Fantastic Metropolis

Timothy J. Anderson: Some authors put themselves in their work, either as cameo characters or in the form of the protagonists they wish they were. Where would a reader look for Ursula to appear? Has she? Will she?

Ursula Pflug: I read an interview in Fireweed some years back with the German film director Margarethe von Trotta wherein she said she was all her characters. I will visualise a character along with their back story which may or may not show up in the text, but when building their responses I might look inside myself. I’ll ask myself: what has happened to me in the past that’s similar to what this character is going through?—then I can base their response in part on this memory. It’s a bit like method acting. A character is then logically an extrapolation of some part of the writer, however small. A beneficial spinoff of writing this way is that it’s an opportunity to learn about ourselves; in the end we have, really, only our own experience to draw from. In Green Music, I can identify with each character—they’re all a part of me. Writing is so much smaller than life in that sense. People have asked whether I’m Su or Marina, when in actuality I have so much in common with Stiv!

Timothy J. Anderson: Are there particular ideologies or personal philosophies which you hope come through in your writing?

Ursula Pflug: I’d say that would be my reiteration of Marina’s interface with the world, and also the idea that is present in a lot of magic realism, which is that magic is created out of necessity, often political necessity. As an analogy, I could bring back dreams. Many people who learn to fly in their dreams do so at first in the presence of danger. For me it was a tiger, cliche as it may seem. Steven founded Marina, implausible as it was, because he had to-it was important to create an alternative community as balance: a counterweight to the misery on Earth-a place where there was less cause for despair. Likewise, I never described how Jack was able to swim to the moon and back; he did it because he had to. He studied with the moon, and what he learned from her were teachings he could bring back to Earth, and to Marina-The-Place, so that both could go on, at least a little while longer. When we forge doors to other realities which are linked to our own, we create the possibility of another way of being. If a different kind of world is possible somewhere else, then it might be possible here as well. If we can only get there, we might be able to bring some of it back. But we must be able to imagine it first.

Timothy J. Anderson is an editor with The Books Collective and the author of Resisting Adonis (Tesseract Books 2000) and Neurotic Erotica (Slipstream, 1996). He is a multidisciplinary music, theatre and literary artist. He has edited books by Mary W. Walters, Peter Watts, Ronnie Burkett, Zhauna Alexander and many more.