Sonya Taaffe is the best possible author of whom you may never have heard. (This is my opinion, but this is also my blog.) Or you have heard of her, and you know about the film blog and the 2018 Lambda-Award winning anthology, but you’ve wondered what she’s been up to since winning that Rhysling. She writes poetry, tells stories, and does the panelist rounds at commendable conventions like Readercon. To me, though, it’s short fiction where Taaffe really shines, which is why I’m extremely excited that Sonya’s newest collection of short stories, Forget the Sleepless Shores, launches August 7 from Lethe Press. I sprained my clicky finger pre-ordering this one. (If you want a taste of salt spray before diving in completely, one of the most finely wrought stories in the collection is available to read online.)
Taaffe’s fiction was first described by Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1877:
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim…
All right, I’m mostly kidding. But I couldn’t get that guy for the blog interview; I got Sonya herself, instead. If you’re curious about an award-winning writer of queer, eerie, atmosphere-drenched short fiction of salt winds and memory-spaces, read on below!
ST: They just walk in. Some of them come out of songs, some out of myths and some out of history, and some of them I have absolutely no idea. A very few of them have intentional antecedents: I was invited to contribute to a neo-Lovecraftian anthology, I was writing to a prompt of strange botany, I was asked if I had any fiction on Jewish themes. Other times a friend leaves an enigmatic comment on Facebook about seaweed and Roman emperors and away we go. Some piece of grit gets into my head. Something haunts me. I embroidered a family story and more than a decade later it turned out to be true.
ST: As Vast as Death and Even Less Known to Her: Mapping the Relations of Ghosts and the Sea in the Fiction of Sonya Taaffe. Because I was asked that question once and all I could think of was the Odyssey, how the road of the dead is a sea-road, the sun’s road, past the streams of Ocean and the gates of Helios, and maybe the pattern would be clearer to someone outside my head.
ST: I think of myself as both of those things. I don’t think of either of those things as the only kind of writer that I am, any more than I am only a writer with a classical education or only a writer with chronic pain, but I don’t see how they could not inform the world as I live in it, even when I am writing about characters who are straight or non-Jewish or wouldn’t know from Aeolic Greek if it ran off with their girlfriend. My mother has said that she thinks of me as a liminal writer. I could live with that, in between.
ST: It’s difficult for me to choose any story of mine as a favorite, but I do have stories that are especially important to me because of when they were written and/or what went into their writing: “The Salt House” and “The Boatman’s Cure” are at the top of this list, followed closely by “The Dybbuk in Love,” “Chez Vous Soon,” and “The Creeping Influences.” I remain proud of the physics I taught myself to write “The Trinitite Golem.”
Typewriters, radio, and records are all too recent and too continually rediscovered to be considered really obsolete, so let’s go with the Sumerian beer straw. I’m too bitter about the ongoing demise of public pay phones to feel nostalgic for them.
ST: I think all of my stories exist in the same universe, because it’s ours. In terms of carryover between stories, I am fairly confident that Aronowicz who chain-smokes over geraniums in “The Boatman’s Cure” is the same Aronowicz who married a demon in “When Can a Broken Glass Mend?” They certainly both live in the North End. Otherwise I don’t tend to write sequels or even tangents, but I am at present engaged in an attempt to revisit the family history of a couple of people in this collection and apotropaically that’s all I will say about it.
ST: I watch a lot of film noir: I fell into the genre a few years ago with The Reckless Moment (1949), a sucker punch to American postwar domesticity that incidentally explodes the popular idea that a woman’s only options in noir are either the good girl or the femme fatale. It’s not some rare strange outlier in its acknowledgement of complexity, either. Noir is the genre of uncertainty, the world that changes shape around and out from under you, and at its best it’s as transgressive as any questioning of national ideals should be. For similar reasons, I watch a lot of pre-Code movies: however fast, cheap, and occasionally inexplicable as they may be, they remain as close as this country got to representing the realities of the world before the enforcement of the Production Code and the self-censorship of Hollywood ironed out America’s self-image into the white picket fence whose hangover we are still enduring. They can feel like a gift from an alternate universe just because they admit the existence of heroes with drug habits or heroines who survived sexual assault or openly queer protagonists or Jewish families just having lives or Black people having any agency at all. So many recent gains in representation turn out to be the reclamation of lost territory, not necessarily the breaking of new ground. It is probably not surprising that as the present political climate swings ever more nationalistic, I want reminders that the past was never as nostalgically conservative as some people want to make out. Even in 1953, I can get you a movie that understands #MeToo.
The answer to your second question is definitely yes, although it expresses differently in different stories. “The Salt House” has several points of genesis including a childhood nightmare, a three-hundred-year-old green glass onion bottle, and the necklace by Elise Matthesen called “Remember What You Say in Dreams #4,” but I know for a fact that its actual writing was jumpstarted by seeing, within weeks of one another in the summer of 2006, I Capture the Castle (2003) and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006). No one in the story is played by Stellan Skarsgård, but I kept a reference image of Bill Nighy on my desktop in the last week of writing, almost as a kind of talisman. I expect other echoes to be visible to readers who know the movies. In “The Boatman’s Cure,” one of the characters looks like Roddy McDowall’s Ben Fischer in The Legend of Hell House (1973) because that’s who was playing the dead man in the dream I had in the spring of 2011 that grew into the story. If it’s a remix of anything, it’s mostly of me, but it remains my only haunted house story to date, as well as my single most successful transfer of material from dream to fiction. I used Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson’s electronic score as writing music along with a lot of Peter Bellamy, Carbon Leaf, and Andrew Bird. “And Black Unfathomable Lakes” is straight-up serial numbers filed off The Brides of Dracula (1960). It was provoked by a Tumblr post of Gemma Files’ in 2013 and I keep forgetting to dedicate it to the memory of Peter Cushing and Yvonne Monlaur.
ST: I love durian! I tasted it for the first time in 2011 when Scott Edelman brought two durians and a jackfruit to Readercon 22 and opened them in the parking lot with the partial assistance of a reenactment bollock dagger belonging to one of my grad school friends. (Hi, Josh!) Everyone around me was comparing the experience to gas leaks, onions, industrial sabotage, sewage mains. It tasted more than anything to me like a cross between a stone fruit and Guinness cheddar—the melony, squashy mouthfeel was completely counterintuitive for the umamibomb. I have since eaten durian whenever I can get it, including in smoothies.
Recently I was reading a New Yorker article about Faroese cuisine which featured the line “The set menu began with an appetizer of dried cod, whale blubber, and dried whale meat (which was black and tasted of seawater, blood, and iron).” I was sitting across the table from my husband at the time, eating something much less oceanic, and I said out loud, “That sounds great.” So if anyone reading has the airfare to send me to Streymoy for purposes of maritime food tourism, talk to me? I’m reasonable. Otherwise I’d like a do-over on my first time eating a sea urchin straight from its shell, because while it was delicious, sweet and briny-creamy and running with salt water, the experience was chased by a horrifying family emergency and I’d really just rather have not.
ST: Then where would I get my lesbian/non-binary Regency romance from?
|
In Print. On the Internet. Oh Dear. 