New Kelley Eskridge interview

The Nebula Awards site has posted a new interview with Kelley Eskridge, in conjunction with the nomination of "Dangerous Space." A more extensive interview (though considerably older) can be found in our archives, here.

Revisiting Dangerous Space

Learning that "Dangerous Space" is on this year's Nebula ballot Asheville, NC bookseller Rich Rennicks, who praised Dangerous Space at the time of its release, decided to reread the collection. After rereading the book, he finds:

The opening line that I wrote last year is still true: this is the best collection of short stories I’ve read in forever. Cutting edge in every sense, Eskridge mines the raw edges of emotion — love, lust, and fear — and places her characters in settings just a little bit different to our own — the near future, the recent past, or the slightly fantastical.

In this second review, Rennicks takes a closer look. You can read it here. His bottom-line conclusion is that rereading all the stories is rewarding.

Aqueductista News

Over at The Fix, Val Grimm reviews the latest volumes in Aqueduct's Conversation Pieces series-- My Death: A Novella by Lisa Tuttle; and De Secretis Mulierum: A Novella by L. Timmel Duchamp. It's a long, thoughtful review.

Over at the UK feminist site the f word, Jess McCabe reviews Vandana Singh's collection, The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet, just out from Zubaan Books. You can check it out here.

The Preliminary Ballot for the Nebula Awards has been announced, and I see that two Aqueduct authors have entries: In the novella category, Kelley Eskridge's "Dangerous Space" (which appears in her collection, Dangerous Space, from Aqueduct); and Gwyneth Jones's "The Tomb Wife" (which Aqueduct will be reprinting in a new Conversation Pieces volume to be titled The Buonarotti Quartet, due out this spring). Congratulations, Kelley and Gwyneth. The full ballot is available here.

Re-broadcast of "Transgender Identity" on Wisconsin Public Radio

If you missed it the first time it aired, now's your chance to listen to Kelley Eskridge's discussion of Dangerous Space and gender on Wisconsin Public Radio's To the Best of Our Knowledge. Check it out here.

Stuff of Interest

I'm back in Seattle, wishing my two nights away had been three. Yesterday we had Jeanne Gomoll's interview; today we have a couple of interesting posts by Aqueduct authors Sue Lange and Kelley Eskridge. Sue has a guest post-- The Singularity Trap-- today at the Mumpsimus; while Kelley has posted Just Say No To Gender Stability on her blog. Also, I've just seen a lengthy review of the Marq'ssan Cycle by Frann Michel (who gave an interesting paper on Octavia Butler's work at WisCon 32) on her KBOO Radio blog. Check them out!

It's Mary Shelley's Birthday

Today is Mary Shelley's birthday. Just in case y'all forgot. Yesterday was the third anniversary of the devastation of New Orleans at the hands of Katrina (aided and abetted by corrupt government). Today, people are evacuating New Orleans, preparing for Gustav, now said to be headed straight for Lafayette, Louisiana, where many members of Tom's family live...

Here's some interesting stuff to check out:

--Karina Meléndez has made a vid for Kelley Eskridge's "Strings" (the opening story of Dangerous Space). You can watch it here.

--Micole has gone to see The Dark Knight, and likens the experience to watching a movie by Leni Riefenstahl.

--The Mumpsimums offers a splendid miscellany of Words from a Few of America's Women, 1790-1920.

--Katha Pollitt, in Sarah Palin, Wrong Woman for the Job has a few things to say about the desperation evident in John McCain's choice. And she nails the abortion issue as the crux of the matter:

Palin is a rightwing-christian anti-choice extremist who opposes abortion for any reason whatsoever, except to save the life of the girl or woman. No exception even for rape, incest, or the health of the woman. No exception for a ten-year-old, a woman carrying a fetus with no chance of life, a woman on the edge of suicide-- let alone the woman who is not ready to be a parent, who is escaping domestic violence, who is already stretched to the limit as a single mother. She wants to force over one million women and girls a year to give birth against their will and judgment. She wants to use the magnificent freedom the women's movement has won for her at tremendous cost and struggle--the movement that won her the right to run those marathons and run Alaska -- to take away the freedom of every other woman in the country.

Her selection does not tell us McCain is a "maverick" who is just stringing the christian right along wink-wink . It tells us that he has thrown in his lot with James Dobson, the Family Research Council, the Catholic hierarchy and others for whom criminalizing abortion is the number-one issue. His record of votes against abortion and birth control -- 125 votes out of 130 in his congressional and Senate career-- apparently wasn't quite enough for them. By choosing Palin, he wins their enthusiastic support.

McCain is gambling that women will vote their gender, and not their interests.

Reality Break, Episode 4-- Kelley Eskridge

Reality Break is featuring a 47-minute podcast with Kelley Eskridge. Go listen to it here.

Us, Elsewhere

Jeff VanderMeer, for Omnivoracious: L. Timmel Duchamp's Marq'ssan Cycle: An Epic Progressive SF Series Decades in the Making.

Stretto, the fifth and final book in L. Timmel Duchamp's stunning Marq'ssan Cycle has just been published by Aqueduct Press. Taken as a whole, the Marq'ssan Cycle is one of the most ambitious political SF series to appear in the last twenty years. The novels have received praise from the likes of Samuel Delany and Cory Doctorow, with Doctorow calling them "a refreshing read and a rare example of deft political storytelling." (There's quite a bit more to follow.)

Matt Staggs has posted Brief Interviews with Women Writers of the Fantastic #8: Kelley Eskridge

And Kelley Eskridge has posted Why are we so scared of naked people?

