Caitlín R. Kiernan’s broad and varied body of work pushes the boundaries of established classifications for literature. Her provocative stories move easily among genres and defy traditional constructs of style and content. Her most noted works Silk and Thread have garnered her several nominations and awards including Best First Novel from the International Horror Guild. Her newest books, Murder of Angels, Daughter of Hounds, and the 2009 release The Red Tree continue to test the limits of fiction as well as the comfort zone of the reader. Information on her short stories, novels, and her erotic digest Sirenia can be found on the web at www.caitlinrkiernan.com.
Reflections Edge: As a writer with a vast and varied body of work, what can one expect when they sit down to read, The Red Tree?
Caitlín R. Kiernan: In a lot of ways, The Red Tree is new territory for me. For one thing, it’s the first time I’ve written a first-person narrative at novel length, and it’s certainly more deeply autobiographical than any of my earlier novels. But, I feel like I’m not really answering your question. In The Red Tree I have tried to create the sort of novel that I most like to read. Which is to say, one with many, many layers and several possible interpretations. You can call it horror if you like, or a mystery, or a psychological thriller, or dark fantasy, or weird fiction. In the end, The Red Tree is what it is, and I really have very little interest in what convenient box people decide to drop it into. I set out to build a novel that is, aside from being a story, a sort of puzzle. It feels to be a bit like a Russian babooshka dolls, what with one narrative set inside another set inside another and so forth. I want readers to sweat over this one. I think some will be surprised at how different this novel is from my earlier books. Then again, I feel like it was someplace I was headed all along. It just took me a while to become a good enough writer to try to accomplish. I would say that The Red Tree is a ghost story, in the broadest possible sense, in that it’s a novel about all the ways a woman can be haunted, and it’s also a novel that fits into the Gothic tradition of “secret histories.”
RE: In The Red Tree, you take a different approach with the protagonist than your previous books. What was your reasoning for that?
Kiernan: I understood from the very beginning that if the novel was going to work the way I wanted it to work, I had to immerse the reader in the mind of the narrator as deeply as possible. I had to find a certain degree of immediacy and intimacy. Sarah Crowe, my protagonist, is the narrator, and so I chose not only the first-person narrative, but a journal format. Here is a woman who is a novelist, and she’s used to writing things for other people to read, but these are her most private thoughts, and she’s writing them down for no one but herself, so she knows that she can be brutally honest. Even the most honest novelists self censor, for reason or another, no matter how much they might claim otherwise. They have to, for practical market concerns, and even for artistic purposes. But, here I give Sarah the chance to speak freely, as this is a manuscript that she intends no one else to ever read. And yet, as it turns out, other people will come to read it, which I think serves as a lesson to myself about how private documents aren’t necessarily private. And, as I’ve said, this is the most autobiographical I’ve ever been in a novel. In a sense, Sarah Crowe became a sort of avatar allowing me to work though some very nasty personal issues I was struggling with as I wrote the book, and also issues I’ve been struggling with all my life. That’s not to say that there’s anything like a perfect one-to-one correspondence between what she says and feels and what I think on any given subject. But there’s an awful lot of me in her. There’s always an awful lot of me in all my characters. I think that’s something that authors have to do, as we are each locked inside our own minds and can never truly know another mind. But, with Sarah Crowe I know I’ve gone deeper than before. It was kind of scary, truthfully.
RE: Where did you get the inspiration for The Red Tree?
Kiernan: In the summer of 2006, before I actually moved to Rhode Island, my partner and I were spending a month in a cottage south of Providence. We did a lot of exploring of some of the more remote places in the state. On one of our long hikes, we were in Exeter, in the woods just south of the Grange Hall and Chestnut Hill Baptist Church. Back in the late 19th Century there was a sort of “vampire” hysteria in Rhode Island, and one of the most infamous cases, that of a tuberculosis victim named Mercy Brown, took place in the church’s cemetery. So, in a sense, we were already predisposed to be spooked by something. And we happened to come across this truly gigantic oak tree, and all about the base of the tree there were what seemed to us almost like offerings. Old wine bottles, dolls, ceramic figurines, moldering books, candle stubs, and so on. And it gave us both a bit of the shivers. It felt as though we’d come upon a very private and, in some sense, sacred place. We didn’t stay long. We didn’t even take any photographs, and have never been back. I filed the tree away in the back of my mind, the way I do with pretty much everything, because you never know what will become story fodder. Two years later, in the spring of 2008, the tree came back to me, as I began playing with the idea of a novel about vampirism and Rhode Island folklore and a malevolent piece of land. So, that was the inspiration for The Red Tree.
