Today it gives the Speculative Fiction Showcase great pleasure to interview J.S. Breukelaar, whose novel The Bridge debuts on June 22, 2021.
The Bridge is your latest book for Meerkat Press. What, if
any connection does it have to your previous books?
None really. It’s a whole new world, new characters. It is
set in a world I’ve used in short stories, though, like “Rogues Bay, 3013” in my
collection, Collision.
Is your work science fiction or horror and does the
distinction matter?
I think that distinctions matter, sometimes. Not for
marketing, but for a writer to know what kinds of expectations they need to
unsettle, boundaries they might like to push, walls to pull down and rebuild. I
mean that’s not for everyone. And sometimes it’s not for me. Other times I like
to know what rules I’m breaking, and I like to be conscious of why. The Bridge
is a darkly fantastic novel with elements of both science fiction and monstrous
horror.
What do you do first when you set out to write a book or a
short story?
I write it. I mean, I really do. I just write it. Clean up
the mess later.
With The Bridge, tell us about the world in which it is set.
Is it the present or the future?
The Bridge is set in a parallel multiverse, a world within
ours in which time and place are familiar yet strange. So it’s earth populated
by humans and other animals, but in a present time in which two important
things have already occurred: huge advances in AI-human interfaces, and the
very real presence of witches.
The blurb says that Meera and her twin sister are Mades -
hybrid women bred by the Father in his Blood Temple cult. In what sense are
they hybrids?
They’re bred in a cult by the Father whose agenda is to
create human beings with no need of women. So he’s coded certain behaviours and
restraints and genetic modifications into a neural mesh that he implants into
female embryos in vitro. The foetus is gestated in a human surrogate, but the
Father hopes to one day dispense with that as well. Once born the infants are
raised in the cult, made to love the Father as a kind of god in order to atone
for what he sees as woman’s original sin. The Mades look like human females
with all the diversity and variation you’d expect, but within three important
constraints. 1 - The Father’s Forever Code, which is basically an Asimovian
compliance protocol, is in their brain regulating their imaginations and
memories. 2 - They can’t reproduce—they are genetically modified to have no
fallopian tubes. 3 - They don’t live very long. Meera and Kai are different
though, in ways that become apparent in the novel, and which they have to learn
to deal with. And live, or die, with.
Tell us more about the Father...
He’s crazy and dangerous as hell. But he’s more than that,
in Faustian ways that intersect with Narn and her two witchy sisters.
Who is Narn, the “mysterious healer and storyteller”?
She’s an ancient being, born of blood and pain and darkness,
one of three sisters based on the three Furies of Greek myth. To get by she’s
assumed the disguise of a witch, and a healer employed by the Father to ensure
the survival of the Mades, but she’s really so much more. A Goddess, really.
She and her sister Mag help Meera escape and raise her in a remote lair haunted
by Meera’s dead sister Kai. But Narn is haunted by her own losses, and guilt
and hunger for revenge.
The story refers to a bridge between worlds, and what sounds
like a threatening afterlife. How does the supernatural element haunt the main
characters?
Well, in ways that I hope collide with the science fiction
element—the monstrous being of the three sisters, Narn, Mag and Tiff, their
long journey from subterranean hell to hell on earth, and Meera’s refusal to
let her dead twin go, causing Kai to come back, and raise a third kind of hell.
And more too, but you have to read the book to find out.
How do you combine your day job - teaching literature and
writing - with the writing itself?
Like everyone else. It’s a nightmare. A daily juggle. A
daily sense of not ever getting enough done.
Your short story collection Collision: Stories was a Shirley
Jackson Award finalist, and received the Aurealis Award for Best Collection,
2019, and the Ditmar Award for Best Collection, 2019; and your short fiction
has appeared in many magazines. What challenges does writing short fiction
present as opposed to novels?
I love them both, and they each come with different
challenges. I love plotting—great for short stories; research not so much so
that’s always a challenge for longer form works. But balancing simplicity and
complexity in short stories is a constant challenge. Writing short stories is
unforgiving, but intensely and immediately euphoric. Writing novels is just a
ridiculous thing to do, but I’m never happier than when I’ve got one on the go.