New Reviews

While I was away at Sycamore Hill, the Spring 2008 issue of the SFRA Review arrived, and I'm pleased to report that among the issues reviews, I found one by Ritch Calvin of Vandana Singh's Of Love and Other Monsters. The review occupies almost a full 8 1/2'' by 11'' page, so I can't quote the whole thing, but I'm happy to give you a taste each of the beginning and end:

I'll start a few sentences into the review:

Singh, born and raised in India, was there raised on a diet of both Indian and English myths and stories. She has a PhD in theoretical particle physics and lives in Boston, where she teaches physics and writes fiction. So it is no surprise that Of Love and Other Monsters begins with a metaphor drawn from physics, the soliton, a type of wave or pulse that does not change shape on collision with another soliton.

And here is most of the last three paragraphs:

[W]hen pondering Rahul's liberation or decolonization, Arun imagines the mitochondrion that has become an integrated part of the cell. "If you could offer a mitochondrion its freedom, would it take it?" (73)

Because of Singh's scientific background, the novella is filled with this kind of comparison. Yet despite this, the central premises of the book--telepathy and mind-melding--remain unfounded in scientific or rational principles. But as with so many elements of the novella (sexuality, gender, alienation), that may well be the point. Nevertheless, Of Love and Other Monsters offers a beautiful and compelling tale of alienation and difference, of groundedness and transcendence. Arun possesses this atavistic alien ability (or it possesses him), which may just be another way of perceiving and tapping into the world around him.Because of this ability, he is an alien in his own country Once he moves to the United States, he is an alien there as well. Arun struggles with the question of allegiances, of assimilation, of rootlessness (and rootedness). But as Binodini tells him, "You're not alone [...] At least, not any more than anyone else" (75)

Certianly Singh's novella is not the first to imagine the alien as among us-- see much of the New Wave for that. And Singh is not the first to imagine other conceptualizations of gender or sexuality. New Wave and feminist writers have done that as well. But Singh brings all of these together seamlessly and draws on another storytelling and mythological tradition not often seen in U.S./British science fiction. I have a strong hunch, though, that that will not be the case for long.

Of Love and Other Monsters can be purchased here, among other places.

Another review that has recently appeared is Paul di Filippo's review of Dangerous Space in the July issue of Asimov's SF :

In her much-anticipated debut collection, Dangerous Space (Aqueduct Press, trade paper, $18.00, 256 pages, ISBN 978-0933500-13-3), Kelley Eskridge can sound like Samuel Delany, Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, or Joanna Russ, while still maintaining her own unique throaty, modulated voice. A non-trivial accomplishment indeed. These seven stories cover a wide territory stylistically and venue-wise, while all adhering to the same authorial POV that regards the world as a dangerous, delightful place, where extending oneself to others and opening oneself up to experience necessarily entails the possibility of suffering. "Strings" presents a future where music has been robbed of improvisation. "And Salome Danced" gives us an actor with some uncanny supernatural abilities. A "dust-devil" bag lady holds some startling secrets in "City Life." Postmodern swordandsorcery is the motif in "Eye of the Storm," while a cyberpunkish vision appertains to "Somewhere Down the Diamondback Road." Original to this collection, the long title story is a mimetic rendition of the pop musician's life. And finally, "Alien Jane" brings us inside a cruel mental asylum where the title character undergoes a lab-animal existence narrated by a fellow patient who might be her only friend. Eskridge's output accretes only slowly—the oldest story here dates from 1990—but like well-aged wine, these tales decant superbly.

Dangerous Space can be purchased here, among other places.

Aqueduct Authors To Read at A Different Light in Los Angeles

Just a reminder, in case it slipped past you in the welter of stuff here about WisCon: Kelley Eskridge and Nicola Griffith will be reading tonight at 7:30 p.m. at A Different Light Bookstore in West LA. Nicola will be reading from Always and Kelley from Dangerous Space. This is their first reading-- ever-- in the LA area. For more details, go here.

Stuff to Check Out

Now that I'm no longer living WisCon 24/7, I can begin to catch up with stuff going on elsewhere. Here are a few links:

Kelley Eskridge is interviewed by LeeAnnKriegh on AfterEllen.com.

David Rovics eulogizes Utah Phillips, who died this weekend.

Lesley A. Hall reviews Blood in the Fruit, the fourth volume of the Marq'ssan Cycle, for Strange Horizons.

Kaolin at GUD (Greatest Uncommon Denominaor) Magazine reviews Sue Lange's We, Robots.

Kelley Eskridge and Nicola Griffith will be reading on Friday at A Different Light Bookstore in West Hollywood. You can catch the details here.

A New Review of Dangerous Space

A new interview with Kelley Eskridge, as well as a new review of Dangerous Space, has been posted at the short review. The reviewer, Tania Hershman, is new to science fiction:

As with the Logorrhea anthology, Dangerous Space opened my eyes to new definitions of "genre". When this book was described to me as "feminist science fiction", I had no idea what this meant. Tales of independent female aliens or space travellers? What I was not expecting was seven poignant, sensual and often poetic stories, of musicians, actors, theatre directors, journalists, most of whom inhabit worlds much like my own but with slight twists, shifts of fundamental rules and expectations.

Eskridge deals with familiar themes - gender, identity, love, passion - in unfamiliar ways, using the imaginative license granted by "science fiction", which permits a writer a greater freedom than those "restricted" by the conventions of traditional literary fiction.

About the interview, I will note only this: the word "gender" never occurs, even once.

Dangerous Stuff

In her year's end list, Cheryl Morgan mentioned that she hadn't yet read Kelley Eskridge's Dangerous Space, she intended to do so---and now she has. She comments in a post titled "Still Dangerous" on her blog:

In his blurb for Dangerous Space, Matt Ruff says,

It takes a special talent to write about emotions this raw without embarrassing yourself.

