We recently caught up with McGuire to ask her a few questions about her work and her life, and to also verify that she is, in fact, real, and not a commune of artists working under one name…

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I have to admit, Seanan, when I read your debut novel Rosemary and Rue in 2009, and began researching you for a review, I was blown away by your biography. You’re amazing—a poet, a musician, a cartoonist, a blogger, and a paranormal fantasy and zombie fiction (as Mira Grant) novelist. For a long time, I didn’t think you were real—I thought maybe some collective of artists combined their talents under one name in some mislead marketing scheme … You’re obviously an intrinsically creative person. Were you this creative as a child?

I was possibly more creative as a child, since I didn’t have a day job or a sense of restraint to protect me from my own desire to find out what would happen if, say, I were to coat the side of a local hill with Crisco and then go sledding on a cookie tray. I used to wrangle my cousins into these huge, elaborate sort of proto-LARPs, and I filled notebooks with the details about the worlds they were playing in, their politics, their species, everything. I was writing short stories by the time I was seven, and essays and songs and lengthy defenses of my position on the works of Stephen King by the time I was nine. Since this was all pre-computer, I was doing most of this writing on an electric typewriter that weighed as much as I did, and that sounded like gunshots going off when I started hammering away at three o’clock in the morning. My survival to adulthood is something of a miracle.

When I was … oh, eleven or so, my mother went to the flea market, and came home with a more than twenty-year run of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, all of them protected by those yearly cases they used to sell. I spent most of the summer sitting under my favorite willow tree at the creek near our house, chewing through classic short stories and dreaming of someday being half as awesome as some of those people. I don’t have the willow anymore. I still have that particular fantasy.

I was so impressed with the originality of Rosemary and Rue and all the subsequent installments of your October “Toby” Daye saga. What was the initial inspiration behind writing this series?

So I went to the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park with some friends of mine, and I managed—being the graceful flower that I am—to get myself hopelessly stuck at the top of the Moon Bridge. Like, “I am not moving, I live here now” levels of hopelessly stuck. So they’re trying to coax me down, and I’m looking down at the water, watching the koi. And the line “Spending fourteen years as a koi fish in Golden Gate Park’s Japanese Tea Gardens does very little for one’s outlook on life” just sort of hit me in the head. I started thinking about that line, and finally, the desire to go home and write the story to go with it got me down off the bridge. I produced a fourteen-page short, said “Right, that was fun,” and went back to my regularly scheduled programming.

Only one of the friends I’d shown the story to was convinced that it was the start of the novel she’d been bugging me to write. So she started saying “Toby wants a novel” every time she saw me. I think I started writing Toby’s novel out of self-defense. I like to say that my subconscious is a liar; I rarely understand the scope of an undertaking until it’s too late to back out. It was that way with Toby. I wrote a short story that was actually a novel, and a novel that was actually a series.

There’s a decidedly hardboiled edge to this series—and it goes beyond Toby being a private investigator in the realm of humans. At points, the narrative tone is gritty, decidedly dark—reminiscent of the mystery pulps of the ‘40s and ‘50s. Like this line from A Local Habitation:

I’ve seen that mixture of resignation and hopelessness before; it’s usually in my mirror.

But then you balance that starkness, that existential angst, with breathtaking images of magic and beauty. Here’s a description of the Garden of Glass Roses in Shadowed Hills from Rosemary and Rue:

White crushed quartz pathways glitter in the sunlight that filters through the roses, throwing up glints of prismatic color. And everywhere, roses, growing in wild, seemingly unfettered profusion. Their slight transparency seems odd at first glance, until the mind admits what the eye is seeing: every flower, every petal and bud, is living, blossoming glass, stained with washes of flawless color…

The dichotomy between worlds—human and faerie—is just profound. Two questions here: Are you a fan of classic hard-boiled detective novels by authors like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, etc.? And do you find writing your October Daye novels comparable to writing poetry? There are numerous sequences where your narrative becomes undeniably lyrical…

I am less a fan of the classic hard-boiled detective novels, and more a fan of grindhouse cinema and classic horror movies, which also tend to be very bleak, very stark, in part because they have no real budget to speak of. I do like noir as a genre, and I love playing with its toys. Remember that traditional fairy stories are also very bleak, but they pepper that bleakness with beauty that’s all the more incredible because it’s surrounded by such a dark landscape.

