An Interview with K. J. Bishop
K. J. Bishop was born in 1972 and published her first novel, The Etched City (Prime Books, excerpt), in February 2003. The Etched City has won the praise of writers such as Jeffrey Ford, Jeff VanderMeer, and Liz Williams, and has been reviewed positively in Publishers Weekly and Locus April ‘03. The story, about the drifters Raule and Gwynn and their sojourn in the lush, vivid city of Ashamoil, is a dark fantasy that fuses surrealist and decadent elements.
K. J. Bishop’s stories have appeared in Aurealis, Fables and Reflections, and Album Zutique #1. In addition to writing she works as a freelance artist and designer. She lives in Melbourne.
Mike Simanoff: The Etched City is concerned with, among other things, the question of evil, in a way that is reminiscent of the 19th century poets Charles Baudelaire and Lautréamont and the novelists Gérard de Nerval, Charles Nodier, and Eugene Sue. You’ve also acknowledged the influence of Lautréamont in your story “Maldoror Abroad,” appearing in The Ministry of Whimsy’s Album Zutique #1. Which other writers have influenced you, implicitly or explicitly, and to what extent?
K. J. Bishop: Concerning the question of evil, and also the figure of the anti-hero, Milton’s Paradise Lost was a big influence on me. I somehow ended up reading it when I was sixteen, and didn’t quite realise that the reader isn’t suppose to barrack for Satan. Baudelaire has also been important, though less for his treatment of evil than for his analysis of the dandy, the self-authored individual—the person as artist and work of art in one. I like the decadents in general; that rich and strange writing appeals to me, and then so does the opposite thing, the laconic voice; so in The Etched City I tried to mix the two.
Michael Moorcock has influenced me enormously; I couldn’t count the ways. I think it would be hard to be a fantasy writer of my generation and not be influenced by Moorcock, either directly or via other writers. Just to mention a couple of things specific to writing, I admire the way he often has deep thinking, action, tragedy and comedy all flying in the air at once—the sublime and the comic playing in sync. And I love his irony. It was Moorcock’s writing (as well as various moments on the TV news) that made me think about the possibility for conflict between irony and sincerity.
M. John Harrison’s Viriconium stories were probably the first stories I fell in love with on the level of the writing itself. He was the first author whose techniques I really tried to study; I wanted to learn how he achieved that climate of strangeness which is somehow all the more strange for having a strong resonance with reality. Perhaps it’s only a slight exaggeration of the strangeness of our own world. He really inspired me to try writing fiction, which I didn’t begin to do until my twenties. At school I was never into writing.
Jeffrey Ford was the writer who made me think, “Yes, I’m going to try to write a novel.” The way he creates a fantasy world, then moves the register of that world into the surreal, where the fantasy world’s own logic (or the reader’s assumption of logic) is broken, is brilliant, and when I read The Physiognomy it made a big impression on me.
I can’t leave out the Bible. I’m not a Christian, but I was educated at a Christian school for 13 years, and I’ve kept up a sort of antagonistic fascination with the Judeo-Christian mythos. The Bible interests me in all sorts of ways—as myth, as philosophy, as a document of the human heart in exile, and as sheer beautiful language.
Going back to evil, a writer who I’ve found very helpful on that subject is Mark “Chopper” Read. I’m not sure if he’s well known outside Australia or not. He’s an ex-standover man, specialist in toe-cutting, who wrote his memoirs. The amount of truth in them is debatable, as he himself says. But I like his stories. They’re tales of the misadventures of people who are unglamorous and for the most part none too bright, and while they’re entertaining, you never have to put up with the feeling that someone’s trying to make you think that something unpleasant is somehow sexy and cool.
