that people connect with the poems and see themselves in the words. After all, connection is, for me, what poetry is all about. 

Her Whole Bright Life: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

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

The Big Idea: Ness Brown

Posted on April 4, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      1 Comment

If you’ve ever wondered if aliens are out there, author Ness Brown is right there with you. In their new novel, The Scourge Between Stars, aliens might be a lot closer than the characters think. Follow along in Brown’s Big Idea to see if we’re really alone in the universe.

NESS BROWN:

Astronomy is sometimes called humanity’s oldest science. Given our species’ long history of stargazing, I believe humanity’s oldest question might be “are we alone?”.

As an astrophysicist, I am part of a long lineage of people dedicated to deciphering the mysteries of the sky. Though my research interests orbit around extreme objects like the first stars and supermassive black holes, I share that ancestral curiosity about whether one of the thousands of stars visible on a clear night is home to a giant rock populated with beings wondering the same thing.

For six years I taught a course on astrobiology, a subject that investigates the conditions needed for and the possibility of discovering extraterrestrial life. My students and I discussed everything from habitable worlds beyond our own, interstellar travel, and even the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. While studying the prospect of life emerging on other worlds, however, we also looked at the morbid possibility of life one day ending here on our own.

Since human irresponsibility is slowly deteriorating the conditions on Earth that gave birth to our species, we listed what next steps humanity could take if and when the degradation of our mother planet is complete. Among these, we considered the solution proposed by countless films and fiction stories: can’t we just find another planet to call home?

Our conclusion—and that of my sci-fi horror novella The Scourge Between Stars—is that it won’t be nearly that easy.

The story follows a decaying generation spaceship limping back home to Earth after failing to colonize a nearby exoplanet. Just as the perils of interstellar space, starvation, and unrest threaten to tear the ship apart, the crew begin to realize that there’s something else onboard with them.

Space horror is one of my favorite genres because few things are scarier than the hostility of the cosmos itself. Being confronted with the dangers that lurk beyond the boundaries of Earth can make us rethink our place in the universe.

Humans tend to idealize space colonization as an inevitability, the next step in our evolutionary journey. This arises from a deep misunderstanding of our current technological capabilities, an ignorance of the precious coincidences that led to our evolution, and a sad tendency to take the Earth—the only world of its kind out of thousands that we know of—for granted.

Even if we could take to the stars, realistically not every human will be granted a ticket off this sinking ship. The technologic aids that we may conscript into service—artificial intelligences, droids, and other common robotic visions of the future—will be exploited for those lucky few. And there’s always the possibility that the next planet we try to colonize could already be host to someone or something else. Can we really say that humans take priority over all other forms of life or awareness?

Like many space horror stories, The Scourge Between Stars challenges the reckless assumption that humans will find another welcoming world so easily after trashing our own. Beneath the jump-scares, spooky corridors, and alien menace, the story questions whether our species alone has a right to survival, and how we might deal with other lifeforms equally committed to finding better prospects elsewhere in the galaxy.

Humanity has wondered whether we are alone in the universe for thousands of years. The Scourge Between Stars looks at a future where we discover the answer the hard way, and maybe end up wishing for a different truth entirely.

The Scourge Between Stars: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

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

The Big Idea: Stark Holborn

Posted on March 31, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

Thinking about the potential change your choices carry can be paralyzing in the decision-making process. Such is the case in author Stark Holborn’s newest novel, Hel’s Eight, and in Stark’s own journey for writing it. Follow along in the Big Idea to see how overcoming this led Stark to the writing of this novel.

STARK HOLBORN:

When I think about this novel, I’m haunted by the ghosts of all the books it could have been. I’m the only person who can see them, though I sometimes wonder whether readers might sense their presence in chapter transitions or lines of dialogue; the places where the papering over between drafts is thinnest.

This is a book that – at times – I thought would never happen. During the worst moments I considered giving up and handing back the (modest, but necessary to my livelihood) advance to my publisher. 

It’s like John says in the guidelines for these posts: ideas are easy, writing is hard. And I had ideas; a great, jumbled pile of them. Ideas for conversations and fight scenes, locations and worldbuilding trinkets. What I couldn’t seem to do was choose a path, the path the novel should take.  

