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A 45-minute conversation with Rebecca Roanhorse, Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Award-winning author of Trail of Lightning and Storm of Locusts, the first two books in the Sixth World series, plus the Star Wars novel Resistance Reborn and the middle-grade novel Race to the Sun (Rick Riordan Presents), and multiple short stories. She won the Astounding (formerly Campbell) Award for Best New Writer in 2018.
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The Introduction
Rebecca Roanhorse is a Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Award-winning speculative fiction writer, and the recipient of the 2018 Astounding (formerly Campbell) Award for Best New Writer. Her novel Trail of Lightning, book one in the Sixth World series, won the Locus Award for best first novel, and is a Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy finalist. It was also selected as an Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Library Journal, and NPR Best Book of 2018, among others. Book two in the series, Storm of Locusts, has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist. Her newest novel, Resistance Reborn, is part of Star Wars: Journey to the Rise of Skywalker. Her middle-grade novel, Race to the Sun, for the Rick Riordan Presents imprint, will release in January 2020, and her epic fantasy novel Between Earth and Sky will follow in late 2020. Her short fiction can be found at Apex Magazine, New Suns, The Mythic Dream, and various other anthologies, and she also writes nonfiction, which can be found in Uncanny, Strange Horizons, and How I Resist: Activism and Hope for a New Generation, published by Macmillan. She lives in northern New Mexico with her husband, daughter, and pups.
The (Lightly Edited) Transcript
Welcome to The Worldshapers, Rebecca.
Well, thank you for having me.
I always look for connections and we have a…we haven’t met, but you were born in Arkansas, lived in Texas, and went to university in New Mexico, and I was born in New Mexico, lived in Texas, and went to university in Arkansas. So there’s a certain…
Wow. Small world.
…although I live in Canada. Yeah, I was born in Silver City, New Mexico. My parents were living in a little town called Bayard down there, so…but didn’t live there very long.
Yeah. That is south and I’m in the north, but I know where it is.
So, let’s go back into the mists of time, as I like to say to my guests, and talk about where you grew up and how you got interested in writing and in speculative fiction in particular. Most of us start with reading, and I think from reading some of your other interviews that that was kind of the case for you, too.
Yeah, absolutely. Always a huge science fiction/fantasy fan. As long as I can remember, I’ve been reading in the genre. And I think really my first sort of big “Wow!” book was Dune by Frank Herbert. I read that one, and that blew the doors wide open. You know, in the fantasy realm, you know, of course, I read the Belgariad, I read all the Wheel of Time books, like those were…
All of them?
Well, OK, not all of them. That’s true. Good point! I haven’t read the last few. I think I tapped out at, like, I don’t know, probably book five or six or something, now I can’t even remember, but I’m very excited for the Amazon show that is coming. I’m really curious to see what they do with it.
So you were born in Arkansas. You grew up in Texas. But then you ended up in New Mexico and you didn’t actually study writing at university. Were you writing as a kid?
Yeah, absolutely. So, I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas. My mom is actually from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, which is in New Mexico. And so, I didn’t return to New Mexico until law school, actually. So, I did my undergraduate on the East Coast and a master’s degree. But when I was in Fort Worth, I was already writing. I think I wrote my first, I would say my first science-fiction short story, when I was in seventh grade. I always joke about…we had a science report and we were supposed to, like, give some very dry facts about the planets, like, you know, how big they are and how far apart they are and that sort of thing, and I turned it into this very dramatic telling of this astronaut doing research, who for some reason, I can’t remember now, had to, like, commit suicide by driving into the sun at the end. So it was very much like, “Tell my wife and kids I love them,” you know, and then he’s dead. And I turned that in for my science project and my teacher was, ah, not as impressed as I had been with my own work. I got a B-plus or something, because that was not the assignment. But yeah, you know, from there I was hooked, and I’ve been sort of writing my own stuff ever since. I kind of…I only got serious about writing…I just did it for my own pleasure. I was a practicing attorney for ten years. And before that, I was a computer programmer, actually, for ten years. And just, writing was in the background. It was just something that I loved to do for myself. I never even thought about getting published until about 2016, when I decided to take it a little more seriously.
Now, did you show your writing to your friends when you were writing as a young writer? I often ask that question because it’s something I urge young writers to do when I’m teaching writing, because it’s a way to find out if you can tell stories that people like. Apparently your teacher was not completely impressed with your first effort, but did you share your stories with other people?
