Photo Credit (left): Emma Gorst
Photo Credit (right): Carole Wacey
Interview by Helen Marshall and Daniel A. Rabuzzi
Helen and Daniel met at the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium in 2011, and have been professional colleagues ever since. Helen was an editor on Daniel’s second novel, much to Daniel’s lasting gratitude. Daniel is an avid reader of Helen’s work and is especially delighted to be among those who receive her and her sister Laura’s holiday cards, which contain unique micro-fiction. Daniel interviewed Helen on his blog Lobster & Canary in 2013. For the interview appearing here in PRISM, Helen and Daniel emailed each other and worked together on a shared digital document over several months, anchored by a long video call spanning the time zones between Brisbane and New York City.
How medieval are we?
Daniel A. Rabuzzi: With plague, famine, war, religiosity in the public sphere, gender roles and definitions so prominent in the headlines today, we may be less modern than we pretend to be. Do “medieval” concerns surface in today’s fiction and poetry?
Helen Marshall: In some ways, the category of the medieval exists simply so that we have something to push against. The medieval is often seen as the pre-technological, the pre-rational, the pre-individual, but of course, it’s a bit of a straw man argument. We live in a world in which we are deliberately seeking off-line activities, retreating from the terror of new technologies (ChatGPT, anyone?) even as we hurtle toward a future governed by them. We believe we live in an age of reason, but the pandemic revealed how much discourse is still governed by superstition, particularly in times of uncertainty. And the individual? We live in our social media bubbles and we retreat to our polarised tribes.
When I began writing my novel The Migration in 2013, I was interested in exploring the idea of a contemporary apocalypse, a crisis where humanity seemed to be on the verge of extinction as it had been (or at least seemed to be). I found myself interested in Juan Diaz’s article in the Boston Review, “What Disasters Reveal” which discussed the earthquake that devastated Haiti in 2010, and linked the notion of the apocalypse to the Greek apocalypsis, meaning to uncover and unveil. Apocalypses tell us something about the conditions of the world. They provoke revelation. Of course, ten years later the apocalypse narratives have taken over to such an extent that we may be reaching peak exhaustion, particularly with climate narratives. Even David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, which had a profound effect on me, writes now in his October 2022 New York Times feature “Beyond Catastrophe” about the new climate reality coming into focus, which is neither as good as we hoped nor as bad as we feared. This is perhaps the nature of things: we are surprisingly like our medieval brethren and sistren, staring down the face of disaster, facing and attempting to master uncertainty, torn between the angels of our good intentions and the demons of our fear and aggression.
And so I suppose I am particularly interested in the books that embrace this. Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr weaves together the stories of several individuals across different time periods, including Anna and Omeir, who are tasked with safeguarding a book from destruction in the present day; Seymour and Zeno, two children trying to survive the siege of Constantinople in the 15th century; and Konstance and Kostya, two cosmonauts hurtling through space in the future. It shows us that the search for meaning and connection transcends the crises of the present, finding connections in the past and imagining them into the future. Likewise, Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind by Anne Charnock tells the story of three women from different time periods: Renaissance-era Italian artist, Paolo Uccello; a contemporary Chinese factory worker, Ming; and a future London-based architect, Toni. Through their perspectives, this deeply philosophical novel explores themes of art, technology, memory, and family, as each character navigates the challenges of their respective time periods.
Genre.
Rabuzzi: You write in various genres: horror, fantasy, the weird. How useful do you find such labels? Anglophone publishing over the past few decades appears to have moved away from 19th-century requirements of realism and the demands of 20th-century modernism, re-embracing the fabulistic and wondrous. Zadie Smith and Michael Chabon, among others, have called our attention to this trend. Or do I overstate the case for the blurring of genre boundaries?
Marshall: I absolutely agree that we’re seeing a disintegration, or ‘evaporation’ as Gary K. Wolfe calls it, of genres. Speaking for myself, these genre barriers seemed most rigid at the end of the 1990s when marketing categories and the need to fit within them seemed to dominate the thinking of most publishers. And while experimentation across genre boundaries persisted during this time, the early aughts saw more successful crossovers such as China Mieville, for example, who explored fantasy and science fiction, mingled with Lovecraftian horror and literary experimentation. Likewise, over the last ten years, authors such as David Mitchell and Emily St John Mandel have shown the commercial appeal of crossover work.
Rabuzzi: We could add A.S. Byatt, Helen Oyeyemi, Cormac McCarthy, Amitav Ghosh, a growing number of others routinely listed for the Booker, the Pulitzer, and so forth.
