An interview with Seattle author Caren Gussoff
“Avinashi did what she considered
her greatest work with the warm weight of her daughter against her back. That
series, done while Lily was an infant, was less critically and commercially
successful than her first series, ‘Horrible Ways to Die,’ but she herself
preferred the gentle hopefulness of ‘Terrible Disasters.’”
This is
one of my favorite passages from The Birthday Problem (Pink Narcissus Press, July 2014), a novel by Caren Gussoff, a Seattle author, a colleague, and a
friend (visit Caren's web site to learn more about Caren and her
fiction).
Avinashi
Gopal was a celebrated artist. Her mother, Malaya, created the nanobots that
eradicated human disease. Her daughter Lily opened a bakery. Her granddaughter
Chaaya recites Fibonacci numbers when stressed. She is or will have been a
mathematician — if not for the nanobot plague.
The Gopal
women are a few among many unforgettable characters one meets in The Birthday
Problem, the novel that it about… well, very much about this— the gentle hopefulness
of terrible disasters, much like Avinashi’s paintings.
I asked
Caren a few questions about her novel and herself. Here is what she told me.
JS: You have come into speculative
fiction from literary fiction What does spec fic let you do that literary
doesn’t, and vice versa?
CG: My first two books, Homecoming
and The Wave and Other Stories, were both driven by character and language over
plot and idea. Yet I think you can see the seeds of my conversion to spec fic
in both books; the settings are hyper-real, the coincidences are near-magical,
and, in at least one story from The Wave, features characters of mythical
origin.
I’ve always been a sci fi and
fantasy fan, and for the first part of my life, was sure I was going to be some
sort of scientist. I think of my time in lit fic as my apprenticeship to craft,
since it was the genre most embraced in writing programs…and it was easier to
get feedback on my work if I wasn’t always having to explain my ray guns and robots.
JS: And I thought you were a literary “plant” in the spec
fic world. Turns out you’ve always been a spec fiction plant in the world of
the literary!
CG: Yes, ray guns and robots,
metaphorically speaking, are my interest, and I love how I can explore really,
really divisive and touchy subjects (colonization, gender, race), as well as
mushy subjects (memory, identity, redemption) with readers – and eliminate some
of the resistance – by setting it on another planet, in alternative history, or
played out by non-human beings.
JS: Oh, that’s interesting, about
tough subjects. Why do you think this is? Is it like hiding a bitter pill in a
cookie? Or is there something else going on, like we always need a mirror of
the “other” to see ourselves?
CG: I think it is exactly like
hiding a pill in a cookie – it’s very human to resist change and to feel
defensive when presented with data that clashes with what we do and how we
live. No one likes being shown that they are a racist, for example, by directly
pointing out how their specific actions stem from being raised inside an
institutionally racist system. Most folks would immediately jump to wanting to
defend their actions, as if their very goodness was what was in question.
I’ve found that using an analogy
eases this…it lets readers safely draw the parallels between the fictional
world and their own world themselves. It’s both gentler and more effective. It
sinks in this way, and encourages dialogue.
JS: If you were to pigeonhole yourself and your
works, which one will you end up in? Do you consider yourself a genre-bender?
