>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington DC.
>> Thank you.
Our second welcome to the
2012 National Book Festival.
I'm Nora Krug.
I write the paperbacks column
for the Washington Post
which is a charter sponsor and
long-time supporter of this event.
I'm thrilled here today to
introduce Nalo Hopkinson who,
if I make quote her
publisher, has been busily
and wonderfully subverting the
sci-fi genre since her novel,
"Brown Girl in the Ring"
was published in 1998.
Since then she's won multiple prizes
and critical acclaim for her novels
and short stories including
"Skinfolk,
Midnight Robber and the Salt Roads."
Hopkinson who spent her
early life in Jamaica
in the Caribbean before settling in
the much colder climate of Canada,
draws on Caribbean history and
language to tell evocative tales
that blend fantasy and folklore.
Hopkinson, whose father was a poet
and actor and whose mother worked
in a library, grew up surrounded
by books but her introduction
to sci-fi came from
much more unusual place.
I don't want to embarrass her
but when she was a child
she said she found a stash
of Playboy magazines and
was looking at the cartoons
which completely baffled her.
And then she stumbled upon
Kurt Vonnegut's "Welcome
to the Monkey House," which she
said she did not understand either.
But she found it very
interesting and thankfully
that interest has blossomed and
given us a distinctive genre
that she calls speculative
rather than science fiction.
Hopkinson, who also
teaches creative writing
and designs beautiful
interesting fabrics,
has recently published her first
young adult novel, "Chaos,"
and completed another
novel called "Sister Mine,"
which is scheduled to
appear this spring.
A new work of fiction along with
an essay and an interview appear
in the just published
report from Planet Midnight,
a chatbook that is part of the aptly
named, outspoken author's series.
Nalo, who will be signing books at
3:30, is here now to tell us more
about her writing and her
inspiration and all that good stuff.
So welcome.
Thank you.
>> Applause.
>> I should be on, yes, I am.
Good. Thank you Nora,
for the introduction.
I'm not the one who is
embarrassed about the Playboy thing
but my mother probably would be.
So let's hope she doesn't
see this film.
So I have lived 35 years in
Canada, I was born in Jamaica.
I now live part of the year
in Riverside California
where I teach creative writing,
but I am, for the most part,
a Canadian with Jamaican background.
And since I've been here my
lizard brain has been convinced
that I've been in Ottawa which is
the Canadian seat of government.
And I have to keep
repeating to myself, no,
you're in a different country Nalo,
it's a different seat of government.
But what finally nailed it home to
me, I was just in the author's tent
and two policemen bearing
guns walked in.
that is such, that is really not a
Canadian thing to have instruments
of war at a book festive.
So I now know that I'm
not in Canada anymore.
I'm going to be talking
a bit about "The Chaos,"
Which is my first young adult novel.
It came out this spring.
It's been a long few years
to get to this novel.
This came out this spring.
In July the chatbook
that Nora talked about,
"Report from Planet Midnight"
came out and next spring the novel
"Sister Mine" is coming out.
I am not that prolific but
I spent the five years prior
to this quite ill, to the
point where I became destitute
and was actually homeless
for two years.
I wasn't writing much and
contracts kept going past me.
So I built up a bunch of work
that needed to be finished and now
that I am at the University
of Riverside
and things are improving quite
rapidly I'm catching up as quickly
as I can on all the work
that I've been doing.
So a book a year is
not usually what I do.
Two books in a year is
definitely not what I do
and that's probably not going to
happen again in a very long time.
So I have a master's degree
in writing popular fiction
from Seton Hill University,
not Seton Hall.
Seton Hill in Greensburg PA.
And I graduated in 2002 I think.
And my first year there, I was
already a published novelist,
I was working on my third
novel under contract,
which is the best way to
take a graduate degree
in creative writing ever.
I was taking a course that was about
writing fiction for young people
and the instructor led us through
an exercise in creating characters.
And I liked the character
that I created so much
that she eventually
became this book.
It took six years, but it happened.