Yeah. So, in eighth grade, I had a great eighth-grade English teacher, and we actually did a group novel, like, each week, you know, came up with the whole story as a class, and then we each were responsible for a chapter. And it was…I don’t know, there were some…I kind of dominated the, as I recall, a lot of the worldbuilding, because I was really into it. And there were some smugglers and there was some, you know, sort of galactic police, and, you know, this sort of thing. And I definitely shared that one. I probably overshared that, I think I forced that on people.
And then, all through high school, or at least my last couple of years of high school, I guess, I was an editor for our creative-writing magazine. And so, not only did I get to do some editing, which was basically like, just, picking what stories were going to be in the magazine, but I put a lot of my work into that as well. And a lot of that was poetry or, you know, very short fiction, like excerpts…you know, I don’t know, what you would maybe call vignettes or something, maybe a little flash fiction, but I don’t think we called it that back then. But, yeah, so I think those years I was always sharing, probably oversharing. And then…I guess for some of my time I had a friend who wrote as well, and we would share stories, like she would write something, you know, we’d be critique partners. But only for fun. It was never really serious. But I was never shy about showing my work per se.
Well, I was also interested when you…you didn’t study writing, but what you studied is very interesting, because you received a B.A. in religious studies from Yale, and a master’s in theology from Union Theological Seminary. That’s an interesting background for a science fiction/fantasy writer. Has that fed into your work going forward? And the law degree, too? I mean, at least with the law degree, you certainly use a lot of words, being a lawyer. My niece is a lawyer, so…she started as an English major, so…so has all that contributed to writing, do you think?
You know, as we’ll get to Trail of Lightning, there is a lot, actually, of cool stuff in Trail of Lightning, so that definitely did. I talk about checkerboard lands and things like that, and that is all real. You know, I think the religious studies and theology degree probably feed into my worldbuilding more than I realize and probably affect what it is that I like to talk about. You know, I like to talk about, sort of the gods, and sort of spirituality and things like that, and religion, and those are my interests, so I’m sure they feed into my work probably more than I realize. I think there was someone on Twitter once that was like, once she found out I had gotten those degrees, she was like, “Oh, that makes so much more sense now.” And I was like, “What does that mean?” And she didn’t tell me, ’cause she’s like, “I don’t like to, you know, like critique people based on, like, who they are, I want the story to stand on its own,” but she felt that that gave her some sort of insight. So I guess so!
And then, when you were…you said you were lawyer for ten years, but where along there did you start trying to get published and how did that happen? “How did you break in?”, is the cliched question.
So, I was a practicing attorney with a small child, and that was just…and I think at the time, actually, I was in private practice. I later started to work for the government, and that’s a better gig. But the hours were insane, you know, and I had a small child, and so I had actually not written for quite a while, but to sort of keep myself sane and to give myself something that I just love to do, I started to write again. And then I found out about NaNoWriMo. So I’m actually a NaNoWriMo story in a lot of ways. I joined the local NaNoWriMo group here, who would meet twice a week and just write. You know, we would just sit at the coffee shop and write. And I loved it. And it gave me a schedule and it kept me, you know, sort of pushing forward.
And then after NaNoWriMo was over, there were three or four folks in the group that wanted to keep meeting. One was a romance author, she’d been…she had, like, seven books. One was more of an academic writer and one was a self-published writer. And I was like, “Sure!”, you know, “Let me join your group!”, even though I had done nothing. They let me join their group and they became my first sort of writing group, my first critique group. And I wrote the book with, you know, along with, you know, that group. And when I was done, they were like, “You know, you should try to get this published.” I was like, “Really? You think? I don’t know. You know, I just wrote this for fun.” And they’re like, “No, no, no, it’s good. You should try to get it published.”
Good advice!
Yeah, well, I sent it out through the slush. I knew nothing about publishing. I knew…I had done some research on agents and I knew which agents, you know, I was sort of interested in. And I sent it out and it got picked up. So there was no sort of magic to it. I just did it the old-fashioned way.
So the novel came first before you sold any short fiction?
