15 February 2005

A Changing Tide: A Conversation with Louise Marley
by Ken Rand
www.sfwa.org/members/Rand/

Ken Rand resides with his family in Utah. He's sold fifty-plus stories to Weird Tales, Aboriginal SF, On Spec, Talebones, Writers of the Future (volume 13), Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (volume 2), Fictionwise.com and four dozen other magazines and anthologies. Books published: The 10% Solution: Self-editing for the Modern Writer (Fairwood Press), Tales of the Lucky Nickel Saloon (Yard Dog Press), Phoenix (Zumaya Publications), and Bad News From Orbit (Silver Lake Publishing). Upcoming: Fairy BrewHaha at the Lucky Nickel Saloon (Five Star), and The Golems of Laramie County (Yard Dog Press). His writing and living philosophy: "Lighten up."

If girls had played league softball or Little League when she was in school, Louise Marley may have made a different choice between her two greatest passions, baseball and singing. "When I was really small," she says, "my grandfather told me not to play baseball, because I'd get my nose broken. That made a big impression on me, I'm afraid. I still played sandlot whenever the boys would let me, but by the end of high school I had no more opportunities. And, of course, I wanted to be a singer every bit as much as I wanted to be a catcher."

Marley says that singing, in truth, was a compulsion, "a real fire in my belly. I was driven to find opportunities to sing, and when it came time to go to college, my mother and I sat down and had the 'Am I good enough?' conversation. Neither of us knew the answer, so I took a chance. Luckily for me, I found teachers and opportunities enough to have a career."

Marley has a parallel career as a writer (Sing the Light, 1995; Sing the Warmth, 1996; Receive the Gift, 1997; The Terrorists of Irustan, 1999; The Glass Harmonica, 2000; The Child Goddess, 2004; The Maquisarde, 2004, all Ace). She believes the impulse to make music and the impulse to create fiction come from the same source.

"Many people have creative energy—chefs, gardeners, even engineers like my husband. I was, of course, already a working artist, and it wasn't a great stretch to turn my hand to a new art. It was second nature for me to go back to school, to read and study and practice."

She contends that having been a musician for so long has made her "more courageous as a writer, more willing to take risks, to allow my creative impulse free rein. Especially because I'm classically trained, I have been incredibly fortunate to absorb, on a deep level, the discipline and structure and language of music, which informs my prose.

"And I often joke that anyone who wants to write fiction had better go sing opera for a while or, failing that, act in a few plays. There's nothing like staged drama to teach you about scene, and pacing, and character."

Marley discovered The Wizard of Oz in the second grade, and that hooked her on speculative fiction. "When I have ideas," she says, "they tend to be speculative ideas, for the most part."

But she admits an interest in contemporary Westerns, "and I have about a third of a book like that already written. I don't know where it's going yet, but when I solve the central problem of the novel, I'll finish it. There's the option of publishing it under a different name, since it would be a departure for me."

Romance, though? No. "I just don't have the turn of mind to write romance," Marley says. "People won't like this, but I actually don't believe in romance—I think it's an illusion that makes very shaky ground to base a life on. That attitude will never fly in romantic fiction.

"Let me hasten to say that my characters have romantic relationships—as I myself have done—but they're complex relationships that are deeply affected by the vagaries of real life. No 'happily ever after.' Romance, in my mind, is not the same as the deep, abiding love that lasts a lifetime. It's a nice start, though."

Her husband Jake and her son Zack play an active role in Marley's creative life. Jake is a businessman and a mechanical engineer. "His colleagues call him 'the rocket scientist' because of all the information he holds in his head. Often when I need to know something, I can just call him up and ask. And Zack, my son, is actually a budding writer himself, with a terrific feel for science fiction and the tropes and trappings of it. He's a good critiquer and advisor, and I never hesitate to ask him what he thinks of what I'm working on. And he never hesitates to tell me, either."

Marley wrote some children's stories, bedtime stories that she read to Zack, but she has no plans to publish them. "Maybe one day when I have grandchildren," she says, "I'll write better ones. In the meantime, my energies are all being spent on novels and the occasional short story. I do have a YA novel coming out next year from Viking [Singer in the Snow], but it's not a great deal different from my other works. It just has younger protagonists."

Marley has an agenda as a writer. She says all writers do. "How can a writer not have an agenda, I wonder? What I mean by that is that we are thinking, caring beings, and when we write fiction, we express our worldviews, our concerns. Like many of us in the field, I'm deeply concerned with the political implications of the current world situation.

"And, of course, I'm a practicing Roman Catholic, which can be a complex and perplexing role in today's church. I like what Madeleine L'Engle says about being a writer of faith. She says that she is a writer who is a Christian, not a Christian writer, and I think that describes it very well. My work is colored by my faith, and by my belief in the principles of feminism. My work is also affected by the conflicts that I see and worry over in my own church and other faiths, and by my interest in the search of human beings for ways to define their spirituality.

