To start, this is your first novel? How did it feel to
finish such a big project?
It’s certainly my first published
novel. I typed THE END on my first novel back in… gosh, maybe 2008? 2009? It
was fun, but it was definitely training wheels time. I think that beast was
like 175k, and it was bonkers. The second novel I wrote I feel no affection for
whatsoever; in fact, I deleted it from my hard drive when I finished it, it was
so awful.
As to your second question… I’ve
experienced various sensations at various times, with Vermilion. Finishing the first draft felt great. Finishing the draft that went out on submission felt…
exhilarating. Finishing the version that’s now printed and thus no longer
editable felt pretty terrifying, actually!
Much of your fiction takes place in historic time periods,
but to my knowledge this is your first time writing a Western. What attracted
you to this setting? What did you set out to do with the tropes and the genre?
My initial desire to have a
conversation with the Western came about when I moved to Colorado. The scale of
the landscape was amazing—I had visited before, but waking up every day to see
mountains, being able to explore them at my leisure… living right where the
prairie meets the front range… wow. It triggered my memories of being wild for
the Little House books as a kid, and bam, I wanted to write something about
this place. Uh, and I was also watching a lot of Deadwood.
The thing is… as you noted, Westerns have certain tropes.
Most modern Westerns, in terms of novels and film/television, seek to either
draw attention to those tropes, or to invert them, because even though the
Western has fallen out of favor, we’re still all too aware of those conceits. In
terms of characters, you have the Gritty Loner, the Native Threat, the Trifling
Whore vs. the Good Woman, and so on. In terms of plots, you have A Stranger
Comes to Town, the Man with a Past, The Person from Back East Who Must Leave
Civilization Behind, and so forth and so on. Because they’re all very familiar,
a Western that unconsciously draws on tropes can come off as feeling a bit
outdated… take Appaloosa, the film, for
example. While it was an enjoyable movie with a lot to like, I was annoyed by
the movie’s embrace of the Trifling Whore trope in Renee Zellweger’s character.
Maybe it’s a holdover from the novel, I’m not sure, but regardless, it was
boring because it was just so dang familiar.
With Vermilion, I
wanted to invert the Western while still paying homage to and drawing on the
tropes of a genre that I love. So, while I might start with a Gritty Loner as a
hero(ine), she goes East, not West; she moves from a state of detrimental
independence to flourishing under positive interdependence (in the traditional
Western, the hero usually has to “go at it” alone, leaving behind any
wimminfolk or friends). Additionally, throughout the novel, traditional
outsiders, even within the “Weird” Western, such as women, progressive
thinkers/social radicals, and racial minorities prove more “civilized” and
establish order much more effectively than those in a position of privilege. Oh,
and of course, Lou is a person of color, and she gets a white sidekick. That
was also fun to write!
One of the major themes throughout the book is gender
fluidity and sexual orientation. Could you discuss why you chose to explore
these themes at length and what you hope readers took away from this theme?
First and foremost, I write what
I like to read! But it was also part of my mission above. Classic Westerns are
often relentlessly heterosexual—or at least, they try to convince us they are,
by having rough-and-tumble ‘good buddies’ visit a whorehouse or get married to
make it clear they’re not really hot for one another. Hell, even Red River, which is famous (infamous?)
for its awesomely homoerotic subtext, pairs Montgomery Clift’s Garth with a
lady at the end, much to Cherry’s dismay. I’m having a hard time even coming up
with a classic Western that features lesbians, or the implication of
lesbianism. Maybe a little in East of
Eden, but like, that’s kind of a stretch. (If anyone knows of any, let me
know in the comments!)
Westerns are often very
traditional in their approach to gender roles, as well… when men were men and
all that. Women, with notable exceptions, are almost exclusively relegated to
domestic duties, and even the ones that saddle up to ride with the boys are
usually doing it to stay close to the man they love. Mattie from True Grit is the obvious counterpoint,
but that’s one of the reasons True Grit
is so good. And when you do get a gender-ambiguous character, like Calamity
Jane in Deadwood, they tend to be
tragic in some way. I wanted to spin this, and have a genderfluid heroine at
the center of the narrative, one whose ambiguousness helps her, rather than
makes her some sort of object of pity or spite, and who doesn’t have some sort
of magical transformation moment where she puts on a dress to amaze the hero,
showing she was “beautiful all along.” Meh.
