Caitlin R. Kiernan made a splash in 1998 when her novel Silk was released. Since then, Kiernan, who was trained as a vertebrate paleontologist, has written a number of novels including Murder of Angels and The Red Tree in addition to becoming a prolific short writer with more than half a dozen collections. Besides the dozens of magazines and anthologies she contributed to, Kiernan also releases Sirenia Digest, a monthly collection of weird erotica. She also was the regular writer for The Dreaming, the comic series which spun off of Neil Gaimans Sandman.
Kiernan just released The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, a novel that is arguably her best to date. The book centers around a schizophrenic woman, the new woman in her life, a nineteenth century painting, myth, family history, memory and truth, leaving one pondering what is real and what is not. This month Dark Horse Comics released the first of five issues of a new comic series, Alabaster, which stars Dancy Flammarion, a character that Kiernan fans know from the novel Threshold and short story collection Alabaster. For the uninitiated, Dancy is a young albino woman who has been sent by an angel to hunt monsters in haunted corners of the deep South. We reached Kiernan at her home in Rhode Island.
ALEX DUEBEN: Youve written in the past about where Dancy came from but just to start, could you talk a little about who she is and what about her has kept you so fascinated over so many years, across a novel (Threshold), short stories (Alabaster) and now comics?
CAITLIN R. KIERNAN: Sometimes I fall very deeply in love with a character I've created. Not always, but sometimes. And from the start, when I conceived her for Thresholdthat was way back in 1998I fell in love with her. To me, she was this beautiful and lost and broken star that shined so, so brightly. It didn't matter to me if she was actually hearing angels and actually killing monsters, whether she was insane or actually on a holy quest to rid the world of what she perceived as evil. That love has never waned. When I finished Threshold, well, there's this paragraph in the novel somewhere that gives you a peek at Dancy's misadventures before the book. I realized I want to wrote those stories, that I wasn't done with my crusading albino waif and her avenging butcher's knife, that I needed to tell more tales. Those were eventually collected in Alabaster in 2006.
AD: So how did youand Dancyend up at Dark Horse?
CRK: I was guest of honor at the 2010 H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, Oregon, and while I was there I had a meeting with Rachel Edidin, an editor at Dark Horse. She was interested in my doing something with them, and we spent the next few months kicking around ideas, though we settled on a Dancy story fairly quickly. Her dynamic just seemed very right for Dark Horse. Now, originally, I was only supposed to do a short prose story. It was called Bus Fair, and it's basically issue one of the comic. But then Dark Horse asked if I wanted to expand it into a mini-series, which I did. So, yeah, issue one was written as a short story in April 2011, then expanded into a comic. I should say that I was willing to work with Dark Horse because they offered me a completely creator-owned project. I'd said for years, ever since I left DC/Vertigo, that I'd only ever return to comics if I was offered that opportunity, to do a creator-owned book, not work for hire.
AD: Your work in general, and Dancys stories specifically, are very internal, which doesnt make them obvious choices to become comics. I know youve written comics before but Im curious what was the challenge specific to this story.
CRK: In my prose, I tend to rely heavily on the thoughts of my characters, because, in the main, I am writing stories about people, not about events or things. But I've also been told, again and again and again over the years, how very visual my writing is, which I don't see as a contradiction at all. We look out at the world, and our mental interpretations of it create what we call plot and action. Still, I was a little intimidated by the process of translating Dancy into comics, but, surprise, it worked perfectly. I can't say precisely why. It just did. The internal became the external, almost effortlessly. Okay, no, not effortlessly. Writing never effortless, but it wasn't the trial I feared it would be. It helped tremendously that I was part of a great team, that I had Steve Lieber and Rachelle Rosenberg taking my words and making pictures out of them. Maybe the hardest part was learning to trust them, that I needed to say as little as possible, and allow them to do the rest. Oh, and our cover artist, Greg Ruth, he also nailed the images in my mind's eye.
AD: In the short story collection, Alabaster, Ted Naifeh drew a number of illustrations and Im curious how that helped as far as visualizing Dancy and her angel and thinking about this world in a visual way that affected the comics and how you wrote them.