Her name is -- her real
name is Sejunior Smith,
she lives in Toronto,
she is the daughter
of a black American
middle-class woman
and a white Jamaican
working-class man.
And I love how the cover manages
to portray the fact
that she's biracial.
She's born and raised
in Toronto which is one
of the more multi-cultural cities
in the world so there are people
from everywhere and all
generations of people there.
Her nickname, what her
friends know her as is Scotch.
It's not short for liquor,
its short for scotch bonnet.
I see some, yeah, a few
Jamaicans, few Caribbean people,
Scotch Bonnet peppers are a
very tasty pepper that is one
of the hottest in the world.
And she's called that because
she's a dancer on her school's team
and her moves are a
little bit nasty.
So they're hot, so
they call her Scotch.
Her parents know nothing of this.
When she's at home she is what they
want her to be, she's a nice girl,
she wears nice clothes and when she
gets to school she goes straight
in to the washroom and changes
into her hoochy clothes.
And that's what she wears at school.
Scotch is mouthy, goes
along with the nickname.
She has been moved from
one high school to another
because in her first high
school she was being harassed
by the other girls.
She was being what
we call slut-shamed,
where a group of girls decide that
you're a problem for some reason
and they start spreading rumors
about awful things you're doing
with the boys in the back room,
rather or not you're actually doing
them and in her case she wasn't.
When she gets to the
second school though,
and that's no longer happening,
she is going about her own
adolescent sexual explorations
and she's hiding this from her
parents because they are afraid
that that kind of behavior
will bring the harassing back
down on her.
And for the record, it's never
the behavior of the person
who is being slut-shamed this way.
So there she is, she's hiding what
she really is from her parents,
at home she's this good girl.
She goes to school where
she's on the dance team,
she hasn't even told her parent
this because it's street dance
and they would be horrified
at the little tiny hoochy
shorts they're going
to be wearing in their practice.
The thing about Scotch is she
has started seeing things.
She's seeing little creatures
that float through the air
and she's afraid that
she's going crazy.
Her mom is a psychologist
and so Scotch knows
that adolescence is the time
where if people are going
to be schizophrenic that
they might have their first
schizophrenic break.
And she's afraid that
this is happening to her.
What she hasn't really taken
in is that there are lots
of strange phenomena
around the school
and that other people are
having reactions to things
that they're seeing and hearing.
She doesn't much notice it because
high school is a crazy time.
People do go crazy in high school.
Her parents go away for a
weekend and Scotch decides to go
with her brother, her older
brother Rich to an open mike.
Her brother is a poet
in training and he wants
to go to his first open mike.
He's afraid, he's nervous and he
and Scotch are actually
fairly close so he takes her.
The thing about Rich,
about her brother is
that their parents let Rich get
sent to jail for a few months
because they found him with a blunt.
They found him with a
marijuana cigarette.
And Scotch is very, very
angry at them for this.
So she and Rich go to this open
mike which is held in a bar
in downtown Toronto and my
girl is, of course, under age.
She's very good about it,
she's drinking ginger ale
but there is no way
she should be in there.
While they are there
something happens.
A large iridescent bubble
forms under the podium
and starts growing
towards the audience
and Scotch dares Rich to touch it.
At which point he disappears and
all hell breaks loose in the city
of Toronto and apparently
in the world.
The book is named "The
Chaos" for a reason.
Very, very strange
things start happening.
The main one of these is that
all of a sudden there's a volcano
in the middle of Lake
Ontario, and I mean all
of a sudden, I mean
in seconds, boom.
Now when I started with this
premise I thought it was fantasy
until I began doing
research into volcanoes.
I can't pronounce the name
of the volcano in Mexico,
I think it [inaudible] that formed
overnight in a farmers field.
He came out one morning,
there was a smoking hole
in the middle of his field.
By that week it was -- by the end
of the week it was 100
feet tall and spewing lava.
Within a year it was
something like 1500 feet tall
and had covered the whole village.
So I sped up the time just a little
bit but a volcano growing in a week,
laughter, this world
is a fantastical place
to live in all by itself.