Marshall: Let me ask this one in response. In 2003, M. John Harrison, when he was christening the New Weird as a movement, suggested that with the evaporation of genres, we would see more literary writers moving into the territory of speculative fiction, particularly as the technological pace accelerates and the present loses its sense of stability and permanence. He argued that one of the downsides of this would be if science fiction writers continued to be sidelined, despite having developed tools and practices so obviously appropriate for the moment. Over the last twenty years, this has played out as he expected: with writers such as Ian McEwan tackling subjects like artificial intelligence.
If we take as given that genres (or literary traditions) with separate histories, audiences, and practices do exist but are beginning to share their subject matter, what is it that you think makes fantasy and science fiction distinct? What are their tools and practices? What might literary writers learn from them if they wish to enter this space?
Rabuzzi: I highlight three elements from the fantasy / science fiction toolkit:
Changing the focus of the “what if” from the private and interior to the public and exterior. “What if my brother died / my spouse was unfaithful / my boss was abusive?” …and that event also materially affected social relations for an entire community, nation, or region? Much speculative fiction is political–it takes very seriously how private decisions and personal characteristics create, resist, and/or undermine power relations for and among the many. As an aside, I believe there may be a correlation between the decline in civics education in the U.S.A. starting in the 1980s and the subsequent surge in speculative fiction focused on world-building, specifically on detailed and comprehensive descriptions of political systems, the dynamics of domination and resistance, economic networks, and histories. The correlation may also help explain the increasing overlap between historical fiction and speculative fiction, especially in the many alternative histories that tweak one or two key factors (“what if?”) while otherwise hewing to the historical record.
As a corollary of the above, and perhaps associated with the civil rights movements beginning in the 1950s, much speculative fiction and poetry probes the areas on the threshold of not only individual but most importantly societal perception. It asks “Is there truly a consensual reality, and, if so, who is actually included in that consensus? How was consensus reached in the first place?” And speculative fiction from within the genre does so while (for the most part) retaining traditional sentence and plot structures, and character development, i.e., in contrast to others who seek similar ends while using techniques such as asemic writing, surrealism, or Oulipo.
Concentrating on the details that convince a reader the narrative takes place in a world not our own. Speculative writers have a double degree of difficulty–not only do they have to convince the reader of the reality of the dog in the story, but also that the dog can fly, or speak, or solve quadratic equations. The best, as Orhan Pamuk puts it, “speak more powerfully to our visual imagination,” in the manner (to use his examples) of Homer, Coleridge, and Balzac.
Marshall: This is the aspect of craft that is most important within speculative fiction. I often think about these details as ‘convincers’: they are hyperspecific to the world and the story, and arresting. In my latest collection The Gold Leaf Executions, I have a short story called “Stud” which retells the myth of Pasiphaë and the birth of the minotaur. My story adopts a contemporary setting in which political ‘wives’ engage in highly unusual sex acts in order to generate controversy and accrue power for themselves, one of which results in the birth of a half-bull child. The story is about loneliness and isolation but it uses details of bovine biology to simultaneously create a sense of authenticity and humour. For example:
…For all that, [Bevis] was lonely. His biology had equipped him with a special nasal cavity for testing pheromones in the urine of potential mates, but social norms being what they were, he never had the opportunity to try it out. As a result, women confounded him as much as they excited him. Sometimes a strange feeling would wash over him as he passed the lady’s toilet. He lived a life of enforced celibacy.
Intertextuality & influences
Rabuzzi: Your work projects forward from a deep well of acknowledged sources–deepening a reader’s understanding of those. For instance, Skeleton Leaves retells the story of Peter Pan, with reference also to Nabokov. How do you converse with your sources? How do you build beyond them?
Marshall: When I first began writing during my graduate studies I was very interested (and perhaps concerned about) influence. One of my short stories in Hair Side, Flesh Side, “Sanditon,” is about a young woman who finds a lost manuscript of Jane Austen on the inside of her skin. That story was clearly exploring what it meant to try to find your own voice when you’re aware of the weight of much better writing. And of course that makes sense. When you are learning to write you aren’t very good and so the work you’re reading is bound to be much better than your own.
I worry about that less now. I don’t feel as if I struggle under a weight so much as I’m engaged in a rich, deep conversation. Sometimes I speak back to other works, sometimes I argue with them, sometimes I admire them, sometimes I play with them, sometimes I simply want to thrill myself a little by putting my own work alongside them. I like what you’ve said about how genre fiction is freed from a strained need to “make it new”… and yet the very pleasure of genre fiction is producing newness out of familiar materials. The genre fiction that often excites me the most (both as a writer and a reader) is work that draws from other genres or styles of writing: a zombie story told in the style of Harold Pinter, Katherine Mansfield but with aliens, Frankenstein in Baghdad, a sixteenth-century Persian Jaws. Different styles have different underlying world-logics embedded in them and it’s always interesting to see how these bring out new facets of familiar work.
