Saint Paul author Naomi Kritzer is notable for her ability to infuse her works with a strong sense of place – in particular, several novels set in the Twin Cities! Producer Sherry Johnson sits down with Naomi to talk about her process.
Links
- The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea
- The Year Without Sunshine – text or audio
- Will Tell Stories For Food | Naomi Kritzer’s blog
- Liberty’s Daughter
Attributions
Our theme song is Tanz den Dobberstein, and our interstitial song is Puck’s Blues. Both tracks used by permission of their creator, Erik Brandt. Find out more about his band, The Urban Hillbilly Quartet, on their website.
This episode was produced, edited, and transcribed by Sherry Johnson; and was engineered by Ian R Buck. Many thanks to Naomi Kritzer for coming on the show. We’re always looking to feature new voices on the show, so if you have ideas for future episodes, drop us a line at [email protected].
Transcript
Naomi: If you can walk to get your coffee, but your barista has to live an hour away, you don’t live in a walkable community. You live in a theme park. And like, I feel like a lot of people do live in theme parks, and I feel like I don’t ever want my world building to feel like a theme park. Even if I’m writing about something that’s happening at a theme park, I want there to be an awareness of the backstage areas because a theme park has a backstage area.
Ian: Welcome to the Streets.mn Podcast, the show where we highlight how transportation and land use can make our communities better places. Coming to you from beautiful Union Station in Toronto, Ontario, I am your host, Ian R. Buck. That’s right. I’m recording this intro during my vacation, which very well might give us material for future episodes.
Today you’ll hear our producer, Sherry Johnson, interviewing beloved local author Naomi Kritzer about her approach to incorporating a sense of place into her novels. Let me hand you off to them.
Sherry: I am so excited to be here with Naomi Kritzer. St. Paul residents might know her as a good neighbor, mom to two grown children, and a subject-to-change number of cats.
Our listeners may know her best as their Twin Cities voting booth pocket pal for having guided so many of us with her thoughtful elections blog. We promise you an election season episode with Naomi about that in the fall.
But in my nerd circles and around the world, Kritzer is known for her immersive, award-winning speculative fiction. She’s won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Edgar Award, and the Minnesota Book Award. This year, she’s a Hugo Award finalist for best novelette for the Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea. I read it Sunday and got flappy happy hands. You should, too.
Naomi Kritzer, welcome to the Streets.mn podcast.
Naomi: Thank you so much for inviting me.
Sherry: So, the reason I wanted to have you on this podcast to talk about writing is that I am drawn to the ways you acknowledge the built environment in your work. We’re talking land use, history and planning, concepts of ownership and even transit. Am I just seeing things when I read your stuff? What’s your relationship to land use and transportation advocacy, Naomi?
Naomi: So, um, I was thinking about this question. Actually, two weekends ago, uh, when I, when I went back to Madison, Wisconsin, which is where I’m from for bat mitzvah the bat mitzvah was for the granddaughter, one of the granddaughters of Ken Golden family friend and Madison Alderman for quite a few years.
My first political involvement ever was helping with Ken’s campaign the very first time he ran, which was in. Sometime in the late 1980s. I don’t remember exactly when. But he was a really close family friend and still is. And, um, my, my mother was the president of the neighborhood association for a while.
And it may have been, she, I know she worked on Ken’s campaign. I don’t remember exactly what she did. Ken is an urbanist–not that we had that term, or at least not that I knew that term in the 1980s–but Ken is a, is a really strong believer in the value of transit and the value of thoughtful land use and density and housing and not prioritizing parking and the, these were all things, I mean, as a teen in the 1980s, I sort of viewed parking as my birthright. And Ken was the first person I ever talked to who spelled out for me in really specific ways how much it costs to provide a parking space, in that he, he was like: Let’s take a flat parking lot. That’s the cheapest you can do–obviously a parking garage is way more expensive–and this is how much it would cost to level it, pave it, paint the lines, maintain the asphalt every year, clear the snow every year. And this is how much it costs per space . This thing that you think of as cost-free is like a whole lot of money for every single space, every single year. And this was my sort of, my first introduction to this idea.
Sherry: And back then, like a car was like a symbol of freedom, adulthood…
Naomi: Yeah. That’s where my understanding of land use in transit really started was growing up in Madison, which was a town that has some issues with urban planning. If you’ve ever been to Madison, like that line from Jesse Ventura about how, drunk Irishmen, I don’t know who, designed the road system in downtown St. Paul.
Sherry: Yeah.
Naomi: I don’t know who designed Madison and I don’t know what they were on.
Sherry: Well, it’s the isthmus, I think. It’s the isthmus, right?
Naomi: Yeah. I mean, why did you put, why did they put the capital in the middle of this tiny strip of land between two enormous lakes? It is, um… . It’s a fascinating choice. It’s really aesthetically pleasing and the most impractical design you can possibly imagine. Um, yeah. Anyway…
Sherry: So, you’re pretty founded in this stuff?
