Bookwork Blues interview

Since Sarah Chorn of Bookworm Blues liked The Troupe so much, she went and asked me for an interview, which I happily gave.

Another reviewer, Jason Baki, mentioned that your novels all focus so much on what he calls the "American myth," meaning your novels all focus on a piece of Americana, like the American entertainer in The Troupe, and he cites the Great Depression and American corporate power as well. When so many speculative fiction novels seem to have roots in legends, lore and cultures from other countries, your focus on Americana seems different than the norm. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on why you focus on the "American myth" rather than other cultures. 

Well, I think most myths focus at least in part on creation – either the creation of the whole world, or creation of a part of it, like how we got fire, or where the rivers came from, and so on. There's an innate desire in us to reimagine or reexamine where we came from, to figure out how all this got started, and I think a lot of that is born of a need to figure out why we are where we are now. Myths often work off of features or qualities familiar to their audiences – fire and rivers, for example, would have been important parts of day-to-day life in the ancient world – so it seemed natural to me to reach into the big, rattling basement of the American subconscious, that huge collection of preconceptions we have about ourselves, and use those big, familiar stories and scenes to tell old myths. In a way, it's new myths bending to match old ones.