I cannot invent things that are
stranger than the actual world.
So through the rest of the
novel Scotch is looking
for her brother Rich as
the world goes to hell
in a handcart all around her.
Her parents are away,
she cannot reach them.
Things are coming out of the lake,
people are having strange
transformations happen to them.
Baba Yaga is in there because
I like Baba Yaga and why not?
For people who don't know who she
is, she is from Russian folklore,
she is a witch who rides in a --
now I changed it a little
bit so I'll have to try
to remember the actual folklore.
She rides in a -- it's a mortar.
So it's sort of egg-shaped.
The kind of thing that you
use to pound, whatever.
food or vegetables, grain.
And I'm -- she stirs,
she rows with the pestle.
And she's a lot of fun to write,
especially the chariot
that she rides in.
So that's The Chaos in as much
of a nutshell as I ever manage.
There's a lot of other stuff
happening but, you know,
I could be sitting up here, standing
up here reading you the book
if I tried to tell you
everything that's happening in it,
then you wouldn't want
to read the book.
They told me I should talk a little
bit about how I became a writer
and how I became a
science fiction writer
and it's something people ask
me because I'm a black woman
from the Caribbean which
is not their picture
of a science fiction geek.
Geek pride.
Laughter, thank you.
And my people are here.
I can hear the Jamaicans; I can
hear the science fiction people.
Wonderful.
I -- since I was a child,
I started reading at three.
And I always looked for the
stories that were outside the usual.
I don't think it's
something that I decided.
But people ask me why I decided
to start writing science fiction
but I just wrote what I had always
been reading and it was always stuff
that was out of the
ordinary in some way.
I was very, very fortunate to
have a father who was a writer
and an English teacher
and my mother,
as you heard, is a
library technician.
Our house was full of books.
And although my parents were
very strict in other ways,
anything I could find that I
could read they did not monitor
my reading.
They just let me have it.
And from a very young age is sort of
had the feeling that, sure or not,
that I sort of know what real
life is like because I have one.
I want to know about the
things that I don't have.
I wanted to know about things
that were supernatural,
that were futuristic, that
were unusual in some way.
And my dad, being an
English teacher,
he had books such as Homer's --
I'm being very distracted
by the noise back there.
Jason and the Argonauts.
What book is that?
>> [Inaudible]
>> No. Odyssey.
>> No, Jason and the Argonauts.
>> Thank you Tom.
"The Odyssey" and whatever
came after it.
"Gulliver's Travels,"
all the sort of classics
that were either epic tales
or in some ways just unusual.
And as you heard, I was reading
them even though I couldn't always
understand them which
became very good practice
for reading science fiction later
on because I failed science.
Never mind the fact that
I occasionally write it.
>> [Inaudible]
>> And I didn't think about
writing because there was a writer
in the house already, my
father was doing that.
Writing is what Daddy's did.
And my parents, as I grew up, would
keep asking me what I wanted to do
with my life and I had no idea.
So I ended up taking
all kinds of things.
I studied Russian, I studied French.
I did study science, very,
very briefly in undergrad.
That didn't go over very well.
And finally I decided
to take a course
in writing sci-fi and fantasy.
And that's where, that
leads me to today.
The other thing that
people ask about is,
particularly if they're budding
writers, is that everyone says
to you that you need to write
every day and particularly
in my genre we're very fond of
pulling out your daily word counts
and comparing them to
see who is the biggest.
I'm not very good at that.
I discovered in my 40's that I've
got attention deficit disorder.
I have something called
non-verbal learning disorder
which basically means high
verbal ability and not
so good at the non-verbal stuff.
I knew that.
And I also have fibromyalgia.
I have a chronic pain disorder.
Writing every day with the best will
in the world is not going to happen.
It just doesn't.
It's what some people do
and it works for them,
it's what I can manage
to do for maybe a month
if I'm on deadline and late.
Other than that, writing every
day just does not happen.
It is possible in other words, to
be a writer and not write every day.
What I do instead is I throw myself
at the computer often
enough that writing happens.
