Last week I talked about Guy Gavriel Kay reading from his upcoming historical fantasy Children of the Earth and Sky at the World Fantasy Convention 2015 at Saratoga Springs, NY. This week, I continue my account of the weekend’s events and provide a paraphrase of my interview with Charles de Lint.

First, allow me to talk a little bit more about the events on Friday. I had an engaging conversation in the dealer’s room with Russell B. Farr, an editor for Ticonderoga Publications, which is actually based in Australia, not New England. I bought a Year’s Best anthology of Australian fantasy and horror from his table, but got much more in return in the form of a discussion about Southern Hemisphere fantasy fiction.

I asked if there were any authors employing Maori or Aborigine myths Down Under and Russell talked to me about the anxiety and tension that surrounds issues of cultural appropriation when white authors try to use such cultural motifs in their work. There are other schools of thought that favour white authors who employ indigenous myth, because at least this means the stories get out there. However, for all that, not too many indigenous authors are emerging as fantasy writers, although I should think there are at least a few hidden somewhere. It seems to me a pity that these Pacific myths do not receive wider audiences, but the politics surrounding the “mining” or “exploiting” such myths are significant.

When I asked Russel Farr what made Australian fantasy unique, he gave me an interesting reply. Although these things can be hard to pin down, he claimed that there is less of a tendency to set stories in Australia. Some Aussies employ European myths set in European locales and some write about Aussies living abroad in Japan, London, New York, but comparatively rarely in Melbourne, Sydney, Townsville. This could be explained by the Australian gaze being directed outside of the country because of its geographical isolation from the main centres of Anglophone culture, rather than being focused within itself. I found this discussion highly interesting because my MA thesis will deal with fantasy as a globalized form.

Afterwards I spoke with Janeen Webb, who is an Australian fantasy author with a new book called Death at the Blue Elephant. She has studied fantasy academically and told me about the Australian gaze, how news mostly comes from outside the country, rather than from within, and how this shapes the Australian psyche. This outward gaze blends with an inward gaze, creating a complex self-regard that defines the Australian literary sensibility. Webb directed me to a study she helped edit called Aliens and Savages: Fiction, Politics and Prejudice in Australia that I might look into in order to provide a learned footnote for my thesis.

Another thing that happened Friday was a conversation between two giants of the epic fantasy genre: Steven Erikson (pseudonym of Steve Rune Lundin) and Stephen R. Donaldson. It was entertaining to watch the banter between them and their approaches to certain epic fantasy tropes. Erikson notably wrote one of his novels while subsisting on a Canada Council grant. More recently, a scholar has for the first time looked through his collected papers and notebooks, which must be a strange feeling for an author to first experience! An archaeologist for some time, Erikson has gone on various fieldwork excursions, once getting seriously ill on a Mongolian dig after drinking a poorly-prepared goat’s head soup. He was finishing up his 10-book epic fantasy series Malazan at the time and almost couldn’t finish it because of his illness, he said. When he did complete the series that Wikipedia says is the most significant since Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant series, he explained to us that he felt like he had accomplished what he had been set on this earth to do and that it was now over. The feeling of completion lasted a mere few weeks…

…

After this presentation I went to Charles de Lint’s reading of his still in-progress novel The Throwaway Child, a longer adult novel that takes place on a Southwest Indian reserve. After the reading I had the privilege of sitting with Charles de Lint for around 15 minutes next to the fireplace by the registration desk. The following is a paraphrase of that interview.

I asked him my first question: How would you define the social role of the artist, given that so many of your works concern fairies or magical beings interacting with the homeless, the dejected, the marginalized? How do you view your own role in relation to the marginalized? He answered that in his formative years, he was a street kid and that most of the people he knew then were outsiders. He wrote what he knew. Those he knew were musicians and artists, quite like the characters that populate his Newford novels and short stories. He likes to make people realize that everyone has a story.

Having supernatural entities such as fairies, gnomes, ghosts, or pixies interact with marginalized people enables them to have conversations that move the story forward. This is a way around boring the reader with soliloquies. Since these beings are magical, they can appear out of nowhere and such characters can speak to them. It takes the narrative out of these characters’ heads and out into the world.

When I asked what tradition Charles de Lint saw himself as a part of, he talked about the attempts of editors to label his work. He indicated that when his novel Someplace to be Flying came out, he and his editor Terri Windling decided to label it before the markets did, as ‘mythic fiction.’ I was aware of this label from other interviews, but it was interesting to note the relationship between de Lint and Windling, because, as I discovered upon arriving home, her art helped to inspire Dreams Underfoot. I can only imagine the full impact her visual arts have had on de Lint’s fiction.

Talking more about where he would position his own work, and of how he tends to write the endings of his novels, de Lint said that his story arcs don’t tend to follow the arcs of other fantasies. He points to Seanan McGuire as another author who refashions urban myths, of the ‘serial-killer at Make-Out Point’ and ‘suspicious hitchhiker’ variety. Also, he mentioned Alex Bledsoe, whose stories tend to take place in the Appalachians, and the Silver John stories by Manly Wade Wellman. He said he grew up on William Morris, Lord Dunsany, E.R. Eddison, James Branch Caball, and J.R.R. Tolkien–through what I presume included the Ballantine adult fantasy series, which republished many early works of fantasy, as Brian Attebery told me at MythCon this year. Every one of these authors gave me a sense of wonder in a different way, de Lint explained. I could sense in de Lint the younger author, searching among these examples for his own voice and the angle he would adopt on the wondrous, a distinct style he has certainly found in himself.

I then asked a more particular question: what prompted you to include the Mafia subplot in Greenmantle? If you read my review of this book, you might have a sense of the incongruity of the scenes that seem excerpted from Mario Puzzo’s The Godfather or Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas appearing next to a plot that involves a sequel to Lord Dunsany’s classic novel The Blessing of Pan. De Lint replied that he was trying to represent the perception of the Mafia, the mythology of the mob, rather than the real Mafia, who are thugs with no code of honour. He thought the Mafia as mythologized resembled elves–an ‘underground’ culture who you have do favours for and who might act benign or malicious depending on their whim. He liked the idea of having ‘elves’ on one hand and then using the myth of Pan on the other. The interesting story here is that his publisher ACE asked him to take the Mafia subplot out of the book. But Charles de Lint stood by his guns and the scenes involving Tony Valenti and the men coming to kill him were included.

My last question was whether Charles de Lint’s literary agent ever influenced the form of any of his novels. Russ Galen is Charles de Lint’s agent and although he had no amusing stories about him, he did mention that for the Wildings series, Galen made a suggestion to target a YA rather than adult audience. Good agents won’t lay heavy hands over your manuscript, after all. However, de Lint’s answer opens the possibility that this suggestion may have (perhaps) influenced the style of the novel in certain ways, so as to better target a younger audience. I think the relationship between agents and authors is frequently an under-examined one that may present many surprises about the way books are written and marketed.

This concludes the second week of my report on World Fantasy 2015. Next week, I’ll be finishing with a discussion of the fantasy canon and Sunday’s awards ceremony.