An Interview with Cat Rambo

Cat Rambo is no stranger to serious readers of modern short speculative fiction. Her work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy, to name just a few. She was a student in the MA writing program at John Hopkins, studying under John Barth and Stephen Dixon, before turning to speculative fiction. After a ten-year hiatus working on software and technical writing, she returned to fiction and attended Clarion West (Class of 2005). In October of 2007, she became co-editor of Fantasy Magazine. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, Wayne, and two cats. I am pleased she was able to answer a few of my questions for The Fix.

How did the position of co-editor at Fantasy Magazine come about? What are your duties and responsibilities?

I knew Sean from correspondence. I submitted three or four stories to Fantasy Magazine before finally hitting with “The Dead Girl’s Wedding March,” which has been surprisingly popular, and during that process there was a lot of emailing and chatting back and forth, particularly after he asked me to send him any fantasy I wrote before other markets. He asked if I’d be interested in co-editing and I said yes, because I really liked the magazine and thought it would be fun.

How do you see Fantasy in relation to the other short fiction publications available online or in print and to its sister ‘zine, Clarkesworld?

I perceive Fantasy as publishing more interesting fantasy short fiction than the other venues—stuff that is a little edgier and more interesting. “Literary” is a scary word in some circles and has become synonymous with unintelligible, so I’m hesitant to use that term, but I would stack some of the stories we are publishing up against the best of the non-genre market. We publish stories that say something about what it means to be human, stories that you can read more than once, stories that have resonance and depth. Recently we’ve published “Erased” by Elena Gleason, which I think is a marvelous story about what it’s like to be in a relationship and see that it is dying. And Stacy Sinclair’s “The 21st Century Isobel Down” concerns a young woman trying to figure out her place in the 21st century at one level while on another it’s a funny piece about being romantically pursued by a huge cartoon tiger.

Clarkesworld also has that sensibility, but has a different kind of edge to it. Although the story that I had in Clarkesworld, “I’ll Gnaw Your Bones, the Manticore Said” was originally purchased for Fantasy, back before I was editing, so that difference may not be as clear as I think.

Undoubtedly, the best way for a writer wishing to sell a story to Fantasy is to read what you’re publishing, but could you offer a few thoughts on what you’re looking for?

When I came onto staff, I rewrote the submission guidelines and said this: “We are looking for stories that delight, entertain, and enrapture readers, stories ranging from delicious treats that melt on the tongue, leaving only a trace of sweetness, to the dark and poignant tale whose memory lingers with you for days, perhaps years. Fantasy Magazine is entertainment for the intelligent genre reader—send us stories of the fantastic that make us think, and tell us what it is to be human while amazing us with your mastery of language and story elements.” That’s all still true.

Pay attention to your first few paragraphs, because that’s where you have the chance to persuade me to read further. If that beginning is badly written, my assumption is that the rest is as well. Give me a reason to keep on reading, and I’ll be glad to. And then follow it up with an ending that has some oomph.

Is there a certain type of story that you’re not seeing enough (or any) of? And any type you’re seeing too much of?

I love heroic fantasy, but for me to want to publish it, it actually has to do something new and interesting with fantasy tropes. I loved Leiber in the 70s, when I was growing up and first encountering fantasy, but that was a number of decades ago. Right now I’m seeing a lot of fairy-tale retellings, pirate stories, stories set in medieval Japan by people who didn’t bother to research medieval Japan, and D&D-type fantasy. Angels and the Christian mythos are usually a hard sell for me, as is splatter-based horror. Stories really do need some sort of fantasy element, no matter how tenuous.

Things I’d like to see: more steam punk, more urban fantasy that doesn’t use vampires/werewolves/witches, more stuff that draws on mythologies that haven’t been beaten to death, more stuff that plays with issues of class/race/gender/sexuality, stories from a non-mainstream culture pov, more metafiction, more magic realism, and generally more stories filled with full-out gonzo wonder.

Has being an editor changed your view of our field? If so, in what way?

I don’t think it has, really. Some of the slush pile is good, and some is bad, which is pretty much what I expected.

I’d like to switch from Cat Rambo the editor to Cat the author now. You mostly write fantasy. What is it about this genre that appeals to you most?

I like fantasy because it has a more interesting range of things you can do! You can have flying eyeballs and talking cows and all sorts of marvelous things, and they can be much more than goofy props. They can be the actual heart of the story.

Who are a few of your literary influences, both mainstream and genre? When it comes to technique, is there a writer or two whom you’ve learned more from than others?

One of the things I’m interested in is description, and I think more than anyone else, I’ve learned (and am still working on!) how to do it from the French writer, Colette, who is fabulous at conveying subtleties. I sometimes copy out passages from her work that I particularly love and try to dissect them and see how they work.

I am vaguely embarrassed to say I like James Joyce, because that has come to be one of the hallmarks of pretentiousness, but I actually do—I took a number of Joyce classes in grad school, and am one of the few who have actually read and still occasionally dip into Finnegan’s Wake. I took John Barth’s workshop and have read most of his fiction, as well as taught his short story collection, Lost in the Funhouse, to bemused Hopkins freshmen, and I can’t help but think that’s influenced my writing philosophy. I read poetry and used to write some, and that shapes some of what I try to do at the sentence level—I particularly like the ecstatic eastern poets: Kabir, Rumi, Mirabai. Genre-wise, I grew up playing D&D and ran campaigns that were sculpted by Andre Norton, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance and other high fantasy, while I was also devouring harder sf: Delany, Russ, Niven. And I used to read a lot of comic books.