With short stories it’s all about the ending. With novels it’s the beginning—how
and what you conceive—and the rest takes care of itself.
You teach Writing the Weird. Tell us about that...
It’s a course that’s
become kind of iconic, thanks to the support of LitReactor.com over the years.
It’s a four-week intensive where students get a lecture and a writing exercise
each week, incrementally building on creating a weird short story that many of
them go on to publish. Students come to weird fiction with different sets of expectations—some
want to dive more into Bizarro (yup, still a thing); others into magic realism,
or slipstream, or twisted fairy tales, or quiet horror or futurism. I welcome
all comers, and we work on walking that unsettling tightrope in which the
familiar is made strange and there is no exit from the lip of the abyss because
you don’t want there to be.
The Bridge is due to appear in June. What are you working on
next?
I’m working on a collaborative novella with Angela Slatter,
and another collection of short fiction. A feel a novel coming on though, so I
need both of those projects wrapped by midyear.
With the global pandemic putting paid to many face-to-face
events, have you been to any of the online conventions and courses?
Yes, I was a guest panellist at The Outer Dark Symposium of
the Greater Weird last year. I haven’t figured out what I’ll attend this year,
but hopefully Conflux here in Australia in October. Meerkat Press will be
hosting a virtual double launch for The Bridge, and Ariadne, I love You, the
new novella out from the crazy-talented Joseph Ashley Smith, in early July, and
I’m so excited for that.
As a writer, has the pandemic had any effect on your
writing, or reading?
Hugely. Like many other authors, I’ve seen a drop in my
productivity. Anxiety and even despair not only over the pandemic but world
events has made it hard to focus, to dig into creative depths that just haven’t
seemed to be there. I hope that changes this year. I feel it will for so many
of us. World events have just been too distracting, too demanding of the often
fragile, fleeting mental and emotion energies of us writers, both those of us
who don’t and those who have day jobs like mine, which became remote for most
of last year. So I was running all my classes on Zoom from my home, and
grateful as I was to have a job, it was hugely invasive of my mental and
physical space. And hugely problematic for students too.
As for reading, again, not so much, because… Netflix. I
pretty much just surrendered to Tiger King and Schitts Creek and Better Call
Saul and I May Destroy You . . . and YouTube Yoga classes. I do have to read
for work though, so I kept up with that. I read and blurbed a heartstopping new
collection by Michael Cisco, Seb Doubinsky’s sharp new horror novella, Joseph
Ashley Smith’s Australian Gothic. I read Angela Slatter’s astonishingly haunting
and lush All the Murmuring Bones, Stephen King’s The Stand (don’t judge me),
Silvia Moreno Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, Laura Mauro’s Sing Your Sadness Deep,
Helen Marshall’s The Migration, which is so smart and gorgeous. Kaaron Warren’s
Into Bones Like Oil, which I still dream about. I subscribed to Black Static
Magazine which kept me going with lovely slim paperbacks of beautifully dark
short fiction. And I found online fiction like on The Dark Magazine and Apex kept
my brain from totally atrophying. But mainly Schitts Creek, which I watched from
start to finish three times. It probably saved my life.
What do you like to read, and are there any books you
especially enjoy?
Everything and anything. Shirley Jackson. William Gibson.
Brian Evenson, Colson Whitehead, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Kathe Koja, Sarah
Langan, Stephen Graham Jones. Can I stop now?
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About J.S. Breukelaar:
J.S. Breukelaar is the author of Collision: Stories, a 2019 Shirley Jackson Award finalist, and winner of the 2019 Aurealis and Ditmar Awards. Previous novels include Aletheia and American Monster. Her short fiction has appeared in the Dark Magazine, Tiny Nightmares, Black Static, Gamut, Unnerving, Lightspeed, Lamplight, Juked, in Year’s Best Horror and Fantasy 2019 and elsewhere. She currently lives in Sydney, Australia, where she teaches writing and literature, and is at work on a new collection of short stories and a novella. You can find her at thelivingsuitcase.com and on Twitter and elsewhere @jsbreukelaar.
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