"But I don't want anyone to 'get' anything. I want them to read my books as stories about people who intrigue them, whom they care about, because that's the way I read other authors' books. I want my readers to read for pleasure, as I do."

Marley has no agenda in her reading habits either, except pleasure. "I don't hesitate to set a book aside if it doesn't grab me," she says, "although I often give it a second chance a few months later."

Her tastes are for social science fiction—early Nancy Kress and Sheri Tepper, Connie Willis, and Elizabeth Moon. She also enjoys some hard SF—Greg Bear, Kay Kenyon, and "a new book I'm reading by Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper [Building Harlequin's Moon, Tor, summer 2005]. I read some soft stuff, like Sharon Shinn, who is my guilty pleasure read, and I'm making a real effort to read more fantasy."

Marley is aware that some writers refuse to read fiction while they're working on a novel, "but I'm always working on a novel, so I could never make that ruling. I suppose I have confidence enough in my own voice and vision that I don't worry about being affected by other writers, except that I learn from them. Elizabeth Moon's Nebula-winning novel, The Speed of Dark, left me absolutely breathless with admiration, and I'm sure I learned a thing or two subliminally about doing characters from reading that work. But Connie Willis, for example, never describes her characters—in fact, she hardly describes anything. I love her stuff, but I don't write that way. And I could never emulate the science in Kay Kenyon's novels, no matter how much I enjoy reading it.

"An essential lesson I learned in my musical life was that a singer must sing with her own voice. Imitation doesn't work for a variety of reasons, but mostly because it doesn't tap into the genius that is each person's individual gift. As a writer, I've found that's just as important a principle. I hope I always apply it to my work in fiction."

Marley's subjects vary widely, and she's learned a thing or two about research and getting the details right. "Sometimes research means reading a ton of books," she says. "Sometimes it's been watching videos, which I did for The Maquisarde to try to understand the problems in China with overpopulation and abandoned baby girls. Sometimes research is finding just the right expert to ask questions of—again, Maquisarde, when I had read two books about flying helicopters, but still didn't have it exactly right until I sat in a helicopter with a real pilot and he fixed it all for me.

"People love to be asked about what they do. I walked right up to a cop and asked him what he called his belt of tools (duty belt). My editor laughed at that, and said only I could have done that; but in truth, anyone can do it. We have to not be shy as writers, but to ask and ask and ask."

Literature will always be a force, Marley says. "It's human nature to tell stories, and to want to hear them."

She said she has deep concerns "about the book market. The public tends to read what they believe is already a bestseller, and to hesitate to try new authors and different fields.

"We all have the experience of people saying, 'Oh, I'd like to read one of your books—but I don't read science fiction.' They do read it. They read Michael Crichton and Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Lois Lowry, even Tolkien. They just don't know they're reading speculative fiction."

Marley says it's very much a marketing/shelving/image problem "I don't know what the answer is. Independent book sellers, who really know their product, are a huge help; but they're also a vanishing breed. I visit schools a good bit, and I'm amazed to find how much SF and fantasy students read. But their parents and teachers still don't get it. I hope we'll find a way to open up the possibilities for them, introduce more people to some of the fine literature that is science fiction and fantasy."

Electronic books offer no surcease, Marley says. "I don't know anyone who likes reading a book onscreen. Do you? And we writers may be the worst, because we already stare at screens all day. I'm sure it will one day be more widespread, but I sense it's going to be a slow development, and influenced by factors like paper shortages, distribution problems, and production expenses.

"I still love, as a kid once said to me, the smell of a paper book when you open it—that scent of promise, of excitement, of impending adventure. I always have."

Her advice to new writers is, "Don't talk about it," she says. "Just do it.

"Okay, that sounds jocular, but in fact, it's easy to say you're going to write, you're thinking of writing, you'd like to write, you wish you could write. We professionals know you just have to apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair and begin. And so I tell people exactly that. Start somewhere, anywhere, and see where it takes you. Worry about the rest of it when you have something on paper."

How would Marley like to be remembered a hundred years from now? "Gee," she responds, "wouldn't it be nice to be remembered in a hundred years? Maybe one of my books will seem timeless enough to still be read—that would be lovely.

"A more likely scenario, though, it seems to me, is that my work might be part of a general trend toward a new kind of speculative fiction, one that extrapolates more from the social sciences than the hard sciences. My novel The Terrorists of Irustan treats with the effect on both men and women of suppressing half a society; The Maquisarde looks at the disruption of societies and families when needy nations are cut off from the developed ones, and the effect that has on children; The Child Goddess addresses some religious issues, and also our obsession with youth, and the dangers of allowing corporations to run slipshod over society.

"Kay Kenyon says it's almost impossible to talk about our own work, and I agree. We often don't know just what our own stories are truly about until after they're in print. It's part of the creative process, the process of discovery. But if, in my own way, I can be a part of a changing tide in speculative fiction, I would be honored and delighted."

Louise Marley fans may keep up with her growing body of work on her homepage at www.louisemarley.com.