Rabuzzi: May I play too? The Decameron on a lunar station, the Sundiata epic carried on to the present day and told partly using various social media platforms, maybe a first contact story shared as a wide range of impressions via TikTok.
Marshall: To ask a different question from what do you draw on, let me instead ask how do you draw on other materials in your writing? What are the processes you use to work with (or indeed work against) material written by others that excites or inspires you?
Rabuzzi: The visual arts propel me. I sketch a lot, then I take the line for a walk (in Klee’s words), letting it lead me back onto the page in the form of words. I also listen to a lot of music, in many styles and traditions. I try to deploy my listening skills when I read, seeking always for the musicality of the language. As James Wood says: “We have to read musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence.”
Speculative poetry.
Rabuzzi: You’re one of the leading figures within the field (school? movement? genre?) of “speculative poetry.” How do you define “speculative poetry”? Is it even meaningful to do so?
Marshall: I immediately find myself wondering, really, what speculative fiction is, even as you ask the question. My own favorite touchstones are writers such as Anne Carson and Anne Sexton, the former working with the Classics and the latter working famously with fairy tales. What binds these together, I suppose, is that they are poems about familiar stories. If we start unknotting the term “speculative poetry” I wonder if we mean poetry that speculates itself.— For example, poetry that imagines other worlds, looks to the past and the future, concerns itself with the irreal. Alternatively, I wonder if we mean “a kind of poetry that runs alongside speculative fiction.” I suppose I have seen both strands, but more often than not, much of what might get called speculative poetry falls into the latter camp, simply by virtues of the literary communities that bind it together and give it a kind of cohesiveness. Some of the speculative poetry that really interests me is that of Oliver K. Langmead who published a long-form science fiction novel in poetry. If I’m honest, it’s the sort of project that I’m tempted to say shouldn’t work. Novels in and of themselves can have difficulty sustaining their poetics and science fiction with its rational-realist tone doesn’t seem an obvious vehicle for extended work with metaphor… but, you know, it does work. Deep Wheel Orcadia: A Novel by Harry Josephine Giles likewise manages to do impressive things with language. Laura Jean McKay’s stellar The Animals in That Country also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. While it isn’t explicitly poetry, it borrows so much from poetry in its depiction of the language of birds and animals that it seems in close alignment. Maybe what this means is that we are becoming familiar enough with the matter of science fiction that we feel less obligation to do the work of explanation and can instead begin to spend our time exploring the rapture and terror of the future.
Sense of history.
Rabuzzi: Spec poetry and spec fiction more generally–seems to me particularly invested in grappling with history, both specific historical themes and the concept of what is knowable and transmissible about the past–and, above all, who gets to know and transmit, in what form and with what authority. Your thoughts?
Marshall: These are the central questions of our age, which is an age of vexed transmission. As a medievalist, the question that concerned me was what gets preserved and why, what gets ignored, what gets distorted. And to me, this was always bound up with a sense of loss. But I love this quotation from Sir Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia:
We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march.
Yet when I turn to our contemporary moment–a moment of extreme documentation where nothing seems to be forgotten, nothing is hidden–in fact the same anxieties of authenticity, honesty, and authority seem to be woven through. “Worldly things will sink and stagger.” So wrote the medieval clerk, Nicholas Grantham who was tasked with copying the records of London a hundred years after the city had been wracked with plague.
Also, I suppose, when you turn to the myths and matters of history, what other questions are there to ask? I think for the moment we are done with the stories of the celebrations of great men. When we look behind them, what do we see? Other shadowy figures. We can either bring those to the fore or we can ask how they were ever ignored in the first place.
Rabuzzi: I heartily agree–another way of approaching the “whose consensus reality is this?”
Marshall: When we say the word ‘speculative’ I often feel we are being weaselly (or, more fairly, strategically ambiguous). You’ve asked about history. When we write to connect with history, I often find we do so to shed light on the past using the present, to shed light on the present, using the past, or to shed light on what is perceived to be ‘eternal’. What projects push against that? Are there other kinds of speculating? How does futurity play into this?
Rabuzzi: The “Golden Age of Science Fiction” in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s was, of course, all about futurity, and the New Wave in the 60s and 70s likewise even as it interrogated how the future was to be conceptualized and by whom. Then, as tech development accelerated, we began to live much of that earlier imagined future in our daily lives–and became wary of writing fiction about a future that might already be passé or obsolete by the time we found our readership. Much of what we dub science fiction today is barely veiled fantasy, with rocket ships replacing dragons and lightsabers as proxies for the blades of yore.
