Outer Alliance Blog Interview with Julia Rios on February 25, 2011

I wanted to share this recent interview. I included the URL, which you may have to copy and paste.

Outer Alliance Spotlight #66/Warren Rochelle
February 25, 2011
Julia Rios

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Welcome to Outer Alliance Spotlight #66. The Spotlight features news about (and sometimes interviews with) allies who are active in supporting and celebrating LGBTQI speculative fiction. Our guest this week is Warren Rochelle, author of The Called.

Warren is a professor of English at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. His interest in mythology and archetypal journeys manifests itself in his fiction, which also incorporates LGBTQ themes and explorations of oppression and struggles for civil rights. His first novel, The Wild Boy came out in 2001 through Golden Gryphon Press, and he has since published two more novels. Harvest of Changelings came out in 2007, and its sequel, The Called, came out in 2010. Warren’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in many places including Icarus: the Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction.

OA: In the alternate universe early 1990s US of your books, people recognize that magic is real and some of the population is part fae, which changes the course of political and social history. How do those realizations affect the history of gay rights in that universe?

WR: That’s a good question.
The realizations that magic is real and that there are folks out there who are part-fae makes things worse–at least for a while–for gay rights. Gay rights and gay people are quickly associated with the fae, in part, because of the tetrads, which form without any particular gender configurations. When those left behind after the Change and the mass exodus of changelings in Harvest and those who manifest their fae-ness after 1991 began to form tetrads and without regard to gender, this draws attention, especially from those already inclined to distrust and fear change (including gay rights). In effect, they become considered equivalent.

As a result, when the fae–or as they are called in this alternate US, changelings–are attacked or persecuted in the years following 1991, so are gay people. As the Ordinary Union (a political movement with its aim a pure and purified humanity) gains power, the accompanying voices in pulpits get louder as well. Changeling children are forced to leave some schools; police look the other way or actively support the persecution, and as it gets closer to 2012, things continue to get worse. There are mundanes (non-magicals) who support magical/gay rights, but theirs is a hard fight. People are scared and are getting more scared.

It’s not pretty.

This is sort of a double whammy of prejudice for the fae and the gay, but I felt it all too plausible as GLBT people are still, for many, the Other, the alien, those people. Nicola Griffith and Steve Pagel write about this in their introductions to their Bending the Landscape anthologies and it had a strong resonance for me. That those opposed to change, such as the revelation of the presence of magicals, would equate gay and fae seemed all too logical.

I also like to think of GLBT people as being somewhat magical, and I like playing the different meanings of the word “fairy.” Here, fairies are fairies–word thus reclaimed and with magical powers.

OA: Harvest of Changelings and The Called take place two decades apart. Do you think you’ll ever write any stories set in that alternate reality in the time between those two books?

WR: Hmm. You know, Julia, I think so, but I’m not sure when. I do have tentative plans for a third novel, as a sequel to The Called, and right now I am working on a novel about a gay werewolf and his lover, who is a descendant of the long-departed old gods. It’s set mostly in and around Richmond (where my partner lives) and in some ways has similar themes, as the 2 young men discover their differences and each other as they fall in love, and, wind up on a quest, fighting evil in various forms.

OA: The fae in your books set up four person marriages called tetrads. How do those marriages work, and what are some of their strengths and weaknesses compared to the current US default of two person marriages?

WR: A complete tetrad has an Air, a Water, a Fire, and an Earth, one of the four kinds of fairies, here or in Faerie. Each has different magical abilities and traits and certain physical traits. [For example,] Fires tend to be red-haired and green-eyed, and often have more volatile personalities. All fairies can have the power to make fire. But a Fire has far more power in this regard than the other three and can easily do such things (as Russell does) like heat water, recharge cooking stones, make light, and so on. Excessive amounts of water can be draining and he has a bad temper.

