Tag Archives: beauty

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Fitting In

Fitting In

A review of Lisi Harrison’s Monster High (Hachette Book Group, 2011)

By Derek Newman-Stille

Lisi Harrison’s Monster High is a series adapted from the doll brand by Mattel of the same name. Her novel adaptation, aimed at a teen rather than pre-teen audience as the dolls would suggest illustrates the adaptability of narratives around dolls and toys. Although Mattel is an American company, Harrison is Canadian. Harrison’s narrative takes a very different approach and storyline than Mattel’s other Monster High narratives such as the webbisodes and films of the same name. Yet, Harrison still explores some of the issues that are central to the rest of Mattel’s Monster High brand.

Rather than setting her story in a high school just for monsters as the Mattel brand does, Harrison sets her story in a high school predominantly filled with non-monster students. Monsters are a minority in this school and in the town surrounding it and have to pass as human to avoid discovery and discrimination by the much larger non-monster population. Harrison’s narrative follows Frankie Stein, the child of other Frankensteinian creations as she navigates a society with the optimism of someone who was only created 16 days before the novel begins. Frankie believes that humans are far more accepting and open than she discovers they actually are and when she attempts to go out in public without the makeup that makes her look human, she is met with discrimination for her green skin, stitches, and neck bolts.

Harrison provides a second narrator for her story, Melody, a girl whose parents reinforce certain notions of beauty through their role as plastic surgeons. In fact, Melody reluctantly had a nose job after her parents told her (falsely) that it would help her breathe better. Melody is worried that any friends she finds only like her because she now upholds the normative standards of beauty instead of looking different than the norm. She is drawn in to the world of monsters when her boyfriend turns out to be far different than what she expected.

Harrison uses the two characters, Frankie and Melody – the girl who is told to fit in because she is a monster and the girl who is worried that she only fits in because she is ‘normal’ – to explore difference in an environment that is the epitome of enforced normalcy – the high school. High schools are spaces where people are policed for any difference from norms and where most kids just want to fit in, and Harrison’s Monster High exaggerates that enforced fitting in by adding the ultimate outsiders – Monsters.

Harrison explores ideas of internalized isms by having Frankie constantly hide her heritage and bodily difference and instead to conform and try to blend in to her society. They force her to wear conservative clothing that allows her to blend into the background, to become unnoticed and become essentially invisible (though not as invisible as the school’s literal invisible boy Billy).

Despite her attempts to conform, the school and surrounding town of Salem still has an intense fear of outsiders and even has school drills for “what to do in case there is a monster sighting” with its own special alarm system.

Harrison’s Monster High is a tale of conformity, challenging expectations, and finding one’s place with friends who support diversity

To find out more about Lisi Harrison, visit https://lisiharrison.com

To discover more about Monster High, go to https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/lisi-harrison/monster-high/9780316176217/

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Radical Acts of Beauty

A review of Daniel Heath Justice’s “The Boys Who Became The Hummingbirds” in Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection Volume 2” (Edited by Hope Nicholson, Alternative History Comics, 2017)
By Derek Newman-Stille

Daniel Heath Justice’s “The Boys Who Became The Hummingbirds” is a comic about resilience and transformation, highlighting the desire of a two-spirit boy to change the world around him through acts of beauty. Despite homophobia, environmental degradation, and all forms of hate against each other, Strange Boy seeks to heal others by bringing beauty into the world. Like many people who seek to bring healing and beauty into the world, especially if they are marginalized, Strange Boy experiences violence. He discovers that a lot of the violence from the people around him is an externalized form of self loathing, their hatred of themselves projected outward toward anything beautiful, anything that represents a reminder of joy that they can’t imagine themselves having.

“The Boys Who Became The Hummingbirds” is an act of beauty in a harsh and close-minded world, it is Daniel Heath Justice’s act of transformative magic, sharing a story of transformation with a world that needs beauty. It is a tale that reminds us that no matter how much violence the world inflicts on us, we can speak back by bringing beauty into the world. Our acts of art can be transformative, remaking the world and opening up others to express their beauty. 