CRK: Working with Ted, that was a great honor. He's a brilliant artist. That was the first time I saw Dancy off the written page. We did a lot of conceptual stuff before he began the actual illustrations, getting her just the way I wanted her. So, his artwork is where the pictorial Dancy began, and for that I owe him a great debt. After Alabaster, when Penguin released a new edition of Threshold, the cover artist drew very heavily of Ted's interpretation of Dancy. Mostly, he did a decent job, though she inexplicably has yellow, instead of pink, eyes. I could get them to fix that. By the time I was shown the cover, it was too late. It was like, here's Dancy with hepatitis. Anyway, when I began working with Ted, I'd already decided this would be a sort of reboot. For that matter, I think a lot of people don't realize that the Dancy short stories were a mild reboot from the novel. A different worldline, you might say. Read carefully, and you'll see the two don't sync up. But Steve and I began by looking at what Ted had done. But I wanted an older and more world weary Dancy. Steve said, if you could have anyone you want to play her in a film, who would you choose. I'd just seen Super 8brilliant filmand I immediately said, Elle Fanning. So, she became a template from which Steve began.
AD: Talk a little about the art team on the book, artist Steve Lieber and colorist Rachelle Rosenberg and how they were able to visualize this world?
CRK: I can't speak for them. I can't tell you how they went about doing what they've done. I haven't talked a lot about their process. Mostly, we've talked about how it ought to be, and they've gone away and made it that way. We all work in isolation, in the end, sending our little notes back and forth. So, here we've entered the realm of "You have to ask them." To me, it's like magic. Also, I have to emphasize the part that our cover artist, Greg Ruth, has played in all this. Every one of his covers, well, some of them have almost brought tears to my eyes. They're that good. And this is what people who may buy the comic will see first. They'll see his covers. In many cases, his covers will be the thing that sells the book.
AD: One of the things I love most about the Dancy stories is that the set-up seems very familiar in that its about a teenage girl fighting monsters, but she doesnt have any superpowers. She has insight and secret knowledge, but shes very much on her own. Having said that, one of the things I alternately like about the stories and which annoys me is that I want more insight into this world, how it operates and getting a bigger picture, which Dancy does not have. Do you have any interest in writing a story where things start to be explained or she starts piecing things together? Or will sheand by extension, usalways be fumbling in the dark?
CRK: Here's something I have very, very strong feelings about. Writing stories about Dancy Flammarionas with most of my fictionwe've entered the realm of the inexplicable. And when you explain the inexplicable, you divest it of its power. A good mystery is worth a thousand answers, and I know I'm never going to waver from that. For example, is Dancy insane, or is the seraph real? Don't ever expect to get a concrete answer on that. I go and do that, the power of the story deflates. We lose a huge part of the tension that drives the stories forward, that, for me, make the tales compelling. Why is her world seemingly filled with monsters? Because it is, and that's the only answer you'll ever get, I suspect. I tell people, you want answers, read Agatha Christie. Dancy is a mystery without a solution, ultimately. This is what makes her beautiful, and makes her world so terrifying and beautiful. People ask me, all the timeand this annoys me"What happened?" And I tell them that most of the time I don't know, not in the sense that I have this secret I'm holding back just to frustrate them. Few ever believe this, but most of the time I don't know what happened, or why a lot of things in my books and stories are how and why they are. If I did, why would I write the stories. It's not my job to hold the readers hands and lead them point by point through a story. I want them to be left with questions they'll chew over for a long, long time. For me, that's what weird fiction is, a presentation of enduring mysteries. Period.
AD: So for fans, give us some context. Where does miniseries pick up in relation to the epilogue of Threshold and the stories in Alabaster and where are we going?
CRK: In retrospect, I genuinely hate the epilogue of Threshold. It never should have been written. And to accept the stories in the Alabaster short story collection, I think readers have to forget it. I'd certainly like to forget it. Then we come to the comic, and, to a degree, I need readers to set aside the short-story collection. Like I said, here's a second reboot. I do refer to the short stories in the comics, to Alabaster, for example, most of which is recounted in #3. But, once again, I'm offering an alternate history. This Dancy has never gone to Birmingham and never will, and that was true in the short stories, too. It was never made explicit, but I knew it. Whether or not readers picked up on that, I don't think it detracted from the stories. Each story is meant to stand on its own. well, okay, except for Bainbridge, which was a mistake, trying to tie everything together. Writers make mistakes, and that was a big one for me. I'm going to rewrite that story someday, and take out the references to Murder of Angels, and, by extension, Silk. Having said that, you'll see, in the comic, a Dancy who finds herself more alone and more on her own than ever before.