The great irony is that this is a book all about chance and choices; about being cognisant of the way reality can branch every time we make a decision, without allowing ourselves to become paralysed by it. My main character, Ten, (her name is her prison sentence) is haunted by a choice she made in her past, so much so that she becomes a conduit for the novel’s “aliens”: incorporeal beings known as the Ifs who are drawn to moments of doubt, and feed on the energy of potential worlds. 

Even here, I hesitate to call them aliens. Some people on Factus – the desert moon where the novel is set – see them as demons, or gods, or manifestations of fate. Some say they don’t exist at all and are simply the children of an idle brain and an oxygen starved mind. 

But real or not, when under the influence of the Ifs, Ten can sense the presence of countless possible worlds in every choice she makes. She’s driven by her own guilt and trapped by it, carrying a tally of lives she will never be able atone for; trying to walk a road of redemption and stumbling off into chaos. 

Another theme of the novel is how decision making becomes harder under duress. I’ve been writing full time for nearly ten years now. Seven published novels and two novellas and I am chagrined to find that – for me – the process hasn’t become easier. Where I might once have plunged in unquestioningly, now I question everything. The old catch-22: I know enough to know I know nothing. 

So, when it came to writing Hel’s Eight I pulled together my glittering collection of ideas and tried to weave them together into a novel. It didn’t work. It had no core, was all threads and no pattern. I took my (patient) editors’ notes and tried again. I lost count of how many paths I started down, how many versions of this manuscript I began and ditched. The plot varied wildly. Characters came and went. I wrote and deleted tens of thousands of words and pulled together a draft that… didn’t work again. 

By now, I was close to panic. We had a cover, we had a publication date, and I’d yet to hand in a decent manuscript. I felt lost, knowing I had to act but unable to see my way through the mess of possible paths to find the right road. 

In the end, the answer was simple. Like Ten, to go forwards I had to look back. 

Back past all the failed attempts and fears and doubts: I retraced my steps to the moment when I first sat down to write Ten Low – a book I wrote purely for me, driven by anger and defiance in a rush of creative freedom. 

I went back to my old notes. I repeated the process that gave me the G’hals, the Augur, the Pit, the Air Line Road and came up with new characters, new places, new weird and twisted elements of world building that brought an almost visceral delight. I remembered why I loved it, and then it finally happened: I saw the shape of the novel, the road Ten had to walk. I disentangled myself from obsessing over everything the book could be, and focused on what it had been since the beginning. 

Some of the ideas remained, set-dressing as the plot sped towards its conclusion, gathering up threads as it went. The choices I had to make felt clear now. Inevitable. Driven almost purely by character. Ten had an arc that I had been ignoring; she had set out on a road at the start of Ten Low and hadn’t reached its end. In many ways, it was a simple path. A promise made and not fulfilled. And in the end I skidded under the deadline in a cloud of relief and elation with a draft that I knew worked. 

It’s taken me a while, but I can say I’m proud of this novel. I’ve done what I set out to: woven together those story threads into a cohesive, satisfying whole and created a vivid world for readers to lose themselves in. 

Of course, I still see the ghosts of the novels it could have been. But ultimately, I’m happy that this book exists, despite – and because of – the choices I made. 

Hel’s Eight: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s|Titan Books

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

The Big Idea: Tiffani Angus & Val Nolan

Posted on March 30, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      3 Comments

Have you always wanted to give speculative fiction writing a go, but felt like you could use a hand, or two, or five? Authors Tiffani Angus and Val Nolan are here to lend you all the hands you might need with their new guidebook, Spec Fic For Newbies.

TIFFANI ANGUS & VAL NOLAN:

A Short History of How Spec Fic for Newbies Happened:

Writing guides are too often stuffy rulebooks. Worse still, we find that they rarely contain what we were looking for when we started out: an unapologetic love of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror in all their brilliant, weird, super-meaningful glory! It was that love of genre fiction and a desire to write it better that led us to the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in 2009 where, over endless squid patties in the canteen (seriously!), we met and first began to hone our own voices.

In the decade that followed, we both finished PhDs, shared convention panels, and published short and long fiction, as well as academic work, but we never forgot how amazing it felt to find our SFF/H creative community and learn our craft from instructors who genuinely loved and understood the challenges of genre writing. It’s an energy we’ve tried to bring to our own teaching ever since.

Snap cut to the COVID-19 pandemic, when everything went online, including the UK’s annual Eastercon, during which Tiffani ran a workshop about writing Historical Fantasy that (spoiler!) became the structure of the sections of this book. Francesca T. Barbini, Luna Press’s Managing Editor, caught the workshop and offered Tiffani the opportunity to produce a SFF/H writing guide.

