[Teresa Edgerton]

CN: Some of the territory you cover in The War of the Flowers -- both in and out of fairyland -- is based on real places, as well (it would appear) as on aspects of your own life. Have you considered exploring that particular version of fairies and fairyland any further?

TW: I'd love to. If I ever come up with a good story that needs that background, I'd have no problem going back. I really enjoyed playing with those ideas.

CN: The fairies in War of the Flowers, the Qar in Shadowmarch, the Sithi and Norns in Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn -- all different from the fairies of tradition and folklore, and from each other. What inspired three such different visions?

TW: What we write, generally, is about voyages in Faerie -- the realm of the fairies, either literally or metaphorically. Thus, it seems to me that fairies should be as diverse as imagination can make them, and so I'm just contributing my little bit. I most enjoy trying to imagine how things look from the fairy side, since we've had hundreds of years of exploring what the experience looks like from the human point of view. However, I find that leaving some mystery makes the folk of Faerie work best. Otherwise we're writing science fiction, and while I love that too, it's a different part of the genre.

CN: And you’ve written about other races like Trolls, Niskies, Dwarrows ... in your treatment of them, they come across as familiar and yet unfamiliar. What are some of the pleasures and challenges of writing about non-human races?

TW: As mentioned above, I really like trying to see things from outside the human point of view. I think that lends that touch of "other-ness" we go to Fantasy to find. It's really fun to introduce readers to a whole new tribe of human-like (or inhuman) creatures, but it's important to remember, as with ethnic groups in real-world fiction, not to make them boringly abstract examples of their kind.

CN: Returning to War of the Flowers,you’re a singer and musician yourself (and I remember a trip to Arizona where you kept the rest of us entertained by serenading us with songs from the sixties) so obviously music is important to you. Do you listen to music on a daily basis, and if so, what and who are you listening to these days?

TW: Oh, yeah. Even more now that I got a Magic Jesus Phone, so I have an Ipod (I'd been putting off buying one). Listening to lots of stuff -- Beck, Wilco, Arcade Fire, CocoRosie, to name a few current folks, plus my old favorites like Elvis Costello, the Who, Bowie, Linda Thompson, you name it. And a lot of classical -- vocal music and quartets and other quiet stuff.

CN: Do you listen to music when you’re writing? If so, what are some of the pieces, groups, or composers?

TW: As mentioned above, mostly classical stuff, because things with recognizable English lyrics tend to influence my writing too much. (Once you get a few Elvis Costello sprung rhythms in your head, they're stuck there for a while.) So I like madrigals and lieders and string quartets and things like that -- stuff that's not too loud and stormy.

CN: How about food -- is there any particular food or snack that fuels your creative engine?

TW: I'd like to say it was all crudites and salad, but I'm one of those people who swings schizophrenically between sweet and savory late at night, so I have to make sure the snacks aren't TOO awful, because I'll eat whatever's there. I try to keep nuts and olives and dried fruit around, but if there's something like chips or chocolate, it will be eaten. If lovin' them is wrong, I don't wanna be right.

CN: And what would you say are your principle literary influences?

TW: In my own field, the big, wide-canvas fantasy writers like Tolkien, Eddison, Pratt, Le Guin, and the flakier writers of shorter fiction like Bradbury, Sturgeon, Tiptree, Lieber, Ellison, Zelazny, and Moorcock (although he's kind of between the two.) Funny writers like Thurber and Wodehouse. Pynchon and Dickens and other purveyors of the circumlocutious.

CN: Whether they influenced you or not, who are some of your favorite authors, in or out of the SF/F genre?

TW: Even having done the lists above, there are zillions more. To name a few:

Barbara Tuchman
Iain Banks
Paul Fussell
Kurt Vonnegut
Mary Renault
China Mieville
Alan Moore
Neal Gaiman
Grant Morrison
Mike Carey
Stan Lee (esp. with Jack Kirby)
Steven Brust
Ruth Rendell
Peter Ackroyd
Barbara Hambly
Tom Robbins
Dan Simmons
Greg Bear
Lindsey Davis
Robert Nye
Lynda Barry
Neal Stephenson
Dennis Potter
George R. R. Martin
Gail Simone
Robert Silverberg
S. J. Perelman
Robert Benchley
E. B. White
Hunter S. Thompson

And I keep thinking of more. Jeez, I could go on for days...

CN: I know it’s like asking a parent which is a favorite child, but is there any one of your books or series that is your personal favorite, or of which you feel the proudest?

TW: I think the Otherland books are the most "me", in the sense that they show the widest amount of what interests me as a writer, and are the biggest exposition of what I amusingly refer to as my "skills" -- a better expression might be "crotchets and bad habits." But I think it was a genuine attempt to do something different within the world of epic fantasy, and I'm proud of it.

