Pride StoryBundle Mini-interview with Heather Rose Jones, author of FLOODTIDE

[catherineldf]

Next up on my list (see A.C. Wises' interviews here) of Pride StoryBundle authors to interview is author Heather Rose Jones. In addition to writing a great historical fantasy series about queer women in a magical kingdom in Europe, Heather blogs extensively about lesbians and queer women in history and maintains a splendid podcast that mixes fiction, author interviews and historical research on the same topic. Welcome, Heather!

Can you tell us a bit about the book you have in this StoryBundle?

 

Floodtide is the story of an ordinary girl, thrown into the midst of extraordinary times. For the fourth book in my Alpennia historic fantasy series, I wanted to shake things up a bit: focus on a working class character, not the rich and powerful; view the world through a single viewpoint of limited experience; and give my collection of teenaged minor characters a chance to have adventures on their own while the adults were distracted.

 

Rozild is a laundry maid and aspiring apprentice dressmaker. Through her friendship with Celeste, the dressmaker’s daughter, she’s introduced to the world of the charmwives--the folk-magic side of the ceremonial magic and alchemy that dominated the earlier books. Roz has an awkward habit of falling in love with girls, which forms a counterpoint to all the other challenges she needs to navigate, but the deep friendships that survive the test are what save the day when the waters rise and fever stalks the city.

 

At the mid-point in the seven-book series, I wanted to write a story that could stand alone and be an introduction to my little magical Ruritania

 

What do you find engaging/important about writing LGBTQ/queer fiction?

 

Writing fiction is always a case of fixing a spotlight on a limited slice of reality (for a reality that can include fantastic and unreal things). Fiction doesn’t have the fractal diversity of real life, so it’s easy for an author’s own interests and biases (whether hidden or overt) to filter what gets onto the page. When all the filters that are allowed to be published are aligned on the same wavelength, the result is a polarized light that only allows readers to “see” a fraction of the world.

 

When I was a young sff reader just beginning to understand my sexuality, the closest identifications I could find in sff were metaphors and allegories: closeted magical races, the demi-monde of vampires, alienated teenage protagonists who only knew that they were different from everyone around them and who went on quests to find their destiny. Those are all marvelously rich literary tropes, but woman cannot live on tropes alone. I wanted characters who were like me and who also had those experiences.

 

Writing in the field of historic fantasy and historic romance--and especially given the hard work of researching and interpreting the lives and experiences of queer people in the past--I also feel that fiction has a key role in rooting our identities throughout the entirety of human existence. Queer people in the past weren’t just like us, but they were there. And that same filtered, polarized light in both fiction and non-fiction writing about history has insisted for too long that they were not there. Writing queer people back into history--even a fantastic history with magic--is my way of claiming my place as an equal member of humanity.

 

What books or stories do you have out that readers of this StoryBundle might enjoy?

 

Obviously, if they like Floodtide, then I highly recommend that they check out the entire Alpennia series, starting with Daughter of Mystery. By the time they come round again to the events of Floodtide they’ll have a new appreciation for how it all fits together. And if they’d like a non-fantasy story that shows just how queer the actual past could be, They might enjoy my free novelette “The Mazarinette and the Musketeer” which takes several real-life women of the late 17th century and throws them together in a fluffy adventure.

 

Aside from your own work, what are some of your favorite queer reads you would recommend to folks?

 

I’m going to suggest three very different works that have grabbed me in different ways. The first is T. Kingfisher’s The Raven and the Reindeer which is the f/f Snow Queen story that would have overturned my life if it had existed when I was a teenager. The second is Claire O’Dell’s near-future gender-flipped Sherlock Holmes series, the Janet Watson Chronicles (A Study in Honor and The Hound of Justice) which may have been a bit too painful in predicting the sort of future we now find ourselves in. The third is Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads which--in the midst of historic pain and tragedy--is a tightly-woven cloth of so many different ways of being, feeling, and loving that I felt more included than I do in 99% of books, despite none of the characters resembling my life at all.

 
Thanks, Heather! The Pride StoryBundle runs until 7/1 and our selected charity is Rainbow Railroad, an organization that works with LGBTQ+ refugees.