Nalo Hopkinson
Nalo Hopkinson was born December 20, 1960 in Kingston, Jamaica, and grew up there, as well as in Trinidad and Guyana, through she also spent some time in the US as a child. Her father was noted Guyanese poet Abdur-Rahman Slade Hopkinson. She moved with her family to Toronto, Canada in 1977, where she has lived ever since. She graduated with honors in Russian and French from York University in 1982, and worked as a T-shirt vendor, government bureaucrat, aerobics instructor, library clerk, craftsperson, and art grants officer before switching to full-time writing in 1998.
Hopkinson’s first professional SF sale was “Riding the Red” (1997), which she wrote at the clarion workshop in1995. Important stories include Tiptree finalist “Class bottle of tricks” (2000), World Fantasy nominee “Something to Hitch Meat to” (2001), and Aurora finalist “The Smile on the Face” (2004). Some of her short fiction has been collected in World Fantasy Award and Sunburst Award winner Skin Folk (2001).
 Her first novel Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) won Warner aspect first novel contest. The locus award for best novel, and was also a finalist for the Dick, Tiptree, Crawford and Aurora awards. Hopkinson also won the 1998 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best new writer. Second novel Midnight Robber appeared in 2000 and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Tiptree, Dick, and Sunburst awards. The Salt Roads. (2003) was a nebula finalist and won a gaylactic spectrum award. Her latest book, The New Moon’s Arms, appeared in early 2007, and Blackheart Man is forthcoming.
She edited anthologies Whisper from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (2000), a world fantasy finalist So Long been Dreaming: Post Colonial Science Fiction and Fantasy (2004), with Uppinder Mehan); and Aurora Award winner Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction (2005, with Geoff Ryman). She curated “radio fiction anthology” Six Impossible things for CBC radio in 2006 with Joe Mahoney. Series, coordinating producer. In 2002 she earned masters in popular fiction from Seton Hill University, where James morrow was her mentor. She has taught at clarion, clarion west, and clarion south, and helped found the Carl Brandon society, devoted to addressing the representation of people of colour in SF and fantasy.
“Writers have to live in more than two worlds. The intellectual life of the Caribbean was available to me when I was growing up, through my parents, but being a science fiction and fantasy reader was strange. (There are still very few people in Caribbean writing SF.) But I think being Caribbean, you’re aware of being a multiplicity. Pretty much all of us who come from there are mixed-race backgrounds, no matter what we look like. And they are really pluralist societies- have been for centuries, through of course there are similar issues of systemic racism. But you have that sense of both from there and knowing your ancestry comes from somewhere else as well, whether that is China, India, Africa, Europe, and/or from the original indigenous Arawak people in the Caribbean, and in some ways that has made it natural for me to work in science fiction and fantasy; the medium is so plastic.”
“I wrote a non-fiction piece about the connection I have to European and Caribbean folklore. If I want to put a soucouyant in my stories, my Caribbean readers will understand, and French readers will probably figure it out from the word. But do I explain that it’s something like a vampire but different, or do I just hope that people will figure it out? It’s the same dilemma science fiction writers have: do you translate the concepts for readers who don’t get it, or do you just put it down and hope they understand? I have both issues because a lot of my readers are not science fiction readers.
 “I once gave an excerpt from Midnight Robber (which hadn’t been published yet) to a co-worker. It was one of the invented folktales that form the books triple spine. She gave it back to me and said. ‘That was great, but I’m never going to Jamaica now’. I asked ‘Why not?’ and she said, ‘There’s all these crazy scary animals there!’ It was the bit of the story where a creature like triceratops attacks someone. I looked at the story again, and the very first passage was about how the ancestors of these people left earth to arrive on their current planet in spaceships, but as free people this time, and by their own choice. I asked her, ‘Did you not read that part?’ and she said, yes, but I thought it was metaphorical.’ And if you were a mainstream reader, it would have been. This literature catches the fancy of people who are sort of going to get it. Yet you can’t assume that you’re not going to find such people in the mainstream, because you will. And you can’t assume you will find them in science fiction and fantasy, because you don’t always.
“When I was speaking at a university in the Caribbean, one of the students said, ‘I recognize a lot of the creatures that you created in Midnight Robber because I know them from carnival. That was all very lovely, but why are you hiding behind these myths? Why all these unreal creatures?’ At first I had no idea what she was talking about, and I said, ‘But they are real.’ She got that look, and I thought, Oh yes: this is someone who now thinks I believe UFOs are probing my brain. So I said, ‘no, no- in the world of the novel, these are real creatures, and I’m not hiding behind them.’