Beautifully illustrated by Weshoyot Alvitre, “The Boys Who Became The Hummingbirds” is filled with images of movement and light. It is a comic that can show the interiors of bodies and make even our bleeding, organic insides things that can be filled with a certain magnificence and wonder. Alvitre is able to capture the etherial quality of hummingbirds, their darting magnificence.

The intwined arts of Daniel Heath Justice and Weshoyot Alvitre add to the message of the story, emphasising the focus of the story on collaborative arts and the ability of one form of art, one story, to resonate in another.

To discover more about Daniel Heath Justice, visit http://imagineotherwise.ca

To discover more about Weshoyot Alvitre, visit https://www.facebook.com/Weshoyot/

To find out more about Moonshot Vol 2, visit https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1350078939/moonshot-the-indigenous-comics-collection-volume-2

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Exposing the Caregiver within the Human Suit

A review of Sandra Kasturi’s “The Beautiful Gears of Dying” in The Sum of Us (Laksa Media group, 2017, edited by Lucas Law and Susan Forest).
By Derek Newman-Stille

Using second person, Sandra Kasturi positions the reader as a caregiver AI caring for an ageing woman in her story “The Beautiful Gears of Dying”. Kasturi explores the relationship between human beings and artificial intelligence (AI), which is significant since robotic assistants are currently being developed around the world with the idea that they may be able to help out in elder care. 

Rather than following what most authors exploring the relationship between human ageing and robots are doing, Kasturi examines ideas of intimacy and beauty between these two figures. Kastrui examines an ageing woman who is angry at the need to have a caregiver and hostile toward that caregiver, something that is normally not covered in tales about caregiving. She tells her caregiver that it can’t understand fundamental aspects of human experience and can only emulate ideas of beauty. 

Kasturi explores ideas of intimacy in caregiving, pointing out the relationship between trust, vulnerability and care when the unnamed elderly woman says to her robotic caregiver “You know my body better than any lover, better than any doctor, maybe better than my future embalmer”. There is something uncomfortably intimate about that statement, revealing to the reader that they will encounter this intimacy if they need a caregiver and will likely have to be exposed to someone who they don’t know. 

In order to reverse some of that vulnerable intimacy, the woman asks her caregiver to take off its artificial skin, to expose its mechanical realness under the human suit it is wearing. Yet, Kasturi illustrates that there is a comfort in that shared intimacy, a safety in seeing one’s caregiver revealed under all of the artificiality, even if all that is underneath the caregiver persona is wires and gears. 

To find out more about Sandra Kasturi, visit http://www.sandrakasturi.com

To discover more about The Sum of Us, visit http://laksamedia.com/the-sum-of-us-an-anthology-for-a-cause-2/

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Speculating Canada on Trent Radio Episode 35: A Discussion of the Works of Nancy Baker

Many years ago, I went on a quest to find the works of Nancy Baker since I had heard such wonderful things about her work. I was able to track down some used copies and read them… and they were brilliant, blending the artistic with the dark. Excitingly, ChiZine Publications has re-released Nancy Baker’s works, so I wanted to take this opportunity to talk about some of my favourities. In this episode, I discuss Nancy Baker’s vampire novels The Night Inside, Blood and Chrysanthemums, and A Terrible Beauty, looking at the way that Nancy explores the power of the vampire to talk about humanity, our society’s beauty and youth obsession, and art.

You can listen to this episode of Speculating Canada on Trent Radio at the link below.

Explore Trent Radio at www.trentradio.ca

Explore Trent Radio at http://www.trentradio.ca

This audio file was originally broadcast on Trent Radio, and I would like to thank Trent Radio for their continued support. I would also like to thank Dwayne Collins for his consistent tech support and help with the intricacies of creating audio files.

Make sure to allow a few minutes for the file to buffer since it may take a moment before it begins to play.