Tiffani’s first response was to rope in Val because together, with their focus on different subgenres, they could come up with something really fun, helpful, and super nerdy for newbies and even more established writers. And so Spec Fic for Newbies took shape as a guidebook for writers who maybe think, “I’ve always wanted to try my hand at a new genre,” or maybe realize “Uh-oh, this story is apocalyptic and maybe dystopian but I feel a bit stuck.” The idea was to distil our classroom teaching into something portable and accessible. Less a textbook than a treasure map. We’re kinda excited to find out what you’ll discover when you explore it!

Things That Are Cool About Spec Fic for Newbies:

• It’s based on our combined twenty years (yikes!) of experience teaching creative writing, especially SFF/H writing: Maybe you never got to go to college or maybe you did but never had the opportunity to study SFF/H writing with a sympathetic instructor? This book is our effort to help you put that right. When you’ve spent as long teaching and offering feedback to novice writers as we have, you get a real sense of what students want (and a solid perspective on what universities aren’t providing when they try to jam centuries of SFF/H tradition and evolution into a single session!). The experience we accrued along the way drips off every page of Spec Fic for Newbies like sticky protoplasmic goop. The result is a celebration of writing about the androids, swordplay, and monsters we all love rather than the divorces and minimalist kitchen interiors that LitFic-y professors tell us that we’re supposed to write about. Because this isn’t a book about gatekeeping, it’s a book about blowing the gates wide open! 
• We come at this project as published authors: We know what it’s like out there in the slush-piles: that writing is hard and it’s easy to get discouraged. So, part of our goal with this book is to offer support and encouragement, because even though we’re snarky as hell with each other, we’ve had the chance to grow thick skins, which we know takes time for a newbie. We were conscious of just how much we’d been helped by authors and teachers who’d come before us (Scalzi at Viable Paradise included!), and we wanted to pay that fellowship forward. Spec Fic for Newbies is us lowering the starship gangway to welcome you aboard.
• It’s organized to make it easy to dip into and out of: The three main chapters (SF, Fantasy, Horror) are each divided into 10 subgenres or major tropes. Each section is organized along the same lines: a brief history of the subgenre looks at its origins and development, along with a quick précis (ooh, fancy!) of key authors and texts; a “spotter’s guide” to typical manifestations of the subgenre (types of Big Dumb Objects, for example); a look at what makes it cool; a list of things writers ought to watch out for; an occasional extra element spotlight (such as character motivation); and, finally, a pair of activities to get you started. Each section sort of looks like this blog post (you can’t blame us for doing that, we’re teachers! #ObjectLesson!).

Things to Watch Out for in Spec Fic for Newbies:

• Check out our specific nerddoms leaking through! We love cheesy 1980s genre movies and sprawling multi-book fictional epics, current short fiction and genre classics. Val tends toward Science Fiction, especially Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica, so he brings a love of characters at the heart of big interstellar tales to his discussion of Aliens, Utopias, and big honkin’ space lasers. Tiffani often writes fantasy with a historical flavour, loves a good paradox, and so brings a depth of knowledge to discussions of Time Travel, costume porn, and Steampunk. Honestly, we have so much to nerd out about that we’re already working on Volume 2: Subgenre Boogaloo!
• Further reading: Spec Fic for Newbies doesn’t cosplay as the final word on its subject. Instead, we provide an extensive bibliography to point you deeper and deeper down the rabbitholes of each subgenre. 
• Clowns: Just, you know, something to watch out for in general.

Activities:

• We’d love it if you’d buy or borrow the book and try out some of the activities we suggest. Hopefully you’ll dip your toes into subgenres you’ve never tried before and, tentacles crossed, you’ll discover some cool stories and characters along the way. We look forward to reading some of your results in genre magazines and websites in the near future!

Spec Fic For Newbies: Linktree

Visit the authors’ blogs (Tiffani and Val). Follow Tiffani and Val on Twitter.

The Big Idea: J. L. Worrad

Posted on March 29, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

What is an urban legend without people to tell their tale, and spread fear into the hearts of others? Luckily, author J. L. Worrad is here with a new novel to keep the legend of his hometown monster alive. Read on to see how he utilizes this boogeyman in The Keep Within.

