Interview with Sylvia Kelso: Feminist, Speculative Fiction Writer, Author of Amberlight, Part One - Page 4

Yes, Paula Guran is a wonderful editor.

Many folks who like literary stories also like speculative fiction. But I wonder if Amberlight might challenge typical readers like myself. After all, readers like to be read books that are accessible. Does that worry you?

Oh, yes, now it worries me a lot. I dislike the market tendency to "dumb down" fantasy — Tolkien would never get published today, he'd be "too wordy" and have "too many invented words" — but when I wrote Amberlight, publication for it wasn't in my head. The audience was an imaginary ideal fantasy reader, who would get all the genre variations, know all the words, and expect the best that I could give. And then the earliest readers loved it, style or no. One early reader, a writer and person I respect in both hats, said, "The style alone was worth the price of admission" — a comment still graven on my memory. But when I tried it on a couple of my current work-in-progress readers, they both threw handsprings about the style. So when I was passed Paula's parameters for Juno, I agonized over sending Amberlight, though it fitted all her checkpoints, and was a series header as well. I went so far as telling her the opposing responses to the style, before I asked if she wanted this one. But she liked it, and so did Sean, so they've gone ahead, and I'm hoping it will pick up at least most of the audience it deserves.

Why did you choose this particular genre? Or did this genre find you?

When I started writing this novel, I was in the throes of a PhD on the interactions of feminism with Gothic/Horror, and with Science Fiction, and I had reached the SF theory chapter, or, what I think should be called SF. And I was trying to figure what distinguished SF and Fantasy. So as I told my supervisor (adviser), just after the first draft, and laughing somewhat hysterically as Lilith does when she uses the words in Octavia Butler's Exogenesis books, this was an experiment in the field. The project was, to write a book that would balance so closely on the border of SF and fantasy, no one could decide which it was. I was quite delighted when I sent it to one of my mates who read a lot of both, and she couldn't decide which she felt it should be called.

Article Author: Carole McDonnell

Carole McDonnell's short stories and essays appear online and in print, in speculative fiction, ethnic, and Christian publications. She lives in New York with her husband, two sons, and their pets. Wind Follower, published by Juno Books in June 2007, …

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