“Fiction’s not autobiography in a party dress. The story is the story. If I wanted to write fictionalized autobiography I could, but that’s not what I’m doing. I’m not saying I don’t draw from experience in my books- everybody does. There was an American women writer in the 19th century, Frances Trollope, who said, ‘of course I draw from life. But I always pulp my acquaintance before serving them up. You would never recognize a pig in a sausage.’
“It has become easier to deal with because I’m more confident about deciding whether or not to explain things. I think I’ve gotten better at seeing where the explanation is built into the context, so I’m not talking down to anybody. So much genre writing- fantasy, science fiction, mystery- in some ways is a game that the reader gets to play, because they’re trying to figure out what’s happening a split second before you tell them. You can’t give that game away by over explaining it; that’s part of the fun of reading the story.
“I think that boundaries in SF/F/H are already boundless enough that there’s room for work like mine. Some people trap themselves. People talk about this impossible divide between science fiction and mainstream literature, and you can see them building the walls themselves. It’s not that the divide isn’t there, but don’t need to reinforce it. It is permeable. I do have an advantage, coming from outside. I didn’t grow up inculcated in what to be science fiction writer, and I grew up within a literacy community that did not rigid genre distinctions. I’m a science fiction writer and reader by choice; nobody imposed this on me! For years I did not know there was an argument between those who like science fiction and those who like fantasy. Whichever you prefer in fine but when you start to say that’s the only legitimate kind…….
“There’s a perceptual difference between fantasy that comes from outside the genre and fantasy within it, but that difference is like the one between steak and shrimp: I like them both, and they’re both meat. Genre stories are pretty much always written with an internal consistency; magic will disappear, or it wanders away.”
“Every so often I come up with a different definition of what science fiction and fantasy do, and I’m always looking for one that describes what they both do, rather than separating them. Currently I’m saying that one of the things they do is look at the effects of large scale social change on both populations and individuals.
Fantasy tends to look to the past, and science fiction to the future, but what is common to many of the stories is change: huge societal upheaval.
“My first two novels and Skins Folk all had the Warner aspect label on the spine and were clearly marketed as genre, but the last two were not (even before Warner became Hachette and dropped its aspect imprint). In the New Moon’s Arms, I wanted to write a book with a more conventional, straightforward plot. In some ways, it’s also a book about smaller dilemma: its one person and the changes she need to make in her life, and the larger socioeconomic stuff is backgrounded. It’s different from what I usually do, so I worry how my usual readers will respond. But I’m contents with the book. When I’m speaking to the audiences and I say, ‘this is a book in which menopause is magic, ‘every female in that audience goes ‘yeah!’
(The damned thing needs some magic.)
“Blackheart Man is set in the Caribbean with an alternate fantastical history, if I can do that- I’ll find out if I can do that! And I’m still doing the research for the third book I owe my publisher. I think the one is going to be set in late 19th-century Toronto. I know is going to involve cross-dressing, tightrope walking and Zulu warriors, but other than that I don’t really have a plot yet!
“At first I never thought I could get up to full book length and write the ninety- or hundred-thousand words the science fiction community expects, but I’ve gotten there. In 2005 I discovered that on top of my fibromyalgia, I also have attention deficit disorder and a learning disorder, which explains why it’s been so difficult to stay on track with writing and why I feel overwhelmed all the time. After the cognitive testing, the psychologist sat me down and said, ‘you have a nonverbal learning disorder.’ Apparently, some doctors consider it to be in the autistics spectrum. I said, ‘Oh! You mean I’m a science fiction fan. I knew that. It’s the other stuff that’s worrying me.’
“At least the diagnosis confirms that I’m not lazy, mad, or bad. Well, maybe mad, but it means I don’t have to beat myself up anymore. I’m medicated for what can be medicated. It’s no easier to write, but I’m beginning to understand my own creative process. It’s been good to recover that ability. The first draft of The New Moons Arms I wrote from my memory of how to write a book. It felt like I was wearing a blindfold and oven mitts. I couldn’t see into it. And my first ‘final’ draft was like lumpy oatmeal that pine cones had fallen into- I had to change all of it!
“I don’t think of it as being ill; it’s just like needing glasses. Anyone can have problems with focus or organization at stressful points in their lives, but mine had always been there and were getting worse. When you move from job with a structured environment and became a freelancer. You have to organize your own life. And there I was with undiagnosed cognitive challenge around doing that very thing. It was hopeless! It’s much better now. Picking up a history book and reading it all the way through without falling asleep or skipping pages- I don’t think I’d ever done that until I went on medication.
