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12-18-09: The Reality Behind Fantasy : NPR Report on Jeff and Ann VanderMeer
There was clearly only one choice for a podcast to end the week. Having heard from Jeff and Ann VanderMeer in print, it seems the perfect time to hear from them again, in my report for NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday. And now let me thank the listeners and readers who left comments behind at NPR's website for the report on the VanderMeers. It means a lot, to me and NPR.
The fact is that NPR is beginning to thaw a little bit with regards to genre fiction, and the VanderMeers played a big part. First off, they gave me this great interview at the World Fantasy Convention, which you heard recently on this podcast, and which directly inspired this NPR Report. I guess I'll get to that next week. But they really hit the ball out of the park when, in one of those weird hangle-jangles, I got Jeff in the studio with me in Santa Cruz and Ann in the studio in Florida, all hooked up via ISDN.
I knew what I wanted to ask, but the whole interview felt like an NPR sound byte. When I'm doing interviews, I can now hear the parts I'd like to snip into some sort of NPR report. You can hear the parts of the last VanderMeer interview I did that made the cut — and those cuts are severe, let me tell you, I have to be ruthless and toss out lots of great stuff — just follow this link to the MP3 audio file.
I'm also hoping that readers will know it is never too late to go to the NPR website of this report and leave comments. They listen to you — and if you tell them you want more of this sort of thing on the radio, they'll have more for you to listen to in return.
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12-22-09: A 2009 Interview With Alyx Dellamonica
"Magic calls to magic"
— Alyx Dellamonica
Alyx Dellamonica has a particular talent for writing about magic — of the sort we never encounter, sourced from an infectious blue liquid, and of the sort we all encounter, as we untangle our relationships with our parents and peers. In her novel, 'Indigo Springs,' it's a blue liquid that is the source of the magic. But for her writing, those relationships prove to be an equally powerful source of sorcery.
Dellamonica does a lot of things so well in 'Indigo Springs' that you the reader are not likely to notice what she's doing or how she is doing it. Not surprisingly, the source of her authentic-seeming magic is the sort of magic a good author excels at — misdirection. Dellamonica wraps the reader up in powerfully-described interpersonal power-plays, catching us in the gut and in the heart of an erotic triangle with more than a touch of taboo. It's easy, then, for her to literally pour magic over this relationship and take the reader into a world where that magic pretty much re-writes the world as we know it. I talked to Dellamonica about the sources of magic in her life, and how she crafts this compelling apocalypse. You can hear our conversation by following this link to the MP3 audio file.
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12-21-09: A 2009 World Fantasy Convention Interview with Garth Nix
"I learned to write, as many authors do, by reading."
— Garth Nix
It's amazing, really how much you can learn in a short time. And fortunate as well, for I had but half an hour to talk with Garth Nix at the World Fantasy Convention. I had to compete with television, tele-bloggers, plain ol' bloggers and other podcasters. But I didn't hit the 8-year mark here at the Agony Column by giving up, and managed to wedge one of those half hours that seems to unearth a wealth of great conversation.
Nix writes what might be called YA fiction, but to my mind, and to his as well, that YA tag is just, as he so charmingly put it, "an entry point." What matters about Nix's fiction (and I've got to say that his last name sounds like something he invented — and we talked about his facility for coming up with evocative names) is that he has that talent of organic unreal. He has the ability to conjure up, in just a few words, a world that seems whole, consistent and yet unreal. He puts his characters in those worlds for us and lets us see the world through their eyes. You can hear Nix himself speak, as if from on of those worlds, by following this link to the MP3 audio file.
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