Naomi: Yeah. No, I mean, I just, yeah.
Sherry: So, okay, so I got the first idea of talking with you about–for this podcast–when I read the extensive Minneapolis- St. Paul material in your young adult novel, Chaos on Catnet. Can you talk about some of the locations you chose for that book and maybe why?
Naomi: I really love writing about Minneapolis and St. Paul for a number of reasons. First, I really love these cities. These are great cities. And each city really has its own magic, but our magic is a little hidden here. Like, you know, you’re more likely to find it if somebody local takes you to see stuff or tells you where to look.
But also, just because it’s a lot easier to write a sense of place. Well, when I’m writing places that I know. So, some of the locations in the book first of all, Powderhorn Neighborhood. ‘Stef’s Mother gets an apartment in Powderhorn because I have a lot of friends in Powderhorn and I really like the neighborhood.
And Nell’s Father’s polycule also lives in Powderhorn because if you’ve got a polycule, and one of them is an artist who works in paper mâché, of course, they live in Powderhorn. Of course they live… Where else would these people live? And I made up a global dumpling shop that doesn’t exist but totally could.
I wrote about Summit Avenue, and there’s a bit that takes place in a decrepit mansion that’s being renovated. I got to go see a really decrepit mansion that was on the market at one point. And it was fascinating and really creepy. Like people don’t realize just how much money it takes to maintain a late Victorian mansion.
Sherry: That was honestly–doing advocacy in that neighborhood–I think that half the ire we get from Summit Avenue folks is just the, “You have no idea what I’ve put into this house.”
Naomi: Right. They’re like, I think they feel like they don’t get the credit they deserve for the really expensive historical preservation project that every single one of them is involved in.
Yeah, and I mean like there, there’s… I have some sympathy, right? It’s really expensive to keep up an old house, and those houses are huge. Anyway, I wrote the house in the book is being renovated by a family that’s living there and renovating it.
CanCan Wonderland is in the book, at least a version of it. CanCan Wonderland is real and really cool. It’s not… it doesn’t have a rollercoaster. I added the rollercoaster. And as far as I know. There is no evil genius using it as a headquarters.
Sherry: My teenager loved these books, and she commented on how CanCan Wonderland in the book is kind of like a Five Nights at Freddy’s feeling. Are you familiar with this? It’s big with the kids… I’m just saying you struck a chord.
Naomi: Oh, and I, I also note that the place where the cult has its hideout is based on a real location , which is a really awful summer camp that I went to as a child. I changed the name of the town nearby, but it is based, I like pulled it up on maps and looked and figured out how long it would take to drive there.
And yeah, the original book is set in a town that I gave a fake name to, but somebody who’s from the real town that the town is based on recognized it because I ran into somebody who was like, this is my town, isn’t it? And I was like, yes. And she was like; I could tell because of the distance from Marshfield.
I was like, oh, yeah, I guess. Yeah.
Sherry: Again, you know how to explain place. You can’t hide…
All right, so we’re gonna have you do three readings. The first is from this book, Chaos on Catnet. It’s second in a series featuring a savvy queer teenager whose mother moves her around a lot in an effort to evade her abusive father. She gets involved in an online community populated by AIs with dubious ethics. In this scene, she has an assignment to ride the Lake Street bus from school to the Midtown Exchange. The year is 2030.
Naomi: Yep. So, this is from the viewpoint of Nell, who is a friend of Stef, but not the one whose mother was moving her around.
Sherry: Thank you.
Naomi: This afternoon, my peculiar high school says, my assignment is to ride the city bus.
Specifically, I need to choose a destination, ride the bus there, and bring back some souvenir to prove I went. Stef has the same assignment, which makes this slightly less terrifying. My mother used to warn me about how dangerous public schools were when she was in high school, kids got beat up all the time. A girl got punched in the face on the first day of her ninth-grade science class. There were kids smoking grass in the bathrooms and maybe also shooting up heroin, and that was just in her school. City schools, well, those lockdown drills you heard about weren’t just for show.
I should note that this character was homeschooled by a woman who was in a cult. So ah, her viewpoint is <shrugs>…
Mom would poop out an entire litter of hairless baby hamsters if she knew that my father had enrolled me at a school that was making me ride a city bus, but this is good actually because I get to pick a destination and I have a quest from The Catacombs. I’ve heard other people talk about quests, but I never got one before.
Quests are optional. The missions aren’t supposed to be. When you do a quest, you can go up a whole lot of levels, a lot faster. Sometimes you’re even granted the opportunity to ask the elder a question, and my quest starts with getting myself to something called the Midtown Exchange. I click Accept, my heart beating a little faster as the cheerful teacher spreads out a paper map of the city so we can pick a destination.
