Black Stars, Dead Badgers, Chimeric Machines and Lucy A. Snyder

This week I'm interviewing Lucy A. Snyder, an Ohio-based award-winning writer whose impressive body of work embraces science fiction, fantasy, humor, horror, poetry and nonfiction.

She's received four Bram Stoker Awards, and her body of work currently includes over 150 short stories, 60 poems, and 4 novels. Her writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Hellbound Hearts, Doctor Who Short Trips: Destination Prague, Chiaroscuro, GUD, and Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. You can visit her online at www.lucysnyder.com

At the moment, I'm taking a particular interest in her 2015 collection While The Black Stars Burn from Raw Dog Screaming Press. Her latest contains 13 dark stories, several of which are Lovecraftian or tie in with the King in Yellow mythos. That naturally attracts my attention, as does the Ohio connection. Her poetry collection Chimeric Machines is one I would highly recommend for some intriguing ideas and approaches to speculative poetry.

I was delighted to have her share some of her perspective with me, and I look forward to seeing what comes next for her.

Do you mind telling us when you first developed an interest in writing? How would you describe your access to science fiction and fantasy growing up?

I grew up in a house full of books. My parents read to me every night when I was little -- mostly fairy tales and children's fantasy like the Oz books and Alice in Wonderland -- and taught me to treat books as something special. This more than anything inspired me to become a writer. It was Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time that simultaneously hooked me as a lifelong science fiction/fantasy reader and fixed me on the idea of writing fantasy and SF instead of mainstream work. I remember that the book spoke to me in a way that nothing I'd read until then really had, and I had that shivery sense of wonder you get with really good speculative fiction. And I thought to myself that if I could write something that made another person feel the way I was feeling, then that would have to be the best job in the world.

We often hear about how writers get started, but what keeps you going these days, as a writer?

I love books ... and I especially love getting books in the mail that have my name on them! That's the simple answer: author copies. The more complicated answer is that writing is the one thing I've really dedicated myself to professionally. Consequently, I've set all sorts of short- and long-term goals for myself, and seeing myself gradually achieving those goals keeps me pressing on to the next goal. The occasional bit of fan email doesn't hurt, either!

Which story of yours do you usually recommend to someone who wants to read your work for the first time?

It would have to be either "Magdala Amygdala", which won the Bram Stoker Award and which has been my most frequently-anthologized story, or "Installing Linux on a Dead Badger", which became a minor Internet meme. And which story I recommended would depend on the tastes of the reader, I expect. Most horror readers agree that "Magdala Amygdala" is my best piece of short fiction so far, but "Installing Linux on a Dead Badger" is funny (in all senses of the word) and readers have told me that the humor in it really connected with them.

Do you prefer coffee or tea?

I drink both. I'll drink several cups of green tea during the course of a day, but I absolutely have to start the day with a glass of iced coffee with milk. I'll be happy to drink hot coffee, but I like cold coffee just as much.

What inspired While the Black Stars Burn? What was your writing process like for this one?

It's a collection, and so in a general sense, my writing process wasn't any different than it was for Soft Apocalypses or any of my other collections. And the process in general is write stories, generally for anthologies or magazines; I try to sell most of my individual stories at least once before I put them in a collection, simply because I earn more money from my writing that way, but I also do try to include one or two new pieces in a book. Once I have a critical mass of stories I haven't collected, I go through them to see if and how they fit together. I spend a fair bit of time looking at how the stories flow and resonate with each other when I'm putting a collection together. I've gotten better at that as I've gotten more experience.

I've been productive enough that I've been able to release two story collections two years running, and both of them have contained fairly recent stories. I wrote most of the stories in While the Black Stars Burn in the past couple of years. I've been getting a lot of invitations to write for Lovecraftian and King in Yellow themed anthologies, and the contents of the book strongly reflect that. I've also been reading Robert Chambers (the author of The King in Yellow) and Lovecraft for my MFA work and have been thinking about those two authors quite a lot, and so I've been intentionally working with various themes from their fiction.

