Nancy Kilpatrick Writer: Get to know Writer, Editor, Poet... Colleen Anders...

Nancy Kilpatrick Writer: Get to know Writer, Editor, Poet... Colleen Anders...: Get to know Writer, Editor, Poet... Colleen Anderson Colleen Anderson NK - You have been all over the map with your writing: ...

Get to know Writer, Editor, Poet... Colleen Anderson

Colleen Anderson

NK - You have been all over the map with your writing: poetry, non-fiction, short stories, collections and you've edited anthologies of other people's stories.  Any prospects of a novel?

CA - Well, in fact, I have two written manuscripts. If the first one isn’t picked up soon (a cross-genre SF-fantasy feypunk tale), I’m going to self-publish. The second, that I call Game of Thrones light (who has time to write a thousand story arcs with a day job), is being shopped around. I am working on a mosaic novel, which is a collection of stories Shahrazad-style, where they inform a particular world and there is an overarching tale that weaves them together. It’s actually SF, so it’s making me work a little harder since I don’t do SF that often.

As well, I’m working on an alternate history vampire novel. I had shelved it because even alternate history requires so much research, and I was stuck on one of my character’s story arcs. I attended Stokercon this year and they have several master class workshops. I took John Skipp’s plotting your novel class and it helped sort things out and inspired me so I’m hoping to get back to that soon.

I should also mention I’m putting together a couple of books of poetry and will be looking for publishers very soon.

NK - I know you've traveled a lot. What is a place or an experience in a place that has made its way directly into your writing?

CA - Sometimes there are elements of geography, or people or an actual town. When I was in India it was such a life-changing experience that it was the direct cause of a vampire story “Hold Back the Night.” India is massive, so many people, so much poverty, a different way of viewing life. This was a long time ago and maybe with all the tech industry there it’s raising the standard of living but there are a billion people. Even if their poverty rate was only 5%, imagine how many people that is. At the time, even though sati (the act of a widow immolating herself, or in many cases being set on fire) was banned in the 20s, someone told me there were still many cases of “kitchen fires.” This was done when the husband didn’t want to be married to his wife anymore and wanted a new dowry or bride price, which often came with the bride. A terrible thing and one of many ways in which women are not treated the same as men. I guess you could say that this tale captures that abuse, and I use a secret cult of Kali in the story. Goats are still sacrificed to Kali.

“Sins of the Father” is probably the first Vancouver story that draws on mold, rain and the Vancouver Downtown East Side. I live in the city. It was first published by OnSpec and is out now in Canadian Dreadful. A couple of years ago I was in the Czech Republic and I loved the Baroque apothecary, the White Unicorn in Klatovy. I haven’t written a story about this yet but one is percolating.

A few of my other stories have been inspired by places I’ve been. And I have written many poems from my various travels.

NK - What's your dream project?

CA - My dream is probably more to have the time to write than any particular project. But I would have to say that it is the alternate history vampire novel that I’m now inspired to get back to. As well, I do like editing anthologies so I want to edit a dark fiction anthology. I have a few ideas out there, so we’ll see if any of them take. In a year from now, possibly my dream project will change. I’d like to think it will.

I think some collaboration would be fun, but it can be hard to find the right fit in style with other writers. You have to get the story idea, work out a schedule and see what happens. But it could be fun to do some free-form stuff with another writer and see what happens. If it works, great. If not, then it was a good experiment.

Other dream projects…while I’m putting together a collection (or two) of poetry, I’d also like to do a themed collection but I haven’t even figured out on what yet.

NK - Which of your books would you like people to look for?

CA - I have two collections. The first is Embers Amongst the Fallen, which contains various stories published in magazines and anthologies and a couple that were unpublished at the time. I self-published it but was happy with the turnout. The second one came out last year, A Body of Work, from Black Shuck Books. If you don’t like dark, then you shouldn’t read this one. 

Bio

Colleen Anderson

Books

A Body of Work

Alice Unbound 

Tesseracts Seventeen 

Playground of Lost Toys


Embers Among the Fallen

Canadian Dreadful


Reviews

Amazing Stories review: A Body of Work

tomjohnstone review: A Body of Work

Nancy Kilpatrick Writer: Get to Know Writer, Editor, Translator... ÉLISABE...

Nancy Kilpatrick Writer: Get to Know Writer, Editor, Translator...
 ÉLISABE...: Get to Know Writer, Editor, Translator...   É LISABETH VONARBURG  É lisabeth Vonarburg NK -  Élisabeth, you were born in Par...

Get to Know Writer, Editor, Translator...

 ÉLISABETH VONARBURG 

Élisabeth Vonarburg

NK - Élisabeth, you were born in Paris, France where EVERYONE would love to live and yet you don't. What brought you to Canada, and, specifically, to Chicoutimi, Québec?

ÉV - I never lived in Paris and certainly wouldn’t love to live there, although I like to go there as a tourist! It has its charm, in certain places. I am a country girl at heart. Chance or, as I like to believe, serendipity, brought me to Québec and more specifically to Chicoutimi, thanks to a program of “military cooperation” between France and Canada—various young scientists were sent all over the world instead of doing their military service. I was just part of my then husband’s luggage. But we both wanted to leave France, which in the early Seventies, post-68, was an even shittier place to be than it is now.

NK - You are a fiction and non-fiction writer, a poet, an editor and a translator (you've translated the works of Tanith Lee and Marion Zimmer Bradley to French, among others). You are a lecturer, and for eleven years have been literary director of the science fiction publication, Solaris. You hosted the radio show Demain la veille on Radio Canada, and won Le Grand Prix de la SF francaise for Le Silence de la Cité/Silent City, and a Philip K. Dick award special citation for In the Mothers' Land/Chroniques du pays des mères. You have published...I've lost count of the many dozens of novels and short stories in French! Some of your work has been translated into English, German, Japanese and Romanian. What in the world fuels you?