Tetrads tend to form in two stages. First, couples, a Fire and a Water, an Air and an Earth, a Water and an Air, or other pairings. They sense a [connection]; they feel drawn to each other; they bond. Then the two couples find each other–drawn together by their magical energies, their mana. Together they are stronger as four than two.
The bond of the couples is the primary bond; the tetradic bond is secondary. Couples or triads can exist and function–as many did after the Long War in Faerie–but there is a constant feeling of incompleteness. Tetrads can form in any gender configuration. A juvenile tetrad is usually formed first, often in early adolescence. This relationship tends to go dormant at the onset of adulthood. Juvenile tetrads can reform in an adult version, but this doesn’t always happen. In Harvest and The Called, the protagonists are in a tetrad, with one primarily heterosexual couple and one primarily gay couple.

I would say some of the strengths of this four-person marriage, as compared to a traditional two-person marriage would be such things as: a parent or parents are always available to the children; any one member can be as alone or as not alone as he or she wants; support is always there; and they are stronger as four than as two or one.
Some of the weaknesses would be it is not always easy to find one person with whom to bond and it is less easy to find another couple, or another three people. And, in my heroes’ case, when their juvenile bond went dormant and they separated, two going to our universe and two staying in Faerie, their reunion as an adult tetrad was made more difficult when it turned out the Earth-side couple had grown older and the Faerie-side couple had stayed adolescents. Aging in Faerie is at a much different rate than it is here.

OA: You’re currently looking for a home for a novel based on your Spectrum Award nominated short story, “The Golden Boy”. Can you tell us more about that?

WR: There are some similarities between The Golden Boy’s universe and that of Harvest and The Called—mainly in the use of the tetrad as the fae family unit, with an Air, an Earth, a Water, and a Fire. I also had as one beginning premise the notion that fairies would be fairies—gay or bisexual, some heterosexual. Beyond that, The Golden Boy’s universe is a different, albeit with some parallels. There is no US; instead there is the Columbian Empire, founded in a revolution from Britain back in 1776. The Stuarts still rule in Britain; the Columbians have a descendent of Theodore Roosevelt on the throne. Magic is real, but is suppressed in Columbia, with the Rationalist Church, which favors science, the dominant faith. The Fair Folk are sequestered in ghettoes; hybrids, like my hero, Gavin, have to live lives of secrecy. Vampires have been hunted to extinction; unicorns and werewolves are in zoos; centaurs hide deep in the woods. I tried to make the Columbian Empire’s universe echo ours, as sort of a skewed reality.

Gavin is also hiding his sexuality as only heterosexuality is legal in the Empire. Gavin is haunted all his life by recurring dreams of a golden boy, who is meant to be one of his tetrad, Fire to his Earth. The others he meets growing up in North Carolina, but very bad things happen.

The novel has two story lines: Gavin growing up and a week in 2000, when everything falls apart and hits the fan. Columbia is beset by earthquakes, hurricanes, and volcanoes, and rebellion. For Gavin it becomes both a personal and public quest for self and survival.

OA: This summer you’ll be presenting a paper on using autobiography in fantasy at the International Creative Writing Conference in London. How much of your own work draws on autobiographical events, and how do you use them?

WR: Probably autobiographical themes would be a better way to put it, more than particular events. Perhaps, the most obvious are the settings. All 3 of my novels are primarily set in North Carolina, especially in the Triangle area, where I was born and raised and lived until 1998. (Faerie is another key setting and in a way, I have lived there all my life.) I also used the North Carolina folklore and legends that I grew up hearing and reading, such as the Devil’s Tramping Ground (south of Chapel Hill). Supposedly the Devil walks there on a circular path on which nothing grows. I decided that would be a good place for a gate to Faerie.

A couple of other examples of settings from my own life would be: In the book I am working on now is set in and around Richmond, which is where my partner lives; and in my first novel, The Wild Boy, the heroes travel to Cartagena, Colombia, where I lived in 1980-82.

I came out rather late in life; I was around 40 when I started dealing with my sexuality. The message I got growing up when and where I did was that everybody got married when they grew up and had children, period, preferably by the time one was thirty. Homosexuals, if mentioned at all, were more than Other and alien; they were evil. I grew up in a pretty strong closet and when I went to college and fell in love with a guy, I couldn’t even admit then what that meant: we were experimenting and it was a dark, dark secret. After that experiment ended somewhat disastrously, there was lots of internal conflict and self-condemnation, trying to be straight, trying to follow what I thought was being normal. Eventually self and truth won out; it just took a while, along with some therapy.