For instance, I wrote the title story, "While the Black Stars Burn," after I was invited to submit a story for the Cassilda's Song anthology. I knew I wanted to write a story evocative of the Chambers story "In the Court of the Dragon" and also evocative of Lovecraft's story "The Music of Erich Zann" but which was not a copycat pastiche of either one. I ended up writing the story at my first winter residency at Goddard College, and the heat wasn't working well in my dorm room, and my being profoundly cold definitely influenced the story as well. In addition to being physically uncomfortable, I was wildly underslept and fighting a bit of writer's block. I remember I ended up watching the "Turn Down For What" video on YouTube about 20 times in a row before I wrote the bulk of the story. Why did I watch the DJ Snake video so obsessively, and how did it affect the story? No clue. My brain is a strange place.

You also write humor, such as "Installing Linux On A Dead Badger." Have you found you process very different between these genres?

I do try to include humor in my fiction as leavening against the horror, but yes, my process for writing specifically humor stories is rather different. Instead of imagining a character with a problem, I usually start with a ridiculous concept, treat it seriously, but then spin it out to even more ridiculous extremes. For instance, how would you install linux on a dead badger, and why? And what kind of world would you have in which that was a desirable installation? Characters in that case become supporting players to the situation and concept, and my focus is on layering in different kinds of humor.

Your experiences include time in South Carolina, Texas, and now Ohio. What's been the great commonality between these spaces, and what are some of the biggest differences you've found?

At this stage, people move around so much that I think the regions have much more in common than they used to (if indeed those huge differences ever really existed). People are people, for good and for ill. I'm good friends with people who grew up in environments I was led to believe were so different than my own that we could never possibly have anything in common. But we do: movies, books, music ... all the cultural elements that transcend regions and countries. Last summer, I was a guest at AnimeKon, a pop culture convention in Barbados, and the people there were geeking out over all the same movies and shows and comics that they geek about at conventions here in Ohio.

Despite chain restaurants taking over the American landscape, I'd say the food is the biggest difference between South Carolina, Texas, and Ohio. I didn't know what most good Italian or Polish food was like until I moved North. And despite the blossoming of Mexican cuisine in Columbus, I have yet to find a place here that serves a decent tamale. Of course, my definition of a decent tamale is based on what I ate in San Angelo when I was growing up, and I'm sure that anyone from Mexico City would look at the tamales in the restaurants there and say "What? This is not a real tamale ...."

You took on some fascinating subjects in your poetry collection Chimeric Machines. How long did it take to complete this collection, and which poem do you feel you worked the most on?

I wrote the poems in that collection over the course of about 10 years. The one I worked on the most intensively was probably "Flyboy"; it's a narrative sestina, which is a challenging form.

Do you feel there's been a significant difference between your mindset for poetry and your mindset for short stories?

Yes, very much so, although there can be a lot of overlap in writing poetry and in writing micro-fiction in terms of needing to be mindful of the weight and effect of every word. Writing poetry opens up parts of my mind that writing fiction does not. You have to focus on layering in meaning, on how your line breaks affect those meanings, and on how the words look and sound together within the poem. The story in a narrative poem is often the least interesting thing about it, though of course that surface story is what a lot of causal poetry readers are primarily experiencing when they read a poem. It's a challenge to write a compact, vivid poem that explodes with layered meanings, but I find it very satisfying.

Cajun Sushi Hamsters, Murder, Aliens and Cats. An interview with Mary Turzillo

Mary Turzillo is a writer of many talents with a great sense of humor, imagination and poetry that I admire. I first ran into her work as a member of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and quickly realized we had many things in common as writers with roots in the Midwest.

Based in Ohio, her work includes the award-winning Lovers & Killers, which won the the very first Elgin Award for Book of the Year from the Science Fiction Poetry Association. She also received a Nebula Award for her novelette Mars is No Place for Children. Her short fiction has been appearing since at least 1994, and she's produced three poetry collections so far beginning with her 2007 debut Your Cat & Other Space Aliens.