ÉV - I’m easily bored. But seriously, words fuel me—I did read a lot, still do, although quite a bit less. Dreams fuel me—I still dream a lot. The world fuels me. And fortunately “reality” has only a limited hold on me. I fell into SF & Fantasy and genres in general at fifteen, which was the Golden Age in the early Sixties. I would likely never have written a line if not for SF. And I have been blessed with what we French call une heureuse nature, i.e. mostly a lot of energy. Winding down, now, but still…

NK - Folklore has it that you had a Big Dream and out of that emerged your Tyranael series, the initial book Dreams of the Sea/Les rêves de la mer. Please talk about that dream and that series.

ÉV - As with many folktales, that one is true. I had just fallen into SF etc. and begun voraciously reading everything I could find, a very œcumenical (read: everything and the kitchen sink) approach to genres, for which I am extremely grateful, in French then in English. After about a year of that diet, I Had A Dream. Which amounts to one sentence in the journal I was then keeping. And I could say that all that I wrote from then on was contained in that one sentence—until I met Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, that is. 

I started writing at sixteen, wrote four complete versions of it, 2000 pages each, first long-hand, then on a rickety-tick-tick typewriter, and finished the fourth version in 1978. I dabbled at it for two more versions (incomplete) while growing up and writing other stuff like Silent City and In The Mothers’ Land. Found out at some point that the damned thing was still very much alive in my heart and mind and decided to Finish It for my fiftieth birthday. So it took 34 years. It evolved from a trilogy (it was a series from the very beginning—I’m a cathedral builder!) to a pentalogy (five books); it is a loving hommage to classic SF (i.e. what I’d read between ages 15 and 25), with a few twists of course. It's a planet story (two planets in fact) taking a thousand years to unfold, with Terrans and Others, mutants, colonists who break away from Bad Mother Earth, and Diversely Mysterious Stuff. I wanted to stay true to the original dream and what I’d found (partly) it meant to me, not betray it by “modernizing” it, i.e. adding all I had learned (and read) in the interval SF-wise as well as myself-wise (or unwise). It is still the only world (and story) in which I would like to live, of all those I've created. I literally lived there for at least fifteen years, from inception to the fourth version. I grew up with it—it helped me grow up—in more ways than one.

NK - What are you working on at the moment that would be of interest to English and French readers?

ÉV - Well, I am always amazed that anything I am interested in writing can be of interest to anyone but me. But since you asked: a science-fiction novel (after two pseudo-fantasy series taking place in a parallel universe, one from a XVIth to a XIXth century and one mostly set in a XIIIth century). An honest-to-goddess SCIENCE-fiction novel, yeah, with which I hope to come to grips with what we are currently going through. But I am not an almost-here-and-now kind of SF writer, I must take wide detours to grapple with contemporary questions, be it feminism, politics, economics or ecology (which will all be motifs in the novel). So: two planets, and multi-parallel universes. Ah: and a black hole!

NK - You are a translator of many books and your writing also has been translated. Any thought on both processes?

ÉV - My first translation from English to French dates back to my encounter with SF: I spent a depressed month of July 1967 translating John Windham’s The Chrysalids. I loved the experience and later on, it helped. At some point, I had the opportunity of translating for a Belgium publisher (a novel by Tanith Lee). After that, I begged the literary editor of Denoël's SF line Présence du Futur to allow me to translate Tiptree’s Up The Walls of the World and, seeing a sample of what I could do, she let me do it. Since then I've translated a lot of American, British and Canadian authors, with the added bonus that at some point I worked for a French publisher who let me choose what I wanted to translate. 

I love translating. When I have to do it instead of writing, to earn a living, it is still writing. And my luck has mostly held, translating what I like—not that I choose anymore, but I usually like the stories I translate. I am very happy about introducing a new readership to them. Translators are what we call in French passeurs, people who serve as links between cultures and people. I’m glad I’ve been given the opportunity to be one, in my modest measure, for the genres I love. 

As for being translated, that’s a whole other bag of beans. And also a comfortable one for me, as I have been blessed with two wonderful translators, very different, but both excellent, Jane Brierley and Howard Scott, both recipients of the Governor General Award for translation—not for my books I hasten to add, although they might as well have been, in my opinion! Jane knew nothing about SF and I educated her while she educated me, much more importantly, in what translation means when you are the one being translated. Howard knows and loves SF but I learned as much from him as from Jane, translation-wise. I collaborated with both of them, as much as 50%, I’d say, and they were nice enough to let me do it. I certainly became a better translator for having been translated, thanks to them. And a better writer, too. Jane has a writer’s soul. It helps. When she and Candas Jane Dorsey (the then publisher and literary editor of Tesseract Books, and also a genre writer, and an excellent one) revised In The Mothers' Land with me, they persuaded me to change some important things (something that wasn’t in character for one of the protagonists) and they were so right! I realized then what a really good translator and a really good literary editor could do, how much they could help a story be the best it can be. Which is why I bemoan the downward spiraling of quality in both translators and editors nowadays (and especially with the laxism in auto-publishing). But that is another rant.

Books

Chroniques du pays des mères

 The Maerlande Chronicles

Blood Out of a Stone

 Reluctant Voyagers

Dreams of the Sea

Les rêves de la mer

Le Jeu de la Perfection

 A Game of Perfection

 Twice Upon a Time

Website

Elisabeth Vonarburg

Nancy Kilpatrick Writer: I'm talking about...VAMPIRES!!!The Horror Zine

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