AD: How has moving to Providence changed what you write? Or has it?
CRK: It has, and for the better. To date, I've written three Rhode Island novels Daughter of Hounds (actually written while I still lived in Atlanta), The Red Tree, and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. Those last two were genuinely breakthroughs for me, and, in my eyes, they're vastly better than any novel I wrote before. They're my first mature novels. I look back at the ones I wrote before them, and I know that. As to the part that moving to Providence has played in that, honestly, I don't know. It's one of those mysteries I can't answer. I don't much care why. Only that it did happen. I'm not going to say something hokey and clichd like, New England is such a haunted place. If any place is haunted, all places are haunted. Everywhere people have ever lived and died. There's always the possibility that moving to Rhode Island had no casual role whatsoever in the shift, that it was something already in progress, that I was maturing as a writer, and it would have happened regardless. I suspect that's the truth, but I'll never know. I will say, I'll admit, anytime I have a new landscape, it inspires me. But that's been true of many places I've traveled to, lived in, spent time in. Los Angeles, coastal Oregon, Manhattan, Ireland, London, Alabama, Boston, and on and on.
AD: I did want to ask about your novel, The Drowning Girl, which came out last month, and which I think is possibly your best novel. Could you talk a little about the book and what you were trying to do?
CRK: You get me started, I could probably talk about The Drowning Girl endlessly. In fact, it's kind of hard to say just a little about the book. It took me two years to write, and I think I almost broke myself in the process. When it was all over, my partner and my psychiatrist both told me to back off from such intensely personal books, and that's not hyperbole. Like The Red Tree before it, The Drowning Girl is heavily autobiographical. Fictionalized autobiography, but autobiography, all the same. They're bookends, though that doesn't mean you should read one before the other. When I say they're bookends, I mean it in an abstract and in a psychological sense. To say that The Drowning Girl is intensely personal is an understatement. And it absolutely is my best novel to date. That's true to the point that I'm not sure I'll ever write another one that's better. I'm not sure I can. I worked through so much in the novel insanity, art, loss, love, hauntings, survival. At its core, it's a novel about the relationship that often exists between mental illness and art, and some people might call it a ghost story, but I'd prefer to say it's a novel about the nature of hauntings, and that's not necessarily the same thing.
AD: You have a new short story collection coming out this summer, Confessions on a Five-Chambered Heart. Whats going to be in the collection and what is it that you love about writing short stories?
CRK: Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart is very much a follow-up to my last collection, The Ammonite Violin & Others. Most of the stories contain erotic elements, sometimes strongly so. Back in 2005, I decided to conduct an experiment. If I wrote erotica, what would it be like, and that led to two little volumesthey actually are, literally, small books that fit in the palm of my handFrog Toes and Tentacles and Tales from the Woeful Platypus. People ask, so what's your erotica like, and I'll say something like, well, imagine Angela Carter and Anas Nin and H. P. Lovecraft were to collaborate, and that's sort of what my erotica's like. I call it weird erotica, because I see it as a sort of sexual annex of the weird tradition. It's not for everyone, but the readers who like it, they seem to love it. After I did Frog Toes and Tentacles, I was left wanting to continue to explore these regions, these territories, so I conceived an experiment. I never thought it would work. I created something I called Sirenia Digest, and it works this way: readers subscribe, $10 a month, and each month they get a PDF with one or two new pieces of my "weird erotica," vignettes or short stories, or sometimes a novel in progress. The first issue went out in November 2005, and we've reached #76, so I think it's safe to say the experiment has exceeded far beyond what I dared to expect. By the way, anyone who's interested in subscribing, it's easy. Just go to my website, specifically to caitlinrkiernan.com, and it's all handled via PayPal. If you're tastes in the erotic aren't conventional, well, you might like what I'm offering. There are some samples up on the website, by the way. One of the most wonderful things about the digest is that a lot of the stories are being printed in anthologies. A couple have even made "year's best" anthologies. Both The Ammonite Violin & Others and Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart collect the earlier stories from the digest, and very glad to say that the former appeared on the cover of Publisher's Weekly and was nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards, so maybe my unconventional tastes are a little bit less unconventional than I tend to think.