You can read more about Nancy Baker and her work at http://www.nancybaker.ca/

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Hiding/Revealing

A review of Dominik Parisien’s “A Mask is Not a Face “ in Goblin Fruit (http://www.goblinfruit.net/2012/summer/poems/?poem=amaskisnotaface)
By Derek Newman-Stille

So much of our identity is attached to our face, our appearance. We construct ourselves and shape our interactions through the medium of visage. Dominik Parisien’s speculative poem “A Mask is Not a Face” explores the notion of a prosthetic face for a skinless girl, a face made out of butterflies that have been sewn together.

This is a text of emergence, the image of the butterfly embodying the idea of transformative beauty and the potency of change. The image of the pierced butterfly brings to light the beauty in horror and horror in beauty – the mixture of the horrific and attractive that is intimately involved in the notion of social masks and constructed appearance. And transformation itself is fundamentally a horribly beautiful experience.

Those around her compare the girl with the butterfly face to a blood orange, Mars, the underside of autumn leaves, and roadside carrion – images that combine life and death, sweet and bitter, distance and intimate closeness. She is contradiction embodied in one form, alternating, changing, complex and carnivalesque.

Masks can be distancing, creating a barrier between subject and object, but they can also be intensely intimate, a representation of the inner worlds of the wearer, constructed from the depths of their soul. Masks can speak.

You can read this speculative poem at http://www.goblinfruit.net/2012/summer/poems/?poem=amaskisnotaface

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Perfect Bodies

A Review of Don Bassingthwaite’s “Too Much is Never Enough” in Imaginarium 2013: The Best Canadian Speculative Fiction (ChiZine Publications, 2013)

Cover image of Imaginarium 2013 courtesy of ChiZine Publications. Cover art by GMB Chomichuk

Cover image of Imaginarium 2013 courtesy of ChiZine Publications. Cover art by GMB Chomichuk

By Derek Newman-Stille

We live in a society in which bodily perfection is considered a major goal. Our society privileges its ideas of beauty, its entrenched notions of health, and able-bodiedness. People medically modify their bodies, cosmetically alter them to appear more like the norms and desires of our society, altering their essential selves. Don Bassingthwaite’s “Too Much is Never Enough” allies this desire for bodily perfection with athleticism. Marco Cole finds himself modified, altered, his body more attractive than before… so much so that he can’t stop looking at himself. He becomes stronger, faster, and more dangerous. The danger from him is not just from his bodily abilities, but from the modifications that have been done to his mind. Whenever he suffers, whenever he has a conflict of morality or fear, his body triggers a Dopamine switch to make him learn to enjoy fear, and pain and to get rid of any concern

Like his body, Marco finds that his will is controlled. He is forged into a fighter for a championship match, but the main objective he has had forced onto him is to assassinate a man. He becomes the perfect killing doll, modified into a military Barbie, posed and perfected until he is nothing but plastic, a play thing of his owners.

Bassingthwaite explores the dangers of a system that is based on a desire for modification and the loss that occurs when bodies are changed, altered, and modified for a social purpose. Modifications and the social pressure to enhance the body and conform it to social notions of beauty and control are difficult to battle against, and it is hard to wrestle control away from the desires that are written onto our bodies.

To discover more about Imaginarium 2013, visit ChiZine Publications’ website at http://chizinepub.com/books/imaginarium/imaginarium_2013.php . To find out more about Don Bassingthwaite, you can visit his website at http://dbassingthwaite.com/ .

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The Disabled and Disfigured Have Become the “Red Shirt” Class

A review of James Alan Gardner’s Expendable (Avon Books, 1997)Expendable
By Derek Newman-Stille

Fans of Star Trek will recognise the term “Red Shirt”, but for those who haven’t seen Star Trek, “Red Shirt” is the term for people on away missions who die to provide plot fodder for the main characters to grow and develop. Generally these plot victims are garbed in red uniforms. I thought it was apt for the title of this review.

In James Alan Gardner’s Expendable, he presents a future in which the admiralty has decided that the only people that should be allowed onto planets on dangerous missions are those who society “won’t miss”. In a society that is hyper-focussed on beauty, the admiralty discovered that people are less inclined to miss those that don’t fit into the social norms of aesthetics for the human body. Even though medical technology has been created that can ‘heal’ any disability and modify any appearance to fit with social body aesthetics, doctors are discouraged from performing surgery to modify appearance as long as the person can appear ‘unbeautiful’ but is still capable of performing duties.