Yes, the novel actually came first. I sold that in 2016, like August 2016, and then in 2017, Apex Magazine put out a call for indigenous fantasists, indigenous science fiction and fantasy. And I thought, “Oh, I should try to get into that. I should write a short piece and get it published. And maybe that will help get my name out,” because the book, it takes a year and a half for a book to come out, and, you know, Trail of Lightning wasn’t going to come out till 2018, so I was like, “I should try to get a short story published.” And, you know, I thought maybe ten, fifteen people would read it, I don’t know, I thought it would just be cool. And that got picked up and that went rather well. So, yeah, that actually came after the book. (“Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience“, Apex Magazine)
That’s a little different from most writers’ experience, to have the novel go first and then start selling short fiction. So that’s why I wanted to mention it.
Yeah.
Okay, well let’s…we’ll talk about Trail of Lightning…well, I guess the whole series, but that was the first book. As I said to you, I somehow managed to schedule a whole bunch of interviews almost on top of each other, so I haven’t been able to read everybody’s books to the end, as much as I would like to, but I have read a considerable portion of it, so I know something about it. But, well, I’ll let you give a synopsis of Trail of Lightning and the setup for the whole series without spoiling anything for people who haven’t finished the book…like me.
Yeah. So, Trail of Lightning takes place in sort of a near future, after a climate apocalypse, where sort of all the world has sort of gone to hell, except for the southwest of the Americas, basically. And specifically, the book takes place on the Navajo Nation, which is now Dinétah Risen, and has become sort of a power player in the region along with some other places like New Denver and the Mormon Kingdom, and we follow a woman there who is a monster slayer, because with the sort of climate apocalypse, all the gods and heroes and monsters of traditional Navajo stories have risen up and now walk the land, like Coyote and other folks you might not be familiar with, but you will be when you read the book. And it is her job to, sort of, a) survive and b), you know, fight them, with the help of her sidekick, who is a very unconventional medicine man.
Okay. And it is a very interesting setup and an interesting character as well. So, how did the idea for it come around? That’s another cliché. Where do you get your ideas? But what was the seed for this book as you were working with this writing group? And…this was what you worked on in NaNoWriMo, was it or was this…?
Uh-huh, this what I worked on for NaNoWriMo.
Okay. So how did the idea come about?
Yeah, so, I am a huge urban fantasy fan. You know, I always say that I sort of drifted away from fantasy, from all that Wheel of Time and stuff like that, for a long time, particularly through college, because it didn’t really speak to me anymore. I didn’t feel like I saw myself in all those questing farm boys and everything, and it just sort of got a little dull for me. So I set aside fantasy for a while, but then one day I was in an airport somewhere just looking for a random book. And I came across, actually, a Laurell K. Hamilton book. If you don’t know her, she writes the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series. And I picked up the book…and this is an earlier book in the series of…the later books get a little not to my taste, but the early books are great…picked it up, not knowing what it was about or who she was. And I read the back, and it was something like, “Will Anita Blake choose between her vampire lover or her werewolf lover?” And I was like, “I don’t know, but I’m about to find out.” I was just amazed a) they let you write that and b) it was on the shelf, right at the airport, and I could just pick it up. So I did. And that’s how I sort of discovered urban fantasy. And from there, I went on to all sorts of other authors, like Ilona Andrews and folks like that, and just sort of fell in love with the genre of these, like, strong, you know, women who are at the center of the story who kind of like kick ass and take on the supernatural, but at the same time have these sort of complicated love lives. I thought that was a lot of fun.
And so, that was really my inspiration for Trail of Lightning. I wanted to write an urban fantasy, but I wanted to write it in an indigenous setting with an indigenous pantheon, essentially, coming from, you know, traditional stories or myths. And then I wanted all the characters and the places and all of that to be indigenous as well, because what you do have in a lot of urban fantasy, or not a lot, but there are a few, is you often have a character that’s half-native, but they don’t…they’re not particularly native in the way their world view, you know, or the way that the story plays out, that’s just sort of a flavoring, I guess. And often the only way that they’re native is that they’re shapeshifters. And I was like, “Well, we’re not going to do that.” I wanted it to be something that felt real to me as an indigenous woman. I wanted it to be the people and the places and the things that I knew and that I had, you know, experienced. But, you know, fantasy. So that’s where that story came from.
And also, well, calling it urban fantasy…a lot of that, you know, it’s like, if you have that character, they’re in some big city somewhere, and that’s just something in their past. But this is actually set…it’s not really urban in the sense of being in a city.
Right. Right. Yeah. This is rural fantasy.
So, how did you go about…well, actually, before I get to that question, is that sort of where all of your story ideas have come from, you’ve written short stories now, and you’re writing Star Wars too. So, you know, in a more general sense, how do story ideas come to you?