Kiernan just released The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, a novel that is arguably her best to date. The book centers around a schizophrenic woman, the new woman in her life, a nineteenth century painting, myth, family history, memory and truth, leaving one pondering what is real and what is not. This month Dark Horse Comics released the first of five issues of a new comic series, Alabaster, which stars Dancy Flammarion, a character that Kiernan fans know from the novel Threshold and short story collection Alabaster. For the uninitiated, Dancy is a young albino woman who has been sent by an angel to hunt monsters in haunted corners of the deep South. We reached Kiernan at her home in Rhode Island.
ALEX DUEBEN: Youve written in the past about where Dancy came from but just to start, could you talk a little about who she is and what about her has kept you so fascinated over so many years, across a novel (Threshold), short stories (Alabaster) and now comics?
CAITLIN R. KIERNAN: Sometimes I fall very deeply in love with a character I've created. Not always, but sometimes. And from the start, when I conceived her for Thresholdthat was way back in 1998I fell in love with her. To me, she was this beautiful and lost and broken star that shined so, so brightly. It didn't matter to me if she was actually hearing angels and actually killing monsters, whether she was insane or actually on a holy quest to rid the world of what she perceived as evil. That love has never waned. When I finished Threshold, well, there's this paragraph in the novel somewhere that gives you a peek at Dancy's misadventures before the book. I realized I want to wrote those stories, that I wasn't done with my crusading albino waif and her avenging butcher's knife, that I needed to tell more tales. Those were eventually collected in Alabaster in 2006.
AD: So how did youand Dancyend up at Dark Horse?
CRK: I was guest of honor at the 2010 H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, Oregon, and while I was there I had a meeting with Rachel Edidin, an editor at Dark Horse. She was interested in my doing something with them, and we spent the next few months kicking around ideas, though we settled on a Dancy story fairly quickly. Her dynamic just seemed very right for Dark Horse. Now, originally, I was only supposed to do a short prose story. It was called Bus Fair, and it's basically issue one of the comic. But then Dark Horse asked if I wanted to expand it into a mini-series, which I did. So, yeah, issue one was written as a short story in April 2011, then expanded into a comic. I should say that I was willing to work with Dark Horse because they offered me a completely creator-owned project. I'd said for years, ever since I left DC/Vertigo, that I'd only ever return to comics if I was offered that opportunity, to do a creator-owned book, not work for hire.
AD: Your work in general, and Dancys stories specifically, are very internal, which doesnt make them obvious choices to become comics. I know youve written comics before but Im curious what was the challenge specific to this story.
CRK: In my prose, I tend to rely heavily on the thoughts of my characters, because, in the main, I am writing stories about people, not about events or things. But I've also been told, again and again and again over the years, how very visual my writing is, which I don't see as a contradiction at all. We look out at the world, and our mental interpretations of it create what we call plot and action. Still, I was a little intimidated by the process of translating Dancy into comics, but, surprise, it worked perfectly. I can't say precisely why. It just did. The internal became the external, almost effortlessly. Okay, no, not effortlessly. Writing never effortless, but it wasn't the trial I feared it would be. It helped tremendously that I was part of a great team, that I had Steve Lieber and Rachelle Rosenberg taking my words and making pictures out of them. Maybe the hardest part was learning to trust them, that I needed to say as little as possible, and allow them to do the rest. Oh, and our cover artist, Greg Ruth, he also nailed the images in my mind's eye.
AD: In the short story collection, Alabaster, Ted Naifeh drew a number of illustrations and Im curious how that helped as far as visualizing Dancy and her angel and thinking about this world in a visual way that affected the comics and how you wrote them.
