{"id":20582,"date":"2015-11-17T05:40:16","date_gmt":"2015-11-17T13:40:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/2015\/11\/17\/awesome-patreon-carmen-maria-machado\/"},"modified":"2015-11-17T21:54:51","modified_gmt":"2015-11-18T05:54:51","slug":"awesome-patreon-carmen-maria-machado","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=20582","title":{"rendered":"Awesome Patreon: Carmen Maria Machado"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been trying to set up a new series to draw attention to cool Patreons, sort of like John Scalzi\u2019s The Big Idea<\/a> or Mary Robinette\u2019s My Favorite Bit<\/a>, but more haphazard. A couple of weeks ago, I accidentally linked to Carmen Maria Machado\u2019s Patreon<\/a> in advance of when I had everything ready. So\u2013oops.<\/p>\n

If you don\u2019t know what Patreon<\/a> is, it\u2019s a website that matches creators with patrons who help directly support their art. Some patreons are set up by project\u2013for instance, my friend Barry Deutsch receives payments whenever he finishes a new political cartoon. Carmen\u2019s is set-up on a monthly schedule. It\u2019s a cool way for fans to make sure their favorite creators can keep making art.<\/p>\n

Carmen is one of my favorite new writers. She crafts beautiful, accomplished mergings of literary and horror fiction. She describes her own writing as \u201cabout sex, sexual agency, sexual violence, sexual oppression, desire, queerness, the female experience, illness & death, pop culture, hypochondria, the uncanny, the human body & its fragility, storytelling, myths, and fear.\u201d I think she\u2019s a strikingly original, inspiring talent. Last year\u2019s Nebula-nominated novelette, \u201cThe Husband Stitch<\/a>,\u201d mingles immersive, psychological surrealism with campfire horror stories.<\/p>\n

Carmen also agreed to do a short interview with me, which is below. Whether or not you decide to toss a few dollars her way<\/a>, you should definitely check out her beautiful stories.<\/p>\n

I really love your writing. One of the things I find most beautiful about it is the way it seems to wing free from traditional structures, and yet come together in this lovely, unexpected way that still feels satisfying and impactful. How do you approach structure as you write?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Every project is different. Sometimes I start off with a form in mind. Stories of mine like \u201cInventory,\u201d \u201cEspecially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU,\u201d \u201cWe Were Never Alone in Space,\u201d and \u201cHelp Me Follow My Sister into the Land of the Dead\u201d were all born with their shapes intact. I wanted to write projects with certain kinds of forms or formal constraints, and that\u2019s what I did.<\/p>\n

But in \u201cThe Husband Stitch,\u201d for example, the formal elements of the story didn\u2019t come until later drafts. \u201cThe Husband Stitch\u201d was initially just the main narrative\u2014the woman living her life with her husband\u2014and the parts where I tap into other urban legends only came later because I wasn\u2019t satisfied with what I had. I also have another recent story (I don\u2019t want to give many details; it\u2019s on submission now) where I started off thinking about formal constraint and tried a few different ones, but the story really resisted, and so I backed off and wrote it without one.<\/p>\n

Insofar as a story is alive, or at the very least a discrete thing with its own Platonic self, I think the story either absorbs artificial forms or rejects them. I just try to figure out what the story needs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Horror. A lot of us grew up on, and recapitulate, fairy tales \u2014 me, Kat Howard, etc. Another thing I\u2019m excited about in regard to \u201cThe Husband Stitch\u201d is that you play with more unusual, but still culturally significant, narratives. Ghost stories, urban legends. Sofia Samatar and Genevieve Valentine have done a little of that as well, and I\u2019m very intrigued by how it plays out. What about those narratives calls to you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I once read this really great essay<\/a> by the writer Hubert Dade where he talks about being compelled to write horror because life is horror\u2014because we live in a world where people go to schools and shoot children and people kidnap and rape and murder and that he himself has his own fears about his life and what he has and what could be taken away from him. I always assign it to my students when I\u2019m teaching horror because I think it directly addresses a common problem students and other early-in-their-art writers sometimes have, where they\u2019re intrigued by the trappings of horror but are less interested in what makes something actually horrifying. (Lovecraft also addressed this in \u201cSupernatural Horror in Literature<\/a>,\u201d where he separates \u201cfear-literature,\u201d which touches on cosmic dread, from \u201ca type externally similar but psychologically widely different; the literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome.\u201d) They have their characters run from monsters or get cut up all bloody-like or experience ghosts, but there\u2019s no weight behind it, just splatter and gore and roaring.<\/p>\n