You can only spend so much time on
Twitter, really before you get bored
and you've got to do something else.
So I'm the voice for,
don't worry about it.
I hear from a lot of people who
want to be writers who psych them
out in all kinds of ways because
they hear this or that thing
that they should do or they
shouldn't do and they don't think
that they can live up to it.
It's not true.
If you want to be a writer, write.
Somehow, just keep doing it.
and don't find ways to not do it.
The only -- the best
predictor of success,
if you want to be a
writer is to write.
The best predictor of
failure is to not write,
it's that simple and
that complicated.
So a few years ago I -- my partner
became ill and couldn't work
and I said, well, no worries,
while you're figuring it out,
we've lived on one income
before, I'm going to step
in and you know, do my bit.
I slowly discovered I could no
longer do what I had been doing.
I had been surviving on a
mix of writing contracts,
teaching contracts and
consulting in the arts world
and anything else I could do
that would bring in change.
I found I could not do any of it.
Problem was, because it was so --
the inability to work was so similar
to the difficulty I have
working every day anyway,
I just thought I was
going through a bad patch.
It was way too long in the process
before my doctor realized I had
developed anemia so badly that
I could not read a sentence
from one end to the other.
Just not enough oxygen
going to the brain.
By the time I got to the end
of the sentence my mind
would have wondered.
See, there is people nodding.
I didn't know that's
what it felt like.
I should have been able
-- I know what anemia is,
I should have been able
to tell, I did not.
By the time that had been found out
my partner and I had been destitute
for some years and we spent a couple
of years homeless and couch surfing.
And in the acknowledgements for
this book I thank the people
who literally kept us alive
for those couple of years.
Science fiction fantasy community,
her community, family, friends,
sometimes perfect strangers.
People who took us in, who
gave us berth when we had none,
who found little bits of
work that we could both do.
I cannot thank people enough for
what they have done to get --
help us get back on our feet
and get me back to what I need
to be doing which is writing.
Science fiction community
is wonderful, is miraculous.
There is a network of
people who know each other.
People who come to events like this.
You've seen me waving at folks,
almost none of whom
live in the city I do.
I know them because
I see them at things.
We've become friends.
And that was how sometimes
when we were
in some strange country
having no idea
where our next meal was
coming from or our next roof.
Someone would day to somebody,
these are good people.
You can take them in for a few days
and we would have somewhere to live.
So I'm kind of preaching the
thank you, again, thank you to all
of you who have done this.
I could not, if I could try to thank
everyone it would have been the
whole book.
And it continues to
happen and that kind
of generosity is a bomb and a boon.
People ask about my
being a Caribbean person
who writes science fiction.
And there are increasingly
more and more of us.
Partly what happens is folks
think that if you're going
to write science fiction
it got to be set in a world
that looks either like
Mars or America.
Laughter. Which is the idea or
notion I have to disabuse people of.
Fantasy is based in folklore and
in religious beliefs and a lot
of it is either Christian or Celtic.
But the world is full of
folklore, the world is full
of religious beliefs and I write
often from the ones I grew up with.
I write from the folktales
I grew up with.
A lot of people have to take the
courage into their hands to do that.
I've been, again, very
fortunate to have --
to come from a community of writers
where people are doing
whatever they wanted
to so I knew that it was possible.
Sometimes I write in
Caribbean folklore,
sometimes I write in
Caribbean English.
Having lived in Jamaica, in Trinidad
and in Guyana I know a
little bit of all three.
Trinidadian is the one that
comes the easiest to me,
but I will often write
in those languages.
And again, science
fiction community,
we're used to reading things in
all kinds of invented dialects
so real one doesn't faze a lot of
people, it's a beautiful thing.
I want to read one thing,
let's see, its two pages long
so I think I have the time.
One of the things about
my characters thoughts,
being mixed race and being
fairly light skinned,
she finds it is very hard
for people to see her
as everything that she is.
And I gave her a scene that
has happened to friends of mine
who were similarly hybridized.
She is in this bar where she has no
right being and she starts chatting
up a guy there, an older guy,
so she's very proud of herself
that she's met an old guy.
