Welcome to Fantasy Magazine! We’re so pleased to bring your story “My Dear, My Love” to our readers. Can you tell us how this story came to be?
Most of my writing is fictionalized autobiography, and as I’m getting older I cull through my life experiences looking for my more interesting dramas. I was thinking of my first marriage and how my husband left me high and dry, but he was still able to get U.S. citizenship. I moved to New York as we were going through our divorce and everything I touched turned to gold. He came to Manhattan and asked if he could see me. I agreed and took him to the theatre where I was working, and then we went out to eat. He told me how a string of bad occurrences had struck him after he left me, including how a dog that had been friendly toward him bit him, and how he’d had an accident driving the bus in his new job. So I got the idea of a man marrying a woman not out of love but because she was his ticket to a big payoff. Instead of her depending on her father to fix her husband, she would do it herself. And of course she would have a best friend who would help her by picking up any straggling pieces—in this story it was Liene helping out with the children while Ma’ Dear was recuperating from “fixing” Jason. The other characters just fell into place.
What was the most difficult part of writing this story, and what came easiest?
The most difficult part was having Ma’ Dear purposely kill Jason. At first I was just going to have her give him a “spanking” but she said, no, she was going to go all the way, live with it, and kill Jason off. It scared me at first, but then I was grateful that I have writing as a weapon because if I had Ma’ Dear’s power I could think of a couple of folks I would “fix.” The easiest part was writing about the love between Ma’ Dear and Liene because I always write about women’s friendships.
What authors or stories have most influenced your work?
Octavia E. Butler (Parable of the Sower), Marlon James (The Book of Night Women), Nnedi Okorafor (BINTI), Tomi Adeyemi (Children of Virtue and Vengeance) and Tananarive Due (any of her short stories).
Are there themes or character archetypes that you find yourself returning to in your writing?
I am new at writing fantasy, and with “My Dear, My Love” I’ve written two stories and now have had both of them published. Until I gave fantasy a try, I wrote literary fiction. But there are archetypes that I commonly use in my writing: the heroine and her ride-or-die girlfriend, a villainy-type and the secondary villain (my secondary villain is also usually a victim of the villain as well), and a Goddess who plays the role of the magical aide. I’m sure, as I write more fantasies, I’ll be using all of these characters.
Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know about this story?
“My Dear, My Love” proved to me that I can use literary devices in writing fantasy and have the two blend together seamlessly. I also liked writing about Hellacious and how he loved his granddaughter, would do anything for her, and how that love, and trust, spilled over to her best friend; I loved how Hellacious was strong enough of a man to let Ma’ Dear be strong enough to take care of her own business.
What are you working on now, and what can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?
I have just finished the final (I hope my agent likes it this time) revision of my novel, The Myth Makers, that I have been working on off-and-on since 1991. It’s a fictionalized account of the two years I spent living in Paris. And I have a poetry chapbook, A Litany of SHE Poems, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2024.