“Where’s the Midtown Exchange?” I ask, trying to keep my voice casual.
The teacher points it out on the map. “Is that where you wanna go?” I nod. She looks at Stef. “Is that okay with you? We’d like you to stick together.”
Stef shrugs. “Sure.”
We each install an app on our phone that does bus routes, and we’re handed our bus passes and a lanyard to carry them in and then sent out to the bus stop in front of our school.
“Have you ever ridden a bus before,” Stef asks.
“No,” I say, “Have you?”
“No,” she says and laughs nervously. She puts her bus pass in her pocket, not in the lanyard. And after a minute I do the same. Stef acts much more worldly than I feel. She’s lived in nearly a hundred small towns instead of just one. So, it’s easy to forget that she’s never lived in a big city before.
And being reminded of this makes my palm sweat, because I was thinking I’d just let her tell me how to do this. There’s an elderly black man with a walker at the same stop as us. The bus trundles up, opens its doors and starts lowering itself to the curb with a loud, hiss. Stef tries to lean in to ask the driver, “Is this the right bus to get to the Midtown Exchange?” But she’s drowned out.
“You’ve got the right bus,” the elderly man says. When the bus is fully lowered, it flips out a ramp with a loud beep, and he boards and then glances back at us. “You’re allowed to use the ramp. Come on in,” he adds. I’m a little nervous taking the word of a fellow passenger over the driver, but Stef gets on, so I follow her.
There are many empty seats. We swipe our passes and make our way to a spot near the middle where there’s another door. I like the seat because it seems like it would be easy to escape out that door if we had to. The app is supposed to tell us where to get off, but I don’t trust it and I’m gonna skip some stuff.
“Are we almost there?” Nell asks.
Stef scrutinizes her phone and then leaps to her feet. “I think we get out here maybe.”
I glance at the old man who told us we should get on. “If you’re going to Midtown, you’ll wanna sit back down,” he calls. “This is Floyd Plaza, and you want Floyd Avenue.”
Stef stares at her phone for a second, utterly perplexed, and then says, “Oh yeah, that’s really confusing.” She sits back down and calls, “Thank you,” towards the front of the bus.
“If you young ladies would like to come sit by me,” he says, “I’m actually going to that same stop, so you can just get off when I get off.” We move up to the front of the bus. “Are you new to Minneapolis?” He asks. We nod in unison. “I’ve lived in this city for 40 years, 43 actually, so relax, because I won’t let you miss your stop.”
He gives us running commentary on Lake Street as we head west. Floyd Plaza is only about 10 years old, and he points out a series of newer buildings that were put up after the riots, which he says like you’d say after the war. “You’ll know you’re almost there when you see the rocket ship,” he says, and I think he’s joking, but there’s a two story building made of sandy bricks with an aluminum rocket ship sculpture on the front that reaches all the way to the roof, and a minute later, the bus stops for us to get off.
Sherry: Thank you. And, and that rocket ship building is
Naomi: Uncle Hugo’s science fiction books as it exists in this novel.
Sherry: What I imagine that was one of the fun things, imagining at the time that you wrote it what Minneapolis St. Paul is gonna be like in 2030. What else was fun about that thought experiment?
Naomi: The really, probably the most fun I had was, uh, CanCan Wonderland because, you know, I wanted to use the real building as a base, but also I added an artist designed roller coaster and I filled it with robots ’cause there’s a lot of robots of this future. And uh, that was a lot of fun.
Sherry: Nice. So, what was challenging? I’m imagining that this scene you just read was particularly challenging.
Naomi: Yeah. Figuring out what to do and I was revising. This was a really interesting challenge ’cause I was revising this April, May and June of 2020.
Sherry: Ugh. And then you got some advice from a friend.
Naomi: Yeah, so I was revising this in… I got my… I wrote this in 2019, and then I got my editorial letter in February of 2020. And I set it aside for a while and normally I set it aside for like… I read a letter, set it aside, and come back in about a week or two. But I got wildly distracted by the fact that we were having a pandemic. And finally, late April, I started seriously working on revisions. And this book had a bus ride down Lake Street, and it has a trip later in the book to Uncle Hugo’s science fiction bookstore.
And so, the end of May of 2020, I was also… This book has fictional riots, and I could not work on that. I realized as real civil disorder was happening around me, I really, I just couldn’t, and I sent my editor an email and I said, “Hey, I’m gonna miss my deadline.” And then I tried to figure out how to do this. And what to do with this. Because this is a near future setting. It’s supposed to be about 10 years out, although, I mean, we’re halfway to 10 years from 2020, and it’s, you know, we don’t have nearly enough robots to make this story work. But, you know, it’s supposed to basically be like almost our society with like, some stuff that’s a little unfamiliar.
So, I emailed my best friend, Lyda Morehouse, who’s also a writer, and I was like, “How do I do this? How do I know what it’s gonna look like? What do I even do?”