And she invites him back
over to the table where she
and her brother are sitting.
I pointed to where Rich
had found us a table,
about halfway between
the bar and the stage.
He looked where I was
pointing, his face got wary.
So that guy is your boyfriend?
I laughed, nah, he's my brother.
I was testing him now.
Though I bet he couldn't
tell, the thing is,
she has come out light skinned
and her brother is fairly dark.
He looked at Rich,
he looked back at me.
He said, you're kidding me right?
You're just trying to pretend
he isn't your boyfriend.
Oh, he was skating on thin ice.
No, for real, he's my big
brother, you can go ask him.
He got this look of
hopeful comprehension.
Oh, so he's your half
brother or something?
One of you is adopted?
Yikes. He could still pull this
one out of the hole he was digging
for himself but the
signs weren't good.
But his was a reasonable
question right?
He didn't have to be
so trigger happy.
Still, my voice came out a few
hundred degrees cooler than before.
We both have the same parents,
one black, and one white.
Can't you see how we
resemble each other?
I came out lighter and Rich
came out darker is all.
Wow. He visually compared
me and Rich again.
I never thought it
could happen that way.
I just figured the kids
would all come out,
I guess, like brown, you know?
Oh oh. Our champion has
only one more chance
for a comeback, can he do it?
He said, I think it's so neat
that you're each a different
mix, you're both unique.
Okay, that was a step
in the right direction.
I gave him a little smile.
Again he tried to hide how
hard he was checking me out
and I knew this blouse
would rock with these jeans.
He leaned forward and said, but
you know what's really cool?
What? You don't look
like you're half black.
I mean, you could be
almost anything, you know?
Oh, now he's down, down and out.
My smile froze on my face.
Nothing left but the shouting folks.
I could huh?
Yeah, you could be Jewish
or Arabic or Persian.
I had a Persian girlfriend once.
You could even...
Pass for white?
He stopped.
A confused frown on his face.
Well, yeah, if you wanted to but
you don't have to be black or white,
you're like a child of the world.
He smiled, threw his arms
out to punctuate his not the
least bit triumphant conclusion.
I slid off my stool,
picked up my drink, yep.
That's me, child of the world.
Daughter to none.
I'm going back to my table now.
Oh, well, can I come
and sit with you guys?
No you can't.
He stopped mid slide,
one foot frozen
in mid-air, the other on the floor.
Well, you really mean that?
I really do.
What's wrong, did I say something?
Oh, you said plenty.
He genuinely had no
clue, they never do.
I was seething as I walked back
to our table, I could be anything.
Right. I could pretend to
be Jewish, maybe from one
of those old Montréal families.
Invent a whole different set of
relative parents and relatives.
Disown my brother maybe, so no one
would see him and wonder about me.
Disown my Mum too.
Or I could invent some exotic Middle
Eastern heritage or Greek or Gypsy.
I could be anything but
what I actually was.
That would be so freaking cool,
yeah, to have no people, no culture.
Thank you.
Applause. So now you
get to ask questions,
there are mics here I gather.
Just have at.
>> [Inaudible]
>> If you could because
there is talking behind me
and though you can't hear it as
much, that's all I'm hearing.
>> [Inaudible]
>> Hi, this is Annette Clouse.
We're in Bordertown together.
Do you want to talk about
the Bordertown story
and how that came to be?
>> Oh, okay.
Annette Clouse, feather waiter?
Laughter. And she's
talking about an anthology
in which we both have
stories that just came out.
Anthologies called
Welcome to Bordertown.
It comes from -- when did the
Bordertown anthologies start?
In the 1980s.
It's what we called a shared world
anthology where there is a world
and writers invent
different characters
and write their own
stories set in the world.
Bordertown is a place
where it's on the border
between the real world and fairy.
And it's a place where people from
both sides, usually young people
but not always, come when they've
been disenfranchised or disowned
or they are just dissatisfied.
It's a place where magic
works some of the time
and doesn't some of the time.
and if you are using
anything that is powered
by magic, it could cut out on you.