The disabled and disfigured have become a disposable class, put into danger because the admiralty has recognised that people are less distraught by the deaths of those who they consider ugly.

When Festina Ramos, a member of the Explorers (or, as they call themselves, the Expendables) who has a large birth mark on the right side of her face, is sent down to a planet well known for killing everyone who arrives on it, she comes into contact with a species that is obsessed with aesthetics – beauty and perfection. This world, Melaquin, is populated with people who, through genetic manipulation, have developed bodies of glass, transparent, but idealised and impervious to harm or aging.  Their bodies are so perfect that they have lost their motivations, their desires, and passions. These “alien” Melaquin people believe that it is a moral imperative to be perfect (with an almost religious fervor). They ask the Explorers who visit them why they would maintain the appearance they have since it makes people “sad” to look at them, hating the involuntary shared suffering that they experience when they contemplate the loneliness that aesthetic difference must cause to people who are made outsiders.

Gardner questions ideas of beauty and perfection in Expendable, presenting a future in which bodily difference is discouraged and those who look different are considered to be less worthy of survival. The alien world and beings in it are not so different from us, trapped in the same patterns of fear of difference and desire for conformity to bodily norms and ideals. Purposely made of glass, this world’s “aliens” are transparent in their fear of difference, in their dislike of diversity, and in their ability to represent our own society’s distaste at bodily difference and imposition of social “norms” of perfection.

Gardner explores images of colonialism in his novel, looking at a society in which “expendable” people are sent down to planets to explore them for the potential for human occupation. Like many who deal with ideas of colonialism in SF, he explores the sexual imagery associated with colonialism – the image of “penetrating” a new environment and “seeding” a new world, however, he makes this imagery explicit. The space drive that he creates uses a field generator for interstellar travel that the travellers have colloquially called the “sperm field” – it creates a white, milky bubble around the ship with a trailing tail that whips back and forth(flagellating) like spermatozoa. This tail is also used as a transporter system to deposit crew members on planets – literally whipping down to the planet and then ejaculating crew members onto the surface. He explores this image of colonialism as a form of forced penetration and impregnation. It is fascinating that Festina Ramos, the crew member who questions the damaging impact of human beings placed on the planet Melaquin, is also someone who saves and rescues eggs from various planets since they are the female equivalent of the sperm, situating her as a figure who is rescuing the feminine from contamination by exploration.

You can explore James Alan Gardner’s website at http://www.jamesalangardner.com/Welcome.html . Expendable is now available in ebook formats, and you can explore it and other Gardner books at http://www.jamesalangardner.com/novels.html .

Thank you to Alissa Paxton for recommending this novel to me.

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Medusa’s Confusion

A review of Sandra Kasturi’s The Medusa Quintet in Tesseracts 14: Strange Canadian Stories (Edge, 2010)

Cover Photo of Tesseracts 14, courtesy of http://www.edgewebsite.com/

Cover Photo of Tesseracts 14, courtesy of http://www.edgewebsite.com/

By Derek Newman-Stille

In her poem The Medusa Quintet, Sandra Katsuri re-envisions the story of Medusa. She is created as a largely unaware and unquestioning woman who is coping with ideas of perfection and an imperfect body. Her body is destroyed and her vain sisters cannot look at her due to their desire to gaze at themselves.

This brilliant reinterpretation of the Medusa myth situates her not as a monster but as an innocent and naive woman who misinterprets the oracles around her and assumes a saviour in an enemy who cannot see beyond her surface appearance.

Poetry often takes as its subject the idea of beauty, and this poem questions notions of beauty, reverses them and calls the reader to examine ideas of appearance and the underpinnings of the beauty myth.

To explore this and other volumes of the Tesseracts books, visit the Edge website at http://www.edgewebsite.com/ . You can explore mor about Sandra Kasturi on her website at http://sandrakasturi.com/ .

