Interviewing Sylvia Spruck Wrigley

A few weeks ago, I discovered that it was a lot of fun to hand people some casual interview questions and see what they had to say. Sylvia Spruck Wrigley kindly responded to the query I circulated to some writers asking if they wanted to play along. She’s a writer currently spending a lot of her time in Wales, and was nominated for the short story Nebula award (along with me) in 2013.

By happy and unplanned coincidence, her new novella, Domnall and the Borrowed Child just came out through Tor’s new novella line. It’s her longest piece of published work to date.

Thanks again, Sylvia, for the interview!

1. The first thing that appears on your website is a quote from The Catcher in the Rye, ending with “I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.” Why that quote?

Self-promotion is hard. There’s this whole thing about even having a home page, that I have to tell the world about myself and hope that they care. I struggled with what to say, because I have this super confusing background and if I start, then it’s going to go on a bit. I can’t even say “I’m from [country]” or something simple like that. To be honest, I wrote a lot of long intros and then I just couldn’t face it. I remembered the start of The Catcher in the Rye; I’ve always loved Holden Caulfield’s voice. And he just really encapsulated how I felt about how to tackle this problem. I figure JD Salinger probably had the same problem, how to start this novel. So I decided to steal that introduction for my own page.

 

In the meantime, I’ve ended up putting a three-sentence bio on the website after all which does manage to give a brief version of where I am from…so I guess it’s rather silly now. A legacy quote.

2. Even today when being online makes exchange a lot easier, a lot of excellent British writers are unknown in America. Have you found it difficult to pass that cultural border?

Well, for writers starting out, I think a real issue is that writers who are not in the US miss out on a lot of events. The amount of education and business that happens at cons, or through introductions that happened at a con, is really a bit frightening. I don’t think you have to show up to break through but my own experience is that it does make things a lot easier, especially when it comes to making connections and finding out about invite-only anthologies. And you get this great support network of other writers — I always feel super motivated after attending a con. I know a few people who attend a couple of cons a year and then work off that energy.

 

This is why I feel really strongly that Worldcon should be held outside of the US every three years. Honestly, I think for something with “World” in the name, it’s not unreasonable to ask that the US limit itself to hosting 66% of the cons. I know not everyone can attend if it is held abroad. But when you compare that to the number of interesting authors who have *never* attended because it quite frankly is never local to them, it doesn’t seem that much to ask that the hosting locations are spread out a bit more.

 

As of right now, 7 of the 74 WorldCons have been held outside North America. So I’m really excited about Helsinki and hopeful for Dublin the year after that.

3. Your recent Nebula Award-nominated story “Alive, Alive Oh” is about home and displacement, a theme I also saw in Matthew Kressel’s nominated story from the same year, “The Sounds of Old Earth.” What about those themes appeals to you? Do you think they have particular traction at this moment in western culture?

I believe there’s a lot more movement between countries (and cultures) than there was even 50 years ago. And really, it comes down to a lot more travel and emigration in the West than there was. It’s not so rare any more to know someone who ended up moving to South America or Thailand or India. When I was a kid, it was this huge big thing that I went to school in two countries. Immigration involved people moving to the US, middle-class white Americans didn’t leave, or at least not more than a summer. As a result, home, displacement and belonging have become important themes that people are exploring. My son holds German and American passports but has never lived in either country, has never had that sense of belonging to a place (or even of a place belonging to him). I think when I was a kid in a similar situation, everyone in both countries was kind of amazed by it. Now, it’s not such a big deal.

4. What is the most irritating mistake about Wales and/or the Welsh that you see in American media?

Confusing Wales with England. I know that sounds silly but I get it all the time. Seriously, like I’ll say “I live in Wales,” and people will ask me what it’s like living in England, and whether I like it there. There’s this total disconnect.

 

I do like England, as it happens, but Wales is very different. Not just the accent, in attitude and economics and a million small things. There’s a lot that I love, like Welsh women are much more likely to say “You are being an idiot” to a man who is being an idiot than anywhere else I’ve ever lived. There doesn’t seem to be this deep-rooted belief that women have to be nicer than men when it comes to idiots.

5. What work of yours should readers be looking for, and what do you have coming up?

My most recent publication is a reprint, Space Travel Loses Its Allure When You’ve Lost Your Moon Cup in the current issue of Flash Fiction Online. I love this story because menstruation in space is just really not a well-covered subject in science fiction. But this publication of it is super special because includes a rap song, which I commissioned off of Fiverr late one night after too much wine. Rsonic had an ad on Fiverr, saying he’d write a rap song about any subject. The guy was this black, good-looking American Marine combat veteran and I thought he was going to tell me to go to hell when I showed him the story. He totally rose to the challenge and wrote a rap song without flinching. Best five dollars I’ve ever spent.

 

I’m also super excited about what’s coming up. Domnall and the Borrowed Child is a traditional fairy tale based in Scotland coming out on the 10th of November as a part of Tor.com’s new novella imprint. This is my first longer publication and it’s part of a story I’ve been working on for ten years. The audio version is amazing – Tor have chosen a narrator with a great mid-atlantic accent. He grew up in Ireland and England but spent his adult life in the US, so I spent my first listen wondering where’s he from? before finally realising that he probably sounds a lot like me. He calls it hybrid, which sounds a lot nicer than “all over the place”.

Source: Rachel Swirsky’s blog

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2 Responses to Interviewing Sylvia Spruck Wrigley

  1. 1
    Tamme says:

    Really saddened by her use of ableist language

  2. 2
    delurking says:

    I love Sylvia Spruck Wigley’s work.

    Thanks for posting this!