I mean, if your motorcycle is
powered by magic you could go down.
And it's a lovely setting
for writing about sort
of that [inaudible] place
of coming to be as a person.
My Bordertown story is
written from the point of view
of a Trinidadian woman who
has found herself there.
And I think it's one of the few
stories that doesn't come explicitly
from sort of Celtic mythology.
I wanted to sort of bring --
that reality has always
been in Bordertown.
The people who created it
[inaudible] were very aware
of what they were doing and it has
been very diverse from the beginning
but sometimes the diversity was more
in the willingness
than in the execution.
And so I created this character
who is from the Caribbean,
who has been living in Canada, who
has found herself in Bordertown
and I was able to use the various
places, the Bordertown places
that had been already created.
And I don't want to say
too much more than that.
The Bordertown series came
to an end about 13 years ago
and has been rebooted by
Kushner and Hollis Lack.
And though 13 years has gone by in
Bordertown, I mean 30 years has gone
by in the real world it's only
been three weeks in Bordertown.
So that was the premise
we were all given
to write from and it was big fun.
I used to read the Bordertown
stories when I was in my 20s
and to be in one now
is just amazing.
I'm not sure who is next.
All right.
>> Hello, I'm a creative writing
student myself and I'm wondering,
I'm just, you know, starting.
[Inaudible] and I'm just
wondering, whenever you have an idea
that you're stuck on like
writer's block or you know,
something that you just
can't get into writing?
How do you try to get into --
what sort of tricks do you use?
And do you have just abandoned
an idea and said, you know,
maybe this just won't work
and when do you do that?
>> I tend to know when
and idea won't work
and that comes with practice.
Mostly ideas will work, you just
have to find your way into them.
But you do get stuck.
Sometimes I put a story aside
and just work on something else.
I have a story coming out in
anthology called "After," in October
that I've actually been working on,
or not working on,
for about three years.
But when I'm committed to
continue working on that piece --
do something physically active.
Go for a walk.
Something that you don't
have to think about a lot.
Go for a walk, do the
dishes, have a shower.
Not working out because
you have to think
about that or you'll hurt yourself.
As I have found out.
And what happens is it can free
up the creative part of your brain
to just go walkabout and sometimes
the solution will come to you
when you've distracted yourself
by doing something else.
The other thing that
will often help is trying
to describe the problem to someone.
It's happened to me so many times
and it's usually my poor long
suffering partner where I start
to describe what's going on,
why I'm having trouble with it
and the answer just
comes to me in a flash.
And I say, oh, thank you and
I walk away leaving him going,
but you haven't told me.
So they say writing is a
solitary sport, it isn't really
for me, sharing the problem.
If you have access to a group of
people who are also budding writers
who are at the same level you are,
sometimes showing it
to them has helped.
But they have to be good critiquers.
If they're just in there to
try to show how much better
than you they are, they're not
going to be much help to you.
So try those three things.
Because I don't actually
believe in writer's block.
Not for me, anyway.
Often what it is is my subconscious
is trying to tell me something
and I haven't listened yet.
And it's -- so it stops
me altogether,
it's saying something
is not working.
You got to listen to me
or story won't happen.
>> Hi. What are you working on now?
>> I just handed in the copy edited
version of my novel, "Sister Mine,"
which is coming out from
Grand Central in March.
It's about two sisters who were
conjoined twins when they were born.
They were separated at birth.
One of them got the magic
and the other didn't
and they are now adults.
And their father, who is the
Trinidadian Lord of the Forest,
has Alzheimer's and goes missing.
And they have to find him together.
So that's coming out March.
I have a novel that had two --
the publisher actually cancelled
the contract during my ill years
because I went four years without
finishing it, and you know,
they can only keep it, hold it
over in their books for so long.
I honor them for hanging onto it for
that long and I plan to finish that.
It's called "Blackheart Man."
If I plan to finish that
and, don't tell them,
I plan to resell it to them.
Laughter. And short
stories and learning how
to teach in an administration.
I've been teaching since
the beginning of my career
but never in a formal way.