Gosh. You know, I think for a writer, part of our job is to just be observant. So it can come…story ideas can come from anywhere. They can come from the news, they can come from an overheard conversation, they can come from a book you read that’s bad, if you want to do it better. I actually think I asked the influence question once to, like, John…I was on a panel, moderating, with, like, John Scalzi, and a bunch of other folks. And I asked, “Where do your ideas come from?” And they all groaned, you know, about the question. But then, as they got to talking, they realized that every one of them had written at least one book because they had read another book that they thought got it wrong. So, like, “I’m going to write my book as a correction.” And I was like, “Ah-ha!” So, yeah, I think they can come from anything. Often songs. Songs are very influential. I’ll often find a song that really captures a mood or spirit that I want to convey, and so I’ll try to, you know, turn it into words.
Well, on the, you know, reacting to other works, it’s often said that science fiction and fantasy are genres that are in conversation with themselves, because we’re all reacting to what we’ve read in the past and what we’re reading now and what other people are doing and things we like and things we don’t like. So, I don’t…I can’t think of one that I’ve written specifically where I was trying to do somebody’s…you know, do my version of something I didn’t like, but I’m sure that figures into it somewhere.
Yeah. Yeah. Even if it’s subconscious, I think we’re always sort of reacting, like you said, like, “Oh, you know, I see it done this way. Let me do it this way,” you know?
So what does your planning process look like? Your synopsizing or outlining or however it works for you. Do you do a detailed outline? Do you kind of just wing it? How does that look for you?
You know, it really depends on the book. I think that first book, because I was just writing for myself and I didn’t really know what I was doing, quite frankly, there was no outline. That was much more of a pantser kind of book and I think you can tell, for better or worse. The second book in that series, Storm of Locusts, was outlined much better. But what I did was, I wrote the beginning and then I wrote the end. And then I decided what needed to be in the middle to get me from that beginning to the end. And then I wrote that.
For books like Star Wars, you have to create a very detailed online, and then it has to be approved by six people at Lucasfilm and ten people at Del Rey, so you really don’t get the opportunity to wing it. So for that one, yes, I wrote probably, I don’t know, a twenty-page outline. I knew exactly what I was going to write. And you have so little time to write it. The turnaround time is pretty crazy. So that actually helped. They know what they’re doing.
They’ve been doing it a long time.
Yes, exactly. So I guess it really varies. And, you know, for this epic fantasy that I’m writing, I have a very detailed outline, because I have a lot of voices to manage and I have a lot of places, the worldbuilding is much more massive. And so I think if I wasn’t organized, I personally would get lost. It would be difficult.
Well, and speaking of worldbuilding and planning, there must be a considerable amount of research going into these books. Is that a fair statement?
You know, yes and no. You know, Trail of Lightning, I wrote what I knew. I know that world. I lived on the Navajo reservation. My husband is Navajo, I have Navajo family, so I didn’t actually do a whole lot of research for that. I confirmed some things that I knew about the stories and things like that, like character names and how to spell things. And there’s always different versions of stories, all across the rez, ’cause it’s a huge reservation. And then, you know, what I wanted to fantasize. And I mentioned before that, you know, I had practiced law, actually, on the Navajo Nation, so a lot of the little things, like jurisdiction and checkerboard land and things like that, I knew from, you know, my practice. So when I put those in the stories, I didn’t have to do research for that. I knew it.
But, you know, for Star Wars, I actually did a ton of research because it’s such a vast universe and you wanted things right. And they do have folks at Lucasfilm who live and breathe the Star Wars universe, so that’s very helpful. And then I think for this epic fantasy that I’m writing, I’m doing quite a bit of research as well.
Now, what does your actual writing process look like? Are you a sit-down-for-a-certain-number-of-hours-a-day at-your-desk typing kind of writer, or do you like write with a quill pen on a parchment underneath a tree?
