An Interview with Catherynne M. Valente

In this interview with reviewer Elizabeth A. Allen, Catherynne M. Valente connects Snow White with CPR, late-night lamb roasts with her literary development, and writing with Katamari Damacy.

Tell me about your perspectives on archetypes. Did a certain class, book, or person introduce them to you? What do you think they are, and why do they provide such fertile ground for your fictional and poetical works?

My mother has degrees in political science and psychology, as well as drama, so I believe I first discovered Jung at about age 12, from a book of hers that described a recurring dream he had of a giant phallus in a golden crown seated on a throne. That sort of stuck in my head—I only had the vaguest idea what a phallus was. I am not, however, a huge fan of his. Ultimately I find delineation of archetypes along the Jung/Campbell lines to be limiting, especially for women, whose roles were largely overlooked in those two gentlemen’s estimable works, save in the capacity of those tawdry, tedious three: mother, whore, and crone. That wasn’t enough for me at age 12 and it isn’t enough now.

As far as archetypes in a general sense, not tied to any one theorist—archetypes are archetypes: templates for mytho-literary personality types—because they provide fertile ground. I believe that art requires restriction—without boundaries, how do you know what to transgress? Given a cookie-mold of a hero or a magician or a judge or a scholar, there is infinite fun to be had in spilling the dough over the edges. I deeply enjoy working within forms, contrasting strict structure and shape with wild language. So an archetype is just a tool to work with, a thing to shape story.

You say on your website that you love the threatening feminine archetypes such as wicked queens. Beyond the characters, what fairy tale stories interest you/stick in your mind/haunt you?

Snow White is probably my all time favorite fairy tale. It has everything: mirrors, blood, maiden in danger, older/younger woman angst, amazing objects: coffin, mirror, comb, ribbon, apple, iron shoes. And dwarves. Also, I always liked that it wasn’t True Love’s Kiss, but True Love’s CPR, dislodging an apple instead of magically awakening the girl with the power of patriarchy. And as a young girl, I suspect I was drawn to a heroine with dark hair, as all my siblings are blonde and I am decidedly not. I also had a stepmother, so all the stepmother stories drew me powerfully, because they told me that I would survive her, that I could fall asleep and wake up and she would be gone from my world. An important lessons to children with difficult childhoods, I think.

You also seem equally fascinated with the transfixed maiden or the sleeping beauty. What interests you about those types?

Well spotted! I never thought about it, but I suppose I do have a thing for those prone girls. More than likely it’s because they are the objects of the wicked queens’ cruelties. Their opposites, their other selves, their mirrors, the state of which any wicked queen worth her salt is terrified: helpless, immovable, alone, at the mercy of men. The queen cannot escape that sleeping princess or embrace her: they chase each other in circles. And of course, the transfixed maid is voiceless, and the voiceless are like catnip to me. I want to speak for them, through them. To tell someone what it is like to sleep alone for a hundred years, dreaming, with snow piling up on your nose.

When I read your short stories and poems, I see elements in them similar to the works of Anne Sexton, Angela Carter, even bits of Sylvia Plath and Baudelaire. What authors/poets speak to you or influence you and why? Do you see yourself as the practitioner of any particular tradition or bits thereof?

Baudelaire is a great call—I spent ages reading him growing up, and Plath is probably my single biggest poetic influence. Milorad Pavic, Anais Nin, Italo Calvino, Jeanette Winterson, Borges, and Eliot are the ones I love passionately, though there are many others—including that mythic voice that permeates so many collected folktales. I’m not sure what to say as far as tradition—I said mythpunk once on a lark and it has stuck to an extent. Some kind of synthesis of magical realism, fabulism, mythpunk, and whatever I feel like when I turn the computer on. I think it’s important to float between schools, never let yourself become defined by a label, even if you made the label up.

What turned you on to the classics? The misconception is that because such languages are dead, they aren’t that relevant, but, obviously, when you explore ancient Greek/Roman culture and myth, you find that’s anything but the case.

When I was a sophomore in college I was part of a society that put together an all-night reading of the full text of The Iliad. We had a lamb on a spit, wine, bonfires, drums…and the first lines of each book read in Greek. The first time I heard it, that rhythm, those words, I knew I had to have it, like seeing a boy across the room that you just have to kiss. Latin was always a secondary love for me; Greek was my passion. And they are relevant in the sense that any language is, as rails to run your brain on, as objects of beauty, as systems complex and arcane.

What research do you do to familiarize yourself with mythologies and cultures that you have not personally experienced?

I read books, mainly. If I have any kind of access to a person from that culture, I ask endless questions, try to learn a little of the language—language imports so much subtle cultural material, it’s almost impossible for me to imagine a culture without rolling a few words around to see how they taste. But the thing is, I rarely write about a culture that I have not in some fashion experienced—the experiences spark the writing. I lived in Japan, and wrote about what I felt and saw. I fell in love with a Russian man and through our relationship became altogether wrapped up in a culture I had found fascinating from childhood. It’s kind of like that video game Katamari Damacy: I roll up a lot of cultural flotsam in my travels and friendships, and then I pick through it. Life, lived well, is research in itself.

On your website FAQ, you describe yourself as “an intuitive writer.” Please tell us more about this characterization and how it plays out in your actual practice of writing and in your writing style.

What I meant by that is that I am not a good student. I don’t make outlines or keep neat files; I don’t plan out my books ahead of time. I feel my way through them in the dark, following the little lights that fire off in my head. I sit down with a blank page, take a deep breath, and jump in—I write hedonistically; I do what feels good. Formal training for writers in this country is pretty flaccid—basically endless workshops without real and substantial instruction on the how’s and why’s of making a book out of nothing. So I think to some extent what you learn as you go along is instinct, acquiring an instinct for what works and what doesn’t, and the ability to listen to the aching or rejoicing of that instinct, which is not always a reliable voice. But over an entire lifetime, you can very nearly train it to be.

Do your characters ever pop out of your stories and talk to you? Or perhaps appear one day and say, “Hey! Write about me!”?

Not really, I don’t engage with my characters that way, though I know many authors who do. Usually I start with an idea, and the characters slowly form, like a statue coming out of the marble. Some piece of folklore or language or landscape in the real and actual world shines out and says, “I want to be made magic.”

It’s the world that says: “Write about me.”