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Interview with Nancy Baker

An Interview with Nancy Baker by Derek Newman-Stille

Author photo courtesy of Nancy Baker

I have been an admirer of Nancy Baker’s work for some time, so I was really glad that she agreed to do an interview on Speculating Canada. Nancy Baker is the author of novels such as The Night Inside, Blood and Crysanthemums, and A Terrible Beauty. I will let her introduce herself and share some of her incredible insights on the vampire, and on horror and fantasy.

Spec Can: To begin the interview, could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Nancy Baker: I’m Canadian, older than I like to think about, have a day job in the business end of the magazine publishing field and can find a thousand ways to avoid writing, including reading other people’s writing, gardening, making jam, and attempting to do a headstand.

Spec Can:  What is unique or different about your vampire fiction from that of other authors?

Nancy Baker: At the time I started seriously writing my first novel (the late 1980s, just to date myself more), there was a reasonable diversity of vampire fiction being written, much of it very good.  There were scary vampires (Salem’s Lot), sympathetic vampires (Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint Germain) and just plain weird vampires.  What interested me in the first book was what happened if you were an ordinary person who was transformed into a vampire, when becoming a vampire didn’t automatically make you rich, smart, or amoral.  How did you not only survive but have a satisfying existence?  How did you make money? What did you do all night? How did you deal with the choices you had to make?  What was your relationship with your creator like?  If you’re an old vampire, how do you adapt to a world which changes far faster than the one into which you were born? To me, these were interesting questions to explore, which shaped the type of vampires I created.

Spec Can: Is there a “Canadian vampire”, a particular style of vampire that speaks to a Canadian audience or from a Canadian perspective?

Nancy Baker: One reviewer called my characters “kinder, gentler vampires”, which strikes me as very Canadian.  I certainly felt that you could not have the kind of violent, predatory vampires in Toronto that seemed common in U.S. vampire fiction – though one New York writer I shared a radio panel with seemed appalled at the idea that I assumed you could leave dead bodies all over Manhattan and no one would care.  However, I don’t think there’s any particular type of Canadian vampire.  Mine might be “kinder and gentler” but those are the last words you’d use to describe the vampire in Michael Rowe’s Enter, Night. One of the interesting things about that book is that the demons that must be confronted are deeply rooted in the book’s Northern Ontario setting and in a part of Canadian history we’re conditioned to think of as something boring to study in public school.  The evocation of nature as a shaping, often inimical,  force is one of the things that is considered traditionally “Canadian” and it works brilliantly in that book.

Spec Can: Why is the vampire such a popular figure at the moment?

Nancy Baker: Vampires never seem to be out of style, though how hot they are at any given time depends on what books and films are popular.   I think that reflects the flexibility of the mythology, which can be scary, seductive, funny, or tragic.

Spec Can: How does the vampire ‘speak’ to today’s audience? What inspires us about the vampire and what social issues can the vampire express?

Nancy Baker: Vampire fiction has been used to look at issues of addiction, oppression, disease, predation, and sexuality.  It’s also been used just to scare the hell out of us.  Every new generation of readers and writers has the advantage of looking at what came before (from the classics such as Carmilla and Dracula to Salem’s Lot and Interview with the Vampire to Twilight and The Passage) and reacting to it, either by emulating it or turning it on its head.  There’s probably a great social media vampire novel waiting to be written.

Spec Can: How does the vampire relate to our obsession over beauty and youth?

Nancy Baker: As the poster for The Lost Boyssaid “Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a

Cover photo of A Terrible Beauty courtesy of Nancy Baker

vampire.”   The idea of eternal youth and beauty is an ancient one, from Greek mythology to The Picture of Dorian Grey to our own culture’s reliance on surgical intervention.   It was important to me in A Terrible Beauty that Sidonie’s beauty was not human beauty and that when she transforms in the end it is not into a flawless teenager but into a woman with the marks of her long existence on her.  The peril of perpetual youth is, of course, that you never actually grow up, and that does seem to be particularly common with vampire characters.  One of the great strengths of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s series is that St. Germain is an adult and, over the course of the books, you can see him gain his hard-won wisdom and self-knowledge.