What is most effective for me is, I am good in the early hours, and late hours. So I think what you need to do is discover when you’re at your best, and when your imagination sort of flags. So I’ll write, maybe, in the mornings from…I’ll drop my daughter off at school and then, let’s say, write from 8 to 12. But I know from, like, 12 to 4, it’s going to be like slogging through mud. I mean, the words might come, but they’re not going to be as good, and they’re just not going to…it’s going to be hard. So, often I’ll take that time, that’s when I do my e-mails or do other things, run errands, whatever needs to get done that day. And then I will pick up…if I have time at 4, but if not, often I will wait till my daughter is in bed and start again and write from like 9 to 12 or 10 to 2, or something like that. So that’s for the first step. And then, if I need speed, I will sketch out the scene beforehand on paper, like, pen and paper, so that I know what it is that I want to write, so I’m not trying to think about what I’m, you know, come up with ideas while I’m typing. I’m typing to get everything done, but I already know what I’m going to say. So I’ll sketch out the scene, you know, put in some important dialogue or things I know. But I will know, you know, how the scene works, where the reversal is, who’s involved, where it’s set. All of that stuff before I start typing.
I wanted to ask you about the voice of the book. You wrote it in first person. Why did you choose first person and what appeals to you about that point of view?
Yeah. So, not all my books are in first person. Trail of Lightning and…like that series….
Yeah.
Star Wars clearly is not. And the epic fantasy is not. But, you know, first person is the conceit that you often find in urban fantasy, so that makes sense. I was also writing a very difficult character. I think that Maggie, who is the main character, is a challenge. A lot of people don’t like her, which I think is fair, because…
She’s not warm and fuzzy.
No, she isn’t. And I think, you know, she doesn’t even like herself very much at the beginning of the book, right? So…and she’s a killer. And so, I felt that if I were going to create a character like that and I was gonna ask the reader to come along with me, it needed to be in first person. You needed to see her, you know, to be in her head and have her perspective on things, or I don’t think it would work as well.
Yeah, I think if she was a third-person character, she would be really hard to warm up to. She would be very scary, I think as third person without some way into her head to see how she feels and is thinking about things. So, what does your revision process look like, once you’ve got a draft done? Do you do a complete rewrite from the beginning or do you kind of rewrite as you go, or how does that work for you?
I edit as I go, normally. What I’ll do is write however much I’m writing that day. I usually have some sort of word-count goal generally, and how I get to that is, I know what my deadline is, I sort of divide that up, how many words I need to write a day to get to that deadline, and then that is sort of the goal. But knowing that I’m going to, you know, miss days. I don’t write every single day. Sometimes something happens and you just can’t. Or sometimes your brain just says no, and you can’t. So, yes, so I have that sort of in mind. I’ll write every day that is on, you know, sort of my schedule try to get to it. Then the next morning I will review what I’ve written, do a light edit and then start with whatever the next thing is. And so on and so forth.
So, by the time I have finished a draft, it has at least been edited once. And then I will go through and like, do a normal, another edit, you know, likely. But I do not…well, this epic fantasy, I am doing a rewrite. This is my first time to do this. But all the other books I’ve not done a rewrite. I edit as I go and I try to draft pretty clean. But this one is just…the whole story has changed. So I’m having to do a rewrite.
And then, once it reaches your editor, have they…what kind of things have they asked you to do? Have there been big changes or they’re pretty happy with it, or how does that work for you?
Well, they tend to be pretty happy with it. Because I do sort of, you know, plan it out. I’m trying to think…you know, probably the most heavily edited book I had, actually, is the children’s book, because that was my first children’s book and it’s the Rick Riordan imprint, and they know what they want, you know, they know exactly what kind of story they want. And it is very hard to write for children. It’s much harder to write for children than it is for adults, in my opinion, because children don’t come with experiences, they don’t come with this sort of set of things, references that you can make that they will pick up on, so you don’t have to spell everything out. For kids, you have to learn everything now.
I remember there was one edit where…in my children’s book there’s this bodyguard that gets left behind, you know, to watch over the protagonist, ’cause she’s in trouble. And I had said something like, you know, “she waiting by the car,” or something. And my editor came back with this whole list of questions about “Well, what is she doing by the car? Well, why would she do that? Well, shouldn’t she come inside if it’s…” And I was like, “Wow, really? We’re really thinking this hard about this throwaway, you know, like, scene?” But those are the kinds of questions kids want answered. You can’t leave them hanging. So I had to bring her in the house and have her sit on the sofa and read a magazine, and, you know, and that’s, you know, because kids need that concrete sort of storytelling. And they also believe what you say, so you have to be…you know, you have to believe what you say, as well, because you might be their first sort of experience of a particular incident or a particular idea, and they take that to heart. So you really have to be more aware of your words, I think.
