‘Short stories are like a quickie,’ she explains. ‘It can be kind of satisfying, but it’s over really fast. While a marathon novel-length session can be tiring and it’s a big commitment. But a novella is just the right amount of time to kind of linger over everything, build a little bit... The novella is the classic length for supernatural stories, for ghost stories. If you’re writing a fantasy novel or a science fiction novel, you need the time and space to do world-building or to build up the logical background of your Middle Earth or whatever it is. And in a horror novel, you have to keep adding the effects over and over, scaring people.’

‘I’ve learned over the years that it’s a form I can do well. Writing at the level of intensity that one can achieve in a novella is much easier at that length. It’ s much harder to maintain that level of intensity in a novel. And in a short story, you don’t have the time to build to it. With a novella you can really focus on character, which is what I like to do’

Does character come before plot when you’re writing, I ask.

‘I can cheat when I’m using mythological templates or a legend or fairy tale, and you’re using that plot. Paul Witcover, another writer and sometime collaborator, said that when people read my books they weren’t reading it for a plot but to find out the correspondences between our world and another world, between one character and another, or between a real-world character and their legendary counterpart.

‘It’s true because that’s what really interests me. Life does not have a plot. We want to impose a plot on it. And the books I tend to be drawn to are not necessarily books that are plot-driven.

‘I feel that plot should emerge from characters. It’s a binary process. A character goes here they have to make a decision to do this or that and until they reach that point they have to make another decision. Yes or no. And so it’s constantly branching, it can go any way. I don’t feel that when you write a book you should know that the character is going to proceed from here to there. Or I might know where she’s going, but I don’t know how she’ll get there.

‘There’s a certain element of surprise I want to keep in the process of writing. Sometimes ideas come to me full-blown. Something seems to be fairly tightly-plotted and I write it that way beginning to end and that’s great. But I like the process too of discovering the world as the character does.

‘Generation Loss (out spring 2007) was probably a more tightly-plotted book than anything I’ve written before, in part because it is a thriller. It was working with a different set of rules. So I felt that I had to educate myself a bit with those rules to know how to proceed. That was challenging. It was good, I learned something technically about how to construct a story. But no, I don’t think it’s ever going to be the thing that interests me most about writing!’

Hand’s engagement with her characters and her skill with the novella is evident in the World Fantasy award-winning Bibliomancy, a limited-edition collection brought out by PS Publishing in 2003. The four novellas include a dark fantasy dealing with rape, revenge and butterflies (‘Cleopatra Brimstone’), a moving account of last rites for Cal, a magnificent counter-cultural artist dying of cancer (‘Pavane for a Prince of the Air’), an homage to writer John Crowley, the art of tattooing and the Tarot in ‘The Least Trumps’. And lastly, a tale inspired by Charles Dickens’ ‘Christmas Carol’ dedicated to Joey Ramone and Sandy Becker, a much-loved, imaginative early-1960s children’s TV host in New York. In October the first three of these tales will be reissued in a new collection, Saffron and Brimstone (M Press), which also includes five short stories ‘Wonderwall’, plus four related pieces in a sequence called ‘The Lost Domain’.

‘Chip Crockett’s Christmas Carol’ was published again by Beccon Press as a stand-alone novel last spring, featuring original illustrations by Judith Clute. Paul Di Filippo in The Washington Post has described this story as ‘a whole generation’s biography’ it certainly had that resonance for me.

Cynical lawyer Brendan is divorced and shares responsibility for an autistic son. His old school friend Tony Maroni contacts him with news that Chip Crockett (ie Sandy Becker) has died. And oh, he’s lost his job and apartment and needs somewhere to stay. Tony is a former member of revered punk band the Maronis, fighting a protracted battle for rights to his own music. Despite his inability to deal with the real’ world, Tony retains his enthusiasm and joi de vivre and in Brendan’s words, a certain integrity’.