Mary has been a professor at Kent State University, and written books on Anne McCaffrey and Philip Jose Farmer. Her husband is the science fiction writer and scientist Geoffrey Landis, who I also feel does wonderful and thoughtful work well worth reading. In Cleveland, she founded the Cajun Sushi Hamsters writing workshop.

I was very curious to see her perspective as a writer and poet, and I appreciate her taking the time out to discuss this ideas with me. Be sure to visit her website and check out her writing.There's much to learn from her style and technique, and I'm looking forward to seeing her next collections.

How did you first develop an interest in poetry? How would you describe your access to poetry growing up?

I was read to from a very early age (two or three) by my grandmother, grandfather, and mother. According to my grandmother, I swatted my grandfather because he didn't use enough emotion in his reading. A lot of books for very young children are in verse, as you realize.

Once I got into first grade, I conceptualized that words on paper were connected to spoken words and stories, and I resolved to write my own Things (I didn't see any difference between poems and stories, and I still don't, really). My mother happens to have saved my first poem, which I wrote down in second grade.

She bought me complete works of Edgar Allan Poe, which of course set the course of my imagination for the ensuing years.


Which poem of yours do you usually recommend to someone who wants to read your work for the first time?

Oh, how to choose? Let me recommend three, since poems are short. "The Emperor's New Spacesuit," "If You Loved Me" (my elegy to borderline personality disorder), and "The Hunter's Mothers." These are in Your Cat & Other Space Aliens, (VanZeno).

The book I'm proudest of is Lovers & Killers, from Dark Regions Press which won the Elgin award in 2013.

I also have a recently published Best of chapbook called A Guide to Endangered Monsters, from Night Ballet Press. It has all my favorites and prizewinners.

Do you prefer coffee or tea?

I like both, but lean a bit more to tea. My preferences change all the time, but right now I like Tulsi Red Chai Masala. And of course, like all cultured people, I love Earl Grey.

If you could have any legendary being for a pet or a companion, what would you choose?

Ganesha, because he is the the remover of obstacles, patron of arts and sciences, god of intellect and learning, Lord of beginnings, and the writer's best friend. And who wouldn't love a deity in the shape of an elephant? But maybe that's a bit blasphemous, because Ganesha is, after all, a god. So my second choice would be Gummitch, from Fritz Leiber's "Space-Time for Springers."

What aspects of life in Ohio did you find most conducive to writing? Did you feel there any distinctive challenges?

Cleveland is a real hub for writing of all kinds. My husband runs a blog called clevelandpoetics (http://www.clevelandpoetics.blogspot.com). The clevelandpoets calendar shows at least one poetry event every night, sometimes several. We have at least ten local indy presses, and I'm not even counting college and university presses. Northeast Ohio is the happening place for poetry. I spent time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in Pasadena, and it was hard to find much going on. Workshops, if there were any, were run by university prigs who wanted to charge huge fees, and who in my humble opinion needed a few lessons themselves, in humility if nothing else. As to readings in Pasadena and Boston? Oh, maybe a few here and there. A couple a month. Never open mic. But in contrast, Cleveland, Youngstown, and Akron have some wow stuff going on. Cleveland's slam team is prominent in the nation.

As far as fiction is concerned, in the internet age, geography is not a big issue. You read, you submit electronically, no problems.

Superman was born here. Roger Zelazny (who was a poet in addition to being a fiction writer). Vachel Lindsay. Hart Crane. Rita Dove. Paul Laurence Dunbar. Langston Hughes. James Wright. Ambrose Bierce. Gloria Steinem. Joe Eszterhas. Leigh Brackett. Harlan Ellison. Kenneth Patchen. John Scalzi lives here now. The list goes on.

Sometimes Geoff and I think the cornucopia of poetry opportunities is a lure that keeps us from writing fiction.

When did you feel Your Cat & Other Space Aliens was "finished" and ready to send to publishers for consideration?