Kelley Eskridge does not embarrass herself in the slightest. This is a superb collection of short stories.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2007, Pt. 7: Kelley Eskridge and Therese Littleton

Adding two more contributions to the conversation...

Kelley Eskridge:

Voices in my head, 2007

I've been trying to make a list of favorite texts—I want very much to be a "good student" for Timmi, who has done so much for me this year—but I just keep wanting to testify instead. So here it is: brothers and sisters, I've spent 2007 writing story and screenplay, trying to make characters come alive in all their human complexity, to give them big moments, big feelings, high stakes, everything to win or lose. I have given myself to "Dangerous Space" and this movie of mine more completely than anything in a long time, and it's the most enormous rush, and all I want is more.

So I've been searching for text that fuels that process, that helps me open deep doors inside myself and bring back what I find there. Flat-out no-holds-barred story told with such skill that the skill itself is transparent, so I am simply transported there and live it until it's done. And then come back and take a breath, and think, Okay, okay, if they can go there, then I can do it too. I have no patience right now for anything less.

I have tried to have this thing that people call taste. I've tried to like what I'm supposed to admire, even when it leaves me emotionally flat. But this is the year I gave it up: gave myself instead to stories that make me weep or yearn or burn with joy. Stories of love, sex, finding and losing oneself, the ecstatic moments of letting go and the desperate moments of holding onto what must not be lost. Stories where I can meet the parts of myself that make me feel like the tree the second before the lightning strikes.

So where am I finding this in fiction? Nowhere new… recent speculative fiction is leaving me flat, and a lot of mainstream fiction is just so fucking precious. But I've returned to some old friends: Patricia McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld—so delicate and so tough—and her Riddlemaster trilogy, whose people live so clearly in me that I know exactly the kind of friends we would be. That's the great gift of great text, a story so true that I want it to be real. Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series, which pound for pound may be the most joyful books I've ever read. The Lord of the Rings, the enormity of being human and doing what must be done. And Nicola's books this year: Always, with the beautiful Aud who is powerful and fractured and so human within the cracks; And Now We Are Going To Have A Party, which tells stories I've heard for nearly 20 years in a different way, playful and searing, that makes me see them and her anew.

I'm finding it in television and films. I love Torchwood for its matter-of-fact transgressiveness, and Jekyll for making me love a monster, for making me wonder what it's like to be so free. Buffy, Deadwood, Battlestar: Galactica, My So-Called Life—such different shows, but they all understand that the small moments are where we find ourselves surprised by hard choices and big feelings.

Films that did it for me this year: Ratatouille, The Woodsman, Lawrence of Arabia, A History of Violence, and I am absolutely panting to see Sweeney Todd.

And these days I often turn to music, where big feelings are expressed with the whole body and no brakes on. Eddie Vedder singing Hard Sun; Heart and Magic Man; Ani DiFranco doing her Swan Dive live: I just want to get my feet wet until I drown, she sings, and she makes me want it too.

I was in a club a few weeks ago dancing like a dervish while Trent Reznor sang I want to fuck you like an animal/I want to feel you from the inside, and he wasn't singing to me or about me, he was singing for me. I had more cognitive dissonance from that six-minute song than I did from all the science fiction I read this year: me being sung by a man, a frisson as exciting as the first time I saw a woman with tattoos or a man in earrings and thought Oh my god, that's hot!

And it all goes back into the work. I listened a lot to The Cure this year. There's a song called Wrong Number with a chorus that goes I had the best laid plans this side of America/Started off in church and finished with Angelica—which I insisted on hearing as Started off with George and finished with Angelica. I blinked, and I smiled, and then I looked at the draft of "Dangerous Space" on my screen and thought, Okay, okay, if Robert Smith can go there then I can go there too…

Therese Littleton:

Favorite Books Read in 2007

Although in these lucky times of too many books I seldom like to retread old ground, in 2007 I re-read several favorite books: Moby-Dick (Herman Melville… I like the Norton Critical Edition), Master and Commander (Patrick O’Brian), and The Golden Compass (Philip Pullman). All three lived up to or bettered my initial assessment and I know I’ll re-re-read them all again someday.

My favorite new book of the year was The Terror (Dan Simmons). I was so absorbed in it that I took it on vacation to Hawaii to finish, even though it breaks my “No Heavy Hardcovers on Planes” rule. The scenes of freezing arctic mayhem and depredation actually had me shivering, even on the warm beaches of Oahu. The book inspired me to read the harrowing Escape from the Antarctic (Ernest Shackleton) part of the Penguin Great Journeys series of short adventure narratives. I now want to try more of these bite-sized tales of manly exploits.

Like so many others, I devoured Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (J.K. Rowling) the night it came out and loved it even through the marathon-induced headache. I also read The Privilege of the Sword (Ellen Kushner) and Riddley Walker (Russell Hoban), two very un-alike books that had two things in common: first, that I had been meaning to read each of them for a very long time, and second, that I thought they each lived up to the hype. The former is a massively enjoyable romp with a great setting and great gender-bending, two things I find irresistible. The latter is post-apocalyptic and told entirely in a difficult dialect. Swoon!

I can’t remember if I started Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell) in 2007, but I’m pretty sure I finished it during this year, so I’m going to count it as one of my favorite books of the year. I loved the symmetrical structure, the inter-narrative links, and the sense of vast time passing in this book. I suspect that if it had been written in the late ‘60s, it might have been published as a science fiction paperback, with a Richard Powers cover, instead of as a mainstream literary novel.

In nonfiction, I had a slow year. The only two that really stick out as memorable were in biology: The Big Oyster (Mark Kurlansky) is a delightful compendium of mostly accurate oyster facts and intriguing recipes, all set against the backdrop of New York City history. A Natural History of Sex (Adrian Forsyth) collects a lot of the more recent evolutionary thinking about sex and presents it through animal kingdom examples… some of which are totally, awesomely squirm-worthy.

