Interview Kij Johnson

[marie.m]

Kij Johnson vient de remporter le prix Hugo de la meilleure novella, avec The Man Who Bridged The Mist. Elle est en interview dans le magazine Locus. On peut en lire des extraits sur leur site :

‘‘The nice thing about starting to write at 25 was that I had some life experience. I eventually published all the Clarion West stories I wrote, though not in the original versions. I feel as though I do nothing but rewrite. The fewest I’ve ever done is ten rewrites, on a flash piece. I wrote ‘Fox Magic’, the story that developed into my novel The Fox Woman, for Ursula at Clarion West. I was just thinking through a Japanese tale from Konjaku, one of the largest collections of Japanese folk tales, because that was the latest obsession for me. The fox falls in love with a guy while the wife is out of town, the fox seduces him, he moves in with her, the wife comes back…. The original story takes 250 words to tell. I had already obsessively researched canid behaviorism for my own interest, and then I’d strayed from that into wolves and foxes and coyotes; they keep showing up in my stories. A fox has no conscience. They do what they want to do. Their purposes in life are to get through and have babies. And the fox in my story succeeds. But there’s this extra little piece, that she’s in love.”