CRK: Working with Ted, that was a great honor. He's a brilliant artist. That was the first time I saw Dancy off the written page. We did a lot of conceptual stuff before he began the actual illustrations, getting her just the way I wanted her. So, his artwork is where the pictorial Dancy began, and for that I owe him a great debt. After Alabaster, when Penguin released a new edition of Threshold, the cover artist drew very heavily of Ted's interpretation of Dancy. Mostly, he did a decent job, though she inexplicably has yellow, instead of pink, eyes. I could get them to fix that. By the time I was shown the cover, it was too late. It was like, here's Dancy with hepatitis. Anyway, when I began working with Ted, I'd already decided this would be a sort of reboot. For that matter, I think a lot of people don't realize that the Dancy short stories were a mild reboot from the novel. A different worldline, you might say. Read carefully, and you'll see the two don't sync up. But Steve and I began by looking at what Ted had done. But I wanted an older and more world weary Dancy. Steve said, if you could have anyone you want to play her in a film, who would you choose. I'd just seen Super 8brilliant filmand I immediately said, Elle Fanning. So, she became a template from which Steve began.
AD: Talk a little about the art team on the book, artist Steve Lieber and colorist Rachelle Rosenberg and how they were able to visualize this world?
CRK: I can't speak for them. I can't tell you how they went about doing what they've done. I haven't talked a lot about their process. Mostly, we've talked about how it ought to be, and they've gone away and made it that way. We all work in isolation, in the end, sending our little notes back and forth. So, here we've entered the realm of "You have to ask them." To me, it's like magic. Also, I have to emphasize the part that our cover artist, Greg Ruth, has played in all this. Every one of his covers, well, some of them have almost brought tears to my eyes. They're that good. And this is what people who may buy the comic will see first. They'll see his covers. In many cases, his covers will be the thing that sells the book.
AD: One of the things I love most about the Dancy stories is that the set-up seems very familiar in that its about a teenage girl fighting monsters, but she doesnt have any superpowers. She has insight and secret knowledge, but shes very much on her own. Having said that, one of the things I alternately like about the stories and which annoys me is that I want more insight into this world, how it operates and getting a bigger picture, which Dancy does not have. Do you have any interest in writing a story where things start to be explained or she starts piecing things together? Or will sheand by extension, usalways be fumbling in the dark?
CRK: Here's something I have very, very strong feelings about. Writing stories about Dancy Flammarionas with most of my fictionwe've entered the realm of the inexplicable. And when you explain the inexplicable, you divest it of its power. A good mystery is worth a thousand answers, and I know I'm never going to waver from that. For example, is Dancy insane, or is the seraph real? Don't ever expect to get a concrete answer on that. I go and do that, the power of the story deflates. We lose a huge part of the tension that drives the stories forward, that, for me, make the tales compelling. Why is her world seemingly filled with monsters? Because it is, and that's the only answer you'll ever get, I suspect. I tell people, you want answers, read Agatha Christie. Dancy is a mystery without a solution, ultimately. This is what makes her beautiful, and makes her world so terrifying and beautiful. People ask me, all the timeand this annoys me"What happened?" And I tell them that most of the time I don't know, not in the sense that I have this secret I'm holding back just to frustrate them. Few ever believe this, but most of the time I don't know what happened, or why a lot of things in my books and stories are how and why they are. If I did, why would I write the stories. It's not my job to hold the readers hands and lead them point by point through a story. I want them to be left with questions they'll chew over for a long, long time. For me, that's what weird fiction is, a presentation of enduring mysteries. Period.
AD: So for fans, give us some context. Where does miniseries pick up in relation to the epilogue of Threshold and the stories in Alabaster and where are we going?
CRK: In retrospect, I genuinely hate the epilogue of Threshold. It never should have been written. And to accept the stories in the Alabaster short story collection, I think readers have to forget it. I'd certainly like to forget it. Then we come to the comic, and, to a degree, I need readers to set aside the short-story collection. Like I said, here's a second reboot. I do refer to the short stories in the comics, to Alabaster, for example, most of which is recounted in #3. But, once again, I'm offering an alternate history. This Dancy has never gone to Birmingham and never will, and that was true in the short stories, too. It was never made explicit, but I knew it. Whether or not readers picked up on that, I don't think it detracted from the stories. Each story is meant to stand on its own. well, okay, except for Bainbridge, which was a mistake, trying to tie everything together. Writers make mistakes, and that was a big one for me. I'm going to rewrite that story someday, and take out the references to Murder of Angels, and, by extension, Silk. Having said that, you'll see, in the comic, a Dancy who finds herself more alone and more on her own than ever before.