Favorite Movies Seen in 2007

I saw a lot of mainstream theatrical releases this year, and had a great time at a lot of them. I’ve tried to narrow down my list to the ones that I’d see again.

As I mentioned in the books section, I’m a Harry Potter fan, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was my favorite film yet. I really like the actors better the older they get, and the films are getting better at special effects, costumes, sets, and plotting. Another film adaptation I loved was The Golden Compass. I completely understand why some of my friends who share my love of Pullman’s books did not like this movie, but I fell head-over-heels for the beautiful look of it, and the great casting work, too.

I love surfing movies, and I saw one this year that was a new twist on the old travel-surf idea. In Singlefin Yellow, one surfboard is shipped in turn to several different professional surfers around the world, each with a distinctive riding style. It’s fun to see how they apply their own techniques with the yellow board. Along those same lines, I thoroughly enjoyed watching animated penguins surf on hunks of ice in Surf’s Up.

For sheer, testosterone-driven action, I enjoyed both Spider-Man 3 and The Bourne Ultimatum. Enough said. For sheer, delightful parody of same, I cannot recommend Hot Fuzz highly enough. From the same guys that brought you Shaun of the Dead, this violent, surprising satire of American cop movies is excellent.

Documentaries are a big favorite with me, but this year I only saw two that were noteworthy. Michael Moore’s Sicko has a scene that both cracks me up and haunts me, as he hunts through a British hospital, looking for a cashier where people pay for treatment (he doesn’t find one, of course). A more harrowing story is told in God Grew Tired of Us, an almost unbelievably moving film about child soldiers in Africa now trying to make their way in the strange land of the United States.

Speculating Gender: an Interview with Kelley Eskridge

by Jesse Vernon

The captivating stories in Kelley Eskridge’s Dangerous Space were my gateway into the wonderful world of Aqueduct Press. A good pal of mine, who works at Bailey-Coy Books in Seattle, handed me a copy and insisted I read it immediately. Being a former bookseller, the first place I glanced was the copyright page to discover the publisher. I was delightedly surprised to find that not only was the publisher local, but focused on feminist science fiction. I’ve been a feminist since I understood what that meant and an avid reader since the age of three but only newly converted to the worlds of sci-fi and even more recently to the genre of speculative fiction.

After re-emerging from this collection of literally personified cities, gender queering actors, and music that flows through your body and encircles your heart, I emailed L. Timmel Duchamp, one of the editors at Aqueduct. Though I had dabbled in editing throughout college and worked at a bookstore for a couple years after, I have only begun to come to terms with my need to be constantly surrounded by books. So I asked if could help out at all and here I am, the new editorial assistant at Aqueduct.

The following interview was conducted for the upcoming release of The Aqueduct Gazette. Throughout the many enthralling dimensions of Dangerous Space, the character Mars was particularly intriguing to me. Three of the seven stories in this collection are told from Mars’ point of view. They are tales of tangible desire, theatrical visions becoming real, tumbling bodies, and creative collaboration rife with tension and connection. After the individual publication of some of the Mars stories (most of them have been published individually, the oldest dating back to 1990), a peculiar thing started happening in reviews. Some reviewers used the pronoun “he” for Mars, while others used “she.” You see, Mars, being the first-person narrator, never uses a third-person pronoun as a self-reference. And none of the other characters explicitly say, “Mars, you are a man” or “Mars, you are a woman.” But very few people picked up on this fact until the publication of Dangerous Space, when Kelley began discussing this aspect of the stories in her publicity materials. So, I had the opportunity to sit down with Kelley over a pint and ask her some questions about gender as well as other experiences that had influenced her telling of these stories. The following is that conversation.

******

How has your own experience with gender/your gender identity influenced your writing? And conversely, how has the creative space of speculative fiction influenced your experience of gender (your own or others’) in everyday life?

I see them as an endless feedback process. So my response is a) not so much and b) completely. What I write comes from who I am, and to me almost everything is an issue of identity. It's why all my stories start with character and build out from there.

So, I’m intensely interested in notions of identity. But I don’t go through the world thinking of myself as a woman, or as white, or as 47, or as…I don’t know, fill in the blank. I think of myself as Kelley. I identify as a writer, and as Nicola’s partner, although I don’t necessarily identify myself as a lesbian.

Uh-huh.

In fact I don’t identify as a lesbian. I’m bisexual and that’s how I identify myself when I find it necessary, which is very rarely because who cares?

(laughing)

I believe, for writers or readers, fiction informs identity. We look for text that interests or challenges us, that we connect with in some particular way. We look for things that tell us stories about what we long to be or what we’re afraid to be.

My parents were activists in the south during the civil rights era, including helping black activists get out of Florida when things got a little too hot. So we always had people in and out of the house – black, white, gay, straight, rich, poor, people who owned slum tenant houses, and the people that lived in them, sometimes at the same party. I knew black men who spoke seven languages and white girls with dreadlocks who were always stoned out of their minds. So my notions of identity in general were pretty flexible.

All the stories that I loved as a child were stories specifically about girls who did transgressive things – things that girls in the 1960s in Florida certainly didn't do. Girls didn’t dress up as boys and take off across the English moors, or run around the neighborhood and spy on their neighbors. The whole list of things that girls didn’t do was a very long one. I loved those transgressive books. The first story I ever tried to write was about girls having adventures.

Gender is a completely real thing in the world. The world is gendered; culture has notions of gender that limit both men and women. The culture is very confused about differences between gender, sexual expression, biological identity, etc. I wish people well if they want to struggle with those distinctions, but I tend to take people as I find them. I hope I make fewer assumptions than I used to.