RE: The experience of the book extends beyond the book itself and to your website’s “Evidence” page. What made you decide to develop these ancillary items?
Kiernan: We were looking for an interesting way to promote the book. I think it all started with me buying a 1941 Royal typewriter, of the exact make and model as the one that Sarah Crowe finds in The Red Tree, the one in which she finds an unfinished page of an unfinished book about legends surrounding the old farm where she’s living. One night, I typed that page out, creating a facsimile of the page from my book, and suddenly I knew I wanted to see other artifacts from the book. So I began gathering them together for the website, which is what you will find under “evidence.” We’re still adding to it, actually. And I think it’s yet another means of giving the novel that extra sense of depth, of making it more real. And it’s been fun, and I rarely ever find promotional work on a book fun.
RE: You also produce a regular digest called Sirenia that contains works of weird erotica. Can you explain what is meant by “weird erotica”?
Kiernan: Well, that can tend to depend on the story or vignette in question. Some people have characterized it as “tentacle porn,” of the Japanese hentai variety. But it isn’t that, at all. Basically, I’d been avoiding erotica for years. Though, looking back at a lot of my early work, there’s a lot more erotic elements than I realized at the time. Which is what happens, I suppose, when a writer consciously suppresses something she actually wants or needs to be writing about. In 2005, I talked with Subterranean Press about doing a small book of erotic vignettes, which all started with the question, if I wrote erotica, what would it be like? The result was a book called Frog Toes and Tentacles, which was very successful. There was a follow-up volume, Tales from the Woeful Platypus, and a third volume will be published next year, Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart. Anyway, the success of FT&T had several results. Most importantly, it left me wanting to write much more erotica in the same vein, which is how Sirenia Digest was started, as a venue for fiction I didn’t believe I could find any other market for. What is my erotica like? I am really lousy at answering that sort of question. I can say it’s like a blend of Anaïs Nin, Angela Carter, and H. P. Lovecraft, but that seems like a cheat. It’s erotica that explores the Other that concerns so much of weird fiction, or horror, or the Gothic, or dark fantasy, or whatever you want to call it. Hence, “weird erotica.” I let myself experiment and explore subjects that might at first make me flinch. Sirenia Digest is me forcing myself never to flinch. And I have found the experience extremely liberating, and discovered that it has had an effect on the material I write outside the digest, the short stories and novels. There’s a powerful erotic element to The Red Tree, for example, that never would have happened if I’d not first begun writing these weirdly erotic vignettes.
RE: You work with an artist to develop Sirenia Digest and you have also worked on other comics/graphic novels including a series with Neil Gaiman. How does writing for graphic mediums vary from writing pure prose?
Kiernan: Honestly, I love working in different mediums. Even if it’s only to learn I’m not particularly suited for that medium. Comics, for example. I was incredibly lucky, early in my career, to be handed The Dreaming, which I wrote for DC/Vertigo, and Neil served as my consultant on. A lot of it, I look back and see I could have done much, much better. But here and there is a gem, an issue I would still say is among my best work. The Dreaming #56, for example, a story about Edgar Allan Poe’s cat saving him from “The Conqueror Worm.” Or The Dreaming #33, “Dream Below,” which allowed me to work with one of my comic’s heroes, John Totleben, to create a world of mere-creatures. One of the things I love doing is working with graphic artists, and that was certainly one of the best parts of my comics work. People like Dave McKean, who did all my covers, and really too many incredible artists to name. As for how it’s different, writing for comics vs. short stories or novels . . . I think I was only just figuring that out when the series ended. You have to trust the artist, and you have to come to understand that the images are integral, that they’re not just there to illuminate or complement your writing. A good comic script has more in common with a screenplay for a film than with a novel.
RE: Your work has been compared to H. P. Lovecraft. How do you feel about that?