Like many shows of the time, programmes were performed live or put on videotapes which were quickly taped over. Sandy Becker’s performances only have a virtual existence in the memories of those who watched him. But rumours of recovered episodes are persistent among nostalgic baby-boomers; it’s something of an urban or suburban myth. Tony Maroni is one who believes that the last Chip Crocket programme a retelling of Dickens’ Christmas tale still exists and is about to be shown.

I come from the Bronx myself, just south of Elizabeth Hand’s childhood home in Yonkers. ‘Chip Crockett’ invoked my own memories of the world of Sandy’s Hour. Nothing was swinging yet in the early 60s. This was the arse-end of the 50s, a time of rigid conformity and fear of nuclear war. We both have memories of shelter drills’ in schools where you crouched in the corridors, close to literally kissing your ass goodbye’.

In an interview with Nick Gevers (Redsine 7, 1/2002) Liz says that her cold-war childhood also influenced the apocalyptic themes of her fiction. This is especially true with her millennial’ 1997 novel, Glimmering. First written as near-future, its vision of an era just behind us still sounds a very contemporary note. When a character says that with the Glimmering’ a deadly version of the Northern Lights caused by heavy atmospheric pollution writers and artists declared there is no point in writing or creating, I was reminded of similar post-9/11 declarations. On her website Liz says she also stopped writing for a while after 9/11. Why was that?

‘A lot of people experienced that. It was just the terrible shock. I felt completely unworthy of coming up with any response to it. Not that I felt I needed to write a response, but I just felt like I couldn’t say anything for a while.

‘Also, I felt this very creepy sensation that when I wrote Glimmering such a dark disturbing book I was convinced this was the way the world was going. With global warming, and these strange mutated viruses, terrorists attacking a New York City landmark. And in the intervening years, I saw some of these things come to pass. But not all these awful things, obviously.

‘In that Nick Gevers interview I said that since childhood I’ve been obsessed with apocalyptic visions and I’ve written about them over and over again. This was in August 2001 and I thought, well I’m finally reaching a point where I believe that maybe all these terrible things aren’t going to happen. Maybe it’s time to stop obsessing about it and writing about it all the time. And then after September 11 I just thought it’s so much worse than I could have even imagined! But people do have this ability, this resilience to go back to living. After several months I was able to get going again.

‘I thought that Tony Kushner’s Angels in America was the first thing that really confronted the AIDS epidemic. And it may be that not enough time has elapsed since 9/11. When books started appearing in the States, people were saying: is it too soon?’ And I don’t know that it’s too soon to write about it, but it may be too soon to engage with what the cultural impact is. In the short-term, the grief and the horror and the sense of loss, all of that is there. But in the longer term, I don’t know if we’ve had enough time to absorb it.’

We’re holding this interview in another setting for Liz’s tales: Camden Town. This is where Jane from ‘Cleopatra Brimstone’ visits fetish clubs and where she collects the rarest of butterflies. And it’s also a fitting place to be talking about Mortal Love (2005). The novel is a sensuous and haunting exploration of artistic inspiration, a potent brew mixed with measures of the pre-Raphaelites, the ever-mad Richard Dadd, Swinburne, folk music, punk and faeiries.

In the 19th century artist Radbourne Comstock is hired to work at a lunatic asylum in Cornwall, where he comes into contact with a strange and compelling woman called Evienne Upstone. In a 21st century strand, music journalist Daniel is in London researching a book on the pre-Raphaelites. Meanwhile, a descendant of Comstock grows up on an isolated island in Maine and he sets out for London too.

It’s here in Camden Town where Daniel meets Larkin Meade and undergoes a profound visionary sexual experience. The book invokes Camden sights, smells and tastes: the shop with the huge Doc Martin over the door, Inverness Street market, the busy canal at night.

‘Every time I come to London, especially this part of London, I think of Daniel,’ says Liz. ‘Of the characters I’ve written, he’s among the ones I love the best. I have used certain characters more than once. Sometimes minor characters from one book go off and have a larger role in another. So, I wouldn’t close the door on using him again. But then, how reasonable is it to expect that somebody will have this encounter with the faerie queen and then go on to something else?