And she said, “Write the Minneapolis that you want to see.” And that was really good advice. And she said, ” You want Uncle Hugos to rebuild, don’t you? So put it back, give them an even better building. Make it spectacular. Make it the building you wish they’d had all along.” And so, that’s what I did. And so, in this book, Uncle Hugo’s is on Lake Street, very close to where its old location was, which is not in fact where they reopened. I really like their new location.
I mean, I put them in the wrong spot, but, you know, such is life. There’s a park where the third precinct was. And there’s a street that’s been renamed after George Floyd and the park.
Sherry: Is that Floyd Plaza?
Naomi: The Floyd Plaza is a park in the location where the third precinct was. And yeah, I mean it is… writing the Minneapolis that I wanted to see was very much the right answer.
Sherry: And it seems like urban planners maybe could learn a few things from writers and especially speculative fiction writers sometimes.
Naomi: Right. Maybe, I mean. Sometimes I’ll say that I am freed from considerations, like, you know, trying to get my ideas through a planning commission.
Sherry: Oh yeah.
So, writing mentors often talk about the need to read like a writer, not only for enjoyment, but also for inspiration, hints on technique. What writers have been most inspiring to you in terms of writing about place?
Naomi: I have a couple of answers. First of all, Fonda Lee, who wrote The Green Bone Series, which starts with Jade City, which is set mostly in, around a city called Kekon, that is, you know, maybe a fictional Singapore. It’s a little island. It’s a tiny little island that’s mostly the city. It was colonized by various groups and, but they have this magical substance called bioactive Jade that a very limited number of people can use safely without chemical enhancement. There’s American analogs who’ve come up with a chemical enhancement so that their soldiers can use it, and it’s a really good series and it is the sense of place in those books is intense and the world building is immersive in a way that’s just amazing. It’s so good. They’re really, really good books.
I really like Lois Bujold’s sense of place. She did one thing that always drives me a little nuts with her fantasy world , which is that she decided that it’s set in a southern hemisphere and not a northern hemisphere, but it’s otherwise our world, it’s just turned upside down. So, like whenever they’re talking about North, I have to like, remember they mean south. She’s just not… I think what she wants is the reader to be doing this and she uses a lot of real-world geography. I kinda can’t not. But it’s really well described cultures and scenery. And in, in her later series, she has a character Penric who starts out in a place in Switzerland, and winds up in a place in Albania with stops in Venice and various other places in between. He does a lot of traveling. Yeah, she’s very… Lois is local. She’s an amazing writer in a whole lot of ways, but very good for sense of place.
Years ago, I’ll note, I read Emma Bull’s War for The Oaks, which is kind of a classic Minneapolis novel. It’s worth noting for people who haven’t picked it up before that like a lot of things that later became kind of like cliches of urban fantasy originated with War for the Oaks. Like she was inventing these tropes. They were new when she did them.
And then recently The Pairing by Casey McQuiston is a romance novel. It’s a second chance romance novel about two people who were on their way for this amazing food and wine tour of Europe when they broke up. And then they weren’t able to get a refund. So, they instead got a sort of a gift or credit, right, towards, you know, do this trip again at some later point. And they both waited until it was about to expire, and they had to go, and so they end up on the same trip.
Sherry: Oh, my goodness.
Naomi: Um, and what I’ll say, I love a lot about this. The food descriptions and the place descriptions are really lavish. It’s very, very clear that Casey McQuiston took the money they made from the Netflix version of Red, White, and Royal Blue, and spent a big chunk of it on an incredibly lavish food and wine tour and wrote every cent of it off on their taxes.
Sherry: That’s amazing.
Naomi: Total validity and legitimacy. And I am just like, live the dream, Casey. I am so happy for you. But also, like really amazing food writing and a nice romance.
Also in the romance genre, Emily Henry’s Book Lovers, which is partly deconstruction of the tropes of the small-town romance. The two characters end up in a small town, where she has been brought by her sister for vacation, and he is there because it’s actually his hometown. They met in New York initially, and what I love about this is that the small town is so much weirder than small towns in romance novels are.
Sherry: Alright, so I think we’re gonna move to the next reading. This one is “The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea.” How did you come up with the idea to write about this seaside town in Massachusetts?
Naomi: So, I wanted to… Let’s see. The idea originated with the #thanksfortyping Hashtag in 2017. Bruce Holsinger, who’s a fiction writer back in 2017, started tweeting out little photos of acknowledgements in books written by men in the thirties and forties and fifties, and they thank their wives for typing, and it’s so clear in so many of them that their wives were doing so much more than just typing… And, I mean, even just typing was significant labor.
But these women also, in one case I mean, were transcribing handwritten historical records, which is like really complicated job. Some of them were doing data analysis or, you know, a lot of these people were uncredited co-authors, and they don’t even get named. They’re just “Thanks to my wife.”
