July 2008

An Interview with Catherynne M. Valente
by JoSelle Vanderhooft

Catherynne M. Valente is one of the rising stars of speculative literature. At 29 she has published five novels (The Labyrinth, Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass-Cutting Sword and the critically acclaimed Orphan's Tales duology) and five poetry collections (Music of a Proto-Suicide, Apocrypha, Oracles, The Descent of Inanna and most recently A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects) as well as numerous short stories in publications such as Clarkesworld, Salon Fantastique and Prime Books' Jabberwocky series.

Ms. Valente was kind enough to take a moment during her stay at the Blue Heaven Writers' Workshop in Ohio to talk with me about poetry, theatre, the interstitial arts movement and, of course, the importance of folktales.

JoSelle Vanderhooft: First, how's it going at the Blue Heaven Writers' Workshop?

Catherynne M. Valente: Great! It's definitely a strange thing, being surrounded by other writers with vastly different established styles. I've gotten a lot from the experience, and I think it's improved me as a writer. Before this year I had never attended writing workshops or taken many writing classes at all, so it's a whole new way of looking at my work for me.

JV: I'd like to talk about your latest release, A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects. For the uninitiated, how would you describe this latest book of wonders?

CMV: It's a poetry collection with a narrative arc. I find that part of the reason poetry doesn't sell is that word-of-mouth is almost impossible. How do you convince your friends to read something when you can't really tell them anything about the book as a whole, just individual poems? A Guide to Folktales is modeled on the Aarne-Thompson Classification system, wherein a number is assigned to each folktale type, and examples given from several cultures. There are eight invented folktale types in Fragile Dialects, with the poems that follow them intended to mirror the cultural examples. Together, they also illuminate a human life, from childhood and sexual initiation to marriage, wisdom and death. This was of course always the purpose of folktales, to serve as guideposts in our own, actual movement through time.

In some sense, I hope the collection follows that tradition.

JV: A Guide to Folktales collects a number of your poems written and published over the past two years or so. Did you conceive of these works fitting together under one cover, and in the structure you have created in this book? Or did that come about later?

CMV: No—and a few poems are missing from the last couple of years of work. My fiancé bought me A Guide to Folktales in the English Language (which uses the Aarne-Thompson system) for Christmas, and I began to think of ways to group my folkloric poems together in the same encyclopedic way. Previous to that, I had been thinking of organizing them according to the Greek humors, which I still may do in the future. I'm fascinated with methods of presenting fiction with academic authority, so doing the same with poetry seemed a great way to put together a new collection.

But I think most poetry collections, unless they are "concept albums" like my Oracles, arise out of writing poems for various publications until you have enough for a collection. I like finding patterns in randomness, so searching my work for a structure that could spring up naturally, as if I meant it that way, is terribly fun.

JV: Poetry—particularly speculative poetry—doesn't often get the attention it deserves, perhaps because readers are less willing to take a chance on it. Why should readers who may only know you through your prose pick up A Guide to Folktales?

CMV: Because if they like what I do with fairy tales, they're going to love Fragile Dialects. It's retelling, but on an intensely personal level, far more so than The Orphan's Tales. I write about the death of my grandmother, my divorce, my childhood, losses and grief that sit at the core of me. I cover them in folktales because, as I said, I find folklore indistinguishable from real life. They illuminate and inform real life. So my grandmother becomes Spider, my ex-husband Crow, my stepmother both Rapunzel's witch and the woman who cursed the Seven Swans. I look at those archetypal tales and see my own experience, my own troubles, and my own absolution. These poems are an intersection, a deeply personal intersection, of a real woman and her mythologies.

The Orphan's Tales are other people's stories—these are mine.

JV: On your Web site, you've noted that A Guide to Folktales will likely be your last poetry collection for a while. Is this because you've become more focused on writing novels?

CMV: To some extent, yes. I'll never stop writing poetry, but I've put out four books in three years. The more I write novels the more I feel I have more to give by bringing poetry into prose than by poetry itself—the world of poetry is currently a place of spare lines with implied meaning or silly rhymes with blunt morals, and that's a battle I find easier to fight in a novel.

That might sound cold. Immediately after saying that it would be my last for awhile I wrote a tremendous amount of poetry, so what do I know? Ultimately, I think I need to challenge myself more, to find some new way to focus my poetry, if not as a skirmish in the aforementioned battle, as a skirmish in my own private wars over what is and is not worthwhile. Fragile Dialects is the result of the last wrestle with style—I'm gearing up for the next. Until I find that, I'm relaxing the collection schedule. A little.