You’ve participated in several workshops over the years. What is it about the workshop process that appeals to you most? Could you talk about the differences between mainstream (graduate lit.) and genre workshops?

For me the workshop is less about getting critiques on your work than it is about being forced to define your own philosophy of writing in order to articulate it while critiquing other people’s work.

I’ve been in the Clarion West workshop and the Taos Toolbox workshop, as well as some one-day workshops and some online crit groups, such as Codex. It’s best to fit a group that is at your level or above it, in my opinion, because it forces you to stretch. I’ve been lucky enough to have some local pro writers with more illustrious careers than mine let me be part of their monthly writing group, and that’s been helpful both in terms of getting feedback as well as spurring me along to have things to turn in.

I have been a little jaded about grad level fine arts workshops ever since my time at Hopkins. There the first semester many of the students were sleeping with each other, and then the second semester we got to critique all the stories about the break-ups, which turned into critiques less of each story than about whichever relationship had inspired it. That wasn’t so much horrible as amusing for me, since my significant other and I weren’t involved in any of the shenanigans. I do think a bad workshop can be a horrible, harmful, toxic experience—I’ve been lucky enough to never be in one of those, but I’ve heard horror stories.

One of the things a writer needs to do, though, is cultivate a hide of iron while remaining a decent human being, and workshops can certainly help with that.

Tell us a bit about your writing habits. Do you have a set schedule or do you write when the muse strikes you?

Up in the morning, drop my spouse off at work, get a large coffee, and come back to write for a few hours. In the afternoon, I write either fiction or work on some other piece. I do much of my first drafting in longhand, which I like for several reasons. It makes me slow down and look at the sentence, it adds a layer of editing/polishing when I transcribe it onto the computer, and it’s easier to edit on paper. I like to write in large sketch pads, because sometimes I have a multitude of circles and arrows and rearranging of numbered sections.

I have some friends I go sit in coffee shops and write with. An upcoming story in Clockwork Phoenix, “The Dew Drop Coffee Lounge,” came out of that practice. Summer is coming up so I will probably do some sitting out on our front steps or down by the lake and writing longhand.

I’m lucky enough to have a spouse paying the mortgage at the moment in order to give me time and space to write in, and so that kicks me in the butt to make the most of it and not waste the opportunity.

You and Jeff VanderMeer collaborated on the novelette “The Surgeon’s Tale.” How did that come about and what was the process of collaborating with him like?

When Jeff was reading for Best New Fantasy, he asked me to send him everything I’d published in 2006. I did, and we swapped some correspondence back and forth, and then he said “I have a story that’s broken, would you be interesting in a collaboration?” I said sure, and he sent me the 1500 word piece that ended up becoming 11,000 in the course of swapping it back and forth. One of us would mention something, and the other would take it and run with it. For example, I mentioned Lucius early on, Jeff expanded on him, and eventually he became a major character. It was utterly painless, enjoyable, satisfying writing, and I’m very pleased with the result. Jeff and I have a couple of other collaborations in the works as well.

You’ve said you’re particularly fond of “The Surgeon’s Tale,” with its theme of love and its use of language. Could you expound on that?

I enjoy “The Surgeon’s Tale” because I think it manages to be both absurd and contemplative at the same time. It is absurd—it’s about a guy who falls in love with a zombie arm that keeps crawling in through his window, for Pete’s sake! And yet at the same time it’s talking about what we project onto our lover and how the person we love is as much a product of our imagination as a real person. He doesn’t love the arm—he loves the woman he’s mentally constructed, who is entirely made-up.

One of my favorites of yours is your Tabatian tale “I’ll Gnaw Your Bones, the Manticore Said.” How did this world and this story come about?

Tabat is a city in which I’ve placed a number of my stories, and which the novel I’m finishing is set in as well. It’s a setting where I can play around with some of the classic fantasy tropes—one of my interests is the class structures underlying the fantasy world and what is complicated by the idea of an intelligent, non-Human mind. That story grew out of the title, which led to the character of Bupus, and then the narrator, and finally the overall story. I have no clue where the glowing leprous rabbits came from, but they’re one reason I’d love to do that story as a graphic novel.

When not writing or editing, how do you enjoy spending your time?

I spend a good chunk of time working with an online game, Armageddon MUD. I’ve been helping administer it for about a decade and a half so far, and I’ve written a few nonfiction essays about that experience. It’s an amazing team that is producing a vast, ongoing story and it’s been the source of a lot of close friendships, including my spouse and my best friend. It can also be a horrible time sink so I try to keep things balanced as far as time spent on it goes.

What’s in the future for you: goals, projects, etc.?

I’m finishing up a novel right now, The Moon’s Accomplice, which can stand alone but which is also potentially first in a trilogy. I’ve got a clutter of other novel ideas I want to work on, including: a novel using Victoria Woodhull as a Sherlock Holmes-type spiritualist/detective; a collection of linked short stories set aboard TwiceFar Station, the setting of my recent story in Asimov’s; a modern YA about a reluctant fairy princess; a heroic fantasy piece about a bunch of bards; a feminist superhero novel; another heroic fantasy novel about women and war; an Arthurian mythos story set on North Carolina’s Outer Banks; and an exploration of American folklore using interdimensional gypsies.

I’m also co-editing a best of Fantasy anthology, which is a difficult job, given the number of excellent pieces I have to choose from. I’m putting together a possible collection of my short stories, and continuing to write some of those, and I’ve got a couple of large projects with collaborators lined up for further on down the line.