Because I had confused you with someone else that I had met, when we continued exchanging email and arranged this meeting, I had no idea whether you were a woman or a man because your name is gender neutral.

Yeah, I thought about that.

I imagined you both ways and I just thought, well, we’ll see. It’s not important for the purpose of the conversation. It’ll just be interesting to see who you are, and your biological identity will be a part of that.

Uh-huh. Context.

So, I had early exposure to the idea that identity is fluid and that, in fact, culture doesn’t determine identity. People can step outside the lines of what’s acceptable or what’s appropriate in their own culture. And when I started reading science-fiction and speculative fiction in particular, that was reinforced in many, many ways. Speculative fiction is the perfect territory for anybody who wants to explore the power of difference and it’s fertile ground for any writer who enjoys metaphor the way I do. I like to say that speculative fiction is the place where we can make metaphor concrete. I don’t have to be J.D. Salinger and write from the perspective of an alienated youth, I can write about real aliens if I want to. I can put the reader into the head of the alien or the head of the person who represents the norm, or I can even turn all those paradigms on their head.

I started seeing [authors doing this] – and I saw all kinds of [it], because I read everything: Heinlein, Marge Piercy, Joanna Russ, Suzy Charnas, Vonda MacIntyre, Ursula Le Guin, the list goes on – and I thought, well this is amazing. It made me understand that in the same way it was possible, although not always easy, to step outside the boundaries of cultural identity, it was also possible, although not necessarily easy, to step outside the boundaries of "literature" [said with a British accent].

Uh-huh.

I was at dinner recently with some friends, one of whom had read Dangerous Space and one of whom had not. And the person who had not read the collection couldn’t understand the fact that Mars is not gendered as a character. And said to me “But…but…but…whether someone’s male or female is the first thing we notice. The first thing we ask about a baby is, you know, is it a boy or a girl. And if you’re going to meet someone you want to know, if you can’t tell from the name, is it a man or woman. How can you possibly create a setting or a situation in which none of those cues…where people don’t talk to someone as if they’re a man or a woman? When it's so important! How can you do that?!” [This person was] pounding on the table and I finally got a little irritated and said, “This is speculative fiction – I can do whatever I want.”

Exactly! (laughing) That's great. It's perfect.

And then we changed the subject…

These things go deep.

They do go deep. I understand that there are folk in the world who walk around with biology and gender so closely intertwined for them that they are inseparable. I know it’s true, but I don’t get it. I don’t have a hard time imagining a fictional character doing that, but I certainly have a hard time imagining me doing it. And I have a lot of behavior and presentation that people will regard as gendered – my hair is colored, my body is waxed, I wear make-up when I go out for nice dinners. I do that stuff. And I’ve also been through significant periods in my life where I did none of those things – I had very short hair and wore big boots and had my labrys and shocked the hell out of everybody in Atlanta with my hairy legs. But I didn’t do that to shock them and I don’t do this to pass. I do what I want. I do what feels good to me and what I think best expresses me. So I don’t have a problem with people having a gender or expressing gender along expectation lines. I think people should do what they want and be who they are.

That's one of the biggest myths about feminism, which I've never understood – that feminism calls for androgyny or that feminism is against any gender expression. I've never understood that misconception. It's about choice.

Exactly. It's about informed choice.

Yes, exactly.

You’ve said elsewhere that some readers view Mars as a puzzle to solve, as if somewhere, hidden within mannerisms and conversations, is an authentic gender identity. You’ve responded saying,

By refusing to create a gender context for Mars, and by doing my best to remove any cues in the story that support assumptions about Mars' gender, I was trying to create a character whose experience any reader might be willing to access. It's too easy for people who subscribe to expected gender norms to then use gender as a way of denying that a certain experience is possible to them.*

Will you explain more of this process? Are there many subconscious cues that you find yourself including when writing a gendered character? Intentional cues that you add later to gender a character? Like, when you wrote Mars, did you need to later go back and take things out that might gender Mars? What was that process?

I’m hearing it as a two-part question, so let me answer the first part first.

Definitely.

The conversation with my friend at dinner brought home for me in a very real way how much we – the cultural ‘we’, the generic ‘we’ as readers – want to hang labels on characters. We want to codify a character so that we understand how to respond to that person, so that we understand whether that person is being appropriate or inappropriate, if they’re being a rebel or if they’re going right along the party line, etc. And I get that. That’s what we do. Human beings make assumptions about the world in order to get through the day. But it's too easy for people to conflate cultural expectation and human possibility.

I believe no emotional experience or human intention is denied to anyone because biologically they’re female. I probably will never have a morning erection, but that’s a biological experience that’s hard-wired into the body, the same way that most men will never have the experience of menstruation. (I say “most” because I like to leave a little door open…) My ability to be human isn't compromised by my chromosomal make-up. I don’t think anybody's is.

I had an experience when I was in my twenties and living in Chicago. A man I worked with asked, “What are you doing for your vacation?” and I said, “Well, I’m going to drive to Florida to see my mom.” He said, “You can’t do that.” I just didn’t understand. I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “You can’t do that, it’s dangerous.”

So I said, “Of course I can,” and he said, “No, you can’t,” and I finally just had to say, “Watch me” and get in my car and drive to Florida. This was one of my first direct encounters with the idea that somehow because women didn’t do ‘x’ that I was literally incapable of doing it.

I had another of these conflation experiences with a very lovely, very religious, straight woman who told me that she had gotten to grips with the fact that my partner was a woman, and didn't hold it against me, but she was so sorry that I could never have children. And I said, “Well, thanks, and you rock, but this part of my body works fine. If I want to have children there are many ways in which I can.” And I could literally see her brain rearranging itself – because for her it was an absolute truth that if there was no man involved in a romantic way, then I couldn’t have children.

