Fantastic Metropolis

M.M. Hall: You chose two seminal stories to be posted here to represent your large body of exquisite short fiction, “The Wound” and “The Cure”. Why these two stories?

Lisa Tuttle: Actually, I couldn’t choose from my entire body of work as I’d recently had two collections of my short fiction published as e-books, so don’t have the rights to use those stories on-line. One book (My Pathology) ranges throughout my career and my three previous collections, and the other (Ghosts and Other Lovers) contains most of my more recent short stories. So actually I was looking mostly at the stories that got left out of those collections, and chose two of my all-time favourites. I feel that “The Wound” is one of the best stories I’ve ever written, and also that it marked a sort of turning point for me as a writer, away from a type of story I’d learned to write with a certain amount of skill, into more uncharted territory. One of the best responses I’ve ever had to any story came when I brought “The Wound”, freshly written, to a writers’ group in London—when it was her turn to comment, one of the other writers burst into tears! She had been so moved by the story, she could not speak. I don’t often get to see the effect of my stories on readers, and I’m sure they seldom get such a powerful reaction, so that was a memorable experience for me, and suggested that others might also find it a good story. As for “The Cure,” although that is an even older story (and feels sometimes as if I wrote it in another life-time!) I think it holds up well, and it is another personal favourite.

Both stories deal with subjects (gender and language) which are extremely important to me, and which I often write about, so I thought they could stand as representative of my work, both past and present.

M.M. Hall: In 1980, “Where the Stones Grow” appeared in Kirby McCauley’s landmark horror anthology, Dark Forces. How did that change your career?

Lisa Tuttle: Why do you think it did? Sorry—getting tone across in writing is difficult—I mean that as a genuine question. Do you think it did?

M.M. Hall: Yes, I think it was rather a watermark in your career which indicated a shift from your SF presence into the dark speculative fiction phase–or horror/psychological shape/mind shifting stories. And as for The Pillow Friend I detected another shift (in your adult fiction) to the literary mainstream. You gave it a shadowy ambiguity that was as sophisticated as it was frightening. “Where the Stones Grow” is deceptively simple. The “place where the stones go” “where the three sisters go” and where “they will kill anyone who sees them” can be anyplace and stones aren’t supposed to grow. There’s a lot going on there in a very small space. Which story or novel–so far truly made you sit up and take notice?

Lisa Tuttle: As far as I’m aware, it (“Where the Stones Grow”) had no more impact on my writing career than any of the other short stories I wrote and sold throughout the 1970s… perhaps rather less, since, as far as I’m aware, it garnered no controversy, no award nominations, no fan mail… I don’t even think it was ever reprinted outside that anthology! Not that I’m saying it should have been; I don’t think it is one of my best stories. As for what you say about the story marking a shift away from SF and into darker, supernatural fantasy—well, I can see that it might appear that way from the outside, due to when it appeared. It doesn’t feel that way to me because it was not the first, but more like the sixth or seventh story I wrote in a particular sequence as I moved more determinedly into fantasy/horror/supernatural fiction, irregardless of what the market at that time was like. Leaving out a few very early stories (and, after all, my very first published short story “Stranger in the House” fits this classification—it was certainly not SF!), there was “The Horse Lord” (written in 1976) “Bug House” (written in 1978), “Sun City” (1978), “The Other Room” (March 1979), “The Other Mother” (June 1979)—following which, in July 1979, I wrote “Where the Stones Grow.” Apart from “The Horse Lord,” which was published in 1977, and “The Other Room” which didn’t appear until much later, all of those stories written in 1978 and 1979 were published in 1980. Personally I felt that “Sun City” (which appeared in Ramsey Campbell’s ground-breaking New Terrors anthology first published in the UK in 1980) was more significant in the terms of where I was going as a writer. And of all those stories, the one which meant the most to me was “The Other Mother.” That one originated in a dream, and was also a story in which I was trying to deal with some very significant and powerful issues—motherhood and creativity, madness and myth. It also seems somehow typical of the way I work that I should have written that story about being a mother and an artist more than a decade before actually becoming a mother in real life!

My first post-natal story to deal with in any way with motherhood was “Replacements”, written when my daughter was only seven months old. Make of that what you will…