That was something I read at the time, and I was fascinated and horrified by it. And then I was thinking about selkies, and something I like about science fiction and fantasy is both that you can make things literal that are sometimes metaphorical, but you can also make things metaphorical that are literal, that were like originally literal. And the idea of the selkie story is that the man steals the woman’s true self. That’s really what the story is about. So, they’re sea creatures that look like seals. Selkies are seals that can shift into women. And the stories about selkies frequently have a man who sees them and steals their seal skin so they cannot turn back.
I just thought that… I just felt like this was a story; that these two things could be related in an interesting way. And then it was set in Massachusetts because it needed to be a coast, right? The selkie stories come from the North Atlantic, and I’ve spent a lot of time in Massachusetts, ’cause that is where my husband is from. So, we spent a lot of time, obviously. Finstowe is made up, but I hopefully the New England stuff rang true. ‘Cause it is at least partly based on places that I’ve been.
Sherry: Nice. So, this reading is from “The Four Sisters Overlooking the Sea.” It is a novelette from the September/October edition of Asimov’s Science Fiction. You can get it online for free. Again, you need to read it. It focuses on the wife in a dual PhD family whose academic career was scuttled when her data was accidentally scrubbed. And the story finds her tasked not only with editing her tenure track husband’s publications, but also with finding housing for his sabbatical at Harvard. She decides on a rental in the mysterious town of Finstowe, Massachusetts. The reading begins with her taking her daughter to a nearby beach.
Naomi: I adjusted the driver’s seat and Cordie moved Stuart’s mess of papers to the back so she could sit up front, and we set out. There didn’t seem to be a road that went up to the overlook, but I found a sign saying The Four Sisters, and there was space by it to pull off and park the car. Beyond the sign we found a gravel path leading uphill through a scrubby wood, and a few minutes of walking brought us out to a spot with a spectacular view of the ocean. Also four standing stones. These are not common in Massachusetts, but there are groups of stones like this all over Europe. Technically a standing stone is called a menhir, a Brittanic word that means “long stone.” In the U.S. they don’t usually look ancient. These did—or at least they looked like they might have been there since the 1700s. They were weathered by the wind and thick moss grew on the shaded parts. The stones stood in a curved line. Four women, staring out at the gray waves of the Atlantic: I could see it. “Is that a beach?” Cordie asked, pointing at the shore we could see far below. “It’s probably private,” I said. In Minneapolis, the waterfront was all public land— this was one of the things I genuinely liked about the city. All the fancy lakefront houses faced a sidewalk, a road, a bike path, a park, and then the lake. In Massachusetts, huge sections of the oceanfront were owned by rich people, although most towns had carved out beaches for their residents. “No,” Cordie said. “Gwen says that in Finstowe, the town owns all the oceanfront.” I wasn’t sure I believed that, but I squinted down at the shore and couldn’t see any oceanfront cottages. I did see something else, though. “Look,” I said. “Seals.” “Seals in the wild?” “That’s definitely not a zoo down there.” “We have to go see them!” “You’ll have to promise not to ‘accidentally’ fall in the water,” I said. “It’s not warm enough to swim.” “I haven’t fallen into the water on purpose in years,” Cordie muttered. “Okay,” I said, “Let me see what the map says, if there’s a path down from here or if we’ll need to go back to the car.” I was looking down at my phone, waiting for the map to load, when another woman came up, walking a tiny gray poodle. “Are you Marissa’s mom?” Cordie said. “I am. You must have known me by my dog.” Cordie crouched down to pat the poodle, which was trying to jump up to lick her face and mostly failing because it was just too tiny. “Marissa’s phone lock screen is a picture of Urchin.” “Hi,” I said. “I’m Morgan, Cordelia’s mom. I think we talked on the phone.” “I’m Rosemary,” she said. “Marissa mentioned you’d talked about our standing stones, so I thought maybe I’d come up and see if I ran into you. It’s a nice day for a walk.” Cordie looked up at her, her face open and cheerful. Rosemary looked us over with the same intense reserve I’d felt over the phone. She and Gwen’s mom had both shown this open wariness of me as an outsider that seemed, honestly, a little over the top. I gave her my best bland smile. “Is there a path down to the beach?” Cordie asked her. “There are seals down there!” “We’ll stay fifty yards away,” I added. “I did research on pinnipeds for a while. I know not to disturb them.” “I can show you the way down,” Rosemary said. We walked back down to the road, and then Rosemary took us to a much steeper path that led to a set of uneven stone stairs built into the hill. She picked up the tiny poodle and tucked him under one arm. “Watch your step,” she said. “Pretty much every year the Town Meeting talks about whether to rebuild these, or at least add a handrail. The problem is, they’re quaint the way they are and a lot of people prefer that to safe.”
