Une interview de Vonda McIntyre

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Voici une interview de Vonda McIntyre. Elle parle du livre Dreamsnake.


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So, what was the impetus for writing "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand," the short story that became the first chapter of Dreamsnake?
[b]Vonda McIntyre : [/b]This is actually one story that I know exactly where it came from. It was a writing assignment from Avram Davidson at the 1972 Seattle Clarion West writers' workshop. He made two lists of words — one list was technological words, and the other was pastoral words. He cut the lists up, and he put them in separate Styrofoam cups, and we each had to take a word from each cup and write a story about them.

Feminism, astronauts, and riding sidesaddle: Talking to Dreamsnake's Vonda McIntyreSo we trouped off to lunch bitching and moaning about the weird words that we had. The words I had were "snake" and "cow." Now, I don't know how I ended up with what I would assume to be two pastoral words, unless for some reason Avram thought "snake" was a technological word; but that's what I ended up with. And a friend of mine said, "Ha ha ha, why don't you write a story with a protagonist named Snake?" And I said, "Oooh-kay." I went back to my room and started thinking about the story, and I couldn't figure out how to use the word "cow" until I figured out that you could use it as a verb, as in "frighten." And that's where the beginning of the story started.

So I wrote about 12 pages of the story and got stuck. And the reason I got stuck is that even though this was the 1970s and everybody was doing drugs, I didn't do that. So it took me way longer than it should have to realize that what a snake called Grass should have is hallucinogenic or some kind of psychoactive venom. Once I knew that, I wrote the story.

I turned it in — I wasn't actually a student at that workshop; I was sort of running it, but I got to sit in on the classes, and every so often I would turn in a story. So I stayed up all night writing it, went to class, turned in the story, did the workshop, came back, and crashed, because I was exhausted — I'd been awake for like 36 hours. And about an hour later, the same friend who had said "Why don't you call the protagonist Snake?" flung open the door to my room, stomped in, threw the manuscript on the floor, and said, "How dare you write a story that makes me feel sorry for snakes!"

And I went, "Huh? OK" — and went back to sleep.

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