Smart Podcast, Trashy Books, March 15, 2019

[music]

Sarah Wendell: Okay, I have silenced my cell phone, I have set up my microphone; maybe I will be able to get through the intro without the recycling and the garbage trucks arriving, because I am taking a great risk with the time of day to record this intro.

Hi there! Welcome to episode number 342 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m Sarah Wendell braving the temporary silence on a Monday morning to bring you “Stories Are Everything: Learning about Narratology with Arkady Martine.” The suggestion for this guest came from EC Spurlock – thank you so much for the email! I’m speaking today with Arkady Martine, who’s also known as Dr. AnnaLinden Weller. As Arkady Martine, she is a science fiction and fantasy writer, and as Dr. Weller, she’s a Byzantine scholar, narratologist, and a city planner. Now, there’s a tense moment in this interview where I almost scrap the whole thing to ask about city planning, but no! We are going to talk about narratology. Arkady recently wrote an essay on Tor.com that introduced me to narratology as a field, so I emailed her to ask if she’d be willing to talk more about that subject on a podcast. If you haven’t heard of narratology, which is essentially the study of how a story works, buckle up, because it’s nerdy deep dive time. I have snacks for everyone, so get ready.

In this interview, we talk about the terminology used by narratologists and how it differs from the terms that readers use, how cognitive narratology explores a very cool question: how does the brain respond to experiencing narrative? We talk about the rules of worldbuilding and the meaning of storyworld, the multiple meanings of the term “news stories,” and the powerful impossibility of getting someone to change the way they understand the world, and of course we talk about what she’s reading and her upcoming science fiction novel A Memory Called Empire. Basically, what I learned from this conversation is that everything is a narrative, everything is a story, and we can learn a lot from understanding why and how a story works. I really like this interview. I hope you guys enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Barely kept my inner thirteen-year-old under control, basically.

So if you want to email me and suggest guests, or you want to respond to this episode, or you just want to tell me a bad joke, that’s great! You can email me at [email protected]. You can also call and leave a voicemail at 1-201-371-3272. You can tell me what you’re thinking, ask for a book recommendation, tell me a terrible joke, whatever. I really love hearing from you, and you guys have really cool ideas, so, you know, get in touch if you feel like it!

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Today’s podcast transcript will be hand-compiled by garlicknitter – thank you, garlicknitter! [You’re very welcome! – gk] – and today’s podcast transcript is brought to you by Christina Lauren and Frolic Media’s The Know-How Series. If you are an aspiring author, someone who is experiencing writer’s block, or you’re just plain curious about writing and want to learn from two of the top romance novel authors, this series is for you. The Know-How is an online educational series that goes beyond the pages with influential authors and personalities to explore the craft of writing and building a personal brand. The Know-How launched with bestselling authors Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, the writing duo known as Christina Lauren. The writers and self-proclaimed best friends discuss their unique writing process, keeping characters fresh, crafting steamy love scenes together, and more in the nine-part series. The Know-How’s first installment, “Creative Writing with Christina Lauren,” is available for $29.99 at frolic.media, but! – Heads up! – listeners of this podcast receive a special twenty-percent discount by entering the code SBTB at checkout. Yes, you can sign up for “Creative Writing with Christina Lauren” for $29.99 at frolic.media, and you get twenty percent off with code SBTB. If you want to check out more, I will have links to that entire Know-How Series at the website smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast in the show notes for this episode.

We have a podcast Patreon, and I normally tell you a bit about it, but I have a special thing to say today, because I read a really cool Twitter thread, and I’m going to share it with you.

I know you’re really excited; I can hear it. Okay. [Clears throat]

Now, if you have supported the show with a monthly pledge of any amount, thank you, thank you, thank you. You’re helping me make sure every episode gets a transcript, you keep the podcast going, and you’re making every episode accessible. Now, recently on Twitter, @TerminallyNerdy and @Neomeruru on Twitter talked about the incredible power and appreciation they have for every Patreon pledge, particularly the one dollar pledges. To quote Lindsay, “Never feel bad about ‘only’ pledging a dollar.” Why? Because as @TerminallyNerdy said, a dollar might not be a whole lot, but for creators like myself, that single dollar has an entirely different meaning. As she said, a dollar pledged says two things: one, that you feel like what I do as a creator has value, and two, that that value is large enough to be worth paying for. That is massive.