Sherry: Yeah. For those of you who have not read “A Year without Sunshine,” that is not one we’ll feature today, but that we will include in the show notes a link to a podcast in which it is read fully. It is a really beautiful illustration of the concept of sharing over hoarding, essentially, and how important sharing will become to us as a society.
So how do you typically approach establishing this sense of place in your writing. Is your writing process the same, whether the setting is real or imaginary, present or future?
Naomi: It’s similar. If it’s a real place, I like to look at it on Google Maps and on Google Street View, and I look at pictures people have taken.
If it’s close by, I can go there. But if it’s not, I rely heavily on Google Street View and um, photos. And if it’s not a real place, I sometimes try to find something analogous that I can go look at. So Finstowe for example, isn’t a real place, but I looked up a lot of the maps of the coastline in the area where it’s described as existing.
Mm-hmm. And like tried to get a sense of like, how do the beaches work there? Are they like, is there a cliff, is there flat leading up to the beach? Like. What varieties do they have in that particular, in the approximate spot where I was imagining this imaginary town goes what would it look like?
Um, and I tried to look at existing photos of real places to get a sense so that I could describe it in a way that would, would fit and would work.
Sherry: You said the town council chose the rickety over the safe. Mm-hmm. Right. Is that the word?
Naomi: Quaint. It’s quaint.
Sherry: Quaint, sorry. Over the safe. Where is that coming from?
Naomi: I, I just felt like that was so. So beautiful and so illustrative. Oh, that’s coming from a lot of time in New England. Also, my husband, although he would totally want a safe staircase, ’cause he wants a handrail if he’s going down a long flight of stairs. But he also would probably vote for the pretty, quaint stairs. He wouldn’t wanna get rid of something. He doesn’t like to get rid of anything that’s pretty.
Sherry: All right. So, when you’re giving readers a sense of place, again, I just feel like there’s this underlying sense of values, so maybe not valuing safety so much as the sharing of space, the commonwealth, the common areas. What other values do you bring to that establishment of setting?
Naomi: When I am developing a setting. I really want stuff to make a certain amount of sense and fit together. There’s a book that I read years ago, Diana Wynne Jones’ book, The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land, is a satire. A travel book for going to the generic fantasy setting. And she makes fun of like fantasy settings where there is stew that’s just always the same and not described in any real way. And like there’s trash piles that never rot and there’s never any explanation for where anything comes from. And I. Work really hard to not write like that. If you’re eating stew, I want it to be a specific stew.
And if it’s stew, somebody has to be growing the beans. And if it’s mutton stew, somebody has to be shepherding the sheep. There’s a whole infrastructure implied by everything you put into your story, and I try to. Think about the ways in which that manifests. And I mean, I’m a writer, I’m not an expert on any of this.
But I try to make it so that, if you’re eating mutton in a fantasy story ever written, we may not actually ever see herds of sheep, but I want. A sense that they’re there. Yeah. I want you to feel like if you, you know, started walking, you would eventually get to the herds of sheep as opposed to you’ll just fall off the edge of the map.
That’s what I rant in my stories is a sense that, that the, that the rest of the world is there, even if you don’t see it. One of my pet peeves are, um, fantasy stories that have hot showers because there’s a, there’s a whole lot of infrastructure. Like I understand, certainly if there’s a way to do it.
You’re gonna have hot showers because hot showers are one of the greatest inventions of civilization. But also, they require a civilization. They require an incredible level of infrastructure. And that infrastructure could be technological, it could be magical, or it could be human. And if you’re getting your hot beds, because humans carry buckets of water and heat them up and then carry them to where your bathtub is and fill it.
I want those humans to be visible, and I want them to like, they’re people. They’re people in the story.
Sherry: It reminds me of The Curse of Chalion. The bathhouse, I want to say
Naomi: Yes. Yeah. And like in The Curse of Chalion, what you see of the bathhouse is that like there’s big copper tubs and there’s. wood kept burning under them to keep the water heated so that the water is hot.
There’s a, and there’s a, there’s a little boy that is the bath boy who rinses Cazaril with a bucket. Mm-hmm. Um, and then this matters because this is a spoiler, but it happens very early in the book. Yeah. The boy sees Cazaril’s scars from being flogged. And reaches an entirely incorrect conclusion about what, what he might’ve done to get those scars.
And this is, this sets a whole lot of things in motion. Lois’s books I love. Her plots are always like just perfectly interlocking parts where like mm-hmm. Everything that happens matters. Mm-hmm. And, you know, it affects the ultimate outcome and really. Beautifully done ways, but that is a gun on the mantel piece that comes back multiple times in multiple ways.
And it, it’s just, it, it is an amazing, um, piece of the plot. But
Sherry: So, it seems like you’re saying like nothing is taken for granted. There’s an ecosystem.
Naomi: Yeah.
