What does it take to make a fictional world feel real? How does speculative fiction help us understand real life? And why use letter-writing to illustrate character motivations?
Award-winning author Amal El-Mohtar ("This Is How You Lose the Time War") has thoughts on those questions, and she sat down with SPR's Owen Henderson to share them ahead of a book launch party in Spokane to celebrate the release of her new anthology of speculative fiction and fantasy short stories, "Seasons of Glass and Iron."
El-Mohtar will speak at Spokane Central Library the evening of Monday, March 30, where she'll be joined by Spokane author Stephanie Oakes.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
OWEN HENDERSON: You might know Amal El-Mohtar as a co-author of the best-selling science fiction novel, “This Is How You Lose the Time War.”
Well, the award-winning poet and author has a new fiction collection, “Seasons of Glass and Iron,” and she's celebrating the release at the Spokane Central Library on March 30th.
She joins me now to talk about her work. Amal El-Mohtar, thank you for your time this morning.
AMAL EL-MOHTAR: Thank you so much for having me.
OH: So, your new book, “Seasons of Glass and Iron,” it's an anthology. I believe the description says it's “miscellany from other worlds.” Diary entries, reference materials, letters, folktales. You write in the foreword that you weren't actually initially sure what the through line would be as you assembled this collection from your work, but what you landed on, and I'm only lightly paraphrasing here, is that you love women.
AEM: Yes.
OH: Elaborate on that for me.
AEM: Sure. I knew that I'd be looking back on about 15 years worth of short stories, which is not to say a huge, huge number.
I'm not super prolific. Given that all of the stories had very different geneses, it felt like it was possible that they would just end up being too dissimilar to each other to really make a coherent aesthetic argument, which is the thing that a friend once said about collections and I've always taken to heart. But the through line just being very straightforwardly, oh, almost all of these stories that I feel proudest of have at least two women in them talking to each other about their lives and their experiences, and sometimes reading each other's stories against their grain.
And it was sort of heartening to see that it is actually a core part of my life to assert over and over again that I love women. I think women's conversations with each other and women's stories and women's relationships with each other are deeply important and deeply worthy of being presented in story.
OH: So like some of the pieces in this collection, your very popular novel, “This Is How You Lose the Time War,” is told in an epistolary style, which is written in messages from agents on opposite sides of this conflict as they fall in love. I'm curious, what about this particular writing style draws you to it?
AEM: Oh, so much. That's such a great question. I think there's something so intimate and confessional, potentially, about letter writing. And with “Time War,” in particular, the tension between trying to impress and outmaneuver someone while simultaneously revealing a great deal about yourself, the vulnerability of committing your desire and interest to paper—well, to, you know, quote, unquote, paper—to the rings of a or the belly of a seal and stuff like that.
I think that that tension between the performance of an identity and the confession of an identity is so rich and so seductive, honestly, to me, both as something to write and to read, that I think there's a lot of really generative power there that I find myself returning to a lot. I love a second person book.
I simply, I love to encounter it. I love to see it done well. I kind of go, ‘Yum, yum, yum, second person, give it to me.’
OH: You know, speculative fiction, fantasy are the realms that you often live in as a writer. How much world-building do you find yourself doing when you're writing just a short story as opposed to a longer work? What are the things that you think are the most important to establish when you're creating this universe for your story to take place in?
AEM: World-building is such an interesting aspect of writing because in some ways, you know, you can think of it as the container into which the story is going to fit, but that in practice is not really the way of it. It's more like the story is the aperture through which the world is perceived.
So when I—the way that I think about it really, really varies from one story to another because there are some where the story as I have it has emerged from a thought about how a world could be and others where the story is emerging from something else and the world is there as more of a rich tapestry, you know, a backdrop.
But that said, you know, my last book, “The River Has Roots,” I did so much more world building for that book than ended up on the page. And it was a little baffling to me, actually.