I can walk into a creative
writing class and go
for three hours with
very little prep.
But all the other stuff,
the keeping attendance,
the writing a syllabus,
the -- no clue.
So I'm teaching myself that stuff.
Good to see you.
>> [Inaudible]
>> Hi, I was wondering what authors
inspire you or what you read.
And or genres and also the second
part of that -- different question.
Do you do research for your work?
>> Research.
Absolutely.
You can't write sensitive
fantasy without doing research.
I don't think you can write anything
without doing research actually.
And often surprised that people try.
So I love libraries.
I'm so very glad to be here.
I read at the Library of
Congress many years ago
and it was during a tour and
I was very, very underslept
and I remember very little of it.
So I'm glad to be here and awake.
Yes, I do a lot, a lot of research.
What do I read that inspires me?
I'm reading a lot of
graphic novels nowadays.
I actually just met Craig
Thompson in the author's room
and saw his book "Habibi,"
and went out
and got it and it looks delicious.
There is a collection of graphic
novels called Bayou written
and drawn by a man
called Jeremy Love.
Think through the looking glass in
New Orleans with in the Jim Crow era
with all the politics that entails.
It is beautiful.
One of my sort of touchstone
writers is Samuel R. Delany,
one of the first known black writers
in the genre and so many others.
I could just go on and on and on
forever about the wonderful work
that people have written
and are still writing
that continues to inspire me.
One writer I'll mention as
the last one is Kelly Link.
She and I went to a science fiction
writing workshop called Clarion
together and the first -- hers was
one of the first stories I read.
And it blew me out of the water.
She is a master short story writer.
It was to the point where
I could have been jealous,
but it would have been like
being jealous of a mountain.
Just there was no comparison.
I love her work, I
continue to love her work
and she continues to
write great stuff.
>> [Inaudible]
>> Good afternoon.
Thank you for mentioning
Bordertown, I am a local DC resident
and I belong to a local
book club that's
for science fiction fantasy,
it's like an addiction.
So we read Bordertown last month.
This month we're reading
-- another plug for you,
"Beyond Binary, Anthology."
And you have a story in
there called "Fishermen,"
which I just finished
reading last night.
And early in your presentation
you talked
about your dialects
that you write in.
I could have Googled this an
probably answered my question
in the past 10 minutes, but
I figured, well, you're here,
I'll ask you while you're here.
Which dialect is Fishermen
written in?
>> Trinidadian.
Simply put.
It's the one that I sort of came
to language when I was living
in Trinidad so it's the one
that comes to me the easiest.
I actually can't -- I can understand
Jamaican but I can't do that accent.
>> Hi, I just wanted to know which
is more fun, making up the rules
for your given universe or world
or whatever, or leaning heavily
on rules that actually already
exist and sort of filling in gaps?
>> Hmm. They're both equally fun.
And they're both just as hard
which is perhaps counterintuitive
because no matter what the
rules are, somehow you have
to pull your own style, your own
story, your own characters out of
that and then at those moments
though of the boom, when you think,
oh, of course, they are pink.
And it solves a whole chunk
of your story problems.
And that happens whether or
not I'm drawing on a folk tale.
The issue with drawing
on a folk tale is
that not everyone will
know the folktale.
Particularly when I'm
using Caribbean ones.
So I used to, for a while, find
some expert who could come on stage
and tell you what the story was
so I could then do my riff on it.
And I got a little tired of it
and I'm sure my readers were
getting a little tired of it
because you know, there's only
so many teachers, librarians,
historians, that you can go to
them and have them tell the story.
So now I don't.
I just write the story
based on the tale
and people can figure it out or not.
But they're both fun.
Yes?
>> Hello. What effect, if any,
did Octavia Butler's writing
on your writing style?
>> Octavia Butler,
colleague friend of mine
who died a few years
ago, also a black writer.
There was a point in my life, I
was working at a public library
and reading science
fiction, as I always had been
and when I discovered that
Samuel R. Delany was black,
I had been reading his
work and hadn't known it.