Sherry: And it kind of reminds me of, it’s kind of the opposite of the Disneyfication of things, right? Where everything just appears perfect. And you can see this in some of the nineties and aughts developments, right, that just look like set pieces from Blazing Saddles or something, right?
Naomi: Yeah. I actually, I heard a line recently that I really liked, which is that if you can walk to get your coffee, but your barista has to live an hour away. You don’t live in a walkable community.
You live in a theme park. Yes. And like I feel like a lot of people do live in theme parks and I feel like, I don’t ever want my world building to feel like a theme park, even if I’m writing about something that’s happening. At a theme park, I want there to be an awareness of the backstage areas.
Oh, because a theme park has a backstage area. I have a friend who worked at Disney World as a costumed character at one point. She played a bunch of different characters. Her favorite was Donald, because he’s allowed to be a jerk. Um, and, and like, she’ll, so she can tell you things like how those costumes smell.
Mm. And. The ways in which Disney manages its guests. Yeah. Um, so that they have a good experience, but also that the people working there don’t get, like accidentally knocked off their feet by like mm-hmm. Enthusiastic hugs and things like that. There’s all, there’s like this, Disney has this incredibly elaborate infrastructure dedicated to propping up the illusions Yes.
That it presents. And like if I am setting something at a at a theme park. I want my reader to be able to see the illusion and how the illusion is being made, because that’s what makes it interesting,
Sherry: and you,
I’m relating it back to the very beginning of this interview. Think about how you, as a teenager, get a car, get a license.
Naomi: Yeah.
Sherry: And your whole worldview is shifted when you see what’s underneath that.
Naomi: Yes. Yes. Very much. Yeah. Yeah.
Sherry: Speaking of worldviews, I would like to get into this next one, Liberty’s Daughter. This one is a novel imagining a near-future scenario in which Libertarians found an archipelago of floating sea-steads in the Pacific.
The main character, Beck Garrison, is a teenage finder, one who sources items for trade, but unfortunately, her work begins uncovering secrets the sea-stead’s most powerful residents want to remain secret. The reading is from Beck’s explanation of her home.
Naomi: I live on Min. Short for New Minerva, which is a sea stead in the Pacific Ocean, 220 nautical miles West from Los Angeles, California.
The sea-stead is basically a chain of manmade islands anchored into place with some bonus retired cruise ships and ocean freighters chained up to the platforms. Min is only one part. There is also Lib, Rosa, Sal, Pete, and New Amsterdam, and each one is its own country with its own set of rules except for Lib, which doesn’t have any rules at all.
That’s sort of the point. The sea steads were built by people who wanted more freedom and less government, a lot less government in the case of lib than they thought they’d ever be able to get in any existing country. And since all the land that existed was already claimed by someone, they built their own.
That was 49 years ago. My father and I came to live on men when I was four, after my mother died. I’m 16 now. I had wanted to get a job, but it was hard to find one. Mostly the people who were hiring wanted real grownups with PhDs for the scut work. Stuff like mopping floors and washing dishes. They wanted to hire guest workers because they’re cheap and reliable.
Guest workers are non-citizens. To become a citizen, you have to buy a stake, and that’s not cheap. Most of the people who come here without the cash to buy a stake don’t have the money to get here, so they take out a bonded loan and then work to pay it off. I finally found a job at Celery, which is this general store run by a guy named Jamie.
Jamie hired me to find stuff. Here’s a weird thing about the sea stead. People have a lot of money. Stakeholders do anyway. Guest workers not so much, but there’s still a lot of stuff. They can’t just go buy easily. You can go to California to shop, but it’s a long boat ride or an expensive flight, and entering the US can be a huge hassle because they don’t recognize sea stead citizenship as a.
Thing. You can order stuff, but shipping things to the sea stead takes forever and costs a ton. But there are about 80,000 people who live on the sea stead permanently, like me and my dad. And sometimes we need stuff. We get a lot of tourists. Amsterdam does anyway, and they bring stuff to seller trade.
But let’s say you need something really specific, like a size six black bathing suit. There’s only a few stores and they might not have one in stock, but there’s probably someone on the sea stead who’s got one. Who will sell it for the right price or trade it for the right thing. And that was my job, finding that stuff and then getting the person who owned it, what they wanted in exchange.
I found the size six black bikini and I found a case of white musk scented shampoo and I found a particular brand of baby binky, not to mention a bottle of fancy single malt scotch. That was actually pretty easy. Tourists bring fancy booze because the guidebook say it’s easy to sell or trade here, and a pair of sapphire drop style earrings along with a nice presentation box for them.
Sherry: Thank you. You had to have come up with a setting first for this one, right? Yeah. Can you talk about that? Like how did the setting help you shape the plot in characters?
Naomi: My sister went to Harvey Mud College. In, uh, the late 1990s, and one of her classmates was a guy named Patri Friedman. Patri Friedman runs the Sea Studying Institute.