I suggest that I always want to see what happens next after a character’s shattering or transcendent experience. There is a whole other story in how they try to live in the everyday world afterwards. In fact, I was wondering if Larkin herself might reappear in another book even though she’s been packed off home!

Liz laughs. ‘I don’t think she’s gonna stay at home. But I don’t know that I would write about her again. But after I finished Mortal Love and wrote a completely different kind of book and some stories, I did find that I wanted to write about faeries more than before.’

Larkin Meade appears as a robust auburn-haired woman who lives on a houseboat near Camden Lock; her cohort Juda a slighter, androgynous figure. Glimpses of their world come in all the shades of green from a tunnel under London, a porthole in Larkin’s boat, a terrifying vision of conflict between human figures and beings of light, energy and sound that Daniel is forced to see.

With Mortal Love, I also became intrigued by the idea of two places coinciding and the possibility of individuals, such as Larkin getting ‘stuck’. ‘That can be very dangerous,’ Juda warns. Some recent reading about string theory and parallel worlds gave me a perspective on Mortal Love that made it science fiction as much as a gritty, dark mythical fantasy.

‘It's funny, I've been thinking a lot about string theory,’ says Liz. ‘It wasn't specifically in my mind with Mortal Love, although it could be made to retrofit. I don't know much beyond what I've read in a few articles geared for lay people, but it's intriguing. My very short story "Kronia" (in Saffron and Brimstone) is a string theory experiment.

‘It’s such an intoxicating idea and something that I’ve thought about a lot with fiction. The notion of parallel lives, parallel worlds… repetition of a self, of a person or series of actions. The epigraph for Mortal Love is a poem called ‘Bifocal’ by William Stafford. It goes The world happens twice, once what we see it as, second it legends itself deep, the way it is.’ And I just love the notion that nothing happens for the first time. I don’t know that I believe this in my day-to-day life but in a mythic sense, in a literary sense you can take the same story and play it out over and over again.

‘And later, in some short stories I wrote since Mortal Love I’ve played with taking real events and things inspired by real events, toying with them and playing them out. Like UnfaithfullyYours, the movie with Rex Harrison. He’s a conductor imagining his wife’s infidelity. He plays out how he’s going to confront her, each time with different music as background. And so in Mortal Love I take the Tristan and Isolde story, and then also Titania and Oberon. And then, it echoes Burne Jones and Maria Zambacco.’

This is a thread running through many of Hand’s books. In Winterlong the ritualistic coming together of two key people in a post-apocalyptic Washington DC may open the way to further upheaval; there is that same element in Black Light and Waking the Moon in very real 1970s/80s worlds. But though the story is similar, each book sheds a different light on it.

‘Yeah, I love myths and legends and lore. On one hand, I don’t want to be going to the well too often. On the other, it is really what I love.’

The themes of creativity and mortality in Mortal Love seem to have a direct lineage to ‘Last Summer at Mars Hill’, an award-winning novella that gave its title to a collection published in 1998. Young Mooney spends each summer with her family in an eccentric spiritualist community in Maine. She discovers that her mother has breast cancer and that the community harbours a secret that may be a key to recovery. Another visitor to Mars Hill is Martin Dionysius, a gay artist with AIDS, who turns up as a central character in Glimmering.

It’s said that the luminous creatures haunting Mars Hill ‘feast on our mortality’ and thus prolong life. In Mortal Love the beings of Larkin’s world are fascinated by our mortality and the creative spark kindled by our struggle with it. This is also reflected in Juda Trent’s work as a therapist who counsels terminally ill people.

Was this connection intended?

‘No, I don’t even know if I got that until you said it! I tend to write intuitively. Certain things I think through. Other deeper thematic elements or substructures I don’t think about. But when I look at my work, I think of course, that follows through.’

