INTERVIEW WITH Justine Saracen

June Newsletter 2006

By Connie Ward, BSB Publicist/Author Liaison

What made you decide to become a fiction writer?

Like every other child, I suppose, I day-dreamed when I was young. But while the other kids matured from fantasy into the real world, I never made it out. My daydreams became more elaborate, divided into chapters and developed dialogs and themes. Eventually they got too long to remember so I had to write them down.

But seriously – I think all people, and certainly gay people – are hungry to see ourselves at the center of some drama which ends happily. I got tired of looking for those dramas elsewhere and made up my own.

What type of stories do you write and why?

I write fantasy realism. That is I don’t create new worlds, like Tolkien, or like Jane Fletcher and Gun Brooke.  Generally I take worlds that are real, that is historical or simply exceptionally colorful, and reclaim them for gay characters. My first (unpublished) novel was set in the world of opera and opera houses. Later, after a trip to Rome, I wrote a lesbian romance around Michelangelo’s painting of the Sistine Chapel. Then my girlfriend took me to Egypt, where I found the vast treasure chest of the ancient Middle East, and that inspired the whole Ibis Prophecy series. All of which is to say I don’t have enough imagination to craft a good fiction out of daily experiences; I need a big staging. If I were a film maker, it would be all costume movies.

What does/do your family/friends think about your writing?

They are supportive, but complain that it gives me an excuse to not wash the dishes or clean the house. The people closest to me are academics though, and they write too, so most of the time, no one wants to do the dishes.

Where do you get your ideas?

I think writers get ideas the same place everyone else does, from the stimuli of their environment, from what goes on around them and engages them. I live in New York City and ride the subway to work in Times Square, so I get plenty of material every day. But behind the plot and the characters, there are the political and social and philosophical ideas that I have always had. That is to say, while I have a lesbian story to tell, I am not neutral on the big issues of the day, human rights, the crushing of cultures, cruelty in the name of good. Most of all, however, I want to keep a reader engaged and entertained, to let her see herself at the center of a drama that turns out well.

How do you write? Do you plan everything out or just write?

Like a good carpenter, which incidentally I am, I plan ahead so that my structure does not get all wobbly on me.  But as the characters develop depth, they begin to go their own ways, and sometimes I have to go back and change things. I am also not adverse to inserting an unrelated scene simply because I think it is visually exciting. And above all, vivid life experiences affect my settings. After being in a hammam in Morocco, I HAD to write a scene in a hammam, although it had no plot function.  It is also true that as a 21^st century urban person, I am influenced by film, and I often move my story along by closing my eyes and simply imagining how it would unfold on a screen.

What makes The 100th Generation special to you?

The 100^th Generation began as a joke. My girlfriend was doing her doctorate at Oxford and Cairo, and we lived apart. I teased her by fantasizing a few paragraphs about a female Indiana Jones. She replied by expanding the scene and I replied to that by developing it further. It became a competition, except she kept throwing in bizarre elements and I had to keep finding ways to integrate them. Neither one of us wanted to admit defeat so it went on for months and produced a huge volume of Monty-Pythonesque nonsense. Much later, after visiting Egypt myself, I adapted a portion of it for The 100^th Generation, so the novel’s origin will always be our Great Joke.

How much of yourself and the people you know are in your characters?

Oh, a great deal. What’s more, having acquaintances in the novel made it easy to describe mannerisms because I had seen them many times. I also had a colleague at work who was arrogant to the point of being almost comical. I thought, I have GOT to use this guy somehow; he is just too awful to waste. So I made him the villain and even used his real name. Since it is unlikely he will read this interview, I think it is safe for me to reveal that.

Which lesbian authors inspired you most?

I have to admit that I was most inspired by Thomas Mann, who taught me the use of the literary leitmotif. I even published a book about him. Although Mann’s style helped form my own, I couldn’t imagine writing about lesbian themes or characters until I read people like James Tiptree, Katherine Forrest, Joanna Russ, Jane Rule. They were like whiskey to a nun. The final shove came from reading Vita Sackville West’s Portrait of a Marriage. I wanted to be in that kind of world, to have a forbidden love and to write eloquently about it the way she did. Then, by the most bizarre coincidence, I met my girlfriend about that time, and she, as it turned out, was a sort of adopted granddaughter of Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson. In the course of the next few years we spent a lot of time with Nigel at Sissinghurst, and he encouraged me to start writing fiction seriously. So I did.

Do you have any suggestions for new writers?

I do. And, if you will forgive me, it is from Goethe. He said (in German, of course) “Playing the flute is not just blowing, you also have to move your fingers.”  I believe he meant that writing is not only good ideas and passion, but hours and weeks and years of developing the craft, in our case, language. And then once you have the skill, it should disappear behind the story. I expect most people reading this interview will be writers, with more or less “success” (whatever that is), but for all of us, I think the goal should be of writing the most thrilling story, in the most wonderfully engaging language, and then, above all, to hugely entertain all our friends.

When you’re not writing, what do you do for fun?

Writing, or rather, having written, IS lots of fun. But when I take a break, I read. I am working my way through Harry Potter now in French. The ‘fun’ part comes when I realize I can get through a page without looking up a single word. My other current amusement is with parrots, large and small. I have three budgies (who live free and uncaged, day and night, in my living room) but also will soon buy a real parrot. In the mean time, I look at videos about parrots, macaws, conures, etc. which my girlfriend refers to as ‘parrot porn.’ One of these days I suppose I must write a story about a lesbian pirate.