J. L. WORRAD:

Have you ever heard of Black Annis? On the internet she’s something of a niche folk-monster. Nowhere near the level of Slenderman, granted, but certainly the recipient of much gruesome fan art and fiction. The hipster’s choice of bogeywoman. 

Black Annis hails from my home city of Leicester, England, and so I’m perversely fond of her as I am my local and ever-struggling soccer team. Everyone’s heard of Black Annis around Leicester and, secretly, they hope she hasn’t heard of them.

Of late there has been attempts to rehabilitate mythical witches, with authors reclaiming the likes of Circe or Morgan LaFaye as feminist symbols. Not Black Annis. Black Annis is just fucking creepy. Vast talons foul with human flesh, there grew in place of hands, says one Georgian ode to her, whilst her obscene waist/ warm skins of human victims close embraced. She drains the blood of victims, preferably children, and hangs their tanned hides from an ancient oak outside her cave. Leicester cottages had tiny windows, it is alleged, because people feared her getting in.

The Keep Within, my latest fantasy novel, shamelessly steals Black Annis. Set in the same world as previous novel Pennyblade, the decaying city of Becken is stalked by Red Marie (beautifully rendered on the book’s cover by Julia Lloyd), a creature of ancient fable. The poor live in terror of her. The rich could not care. 

This was a realisation that writing The Keep Within soon led me to: bogeymen are the peasant’s fear, never the noble’s, never the priest’s. Folk monsters represent the ever-ready talons of a precarious life: hunger, want, disease, landlords. But the legend of Black Annis takes the metaphor further. Annis lives in her self-carved cave, yes, but the cave is home to a tunnel that leads some two miles (Leicester’s folklore boasts several absurdly long tunnels) to the cellars of Leicester castle. How poetic is that? The commoner was shrewd indeed to imagine the very seat of power gave succour and respite to their worst nightmare.

The Keep Within is about power. Fear’s power, physical and fiscal power, the desire to have power over others and the desire to be controlled in turn, to be a cog in a machine. It’s perhaps the oddest and most awkward part of the human soul to have to consider. Power—and the allure of power—is also utterly and unforgivably absurd. Thus The Keep Within soon became a black comedy. Most humans, the vast majority in fact, have been serf and slave, sweating out their lives and hopes and true potential beneath another’s yoke. Just thinking about that breaks me out in a cold sweat, as it should any half decent person. Thus one must laugh in the face of Black Annis because it’s either that or weep.

Naturally it’s my protagonist who does much of the laughing. Sir Harrance ‘Harry’ Larksdale, proprietor of the Wreath Theatre and bastard brother of the king. A kind and hearty soul, a man with a foot in both the streets of Becken and the halls of the Keep, the brutish citadel that looms above the city. Larksdale is duality itself, an aristocrat and bawd; a lover of both men and women; the procurer of the king’s delights and the bane of his queen, with whom Larksdale shares a best forgotten past. Like Red Marie he roams freely through a regimented world. Unlike Red Marie he uses that gift, or tries to use it, for his idea of the good. 

The Keep Within was the hardest book I’ve ever worked on but the end result pleases me beyond measure. If nothing else I survived a long walk in the dark with Black Annis.

This time around.

The Keep Within: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|IndieBound|Bookshop

Visit J.L. Worrad’s website. Follow him on Twitter.

The Big Idea: Lavanya Lakshminarayan

Posted on March 28, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      3 Comments

Coming up with one main character can be hard enough, but author Lavanya Lakshminarayan came up with over twenty in her debut novel, The Ten Percent Thief. Read on to see how all these individual stories took form and shaped into one book.

LAVANYA LAKSHMINARAYAN:

I first met my arch-nemesis burnout when I worked in videogames. We took to each other like a house on fire. I was a woman game designer working in a predominantly male-dominated industry, hellbent on proving myself, and willing to put in the extra hours to do so. Burnout was my shadow, lurking in my flight path all the way to its inevitable conclusion—splattered against a glass ceiling, blood, feathers, and objective lack of glory.

Unyielding sixty-odd-hour work weeks with high pressure stakes never end well. Six years into my gaming career, I hit the end of the road when I found myself having a panic attack in a grocery store. I was overwhelmed by the fact that tomatoes were, in fact, 3D objects and not jpegs on the screen of a door-delivery app.

The experience prompted me to reassess my life. It also sparked the first story I wrote in my debut novel, The Ten Percent Thief. 

