Nalo Hopkinson

Interviewed by Lynda: Williams Dec 7, 2004

transcription by Amanda DaSilva Nalo Hopkinson read at Mosquito Books, in Prince George, B.C., on Dec 7, 2004, at the invitation of Dr. Robert Budde of the UNBC English program. She was interviewed about her writing earlier that day by fellow author Lynda Williams, who runs the web development lab at the Centre for Teaching and Learning at UNBC. Pictures were taken at Nalo's reading, on the evening of Dec 7.

Nalo read from her Christmas story, "A Young Candy Daughter", donated as a benefit for the Caribbean hurricane relief fund, as well as her critically acclaimed novel, The Salt Roads and other works.

Lynda: I usually like to talk about people's writing in general, but it's really important to know what your latest book is and when it's out, so let's begin with that.

Nalo: That book came out a year ago. It is"The Salt Roads". It came out in November of 2003.

Lynda: Ahh, I remember seeing that at V-CON.

Nalo: Yes, it was just about to be released then.

Lynda: And what's next?

Nalo: What's next is what I'm calling Mammalian Diving Reflex. I am 69,000 words into the draft, and it's due at the publisher next year. So it could be 2006 before it comes out.

Lynda: Are the books connected in terms of characters or in terms of theme?

Nalo: No. I have the attention span of a flea and no patience. Once I'm finished in a world I'm done. So I have yet to go back into anything I've written and pick it up. People do ask. I think you've done your job if there is are potential for stories left, reverberating in peoples heads, after they've read something you've written, but that doesn't mean I have to go and write them. They can go and have their own fantasies about what I've written. So, so far I have not commited to a seque. Doesn't mean that I won't. I've left the potential open in my second novel, for instance, to write a sequel, but I do find that once I get done, I am so-o-o done with that world, I just don't want to go back. I've said what I needed to say and created the thing I wanted to create. Even if I think , well I could have done x or y or z better, I have yet to want to want to. To dive back in and try to tell more stories.

Lynda: So is it the creating of the world that does it for you? Once you've created the world you have said what you want to say.

Nalo: I'm not sure, I mean I haven't been at this long enough to know. I've got three novels, and a couple of short story collections. So I don't really know. I think each one is different, and with my first two I definitely had characters I wanted to set in a particular setting and histories I wanted to excavate and old folk lore I wanted to work with. I'm not quite sure what I'm doing with this forth one.

Lynda: All good writers evolve. Tell me about your earlier novels?

Nalo: Brown Girl in a Ring was the first novel.Midnight Robber was the second.

Lynda: And you mentioned excavating folk lore. Is that an influence in your background? How did you get that edge?

Nalo: My dad was an English teacher, high school level, whatever would be the equivalent of the last grade here. He was also a playwright, he was a poet, he was an actor. My mother is a library technician. So stories, folk tales, that kind of stuff was in our house. My father was teaching classi, such as Gullivers Travel's and Homer's Illiad, so the books were there and that's what I read as a kid. So much fantasy and science fiction draws on old mythology, but it tends to be very specific European or British mythology. And although those are things that I learned -- I come from an ex-colony so those are things that come from our cannon as well -- we have our own folk tales, we have our own legends, our own myths in the Caribean, so part of my project at that point was to use those stories rather than use something that didn't look or feel like me. Didn't look or feel like my culture, my body, my face. That's part of what I was doing.

Lynda: You said that your latest book, the one that's going to be out in 2006, is quite different. What is the difference?

Nalo: I still love those old tales because they have a burnish to them, that I guess is from being told and retold and being improved upon and changed over sometimes thousands of years. So they'll always figuire in my work. But this one has an older woman protagonist, she's actually menopausal, much to her disgust. Every time she has a hot flash something strange happens in her life. So it's a contemporary story, and that might be part of the difference, whereas the Salt Roads, my last novel, was very very non-linear; was four braided stories; was historical-- this one is quite contemporary. I do one little dip into the past to kind of give you a reference of what I'm talking about, but I think that would be the only one. So I have this woman who it's rare to see in science fiction fantasy I think, a protagonist who is an older woman. And being 44 myself, or about to turn 44, I have a hard time thinking of her as older because that's about 10 years from now for me. So I think, well, she's just the age that the protagonist should be. But the book is probably not going to be genre fantasy in the way that we're used to, because we'll be dealing with stuff that is supernatural, that's mystical, that's fantastical, but it might not fit inside the specific parameters of genretropes.