‘John Langan, an American writer and critic reviewing Mortal Love, said that he was intrigued by this whole thing with immortality and faerie. He said this seems to be a direct reference back to Tolkien. When I was working on Mortal Love I was rereading Lord of the Rings for the hundredth time and The Complete History of Middle Earth, which has the background about the elves coming over and the relationships between elves and mortals something that’s always intrigued me.

‘It would go back 40 years to reading LOTR for the first time and being so intrigued by the elves, not as airy-fairy characters, but more like the people in Tir-na-nog. When I was about 12 my Irish grandfather told me about Tir-na-nog. It was a beautiful notion that you can go and you’d be living in faerie. But on the other hand you would be losing everything about this world.’

Also surfacing again in Mortal Love are the Benandanti, an ancient order that considers itself to be guardians of cosmic law n' order against those who seek to restore the primal Dionysian mysteries. This idea was inspired by the work of Italian historian Carlo Ginzberg, who described a struggle between a group with shamanic powers and those seen as the evil witches. The Benandanti play a major role in Black Light and in Waking the Moon.

So, when Juda makes Danny see this vision of the battle in Larkin’s green world, is this connected to the Benandanti?

‘Yeah. In an earlier version of Mortal Love I wanted the Benandanti to play a role though they really don’t in the book as it stand now. That’s one of the out-takes that remains. I wanted to underscore these constant strivings between order and chaos whatever you want to call it and that was just a glimpse of one of them taking place. Probably what I also had in mind was a scene I always loved in M John Harrison’s The Course of the Heart, when he has the vision of two figures copulating and he sees them transfixed in the air. I love those figures. The Boy in the Tree, the Green Woman, Anima, all of that.

Liz’s forthcoming novel, Generation Loss, originally began as a book with Benandanti themes. ‘It started out as an urban or ex-urban contemporary fantasy like Waking the Moon. But it morphed completely. The central characters remained the same and the plot and setting didn’t differ. But it now has no fantastic element at all the first time I’ve done something like that. And so it’s being published as a literary thriller.

‘I found in writing it I missed having the supernatural there. There is a certain pleasure I get from writing more fabulist stuff. I think it’s a really good book, a very tight strong book and people who’ve read it think so too. But for me, it was a very difficult book to write. It was very dark, and very bleak. Although the subject matter was not all that different from what I’ve written before, the process of writing it was unrelenting because there wasn’t that filter. But I’d be happy to do another book like Generation Loss if it does well because it was fun.’

And it does happen that Liz will be writing another dark, non-fantastic novel about erotic obsession called Available Dark. She has also signed with Viking to write a YA novel, Wonderwall, where a young American runaway encounters the teenage Arthur Rimbaud. The YA novel is distinct from ‘Wonderwall’ in Saffron and Brimstone, though they have thematic links and Rimbaud appears in both.

‘It’s a contemporary fantasy. I found when I finished Generation Loss I still wanted to do something more along the lines of Mortal Love something that was contemporary and had a fantastic element.’

Liz’s remarks on the filter’ of the fantastic prompts me to think of why straight realism can sometimes feel unsatisfying, as if it’s just saying life’s a bitch and then you die’. Does the fantastic offer more opportunity to show transcendence, to question current reality in critical way?

‘Oh yeah, I think that’s absolutely true,’ says Liz. ‘With supernatural fiction, fantasy, horror and SF it can be easier to get there because of the special effects you can work with to show the transcendent. It’s much harder to demonstrate a moment of real transcendence in mimetic fiction because you’re dealing with the stuff of everyday life. And unless you’re a mystic or visionary or supremely well-adjusted, it does not have the same kind of numinous charge.

‘But I also think that this is what we have to work with. Realist, mimetic fiction, straight fiction can achieve transcendence. And real life is numinous and transcendent. It is for me, it is for a lot of people. There are moments I certainly have being alive and experiencing things, and especially living in a beautiful place. I get that same rush from the everyday world that I get when I read about something spectacular happening in a novel by John Crowley or an Arthur Machen story.