For me, to meet the void, other kinds of speculating have increased in scope, strength, and sophistication–especially the nuanced and gripping speculation about the ideas and feelings of what society deems The Other, in ways that have caused us to question what we mean by “normal” and, in some small but real ways, to change social definitions and societal ways in real life. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971) springs to mind, ditto the work of Dick, Delany, Butler–and more recently, Link, Jemisin, Okorafor, P. D. Clark, Samatar.
Ethos.
Rabuzzi: While spec fiction has no stated program, it does share a set of affinities, an ethos that I believe focuses on revealing the unstated and/or hidden premises of the world as conventionally (re)presented–deploying what is nominally un- or surreal / super- or preternatural to expose the falsities, gaps, and paradoxes beneath our “normal reality.” I think, cribbing from Stephanie Burt, Don’t Read Poetry (2019), that such revelatory work makes spec poetry a form of wisdom literature–and thus potentially reparative. Would you agree?
Marshall: I love the idea of speculative poetry–and I will say speculative fiction as well–as a kind of wisdom literature simply because it seems to me there are so few forms of wisdom literature in Western writing. I often find myself thinking about the climate crisis and the challenge it poses to writers, for example. Many writers are aware of the fact we are in a time of terrible collapse and feel the urgent need to bring whatever resources they have to draw attention to this, to try to make people understand and change their behaviors. And yet at the same time, the publishing industry is turning away from climate fiction in favour of lighter, gentler materials. For many years it felt as if what lay behind the project of climate fiction was fundamentally revelatory. But now the work of pure revelation has passed. We no longer need to be told there is a climate crisis. So the question that comes now, aesthetically, is what comes next? What is the role of literature in the face of an existential threat? Does it console? Does it announce and process grief? Does it interrogate? Does it frighten? Does it provide hope? And I suppose a good answer could be: it provides wisdom. It invites us to see other possibilities, it explores unintended consequences, it brings us closer to the past so that we might learn from it, it shows us our hopes and dreams and terrors, it forces us to confront what is within us already, it invites us to see what this means for the world.
In 2016 I became obsessed with the potential of Weird fiction, which centralizes these moments in which something terrible from outside of our world intrudes on the established normal. I was interested in this subgenre’s capacity to potentially innoculate us against the effects of Brexit and Trump, the sense that our expectations of the world were utterly wrong, the shattering of a (middle-class, at least) consensus reality. I’m less certain now.
Rabuzzi: I love your mentioning exploration of unintended consequences and the shattering of one version of shared reality.
Marshall: I’d like to hear your own answer to the same question. What wisdom do you find in speculative poetry?
Rabuzzi: Much of the speculative poetry I read connects with great self-awareness to traditional folktales from around the world–in the form of retellings, commentaries, subversions, updating old motifs to meet our current needs. Folktales focus on the inequities of power relations, on injustice and misfortune; they do not shy away from death, depravity, poverty, abuse. The wisdom they convey is hard-won through a thousand generations: how to survive, how to seek justice, how to dream for something more. At the same time, they temper hope–outcomes tend to be more like that of the grim denouement in “The Juniper Tree” than the “happily ever after” of “Cinderella” (I think Randall Jarrell may have said something along these lines, though I cannot now locate the passage). Call it pragmatic dreaming, or raising the possibility of ultimate success for the rhizome, even when monsters devour the trunk of the tree.
Aesthetics.
Rabuzzi: Allied with its historical bent, spec poetry self-consciously delves into the roots of language, understanding how current meanings are derived or have been misprised, or warped. Does spec poetry differentiate itself (or at least distinguish itself) in this regard from other current forms of poetry in English?
Marshall: This is a facet of writing in general which I love: words are haunted by their own ghosts, and they often still carry a kind of residue, ectoplasm perhaps, of their prior forms. I think speculative poetry has a deliberately allusive quality (whether this is to myths and legends, other forms of stories, or indeed something futures-oriented, an embeddedness in tropes and conventions of speculative fiction more broadly). This allusiveness is perhaps different than other forms of poetry in that speculative poetry is not a form that simply allows one to sit in the moment and observe the contemporary self without imagining that self in relationship to another. It is a form that is always reaching away from itself, and paradoxically, by reaching away it reaches back toward the self (speculative, here, from speculum, the Latin word for mirror, but allusively, of course, a mirror that sits outside the body and allows one to see into it).
Parting recommendations.
