Summer Sessions 2011: Session Five
SESSION FIVE: MELISSA DOMINIC, INTERVIEWED BY NOEL GAYLE
With a flair for the post-apocalyptic, author Melissa Dominic discusses her mix-and-match sense of minimalism, her love for the complex dynamics of cities, and just what it means to be a Data Gypsy. You can find more about Melissa at her website, Broken Nerves.
1. Where did you get the green dia de los muertos skull featured in
the sandwich pic currently at the top of your page of bloggage?
In Miami, there's a little bit of awesome that is known as The Miami
Book Fair International. Last year, there was a large push in the
culture of Mexico as part of the theme. I picked up one of the Dia De
Los Muertos skulls because I'm quite a fan of the holiday, especially
because my birthday falls on November 2nd – All Soul's Day, one of the
days of the celebration. The little skull was cheap, in one of my
favourite colours and I leave it on my desk like it's my little friend
or something.
2. Being well aware that asking a writer about the source(s) of their
inspiration is about as useful as greasing oneself up and trying to
slide to China…would or could you at least attempt to relate the
mindset and the circumstances surrounding the writing of A
Contortionists Love Story? Pretty please?
Since you picked such an easy one to talk about, I can do that! Last
November was my lucky month, it seems. I also got a chance to go see
Cirque de Soliel's "Kooza" under the big top in Miami. They usually
have a contortionist trio that does a sequence, but, this time one of
them wasn't performing, so it was just two women. After I got back,
the way they twisted and folded into one another had me thinking for a
few days on end. A pinch of creepiness and I was able to write the
story in one shot. It comes across a whole lot less glamorous then the
end result does, I'm sure.
3. When I read Ithica and the Pack of Wolves I immediately got
flashbacks to Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (the one time I saw the ending), Midgar City from FFVII and the city that is the backdrop and focus of Kakurenbo, an anime short film. Having explored the various online locales that you have and maintain, I have come to recognize your fascination for cities, a fascination that comes across in your description of the blackened city in Ithica. Could you tell us a little bit about this city, how it got this way and how the people within it survive from day to day?
The Black City is a city I am still working on and it sometimes goes
by several names, but, it is the major area in the story set known as
Cartography, existing just outside the only normal funtioning city in
nation it's a part of. It's the backdrop to my collection of gypsys,
mapmakers and gypsy mapmakers who roam the battered landscape trying
to remap what is left of the nation after a deadly virus and war had
ravaged it. While I still don't have all the perfect answers, I can
say that the Black City is mostly run community style – everyone
helping one another where they can, importing and exporting goods and
using barter systems between them. Without the people, there would be
no city. It is probably the largest of the areas of it's type in what
is left of the nation at the start of Cartography, but it isn't the
only one of its kind.
4. "It left the outer cities in dirt and dark, left them not really
cities at all, but loose groupings of buildings and people." This is a
beautiful turn of phrase. At the end of reading this, I can see the
shattered cities and broken skyscrapers. What do you draw on to find the emotional resonance with which you infuse your words? Is your writing mainly stream of consciousness (which I suspect) or more crafty and word for word?
I actually am extremely meticulous when it comes to chosing my words
and I can spend forever tweaking a sentence until it is just right for
me. Before I properly began in fiction, I studied and wrote poetry
almost exclusively. I think, because of this, I am really detail
oriented when it comes to my fiction work and I like to make sure each
and every single word, phrase, sentence, paragraph (etc, etc, etc…)
is the best it can be, said in the most concise way and also has a
particular sound when read outloud. You can always find me at the
computer, re-reading my work outloud, just to make sure it has the
right sound.
5. What is it about cities that fascinate you so?
The short answer would be everything. From the way they function, to
the histories in the people that have passed through them, to the ways
they've evolved over time. Every single thing you can imagine about a
city facinates me. I think, though, I've sort of pinned down why I am
so facinated with cities. I'm a girl who grew up in a smaller-type
town in northern New Jersey, just across from New York City itself. I
spent seventeen years of my life trying to escape it – never
completely happy with where I lived, but I was always observant of the
place, even if it was only in an effort to explain how much I disliked
it, and eventually, when I packed up and moved to Miami in 2001, after
two months or so I was homesick. Disgustingly homesick. To the point
that some days, I am still homesick. While I learned to love Miami and
I was and am still in awe by it daily, I realized you can leave a
place, but you can never really leave it and as a person, you become
the places you live. You are your enviroment.
People, to me, are a sum of what is around them. Once I started
looking at it that way, that was when I became even more obsessed with
cities and places and really developing them in my stories. It seemed
to be where my best work came from. It seemed to be what I enjoyed in
other novels the most. Things like Dark Dark Cities and Places We've
Never Been sprung up in my mind and they were all cenetered around the
world that can develop when you just try to populate a piece of land.
For me, a city is another character in the story. It reflects
everything: the plot, the theme, the characters, the emotion. I try to
make my stories unable to exist anywhere else other than where they
exist. The city and the person, the story, the idea, can't be pulled
from one another.
6. The short piece Cartography, combined with the concept of Dark Dark Cities paints a picture of desolate cities dotting the landscape of broken nations, inhabited with those that survive and adapt and those that don't and are preyed on; the places that Dark Dark Cities was set up to map out and explore. Do you plan to do anything else with this concept/digital domain in the future? If no, why not?