It’s hard not to get lyrical when I’m writing about Faerie itself, because it really is a world that operates according to an entirely different set of linguistic rules. The sky is a different shade of blue. I don’t find it comparable to writing poetry because I still have to stay grounded, and that’s the service that the darker parts of the narrative can provide for me. They anchor things, and that is an invaluable service.

The utilization of folklore and myth is obviously nothing new in fantasy (and poetry—I loved your poem “In Persephone’s Garden!”)—the October Daye novels are just saturated with elements from various mythologies. I could be completely wrong here but did I read something somewhere about your grandmother being a folklorist? How much influence did she have on your writing?

My grandmother was a banker. She had a huge amount of influence on my life—I lived with her for years, and even though she was a very practical woman who read category romances when she read at all, she was completely supportive of my desire to be a writer, and she was happy to read every word I wrote. I genuinely regret the fact that she didn’t live long enough to see me finally start publishing, and see me realizing the dream she nurtured. She passed away a few years before I signed with DAW. I miss her a lot. I actually called her number when Rosemary and Rue came out, and asked the woman who has it now if I could just tell her about my book. She let me, and she thanked me for being a good granddaughter, and then she hung up. That was when I finally deleted Gramma’s number from my phone.

I connected with October Daye right off the bat. She’s the proverbial outsider. And I’ve heard similar comments from numerous readers—Toby just resonates with readers. From Rosemary and Rue:

My name is October Christine Daye; I live in a city by the sea, where the fog paints the early morning, parking is more precious than gold, and Kelpies wait for the unwary on street corners. Neither of the worlds I live in is quite mine, but no one can take them away from me…

How much is October Daye like Seanan McGuire?

Not very! If I have a “cognate” in Toby’s world, it would actually be her Fetch, May. I am a classic Marilyn Munster girl. I wear pink and decorate in cobwebs. My bedroom is orange and green with bats hanging from the ceiling. I live inland, in a small city that was semi-rural during my childhood; we get an annual tarantula migration here. Toby is sort of my invisible best friend who occasionally lives in my head, but she isn’t very much like me at all. For which all my friends are profoundly grateful, as it means they don’t have to deal with many bloody shoot-outs in the middle of their living rooms. Toby is hard on the people she loves. I’m just occasionally hard on their nerves.

Paranormal/urban fantasy has been experiencing a Golden Age of sorts over the last few decades. It’s evolving before our eyes—blending elements from a diversity of genres (fantasy, romance, horror, etc.) and creating something new. Do you see this disintegration between genre boundaries continuing? Where do you see genre fiction a few decades down the road?

I studied folklore in college, and I’m still studying it now, as an adult. I expect to be studying folklore for the rest of my life. With that in mind, I truly believe that the current blurring of the borders between fantasy, horror, and romance are not representative of a mutation; they’re representative of a bunch of walls we didn’t really need finally coming down. The oldest stories we have were, at the time, what we would classify as “urban fantasy” today. Thomas the Rhymer?  His mother was dead when he was conceived, and he was carried to term in her coffin (horror). He fell in love with the Queen of Faerie, calling her “Queen of Heaven” and charming her heart (romance). So she took him to the fairy lands to dwell by her side (fantasy), even though they had to wade through red blood to the knee to get there (horror). Eventually, he chose to leave her to return to his own kind, and she cursed him with honesty (fantasy). In the end, he returned to her, and to Faerie, forevermore (romance). When this story was new, the settings it used were as familiar to the people who heard it as Chicago or Melbourne or San Francisco will be to modern readers of urban fantasy.

In some of the oldest forms of the Snow White/Rose Red story, there’s a third sister, Lily Fair. I like to say that urban fantasy writers are the Children of Lily Fair, the ones seeking the balance between Snow White’s fantasy and Rose Red’s horror. We’re the place where the lines drop away, and that’s a beautiful place to be.

You won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2010. That puts you in an elite group of writers—C.J. Cherryh, Orson Scott Card, Lucius Shepard, Nalo Hopkinson, Cory Doctorow, Jay Lake, John Scalzi, etc. Was winning the award a surreal experience? Any interesting stories from the ceremony?

Oh, wow. Oh, yes. Even being nominated was surreal. I was on the phone with my friend Claudia when the email asking if I would accept the nomination arrived, and I literally screamed out loud. Sorry, Claudia. When I won … I was sitting in the front row, clutching Cat Valente’s hand like a lifeline, just sort of waiting for it to all be over. And then they said my name, and I didn’t move, because by that point, I could taste sounds and hear colors, I was so freaked out. Cat had to push me toward the stage. It was one of the most amazing moments of my life, it really, really was.