Lynda: You say you always deal with themes that are metaphysical, spiritual, supernatural. Can you tell me a little bit about your attitude tothat? Do you view all these things as metaphorical, or literal, or what is it about magic that draws you as a writer to deal with it?

Nalo: What draws me to it is that it's the way we tell stories about the world. I think the thing that makes humans human, one of the things, is that we tell stories. And I don't know if any other animal does that. Human beings tell stories and that fascinates me. We make up stories to explain how we got here and who we are and why the world is the way it is. Do I think that magic is real? I have no clue. I have experienced very little in my life that would lead me to believe there is. Except the universe itself which is miraculous, in and of itself. So, I sort of take the position that I don't know and it doesn't matter if I know or not. This is what interests me.

Lynda: I'm going to ask you a potentially politically incorrect question, here. A lot of your characters are black, do you have any feelings about whether white people can write black characters or if black people can write white characters? And also about the male - female thing. Like whether women should write female characters or can men write female characters, those kinds of issues?

Nalo: Big question. I'd say that a lot of my characters are mixed race, I'm mixed race. I say black because it's a convienent handle. What shows in my face is my African American background, so I'm black. But coming from the history I come from, that means part South Asian, and part thaision, and part Scottish. And a lot of my characters are like that and it tends to be that people review my work and all they see is the one thing. And that's interesting. I write white characters all the time. The issue for me is not whether you are writing outside your experience, because the minute you stop writing autobiography you are writing outside your experience. The issue is how you are doing it. Are you making those characters rounded, are you making them people. Are you setting yourself up as the expert or the gatekeeper for a culture that is not yours. So, it's not just in how you write but also how you act to the world. When I was working on my first novel there was a whole plot thread that was about the Teme-Augama Anishnabai people out of Ontario, the Deep Water people. And I was doing all the research and I was going to write the story and then I thought, have I ever seen stories published by writers from that nation? I could only find a few people who were getting published and I thought, then I don't want to. And I think every artist makes that decision for themselves, but you have to make a decision if your going to be drawing on cultures outside your own, how are you going to do it, what do you think is respectful behavior, what do you think is behavior that is honorable. And I'm not going to tell anybody what that decision is but I think you have to make it.

Lynda: My dodge is to write about cultures I've invented. But your very brave, you actually write about places and connections. Your drawing on things in this world in a very direct way. How does that work? Do you have times when your worried about some little mistake?

Nalo: Yes, I worry all the time, I'm fretting all the time, I'm always terrified. There's a large portion of the salt roads that is set in 17th century Hispanola which is now Haiti. For me that's writing outside my culture, and specifically writing about a group of people and a belief system that gets demonized, gets misrepresented. And so I'm just terrified that I've gotten it wrong, that I've dishonored a people who I respect a whole lot. It's a chance I took. I was reading at the Miami book fair, at an event just outside the Miami book fair, in Miami last year, and in the middle of my reading Edwidge Danticat walked in, and I had to keep going. She's a writer that I respect enormously, who's a very political writer, and here I was writing about her country, and I have never been to Haiti. I had no idea what kind of job I had done, and I knew I would have to go and ask her afterwards, but at that moment I had to continue the reading. So yeah, I think being an artist is a political act, no matter how much we try to get away from it. And you either engage with that, or you put your head in the sand and say "oh! No no no, it's just entertainment!". Entertainment's political.

Lynda: We're almost out of time here. But you mentioned demonizing something, so I'll ask you one more question, and that is: bad guys. Do you get to like them? Do you need to be in their head to some extent in order to make them believable?

Nalo: I think you do. I hope I'm getting better at my bad guys. It's very easy to make Gary Wolfe, writing for Lupis Cole -- the villian in my first novel -- a "hiss at the screen villian. And it's easy to do those. In my head he was more complicated than that, but I didn't put it all on the page. You absolutely have to get in their heads, you have to empathize with them. They have to be as well rounded as the others, and it's hard because often they are doing things that you just hate. But you have to understand and forgive, to do that. I'm trying. I find what it means is I'm writing fewer and fewer villains. Just good people who do bad things.

Derryl Murphy and Rob Budde (Left to Right), Dec 7, 2005, at Nalo's reading.	Nalo Hopkinson braves a cold spell in Prince George, B.C., to read from her work at Mosquito Books.