Actually, it didn't happen that way. I do a lot of readings, mostly local in northeast Ohio, but also at cons, both in the US and the UK. A local poet and editor, Marcus Bales, had heard me read and had also read my stuff. He was inaugerating a press devoted to spoken word poetry, and he asked me to submit a group of poems. I gave him 96 poems, about half of which were already published, and he chose 69 of these to be in the book. In some ways, Marcus was a collaborator, in that he selected poems that he thought were the best and that worked together thematically. He didn't edit the poems themselves, but he definitely worked with me on concept. We came up with the title together and it really works for me.

I've never actually published a poetry collection that I submitted cold. I do have a couple of books I've lazily shopped around for various contests and publishers. I don't like fee contests; I am concerned that younger, less well-heeled authors are shut out of that process. Not everybody can shell out $50.00 every time they see a new call for a manuscript. I have five single-author collections in print, and all of them have been published because the editor came to me. I admit it, I'm lazy.

Anyway, Marcus published Your Cat & Other Space Aliens under his imprint of VanZeno, and I'm really happy with how it came out. He's a brilliant editor and incidentally a very fine satiric poet.

Marge Simon and I have four collaborative collections, and she placed them, being not only a genius poet but a woman who knows the indy poetry landscape better than anybody else in the known universe. She was a long-time president of the Small Press Writers and Artists Organization. We mull over where to submit (we have been rejected a few times, mostly because our concepts were pure hubris). And we mull over whether each book is finished. In fact, we're mulling that over right now with a book called Satan's Spawn.

I should mention that the brilliant and underappreciated poet Bruce Boston has edited two of my collections and also the collaborations Marge and I did. Bruce came up with the title of Lovers & KIllers, and he also did the cover. I couldn't be happier.

What's been one of the most unusual subjects you've tried to take on with a poem?

Jodi Arias. Marge and I are writing a collection of poems about murderesses. Jodi stands out as one of the strangest subjects for poetry that I can think of.

What's one of your enduring memories from the Cajun Sushi Hamsters?

Steve Swiniarski (A.K.A. S. Andrew Swann) brought the early manuscript of Forests of the Night to our workshop, and we gave him enthusiastic encouragement. We have a custom that a writer has to bring a bottle of champagne to the workshop when he or she sells a story. When Steve sold Forests, and was reminded of this, he confessed shamefacedly, "I'm not old enough to buy champagne."

How easy is it for you to determine if a piece should be prose or poetry? What was the most difficult example to choose from, so far?

Basically, the issue is whether I want to spend an afternoon first-drafting a poem, a couple of weeks making it into a story, or a year making it into a novel. If I can stab the subject quick and deadly, it's a poem. I have a poem I've never published about a certain genetic aberration, and I've written a novelette on the same theme. They go together. I've never sent the poem out, because it would be a spoiler for the novelette. I really should get that novelette in the mail --

Of course fiction needs more of everything. My poetry tends to be narrative, but a story or a novel needs a lot of threads and characters and incidents.

I say I can write a poem in an afternoon, but I've picked at poems, adding a word, removing a word, twisting a line, for years. You know how it is, right? You lie in bed trying to think of the exact right word.

Are there any frontiers in poetry that you feel today's poets could explore more?

Right now SFnal writers are dodging the whole form issue. We need to write form poetry, not just doggeral, but actual good villanelles, sonnets, tanka, sestinas, etc. I personally write a lot of non-form poetry, and I don't think it's in any way inferior to the hard stuff, but I think poets should experiment with form just to see how it feels. I think what a person learns from writing metered poetry or poetry that has some exterior shaping transfers to free verse.

I also think many speculative poets should browse in the vast ocean of poetry that's being published and performed today. There's so much. So much variety.

One good thing is that there seems to be no wall between speculative poetry and the poetry of the greater literary world. A lot of Billy Collins' work could appear in Asimov's. I sometimes meet poets who have no idea that their work is speculative and then a couple months later, at my suggestion, they submit to Star*Line and get an acceptance.