Q&A with Abbey Mei Otis, author of “Moonkids”
Abbey Mei Otis’ “Moonkids” was published in The Offing’s Fiction department on October 29, 2018. Q&A conducted by Megan Giddings, Editor, Fiction.
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Megan Giddings: One of the many things that I really enjoyed about “Moonkids” is that you blend researched details about the moon, what the differences in gravity might do to the human body, and it all feels natural, lived-in to the characters. What advice would you give to writers who are working with research to make sure that it feels lived-in rather than “Whoa! This author can use Wikipedia!”
Abbey Mei Otis: I think it’s easy to amass knowledge about a particular place/subject/concept, but inserting that knowledge into a story will feel like an info dump unless you tie it into the lived experience of the characters. I read as much realist fiction as I do speculative, and I try to pay attention to how writers describe the world we actually live in because that’s a kind of world building too. A lot of it is comparative, or tied into the embodied experiences of characters. It’s not focused on explaining the technologies we live by. Like, a character in a story might think a lot about how their life in San Francisco is different from life in Ohio, but no one stops to ruminate on the mechanics of a car every time they go for a drive. I try to render my speculative worlds as realist as possible, because they are the real world for the characters who inhabit them. So the moonkids are very aware of how their experience on Earth is different from on the moon, because it feels different in their bodies, and they have emotions tied to that difference. But they don’t ever think about the mechanics of how the moon colonies sustain themselves, or how their surgeries happen, because those technologies are made invisible to them.
However, I also recognize that I do a couple big ‘info-dump’ style sections in this story, and there I was trying to see if I could rely on a nontraditional narrative voice to make the receiving of that information feel like it enhances the tone of the story, rather than pausing it. The narrative voice here is lively and very present — that’s in part me trying to keep myself entertained, but also I imagine it as how moonkids speak, how a culture of survival speaks, when language is the thing you have to make the world around you more vibrant.
MG: Another thing that I think works really well is that you contrast two different environments — the kind of grimy cuteness of a small beach town — and the sterility and order of the moon society. When you started writing and inventing the moon side of it, what were your inspirations? How do you think contrasting two different locations influenced this story?
AMO: I read John Kessel’s “Stories for Men,” which is about a dys/(u)topian all-male society on the moon, which inspired me to explore of what quotidian moon-life would look like, as well as the concept of long-term life between the earth and moon being physically transformative because of gravity differences. But generally, I was thinking about the whole history of build lunar/Martian environments in SF, how they are sterile and involve lots of domes and tunnels, how the grit and hygge and lived-in feel of human environments dissipates when we imagine the mission-driven worlds of space. And then I thought about how it might feel to children who are raised in that, for whom that sterility does embody their notion of home, what does it mean to long in a very human way for something that other people find cold and inhuman?
The beach town I think comes from my morbid fascination with tourist culture. Like tourism, the concept of traveling to a place as a form of acquisition of experience, rather than living and understanding and putting roots down in a place, feels like the opposite of life to me, feels deadening. Tourism feels like a death cult. So I feel drawn to the people whose livelihoods are bound up in that culture, service workers, the liminal population who permanently inhabit spaces built for transience. I think it’s more broadly a fascination of exploring labor through narrative. But on a more basic note…I just really love the beach? I grew up in North Carolina going to the Outer Banks every summer, and so I was imagining that setting as I wrote.
MG: After reading Alien Virus Love Disaster, it felt like one of the questions you were asking yourself while writing this book, is what does it mean to have a body that is in argument with your — I can’t think of a less corny word for this! — your soul? Like for example, many of the characters are battling illnesses, are unhappy with their physical appearances, and dealing with the kind of discordance of desire. Was that one of the themes that helped you decide which stories should be in this collection? And what do you think it means to you as a writer to build bodies in fiction?
AMO: I like that formulation of bodies in opposition to souls, because what I frequently think about is people in opposition to a world that is organized to deny them life or agency on any level. The soul and body feel like another level of that. The spirit railing against the structure. I found, as I was compiling the book, that so many of my stories involve people, particularly young women and queer people, in opposition or open revolt against a world that denies them power, trying to reclaim that agency, and in doing so running up against the impossibility of that and eventually destroying themselves. “Moonkids” doesn’t end in a moment of destruction, but in a moment of ambivalent desperation, which I think fits the pattern. I didn’t really think this through until I was looking at all the stories together. It started to feel kind of grim, but I also think my constant return to that perpetual battle, to be constantly in revolt, is the only kind of hope that resonates with me.
I just feel more at home among the grotesque and visceral and strange. My current position on speculative fiction is that I am more interested in giving people a novel experience in their bodies, a shudder or shiver or pull, than I am about speculating on future societies. I’m incessantly commenting on my students’ stories YOU FORGOT ABOUT THEIR BODIES! WHAT ARE THEIR BODIES DOING? I think people tend to think of writing as a purely mental exercise, and from there it’s easy to lose hold of the embodiment of your creations. But our bodies are the part of ourselves that gets most interpreted by the world. Of course, fiction needs to contend with them, on a sentence level and a conceptual level.
MG: After a reader buys and reads your book, what are the next five books or stories they should read?
AMO:
History
Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South, Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford
The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry, Ned Sublette and Constance Sublette
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, Elizabeth Catte
Poetry
full metal indigiqueer, Joshua Whitehead
The Carrying, Ada Limón
I’m on a history kick right now, marginalized and subversive histories. I’m really interested in watching the moments in which our society crystallized into the form that it inhabits today. I read speculative fiction to be conversant in the genre but more of my inspiration comes from history or theory or poetry. That’s where I learn how societies function and how language functions, and see the origins of the narratives on which people stake their identities.
Abbey Mei Otis is a writer, a teaching artist, a storyteller, and a firestarter raised in the woods of North Carolina. She loves people and art forms on the margins. She studied at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, TX, and the Clarion West Writers Workshop, and now teaches at Oberlin College in Ohio. Her stories have recently appeared in journals including Tin House, StoryQuarterly, Barrelhouse, and Tor.com.