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I will have information at the end of the show about the music you are listening to, and I will also have a preview as to what is coming up on Smart Bitches this coming week, and I’ll have a terrible joke, because that’s how I end every episode, because I’m evil and I love really, really bad jokes, and wow, is this week’s terrible. I haven’t even test driven it on my family yet. They’re going to get to enjoy it later today. [Laughs evilly]

Now, we talk a lot – a LOT, a lot, a lot – about some academic books, some romances, some science fiction. I will have links to all of them in the show notes.

But now, let’s get started on this interview; on with the podcast.

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Arkady Martine: I’m Arkady Martine, also known as AnnaLinden Weller. The first one’s my penname; the second one’s my legal name. I’m a writer, mostly of science fiction and fantasy; also a Byzantine historian, a narratologist, and a city planner, so I do a lot of stuff.

Sarah: Whoa! You do a lot of cool stuff!

Arkady: [Laughs] It’s all kind of fed into each other. I mean, I’ve always been a writer, but I have a Ph.D. in Byzantine History, and I did that for about a decade, had some post docs in Europe and in Canada, and then I decided to leave academia and switch to a sort of more hands-on engagement with the universe, which ended up being urban planning and specifically, like, climate planning and sustainability, and I keep writing science fiction all the way through, so.

Sarah: Whoa! I had no idea about the city planning part. Now I want to be like, scrap all these questions! Let me ask you about that!

Arkady: [Laughs] Well –

Sarah: We are now a city planning podcast, folks; get ready. [Laughs]

Arkady: Okay. We can talk about zoning law! [Laughs] You’ll be really bored, though.

Sarah: [Laughs] The reason that I originally contacted you was because you wrote a really fascinating article on Tor.com about narratology, and it was one of those moments where I didn’t realize this thing that I liked doing on a very amateur level had a name, and that people studied it, and that is was a thing. Like, I literally didn’t know it, this was a, that this was a thing, and it was so exciting for me, so I want to start by asking you, could you explain exactly what narratology is?

Arkady: Okay, yeah. So narratology is basically an academic discipline which studies the structure of narrative in all kinds of narrative, like books, films, history, comics, anything you can think of, and it’s the study of how narrative structures work and how humans interact with, understand, and make narrative structures. So it’s a really big, very broad field, and what you describe about, like, suddenly discovering that there was this thing that described what you were doing anyway was pretty identical to how I felt the very first time I ran into it. I was like, wait –

Sarah: [Laughs] There’s a name?! Oh my gosh!

Arkady: I do this all the time! You mean –

Sarah: Right!

Arkady: – people study it? The narrative is the point of view filtered through a particular place, object, how does it move? Where is, where it’s the focal point. You can think of it as a kind of lens, like the way a lens focuses?

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

Arkady: So in that way, the term is useful when you’re doing this kind of analytic work that narratologists do, but I spent a lot of time when I was actively working on a narratological project thinking, okay, this is useful for analysis, but actually, when I’m actually doing work as a practitioner, I’m just going to call this point of view, ‘cause that’s what it means.

[Laughter]

Sarah: You are making it needlessly complicated. Stop that.

Arkady: Well, it’s not needlessly complicated. It’s –

Sarah: True. True, true, true.

Arkady: – the difference between the tools you want for being able to systematize and describe a really complicated sphere of things, which is, like, all the stories in the world –

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: – and the tools that you want when you want to write a story and think about how you’re doing it –

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: – and sometimes those are the same, and sometimes they’re really different.

Sarah: They are! One of the things that you talked about in your article that I loved – I’ve read it, like, three or four times, and I think it’s so deliciously savory. It was, like, the, so much fun. Thank you so much for writing it.

Arkady: Thank you.

Sarah: You wrote that narratology is the study of narrative structure and how humans interact with narrative structures. What is cognitive narratology, and how is that different? ‘Cause it sounds like it overlaps between literary study and psychology and cognitive analysis. Like, there’s a whole bunch of fields –

Arkady: It does!

Sarah: – coming together, which is super cool, ‘cause I know interdisciplinary study is, like, still a hot thing in the world. [Laughs]

Arkady: It is, and that’s a good thing! So narratology in its original form was really a branch of literary analysis, so it was done by people who were, like, doing structuralism and post structuralism, all those, like, French structuralists you read about in literary grad school if you were inflicted with that.

Sarah: Yes.

