An Interview with Nalo Hopkinson

Nalo Hopkinson:Hi.

NH: Well, I was born in Jamaica, lived in Jamaica, Trinidad and Guyana, a little bit in the West when my dad was going to Yale, in Connecticut, then moved to Canada when I was 16 and I think, in the interim, I had forgotten winter.

NH: Because when you’re 5, it’s…

NH: Sort of…snow and cold but 11 years later, you forget just how profoundly cold…I had prepared for winter, I thought. The first Toronto winter…I sew, so I went out and bought some wool and made a pair of pants.

NH: I thought “Wool is warm!” I bought wool jersey, which is the equivalent of making a pair of pants out of t-shirt material…

NH: …and went outdoors the first time the weather hit freezing and my bones froze. I just could not believe it could get *that* cold. So that was a big shift, but then I did 35 years in Toronto, moved to southern California just about 4 years ago and now it’s full-on desert.

NH: Which means it sort of looks like where I came from, but the palm trees have the wrong fruit on them, the lizards are the wrong color, and yes, there’s sand, but where I come from, if you’re near the beach and sand and there’s holes in the sand…there’s crabs in there, not snakes or gophers. (laughs) So, you keep having these moments of dissonance…”Wait, there’s not a beach around the corner” because sand means ‘beach’ to me. “We’re in the desert”. That’s different. “Don’t poke anything down that hole. Dinner’s not coming out of there.”

NH: Well, I’ve been teaching from the beginning, since I started being published. This is a regular teaching gig, which has its own effects. Because I was lucky enough to be given tenure just off the bat, it means that my teaching load is reasonable, quite reasonable, so I find it additive more than anything else because I know where my next meal is coming from and I’ve spent a few years not doing that. So, it’s all good.

NH: Students are amazing and UC-Riverside students are particularly amazing and I don’t think a lot of them realize it. It’s a university that’s one of the more diverse universities in the country. For instance, a couple of years ago, I wanted to teach the Lewis Carroll poem Jabberwockywhich is made up of words which Carroll invented. I was talking about how to make words up so I wanted to show it to them in different languages and at first I tried picking languages I knew I could muddle through. But then I thought, “Wait a minute; a 72 person class…I can just pick any language I want and somebody in the class will be able to read it!”

NH: So, I took in a stack and said, “Who speaks German? Who speaks Korean? Who speaks Urdu?” and had them read it out and explain how the made up words were working. It’s glorious.

NH: Yes.

NH: It is wonderful.

NH: On top of that, I have Fibromyalgia, which is why I’m moving a little slowly today…you get moments with all three of brain fog or things you knew five seconds ago are gone forever. But along with Non-verbal Learning Disorder comes high verbal ability…

NH: …so words and story make a lot of sense to me in ways that it’s hard to explain. There’s that advantage: I can turn the hell out of a phrase.

NH: The disadvantage with something like ADD is, of course, I don’t like to do anything twice. So the sitting down and making yourself write once it becomes a job is very difficult to do and I’ve had to find ways to convince my brain that this is still fun, to tell it that “you don’t have to sit here for 17 hours, you can write a sentence and then get up and walk away”. In science fiction, we like to boast about what our daily word count is so I like to go the other way. “I wrote a sentence. It was a good sentence.” (laughs)

NH: Yeah. My brain isn’t balking as much; it’s not saying “Oh, my God, I can’t deal. There’s too much!” I write a sentence…I can write another sentence!

NH: Woo-hoo!

NH: Exactly!

NH: Come to think of it…I do use poetry and song a bit…I use folklore a lot…

NH: My last novel, there were a couple of songs in there that were actually songs that I dreamt. Every so often I dream 3 or 4 lines of a song complete with a tune.

NH: I’m singing it when I wake up.

NH: So a couple of them are mine, but with pre-existing material like folklore and ballads, the trick is to not retell the story but to tell your own story and find the piece of folklore or ballad that has reflections of it, that resonates, or to tell it in a new way. One of the first times I did that, it was a writing assignment by Pat Murphy when I was still at Clarion studying and it was to write “The Beast with the Heart of Gold”. I thought, “Who’s a ‘beast’ that we think of as evil?” and I came up with Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf and I ended up writing the Little Red Riding Hood story not from the point of view of the Wolf so much but from the point of view of the grandmother. Because the grandmother’s story never gets told and I thought there were hidden depths there. I ended up making this weird sort of almost…I don’t want to say *love* relationship because it is abusive, but the Wolf comes to represent a sexual coming of age. That’s a difficult thing but it’s a thing that happens to everybody. So the grandmother and the Wolf have this relationship where he was her sexual coming of age; he’s sort of an archetype.

NH: So you tell the story or you take the story apart and you find the things in it that are the most disturbing…

NH: …writing a sexy story about a grandmother and a wolf who tried to kill her. (laughs)

NH: Yes; I do like comic books. I don’t much read the Big Two anymore; I like graphic novels more than comic books, but I don’t make a difference between them. I do read a fair number of them. Nancy Jack has been percolating in my head for about 15 years now…and my synopsis hasn’t…

NH: …but, basically, I have a creature working on the railroad in the US between the two wars as a porter, because he looks like a black man. What he *is* is a creature from West African folklore called an adze who looks like a ball of fire in his natural form. He can become something that looks human to come into villages and towns and feed on blood. His village, the village he thought of as his flock (in the most disturbing way you can think of), was taken in slavery 500 years ago. So he followed them because they’re “his”. So now, you have a ball of fire travelling on the ocean to follow these human beings…he’s kept track of them and of people with the same bloodline (because he can read blood) by becoming a porter on the railroad. So that’s how he keeps track of the descendants of his flock and he’s starting to kind of lose it. Imagine a creature that we would already think of as over-the-top, because he’s a predator…now, he’s going a little crazy.

NH: There are a couple I like…Le Chat du Rabbin (The Rabbi’s Cat) by Joann Sfar. He’s a Moroccan-French artist and he has four books about the cat of a rabbi living in Morocco at a time when’s there’s lots of pogroms against the Jews. There’s a cat and a parrot living in the house with the rabbi (the cat’s telling the story) and the cat says “the parrot is stupid but it can speak; I have brains but I can’t talk” and it goes on from there. That’s one of my favorites. Also, Bayouby Jeremy Love, he started by winning an award, I believe through DC, to have his comic made as an online comic and later to be published. It’s got two in the series, based on the folklore of the American South. It’s a story of a little black girl whose father has been arrested and is probably going to be lynched and she’s trying to save him. But it’s infused with all these humanized…Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Bear, creatures from the American South and it’s beautiful and it’s terrible and it’s gorgeous…it’s just lovely, lovely…he’s got two stories in the series and people who love it are waiting for the third.

NH: I am nominally at nalohopkinson.com. I am more often on Twitter @nalo_hopkinson. That would be the best place to find me.

NH: Thank you!