Fantasy magazine

From Modern Mythcraft to Magical Surrealism

Dystopia-Triptych-Banner-2023

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Feature Interviews

Nonfiction

Interview: Charlie Jane Anders

I feel like it’s more interesting to watch people change through their relationships to other people than to see them go through changes in a vacuum. I feel like one thing the stories in Even Greater Mistakes have in common is that you can usually identify one or two relationships that power them. Even in my novels, this is usually the case for me, and I feel like my novels are firing on all cylinders when you can track a particular relationship from beginning to end.

Nonfiction

Interview: Jennifer Marie Brissett

I began writing as a coping method, sneaking out of bed at night to work at my computer. I wasn’t sleeping much, anyway. This went on for a few years. I wasn’t doing it seriously, just writing what came to mind. There may have even been a novel attempt in there. I never showed anybody anything. It was just for me.

Nonfiction

Interview: Silvia Moreno-Garcia

My books are very different, and I think for someone who has only read one type of story from me it can be a bit shocking to see how much things can change from one book to the other. Velvet Was the Night is absolutely a noir set in a time and place most people don’t know about. This is the era when the Mexican government is torturing, killing, and beating activists. The CIA is assisting the government because they want to fight communists in Latin America. It’s a grim, dingy setting, full of conflict.

Nonfiction

Interview: Tasha Suri

In The Jasmine Throne I wanted to explore shades of grey: ostensibly good people doing unjust things for their ideals; people choosing to become villains with their eyes open; the way power can unmake you and monster you. It’s also about unjust systems and cruel power hierarchies and—yes—love. But its characters don’t always choose the right path, and love doesn’t always have the power to save them.

Nonfiction

Interview: Charles Yu

I’d written poems as a kid, and I took poetry workshops as an undergrad at Berkeley. But I didn’t make a sustained effort at writing until my mid-twenties, after graduating from law school. Instead of studying for the bar exam, I found myself at the bookstore every day, reading story collections. Going into a new career as a lawyer, I think I was searching for a creative release valve, some private headspace I could carve out. So I started writing little things in the margins of notepads, or sending emails to myself with scraps of language. My first pieces were very short, weird experiments. I don’t even know you could call them stories.

Nonfiction

Interview: N.K. Jemisin

I don’t tell other artists how to do their art. For me, however, it’s important that art accurately reflect the world around me — how people really behave, how societies really work, how change really happens (or doesn’t). Even if I put it in another world, wrapped in trappings that have nothing to do with reality, certain things need to be true to life. That makes it political whether I intend for it to be or not. And right now I see (and feel) a lot of resistance, so naturally that appears in my work.

Nonfiction

Interview: SL Huang

One thing I do know, though, is that I don’t really believe in the idea of “breaking in.” Everything’s small steps, the way I see it—some, like a novel publication, larger than others, but everything sort of accumulates, and eventually there’s something other people look at and say, hey, that’s a career-shaped thing. But it’s never felt like that from the inside, for me. I did a bunch of small, individual things, separately, and they’ve sort of lumped together over time.

Nonfiction

Interview: Hal Duncan

Hal Duncan is the author of many novels, stories, poems, blog posts, and other works, including the Book of All Hours diptych, Vellum and Ink, as well as the novella Escape from Hell! (Monkeybrain Books), the chapbook An A to Z of the Fantastic City (Small Beer Press), the libretto Sodom! the Musical, the essay Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fiction (Lethe Press), and the story collection Scruffians! (Lethe Press). Vellum was nominated for the Crawford, Locus, BFS, and World Fantasy awards, and won the Spectrum, Kurd Lasswitz and Tähtivaeltaja awards; both Rhapsody and Scruffians! are, as I write this, nominated for the BFS award.

Nonfiction

Women Destroy Urban Fantasy: An Interview with Carrie Vaughn and Kelley Armstrong

It’s so ironic that you’ll hear people talk in one breath about how women are better at writing fantasy and men are better at science fiction, and in the next breath talk about how of course men write better epic fantasy, and women really only write that “girly” fantasy. There are some folks who’d squeeze us out entirely if they could.

Nonfiction

Feature Interview: Puss in Boots Director Chris Miller

We knew that we were going to have the fairy tale world as a backdrop in Puss in Boots, we wanted to make sure we didn’t end up just parodying them. We wanted to take the original stories and put a new spin on them.