10 Questions with Writer, Speaker, & Futurist Kathleen Ann Goonan (@KathleenAnnGoonan)
This Author Spotlight
features
Kathleen Ann Goonan
author of
QUEEN CITY JAZZ
Kathleen
Ann Goonan is the author of seven critically acclaimed novels, including her
groundbreaking Nanotech Quartet: New York Times Notable Book Queen City Jazz, Darrell Award winner Mississippi Blues, and Nebula Award
finalists Crescent City Rhapsody and Light Music. In War
Times won the John W. Campbell Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of 2007
and was the American Library Association’s Best SF Novel of 2007. Her most recent novel is This Shared Dream. She has
published over fifty stories in venues such as Discover Magazine, Asimov’s,
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and numerous Best of Year
anthologies, some of which are collected in Angels
and You Dogs. Professor of the
Practice of Science Fiction Studies and Creative Writing at Georgia Tech
2010-2016, her most recent academic work appeared in SFRA Review and in Intelligence
Unbound: The Future of Uploaded and
Machine Minds, edited by Broderick and Blackwell and in Sisters of Tomorrow: The First Women of Science Fiction (Ed.
Yaszek and Sharp, Wesleyan 2016). A
novella, “The Tale of the Alcubierre Horse,” will appear in Extrasolar (PS Publishing) in 2017. Her web site is www.goonan.com.
1.How did you get into writing and why do you write?
I always intended to be a writer, but after some initial
success with poetry while in college, I had the somewhat belated realization
that I needed to make money (I graduated from Virginia Tech in 1975 with a
degree in English; MFA’s were not as ubiquitous then as they are now). I therefore took a master’s Montessori
training course so that I could have my own business, control my own time, and
begin my writing career in my copious free time. Because my school soon had a hundred
students, two locations, and many employees, and because I found that I loved
teaching preschoolers and managing a business, that time did not come for a
number of years. Maria Montessori was a
scientist and developed her method of teaching based on observation and
long-running experiments, during which she laid the foundation for our
understanding of how humans learn (now being corroborated by fMRI). Seeing how
effortlessly children can learn to read, write, and lay the concrete
foundations of math at a relatively young age, I had an epiphany about how
science works. This lead to my writing
science fiction, becoming keenly interested in science and technology ethical
issues, and, since 2010, teaching courses about the confluence of science,
technology, and culture in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication
at Georgia Tech as a Professor of the Practice, where I also teach Creative
Writing.
But to move the story back a bit, I awoke from the trance of
teaching when I was 33. A voice in a
dream said to me, “If you’re going to be a writer, you’d better get started.” Startled, I woke and took this advice to
heart. Better yet, I had an entire novel in mind. I wrote early in the morning, during lunch,
and on weekends and finished it in a year, a feat which still amazes me,
considering that it now takes me two or more years to complete a novel. I then started writing stories and sending
them out; within a year I was getting personal notes from Ellen Datlow and
Gardner Dozois suggesting that I workshop them.
Instead, I left my school, moved to Honolulu with my husband, and began
writing full time. I sold travel pieces
and mainstream fiction, but no SF. A
friend who had read my trunk novel recommended Locus, and there I saw a tiny ad for a six-week writer’s
workshop. I attended Clarion West in
1988, which gave my career an SF focus and a push in the right direction.
I think that persevering in a writing career is a fool’s
errand, but successful writers are overwhelmingly convinced of the necessity to
do so. Belief in one’s own vision can be
a curse or a blessing, but is most often a combination of the two. When it works, it is the most satisfying
thing to do that I can imagine, other than teaching a child to read.
2.What do you like best (or least) about writing?
Writing.
Actually, writing a first draft puts me into a state of
agitation and irritation at how wretchedly the whole process is proceeding
until about 45 minutes in, and then it becomes easy. When I look up, hours have passed. Having been a professional writer for
twenty-five years, I do have confidence that a story will be wrought, which is helpful. Rewriting—rearranging, cutting, adding new
scenes, exploring and pointing up nuances—is the most important part of
writing, and the most satisfying.
3.What is your writing process? IE do you outline? Do you
stick to a daily word or page count, write 7 days a week, etc?
I have done all of the above. It all depends on what I’m working on. I must say that I’ve never tried the daily
word count approach, but I generally write over a thousand words a day. I usually have a necessary scene in mind when
I sit down to write, and generally know how I’m going to go about it. If I finish a scene, I’m satisfied.
4.Who are some other writers you read and admire, regardless
of whether they are commercially “successful?”
Reading is my drug, and I read omnivorously and catholically,
in and out of various genres (SF, mystery, thriller, literary, mainstream, past
and present writers). I admire
biographers such as Hermione Lee and David McCullough, historical writers such
as Max Hastings and Doris Kearns Goodwin, contemporary fiction writers such as
Karen Joy Fowler and Zadie Smith, and science writers such as Eric Kandel,
Freeman Dyson, E.O. Wilson, and a host of others. I’m particularly interested in the recent
spate of books about women in the jet propulsion industry and other sciences,
such as Hidden Figures, Rocket Girl (about Mary Sherman Morgan, who developed
Hydyne), The Glass Universe, and
women scientists in general, such as Lise Meitner, whose biography I taught as
part of one of my courses, and Maria Montessori. Lise Meitner became the model for Eliani
Hadntz, a character in In War Times
(Tor, 2007), my sixth novel, which was the American Library Association’s Best
SF Novel of the Year and a John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner; she is also
in This Shared Dream (Tor, 2011),
recently released as a mm paperback.