I have quite a few plans for Dark Dark Cities! Once I realized that I
cared about having really specialized cities for my stories to exist
in, I began to pare them down and combine stories, trying to get to
the core of the places I want to talk about. Each city itself has a
certain type of story to be told in it: some of them are more focused
on being post-apocalyptic (Cartography), cyberpunk/speculative
futurist/magical realistic (District Heights) and even bubble-gum
coloured future noir (Stereoport). My plan is to have this place be
their home, to express all these different stories through one main
channel. The idea is, at it's heart, every city is dark, but we live
in them and love in them every single day.
Right now I am working on a story for District Heights that I hope to
be able to seralize on Dark Dark Cities once it is complete.
7. The term Data Gypsy brings to mind a dancer on the seas of
information, or in them, slipping from stream to stream, stopping only to save a rare bit of info or shake the accumulated digital flotsam from her skirts. Do you take the name seriously? What does it invoke in your mind?
In my own way, I definately do take the term seriously. The
terminology mostly comes from me trying to describe Ithica (from
Ithica and the Pack of Wolves and Cartography), who is probably the
closest representation of myself I've ever put down to paper. My own
personal style itself is very cyberpunk/data gypsy mixed with a bit of
mori girl and most people don't expect it of me. After reading my
stories and even seeing some images of me online, they expect a
constantly goggled girl who is always wearing slick black and
razorblades and while I totally would love to be a Gibsoneque
Razorgirl, it isn't in me. I'm all flowing layers and I think the
image you've got going on right there is spot on. I'm a data gypsy,
wearing too many layers of light fabric, old boots and torn up
tanktops, surverying the land for information and collecting it in my
side pouch for later use.
8. Have you ever wanted to live in one of the fictional cities that
your characters inhabit? (Of course). Which one and why?
Oh yes! Once I got thinking about it though, the answer slighty
surprised me. While I love the dirt and dank of most of my cities, I'd
actually love to live in Stereoport, where everything is blazing
bright and art-fueled. I guess the idea of a city where I can shove
away responsibility for a little while and dodge criminals and become
a gang member and have it mean more like being part of family than
anything dangerous seems sort of… fun. Soccer matches every Sunday
morning and all-hours maid cafe styled diners where I can eat taco
rice at 3am? While the city in Steam Gutterwork entices me like you
wouldn't believe, I'd make my home in Stereoport, for sure.
9. You speak of the loss of internet community, and more specifically, the loss of your LJ community, as a heart breaking loss; a loss I can very well understand. How did this affect your writing? How did it colour its ongoing mood and tone, if any at all?
Above all, I had to learn to write alone. It's tough and it still is
tough when you come from a background that involved a lot of
community-based literature and instant gratification. It can be rough
in the way that I no longer know for certain if something works or
not, but, you find the people whose opinion you begin to value and
they open up their own stories to you in the same way you open up your
stories to them and at some point, you can go to them with one hundred
questions and they will have one hundred answers. Finding those people
is hard. I still don't have all the people I can carry in my pocket
and I still am always looking for more.
It does hurt, still, but, I think by being vocal about it, I've found
more people who are suffering through similar types of loss and that
brings me more people to discuss stuff with. Which I like. A lot.
10. I find your writing to be in the vein of Steampunk/Dark
Sci-Fantasy; Steam Gutterwork is a fine example of this (and another example of a world I wish you would explore more. :P). This has clearly developed over the years you've been writing. Stop and think about whether or not I am right in my assessment of your style, and share some of the influences that you are certain led to your development of this style.
I find your assessment of my style to be very interesting. It's not
really for me to say if it is right or if it is wrong, but, I can tell
you I view my own work slightly differently. I've jokingly referred to
my own work as post-post on occasion. I have post/cyberpunk sentiments
and post-apocalyptic leanings and I've spend a lot of time crafting
speculative futures and dabbling in magical realism (or at the very
least, total-belief-suspension-on-really-weird-crap) and I've wrapped
it all up with a extra-heavy dose of minimalism.
There are things I know for certain fact have lead to my style,
though, I am unsure if they're the sort of things people expected.
While I love William Gibson as an author and yes, I am completely
inspired by him and everyone always throws that name out first, I
didn't discover any of his work until I was twenty-one, after I had
already been writing for some time. I'm more heavily influenced by the
things I see and the things I hear other than things I've read.
You've mentioned both anime and video games and I have to admit that
Midgar from FFVII was totally an early influence of mine. It was one
of the few things I've seen, visually, that sort of expressed all the
things I wanted to say before saying it. Also, Cannabis Works by
Tatsuyuki Tanaka is one of the art books I am constantly going back
to, trying to squeeze it for all it's inspiration. I spent a lot of my
youth pillaging anything that came out of Japan, anything from Akira
to Cooking Master Boy to Suikoden and even every day street culture.
Just random things. I pull from everywhere.
Other than that, I'm also extremely influenced by music – post-rock to
be exact and rap music when I'm feeling amusing. I can easily say I've
penned most of Stereoport while listening to Drake's "Thank Me Later"
on repeat and the entire Stereoport idea came from seeing Major Lazer
play ULTRA 2010. Music on long busrides or while sitting in the
backseat of someone's car is probably the most inspiring to me.
Also, I should mention, there'll be a sequel to Steam Gutterwork being
published soon, so, I haven't totally abandoned you on that!
