Fantastic Metropolis

Brendan Connell: No problem… Anyhow, a lot of women seem to go out of their way to make their writing “women’s writing” —in other words a book somehow different from a “male” book. Do you care much if your writing is feminine, or would you consider writing in a “masculine” voice also. Or would you rather stay out of the male psyche?

Catherynne M. Valente: Well, right now I am working on an Arthurian novel which is largely from a male point of view. I do think it’s a bit of a problem, for myself I do my best not to make it a “male” or a “female” voice, but a human voice. However, I am, as a woman, more interested in the female psyche. In the end, all I have to communicate is my own experience, which is necessarily female. To write in a male voice is an exercise in speculation, which is another kind, a less personal kind of creativity for me. No matter how wild the subject matter, it comes down to my own voice in the end, and I don’t hide my gender, I exult in it. My writing has a great deal of feminine physicality in it. I’m very at home in my body and my femininity, and it comes out in my books. Obviously this isn’t something I can bring to a male perspective. When I write that way, some of that physicality has to be lost.

Brendan Connell: So… you somehow link your body to your writing?

Catherynne M. Valente: Writing comes from the body. It has to—the body is central to existence. Not to get too philosophical here, but for me all writing is grounded in the body—not necessarily a gendered body. A body isn’t the sum of its genitals. Because writing is such an intellectual thing, in order not to be completely cerebral it has to find its root in physical experience.

Brendan Connell: This Arthurian novel. Can you tell us something about that?

Catherynne M. Valente: It’s a surrealist version, told from the points of view of several of the knights of the round table. Each chapter involves a knight in extremis, so that the Arthurian chronology is told through these linked men and women in their moments of greatest difficulty. It also bends time and geography so that parts take place in ancient England and parts in modern California.

Brendan Connell: As you mentioned earlier, The Labyrinth is a bit of a “quest” kind of book… So is the Arthurian book also along those lines;—quest for the Holy Grail and that sort of thing?

Catherynne M. Valente: The quest is part of it, yes;—can’t very well ignore the Holy Grail. You buy into a certain package when you write Arthurian. As for The Labyrinth—I think of it as an anti-quest. It uses the framework of a quest to show that all quests are ultimately imaginary, functions of the desire for meaning. But they are constructs—they have no end, no true Grail that anyone can possess, they have no real purpose—they are mazes without centres. A circular quest repeats itself until there is no meaning left at all. Just the impulse to keep moving forward.

Brendan Connell: A writer of anti-quests?

Catherynne M. Valente: Quests, anti-quests, it all depends on how much spare optimism I have to spend.

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Brendan Connell has had fiction published in numerous magazines, literary journals and anthologies, including The Journal of Experimental Fiction, Fantastic Metropolis, Leviathan 3 (The Ministry of Whimsy Press) and The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases (Night Shade Books). He has had translations published in Literature of Asia, Africa and Latin America (Prentice Hall 1999).