My escort for the Hugos was my good friend Jeanne, and she and I went to Cat’s room to get ready for the ceremony, along with Cat’s friend Gretchen (now a mutual friend, because wow, bonding experience). When we got to the room, Cat told me to close my eyes, and led me inside… and one of the beds was covered in tiaras. Like, totally covered. “We wanted to make sure that no matter what happened tonight, you’d go home with a tiara,” she said, and they were from all my friends, and I cried. And then we all sang SJ Tucker’s “Shipful of Monsters” and my “Wicked Girls” as we got ready, and we found out that our friends in Seattle were holding a Hugo party at the Night Kitchen, so they could see the results live. Apparently, they all screamed when I won. It was just the most amazing night. We wrapped the arms of our community all the way around the world.

As much as I enjoy your October Daye saga, Feed—the first installment of your Newsflesh trilogy—written pseudonymously as Mira Grant, just blew me away. I ranked it my #1 zombie fiction read of 2010.

A fusion of post-apocalyptic horror and cerebral political thriller, Feed is nothing short of a labyrinthine masterwork. Set in the year 2039, almost three decades after “the Rising”—essentially the end-of-the-world-as-we-knew-it when two revolutionary cures (for cancer and the common cold) were unleashed upon the world and, after mutating with one another, created a virus that reanimated dead flesh—the world is now radically depopulated, with entire cities and states turned into literal forbidden zones…

Poetry, music, faerie-powered urban fantasy—and the zombie apocalypse! I know you’re into horror movies. Was this something you’ve wanted to write about for some time?

I have wanted to be a horror writer my entire life. The fact that Feed is more science fiction was sort of accidental, because I am in love with the transcendent “why,” but I wanted to write my take on zombies so bad. What’s kind of funny is that Feed was started long before the current zombie “boom.” I spent a couple of years kicking the world around in my head before it got a story to go with it, and then it took me about two years to write the book, because I was still trying to feel my way into things. So the timing of it all was just an incredibly happy accident.

You referenced George Romero in Feed (as “one of the accidental saviors of the human race”). Was he an inspiration?

Weirdly, not so much! James Gunn, definitely, and Aaron Sorkin, to a lesser degree. I think the primary inspiration was actually Warren Ellis, and his amazing comic, Transmetropolitan. I wanted to tell a zombie story, and I wanted to use the news to do it, and Ellis had the sensibility that I was trying to capture already nailed down fast. I love Romero, I really do, but post-Rising fiction isn’t going to depend on him as much as during-the-Rising fiction.

Lots of excellent social commentary in Feed. I particularly enjoyed the character Georgia’s blogs, for example:

This is the truth: We are a nation accustomed to being afraid. If I’m being honest, not just with you but with myself, it’s not just the nation, and it’s not just something we’ve grown used to. It’s the world, and it’s an addiction. People crave fear. Fear justifies everything. Fear makes it okay to have surrendered freedom after freedom, until our every move is tracked and recorded in a dozen databases the average man will never have access to. Fear creates, defines, and shapes our world, and without it, most of us would have no idea what to do with ourselves.

Our ancestors dreamed of a world without boundaries, while we dream new boundaries to put around our homes, our children, and ourselves. We limit our potential day after day in the name of a safety that we refuse to ever achieve. We took a world that was huge with possibility, and we made it as small as we could.

I couldn’t agree more. How cathartic is it to write stuff like this?

Extremely, even if it does make me worry that I’m going to wind up on a watch list somewhere. Georgia at her most judgmental is sort of my darkest view on human nature. The blog posts of hers that I included in the book were all from her op/ed column, rather than from her straight-up news reports, because I don’t really have the training to write news of the caliber that she does, but golly, can I rant about the world being messed-up over the insane desire for safety at the expense of every other possibility. I am fairly reliably depressed by the way we comport ourselves as a species, which is probably why I watch so many horror movies—bad things happen to good people in them, but at least you can pick up a shotgun or a machete and fight your way free.

Just clarifying here—you’re really not a group of artists living in some commune, right?