Arkady: Cognitive narratology comes partially from that sphere of thinking and partially from – you’re exactly right – neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and some really very technical, scientific, how does the brain respond, like, in an MRI to experiencing particular kinds of narratives? What happens inside our neurology when we experience a story or think about a story? And this is a, it’s not a super new development. Like, cognitive narratology started happening in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Arkady: – but it’s much newer than narratology as a whole, and that’s because, I think it required the technology to advance far enough that people started thinking, well, if we can see what lights up in the brain when we move our arm, what happens in the brain that, when we are sad? What about if you watch a scary movie? What lights up in your brain?

Sarah: Right. What happens in your brain when you’re reading a romance novel?

Arkady: Exactly.

Sarah: I kind of want to know the answer to that, and I don’t know if anyone’s studying it. Now I need to know.

[Laughter]

Arkady: I think the cognitive narratologists had not done as much work as I would like on romance and other sort of positive emotions? Like feelings of excitement and interest and love, but there’s, there’s, I – when you asked me to come up with a list of people working on narrative of romance, there’s definitely people working on narrative of romance, but I don’t think it’s quite hit cognitive narratology yet –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Arkady: – though I do have one really cool exception. So there’s this singer called Dessa. She’s part of a, well, she started out as part of a rap collective out of Minneapolis called Doomtree. She’s an amazing singer, and she wrote a memoir recently which was about her attempts to fall out of love with her ex using an MRI machine and the kind of processes that people who have, like, lost a limb and are learning to control a prosthesis use.

Sarah: Oh my God, I can’t even describe my face right now.

Arkady: Yeah. So –

Sarah: Wow!

Arkady: – it’s such a cool book, and she’s a great writer and a great artist in general. So the name of the memoir is My Own Devices, which is kind of great, and –

Sarah: That is brilliant.

Arkady: – I, she really came up with this on her own. Like, this, this woman, she’s – you think I do a lot of stuff. She was a philosophy major, and then she was a, a, is a rapper and a writer, and so when she had this problem she couldn’t fix through the usual ways like therapy and thinking about opening up her relationship and deciding that wasn’t for her and then, like, moving to a different city, and she was still stuck, she started thinking about free will and love and how the brain worked, and found a bunch of people to help her reprogram her own brain.

Sarah: Wow!

Arkady: So that’s the power of the connection between narrative and, like, the processes of our neurology?

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: It’s so deeply intertwined.

Sarah: And our brains respond so very much to the stories that we literally tell ourselves –

Arkady: Yes!

Sarah: – about our own reality. Like, our reality is a constructed narrative of how we experience things. Whoa! One of the aspects of your article that I really liked was the discussion of storyworld, which I took to mean, oh, like, worldbuilding. But it’s not just the world of the book; it’s the world of the reader of the book interacting with the world of the book as well.

Arkady: Yes!

Sarah: Which I –

Arkady: Which is the gorgeous trick to it.

Sarah: – I didn’t know that that had a name! Again, mind blown. So excited! Can you explain what storyworld is, as someone who studied narratology?

Arkady: Yeah, sure! So a storyworld starts with worldbuilding, the way that we think about it, so, like, all of the stuff that goes into the world of the narrative.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: But not just the things you see on the page. It’s also all the possible things that could happen inside that world.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: So I’m a sci-fi writer, so a lot of things can happen in the worlds I write about that can’t happen in the world I live in, but those possibilities exist inside that world, even if I don’t write about them. If I don’t write about, like, the journey through a wormhole but I know that that can happen in the world I’ve set up, that’s part of the storyworld.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: So that’s the first half. Then there’s the fact that all stories, all narratives have an audience, and sometimes we call this audience the reader, sometimes we call this the perceiver; audience is a pretty good catchall. The person who’s looking at the narrative; not the writer, the person who’s looking. And the person who’s looking carries their own sense of how the world works with them from their own experiences of their life, and they also are educated by the process of reading or watching or otherwise experiencing the narrative and the rules of the world inside the narrative.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: And the cool thing about the storyworld is it’s the interaction between those two sets of rules, the rules –

Sarah: That blows my mind.

Arkady: – of the story and the rules that each individual reader brings to the story which tell the reader how to respond to the story, and that can be as sublime as reading a book and feeling like it is reaffirming some deeply held belief that you had, like, your whole life –

Sarah: Yes.