‘What I like to do certainly in stuff I’ve written more recently is to transpose that and show how the transcendental is here in the everyday world. To do that you have to break through and show that there is another world beyond this one. I don’t feel that I have the gift of doing that in the way that off the top of my head, Laurie Colwin does. She writes what one might call domestic fiction’. Her books are magical, though no magic happens in them. But there are such beautiful evocations of everyday life. If the real world was as magical as the real New York City that she writes about we would all be happy.

‘Robert Stone’s books also deal with transcendence. In Children of Light a Hollywood actress who is mentally ill goes off her medication while making a film because she believes this will give her a better performance. She’s mistaken, because it ends badly, But he really gets some beautiful moments of this numinous transcendence though what you’re experiencing is someone falling apart.’

We go on to talk about Liz’s interview with her fellow guest of honour M John Harrison at last April’s Easter on. Does she have an affinity for Mike Harrison’s work?

‘Absolutely! Richard Grant, an American writer who’s my children’s father, is a big admirer of MJH’s work. I read the Viriconium books and really liked them. But I was blown away by The Course of the Heart and Signs of Life. I think all his work, but especially some of the work from the late 80s onwards is some of the best writing in English, not in fantastic literature but any kind of literature at all. He has this gift, this genius for showing a world that is recognisably our world, arguably our world and showing this transcendent beauty in it but beauty that is terrifying.

‘This is something I’ve always responded to. I remember thinking that magical encounters are always treated as ‘oh, we’re traipsing off to Narnia or wherever’. If it happened to someone in real life it would unmind you, it would just drive you mad and destroy your sense of being in the world. One of the few things that evoked that is Alan Garner’s Elidor, which I read as a kid. It had a deep impact. In that book the kids in Manchester cross over to another world and then back. But it’s very frightening. And though it’s undeniably a fantastic other world like Narnia, it’s a terrifying experience to them and to the reader. Mike Harrison’s work gives you the grown-up equivalent to that.’

This brings us to a panel at Worldcon in 2005, where Liz teamed up with Geoff Ryman and others to talk about the portrayal of older people in science fiction. Liz’s assertion that she doesn’t want to just write about kids anymore echoed advice given by Cal to the writer protagonist of ‘Pavane for a Prince of the Air’: ‘You have the plucky heroine and her cynical best friend sidekick and the blood sacrifice… But they’re always so young. You should write about grownups now, Carrie.’

‘Yeah,’ Liz says, ‘when we’re young everything is new and wonderful and exciting. It’s our responsibility to have very interesting youths. But I have limited interest in reading about 20-somethings finding themselves over and over again. If you have a really brilliant writer writing a book about that, I can read it. But I’m 49 and I’m not that interested anymore. Plenty of other people write books for that audience.

‘I just wrote a novella that’s a YA story with teenagers in it. That was great and fun, but it’s not a coming-of-age story. Traditionally, fiction was not the provenance of kids. And now, commercially publishers are looking for 13-year-olds writing a novel because from a marketing standpoint that’s where they think the money is. But I have teenage children I get enough of that at home! I really don’t want to write about it except as back-story.

‘I know plenty of readers my age or older or younger and they want to read about themselves too. If one looks at it from the other end of the marketing spectrum, the baby-boomers are getting older and they’re not going to want to read about what we invent as their grandchildren.

‘I also thought since I was in my 20s it would be much more interesting to write a fantasy where grownups are having the adventure. You read the Narnia books or books where kids pass into the other world. I still love those books. But even before I was a parent, I would think: What about their parents? These books are usually engineered so that these kids come back to our world the same moment they left. So there’s no parental anguish over the children being lost.

‘But I thought: what if they didn’t? What if there is real time passing? What about the parents left behind? What would happen if a parent went through after the kids to see what happened to them? What adventure would a grown-up have? What would their perception of this other world be? So I’m much more interested in an adult response to this world. How do you respond to the numinous and strange when it’s not necessarily the first time that you’ve seen it?’

Liz’s older characters have often led a rebellious or marginal life; now they are trying to reconcile their values and pursuit of freedom with the realities of getting older.