I can say with complete sincerity that I am not a group of human individuals working to produce my annual output. I cannot comment on the possibility of my actually being an alien hive-intelligence here to conquer your world, but it might be a good idea to practice your hive-intelligence placation skills. Hive-intelligences like Diet Dr Pepper and candy corn.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms revolves around Yeine, the estranged granddaughter of the head of the Arameri family and “uncrowned king of the world.” Born and raised in a remote northern kingdom, Yeine is summoned back to the majestic, towering city of Sky—also the location of the floating palace of the Arameri family—shortly after her mother dies under mysterious circumstances. Named an heir to her grandfather’s throne, she finds herself in the middle of a viper pit of scheming relatives, enslaved deities, self-absorbed nobles, and a labyrinth of bloody family secrets. When she realizes that she is a pawn in a much larger game—one where the salvation of humankind may very well be in the balance—she must make the unthinkable decision about how best to use her death…

With the 2010 Nebula Awards nominees recently announced, Jemisin—whose The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was nominated for Best Novel along with M.K. Hobson’s The Native Star, Mary Robinette Kowal’s Shades of Milk and Honey, Jack McDevitt’s Echo, Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, and Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis—finds herself in line to become the very first woman to win the Nebula Award for her debut novel. In fact, since the Nebulas began in 1965, only four authors have ever accomplished this feat—Daniel Keyes (Flowers for Algernon), Alexei Panshin (Rite of Passage), William Gibson (Neuromancer), and Paolo Bacigalupi (The Windup Girl). (The odds are very good that history will be made this year—Hobson’s The Native Star and Kowal’s Shades of Milk and Honey are debuts and although Okorafor has published young adult novels, Who Fears Death is her adult debut.)

So why has Jemisin’s ascension to the fantasy fiction stratosphere been so meteoric? It’s simple—she is a master storyteller. Her first two novels (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and The Broken Kingdoms) are intricately plotted, meticulously described, and are powered by a cast of extraordinarily developed characters. The heroines of both novels (which can, by the way, be read as standalone novels) are as inspiring as they are unforgettable—the unlikely heiress Yeine and Oree Shoth, a blind artist whose benevolence entangles her in a deadly conspiracy.

Jemisin’s writing style is fluid, lyrical, introspective—addictively readable—and offers up a totally immersive reading experience. Here are the first few tantalizing sentences from her debut:

“I am not as I once was. They have done this to me, broken me open and torn out my heart. I do not know who I am anymore.

I must try to remember…”

Try to put this book down after the first page—I dare you.

But although Jemisin writes an entertaining and immersive story, it’s the philosophical element that makes her novels so substantial, so memorable. The narrative, at points, verges on profound existential enlightenment. Here are just a few examples:

• “You’ve spent time among the gods … Haven’t you noticed? They live forever, but many of them are even more lonely and miserable than we are. Why do you think they bother with us? We teach them life’s value.” —The Broken Kingdoms

• “There’s truth even in tainted knowledge, if one reads carefully.”—The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

• “It’s all very well to say the world values reason and compassion and justice, but if nothing in reality reflects those words, they’re meaningless.” —The Broken Kingdoms

• “We can never be gods, after all—but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.” —The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

• “…if the gods do decide to wipe us out, is it such a bad thing? Maybe we’ve earned a little annihilation.” —The Broken Kingdoms

Regardless of whether Jemisin wins the Nebula or not, it’s evident that she is one of the most original and talented new writers in the genre—and fantasy fans will be reading her work for many years, many decades, to come.

With the Nebula Awards ceremony looming—it will be held May 19-22 in Washington, D.C.—Jemisin took time out of her hectic schedule to answer some question for Fantasy Magazine.

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FM: I know you were nominated for a Hugo and a Nebula Award for your short story “Non-Zero Probabilities” but having your debut novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms nominated for a Nebula Award … wow. Do you remember where you were and/or what you did when you heard the news?

NKJ: I was at work, on an insanely busy day, actually. I’d just managed to carve out about 20 minutes to cram down some lunch when my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, and was about two seconds away from giving somebody whatfor when a voice said, “Hi Nora, this is John Scalzi.” That was when I knew, and gave a quiet (’cause I was at work!) squee.

Since the first Nebula Awards were given out back in 1965, only four authors have won the Best Novel award with their debut: Daniel Keyes, Alexei Panshin, William Gibson, and Paolo Bacigalupi. If you win, you’ll be making history—doing something no other female SF/fantasy writer has ever done before—not Ursula K. Le Guin, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Vonda McIntyre, Margaret Atwood, Jane Yolen, Nancy Kress, Lois McMaster Bujold, Connie Willis, Kate Elliott, etc. What would winning the award mean to you?

