Kelley Eskridge 2009 Interview
Kelley Eskridge is nominated for her novella “Dangerous Space.”
In “Dangerous Space”, I could feel your passion for the story moving under the surface. What is it that you’re most passionate about in your fiction? What are the themes that inspire you to write?
I’m fascinated by all the ways there are to be human in the world. I’ve spent my life exploring human experience, mine and others’, and trying to report back what I find. Mapping our internal territory… it’s a vast and varied landscape, and I never get tired of traveling it.
I’m constantly astonished by the possibilities of being human. We build billions of different lives out of the small daily choices we make, the impulse of feelings we don’t always understand, thoughts that inspire or frighten us, actions that are better or worse than we ever believed we could be—and then we tell each other stories about our own lives or lives imagined. For those moments we can live other choices, other chances. We can be more than who we are.
It’s the most marvelous feeling in the world for a writer or a reader to be taken that way by a story. That’s what I’m passionate about.
As for theme, well… there are themes that run through my body of work, absolutely, but I am never inspired to write by theme. I find characters who compel me, and I get as far into their hearts and minds as I can. The themes that have emerged in my work are explorations of identity, love, isolation and connection, hope, choice - what makes us who we are, and what do we do when our sense of ourselves is challenged or changed?
Would you like to tell more about the writing of Dangerous Space?
Timmi Duchamp, the editor of Aqueduct Press, asked me to write a new story to anchor the collection. I wanted to write another story of Mars, a character who appears in two other stories; and I had been thinking a lot about what music means to me.
We had a tight deadline to put the collection together. I was scheduled to teach the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop in summer 2007, and I wanted to have the collection out before then. Timmi, Tom and Kath at Aqueduct Press all worked like mad to make it happen.
At the same time, I was working on my first screenplay. That was an intense creative and personal process - it essentially felt like I was going deeper into myself as a writer than I ever had before, taking more chances, being more vulnerable and more passionate and more…. I don’t know. Writers talk about the moments of transcendence that happen in the work - not where we lose ourselves, but where we find ourselves completely, without fear, ecstatic, absolutely in flow. Working on the screenplay made me remember what that’s like. And when it came time to write “Dangerous Space,” the story just poured out of me. I wrote 25,000 words in six weeks, and it was the most exhilarating, draining, crazy-beautiful experience I’ve ever had as a writer.
In your essay “Identity and Desire” you say you wanted Mars to be without gender. Would you like to tell more about this?
I don’t include gender markers for Mars in any of the stories, although the biology and gender of the characters around Mars is clear.
The thing is, as readers, by default we identify with the protagonist: but if that protagonist is “different” from us, there’s an automatic distance and resistance to letting ourselves “be” that person, walk in their shoes, live their lives. Gender is one of the great gaps, for whatever reason. Men often don’t want to identify with women characters, believing that women’s experience has nothing to offer them. And women readers learn early to squint sideways and fit themselves into male characters because the boys’ stories are so often the great adventures that we all want to have.
And that’s the key - we all, every single human one of us, want to have those adventures when we read. I give readers a Mars who is fully human, into whose skin anyone can step if they choose. Because Mars isn’t presented to the reader overtly as a man or a woman, Mars’ behavior becomes unhooked from gender expectations. Whether you read Mars as a woman or a man, at some point the character will do something that might contravene your own notions of gender. That’s an interesting moment. That’s the moment that the fences of gendered behavior (men don’t do this, women can’t do that) dissolve and we step into the territory where we’re all human - male, female, intersexed, transsexual, queer, straight, whatever we may be, all of us human beings capable of love, fear, joy, aggression, passivity, despair, courage, hope.
That’s the Big Idea in all the Mars stories. The F-tech in “Dangerous Space” is simply the externalization of that.
You are married to fellow writer Nicola Griffith. How has this marriage of two writerly minds influenced or informed your writing? What’s it like being married to someone who also writes and who is just as passionate about her work as you are?
I wouldn’t be who I am as a person or a writer without Nicola. We have different voices and different stories to tell, and we’ve agreed to help each other make those stories the best they can be.
My work is so important to me - it defines me, creates me, takes me places I couldn’t go any other way. Sharing that unreservedly with a partner on a similar journey is one of the great joys of my life.
A few years ago, we were asked to write this joint essay about writers-as-partners for the anthology Bookmark Now. It turns out we were the third writing couple the editor had approached: the other couples had backed away in horror at the idea of going public about this aspect of their relationship. We saw it as a chance to shine some light on some of the very real issues involved. It was the first time we’d collaborated on a piece of writing. It was fun.
You’ve engaged various forms of storytelling. The novel, the short story form, essay writing, and screenwriting. Which form appeals to you the most and why?
Oh, that’s like asking which is the favorite child (grin). I love them all, and would not wish to do without any of them. They take me different places and teach me different things. Short stories are where I am most experienced, where I have a mainline to the deep places in myself that I need to reach if I am to write well. Screenplay is the newest form for me, and we’re just coming out of the mad-romance stage where all we want to do is roll around with each other. I have a master plan for a kickass screenwriting career. I have at least a couple more novels agitating to be written. There are certainly more Mars stories. And because I blog regularly, I feel as though I’m writing little essays all the time. It’s all satisfying.
If you had to choose, would you write for love or for money?
I would prefer to write what I love and have money showered upon it.
What does a regular writing day look like for Kelley Eskridge?
When I’m in the beginning stages of a project, I become incredibly mentally distracted. Random thoughts, ideas, scenes, sentences come to me while I’m washing dishes or making tea, and I often forget what I’m supposed to be doing. Those days it looks as though I’m doing no writing at all, when really I’m working like mad under the surface.
When I’m actually writing and have some traction on the work, I start getting up very early. It turns out, inconveniently for both me and Nicola, that my best creative window opens around 4 AM and closes sometime after lunch. During these intense periods, I live on tea and music and story, and pretty much disappear from the world. I love those days. I love being a writer.
(photo of Kelley Eskridge by Julie Boycott)
Kelley Eskridge is the author of the novel Solitaire and the collection Dangerous Space. She lives in Seattle with her partner, novelist Nicola Griffith.
Solitaire was a New York Times Notable Book, a Borders Books Original Voices selection, and a finalist for the Nebula, Spectrum and Endeavour awards. A film based on the novel is currently in development with Cherry Road Films/Radar Pictures, with Nicole Kassell attached to direct, screenplay by Gregory Widen and Kelley Eskridge.
Stories in Dangerous Space include a winner of the Astraea Prize as well as finalists for the Nebula Award, two Tiptree Prize Honor List stories, and a story adapted for television.
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz was born in the South of the Philippines, grew up in the mountains of the North (Ifugao), and moved to The Netherlands after her marriage. When she went to college, her mother insisted that she take up music, a thing for which she is grateful as it now supports her passion for the written word. She writes columns for the Philippine-Dutch publication (Munting Nayon), reviews for The Fix , and co-edits the online mainstream publication, Haruah: Breath of Inspiration. Her fiction has recently appeared in Weird Tales Magazine, Fantasy Magazine and Philippine Speculative Fiction volume four.
1. barbara sanchez on 21st April 2009 at 11:03 pm
Thanks for the perceptive interview of one of my favorite writers. I hope she wins.