And I thought, well, where are the
other black writers in this genre?
Where are the other writers
of color for that matter?
And working at a library
is a lovely thing
because I could go do the research
and interlibrary loan all the books,
which I probably did and read all
of Octavia Butlers
work in about a month.
And depressed myself thoroughly.
Because Octavia's work is very
-- she doesn't pull any punches.
And she follows her
premises through all the way.
The thing is she uses
black characters --
she uses situations
where people have to --
they're put into situations
where they have
to learn how to live a new way.
I think she used to say, if you
find people doing things that happen
in my books then something
is really wrong.
I'm not writing to
predict the future.
I'm writing to tell you
what you shouldn't be doing.
And a few years later I was in
Barcelona, I went to an event there.
I was alone, I speak very little
Spanish, I was in a hotel run
by people who were [inaudible]
I speak no [inaudible].
TV wasn't working for me.
What I had was a copy of
one of Octavia's books.
And it was like coming home.
It was like old friends.
The effect that it had on me when
I first read it was not there,
instead I was able to see
the humor in her work.
I was able to -- it
was like catching
up with someone you
hadn't seen in a long time.
Definitely very, very
influential to my writing
and she blurbed my first novel.
Which I'm still doing the happy
dance about 15 years later.
Yes?
>> Is it ever like, hard to
draw inspiration from something
when you're making a
new book or is it easy?
>> It's rarely easy.
I mean you have those
moments where it just comes,
boom, don't wait for those.
They don't happen a lot.
They're nice when they happen, they
give you the energy to keep going
to the end but I have found
that inspiration is over rated.
When I look at -- I see
the writers nodding.
When I look at something I wrote
that was like pulling teeth
and I had to fight through
every word and I look
at something I wrote
because I was inspired.
I can't see a difference.
So don't wait on the inspiration,
just bless it when it comes.
And but in between
then just keep working.
Because the best way to get
inspired by something is
to keep working on it, it will come.
It will -- for awhile it will be
awful and it is like going up hill
but you do come to the crest of the
hill and then you're just boogying.
>> Some of the way you described --
in your reading reminded
my of Charles de Lint.
Was he an influence of yours at all?
>> Talking about Bordertown, he
was one of the original authors
of the Bordertown series and then
I of course paid a lot of attention
to him because he's from Canada.
So he was a fellow Canadian
also writing in my genre.
He took the city of
Ottawa which particularly
when he first started doing
it could be a very dry city.
And made it magical and
that was just amazing to me.
So yes, I have been reading his
work for a very, very long time.
And of course that kind
influence creeps in.
He was one of the people who added
black characters in Bordertown.
And I actually pulled
his characteristic
into my Bordertown story
so I could make fund of him
because Stick is very,
very stuck up.
Laughter. Yes.
>> I'm currently taking a writing
course and we've gotten to the part
of the use of vernacular in the --
it's rather a well established
book, the text we're using.
And it states that
it's best to avoid it.
Now the stuff I write about is
usually going to have some kind
of cultural mix and I do
tend to like using it.
You yourself, would you suggest that
you do keep to the official line
of avoiding vernacular or go ahead
and use it because it suggests
that you instead use word
selection and syntax instead?
>> I do both.
Yeah.
>> Do you have to have
a well developed ear
in order to pull it off well?
>> Yes, in fact you
need one for both.
You need a well-developed ear.
You need to listen
to people very well.
When I'm writing in Jamaican
sometimes I will go more
with the syntax because
if I spell it the way
that Jamaican sounds nobody else
would understand it even though
it's English.
I got into an argument once with
a bunch of science fiction writers
who said they didn't understand why
people had trouble with vernaculars
because English is
English is English.
I said, no.
And they said well, prove it to me.
And I'm going to and my accent
will suck but there's a proverb
from Jamaica that goes,
"If [inaudible]" Laughter.
So ah, I'm going over time.
So absolutely do both
but develop your ear.
All right.
We are out of time, way out of time.
Thank you all for staying.
>> Applause.
>> This has been a
parenteral nutrition
of the Library of Congress.
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