Spec Can: What can the monster in literature do to inspire us or challenge us?

Nancy Baker: At its best, horror and fantastic literature can show us the darkness that humans are capable of and to reveal that the reader shares that potential.  It can also show us that the “other” is sometimes as deserving of compassion as we hope that we are.

Spec Can: Why is the vampire so often paired with the sexual or with romantic questions?

Nancy Baker: Entire treatises have been written on this subject so I’ll just touch on a couple of points that interested me.  There’s the obvious sex without consequence element – no choice therefore no guilt and, practically, no pregnancy.  For more traditional vampire fiction, the eroticism is all about foreplay and anticipation, which has an appeal for female readers.  It’s also lots of fun to write.  Most vampire novels that I’d read focused on the romantic/sexual prelude but very few seemed to deal with the fact that vampires end up turning their partners into themselves, and therefore the same relationship is no longer possible.  What is fidelity to a vampire?  These were some of things I wanted to play around with in Blood and Chrysanthemums, through the evolving relationship between Ardeth and Rozokov.

Spec Can: What is the role of the outsider in your work? Why do social outsiders make such great stories?

Nancy Baker: I’ve always thought that my vampire novels were actually quite conventional, by the standards of many of the other books in the genre.  The “outsider” status of the characters is mostly self-imposed or psychological. Ardeth [from The Night Inside and Blood and Crysanthemums] is not really an outsider, though she perceives herself as one, because she’s an introverted grad student.  When she becomes a vampire, she doesn’t feel “cool” enough to fit into the Goth scene that emulates the thing she really is. Matthew in A Terrible Beauty lives a self-consciously Bohemian existence but he always has the safety net of his family.

This was a conscious choice on my part, because I was tired of reading about cooler than cool punk vampires and the general

Cover photo of The Night Inside courtesy of Nancy Baker

assumption that becoming a vampire automatically made you sexually transgressive and adventurous right away.  Ardeth was a conventional heterosexual woman as a mortal and she’s a relatively conventional heterosexual as a vampire.  Of course, she’s a very young vampire, so her horizons will undoubtedly broaden as time passes.

Even Rozokov [from The Night Inside and Blood and Crysanthemums] and Sidonie [from A Terrible Beauty] are actually fairly sedate, as vampires go, mostly because they’ve had time to get their wilder desires out of their systems centuries earlier.  By the time of the novels, they’ve settled into being essentially who they are.  Their challenge is to continue to find a reason to exist, to be more than simply predators who must keep consuming or die.

Spec Can: Your novel A Terrible Beauty features an artist who eventually paints a vampire. The image of mirroring, reflecting, and representation seem to figure very significantly in this story. What is the role of reflection in your work? How does the vampire challenge us to reflect on things that we take for granted?

Nancy Baker: In all the books, I was interested in the gap between the popular image of the vampire and the reality that the characters were living.  Ardeth’s recreation of herself as a vampire is unavoidably shaped by Goth, by Dracula, by Louise Brooks, by a thousand media images she’s seen and associated with seduction and vampirism.  Without Rozokov to teach her how to be a vampire, she goes by the only guides she has – movies and books. In Blood and Chrysanthemums, Fujiwara filters all his real experiences as a vampire through the literary conventions and popular culture of many eras.   This was partially because that was the only way I could handle a thousand years of Japanese history but it worked very well for his character.  In the absence of any folklore to name him, he has to use the ghost stories and mythology of his world to construct a definition of what he is.  It also conveniently cast his truth as fiction, should his diary be exposed.

The art in A Terrible Beauty was based primarily on fin-de-siecle painting and was heavily influenced by the book Idols of Perversity, which deals with the ways in which women were defined through art in the 19th century.  Painting is Matthew’s method of dealing with his captivity and exploring his reactions to Sidonie.  Sidonie has not seen her own face for thousands of years and takes his representations for the truth though, ironically, they’re not.

Spec Can: Captivity features very strongly in your novels The Night Inside and A Terrible Beauty. What is the significance of captivity in your work?