And I originally heard about this because my sister was like, “Hey, check this out.”
And I was like, “Wow, what a weird concept.” And then I was like, I could write like, the kind of stories that normally you have to set in space. And I wouldn’t even have to figure out a way to get people to space. You could do this near future.
That’s so cool. And it fit an idea I’d had ages ago at, you know, earlier about a place where it was just like a little tiny seed of an idea that actually doesn’t show up until very late in the book about a place where like the elevators prioritize the executives. Like the elevators come to you faster based on your rank as you know, as communicated by your employee badge.
And then I, I, uh. I linked it to another idea I had, which involved investigating the disappearance of, of a person and yeah. That is, that is, that is where that, that is where that book came from. How did this setting help you say what you wanted to say? It’s pretty great for showing the value of a functioning government, which I’m a little worried about.
Sherry: I think a lot of us are pretty worried about right now.
Naomi: Yeah. I mean, Beck, the main character. Grew up in this intensely libertarian environment, and that’s very much part of who she is. So, I don’t know what you call it when it’s not exactly an unreliable narrator, but it’s like a narrator who’s definitely observing things correctly, but is interpreting them through a, a worldview that she’s grown up with.
So, like, she’s like, how do we solve these problems? And the answer for, most people would be: Well, this is why you have a government, my dear. I really believe in the value of a functioning government, and I really believe in the value of, um, having effective regulation on things like water and on things like working conditions, emergency healthcare…
I had a really good time writing about this world that is here and also doesn’t have any of that stuff. It’s not something I really wanna live through.
Sherry: Are we gonna get a second one?
Naomi: I’m undecided. It’s complicated by… We’ll see. I have ideas for other stuff that could happen.
Sherry: …Because we could use an instruction book here.
Naomi: Oh yeah. Right. Yeah. No, I mean…
Sherry: So, I mean, that leads to my final big question is what would you share with aspiring writers, particularly speculative fiction writers, as we face so many social and climate challenges in this time and the way that we write our stories, what can lead us to maybe a better place or sound the warning alarms that need to be sounded?
Naomi: So, what I would say to aspiring writers is that your voice matters and your ideas matter. And your stories matter, and you really have to believe in that in order to stick with it and keep writing. And it’s really true.
You know, you are the only person who can tell your stories and you’re the only person who can speak in your voice. And voice is an incredibly important part of the stories that get told and the books that get written, and I, I mentioned this in part because it is something that, there’s a lot of things that chat GPT cannot do, but one of them is very much is speak in your voice and.
There’s value in both the warning story and in the story that shows people what. They could build at the end of the tunnel. And you, you just have to figure out what you wanna do. I mean, some people really wanna scream the warning. Yeah. And like I have written more stuff that is about the story at the end of the tunnel, but I’m, I wouldn’t tell anyone not to write a good warning story.
Just, I, I worry, I the line about how, um. New from Meta, it’s the Torment Nexus! I do feel like there’s an awful lot of stories that were written as warnings that were not taken as such by some of the readers in some really weird ways. Like the people who watch Star Wars and really fetishize like, um, the empire and the aesthetic of the Empire.
These are actually like, you know, genocidal bad guys. They’re not. Really supposed to be as appealing as people find them. I read an article that theorized that, uh, the author of the Hunger Games has been writing books, has been writing sequels that get just more and more intense about. She strips away all the stuff that people find cool each time.
Mm-hmm. Even more of it. Um, because people read the books, and they’re like, that sounds so neat. And she’s like, no, no, it’s not neat. It’s horrifying. You’re supposed to be horrified. Here. I’ll write you one with all the neat stuff taken away. Just horror. Okay. Do you get it now? Are you horrified yet? My advice to writers is to tell the stories that that call to you to tell them and to tell the stories that are your stories that only you can tell and, um, and to believe that they matter.
Sherry: Thank you. So besides going to join Worldcon and maybe voting for your Hugo this year, where else can readers find you and support you?
Naomi: Uh, you can find me at my website, which is NaomiKritzer.com and, I’m gonna have a book called Obstetrix coming out—it’s Obstetrix with an X at the end—coming out next year. It’ll be a novella coming out from tor.com, and it’ll be available as both a print book and an ebook. It’s about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult.
Sherry: Oof. Yeah. Thank you so much, Naomi. What a pleasure it was to talk to you.
Naomi: Thank you.
Ian: And thank you for joining us for this episode of The Streets.mn podcast. The show is released under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial, non-derivative license. So, feel free to republish the episode as long as you are not altering it, and you are not profiting from it.
The music in this episode is by Eric Brandt and the Urban Hillbilly Quartet. This episode was produced, edited, and transcribed by Sherry Johnson and was engineered by me, Ian R. Buck. We are always looking to feature new voices on the Streets.mn podcast. So, if you have ideas for future episodes, drop us a line at [email protected].
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