Dude, you really know how to lay on the pressure.

Honestly, though, I can’t say that knowing this means anything more or less for me. For one thing, it’s not like the people who nominated The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms did so because I’m a woman, or because I’m a debut author. Plenty of both to go around, these days. For another thing, the Nebulas seem to be undergoing a kind of sea change in general; writer Jason Sanford has been doing a kind of qualitative analysis for the last couple of years, and has noted that the nominees lately are more demographically diverse, seem to hail from a wider variety of sources (e.g. online markets for short fiction, versus the paper Big Three), and are more “literarily” diverse. That is, there are more stylists than scientists, more subgenres (e.g. urban fantasy) on display, and so on. I think the whole slate of Nebula nominees probably reflects this.

You listed Octavia E. Butler as your “own personal grandmaster” in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms and in an interview we did together last year said that she “left behind a lot of children, spiritually speaking” when we discussed the growing number of African American woman writing fantasy—Nisi Shawl, Nnedi Okorafor, Nalo Hopkinson, Tananarive Due, L. A. Banks, Sheree Thomas, etc. Do you think that’s one reason why your first two novels have been so commercially successful? Readers are enjoying the newness of different mythologies, futuristic ideologies, etc.?

There isn’t any newness here. Like I said—Octavia Butler started doing this stuff thirty years ago. And male and female black SFF writers have been around for decades; Sheree Thomas’s Dark Matter anthologies proved that by reprinting stories published as far back as the 1800s. So a black female SFF writer is nothing new. The SFF readership is just less prone to restrict itself to white men—but that’s not really new, either; it’s a change that’s been ongoing for some time now, both within and outside of the genre.

And yes, I think Butler’s persistence, and the persistence of her “spiritual children”—children of all races and genders, note, not just black women—has helped to facilitate this change. But I can’t see how that spells success for anyone who happens to share her race and gender. Usually, being black and female in this business is a recipe for diminished sales, as the writer’s work gets stereotyped and qualified and shoehorned into little boxes that keep it from getting the mainstream attention necessary to succeed. The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms has occasionally been found shelved in the African American Interest section, for example—despite the fact that it contains no Africans, no Americans, no black human beings at all, and despite the fact that most African American SFF readers are going to look for it in the SFF section—like everybody else.

So it definitely helps to be treated like “just another SFF writer”, and not “omg BLACK!!! FEMALE!1! sff writer”. Unfortunately we’re not 100% there yet.

I’ve found the first novels in your Inheritance Trilogy to be deeply philosophical and filled with existential wisdom. You said that the trilogy’s philosophy is “that change itself is irrelevant, because it’s unavoidable; how we deal with change is what matters.” How has your real-world experience as a counseling psychologist affected your writing?

Honestly, it’s impossible to say. Studying psychology, and working with clients in a variety of contexts, has had a huge impact on how I view the world, and that obviously impacts my writing. But then, so does every bit of knowledge I ingest, and every interaction I have with other people. I can’t really sift out one set of experiences from the rest.

The concluding volume of your Inheritance trilogy—The Kingdom of Gods—will hit bookshelves later this year. Can you give readers just a little tease as to the storyline?

Well, the protagonist of this one is Sieh, the god of childhood and mischief, whom we’ve seen before in the first two books of the trilogy. The story starts when Sieh meets a pair of mortal children—Arameri children—and suddenly, inexplicably begins aging at a mortal rate. Since Sieh’s “godliness” is dependent on him being a child, this means that the older he gets, the more human and powerless he becomes—and if he can’t manage to stop the process, he will eventually die of old age or some other mortal cause. Kind of a twisted bildungsroman: the coming-of-age of a boy who’s several billion years old, who’ll die if he grows up. There’s a lot more to the story than that, including a global revolution against the Arameri, and a godling trying to overthrow the Three. I had a lot of fun writing it.

What’s next after the Inheritance Trilogy? World domination?

Still working on that! In the meantime, I have two new novels, in a new duology, coming out in 2012—the Dreamblood books. They’re set in a fantasy realm that I modeled on ancient Egypt, in which a group of priests who wield magic based on sleep and dreams must defend their land against threats from within and without. Beyond that, who knows?