Nancy Baker: I’m not sure there’s any specific significance.  The Night Inside grew out of a short story idea.  Interestingly, Robin McKinley’s Sunshine begins with almost exactly the same scenario in a completely different context and I love what she did with it.  The situation in A Terrible Beauty was driven by the source fairy tale.  I think in both cases the captivity gave me a way to force the characters to confront each other in a situation that required them to move beyond their preconceptions.

Spec Can: What do you hope your readers will take away from your stories? How do you hope your stories will change or inspire them?

Nancy Baker: I hope that readers find something of value to them in the stories – a character they like, a phrase that resonates.   I suppose the biggest compliment for a writer is that a reader wants to read your next book as well – or your old ones again.  I’m also thrilled if someone says that one of the books made them want to try writing something of their own.

Spec Can: Is there anything further you were interested in mentioning to our readers, anything I haven’t covered?

Nancy Baker: Thanks for all the interesting questions.  It was a pleasure to think about these things, since when you’re in the throes of writing, many of these things happen organically and it’s not until someone points them out to you that you realize you’ve done them.

I want to thank Nancy Baker for this fantastic interview. Much like her books, this interview shows her extensive knowledge of the vampire subject and her passion for providing new insights about vampire fiction and its relationship to society and I was pleased to be able to interview her and share these insights with readers.

You can explore more of Nancy Baker’s work at http://www.nancybaker.ca/ .

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Upcoming Interview with Nancy Baker On December 5th

I have been an admirer of Nancy Baker’s work for some time, so I was really glad that she agreed to do an interview on Speculating Canada. Nancy Baker is the author of fantastic novels such as The Night Inside, Blood and Crysanthemums, and A Terrible Beauty.

Author photo courtesy of Nancy Baker

Check out our interview on Wednesday December 5th and hear Nancy Baker’s insights on the nuances of vampire characters, infusing vampires with normal lives,  the use of the vampiric subject to explore social issues, sexuality, and the role of horror in giving voice to the ‘Other’.

Here are some highlights from the interview:

Nancy Baker: At its best, horror and fantastic literature can show us the darkness that humans are capable of and to reveal that the reader shares that potential.  It can also show us that the “other” is sometimes as deserving of compassion as we hope that we are.

Nancy Baker: “What interested me in the first book was what happened if you were an ordinary person who was transformed into a vampire, when becoming a vampire didn’t automatically make you rich, smart, or amoral.”

Nancy Baker: “Vampire fiction has been used to look at issues of addiction, oppression, disease, predation, and sexuality.  It’s also been used just to scare the hell out of us.”

Nancy Baker: “The evocation of nature as a shaping, often inimical,  force is one of the things that is considered traditionally “Canadian””

Nancy Baker: Vampires never seem to be out of style, though how hot they are at any given time depends on what books and films are popular.   I think that reflects the flexibility of the mythology, which can be scary, seductive, funny, or tragic.

Nancy Baker: “The idea of eternal youth and beauty is an ancient one, from Greek mythology to The Picture of Dorian Grey to our own culture’s reliance on surgical intervention.”

Nancy Baker: “The peril of perpetual youth is, of course, that you never actually grow up, and that does seem to be particularly common with vampire characters.”

Nancy Baker: “I suppose the biggest compliment for a writer is that a reader wants to read your next book as well – or your old ones again.  I’m also thrilled if someone says that one of the books made them want to try writing something of their own.”

Nancy Baker invites readers of this interview to ponder the vampiric subject further and asks her readers to delve deep into questions about vampire stories and what they can reveal about the world that creates them. She invites readers into the process of postulating over the vampire.

Ms. Baker shares her extensive knowledge of vampire literature on Speculating Canada on Wednesday, December 5th. If you are anything like myself, you will probably be reading this interview and taking notes about what to read next. I hope you enjoy it.

You can check out my review of Nancy Baker’s A Terrible Beauty on September 12th on Speculating Canada. You can check out Nancy Baker’s website at http://www.nancybaker.ca/