Interview
with J.M. SIDOROVA
J.M. Sidorova is the author of science fiction and fantasy
short stories and a novel THE AGE OF ICE (Scribner/Simon & Schuster, 2013),
which blends history and magic realism. The novel was featured in Locus
Magazine's recommended reading list and among Tor’s best books of 2013. J.M.’s
short stories appeared in Clarkesworld, Asimov's, Abyss and Apex, and other
venues. She is a 2009 Clarion West workshop graduate. She holds a Ph.D. in
molecular genetics and does biomedical research at the University of
Washington, Seattle.
What
are you reading right now?
First of all, thank you for reaching
out to me; I appreciate it. So, to begin: MAGIC PRAGUE by Angelo Maria
Ripellino. As it often happens, it’s part of my research for the novel that I’m
writing. The book is in a genre of its own — a city’s biography written by a
hyperverbal, hyperbolic, gushing, excitable Italian literati who lived there in
the nineteen sixties. Part history, part literary criticism, part a flight of fancy.
Very useful.
What
first sparked your interest in writing?
I am one of those people who have
been writing (or telling, anyway) stories for as long as they remember, so it
is hard to pinpoint exactly how it happened or why. The usual “triggers” were
in place, of course, like growing up with a lot of books.
What
do you love the most about writing? The least?
There are public and private,
personal and professional aspects to writing that have good and bad facets.
Let’s say we talk about writing as a private preoccupation. Love the most: isn’t
it total fun? An introvert’s guilty pleasure. To go roaming in your head and
make stuff up and put it into nicely arranged sentences. Love the least: I am
terribly slow. I second-guess and self-doubt. I get in my own way. I can’t get
out of my own head!
Tell
us a little about your writing process.
A pain in the gluteus maximus. I
start out with an irrational need to write about a particular thing. I outline
it in general strokes. As I actually write it, it changes, of course. My
understanding of it grows. Characters grow. Sometimes there are whole paragraphs
that I build one word at a time. In some ways it becomes a piece of
installation art made of found objects. Those found objects are historical
facts, or trivia, or memories, or images, or coincidences. It can become too
cluttered of course, and then I need to clean it up.
What
are your passions?
A side note: I typically have difficulty
answering the simplest questions (like this one pretends to be) — because I have
a compulsion to complicate things. Let’s see…I guess I still, after twenty
years of doing it, have a passion for science. I wish I could do more to
promote it (Neil deGrasse Tyson is such an inspiration!). In general, learning
stuff about the world and telling it in stories. I suppose I feel pretty
passionate about that.
What
inspires you?
Ah, another one of those deceptively
simple questions. I am just going to rattle off one long example. A kid running
in the field with his/her arms outstretched, imagining s/he is an airplane —
that’s inspiring. That same kid, now a pilot, bombing the heck out of something
— that’s not so inspiring, but it is complicated, so I won’t judge. The story
of Charlie Brown, an American, and Franz Stigler, a German, two WW2 pilots, is
inspiring: one is in a seriously wounded and barely limping bomber and in swoops
another in a fighter, with orders to shoot, but instead of dispatching Brown
Stigler escorts him out of harm’s way; and then decades later they connect and become
friends, and then some more years later a man writes a book about them, and
another man lovingly paints a painting for the book’s cover, and then a whole
bunch of people read this book and keep writing heartfelt comments online — that
whole thread is inspiring, I think.
Why
speculative fiction? (If you consider THE AGE OF ICE as such. If not, why not?)
I do consider it speculative fiction.
Though not fantasy. Magic realism. As to why — my latest explanation is that
infusion of reality with magic is an almost inevitable byproduct of our minds. Our
minds just kind of… sweat magic all the time. What we do with it —now that
depends on us. It can help us parse reality, process and accept it, but it can
also mislead us. In THE AGE OF ICE I was processing reality with the help of
magic. The rest is realism.
How
was THE AGE OF ICE born?
Five years of labor… then a
C-section… just joking. I can tell you exactly how it was conceived: I read an
article in The New Yorker called Ice Renaissance by Elif Batuman (who is
inspiring, by the way). That’s how I learned about the Ice Palace built in the
18th century Russia and the wedding night that took place in it. And
that was it: I wanted to write about the children conceived that night.
Did
the story require a lot of research?
Oh, yes. Fortunately, I did not
realize at the beginning how much research it would take. And when the
realization hit me, it was too late.
What
drew you to write about Russia in particular?
If the Ice Palace had been built in—
I don’t know— New Zealand, I would have had to write about New Zealand. But it
was like: hooray, I actually know a thing or two about the subject. I am of
Russian extraction.
Do
you have any advice for aspiring authors?
The other day I stumbled across
something William Vollmann wrote in 1990 for the Conjunction magazine. In his
article titled happily, American Writing
today: a diagnosis of the disease, he says among other things, “We should
never write without feeling.” I totally agree. It is, of course, a pledge
rather than advice. But it does seem to me that an aspiring author’s first
novel has a better chance (all other things being equal) of winning a
publisher’s heart if it is written from the author’s heart.
Is
there anything else you would like to tell us about yourself?
Hmm. I can’t think of much. I grow grossly
oversized vegetables in my backyard. I am a pessimistic humanist. A month ago I
flew over the bar of my bicycle and hit the pavement because I was distracted
by a need to fish something out of my pocket. Tells a story, doesn’t it?