Not to be biased here, but this interview probably ranks among my favourites that we’ve done, perhaps even outright top on the list. And that’s only partly because I’ve just started reading Uncommon Charm and I’m already loving it. Mark this one TBR folks, because it’s so good.
Sadly, because publishing is publishing, it’s not available just yet, but in the meantime, you can enjoy this interview with the authors!
Before we start, though, don’t forget you can also follow Emily and Kat on twitter!
Have you always known you wanted to be a writer? How old were you when you wrote your first story?
Kat: I don’t know about my first story, but I have a journal from 1996 in which I wrote and illustrated such masterpieces as “Ocean Adventure,” “Animal Olympics,” and “Esmeralalda the Magic Mermaid.” I was also the creator of various lore compendiums for childhood imagination games. Talking animals featured heavily.
Emily: Always talking animals. Redwall fanfic, age seven, don’t remember much besides a hare eating meadowcream. Rather than deleting single mistakes I kept deleting the entire thing in a perfectionist snit.
We do know when we wrote our first book together.
Kat: What were we, like 15? 16? I printed out a copy for you, put it in a three ring binder, and brought it to the high school Latin summer camp we both attended. (Also known as the National Junior Classical League Convention – it was Latin camp, whatever.) We met online when we were twelve, writing pass-along roleplay fiction. Collaborative storytelling has been our primary mode for a long time.
What are your favourite genres to read and write, and are there any genres or tropes you wouldn’t write?
Kat: Reading: fantasy of any variety – high or low, in between – grounded in a specific time & place (even if it’s nominally secondary world), gothic fantasy and horror, space opera, slipstream, “literary” fiction that’s also “speculative” or vice versa, classic mysteries, 19th century lit – and any or all of the above in translation.
Writing: history with magic is my forever love, and no matter what else I ever happen to write, I will always return.
I’m not going to limit myself and say “never” to anything, but science fiction that depends on even halfway real-world adjacent physics or chemistry is not my wheelhouse. I dislike “hard” sci-fi as a term because biology, sociology, psychology, etc. are still science. They’re evidence-based disciplines. So is history, frankly. And I do prefer to write at the intersection of magic, history, and fantasy. (Though the somewhat arbitrary division between what’s science fiction and what’s fantasy is another conversation. In short: it’s all fantasy. It’s fine.)
Emily: I read SO MUCH interwar and postwar fiction but my main true love is what’s called the feminine middlebrow, books that were popular in their historical context but failed to achieve Classic status. They deal with domestic life, class, gender, and romantic love. One reason they’ve lost their hold is that “feminine” appellation, the sense that they’re trifles, but also because they’re so much about domestic disappointment and a sense of women’s diminishing potentialities. It is easier to read Nancy Mitford as old “chick lit” than it is to see her heroines (while privileged!) have not been allowed education, exploration, opportunity for anything but forming romantic and social attachments. Of course they will throw themselves into grand love affairs. What else can they do?
I don’t read many books without speculative elements otherwise. But “speculative elements” is a broad category, and I’m the kind of ass who will make the argument “but isn’t ALL fiction speculative?” What I’m looking for is a text that is some way estranged or dislocated from consensus reality by way of its narrator. If some perfectly objective recorder wrote in exacting detail everything that happened in Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings, it wouldn’t be as interesting to me as reading Sayaka Murata.
As for what I like to write: I’ve just told you! Personal, domestic, emotional conflicts. A sense of being other. Those can fit in any genre. The only thing I’d rule out is a story with enormous narrative stakes. I like to write antagonists but not villains, protagonists but not heroes. No destinies, worldsaving, etc.
When you close your eyes and imagine an apple, what do you see? An actual apple, a sketch of one, a blackness? Do you think that impacts your writing process?
Kat: We both see apples in various styles and mediums, I think? Yes? Yes. We’re both visual thinkers – visual artists, both of us. And in the theater of the mind, I can do things like turn the apple and adjust the lighting.
Emily: Style and medium are key here. I think people take “seeing the apple” to mean cinematic framing. And it’s not NOT that, but not frame-by-frame beat-for-beat playing a scene.
Kat: Illustrated stills, more like.
Emily: Exactly. There is no unadulterated, pure visual realm. All representation has style, and style is deliberate. So it is also a sketch of the apple. I’m the apple’s interpreter.
Kat: When writing, I do consider blocking and visuals, but there’s less of a camera, more of a dollhouse I can reach in and play with. Test metaphorical fabric swatches. I don’t want what I see to be replicated in the reader’s head, I want to offer them enough to picture it for themselves, if they happen to think that way. I like physical description, both writing it and reading it. There’s a certain grounding effect, a hook on which to hang your imagination. My red may not be your red, but the little psychic connection inherent in prose is all the more fascinating for the variations it calls forth.
Which three authors would you say influenced your writing the most?
Emily: My first response was “oh no, LMFAO.” You know how when you post an opinion on Twitter you’re compelled to preemptively defend yourself from arguments too absurd to consider? You act out your response to the bad faith response of the Guy You’ve Made Up when it hasn’t happened yet? That’s the same thing as taking influence from Vladimir Nabokov. Influence invites comparison to the man who wrote how sad it was to lose his mathematical genius to a childhood fever. It’s arrogant. It’s precious. It’s Lit Bro.
But nobody has accused me thus yet, so Vladimir Nabokov.
Kat: One can be influenced by equal parts admiration and spite. I admire the intertextual playfulness and unashamed self-indulgence; I write spitefully in response to…so much, where to begin, that’s a discussion for another time. Though I don’t compare our actual prose! Also, shout out to Delia Sherman and Ellen Kushner – who, as co-writers, made us sit up and go, “We can do that?”
Emily: Actually, count VN as a pair (Vladimir and Vera!).