As to what I wanted readers take
away… I’m not sure how to answer that. Sure, I had a lot on my mind when I was
writing it, but first and foremost I wanted Vermilion
to be a fun adventure story—and I saw the characters and their private lives as
natural fits for the tale, rather than object lessons. If anything, I wanted to
normalize the presence of such characters and themes within the genre of the
Western, not draw attention to them!
On that note, I’ll point to a
novel that was almost constantly on my mind while drafting Vermilion: Connie Willis’s Uncharted
Territory, a novel that at first I wasn’t sure I liked when I read it in
college, but really stuck with me in that way of better books. For those who
haven’t read it, I shan’t spoil it, but I actually structured the first chapter
to be an homage to her novel in my first draft, and though I eventually chose
to introduce Lou in a different, more effective (for my project) way, I kind of
still regret the loss. Those who have read Willis’s novel probably know what
I’m edging around—and anyone who hasn’t, who liked Vermilion, might want to pick up a copy. It’s a Space Western, and
it’s super good.
Vermilion has
quite a lot going on, being a weird Western with elements of Ghostbusters and a
liberal dose of Chinese mythology/folklore. The psychopomp business is
especially fascinating. What sort of research did you do for this novel?
What sort of research didn’t I do would probably be an easier
question to answer. Of course I put a lot of hours into researching the Chinese
cultural element, because I wanted to be as respectful as possible in my
treatment of Chinese-American culture and the Taoist traditions Lou’s work
draws on. I also read and did just a ton of random stuff… I visited a train
museum, drove up to Cheyenne to see the lay of the land to give those scenes a
touch of verisimilitude, researched the properties of cinnabar/vermilion… hiked
all around the Rocky Mountains (oh, the sacrifices I make for art!). Hell, I
even contacted a period firearm museum for information on Lou’s LeMat, toured the
death facilities at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and got a
prescription filled at a Chinese apothecary in San Francisco after reading all
about traditional Chinese medicine in a copy of the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine. Fun times!
Now for the big question. Are there any plans for a
sequel? Will we see further adventures of Lou Merriwether or more fiction set
in the same world?
More fiction, certainly. This
August, Nightmare Magazine will be
reprinting a short story of mine called “Qi Sport,” which is about Lou’s first
adventure. It’s referenced in Vermilion,
but this is the full account. And next year, Lazy Fascist will be releasing a
standalone edition of “Rumbullion: An Apostrophe,” a novella/short novel of
mine (which you actually reviewed). “Rumbullion” is very tangentially related
to Vermilion. No one who read
“Rumbullion” on its own would have any idea it was related to anything else,
but I think anyone who reads Vermilion
first will notice some overlap.
As for an actual sequel… I feel
confident saying Vermilion won’t be
Lou’s last adventure. We’ll have to see!
What else can readers expect from you in the coming
months?
I have several short stories
coming out—one in Joe Pulver’s anthology Cassilda’s
Song, and all-lady King in Yellow anthology, that’s sort of about Ayn Rand
and Carcosa… it’s called “Grave-Worms.” I have another story called “The Thing
on the Cheerleading Squad” in Innsmouth Free Press’s She Walks in Shadows, ed. Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Oh, of course, and
“But Only Because I Love You,” in Dreams
From The Witch House.
In terms of big stuff, I have
another novel coming out this November from Lazy Fascist, called The Pleasure Merchant. It’s an 18th
century picaresque about Tom Dawne, a wigmaker’s apprentice who becomes a
manservant when he is dismissed after one of his wigs is sabotaged, and then
rises through late 18th century society… but as Tom’s station
changes, so do his pleasures… Anyways, it’s probably my most personal novel to
date, and my least speculative work (even if it’s the most horrifying, in a lot
of ways). It’s very loosely based on the real-life 18th century
philosopher and poet Thomas Day, who was bewitchingly terrible. If people have
heard of Thomas Day, it’s usually because he wrote a poem called “The Dying
Negro” that was intended to drum up support for the abolition of slavery
(good!), but Day’s sympathies did not extend to women. Because he was unlucky
in love—this guy was basically an 18th century “nice guy”/MRA and
all women he came near basically fled his presence—he adopted two orphan tween
girls, took them to France to isolate them, and tried to train them in the
hopes one of them would blossom into his ideal bride. The account of his experiment
is best chronicled in Wendy Moore’s How
To Create The Perfect Wife which I highly recommend if you want an
excellent pop history read about how horrible the 18th century
really was.
Thanks for your time!
Thank you!
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