Nalo Hopkinson: What the Magic Is
NALO HOPKINSON was born December 20, 1960 in Kingston, Jamaica, and grew up there and in Trinidad and Guyana, though she also spent some time in the US as a child. Her father was noted Guyanese poet Muhammad Abdur-Rahman Slade Hopkinson. She moved with her family to Toronto, Canada in 1977, where she lived until relocating to Riverside CA in 2011. She earned a Master’s degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University, where James Morrow was her mentor. She is now a professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She has taught at Clarion, Clarion West, and Clarion South, and helped found the Carl Brandon Society, which exists to further the conversation on race and ethnicity in science fiction and fantasy. She won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best New Writer in 1998, and was named a SFWA Grand Master in 2021.
Hopkinson’s first professional SF sale was “A Habit of Waste” (1996), in the Canadian feminist journal Fireweed. Notable stories include “Riding the Red” (1997), which she wrote at the Clarion writing workshop in 1995, Tiptree finalist “The Glass Bottle Trick” (2000), World Fantasy Award nominee “Something to Hitch Meat To” (2001), Aurora finalist “The Smile on the Face” (2004), and Sturgeon Memorial Award winner “Broad Dutty Water: A Sunken Story” (2021). Some of her short fiction has been collected in World Fantasy Award and Sunburst Award winner Skin Folk (2001), Report from Planet Midnight (2013), and Falling in Love with Hominids (2015), with new collection Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions forthcoming.
Debut novel Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest, the Locus Award for best first novel, and was a finalist for the Dick, Tiptree, Crawford, and Aurora Awards. Midnight Robber (2000) was a finalist for the Hugo, Tiptree, Dick, Sunburst, and Nebula Awards. The Salt Roads (2003) was a Nebula Award finalist and won a Gaylactic Spectrum Award. The New Moon’s Arms (2007) won Aurora and Sunburst awards and was a finalist for Nebula, Campbell, and Mythopoeic awards. Her first YA novel, The Chaos, appeared in 2012, and Sister Mine (2014) won the Andre Norton Award. Her long-awaited adult novel Blackheart Man is forthcoming this August from Saga. Another short story collection, Jamaica Ginger and Other Concoctions, is forthcoming this October from Tachyon.
Hopkinson edited anthologies Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (2000), a World Fantasy Award nominee; Mojo: Conjure Stories (2003); Aurora Award finalist So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy (2004, with Uppinder Mehan); Aurora Award winner Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction (2005, with Geoff Ryman); and Particulates (2018), with stories inspired by the work of artist Rita McBride. She curated “radio fiction anthology” Six Impossible Things for CBC radio (2006, with Joe Mahoney).
Excerpt from the interview:
“My new novel Blackheart Man has elements that are uniquely me that fans will recognize, but it’s also very different, not just in terms of what I’ve written, but in terms of Caribbean fantastical literature. My approach won’t be that new by the time the book comes out, because it took me 15 fucking years to write this book, and other Caribbean fantasy writers are now moving in the same direction. But it was new to me. It’s got my use of vernacular speech, and in this case, I invented what an eighteenth-century set of Creoles coming from a Caribbean country that doesn’t actually exist might sound like. Typical of me, I’m writing in different registers, because people speak according to their socioeconomic statuses. It’s got my usual politicized take on race and access and peoples’ and communities’ drive for equity. If someone is put off by the word ‘political’ as it relates to art, they will always find my work offensive. I’ve inverted what you’d expect the social power order to be in a society such as that, but it’s also doing an alternate fantastical history of a Caribbean nation that doesn’t exist. Though I’m drawing from existing histories, I’m then fantasizing them.
“It was really tough to write because of what I was going through at the time, and writing is always tough, but every time I thought, ‘I’m done, I can’t do this,’ I’d pick it up and read what I had and think, ‘I like this – I’m going to try to keep going.’ I really have to thank Cathy Thomas. She is a writer and a scholar who studied with me as a postdoc for a couple years. Afterwards, during COVID, she pulled together an online writing group of academic women – largely, but not exclusively women of color – and there was a Zoom open for us every day at eight in the morning. We weren’t workshopping. We would just hang out and co-work with each other. That’s how I got that fucking thing finished – I’m swearing a lot. I do that! My students know this. My mother knows it and hates it.