So, my process with Mars is to not get into those kinds of conversations. I create a context where people are accepted for their skill or talent, for fitting in to the world in which they find themselves. They're not accepted because they conform to cultural expectations of men and women, per se, but because they meet the cultural expectation of Can you do your job? Can you hold your own? Can you be with us? That’s how I’ve always approached my own personal experience, so being able to do it for Mars is a joy – to find the reality in which it really doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of time having gender-norming conversations.

Honestly, the hardest part of writing Mars is when there’s any kind of sex involved. And mostly that’s just a question of not naming body parts: of focusing on emotional responses to sex, or finding the ways of describing the physical experience that don’t turn into gendered cues. So we don’t talk about breasts, we don’t talk about penises.

I really believe that human experience is possible to everybody. If a human being does something, it’s a human thing to do and it’s possible to any of us. It just is. I resist notions of norming, that there’s this group of us who are normal and then there are all these other people who aren’t. The human pond is big, and I think it ought to be. I think that we’re all swimming together here. And that’s the pond I’m trying to swim in with Mars – the human pond, where the point is “What kind of person, what kind of human being does it take to have the experiences that create this story?”

And it doesn’t matter what kind of body the character is wearing. We all live in our bodies, absolutely, but the big moments in life – love, death, sex, joy, fear, loss, being given everything you’ve ever wanted – those moments of feeling too big for the world or feeling too small for the world – those are all human moments. And it doesn’t matter whether we are a boy or a girl. Everybody feels those things.

So writing Mars is not that hard to do. I appreciate when reviewers talk about the skill or the difficulty, but for me it’s really not that hard. It’s just a question of balancing. In “Dangerous Space” in particular, which is the longest of the Mars stories, I made a very deliberate effort to balance anything that might lead people down a gendered path. So, for example, Mars is introduced as a sound engineer. That’s a typically male profession. But at the same time that we learn this about Mars, we also see Mars being attracted to a man on the stage...a rock-and-roll singer, so everybody assumes a boy/girl dynamic and now maybe Mars is a woman. Except then we see Duncan Black [the rock star] kissing a man as well as a woman, so now who the hell knows what’s going on? Mars is a character who ends up against a wall with a man’s hand in his or her pants at one point, and has a bar fight at another. So now do you hang a male tag or a female tag on this person, based on your own experience of the world? Based on my experience of the world, I can see it going either way. That’s really how it is for me.

And it’s not a game. It’s not a game. There is no right answer except that Mars is human. And hopefully anybody who is adventurous can slip into Mars’ skin for the duration of the story and just feel what it’s like to go there.

Yeah, that was, in some ways, the experience that I had reading these stories. And now I'm understanding it a lot more because it's not necessarily absence of markers, it's balance...or this amazing...I can't quite figure out the word. This wonderful confusion. Confusion without any negative connotation. Like this great freedom of humanity.

It's absolute freedom.

Because it's that back-and-forth, back-and-forth and if you keep searching for [gender markers], then you find that you have to step away and just experience [the story] and not be like [making air tally marks] tally, tally, tally.

If people are consciously searching for cues throughout the story, then either the reader is really not the right reader for my work, or I haven't done a good enough job as a writer. The reader ought to be pulled right into the story and go there with Mars. And based on how the reader is choosing to read Mars, at some point they’ll come up against a place in the story where they go, “Whoa...whoa, okaaay.” But hopefully, if I’ve done my job right, they’ll just go with it because they are already connected to Mars on an emotional level, a human level, that has very little to do with, “Well, a boy wouldn’t do this” or “A girl wouldn’t do that.”

What other kinds of feedback have you received about the perceived gender (or lack thereof) of Mars?

People simply read the character however they want, as male or female. And proceed from there to look at the more obvious explorations of gender or contravening of gender convention. In the first Mars story [“And Salome Danced”], the antagonist literally changes gender in the beginning of the story, so reviewers focused on that and were interested in the fact that no political point was made about it. In “Eye of the Storm,” Mars is part of a group of four people who are all fighters, men and women who sexually pair off with each other in whatever combination they happen to. The assumption in the world-building is that this is common; nobody makes any remark about it. Feedback often focuses on that, and also on the coupling of sexual expression with violence and aggression – which I think is why most people assume that Mars is a man in that story. As if a woman is incapable of being violent and finding violence sexually exciting. Go figure.

I want my stories to be emotional experiences for people. I want them to fall in love with the characters and care about what happens to them. I would love nothing better than to have readers leave the Mars stories with a sense that some space inside them is opened up a little bit more. Something that says, “Well, okay, if I’m a woman reading this story and Mars is a woman, what does that mean for me? If I’m a man reading this story and Mars is a man, what does that mean for me? How could I bring that character into my world and into my identity?” I would like nothing better than to touch people that way.

How has creating Mars affected the way that you gender the rest of your characters?

I’m not really sure that it has. Mars is the only character with whom I consciously check for gender cues. I’m very happy writing about characters who have gender identities and who are gendered in their behaviors in ways that are appropriate, or not, to their biological sex or class or race or age.

We’re skirting the edges now of a question that Timmi [L. Timmel Duchamp] asked me. I’m paraphrasing now, probably reducing it a little bit more than she would, but it's the question of whether or not a writer writes in a gendered voice. She talked about quotes from both [Joanna] Russ and [James] Tiptree[, Jr.] which had to do with writing more truthfully by finding a “male” voice, given the time and place in which they were writing, and who they were as people. Timmi asked about my response to that. And my response is that I acknowledge that gender has a huge influence on the way that we respond to each other. Gender expectations and the choice to conform or not to conform to those expectations is a decision that affects everyone who makes it in one way or another.