Arkady: – and as, like, incredibly basic and dull as reading something and saying, well, that’s not how that works!

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: I don’t like this book!

Sarah: [Laughs]

Arkady: I’m not going to read it anymore. And that’s a mismatch between, like, to use the technical narratology terms, the source domain, which is the reader’s rules, and the target domain, which is the story’s rules.

Sarah: Right. I know with readers of romance especially, when we’re talking about paranormal, science fiction romance, worlds in romance where there’s a considerable amount of worldbuilding, I, I hear a lot of readers, especially those who review, talking about the rules of the world and how, how is there going to be a happy ending between these two characters that doesn’t violate the rules of the world that we all know, and that in the hands of a very talented writer, the solution arrives in a way that is both believable that these two people will have a happy ending and that doesn’t break the rules of the universe. But the readers in those cases, they already are participating in the storyworld; like, they have already, for lack of a better term, bought it. Like, yes, I agree –

Arkady: Yeah!

Sarah: – all of these things are the things. And when –

Arkady: Well, like, the writer has to be good at it. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yeah, exactly! It’s a, it’s a considerable skill to be like, here are the rules, and I have set up this tension where these two characters are outside the rules, and I’m going to bring them together, even though they break the rules within the rules: watch. And it’s like, how did you do that for thirty books, forty books? How did you do that? Like, Nalini Singh is brilliant at that. It’s, it’s kind of terrifying how good she is.

Another, what you were saying just now also made me think about that experience that when you, when you read something and you hear that someone else has read or, or watched something and their reaction is so different from yours, you’re like, how did we even watch or read the same thing?

Arkady: Yeah, exactly, and you did watch and read the same thing, but you’re not the same person, so –

Sarah: Yes!

Arkady: – you didn’t have the same experience.

Sarah: This is very comforting, ‘cause I remember in college going to see Dead Man Walking, the movie, and –

Arkady: Yeah.

Sarah: – coming out and being like, wow, the death penalty is a terrible idea. Holy cow! And then my, my now husband, then boyfriend’s roommate or suitemate came with us, and he was like, wow, I fully support the death penalty now! And I’m like, what?!

Arkady: What?!

Sarah: How? How did you even take that? How is that a takeaway? And he starts talking about all of the same things that I just saw, and his interpretation was one hundred and eighty degrees opposite of mine. Whereas what you’ve just explained about a storyworld and the participation of the person who is interacting with the story but didn’t create it, their world has to in some way – I don’t want to say align, because everyone’s alignment is different.

Arkady: Yeah, it’s not really align –

Sarah: No!

Arkady: – informs.

Sarah: Yes, thank you; that is the perfect word! Like, you have to inform the way you’re going to interpret that world.

Arkady: Yes. And this is something that we don’t do deliberately. We can’t choose to do it or choose not to do it; we do it all the time. It’s part of the function, in my opinion – and I think cognitive narratologists would agree with me – of being a person, being a human –

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: – is we take in narratives, and we interpret them based on our own understanding of how both the world in general works –

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: – like the world we live in, and what the writer/composer/author of the narrative has shown us about the world that is the world of the story.

Sarah: One of the things that you wrote that I actually wrote down and highlighted in my, in my show notes is that this is how fanaticism happens, how people believe things which are not true: even when they’re presented with evidence to the contrary, it doesn’t match their story, the world doesn’t make sense with that evidence, so the evidence must be wrong.

Arkady: Yep.

Sarah: That is staggering!

Arkady: It’s kind of the scariest part about really starting to think about the way that humans are storytelling animals? That that’s, like, the center part of what makes us human?

Sarah: Yes.

Arkady: Is that we, we build not only our interpretations of events, but our sense of self, our sense of reality around stories, and humans are incredibly bad – and this, there’s various scientific studies about how incredibly bad we are at this – at taking in information that contradicts the story.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: We can learn that we’re wrong. We’re actually okay at being mistaken?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Arkady: Like, you can imagine someone who – an ecologist. An ecologist believes that the, a particular species in the Chesapeake – think about, like, the, the, the crabs and what – you’d, you’d have some theory about why they breed more in some years and breed less in other years.

Sarah: Right, of course.

Arkady: And you learn that your theory, in fact, is contradicted by your evidence –

Sarah: Yep.

