Fantastic Metropolis

Timothy J. Anderson: Who, then, are your models? [And, if you dare, who is guilty of boring you to tears?] Who do you derive pleasure from as a reader? In what ways are you different from them?

Ursula Pflug: I wasn’t able to read Dune, ever. I don’t think I’ve looked at a fantasy trilogy other than rereading Tolkien since the British “The Five Children and It” series by Edith Nesbit we read as children. It’s a question of personal taste, and very subjective; if someone reads Stephen King and nothing else that’s entirely their business, and in any case writers like King will always do much better than an esoteric story teller such as myself. I just reread Dhalgren and found it held up very well. Would it be published today, submitted by an unknown? It’s experimental in so many ways. I’ve done a Read and Appreciated List for FM where I mention many books I’ve loved and these include: Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry, Ted Mooney’s Easy Travel to Other Planets, Herman Hesse’s Magister Ludi, The Glass Bead Game, Keri Hulme’s The Bone People, and Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. These were all published as literary mainstream, although each one is speculative fiction, and I think I’m well-positioned in that category, if it even is one. I read a lot of William Burroughs when I was young. His time travel is subjective–he doesn’t write about machines, but how it would feel, the loneliness of being uprooted, which was very interesting to me. One of my favourite SF books is Maureen F. McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang. When you’re starting out you imitate what you’ve loved consciously or unconsciously but later on it’s much more important and exciting to develop your own voice. The writers I’ve mentioned are very different from one another, beyond all having mastered a literary spec fic thing. The specific ways in which I’m different from them?—I think someone else would have to answer that.

Timothy J. Anderson: What do you see as the “typical” fantasy/speculative writer career path, and how does it mesh with the path your career has taken?

Ursula Pflug: I don’t know much about what other people do. Most people who write for print are, at least financially, in a bit of a mug’s game. Is it really a career or just a collection of clever party tricks? Publishing books or writing for theatre might impress the hell out of a lot people, but these activities don’t pay rent very effectively, except for spiritual rent. I know it’s important to me to work with people who don’t think in boxes. It’s what I look for and have been lucky enough to find. That may be a speculative writer’s mindset, I don’t know.

Timothy J. Anderson: Ursula, you’ve done a fair amount of history-based writing. How has that influenced your fiction?

Ursula Pflug: It’s given me a break from invented worlds. I enjoy the research process quite a bit. The spillover is that I’m quite willing now to read massive amounts of text in support of something I want to include, or to interview people, which I may not have done before. Earlier I was most interested in capturing the qualities of dream, and of certain kinds of subjective states. I wanted to craft contemporary fairy tales. I haven’t lost interest in this, it’s just I now see research as a stream of information I can draw on to support that process.

Timothy J. Anderson: Dreams, both sleeping and waking, are an essential element of many of your stories. What is the dream life of Ursula Pflug?

Ursula Pflug: I’ve been a dreamer all my life. I’m always a little alarmed when people tell me they don’t dream. Everyone dreams; many just don’t remember. There are many vivid dreams I remember from childhood and think of till this day. My mother had a dream about a fantastical wedding which she described in a letter, I think to my father. It’s included in a published archival booklet; I was astounded to discover it, as I realised I’d had a variation of the same dream, which I attempted to make into a story. It’s never been published although I read it at ClitLit, novelist Elizabeth Ruth’s reading series in Toronto. One morning my daughter came down the stairs and told me yet another slight variation of this same dream. So there you go-three generations of the same dream-what can this possibly mean? For years when I was much younger I had lengthy lucid dreams, real as life, where I learned the trick of control, which was both startling and fun. The process is discussed at length in Richard Linklater’s charming animated feature film, Waking Life, as well, of course, as in Green Music. Lately I’ve thought a lot about a dream I had around twenty years ago. Standing in a razed city full of panicking people, I was airlifted out by some clever and witty space aliens who spoke a telepathy-based language I’d had the luck to learn. Unfortunately they could only rescue people who’d learned-people who couldn’t communicate in this way fritzed their fourth dimensional technology, making their ships unable to fly. I remember the modality of the language quite well-it was a combination of transmitted images and emotions. There were words too-both transmitted, received and spoken, but far fewer words than we use now. It seemed a much more complete form of communication. We flew over the suburbs, landing in the backyards of ranch-style houses. There’d be gleeful children jumping up and down inside, looking out at us through their patio doors. They wanted us to take them for a ride, and were fluent, so we could.