This internal struggle has fueled some of my characters’ struggles, and has fueled some of the metaphors with which I have constructed the environments in which they find themselves. I did this in my first novel, The Wild Boy, without realizing it. I wrote the original draft of The Wild Boy, back in 1990-91 (my MFA thesis at UNC Greensboro), which was before I came out. When I sat down to revise it (post-PhD, 1997), I was in the process of coming out, and as I reread it, I realized I had been telling myself a story then that I wasn’t able to understand: the two male protagonists, one alien, one human, were lovers. Talk about the Other! When I reread an early draft of Harvest after that I realized: oh, Russell and Jeff are gay. Since then I have been using gay themes and characters, drawing from my own life and from the people I know. The story always comes first, but even so, social commentary has become part of my work as well. And no, not all my gay characters have tortured coming out experiences, or live in hostile societies!

Fathers and sons, parents and children, are other motifs in my work and I have drawn upon my evolving relationship with my own parents. Here I can say I have used personal family history to shape some of these relationships, and particular family events, too. I have drawn liberally from Celtic mythology, which is a personal interest that grew as I explored my own Scotch-Irish heritage. No Cherokee blood, but I grew up learning about the tribe as they are the most prominent one in North Carolina and I visited there often.
I think all writers do this, some more overt and deliberate and obvious than others, as we write out of the context of our lives. Our hero or heroine may be on a spaceship, or even an alien, but still we are creating out of who we are and what we know and feel and have experienced.

OA: Speaking of interesting stories from your own life, you’ve got two cats who usually get along, but you’ve had to consult an animal communicator to sort things out before. What exactly happened with that?

WR: Well, I hope folks won’t think I am too crazy, but here goes. I got Alex and Festus from the local animal shelter here in Fredericksburg, VA, thinking they were littermates. My vet set me straight on that: same mother, different litter. This meant their bond was a bit shakier than the bonds of littermates usually are. About 5 or 6 years ago, for reasons I couldn’t figure out, Festus, the older (and smaller, not that made any difference) started treating Alex as if he were an invader, a complete stranger: hissing, growling, and attacking. It was awful. I tried everything and the vet just told me to separate them, which helped, but didn’t stop the aggressive behavior.

A buddy of mine, Suzanne, mentioned she had consulted an animal communicator to help her sort out the behavior of her dog, who was a rescue. I was more than a little skeptical when she told me how it all worked—it sounded like the stuff I make up. But at that point, I was willing to try anything. Suzanne said it had worked for her and her dog amazingly well. I was just about ready to take Festus to my parents to live. So I emailed Patty Summers, the communicator, and set up an appointment, paid my fee. The appointment was by phone.

She called and we talked and then she “spoke” to Alex and Festus. Yes, it was weird. When she channeled (for lack of a better verb) what they “said” back, at first I was struck by how much it sounded like them, their personalities—Festus, more withdrawn, easier to spook; Alex, in your face, love me now. The story came out: a big cat in the neighborhood had confronted and scared Festus through the patio door. The aggressive response he had toward that cat, since he couldn’t get to him (thank God) had shifted to Alex—(the technical term is “displaced aggression,” by the way, and my vet said the communicator was probably right). Festus was afraid he was going to be sent away.

Reassurances of safety, promises to help, to give space (yes, from the cats!) were made and she gave some practical advice about how to handle Festus when he turned into a demon.
It took awhile, but her advice worked. Festus still has spells, but they are very brief and are usually solved with a time out in a dark and calm space. They get along now, most of the time.
There’s more. The really weird part. After communicating with Festus and Alex, the communicator said she sensed another cat, this time one in the spirit world. Yeah, I know you are shaking your head. The animal she described—and she had no way of knowing this—was my first cat, Osito, who had died a year after I moved here. He was still around, looking after me.

There you go. I know it sounds crazy.

Thanks, Warren! Join us next Friday for more queer spec fic goodness, and in the meantime, check out The Called.



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