There were points where in the revision process, my editor was asking about why something was a certain way. And I was like, 'Oh, that's because of this thing, this obvious thing that I figured out in the world building, but I guess put nowhere on the page for you to see.'
And I ended up having to just not put that on the page because ultimately that was a story that was about two sisters and I wanted it to stay focused on them.
And if I widened the aperture to include these other world building details, it would no longer frame the sister's story the way that I wanted it to be. So I still have all of this world building that is sort of awaiting a different story to be deployed in because I do think it's quite interesting. But fitting the revelation of world to the drive and direction of story, I think, is always a bit of a challenge and a bit of a calibration issue.
OH: It makes me wonder what it is that when you're reading speculative fiction or fantasy, what is it you look for? What makes a world feel lived into you, but then also where do you draw the line at, like, ‘Okay, now you're telling me things that you were excited to make and have nothing to do with this story.’
AEM: Yeah. You know, it's funny too, because I used to teach creative writing and this was something that I saw a lot with students writing is that it was often clear that they were very in love with a world and they were loving the invention of the world, but they weren't yet writing stories that kind of faced outwards to a reader.
They were clearly experiencing their own world as a reader in the first place and in a way that is very delightful and pleasurable, but that like the work of craft to actually make that world sort of hospitable, almost, to a reader or to someone else's gaze is its own separate work from inhabiting the world. Whenever I have been really, really thrilled to inhabit a world or felt like I was really inhabiting a world, it can happen a bunch of ways. I don't want to be too prescriptive and say it has to be through character.
You know, truly it feels like a character is a vehicle that you sort of step into to explore the terrain of world building in a story and you can do that a lot more effectively sometimes than if you were just, you know, standing around and looking at everything.
Mainly what I look for, I think, is to not have my disbelief unsuspended. All to say, I think that what I'm looking for when I'm reading a story is to be delighted, is to be immersed, is to be carried along.
And there are so many different paths to that depending on what the story is. You know, if it's a character forward story, then I want to be grounded in the desires and fears and longings of the character who I'm reading to, you know, move through this world.
But if it's actually about exploring this wonder of a world, if I think of something like “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin, there isn't a particular character driving that story.
There is a narrator exhorting you to look at Omelas from all of these different angles and all these different ways in order to then bring your gaze to something terrible. And that's one of those stories that I return to so often, thinking about who I am now, who I was when I last read it and stuff.
So infuriatingly, the answer is, like, it depends. It depends. There's like so many answers. But that's ultimately what I'm looking for is to be transported, I think.
OH: I'm curious how you think about just speculative fiction as a genre, as a tool to re-examine the world, the real world, the world we live in and comment on that world.
AEM: One of the things that I would tell my students over and over to develop or improve their work is to read it out loud. For a number of reasons, you read it out loud, you hear how a sentence kind of fits in your mouth and you can find different things about the cadence in which you're writing, you know, understanding your prose.
But the main reason is that to read something out loud, to read your own work out loud, puts distance between you and the work that you're reading so that you can appreciate things that might otherwise be invisible to you or that you're taking for granted.
And I think that what speculative fiction does is allow us to have this toolbox of different ways to introduce distance between us and things that we might otherwise take for granted. And I don't mean this just in terms of allegory or, you know, one-for-one representations of things.
I mean that there are things that are easier to apprehend at a remove. The toolbox that speculative fiction has, I think, allows for more ways of creating and maintaining that distance so that you can look at our world slant and by so doing, see some elements of it more clearly, perhaps. Or if not more clearly, then in ways that are surprising or novel or revelatory.
I think that's the main thing, that idea of just, you can put distance between you and something in order to actually paradoxically come closer to it or come closer to apprehending something true about it.
OH: Amal El-Mohtar is the author of the new book “Seasons of Glass and Iron.” She'll be discussing her work with local author Stephanie Oakes at the Spokane Central Library on the evening of March 30th.
Amal, thank you so much for your time and this fascinating conversation.
AEM: Thank you so much for having me, Owen. It's been a real pleasure.