Titled ‘Analog/Virtual’, and set in a performance-obsessed world, a woman in her late-twenties grows reliant on running all her errands using apps, so she can maximize her productivity at work. But she underperforms at her job, is denied access to her tech as a consequence, and is forced to navigate a grocery store IRL. Her fear of real-world tomatoes echoes my own. And yet, the novel that emerged isn’t about her—or about me. We are a microcosm in our fragile worlds. 

The Ten Percent Thief spills over with my concerns about the future. It’s equal parts urgent warning and social satire, examining the impact of technocapitalism and the climate crisis in near-future Bangalore, now rebranded Apex City. It also happens to be a mosaic novel, made from the jagged threads of over twenty protagonists, all struggling to find meaning in a ruthless, relentless reality.

As the voice of my first character hammered its way through my keyboard, it dawned on me that there was no other way this novel could be. She wasn’t a hero; she was just a woman trying to survive. And she was never going to be free—she was too entrenched in the system of social hierarchies, values and philosophies that framed the city around her. She wanted to belong, no matter the cost. She got me thinking about others like her, trapped in in invisible city-cages, unable to see the bars. And others unlike her, outsiders trying to redefine what the city could be.

Apex City is governed by a corporation, and its citizens are mapped onto the Bell Curve. Productivity and the right social persona can catapult individuals to the top twenty percent of society. As the Virtual elite, there’s limitless access to privilege—everything from climate control solutions to olfactory simulations. Fail to perform, and risk falling to the bottom ten percent—routinely deported from the city and branded Analogs, with no access to running water, electricity, or their humanity.

Visions of everyday people going about their lives under the all-too-real burden of the Bell Curve popped into my head, faster than I could put pen to paper, a kaleidoscopic image of this new reality. Millions of shimmering threads wove together into a city reflecting the sum of its parts, yet disregarding the brightness of the individual skeins for the greater whole; a vision straining towards perfection, continually mending any rips and tears or knots gone wrong, through any means possible. I wanted to shine a light on those individual skeins—its people—and follow their paths through the weave. 

Over twenty different voices, their threads running in parallel, crossing over each other, cutting each other off, lending texture and color to each other, emerged on the page, one story at a time, knitting themselves into the narrative of a city. A city pushed to its breaking point and losing control. A city pummeled into submission by the climate crisis, struggling to prove its worth to its corporate overlords, its foundations crumbling beneath the burden of survival, trying to save itself. A city on the knife edge of something remarkable, teetering between evolution and annihilation. 

Rebel, conformist, puppet master, pawn… each person unspooling before my eyes was made and unmade by the city that empowered them, liberated them, inspired them, oppressed them, judged them, broke them. And they all had the choice to build the city or tear it down. My mind held an infinity mirror, my heart a song of hope for this dark future.

The Ten Percent Thief first made its debut in South Asia as Analog/ Virtual, titled after the story where it began. It resonated with readers, who saw themselves—and the cities they came from—in its pages. Apex City is a futuristic projection of my hometown, and it retains some of its history, but it’s also a city on fire that could be anywhere in the world. Some of its people are like me, but they could also be you. All of them are stuck in a moment. Some will burn out; some will burn the future to the ground. If they could only come together, they might be able to save themselves, and build a better future. And so could we.

The Ten Percent Thief: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powells|Waterstones|Forbidden Planet

Follow the author on Twitter and Instagram.

The Big Idea: Leopoldo Gout

Posted on March 23, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      2 Comments

A beloved part of childhood celebrations has a darker past than most people realize — and for author Leopoldo Gout, this is only one secret that the past holds, which came to be part and parcel of how his novel Piñata came to be.

LEOPOLDO GOUT:

Piñatas can be seen as a symbol of hiding joy in plain sight. As kids we sang the piñata song and banged those colorful objects in anger and violence to access that joy. To have that rush of joy in that moment that the candy cascades and everyone jumps to grab it like a bizarre wrestling match. How can this object of pure adrenaline and joy have such a dark history?