On the reference side…I have a young adult series called The Shards of Excalibur, and the second book…it’s changed publishers, but the original publisher had a very young editor, who was probably twenty-one or twenty-two or something like that, and I had made some reference to somebody looking like they had come from a Dallas-themed costume party because of the way they were dressed, and she said, “What is Dallas except a city in Texas?” And I said, “OK. First of all, you’re very young. But secondly, you’re absolutely right, because no teenager is going to get that reference, likely.” So, yes, it is very different
I was going to ask you about the children’s book. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
It is sort of a kid’s version of Trail of Lightning, I guess, like for the middle grades, so eight to twelve, that age group. It focuses on seventh-grader Nizhoni Begay, who can see monsters and no one else around her can. And she is sort of your typical seventh-grader, which means she’s kind of a mess. She wants to be popular, but she’s not. She wants to be athletic, but she’s not. And so, she’s, sort of fighting, you know, that sort of stuff, like how to be cool or how to get likes on the Internet. And at the same time, her mother has left and her father is sort of an artist type, who sort of like doesn’t really pay close attention to what her and her brother do. And so, when monsters show up and threaten the family, it’s sort of up to her to step up and save the day. And then along the way, it explores a lot of Navajo traditional stories, as she has to follow in the footsteps of Navajo heroes in order to get some magical weapons and fight the bad guy.
It sounds like…it does some very much like a middle-grade version of Trail of Lightning.
Yeah. Absolutely.
Hopefully the middle-grade readers and young-adult readers of that will go on to read the adult series as they get older.
That’d be great.
Well, you had great critical response, obviously, and, you know, one or two award nominations and stuff like that along the way. Were you surprised by the reaction that the book got when it came out? Were you happy? How did you feel about that?
Yeah, absolutely surprised. I…like I said before, I didn’t know anything about publishing. I didn’t know about the field in a professional sense. So, I wasn’t really familiar with a lot of the awards and everything. I mean, I was from the year before, clearly, when my short fiction did well, but I did not…really, I thought Trail of Lightning would be sort of a niche book. I thought there’d be a certain, you know, kind of person who liked it and…so, yeah, I was. It was all pretty shocking, you know? Pretty exciting, I mean, clearly. But the fact that that book got published to begin with, that I could write a book like that and a big five publisher would pick it up, and then for it to do as well as it did. Yes, I think it’s pretty amazing.
It’s a pretty amazing list of awards and award nominations you’ve picked up, for sure.
I want to go to the big philosophical questions. Well, it’s really one question that I always ask, which is, “Why do you write?” and then, subsidiary, to that, “Why do you specifically write the kind of thing that you write?” and on an even broader level, “Why do you think any of us write stories that are fantastic?” But start with you. Why do you write?
I think I write to keep myself sane. I think that’s where it started. I am a much nicer, happier person when I’m writing. Just ask my husband. He will attest. But yeah, I mean, I write because I have stories and I did not see a lot of my stories, the kind of stories that I wanted to tell…I saw none, actually, let me rephrase that, out there in the world. And so, I think that’s why I write what I do write, because I feel like those stories need to be told. And no one is telling them. I think those readers need a chance to see themselves in stories, and no one is giving them that. And so I’m excited to be able to do that.
Why the fantastical? I think because I’m a huge fan of it. I mean, I think that’s what I prefer to read. That’s what I read growing up. That was what I’ve always read. I find books, you know, sort of literary realism type books tend to not be my thing. I tend to tap out. So why the fantastic? It’s the genre that I love, that sense of possibility and fantastic, the world building. Those are all the things that really appeal to me.
And what do you think…what do you think is the urge for all of us to write and tell these kinds of stories? Where do you think that urge comes from?
I don’t know. I think that’s like a bigger human urge. I can’t think of, like, a culture or a time when there weren’t stories of the fantastic, you know, whether they were used to sort of explain the world around us or whether they were used purely to entertain or a little bit of both. I don’t think you could, people would listen to your, you know, preaching about the world around you unless you were entertaining, right? These are stories of heroes and monsters and villains and these sort of large-scale, you know, epic stories, the characters. I don’t know. It’s just…I think that’s just part of who we are as humans.
