Ted Kosmatka 2010 Interview
Ted Kostmatka is nominee for the novelette “Divining Light”.
Hi Ted! Thanks for agreeing to do the interview. First off, what made you decide to become a storyteller, in whatever medium be it prose, plays, games, etc.?
I don’t think that I ever made a conscious choice to be a storyteller. It was always something that was just in me to want to do from a young age. I’m not sure that I showed any particular early promise at it, but the interest was certainly there, and I kept returning to it again and again. My mother still has some of my early attempts—these crayon Star Wars stories that I wrote when I was probably seven or eight, folded over and stapled into pamphlet-style books. I was a double threat back then, doing all my own cover art. I think the only time choice ever came into it was sometime during college when I made a decision to take my writing more seriously. I remember wanting intensely to go to a Clarion writers’ workshop. There were all these great writers coming out of there, people I wanted to meet and learn from, but I could never scrape together the money to go. Later, when I had the money, I also had a job where I worked a ton of hours, and I could never get time off work to go. So I never went. In the end, taking my writing seriously and not taking it seriously at all looked very similar to each other. In both cases, I worked day jobs; wrote stuff at night. This was also true when I gave up on trying to be a writer altogether. (At that point, I’d written probably a half a million words, none of which I’d managed to publish.) I gave up, but I still kept writing. Which I know doesn’t make any sense, but it kind of circles back to writing not really being a choice.
I think “Divining Light” is one of your more developed and sophisticated pieces. What was the inspiration for the story?
When I wrote “Divining Light” I was working in a research lab that was, coincidentally, not so different from the one described in the story. I think laboratories are inherently fascinating places. They’re populated by interesting people doing interesting things, and by virtue of what takes place in them, they are places of mystery. They are places where people are trying to figure things out. The character called Satish in the story is actually based on one of my best friends who worked side by side with me in that lab for four years.
When I interviewed you back in 2008, you mentioned that elements like faith and religion were unconscious on your part. When writing “Divining Light”, is that still the case? Or do you see predestination as an entirely different subject matter?
It’s still very much an unconscious thing. I’m still surprised by the themes that keep surfacing in my work. I don’t know why I write the kind of stories I do. Story ideas pop into my head on a semi-regular basis, and most of them, I’ll admit, are pretty bad—they’re either clichéd, or too abstract, or too inert—which is why I don’t write them. But there are also these other story ideas that pop into my head, and I think, okay, that might have potential to be good science fiction… but then I find myself not writing those either, because I have a pretty full life, and between work and family, there’s only so much time in the day for me to write; and it seems like all the stories that I have to write are the ones that don’t just have the potential be good science fiction but also are stories where I’m trying to figure something out for myself. I’m trying to clarify my own thinking on a subject, make sense of something. So it’s like there is this filter in my head, and only certain kinds of stories get through and onto the page. Sometimes I feel that I can really only think when I’m writing. Writing a story is how I think about a subject that interests me.
What impressed me with “Divining Light” is how it’s grounded in real science, and then transitions into something that seems fantastical. Were you conscious of this transition? What were the challenges in writing the scene? How much research (on the science theory) did you have to do?
Great question. And yes. I wanted to draw a line in the story and say, here, right here is where this steps off from known science and becomes science fiction. Of course, I couldn’t do that, but the impulse was there. There was a lot of research that went into that story. Probably more than any other story I’ve written. One of the issues that I had to overcome in the story is that quantum mechanics itself reads like some impossible fictional conceit. You study quantum mechanics, and your first thought is, there’s no way the universe can really work that way. But it does. Or at least it seems to.
Currently, especially in light of your recent award nominations, how do you see yourself (or what amalgamation)? Scientist? Writer? Gamer? Father? Where do these lines intersect and where do they end?
I still think of myself as all those things. Though now less a scientist than a dreamer about science. Or maybe I was always just a dreamer about science. Where all those things intersect is just a function of the age I’m at right now. I’m doing my best to try to balance all the different competing aspects of my life, but it’s not always an easy thing.
What projects are you currently working on? Any update on your novels or short story collection?
I’m working on several projects right now. I have a short story collection that I’m continuing to write stories for, hoping it eventually catches a publisher’s eye. I’m also still shopping around my novel. It’s a difficult time in the publishing industry right now, and everything seems to be changing. I’m still trying to find out where I fit in to that. (Or if I fit in at all.) There are a couple of other non-publishing projects that I’m working on that are keeping me nicely busy as well.
Over the last five years, Ted Kosmatka has published more than a dozen stories in places like Asimov’s, F&SF and Subterranean. His writing has been reprinted in seven Year’s Best anthologies, serialized over the radio, performed on stage, and translated into Russian, Hebrew, Polish and Czech.
Ted was born in Indiana, not far from Lake Michigan. He studied biology at Indiana University and since then has gradually assembled one of those crazy work histories that writers so often seem to accumulate. Among other things, he’s been a zookeeper, a chem tech and a laborer in a steel mill. More recently, he worked for four years in a research laboratory where he got to play with electron microscopes.
Charles A. Tan is the co-editor of the Philippine Speculative Fiction Sampler and his fiction has appeared in publications such as The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories and Philippine Speculative Fiction. He has conducted interviews for The Nebula Awards and The Shirley Jackson Awards, as well as for online magazines such as SF Crowsnest and SFScope. You can visit his blog, Bibliophile Stalker, where he posts book reviews, interviews, and essays.