That is the origin for the big idea behind Piñata. I literally peeled things about its history of where the piñata tradition comes from and how the rituals became what they are today. In this research the truth came far more horrifying than I could ever imagine…

Let me first frame a little about my personal journey. Years ago, I was around ten years old on a trip to Chiapas in the south of Mexico, to visit a banged up old hacienda where my father had been born. This broken-down old property in the mountains of Chiapas was being swallowed by the surrounding tropical forests of the area. They crept in from the property lines, inching forward to retake the land. But even on the crumbling walls there were the memories of rage left by the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Bullets peppered the walls from the battles which tore Chiapas apart. This abandoned hacienda was near to some of the most ancient pyramids in Mexico. All these abandoned buildings dancing through a give and take with nature. Again, echoing this rage and love. When I started Piñata I went to these memories of Chiapas and where I grew up: Mexico City.

I was always aware of the history under the city built on top of the Aztec capitol of Tenochtitlan. As a kid I often went on visits to ancient ruins under the main square. I thought of the Aztec sculptures trying to break through the pavement of Mexico City to escape their tombs. The city of the underground crying to swallow that above, to free itself from a tortured history. Some of the buildings of modern-day Mexico City are now quite literally sinking back into the earth as the massive metropolis reacts to an ancient forgotten lake where it was built.

But that Chiapas trip was a truly stunning moment because who we had really gone to see in Tuxtla Gutierrez was my great-aunt, Hellen Gout. As a kid I thought she must be 115 years old. In her house, smelling like leather tacky with old honey and dusty bottles of rum, old Hellen showed us a document which changed my perception of myself and my family.

All my life, my father’s family talked about their “French ancestry,” but what great-aunt Hellen showed us was an illustrated genealogical history, our whole family tree with every ancestor drawn and painted. Following the line up from my father with his French ancestry, straight up from his place on the tree, we saw her: an indigenous Zapotec woman. It was incredible. To this day I refuse to take any of those DNA tests because I don’t want to have any chance that its wrong.

According to that document, I have Zapotec blood, the blood of one of the great architect and sculptor indigenous nations. There is a line between myself and all of those ruins and art I adored.

I was struck. My curiosity for pre-invasion Mexico grew as I visited every temple and museum I could and never stopped. The indigenous art of Mexico has always had a deep impact on my work in all mediums. My first novel, Ghost Radio, was directly inspired by that connection as my first attempt to call on those memories to tell a story. Those stories and ideas have matured and evolved through my other projects and into Piñata. I have countless more stories about my lifelong search for further connection with the original ways of Mexico.

 I was lucky enough that my late mother, Andrea Valeria, was an avid supporter and great friend to many indigenous artists and families. Every year they would come to our house, bringing with them intricate and beautiful masks they had carved. One of the greatest and most fascinating differences between our cultures that I gleaned from those days was the attribution of value. We might appraise the value of a mask by the intricacy of its design, how much labor it would have taken, the vibrance and skillful application of paint, or the simple beauty of them. They, however attributed value to each mask only by how “danced” they were, quite literally how much one had been worn during the act of dancing determined its value. It was a value determined by the amount of energy which had been poured into an object after its creation, how much life the empty eyes of the mask had seen.

These are just some glimpses into my upbringing which fostered a deep connection with and curiosity for ancient Mexico. These were some of the memories and feelings which drive the pistons in Piñata’s engine. The real crystalized big idea for which came when, during my research, I found that Catholic friars introduced piñatas to Mexico. The Aztecs had something mildly similar, but they had different purposes which is explained in the book. But, what these Spanish friars would do is paint them with images of indigenous gods, what they deemed idolatry, and fill them with food. Then the children, taken from their culture and hungry, would be forced to destroy the image of their gods if they were to get the food within. The image and idea were so extraordinarily horrific I didn’t sleep for days thinking about it. I wrote the beginning story right away and felt transported, like I had been a witness to such horror.

I use all my senses in my work, both as visual artist and writer, and my scent and sensory memory really drive the cathartic horror in Piñata as it focuses so heavily on the memory of the indigenous people of Mexico both past and present. I sought to express the rage inherent in that tortured history, to explore it like the ruins of that old Chiapas hacienda. At the same time though, while trying to dive into that historical anger, I had a young talented daughter growing before my eyes. I ended up in my daily life balancing that immense love and promise of the future with a rage I conjured from the past.

That clash led to the story that is Piñata. It focuses on a family but takes place in a country inextricably linked to a violent past and facing a violent present. It is personal and political, external and internal. It was my attempt to pull these binary oppositions into something cathartic for myself and hopefully for everyone who reads it. So my big idea that catapulted me into Piñata is inside that space between rage and love.

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