This podcast is, of course, called The Worldshapers…and you’ve sort of touched on this a little bit…I think it’s safe to say that shaping the world is a bit grand. I mean, very few of us actually shape the entire world in fiction or any sort of writing. But certainly we can reach out to specific readers and touch them in some fashion and influence how they think. Is that something you hope you have done and will do as you continue to write?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I know that—’cause I have been sent emails and been told at readings and stuff—that it’s a pretty big deal for an indigenous woman to write in the genre, and especially something like Star Wars. And so, I have had readers tell me that it’s a big deal to them. You know, oftentimes, especially kids, they might read a story with a native character, but to have a native author write a story is a whole ’nother level of, “What? You can do that?” So I guess my feeling when I saw Laurell K. Hamilton, “You could do that? They let you do that?” And so for them, that was, you know, it’s often an idea like, “Wow, I didn’t even know that was an option. I didn’t even know that was a possibility.” And that, you know, is the world to me. If I can inspire a whole truckload of other native and black girls and boys to write, then that’s amazing. More than I could ask for.
We’ve…it’s interesting. I live in Saskatchewan, and there’s a First Nations man—also a lawyer—Harold Johnson, who wrote a climate-fiction novel (Corvus, Thistledown Press – Ed.) set in northern Saskatchewan, where basically the north becomes a powerhouse because of all the climate refugees fleeing to the north. And, you know, I was on a panel with him, actually, on Words on the Street in Saskatoon, and I hear some of that same echo in what he has said and what you’re saying.
Well, that’s very similar sort of set up, too, to my book. I have not read him, for the record, but that’s…I’m sure that’s probably a thing that a lot of indigenous people think about. So that’s not surprising.
He’s an interesting, he’s a very interesting writer. I mean, he’s not primarily by any means a speculative fiction writer, but he does do some. Of course, it’s all through Canadian publishers. You’d be unlikely to have run across him, but if you wanted to look him up, you might find him interesting. Harold. Harold Johnson. There’s also another Harold Johnson who’s a game designer, I think. That’s not him.
I wanted to talk a little bit about the epic fantasy that’s coming up, because my next question is, “What are you working on now?” So, what is that all about?
Yeah, so, I can’t say much because I am in a rewrite, so who knows? But…
It has a title.
It does have a title, because I have written a version of it. I’m just rewriting that now. So I’m not sure what’s going to stay and what’s going to go. But generally, I wanted to write an epic fantasy, sort of in that vein of, you know, the epic fantasy that we’re familiar with, but focused on the Americas, like cultures, like sort of, you know, cultures that reflect or, you know, sort of parallel in a secondary world, cultures of the Americas.
And so, my ancestors, the ancestral Puebloans, lived in places like Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde, which are big in the American Southwest. I don’t know if everybody knows about them. And they were previously called the Anasazi, but we’ve moved away from that term and now we refer to them as the ancestral Puebloans, but sort of these cliffs cities that were, you know, sort of obsessed with astronomy and, you know, tracking the heavens and were centers of…both religious centers and trade centers. And so, I’m very interested in sort of the trade networks and Cahokia and Mesa Verde and the classical Mayan period and creating a world sort of centered around those cultures. But in a secondary world, clearly this is fantasy.
I had an opportunity…I guess it was when WorldCon was in Denver, I think, and then we went on down to New Mexico, which was the first time I’d been down there in ages. And then we went to…I can’t remember the name of the park we went to (It was Bandelier National Monument – Ed.), but it was one with the cliff dwellings, and (I remember) being fascinated by that culture and especially the fact that they had all that trade with other cultures at the time. So, it sounds like it’ll be a very interesting setting for a for a fantasy novel.
I hope so.
And if you want to look even further down the road, how do you see your writing career developing over the next few years? What do you hope for?
Oh, gosh. Well, I’m under another three-book deal with Saga, so there will be two more books in the Sixth World series, for a total of four. I’ll have Between Earth and Sky, and that hopefully we’ll start a new series. And then I have a couple of other projects that I can’t talk about yet, because publishing is all about, you know, keeping secrets for a year. But I think I’m going to be writing for quite a while, and I’m thrilled. I feel very honored and very lucky to be able to do that. So, yeah.
And where can people find you online?
They can find me on my Web site at RebeccaRoanhorse.com. I’m also on Twitter @RoanhorseBex. And I occasionally stop in on Facebook. But it is not my favorite site, Facebook. And that would be facebook.com/roanhorsebex as well.
All right. Well, I think that’ll do it. So, thanks so much for being a guest on The Worldshapers. I enjoyed the chat. I hope you did, too.
Thank you. Yeah, I absolutely did.
Bye for now.