jo asked Nicola Griffith:

hi. i am a huge fan. i mean to teach The Blue Place or Slow River in the fall. your lesbian characters come from brokenness. aud torvingen, also, gets broken quite a bit more in the course of the series. how do you see the relation between being a lesbian and having endured (and keep on enduring) terrible pain?

Nicola Griffith Aud isn't broken. She's been through grief--like all of us who are lucky enough to love hard enough and live long enough--but she is absolutely not broken. Aud, rhymes with bloody but unbowed.

However I do think that the further a person is from the perceived Norm (where I was growing up: straight, white, male, healthy, Protestant) the harder some of the ordinary things of life can be because you are Other and so the world is rather biased. If you're a dyke, things can be harder than for many straight people. Another way to look at it, particularly if you're a gamer , is that being a dyke means you start the game at a higher difficulty setting. (John Scalzi talks about this: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15...)

But, again, Aud is not broken.

I don't think Lore (from SLOW RIVER) is broken, either, though she is certainly damaged--though that's because of child abuse, not being a dyke.

In my fiction, being a lesbian (or bi in Hild's case) is not an issue for any character. Ever. I write this way to do my part in the creation of the possibility of a better world.

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