JV: One thing that never comes up in interviews with you—at least in the ones I've seen—is your background in theatre. Could you tell me a little about that? Did you write plays? Act? Also, have the conventions of the theatre influenced your poetry and prose?

CMV: What an interesting question. Yes, I imagine. I grew up in the theatre, both my parents were directors when I was a child. I adored Beckett and Under Milk Wood and Apollinaire at ridiculously young ages, due to their efforts. I think I always imagine what it would be like to perform my work. Sometimes I think my short stories are all secretly incredibly long monologues. I think about beats and subtext and motivation as though I were performing as each of my characters. It certainly affects how I read my work in public. However, I never really thought of that until you asked this question, so thank you!

JV: One more theatre question—would you tell me a little about the multi-media Orphan's Tales events you and S.J. Tucker have performed? And do you anticipate collaborating on a similar theatrical presentation in the future?

CMV: Your lips to her ears! I'd love to perform another piece with S.J. She's phenomenally talented. We'll see if future novels inspire her!

We traveled the East Coast performing reading-concerts with varying levels of costume and acting—the most complete was at Lunacon, when we had a stage, several costume changes, and our little cast of three (S.J., her partner Kevin Wiley, and I). These were very well received, as music livens up a reading and stories give narrative to a concert. We had a great time, and I'll never forget it. We hope to do a radio play of our show in the near future.

JV: In your recent interview with Locus, you said that The Neverending Story was the first book you ever read. Serendipitously, I'm re-reading it for the first time in years right now. And I'm rather surprised that more interviewers haven't noticed its influence on The Labyrinth and The Orphan's Tales, at least as far as structure and world-building go. Could you talk a little bit about what this book has meant to you, and what other works have influenced you?

CMV: I haven't read it in years, so I couldn't get too specific, but certainly the frame narrative, the fantastic setting and creative creatures—I'm such a sucker for creatures!—seeped into my head very early on. Stylistically, I would be remiss if I didn't mention Under Milk Wood again. There's also House of Incest by Anais Nin, Landscape Painted with Tea by Milorad Pavic, Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, and Alice Through the Looking Glass. I think every author patchworks the books they love best, learns from each of them, synthesizes those lessons into each subsequent novel of their own.

I think, having read it first of all "grown-up" novels, what it stamped on my psyche was strange, intimate, complex worlds beyond our own, and non-linear structure, circular narrative, and that loving books can save the world. Not bad things to give a shy five year old girl.

JV: Let's talk about the Interstitial Arts movement. You've written fiction based on pieces of jewelry and stories based on historical documents, like Prester John's letter. What appeals to you about this movement?

CMV: Play. I feel like we're all sitting around playing a game with each other, and our works are our pieces. I like to play outside the structures of novel, short story, poem. Linking art makes each piece more special, and especially objects based on fiction or poetry make the fiction so much more real. I look at it as folk art, based on folk tales, and that is a very old human instinct. I think my favorite thing in the world to do is spin magic out of the real world, gold out of straw, so to speak. All the better if, like Prester John's letter, there was magic, false or real, in the real world to begin with.

Why stop with a book? Why not integrate it into the world in this way, with music and jewelry and clothes and paintings? It makes fiction alive.

Also, I'm addicted to shiny, jeweled things, in fiction and in life. It's a natural match.

JV: Through your monthly subscription-based Omikuji Project, you've also become a proponent of cyberfunded art. Tell me a little about how this project came to be, and how it's developed since its start in April?

CMV: It came to be for two reasons: one, between novels, a steady income stream is an impossible dream for writers. Two: a novel called The Chess Garden, in which the protagonist sends fantastical letters home to his wife. I wanted to reach out in the same way, construct secret, wonderful things, and build a community. It has become a kind of ersatz family, like an old-world bard who comes to the village once a month and tells tales in return for dinner. There is such honor in that for me, and I'm so grateful people have decided it was worth their time and money and energy to be a part of it.

Every month I send out a short story published nowhere else, printed on archival paper and sealed with scarlet wax, signed, and accompanied by my own illustrations. So far I've done one complete story and one three-part tale. Subscribers are generally members of a LiveJournal community where they discuss the stories and the experience of receiving them.

Ideally, I'd like to expand the project and possibly do something bigger with the stories, something multi-layered like The Orphan's Tales, but for right now, I'm getting a feel for what the community wants and enjoys.

JV: And finally, the obligatory question: What are your current and future projects?

CMV: My next novel is Palimpsest, which is an urban fantasy involving a city whose citizenship is viral—sexually transmitted. It comes out in February 2009. The rest of my projects I'm working away on but haven't sold yet, so I'll keep them in the vault for now!