“I can write whatever I want, but I have to do my research like anybody else. Sometimes I write from a black perspective, sometimes from a Hindu Canadian perspective, and so on; whatever the story seems to require.(I live just up the street from the Chinese Canadian Mennonite church- I love my city!) the new book was hard because I had to write a character I didn’t like very much. In the first draft I think I went too far with the didn’t like, and then I tried to make her too nice; it went back and forth. I had to give her characteristics that showed the human inside. Her sense of humour was, I think, her saving grace. Every so often she would listen to herself and go, ‘whoo that was asinine!’
“Sometimes I have this ambition that I’m going to work on two novels at a time. I’m still trying, but… the word I’ve used the most these past years is ‘overwhelmed’. I haven’t been able to do it so far. I still have high hopes, but usually what I end up doing is writing one book while researching the other. And that’s what I’m doing bow with Blackhearts Man and the unnamed novel to come.
“I usually can’t afford to travel for my research, but I take advantage of invitations. That was one of the things Jim morrow did for me when I was working on Salt Roads, which was my thesis for my master’s degree? (It was very difficult, but it was a lot of fun. When I graduated, I sent around an email, saying ‘call me master.’) I cannot sing Jim’s praises enough.
I was curious about his novel-in-progress, The Last Witch Finder, so he let me see the manuscript. So then I was reading his novel while he was reading mine. We were trading information back and forth: he was making me work really hard at getting my setting right and making my prose sing, and I was trying to help him get more layered with some of his emotional tone. He kept saying, ‘your settings aren’t coming alive yet.’ I could sort of fake my way through the feel of Haiti, having lived in the Caribbean, but France was just not working, never mind 4th century Egypt. And he said ‘you have a book coming out in translation in French, don’t you?’ it turned out we shared the same French publisher. Jim told the folks who run the science fiction festival Utopiales in Nantes, France, that I had a book about to come out in French. That got them interested in inviting me. So I went to Utopiales in Nantes, which just happens to be where one of my main characters was born. And I had a day and a Half in Paris. At the opening of the festival I had no idea how I was getting to Paris or where I was going to stay. (I think I had enough money for the train, but not for too much else.) At Utopiales I met Kris Kathryn Rusch for the first time. I mentioned that I didn’t know where I was going to stay when I got to Paris, and she said, ‘I’m going to Paris after this.
Why don’t you stay with me?’ the Van Gelders, who were in Paris at the same time, bought me dinner one night. People in this community can be so generous.
And Paris and Nantes were just amazing. So when I can, I take advantage of where I’m going to be to do research there.
“One gift of writing for science fiction readers is that they love to be challenged. We’re all such knowledge geeks, so often all you have to do is ask for information you need. And even outside the community- for The New Moon’s Arm I had some questions about what a paramedic who responded had never even read my work; his brother reads my blog, and this man walked me through, line by line, how the scene might go.
“When I was working on The Salt Roads, I wanted to reproduce one of Baudelaire’s poems. I could read the French, but I wasn’t up to doing the translation and the translation I was finding weren’t wowing me. I found two specialist in translating Baudelaire, contacted them both, and one of them translated the poem for me just because I asked. That’s golden- you can’t ever repay that.
“I can sit in my chair and do my research a lot of the time, just because people are so kind. Sometimes it is so much fun to find stuff out; I have to make myself not load the story down with cool facts. I just have to tell myself, ‘for this story, people won’t care what type of underwear prostitutes in the 19th-century France were wearing.’ I know how much you paid for certain sex acts in 14th century Alexandria! You have to just hold that kind of knowledge in your secret heart and only put in what the story needs.
“One more thing about The Salt Roads. Out of the blue, I got an email from Kim Antieau. I knew she was a writer. But I didn’t know she was a librarian as well. She said, ‘I work for a library in DC, and I bought The Salt Roads for our library. I want you to know that someone has issued a challenge to the book- they would like it banned. I wanted to tell you, because it always gives me a lift when someone wants to censor one of my books. And I just want to give you the opportunity to respond.’ So I wrote my response to the librarians, and they ended up keeping the book. The women said The Salt Road was ‘filth, by anyone’s description.’ I thought, ‘well, yeah, and your problem with that is?’ Then she said she didn’t believe that women, and especially black women, acted in so depraved a manner, and in brackets she wrote ‘page 180.’