Kiernan: I think a more interesting question is how Lovecraft would have felt? I think he’d have been horrified. Given his prudishness and particular set of hang ups, I think my being seen as someone who’s carrying on something he began would have appalled the poor fellow. But, yeah, the comparison is there. I’ve seen myself referred to as “Lovecraft’s spiritual granddaughter” and so forth. How does it make me feel? Well, on many levels, I do adore Lovecraft, and he was an important formative influence on my work. So, there’s no way that I can’t see the comparison as flattering, so long as people understand I never set out to be perceived that way, and so long as they don’t expect those awful Lovecraft pastiches from me. I am my own writer, with my own voice, even if it is a voice that has been shaped by many, many writers I’ve read. For all the weaknesses of Lovecraft’s prose—and it’s impossible to be objective and not see those warts—his imagination was brilliant, and he fashioned one of the most powerful cosmologies in fantasy and science fiction. And he meant for others to expand upon it. The trick is to do that, expand Lovecraft’s universe and also be true to my own. I think it’s really more about comprehending his Cosmicism, his view of the universe as a place ultimately, at best, indifferent to human life. I think that’s what most attracts me to his prose, more than the “mythos” elements, though I have, of course, written “mythos” tales.
RE: While the market is constantly trying to put writers into easily identifiable genres, you seem to challenge those categorizations both through your hard to define works and your open objection to being identified as a horror writer. Do you feel that genre classifications limit writers?
Kiernan: Categories are great things, so long as they are seen as tools, and not as an end unto themselves. And so long as it’s understood by all parties involved—publishers, writers, editors, readers—that they are mutable and artificial categories. So long as they do not become restrictive. But they do become restrictive, and that can be disastrous for an author who wants to branch out into areas perceived as lying beyond whichever category they’ve been dropped into. In my own case, I know that most readers, and publishers, tend to think of me as a “horror” author, though I’m not, and I have never thought of myself that way. I’ve written dark fiction, yes, but also stories that get boxed as science fiction, erotica, sword-and-sorcery fantasy, slipstream, urban fantasy, noir, steampunk, dark fantasy, and so on and so forth. But, despite this, on a few occasions I’ve encountered reviewers or editors who can’t see me as anything more than a horror writer. That’s this reputation I’ve garnered, whether it’s accurate or not, and it can hold you back. You might not get invited to submit to an anthology because of it, or it determines where your books are shelved, and who they’re marketed too, or a reviewer is appalled that you’re attempting “cross genres.” Fuck that. I write what I need to write, and I do my best to get it out there, and to make a living. So, I am not offended at categories, as long as the walls are fluid.
RE: What are you working on now?
Kiernan: Right now I’m getting ready to begin my next novel (for Penguin; NAL/Roc), which I’ve given the working title, Blood Oranges. Likely, it’ll be called something else entirely, but that’s what I’m calling it now. It’s a novel about Outsider art and murder, lycanthropy and psychosis, and really, a novel about an awful lot of things that might seem to have no relation to one another. People will call it a horror novel, or a dark fantasy, and maybe it will be. It’s too early to tell. I do know that it will be something more along the lines of The Red Tree, with the same sort of metafictional component as that novel, than it will be like my earlier novels. I’ll spend at least the next year writing that novel. Also, I’m finishing up editing my next short fiction collection, The Ammonite Violin & Others, which will be released in 2010 by Subterranean Press. And my third collection of erotic vignettes, Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart, which will also be out next year from Subterranean Press. And Sirenia Digest #46 is in the works, so that’s an ongoing concern, Also, I’m about to begin a short story for a science-fiction tale set on Mars, for a young adult book. So…lots. I’m working on lots now. Which is the way it always is with me.
RE: What advice do you have for writers?
Kiernan: Very damn little, truthfully. I do not like giving advice, as it makes me feel responsible for the decisions that others make. I mean, I say do X, and someone does, and they fail, and they say, but Caitlín Kiernan said to do X. I really try to avoid that sort of thing. So…I would say, get the best education you can get, and have a fallback. Most writers will never know any degree of success, so don’t go in thinking this will make you rich, or even serve as a decent day job. Probably, it won’t. Understand that fame and financial success do not necessarily go hand in hand. Write what you know and what you want and need to write, and do not chase market trends. Do not write a book because it’s what’s “hot.” Write books because you need to write them, because you will not be whole unless you write them, because they’re something you have to get out of your system. Read everything you can get your hands on and have time to read. Don’t think workshops and writing classes will make you a better writer, because the only way to really become a better writer is to write, and write, and write. Find a good agent, and get used to rejection slips. See? This is the sort of thing I have, and it’s not cheerful stuff. For most writers, it’s a hard life. Most writers I know never have enough money, and they don’t have health insurance, or life insurance, or own homes, or take fabulous vacations. They’re not rock stars. So, if you do this thing—and I would advise you not to—do it from your heart and from your soul, not from some fantasy that you’ll be the next whoever’s big right now. Because you won’t. And if that’s how you define success, you’ve failed before you’ve begun.