Kat: Correct, we will not stand for Vera erasure.
Emily: Would he be genius without her? Yes, but genius and disorganized. Her editorial labor was an act of immense love, I think sometimes squandered. She cut and clarified and she stayed invisible.
The biggest influence on our writing and this novella, though, was Nancy Mitford. I discovered the Mitfords by way of Jo Walton’s Small Change trilogy and thought, no, no way, this family can’t be real. Of course they embellished their stories; I found I loved not their mythology itself, but that it was mythology. A story can be about a family. A family is not a story. Narrative arcs help you understand yourself but also conflict with real lives and heartbreaks.
When you’re building your world, what do you focus on? How do you try to make it come to life?
Emily: I would’ve said we don’t worldbuild, but that’s wrong. We aren’t worried about what people wear, imports and exports, the map-making kind of worldbuilding. Sounds like guff from writers with a “magic system,” but something broke through when we stopped considering magic as a taxonomy of actions with concrete effects on the world and began to see it as characters transforming their thoughts. In short: no need to excuse the presence of magicians in the Real World with a code of silence or some spell of concealment. Alan Moore and Zardulu are wizards. Do you need to believe in Alan Moore?
History is an interpretive discipline. We’re not writing a dry, chronological record and I don’t think that’s possible. We decide what’s of value by writing about it. The sights, sounds, and smells of the old Jewish East End are just as important as “here’s how the Romanovs died in 1917” (and the way that gets framed! I’ve got a bone to pick re: elegiac novels for the Russian aristocracy).
Kat: We worry very much about what people wear, to be honest.
Emily: Pbbbbt. I mean we don’t have to invent what they wear.
Kat: I’m just saying, it’s a personal pleasure to do decorative arts research. Even if it doesn’t make it into prose, we know. But I don’t really do worldbuilding in the traditional sense, if only because I do recognize in myself the capacity to get hung up on quantifying minutiae. In this house we do our best to resist categories and generalizations; it is a conscious decision. I enjoy marinating in the soup of a place and time and then picking out whatever vegetables float to the surface. And then I will spend two hours looking up light fixtures. Holistic vibe first, detail second. The former takes much longer than the latter – often literal years – but having that easy, natural-feeling background knowledge to draw on lets your world breathe.
What projects are you currently working on? Can you share any details yet?
Emily: We are and are not working at all times. Work is often thinking, individually and together, about what we’d like to do. I only thought of stories for a very long time, didn’t write them (paracosm!), but despite Pandemic and other circumstances I feel I can return to prose. I’ve written, what, fifteen pages of another Julia-and-Simon story? One from Simon’s point of view, more, uh, explicit, not more mature since Uncommon Charm goes to some bleak places.
Kat: Lightly.
Emily: I wouldn’t write without Kat, anyway. She is a terrific editor. I need her!
Kat: Editing brings out good things in me, feeds my soul and whatnot, and I’m rolling more in that direction for a bit. Publicly, anyway. I write for a limited audience of friends! I’ll always write in one way or another.
Emily: Fame and fortune aren’t the point. Neither is notoriety. The greatest accomplishment is to achieve artistic goals, sometimes for an audience of readers and sometimes for your Dungeons and Dragons group.
Three images that capture the aesthetic of your book?
Three songs you would put in your book’s soundtrack?
Patrick Wolf – The Magic Position (Sundark & Riverlight vers.)
Noel Coward – I Went to a Marvellous Party (or The Divine Comedy cover)
What would be your dream project?
Kat: This. This one. Uncommon Charm and its world. Other than that, I’d love to write a dark comedy in some kind of grotesque high fantasy setting.
Emily: A biographical novel about Voirrey Irving and Gef the mongoose. I’m interested in isolation, retreats into imagination, the difference between proving and having an experience.
Which of your characters would you most want to fight a zombie apocalypse with?
Kat: Our main characters: Julia and Simon, 1920s jock prep and jock nerd. A fencing foil only deals piercing damage, but give the girl a cricket bat or a field hockey stick and see what happens.
Emily: I don’t disagree but consider their mothers.
Kat: Yeah, give Simon’s anarchist mom a blunt instrument too.
You’re stuck on a desert island and you’re allowed only three (LGBT) books. What are you taking?
Emily: Fingersmith.
Kat: Fingersmith.
Emily: Hmm. Swordspoint and…
Kat: The Count of Monte Cristo. Listen. Listen. It’s long, and there are canon lesbians. I’d pick Privilege of the Sword, for Kushner.
Emily: Ah, you’re right. I’d do that and The Haunting of Hill House. It’s not long. There is at least one lesbian.
You can collaborate on anything with anyone in the LGBT community: who would it be and why?
Kat: Emily just wants to talk to Bryan Fuller. Just talk. Have a chat.
Emily: I want his Garak/Bashir meta! Not his fic, he already did the television adaptation of his serial killer AU.
Mine is sort of a cop-out answer, but I know and know of too many lovely and wonderful artists and writers to pick just one person.
Kat: Oh, I know! Magazine or small press, limited runs, with you, me, and Alison Rumfitt (author of Tell Me I’m Worthless) on the masthead. She has an impeccable sense for the weird and discomfiting.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Kat Weaver and Emily Bergslien are writers (and artists) who live in Minneapolis with their two birds.
Kat’s fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Lackington’s, Timeworn Literary Journal, and elsewhere. Her art can be found on her website, and on Twitter @anoteinpink. Emily is a Twin Cities bookseller whose reviews have been published in The Riveter magazine. Find her on Twitter @eudaemanical.
Their novella Uncommon Charm will be a part of Neon Hemlock’s 2022 Novella Series.
Follow Emily on Goodreads | Follow Kat on Goodreads | Add Uncommon Charm
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