Kij Johnson Interview, plus links to author biography, book summaries, excerpts and reviews

An interview with Kij Johnson

Kij Johnson on writing The Privilege of the Happy Ending, a collection of speculative and experimental stories that explore animal intelligences, gender, and the nature of stories.

Even now, every story I write is a conscious craft experiment, whatever else it is. It was very early in my fiction-writing life that I realized the kinds of stories I wanted to write would happen only if I forced myself past the margins of what I thought I already knew how to do, what I think of as my glibnesses. Even at the beginning I knew I loved vocabulary and lyricism, and I had intuitively developed an understanding of the uses for scenic and narrative writing. I also had a lot of experience with interiority and feelings because of all that bad poetry and journalling in high school and college. It seemed evident that if I worked hard on just those things, I could within a year or two write publishable — maybe even popular! — fiction that was atmospheric and full of feels. I also could tell that this would get boring for me — I had read plenty of author notes from writers, Arthur Conan Doyle, Fredric Brown and others, who grew to hate their comfortable niches.

As a child I had read obsessively in a lot of adult genres. I loved SF and fantasy, but I read a lot more mysteries and romances, and then there was horror, biographies, history, the classics, science. I didn 't always understand what I was reading, and I learned to love that slight insecurity. What's this word mean? Why are they acting this way? Why is this bit being told out of order? It was like peeking through a keyhole into the adult world where (I assumed) everyone understood everything. Not quite understanding what I was reading was a feature, not a bug, and it invariably led to me trying to figure it out. My answers weren't always canon — I was convinced that "misled" was the past tense of the verb to misle, and my takeaway from Anna Karenina was, don't get married — but they satisfied me in ways that the conventional and correct answers sometimes don't. So, when I started writing, I was especially interested in all the things I didn't know yet. I didn't want to be good at writing fantasies or vampire stories, which I knew pretty well. Well, I did want to be good at them, but I didn't want to be good at just them.

Early on I realized that the way to improve was to play to my weaknesses: every time I started to do something rather well, move on to something I don't know as much about. I set myself challenges every time, big or small, based on form or voice or content. As time has gone on, many of the challenges engage with immersion and estrangement. How deeply can I involve a reader in my tale, to the point where they forget they are sitting in a chair? What sorts of deep engagement are possible, if any, in a story told as a list, or in 200 words? What rewards have to be offered to sustain the reader through a story that is not, in fact, a story? This has meant that I alternate stories between somewhat conventional narrative forms and unconventional forms that challenge what a story is.

Two of the works in this collection, "The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe" and "The Ghastly Spectre of Toad Hall" are the result of my interest in making sense of other peoples' work for myself, the way I used to as a child. I had questions about HP Lovecraft and Kenneth Grahame's work, about the​ mechanics of their voices and the absence of women in their work, and writing stories engaging directly with this gave me a chance to answer them for my own satisfaction, if no one else's. ​

Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.