CN: Even though you put the characters in all your books into some very serious and dangerous circumstances, there’s often a dry sense of humor at work. Do you think about this as you write, or does the humor just arise unexpectedly out of particular situations and personalities.

TW: It's so nice to hear my sense of humor called "dry." Some people have termed it "annoying," which I find much less satisfying. I would say the humor arises from my amusement at life, whether the real stuff or our fictive versions. How can you not laugh at things? It beats the heck out of continual weeping. It's a great anti-entropic force -- perhaps, along with love, the only two truly effective counters to entropy.

CN: Still, you seem to be quite ruthless in terms of killing off sympathetic characters. Obviously, these deaths are plot-driven, but when the time comes, do you ever find it hard to kill favorite characters?

TW: Not as hard as some writers. I'm more interested in my characters than I am attached to them. And the difference is, in some cases I knew they were born to die, as it were, so the readers are surprised, but I'm not.

CN: Are there any of your surviving characters that you’ve considered spinning-off into other books?

TW: Oh, I could definitely see writing a novel based around Orlando Gardiner from Otherland. That became clear when I wrote the “Happiest Dead Boy in the World” short story.

CN: If you could live in any of the imaginary places you’ve created, which would it be?

TW: The Otherland network, without a doubt, or possibly the Fairy world in War of the Flowers. But Otherland is really sort of a Tad-paradise -- an Ipod for experiences, as it were, where you can really get into something historical or factual or imaginary in as much depth as you want, or just go random and always have new experiences.

CN: In terms of starting a new story, for you, where does it usually begin: the plot, the setting, or the characters?

TW: Usually it's kind of an idea. Had one the other day: a war between the dead and the living. Ghosts against the living. Why? What would they possibly want? What threat could they be to us? It starts like that, then it begins to expand and agglomerate.

CN: How intensive is your world-building in the early stages? Is everything down before a word is written, or does the setting organically evolve as the story unfolds?

TW: I do some of each. I have to have enough world to feel comfortable writing the beginning of the story, but I can't think it all up at the beginning -- some has to come from discovery along the route.

CN: A certain well-known SF writer (who I won’t name here) has recently made some rather disparaging remarks about books that feature an extensive amount of worldbuilding, equating it with “nerdism” and (apparently) bad writing. Do you have an answer to that?

TW: I'm certain there are lots of bad books featuring worldbuilding. I'm also certain there are lots of bad books written in the style that author most reveres. There are no bad genres, only bad books, or at least bad writing. Any other position is basically not a lot different from saying, "I like it, thus it is good. I don't like it, thus it is bad." I can show you some of the most dreadful crap written in the sparse, literary style this author probably likes, or in the deadpan, no-wasted-time style that many SF writers emulate. I can show you some beautiful work with heavy worldbuilding. I get bored with people attempting to make themselves feel better by belittling things they don't like. I used to have the same arguments about music when I was young -- "Eeew, how can you like that?* I can prove SCIENTIFICALLY that it's CRAP!" I'm too old for that @#&% now.

CN: This is sort of a stock question, but I’m very interested to hear what you have to say on the subject. What do you think is behind the current popularity of fantasy?

TW: I think that not only do we live in somewhat disturbing times, we live in times when it's hard to feel disconnected from the whole and responsible for your own destiny. Fantasy fiction tends to make that an icon of the genre -- making one's own destiny. We celebrate the victors, but we also blame the losers, because most of them (in average fantasy books, anyway) seem to have chosen their own path to un-good-ness. That's a powerful lure in this disaffected, confused age.

CN: If you were walking down a familiar street and discovered a little, hole-in-the-wall bookstore operated by a small, gnome-like proprietor -- a store you had never seen before, and strongly suspected would no longer be there the next time you passed -- and you learned that it was full of rare and unusual books from every country and every period of history, what would you hope to find there?

TW: A copy of Shakespeare's Cardenio, which was based on a contemporary translation of Don Quixote. That alone would be worth the trip, obviously.

CN: Are you a fan of any current SF or Fantasy programs on television? Of any recent movies in the genre?

TW: I think my favorite SF movie of all time is Groundhog Day, because not only is it just plain good -- thoughtful and funny and entertaining -- but it's also good SF: it never sells out its principle idea, and works the whole thing through with due Gernsbackian rigor.

I know there's lots of good stuff on these days, but I haven't seen most of it. The downside of having young, attention-demanding children. The rallying cry of my generation: "I'll catch up when the DVD comes out...!"

CN: Chronicles members are always looking for book recommendations. Are there any books that you’ve read recently -- in or out of the genre -- that you were particularly excited about?

TW: I enjoyed Patrick Rothfuss' first book very much. Mark Ferrarri's The Book of Joby was lovely. I really enjoyed Mike Carey's The Devil You Know, and I'm also enjoying Pynchon's new one, Against the Day, but the bugger writes really heavy books so I can only read them when I can rest them on a table. Who would write such long, heavy books? I ask you!