Clark Meets Clarke: Metal from Heaven Interview

This wild, beautiful, intense book! And two of my favorite writers in conversation with each other about it! As a writer, I loved this particular moment about point of view and what kind of experience it gives…

A thing I really was trying to do in Scapegracers, which does show up here, is I think it’s really interesting to ask somebody to really be in somebody else’s body. Not just in their head, but in their body. I think that the mind body split is fake and silly. We are only our body. Our body is our whole mind, right? And I also think it’s an experience that, particularly in genre fiction, we don’t see often, where we’re just in somebody else’s embodied experience of navigating the world sensationally, in a way that isn’t pulled back in an intellectualized or stripped down to its component parts so that you can move, move, move, move, move through the story. And this story is told in direct address to somebody, the “you” in question.

And I think telling someone a story–I’m trying very carefully not to spoil anything here–I think telling someone a story by having them experience, inviting them to experience, demanding they experience, how you physically felt in the best and worst moments of your life, demands a lot of the reader in a way that I am interested in doing.

I love stories written to a “you.” It just does something to ground the whole piece, and maybe this part of the conversation about Metal From Heaven caught my attention specifically because of what I’m working on this year in the Clarion Novel Writing Workshop, a piece which takes place in the aftermath of a war, with characters trying to face the moral injuries of it all, and their own failures, and who they feel morally and spiritually like they can become now that they have—somehow—survived.

Well worth reading the full interview, and, of course, the book!