5.Should the question mark in the above question be inside
or outside the quotes?
Either, depending on whether you are an academic or a
civilian.
6.What’s your stance on the Oxford Comma?
I enjoy the flexibility of a neutrality in which either
usage is a style choice, not a heresy, in the writing of others or my own. I’m a word and language wonk, so the
controversy delighted me.
7.What is your book Queen
City Jazz about and how did it come to fruition?
I had been writing stories and selling to professional
markets for a year or two after Clarion West 88 when QCJ emerged from a vision
I had of a city with giant flowers atop the buildings, which inferred giant
bees. Let us call them Bees, for they
have an important role in the book.
I knew that the city was Cincinnati, where I was born and
from whence my family moved when I was 8, to Honolulu. My memories gave the Flower-City of
Cincinnati a decidedly surrealistic slant.
I was reading a lot of science and technology books at the
time, including Drexler’s Engines of
Creation. My husband, a physician,
often mused about fascinating new biological applications; these musings were
the foundation of how communications in the Flower Cities work. When the novel opens, many cities in North
America had long ago converted to this new biologically-based system after
radio communications failed. John Cramer, well-known physicist, suggested
one theory of how this might have happened, but during the course of the
Nanotech Quartet, which spans a century, several theories are in play.
The little town of Miamisburg, Ohio, first settled and
platted by my not-so-distant ancestors in 1801, where my father grew up and
where my grandparents had quite recently passed away, insisted on itself as the
emotional focus of what I thought was a short story, and then a novella, after
I tried setting it just outside of Cincinnati.
Once I moved the opening to a Shaker community near Miamisburg, it took
off.
My grandfather, Russell Goonan, was born in 1888, and knew
the Wright Brothers when they were just bicycle repairmen. He mentioned that there had once been a
Shaker community nearby, and said “They didn’t reproduce, so they eventually
died out.” Mother Ann and the utopian
Shaker experiment fascinated me, and religious belief became the reason that my
main characters are outsiders, part of a sect that fears the nano-biotech of
the Flower-City technology that emerged when radio communications ceased to
work.
The most powerful underpinnings of QCJ are the American
arts—ragtime, jazz, fiction, poetry, comics, architecture and design—and
history. I called the processes
occurring in the city bionan, because communication is intricately modulated
and processed biologically.
Queen City Jazz
was published by Tor in 1994, and was a New
York Times Notable Book; it was also featured in a Scientific American
piece about nanotech, Shamans
of Small, along with the work of Greg Bear and Neal Stephenson and became
an important part of the conversation about the possibilities of
nanotechnology. Reviews in newspapers
all over the country led to frequent interviews about how Drexlerian
nanotechnology might play out, and my vision of that particular future played
out in my Nanotech Quartet, which includes Mississippi
Blues (Tor, 1998) as well as Crescent
City Rhapsody (2000) and Light Music (2002),
both Nebula Award Finalists and published by HarperCollins. By 2000, I was receiving frequent invitations
to speak at universities and several international literary festivals about the
future of nanotech. Nanotech has taken a
more conservative turn than many originally feared, but research and
speculation continue.
But basically, Queen
City Jazz is a story about a girl and her dog, death, life, and the power
of the arts. Oh, and also Giant
Bees.
8.What’s your current writing project?
I’m working on a novel set in the Florida Keys in the 1930’s.
9.What book(s) are you currently reading?
Biographies of American presidents/American history and
political theory, books about WWI and WWII, several books about animal
consciousness as well as plant communication, and Moonglow by Michael Chabon
10.Who or what inspires your writing?
The world, personal memory, history, and deadlines.
Finally, is there anything you’d care to add? Please also
include where people can read your published stories, buy your book, etc.
I love feedback, so don’t hesitate to write to me at kathleen@goonan.com. I have published about fifty short stories,
some of which are collected in Angels And
You Dogs (PS Publishing, 2011). You
can also read some stories online.
Discover Magazine first published “A Love Supreme,” and it
is available here
and at Lightspeed Magazine.
Tor.com has published “Where
Did We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”, which is about genetic
engineering and animal rights, as well as “A
Short History of the Twentieth Century, or, When You Wish Upon A Star,”
which is about rockets, rocket scientists, Disneyland, WWII, and a girl with a
Bowie knife.
My web page is www.goonan.com,
and it has excerpts, essays, and many travel articles, most of which appeared
in The Washington Post.
Signed hardcovers of CRESCENT CITY RHAPSODY, LIGHT MUSIC, THE BONES OF TIME, IN WAR TIMES, and MISSISSIPPI BLUES are available via my web page at https://www.goonan.com/ orderform.html.
THE BONES OF TIME, my second novel (1996), was an Arthur C. Clarke Award finalist, and is available in ebook format at Amazon.
Signed Hardcover at https://www.goonan.com/ orderform.html
MISSISSIPPI BLUES, my third novel, is the second novel in my NANOTECH QUARTET, for which I was inducted into the Darrell Award Hall of Fame. Signed hardcover available at https://www.goonan.com/ orderform.html
"Memory Dog" was a Sturgeon Award runner-up. It is available on Amazon.
"Sundiver Day," a novelette ebook, is also available on Amazon.
"The String" was a Nebula Award finalist. Available at Amazon.
Thanks, Kathleen, for sharing your insights into writing and your career. You've given us a great deal of work to enjoy. Please visit with us again when your new novel is ready!
Be sure to visit Kathleen's website www.goonan.com to learn more about her work and to order autographed copies!
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