But, having said all that, it’s not important to me as an "issue." I don’t write about issues or themes. I don’t write about gender. I don’t write about politics. I write about people. Everything to me is character and that character’s human experience in the world. If that experience is gendered, then that’s what I write, but I’m not interested in educating anybody about anything. I will leave that to people who are better equipped to do it. I find theme fiction uninteresting to read, and I don’t write it because I don’t know how to shape a character to the needs of cultural debate. I do know how to articulate the layers of debate that go on within our private selves. That’s what I do.

I don’t worry about gender role of characters being correct or incorrect. I don’t feel a lot of responsibility or compunction to explain why character are or are not acting "masculine" or "feminine," and I don’t feel any need to apologize. As long as it’s understandable in the context of what the character is experiencing, then it should work. And if it doesn’t, then that’s my failure as a writer.

The next fiction project that I’m working on, probably my project for next year, will probably be a young adult novel.

Cool.

Those years are so much about identity and fluidity. And worrying, of course, about what’s appropriate because that’s a huge time of being subjected to peer pressure. And at the same time, it’s also understood that in high school there will always be people who fall outside of what’s expected. You have the example of difference all around, people trying on different sets of images. I’m interested in exploring that in ways that are both very gendered and very much not gendered.

Wow, that sounds really exciting. I love young-adult novels.

I'm really excited about it.

Have you ever heard of Born Confused?

No...

It's a really good young adult novel by Tanuja Desai Hidier. It's about an Indian-American girl that grows up in northern New York state and her best friend is this skinny beautiful white girl – it's all about growing up and dealing with her family and different cultures. It's amazing. The epigraph is by Nietzsche. It's a really rich young-adult novel. It was one of my favorite books to recommend [while working at a bookstore].

I love young adult novels; I've been reading a huge amount of them. There's a novel called Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson…

I remember seeing the cover.

An amazing book about – and I'm not really spoiling it because it becomes pretty clear early on – a girl coming into high school who has been raped at a party and can't talk about it. She doesn't know how speak about it. Now there's a gendered experience. Anderson does an amazing job of writing a girl's story, and at the same time she's anybody. I have to believe that any man who loves character-based fiction who read Speak would identify with the experience of being hurt in a way that he couldn't talk about – because it was too unexpected or frightening and it turned the world inside-out.

It goes right back to what you were saying earlier about what it means to be human. That's exciting. ::sigh:: I just want to read all the time.

So, going back to the idea of conflations: many people tend to conflate sex, gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation – i.e., a biological male will necessarily identify as a man and will necessarily be ‘masculine’ and therefore attracted to women. Your characters tend to challenge these assumptions across various lines of identity. Can you talk more about encountering these assumptions (in readers and perhaps yourself) and what it’s like to play with those boundaries?

Boy, it's a big question.

Some of us like to live out on the edge, but most of us, I think, like to operate from our zones of comfort, and categorization of other humans is a very comfortable thing to do because then we know how we’re supposed to behave with them.

I found pretty early on in my own life that I got tired of people making assumptions. I got tired of people assuming that because I didn’t have a boyfriend, I was a lesbian. I got tired of my lesbian friends assuming that because I didn’t have a girlfriend, I was straight. I spent a lot of time alone before I met Nicola, so I got very tired of people assuming that I must feel lonely. Sometimes I was, and sometimes I really wasn’t. I found out that making assumptions about what people will or won’t do with their feelings or their bodies is pretty much a fool’s game. It really is. Because we never know. If we’re open at all to the world, we just don’t know what we’ll do. It’s nice to have rules and feel safe and to have a sandbox within which we play, but I’ve learned that most of those limitations are self-imposed. If one were going to characterize my life, one way to characterize it would be that I have crossed categories in so many ways. I’ve jumped [economic] class. I’ve been identified as straight, as lesbian, as bisexual. I like to drink beer in pubs and very expensive wine. I travel well between various cultural groups – I’m good at picking up cues, and at participating as fully as I can within different cultures. And because that’s been my personal experience, I tend to write about people who do that. Because I think it’s fun.

So what’s it like to blur those boundaries? It’s fun. It’s exciting. It’s freeing. It feels naughty sometimes. It feels transgressive. And I like being transgressive. And I don’t do it for its own sake, but if I can be myself and raise someone's eyebrow, that’s fine with me. I enjoy confounding people’s expectations. And I hope I’m enough of a grown-up that I won’t just do it for its own sake, but I also hope I’m enough of a grown-up to say, “Yes, this is who I am right now. This is what it is.” And to no longer feel compelled to apologize. And so I’m having enormous fun with my fiction – to cross boundaries, to push back on assumptions.

I’m writing a commercial script right now, and Hollywood’s very, very, very antediluvian about these things. It’s just astonishing to me, actually. I’m working very closely with a producer who I really like. We have an intense creative relationship, and I’ve learned so much from him. He, and the people who read for him and give him feedback, have some very serious notions about what men do and what women do, especially in the movies. It's been interesting to push back on these boundaries with him, and the thing I like about him is that he listens.

An example of this is: I wrote a scene in which a woman is arguing with her boyfriend, trying to make a point that’s important to her, a point of identity, a point of self. The feedback I got from my producer was, “Well, the readers think she’s awfully tough and aggressive, and he seems a little weak. So maybe we can have him have the last word or tell her strongly to calm down.” And I said, “Okay, let me just make sure that I understand correctly. You’re saying that it’s okay for him to yell at her, but it’s not okay for her to yell at him?” There’s was a silence on the phone, and he said, “Huh, point taken. Never mind.” And off we went to the next thing.

That's great. That's a good producer.

It is great and it's why I like working with him.

I wasn’t writing a scene where a woman was being aggressive, I was writing a scene where a person was pissed off at another person. And then here come these assumptions about gender… I thought, okay, I’m not going to have the gender argument. I’m not going to say, “A woman can do anything she wants.” I’m going to say, “Are you telling me that it’s okay for one human being to do something but not another? Because you’re going to have to help me understand why this is the case.”