Who have we read recently that you would recommend to others? Are there long-published authors whose work we think deserves a wider audience?
Marshall: I recently discovered the Mununjali author Ellen van Neerven whose short story collection Heat and Light from 2015 blew me away. Her stories pulled me along, speculating on Australian culture with hints of science fiction and magic realism woven in. I’m very much looking forward to the release of Tashan Mehta’s Mad Sisters of Esi. This is one of the most extraordinary fantasy novels I’ve ever read: a cross between Piranesi and some of the works of Christopher Priest. It is wildly imaginative, one of those novels that made me think, “This is a whole new way of doing fantasy.” The author I keep returning to is Nicola Griffith who has written crime, historical fantasy, and science fiction. Her novels are so utterly humane that I love visiting her worlds.
Rabuzzi: Freya Marske’s 2021 debut novel, A Marvelous Light, is full of romance, sex, derring-do, and magic conspiracies set in Edwardian England. Among established authors, Harryette Mullen stands out for her unflinching focus on history that is suppressed, along with her deep dives into etymology; try her Sleeping With The Dictionary (2002) and Recyclopedia (2006). Sonya Taaffe writes exquisite poetry and short fiction, combining erudition with deep insights into loss, grief, love, and human frailty. A Mayse-Bikhil (2011) is a good place to start. Read everything N.K. Jemisin has written–her Great Cities Duology (2020, 2022) is a brilliant NYC tale tackling huge social justice issues, with vivid characters, a gonzo plot, and laugh-through-your-tears humor.
Parting questions:
We find ourselves in a troubling moment, having just survived one set of massive societal level challenges and facing others (artificial intelligence, climate change). What have we each personally learned from the pandemic and its relationships to the arts that might be applied to the next set of crises? Do we each believe AI is a crisis for the arts? And lastly, what keeps us hopeful?
Marshall: In 2021 I gave birth to my son. Ever since then, I have felt an unexpected sense of being pinned to a timeline. I never felt myself aging before but I do now: I see him grow and I measure my own years against that growth. The experience of becoming a mother has changed hope from a thing I might feel from time to time to a thing I must do, I must work at, I must realize.
Recently he has discovered the joys of scribbling on paper with pencil crayons. The colours enrapture him. He is eighteen months old and he can sit down with a blank piece of paper and work on it for hours. Nothing else has held his attention to the same degree. I want him to grow up feeling capable of making art. I want him to feel that connection between eye and brain and hand and page. Of course, this doesn’t mean no computers. But it does mean a certain kind of slow thinking and learning. AI has the power to accelerate everything–is that wholly good? Of course not. And I think some of us, during the pandemic, found a kind of peace via slowness. I hope we carry that with us.
One of the reasons I think so many people looked to history texts during the pandemic was because this kind of crisis does not happen in every generation. We can’t necessarily rely on living memory. But crises do shape the generations that experience them and I hope we have emerged with some kind of wisdom that will gird us for what comes next.
Rabuzzi: The pandemic taught me that the arts need to be more explicitly collective in nature and execution, as we saw in the late medieval / Renaissance bottega and karkhana models, and see today in video game and animation studios, with their design sprints and charrettes.
I do believe that general AI is a crisis for the arts. Matt Kressel, Cory Doctorow, and others have raised the alarm over how AI trains by scraping existing arts and letters, violating copyright on a massive scale with impunity, thus depriving human creators of their rightfully earned income. Even more ominous is the possibility–alluded to by Geoffrey Hinton–that general AI might replace human creators altogether, or relegate us to a fringe existence similar to that of thatchers and blacksmiths today.
Still, I remain upbeat. One promising development: after years of decline, independent bookstores are increasing in number across the U.S.A., and expanding their ownership and outreach to audiences previously ignored–some 300 established since the onslaught of the pandemic, including at least three in my NYC neighborhood.
Helen Marshall (she / her) has had one novel, three short story collections, and two poetry collections published since 2012. Her work is widely anthologized, and has won the Shirley Jackson Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the British Fantasy Award as well as being short-listed for the Bram Stoker Award, the Aurora Award from the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association, and the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic (among others). She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Queensland. She earned her PhD at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, and spent two years completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Oxford investigating literature written during the time of the Black Death.
Daniel A. Rabuzzi (he / his) has had two novels, five short stories, 35 poems, and nearly 50 essays / articles published. He is a Pushcart Prize nominee. He earned his BA in the study of folklore & mythology at Harvard and his PhD in European history at Johns Hopkins. He lives in New York City with his artistic partner & spouse, the woodcarver Deborah A. Mills (www.deborahmillswoodcarving.com).