‘Yeah! It’s a tough question, it’s interesting, it’s a challenge! We were all young and having wonderful immortal lives when we were 20, but unless you die you’re still having to make do years later and how do you do it? People are getting involved in more things as they’re 50, 60 or 70. It’s taking mainstream culture, certainly its commercial aspects, a little longer to catch up with that fact. All these young people now, they’re gonna be like us pretty soon! And just like us, they’ll be more interested in reading about their middle-aged selves.

‘Ideally you want to have older people, you want to have kids, you want to have teenagers. Fiction should not be a gated community. It should not be a place where you only have people of a certain income level or education, gender or sexual preference or age or anything else. I think you want to have everything in the mix.

‘But by the same token I would feel presumptuous to write now from the point of view of a 20-year-old or a nine-year-old. A writer’s job is to write about other peoples’ perspectives, but I don’t think I could do it realistically. Maybe I could do it tomorrow. Also, another reason why I love M John Harrison’s work and John Crowley’s is that their protagonists aren’t kids. There are people who are middle-aged and having adventures. As a reader, I want to think: this can happen to me. I might be 50, but something fantastic can happen.

Something unpredictable. People want to know that their life still holds the possibility of something like that.

Our conversation touches on the state of the publishing world several times. Having lived in both the US and UK myself, I wonder what if any differences are there?

‘The publishing world has become so corporatised that I don’t feel that there’s much difference anymore,’ Liz says. ‘I was reading that in the US there are now five major publishers. And of those five, three or four are owned by non-American conglomerates. And they are probably the same conglomerates that own the five major counterparts in the UK. Books still appear here that you don’t see in the States, but for the most part it’s like television. It’s become a global crap culture, and you see the same crap here as you see back there. And you see the same good stuff here.

‘And I think the small presses here are wonderful in the way that small presses are in the States. You get the same level of integrity and concern for writers. In the last ten or eight years one really great thing that we’ve seen with the collapse of the big corporate publishing industry, which has abandoned mid-list writers and also with the growth of the internet are so many small presses emerging to pick up the slack.

‘So it’s a really rich field for writers if you want to write at the novella length. It’s a hard length to publish too long for a magazine, not long enough to be published as a stand-alone novel. But for small presses, it’s an ideal length. And so we’re seeing PS Publishing and Subterranean and Golden Gryphon and tons of excellent small presses now publishing wonderful writers. It’s a great opportunity for emerging writers. It’s really a boom time for that, like the Golden Age of the pulps.

Talking about independent publishing also bring us to the good news about Generation Loss, which has found a home with Kelly Link’s Small Beer Press. But a special feature is that Harcourt will bring out the paperback edition and the prospects for a UK edition look ‘promising’.

‘It’s the best of both worlds,’ says Liz. ‘I’ve been following the alternative music world, thinking this is so cool. With music you can have an indie or relatively unknown group and you can build an audience by touring and downloading. Then make a deal with a larger label once they’ve cut something on a small label and get bigger distribution and build their audience. I literally spent the last few years wishing there was a similar model in publishing. And this is exactly what happened! I’m very, very excited about it.’

Rosanne Rabinowitz’s published fiction includes stories in The Third Alternative, Visionary Tongue and Roadworks, plus anthology contributions to The Slow Mirror: New Fiction by Jewish Writers, Deep Ten and Café Ole: Too Hot to Handle. Recently two stories and an interview were featured in Midnight Street 4. She has also written reviews and articles for TTA, Interzone and of course, www.laurahird.com. Rosanne lives in South London with a rather demanding 18-year-old cat (a big party was held to mark Weeble’s 18th). Sometimes she works as a freelance sub-editor; other forms of toil have included stints as a life model, oral history researcher, part-time mental health worker and full-time dole claimer. A graduate of the Sheffield Hallam MA in Writing, Rosanne has completed one novel and is working on a second. To read Rosanne’s story, ‘These Boots’ on the showcase section of this site, click here

© 2007 Laura Hird All rights reserved.