By Mair Allen, MCWC 2021 Conference Assistant
Award-winning speculative fiction author Alaya Dawn Johnson will teach “The Liminal Heart of Speculative Fiction” at MCWC 2021, and we’re thrilled to welcome her!
Johnson is a prolific and acclaimed writer. Her most recent novel, Trouble the Saints, was published in July 2020 by Tor and in January 2021 her short story collection, Reconstruction, was released by Small Beer Press. In 2015 she won the Andre Norton Nebula Award for Middle Grade and Young Adult Fiction Nebula Award for her novel Love is the Drug and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette for her short story “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i.”
Johnson took some time to discuss with us how research informs her worldbuilding, leaving New York City for Oaxaca, Mexico, and how the speculative elements of storytelling reveal that which otherwise goes unnoticed.
You have said in interviews that you were inspired by a Discovery Channel show on engineering. In your entry for The Reading List you mention reading theoretical texts by Claude Levi Strauss. In “A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai’i”, a character reads Mishima. Your academic background is in Mesoamerican studies. How do you think broad ranges of interest affect your writing?
I always liken my writing process to a compost heap, where you get the best compost from a wide variety of scraps. So to me, those completely disparate sources are precisely what, in the long term, allows me to synthesize a lot of different kinds of information and create vivid worlds—in order to, hopefully, say something interesting and useful about the world we’re living in now. To me it’s always vital to go beyond the limits of what I would encounter in my daily life—there will always be so much I don’t know, but I try to at least always expand the quantity and scope of what I do know. As a speculative fiction writer this strikes me as fundamental because what we’re engaged in what you might call active worldbuilding (any writer, of course, is always going to be engaged in worldbuilding, but not all of us are actively trying to create fictitious or fabulist worlds). In active worldbuilding, I’m trying to create a construct that has a range and a feeling of a real lived-in place. But how can I possibly do that if my own understanding of my real lived-in place is hopelessly constrained by the narrowness of my own single point of view? The only way to get beyond that is to research, learn, grow. It’s about trying to jolt myself out of my comfort zone again and again. That’s where my (good) ideas come from.
Your novel Trouble the Saints is an historical fantasy set in 1940’s New York. What was your research process like?
I had already done some research on the adjacent time period, the 1920s in New York, for a series of fantasy novels I’d written several years before, so that definitely helped ground me. I also read novels from the time period and a bit earlier, with the idea of beginning with the feel of a place and time, not just its historical events and personages. I went through several drafts of the novel, one of which was a total overhaul. At that point I had the characters and the three-part story structure, but I needed some element that would tie them together. That was when I started asking around and reading, and I started learning more about a huge element of black urban life for most of the 20th century: the numbers racket, or policy (a bet on three random numbers generated daily, first by horse racing stats and then by the Dow Jones Industrial Average). Playing the numbers was a particularly big deal in the twenties, thirties and forties, and it was an important driver of black social mobility in that time period. The big players in the numbers racket also heavily supported the NAACP and other civil rights organizations. So when I started reading about that, I knew that I’d found the kernel that would tie the whole novel together. Playing the numbers tied into traditional forms of divination and conjure in the black community, which then led to my development of Tamara’s system of reading the cards. When I hit that seam of history I honestly felt as though my novel just re-wrote itself. It was one of those perfect moments in research that you live for—but of course, it only happens after months or years of work!
You’ve lived in Mexico since 2014, can you talk a little about being a working writer outside of the United States?
It’s definitely been an experience. Mexico has truly changed my life for the better. At the moment, living in rural Oaxaca, I exclusively use English for writing and interacting online, not for living my daily life out loud. In a weird way, the internalization of my English has given it a private, intimate quality that I think has helped me develop my writing voice in interesting ways. I’ve also enjoyed having distance from the sometimes hothouse atmosphere of the US publishing scene. I lived in NYC before, the center of the US publishing world, and while I love the city and my friends there, it could sometimes be very intense as a writer to be swimming in publishing and professional writing day in and day out. Here I’ve had a chance to deepen and broaden my view of the world, of writing, of living. I learned Spanish fluently and wrote a 300-page Master’s thesis in it! I don’t know how much of my experiences here will make it directly into my books, but I do know that they have enriched my writing incalculably.
Your book Love is the Drug uses the background of a pandemic to highlight characters’ social positioning. Trouble the Saints has white supremacy and constructions of race as central themes. Can you speak about how speculative fiction and historical fiction lend themselves to challenging systemic power structures?
I adore speculative fiction for its ability to highlight certain aspects of the real world and bring them to the forefront of the narrative, both as text and as a concretized metaphor. Historical fiction has a similar ability to pinpoint a historical moment that is important to you as a writer for whatever reason. In my case, I was drawn to the forties as a moment that is exactly as distant from the civil war as the present day, a moment before the paradigm-shifting civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s, but that still said very important things about what came before and what would come after. I also set it right before the US entry into WWII, so to me it was about a certain liminal space in history that mirrors the liminal spaces that my main characters have found for themselves within the white power structure. And then I add the speculative element: a kind of power that comes from their ancestors, the ones who have gone before, and want to give their descendants a small chance to make a better life for themselves. I think of it like that classic fantasy novel trick of throwing sand on the invisible bridge or what have you to make its dimensions visible. I use the speculative element, the magic, the tech to help make visible an element of our social systems that normally passes unnoticed. The same was true, as you note, with the pandemic device in Love Is the Drug, though reality has more than trumped (ugh) even the worst of what I imagined back then.
You won a Nebula award for your YA novel Love is the Drug. Another of your works, The Summer Prince was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Can you talk about what draws you to YA as a genre?
A friend of mine once said to me that YA is like taking all the backstory from an adult novel about why your character is the (messed up) way they are and making that the main story. I love that framing so much because it zeroes in on precisely why I find YA as a genre so freeing and dynamic as a writer. Of course you can have flashbacks in YA and of course people’s early childhood experiences mark them, but there is a certain immediacy, a freshness and urgency in the adolescent experience that can never be captured again after those formative moments. I have another writer friend who says that we all have an inner child at various ages inside of us, and the age of that child (or children) tells us what genre we can write in. In my friend’s case, she has an inner twelve-year-old and an inner twenty-four-year-old, so she can write middle grade and new adult, but she can’t get her head around YA at all. In my case, I have an inner seventeen-year-old and she is always full of stories. (I just turned in my next YA novel and I am SO EXCITED about this one, but I still can’t say anything quite yet).
To find out more about Alaya Dawn Johnson, visit her website at www.alayadawnjohnson.com.
General registration is now open! To register for the workshop of your choice, visit mcwc.org/2021-registration. There is no application required to attend MCWC and registration includes the morning workshop and all afternoon and evening events. All events will be held over Zoom this year.