Fantastic Metropolis

Robert Freeman Wexler: A lot of your fiction over the years has dealt with feminist issues, women fighting for their voice, for control (and though The Mount doesn’t deal explicitly with this, one could say the Hoots represent the dominance of men and the Mounts of both sexes represent the women, being ridden and subjugated. Though maybe that’s stretching it. How have your attitudes toward this changed over the years? It still seems to be a subject you cover, for example in the title story from Report to the Men’s Club, which takes the form of an address by a woman (or former woman?) to a men’s-only organization.

Carol Emshwiller: Aargh. I don’t like (at all) the idea of both sexes of the mounts representing women. That certainly wasn’t in my mind at all. And since Little master was the hoot most often on stage, I think hoots are very nice. Obviously I felt humans and hoots were equals. In fact Little Master understands everything way before Charley does. He knows what freedom means before Charley. Little Master always knows what’s going on. He saves Charley when Charley wants to go join the guards. I felt that their closeness made them both better than they would be by themselves.

I wrote “Report to the Men’s Club” a long time ago. Ed would have been alive then so that would make it 15 or so years old. A couple of the stories in that collection are older. Things that Kelly and Gavin liked. Actually I do still like “Report to the Men’s Club” though it seems old fashioned. When Ed was alive I was often frustrated what with three children at home and not much help from him. He always said his work was more important than mine because it made more money. (It still would now, too.) But since his death I felt I lost that part of my writing. I used to feel I was writing about the battle of the sexes, not “just feminism.” As in Carmen Dog I wanted to make fun of both men and women. I mean Carmen Dog slept on the doormat on purpose. It was her idea in the first place. She thought she belonged there. Now I have my three brothers whom I adore, and they don’t frustrate me at all. And “Report to the Men’s Club” was suggested to me by Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy.” In that story an ape joins the academy. Kafka is my favorite writer and a lot of my stuff is, to varying degrees, influenced by him.

I was worried that people would take The Mount to be about race relations and mounts would be thought of as blacks. I knew that was true no matter what I wrote, but I tried to undercut that idea when it popped up too clearly. I wanted the mounts to stand for any oppressed group. I didn’t want the parallels with blacks to be too clear but I know they’re there. That’s OK with me as long as readers think of oppression as broader that that.

Robert Freeman Wexler: Your new collection, Report to the Men’s Club, ranges widely from earlier “battle of the sexes” stories to some of your more recent ones, and it’s a mix of genre and non-genre. A couple of stories I’m glad to see reprinted are “Modillion” and “Venus Rising.” It must have been difficult to put together a collection that covers such a broad period, and I’m sure a lot was left out.

Carol Emshwiller: I do have lots of stories that were left out of Report to the Men’s Club, and lots of new ones. I think there’s enough for another collection… or will be in a minute.

Robert Freeman Wexler: You mention Kafka. What other writers would you consider to be influences? And what fiction have you read recently that has impressed you?

Carol Emshwiller: I wish I was back in NY (well, I will be in a month) so I could look at my book shelves and remember the ones I like. I just had to do a review of The Deadly Space Between, a new novel by Patricia Duncker. It was a fantasy though marketed as regular fiction. I loved it and I’ve ordered more of her books. I like Alice Munro and Andrea Barrett. I always learn new things to try from them, (as I did from Andrea Barrett). I like Calvino and Cortázar and Clarice Lispector. Also Henri Michaux and Alasdair Gray (some of his). Oh, and Samuel Becket, especially his early short stories, also parts of his novels. I love the plays but I don’t think they influenced me as much as his short stories.