“People were pining for lack of community, Cathy created one of writer scholars for a few of us, so she’s going in the acknowledgements for the novel. My students are so often working in spec fic, and in academia, it’s hard to find the support. So I tell them, ‘You can create a writing group – there are so many ways to build community.’ They say that writing is a solitary sport, but it isn’t, really. It doesn’t have to be. Some people are really happy about writing alone, but some people actually suffer from the isolation.
“I originally finished the book at a very bad time in my life. It had been under contract, and I was struggling with illness and poverty. What I got done was not good enough for the publishers, so they got me for breach of contract. I had that hanging over my head. My agent, Donald Maass, saved my ass. I was homeless at the time. There was no way I was going to be able to find the money to repay the advance, but he found a way around it, so I was not immediately out of pocket, and I could keep working on the novel. It was years before I could look at that manuscript again, though. Having that writing group helped me so much in terms of being able to face down that awful feeling of failure, and just sticking with it when it was a hard time to stick to anything.
“I was so scared that my career was dying. Even after the novel got accepted for publication, a bunch of things happened to delay it, so it was almost three more years before it finally had a publication date. The poverty and subsequent homelessness began when I was living in Toronto. I became ill, and didn’t realize it. I was too anemic to think clearly. But I already have ADHD, fibromyalgia, and learning disorders. Things are always scattered in my brain, so I didn’t realize there was something else going on that was affecting my ability to do what I do. At the same time, my nestmate was also ill, so there was not a lot of money coming in. We were homeless for a while, and ended up couch surfing, and I was working on Blackheart Man because it was due – I had a contract for it. It’s been quite a journey to get to the point of, ‘Oh my god, they’re sending me the cover flats – and they’re gorgeous! It’s a book! It’s going to be a book!’ It just feels miraculous that I got this thing this far, but it felt like I really had to. One, I needed to have a novel out there again, but also it felt like something I was driven to keep working on. I’m very proud of it. It’s not a perfect book – no book is – but I’m proud of it and of having gotten it to this place. I’m grateful to all the people who got behind me. Everyone from my agent, my partner, friends who were beta readers, and Cathy and the writing group. This book took a community to make it happen, and it’s the record of that.
“Playing with the language was probably the most fun thing about writing that book. My dad was a Shakespearean actor and teacher of Latin in upper grades of high school. I grew up in a house full of books, some of them European classics, some of them Caribbean literature and folk tales. That was my reading palette growing up. Every so often, Daddy would get a yen to revisit some play or another he’d been in, and he would lie on the floor of the living room and quote the whole thing. I mean a whole Shakespeare play – so that’s what; three hours? Being an actor, he wouldn’t just learn his own part; he’d learn everyone’s parts. Stepping over this man while the housework is happening around him….
“I enjoy exploring my connection to Caribbean vernacular – or, any vernacular. I love how people actually speak. There is an art and a poetry and a beauty and a logic to it that, to me, is undeniable. There’s no such thing as bad language, in my mind. I know so many words! And I have a sense of how language has changed in English over the years, over the decades, and over the centuries. In Blackheart Man, I got to do that in a Caribbean sensibility. That was just amazing – that was big fun. When my beta readers who are Caribbean read it, they were like, ‘Yeah, you nailed it.’ I think Karen Lord called it a master class in language. Again, it’s not perfect. I’m sure people will find things to pick at, and I’m sure many of them will be correct. I’ve learned, don’t fight too hard when readers say, ‘You got this wrong.’ There’s a very good chance you got it wrong. I’ve started to think of it as them being helpful – that’s what’s best for my psyche. It was a blast to just get the characters going and have them just having flights of language, and to come up a few new words, and new ways of using language.
“Think of an eighteenth-century grad student Caribbean Taino – so, Indigenous – stoner. Indigenous, at the top of his society in terms of privilege. He’s like that smart young white dude who understands stuff but not as much as he thinks, and really doesn’t understand privilege, and thinks he always knows best. He has a lot of heart and he means well, but he loves trying to impress people with how smart he is. But he’s doing damage, not understanding what he’s doing. I like Veycosi for this because he does mean well, and he does learn, and it was fun to write scenes where he’s stoned out of his mind. He’s flailing about, trying to be smart, and discovering all the ways in which maybe he’s not as smart as he thinks, and people he thinks aren’t as smart as he is have lessons to teach him.
Interview design by Francesca Myman
Read the full interview in the April 2024 issue of Locus.
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