I think that good horror always has a metaphorical component of some kind, where the story is touching on real human fear. What does it feel like to not be believed? What does it feel like to be up against something you can\u2019t control or conquer? And so on. You can build any kind of narrative\/world\/trope over top of questions like that, and the story can be horror. (And it can be other genres, too. These are really basic human questions.)<\/p>\n

This is a very long way of saying that horror calls to me because I am at times overwhelmed by life\u2019s many terrors\u2014death, illness, gendered violence, loneliness, well-intentioned evil, wasted time, the power of societal pressures and expectations, and so on\u2014and I find the exploration of that (both in my reading and writing) to be a satisfying way to deal with those emotions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Iowa question. [Note: Carmen Maria Machado and I are both graduates of the Iowa Writers Workshop.] Tell us a thing or two you learned that the rest of us should know.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think I learned any kind of magic advice at Iowa that no one else has heard of, but there was one thing I saw modeled again and again that I really respected: honoring the project, and the writer\u2019s intentions. A good teacher\u2014and a good workshop in general\u2014will be helping the writer make their story the best version of itself, rather than something they themselves would write. This isn\u2019t always simple\u2014sometimes the writer\u2019s intentions are not exactly clear\u2014but trying to get a story to switch genres or attacking it on the grounds of what it\u2019s doing compared to your own fiction\u2019s standards, as opposed to its own standards, is useless to everyone involved. This applies in any direction, whether it\u2019s criticizing a story for not being \u201cgenre enough\u201d (or genre at all), or criticizing it because it contains spaceships or aliens or monsters or fairies. These elements in and of themselves mean nothing; what is the author trying to do<\/em>, and is their story doing that?<\/p>\n

This sort of loops back to the idea of the story\u2019s Platonic self. Lorrie Moore\u2019s \u201cTerrific Mother\u201d (humorous realism) and Kelly Link\u2019s \u201cMagic for Beginners\u201d (liminal & metafictional fantasy) and Alice Sola Kim\u2019s \u201cHwang\u2019s Billion Brilliant Daughters\u201d (science fiction) are all perfect stories that are doing, in my opinion, exactly what they set out to do. Suggesting that they switch genres simply because you dislike or don\u2019t understand one of those genres is ludicrous. I\u2019ve seen this in workshops and writing groups and elsewhere and it\u2019s always very disturbing to me. You might as well criticize a house for not being an apartment complex. Rather: is the house doing a good job of satisfying its own purpose, and if not, what can be done to make it better?<\/p>\n

So, yeah. Ask yourself what the writer is trying to do. Respect the project.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What\u2019s the worst writing advice you\u2019ve received?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWrite what you know.\u201d It\u2019s not that it\u2019s the worst, precisely, just that despite its good intentions (helping young writers ground their narratives in experiences with which they\u2019re emotionally familiar) it\u2019s just very limiting. I think a better version would be \u201cStart with what you know, or what interests you, and move outwards from there. Don\u2019t be afraid.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You get to walk into any horror story or urban legend in any role you want. Who would you be?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Okay, I have thought about this question for, like, half an hour (seriously\u2014I went and made myself a fresh pot of coffee and everything) and I think the answer is \u201cnone\u201d because urban legends and horror stories never exactly turn out happy, well-adjusted, alive people at their ends. But I guess life doesn\u2019t, either? I\u2019ll stick to this role\u2014my own\u2014where I\u2019m reasonably sure that supernatural things don\u2019t actually exist, bring down the number of bad and sad things that can happen to me from \u201cinfinity\u201d to \u201cslightly less than infinity.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Tell me about your Patreon and its goals. What projects are you working on that it will help fund?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Right now, I balance my teaching income (which, as an adjunct, is quite low) with freelancing. The freelancing is great and flexible, but time-consuming. My goal with my Patreon is to be able to replace freelancing projects to free up time for my fiction (which, at the moment, includes a few short stories and a novel project). At just over $100\/month, I was recently able to drop a monthly assignment that\u2019d been taking up about 10 hours\/month. Any new contributions will build toward a second foregone assignment. And if you\u2019re considering contributing: thank you so much! You can email me with any questions about my Patreon or other means of support at carmen dot machado at gmail dot com.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Source: Rachel Swirsky’s blog<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been trying to set up a new series to draw attention to cool Patreons, sort of like John Scalzi\u2019s The Big Idea or Mary Robinette\u2019s My Favorite Bit, but more haphazard. A couple of weeks ago, I accidentally linked … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[171,172,173],"tags":[170],"class_list":["post-20582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews","category-mandolin","category-patreon","tag-rachels-rss-import"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20582"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20582\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20598,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20582\/revisions\/20598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}