“A little after that, I was in Barbados speaking at the university of the west Indies, and during one of my talks we got to talking about self-censorship within the community. I gave the example of that women (who I’m pretty sure was black) trying to suppress my book, and I started to describe the scene she didn’t like. Then I thought, ‘but people were bullying the book and opening it to page 180. and I thought,’she’s done me a favour.’
“It was my friend Uppinder Mehan who came up with the idea for So Long been Dreaming: Post Colonial Science Fiction and Fantasy, the anthology we co-edited. Years ago, when I first met Uppinder, he told me had an essay coming out in foundation journal about challenges faced by writers from India writing Science Fiction and Fantasy, where so many of the tropes are European. Uppinder’s an academic, not a fiction writer, but there was a lot in that essay that fascinated me and that actually informed the writing of Midnight Robber, where I ended up speaking specifying about language and what happens when you come from a culture that’s been under the thumb of colonialism for hundreds of years. What happens to language under those circumstances, and what happens when culture becomes free? That’s a lot of what Midnight Robber is about. I played with what would happen if you took that already stolen tongue- at first it’s an imposed tongue- and then you steal it and change it and make it yours.
“I didn’t discover that I was supposed to go on my latest book tour with Octavia Butler until the day after she died. When my editor called me she was in tears, I was in tears, and we decided my tour events would include tributes to Octavia. And the Carl Brandon society (I’m on the advisory board) is doing fundraising to start an Octavia e. Butler scholarship to send a student writer of colour to one of the clarions every year. There are usually only one or two students of colour. When someone is a token of any group in that no one else understands their experience or outlook on the world. Sometimes people in the group become very committed to vehemently denying that experience and discrediting that person at every turn. When you’re 19 people living cheek by jowl for six weeks, hostility can spill out of the critique sessions into your everyday. The lone person can be outnumbered and without allies. That’s no way to live for six weeks. The clarions are our allies in this. They’re doing their own work on diversity and group dynamics. If the CBS can increase the numbers of clarionites from among our communities’ interest, I think that’s all to the good. The SF community has been very supportive of the CBS. There are people who get bogged down in denial and defensiveness, but even that’s okay. It leads to discussion and that’s what we’re here to foster.
“The scholarship is different from the awards. We had the first Carl Brandon Society parallax award last year. It’s for science fantasy, whatever, that deals with race and ethnicity, and it can be written by anybody of any race or ethnicity – people keep getting that wrong! Then there’s the CBS kindred award for science fiction fantasy by a writer of colour. And that means all communities colour (some people assume it only means black). Last year the talented Pam Knowles was the administer, and I helped, because I worked for eight years running art juries. It was a lot of work. We were exhausted by the end of it. The CBS definitely needs more volunteers of any stripes.
“It feels nowadays that I’m reading more fiction from students than I’m reading published fiction. It actually teaches me a lot about writing, because when I try to explain why I think something is or isn’t working, I discover things myself. It can also be really frustrating. I recently had a short contract for a job where I was reading slush, about 700 short fiction submissions in a brief time. I began to see that there are very distinct patterns in what doesn’t work- or doesn’t work for me. I got on my blog and wrote down a list of anything that anybody can call a rule in writing you can break successfully, so everything I say is a lie! But I came up with about 25 warning signals.
“That’s been change, that ability to step back from the story, and even to some extent from my own writing, a little bit more than I used to. It’s not so risky anymore. If I’ve written something that’s not working, I don’t feel I’m a bad person. And people who point out to me what they see not working are, for the most part, not trying to destroy my ego; they’re trying to help. So I’ve become less defensive about it and more able to do it for myself.
 “At a conference in Antigua, Steve Barnes and I got to talking about writing. Steve and I have very different approaches to the world, but we discovered that though we might take different roads, we often end up similar places. He said, ‘I’m teaching a writing workshop here. Would you come and be a respondent to what I have to say?’ He wanted people to get a sense of multiple ways to come at story making. So we did that. He would talk about his approach to a particular concept, and I would describe mine. We went back and forth a few times, and then he suddenly looked at me and said, ‘You think kinetically, not in terms of visual or audio.’ I do, but few people recognize that! He’s very perceptive guy. And yes, I think of story in terms of shape and movement. Like music or film, fiction is a time-based art: it’s four-dimensional. It is an artificial construct that has to hold together, and it has to change over time. I’ve been saying these recently when I teach. Some people understand what I say, and some just give me that look!”
- Nalo Hopkinson
Article from Locus – The magazine of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Field
June 2007 |