AD: How has moving to Providence changed what you write? Or has it?
CRK: It has, and for the better. To date, I've written three Rhode Island novels Daughter of Hounds (actually written while I still lived in Atlanta), The Red Tree, and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. Those last two were genuinely breakthroughs for me, and, in my eyes, they're vastly better than any novel I wrote before. They're my first mature novels. I look back at the ones I wrote before them, and I know that. As to the part that moving to Providence has played in that, honestly, I don't know. It's one of those mysteries I can't answer. I don't much care why. Only that it did happen. I'm not going to say something hokey and clichd like, New England is such a haunted place. If any place is haunted, all places are haunted. Everywhere people have ever lived and died. There's always the possibility that moving to Rhode Island had no casual role whatsoever in the shift, that it was something already in progress, that I was maturing as a writer, and it would have happened regardless. I suspect that's the truth, but I'll never know. I will say, I'll admit, anytime I have a new landscape, it inspires me. But that's been true of many places I've traveled to, lived in, spent time in. Los Angeles, coastal Oregon, Manhattan, Ireland, London, Alabama, Boston, and on and on.
AD: I did want to ask about your novel, The Drowning Girl, which came out last month, and which I think is possibly your best novel. Could you talk a little about the book and what you were trying to do?
CRK: You get me started, I could probably talk about The Drowning Girl endlessly. In fact, it's kind of hard to say just a little about the book. It took me two years to write, and I think I almost broke myself in the process. When it was all over, my partner and my psychiatrist both told me to back off from such intensely personal books, and that's not hyperbole. Like The Red Tree before it, The Drowning Girl is heavily autobiographical. Fictionalized autobiography, but autobiography, all the same. They're bookends, though that doesn't mean you should read one before the other. When I say they're bookends, I mean it in an abstract and in a psychological sense. To say that The Drowning Girl is intensely personal is an understatement. And it absolutely is my best novel to date. That's true to the point that I'm not sure I'll ever write another one that's better. I'm not sure I can. I worked through so much in the novel insanity, art, loss, love, hauntings, survival. At its core, it's a novel about the relationship that often exists between mental illness and art, and some people might call it a ghost story, but I'd prefer to say it's a novel about the nature of hauntings, and that's not necessarily the same thing.
AD: You have a new short story collection coming out this summer, Confessions on a Five-Chambered Heart. Whats going to be in the collection and what is it that you love about writing short stories?
CRK: Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart is very much a follow-up to my last collection, The Ammonite Violin & Others. Most of the stories contain erotic elements, sometimes strongly so. Back in 2005, I decided to conduct an experiment. If I wrote erotica, what would it be like, and that led to two little volumesthey actually are, literally, small books that fit in the palm of my handFrog Toes and Tentacles and Tales from the Woeful Platypus. People ask, so what's your erotica like, and I'll say something like, well, imagine Angela Carter and Anas Nin and H. P. Lovecraft were to collaborate, and that's sort of what my erotica's like. I call it weird erotica, because I see it as a sort of sexual annex of the weird tradition. It's not for everyone, but the readers who like it, they seem to love it. After I did Frog Toes and Tentacles, I was left wanting to continue to explore these regions, these territories, so I conceived an experiment. I never thought it would work. I created something I called Sirenia Digest, and it works this way: readers subscribe, $10 a month, and each month they get a PDF with one or two new pieces of my "weird erotica," vignettes or short stories, or sometimes a novel in progress. The first issue went out in November 2005, and we've reached #76, so I think it's safe to say the experiment has exceeded far beyond what I dared to expect. By the way, anyone who's interested in subscribing, it's easy. Just go to my website, specifically to caitlinrkiernan.com, and it's all handled via PayPal. If you're tastes in the erotic aren't conventional, well, you might like what I'm offering. There are some samples up on the website, by the way. One of the most wonderful things about the digest is that a lot of the stories are being printed in anthologies. A couple have even made "year's best" anthologies. Both The Ammonite Violin & Others and Confessions of a Five-Chambered Heart collect the earlier stories from the digest, and very glad to say that the former appeared on the cover of Publisher's Weekly and was nominated for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards, so maybe my unconventional tastes are a little bit less unconventional than I tend to think.