I like that approach. It seems that initially he or the readers saw it as you being the one that gendered [the situation]. And to pull that back on him, ya know?

Exactly. I'm sure they think I'm this right-on lesbian feminist writer pounding the table… I've tried to explain over and over again that I have no agenda about this. I need the character to be strong because she's the hero of the movie. She needs to act like a hero. Another one of my arguments when we get into these conversations is to say, “Okay if this were Tom Cruise in this role, wouldn't you expect him to do something like this? So why can't this character do it if she's the hero?”

I’m just not interested in fighting for “the cause.” I would rather model the behavior.

It sounds like everything that you do is really grounded in experience – personal experience and, more generally, human experience.

Personal experience is the wellspring of identity. I grew up relatively poor. I grew up as an only child. I grew up in a house where all different kinds of people were welcome based on who they were as people, how they behaved, what they did, what they brought with them, and it wasn’t about anything else. I learned pretty early on about the effects of racism because the little girl whose grandmother lived across the street suddenly wasn’t allowed to play with me anymore because there were black people in my house. It wasn’t the same kind of experience for me as it was for the black people, but it was my doorway into the experience. And it was the beginning of the opening up of my imagination as to, “Well, okay, so what must it be like for these people?”

But I really do have a horror of the co-mingling of art and politics. A lot of people do it and they do it very successfully, but it’s not part of my process at all. I think that conscious theme is the death of good fiction and good music and good art. But that’s just me. Mileage varies hugely in this regard.

My work is for me. The things that I want to explore and express are about freedom. I want to take a reader, metaphorically, by the shirt, pull them up close and say, “Imagine…imagine a world where it wasn’t about who was normal and who wasn’t, it was about the spectrum of experience – here’s one experience of love, here's a different one, and here's something else….” If we can find doorways into all those different experiences because they are all human experiences, maybe at the end of the day we can sit down and think, “Holy shit, those people are so different from me and, you know what? I get them. I am not them, but I get them.” Or even, “I don’t get it but at least I see what is. I don’t get it but, wow, isn’t that an interesting way to be human?” Even if there’s just that amount of connection… and so I’m not about polarizing. I’m not about the lens of harsh reality. I think there’s enough harsh reality in the world. I’d rather just look at human experiences: how are they congruent, how do they flow together, how can I relate to that?

There is a place in our world, a need in our world for people who make the argument on a global scale, who fight for the cause, who proselytize, who take the issue out to the people, and god bless those people. Actually, I don’t believe in god so I shouldn’t say that. Bless those people. But I’m not one of them. My way is through relationship and personal experience, through making connections with people and asking them to re-imagine the things that they do.

Have I answered your question?

Oh, yes.

******

For more information about Kelley Eskridge, check out her website. To purchase Dangerous Space, go here.

*Kelley Eskridge, “Identity and Desire,” Women of Other Worlds: Excursions Through Science Fiction and Feminism, ed. Helen Merrick and Tess Williams (Australia: University of Western Australia Press, 1999), http://www.kelleyeskridge.com/essays/identity-and-desire.

Kelley Eskridge Talks about Dangerous Space on Public Radio

This weekend, Kelley Eskridge discussed her Mars stories on PRI's To the Best of Our Knowledge in a show devoted to transgender identity in life and art. You can listen to an MP3 download of it, available on the show's site.

That Definitional Thing

It's very hot here in Seattle, & somehow iced tea and the fan running on high just isn't cutting it. Sad to say, I'm a weary zombie from lack of sleep. Nevertheless, I thought I'd note that a certain perennial subject came up last night at Kelley Eskridge’s reading at the Science Fiction Museum. Kelley read an excerpt from her story "Alien Jane" (which closes Dangerous Space) and longer excerpts from the new title novella, "Dangerous Space." She took care to leave about half an hour for the Q&A typical of Clarion West readings, during which she fielded a wide variety of questions about her work. Among these included a request that Kelley explain how “Alien Jane,” a story without any fantasy or science fiction elements, came to be included in a collection labeled “science fiction” and whether she had had any problem getting it published originally in genre publications.

Kelley began her response with a review of the story’s genre history. In sum: "Alien Jane" debuted in the first issue of the prestigious, beautifully produced Century edited by Robert K.J.Killheffer; it was a finalist for the Nebula award and won the Astrea Award (for lesbian literary fiction); it was reprinted in Nebula Awards 31 (ed. Pamela Sargent); and finally, the SF Channel then based an episode of Welcome to Paradox on the story. The story, Kelley noted, was treated within the genre as sf, and that was all that mattered. The label is just a label. She’s happy to have the label of being an sf writer (and herself chooses to call her work “speculative fiction”), but she doesn’t care about definitions.

On reflection, I think “Alien Jane” offers a good example for the argument that sf is not identifiable through a set of definable parameters but is, simply, what people who edit sf choose to publish and what people who read sf choose to read. “Alien Jane” is, in fact, less “speculative” than Karen Joy Fowler’s “What I Didn’t See.” For some reason, this didn’t provoke the sf Border Police back in the mid-1990s the way Karen’s story did in 2002. And for some reason, the SF Channel made it into a television drama. I could, I believe, make a comparable argument about “Alien Jane” to the one I made about “What I Didn’t See” in “Something Rich and Strange: Reading Karen Joy Fowler’s `What I Didn’t See’.” “Alien Jane,” like most of the stories in Dangerous Space, is in conversation with feminist sf. Like “What I Didn’t See,” most of Kelley’s stories can be read with pleasure as literary fiction: but how much richer and deeper they are for those engaged in the conversation of feminist sf!