Arkady: – and most, most ecologists would be like, okay, well, I guess I was wrong, but what you haven’t done in that, the ecologist is not being challenged on their beliefs about the world. Their beliefs about the world are, there are physical effects in the environment that change the behavior of crabs.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: That’s the belief, not what is the physical effect? So if you came to the ecologist and said, and said, well, actually, we know for a fact, and here’s a video, that crabs don’t actually breed. A specific number of crabs is delivered to us by aliens from Alpha Centauri every spring, and here, here’s the video of them putting them in the bay, the ecologist is likely to be pretty convinced that you’re nuts, and they’re not wrong. Now –

Sarah: [Laughs] I brought you a video of aliens installing crabs in the bay.

Arkady: Yeah, so all of your theories –

Sarah: Okay, yeah!

Arkady: – about breeding are wrong –

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: – and the ecologist is going to go, no.

Sarah: ‘Kay, no.

Arkady: [Laughs] Because that’s a challenge to the way the ecologist understands the basic rules of the world.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: (A) Aliens usually don’t come down and deliver animals of any kind, and (B) the environment has effects on the behavior of animals.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: And I mean, that, that’s a silly example, but I can do some, give you some more, like, troubling ones. So did you know it’s almost impossible to get people who have really strong political beliefs in any direction to change their mind?

Sarah: I have been made aware of this fact, and as you’ve been talking, I’ve been thinking about the fact that news broadcasts are called news stories, and we accept them as factual; in fact, they are stories.

Arkady: Well, I, I can make it worse.

Sarah: Oh, bring it on!

Arkady: Yeah, there aren’t really – we call things news stories, and it’s not inaccurate for several reasons: one, most news that is reported is reported in narrative format, and that has to do with the way that it reaches us –

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: – either on television, on Twitter, in a newspaper, in a magazine, all of those have different kinds of narratives –

Sarah: Yes.

Arkady: – and all, they, they may be conveying information, but they have to convey it to you in a sequence that makes sense to your brain, so that’s narrative.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: So all communication is narrative based, which means that, well, some things are definitely true –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Arkady: – it’s really, really hard to disentangle truth from storytelling. Things are true, but nothing is objective.

Sarah: Things are true –

Arkady: Because –

Sarah: – but nothing is objective. Yeah, I’m with you, I’m with you!

Arkady: –  from the way that the story is told.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: Even if you, if you get someone who is a deep believer in biblical literalism and someone who is a meteorologist who works for the National Oceanic and Aviation Administration and ask them about why a particular town got decimated by a hurricane –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Arkady: – and they have the same evidence, and they both believe the same evidence: the hurricane happened, it happened here, this is what happened.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Arkady: Why did it happen? Why did this hurricane happen here? And you might have two very different answers, and one of them might have some of the trappings that we often consider to be truth markers –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Arkady: – which, like scientific evidence. Here’s a graph of how hurricanes are increasing in force due to climate change –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Arkady: – and one of them might not. The people in this town had committed some kind of sin, and they’re being punished specifically.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Arkady: But that doesn’t make the interpretation of the evidence for those two people any less real.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: And the evidence is still there, no matter what your interpretation is. The hurricane really happened.

Sarah: And the challenge, therefore, when you’re trying to convince someone of something that they absolutely cannot consider as possible, is to find ways of introducing information that is going to somehow fit, but also slightly adjust their storyworld.

Arkady: Yeah. Yeah. So you can’t just say, well, no, that’s not how that works to someone when you’re trying to, like, get them to acknowledge a possibility that is threatening to them?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Arkady: Threatening to their way of thinking about the world?

Sarah: Yeah.

Arkady: And this is not reserved for people on the political right or on the political left. Everybody has things that are incredibly threatening to them.

Sarah: Absolutely.

Arkady: And the contradiction of self-image or cultural image is one of the, it’s existentially traumatic –

Sarah: Yes.

Arkady: – and people react by doing really awful stuff, like saying, no, I can’t be a racist; I’m nice!

Sarah: Riiight. [Laughs] Yeah! Which is a challenge all the way around.

Arkady: Yep.

Sarah: Wow.

Arkady: Because the challenge there is that the challenge is to this person’s sense of their own, like, ethical goodness.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: Like – and this is why it’s so difficult to get people to – especially white people – to acknowledge that they can be racist and that’s not, like, the end of the world; it’s something they have to change?

Sarah: Yes.

Arkady: So – I, I’m sort of bouncing all over the ideological map here. [Laughs]

Sarah: No, it’s, it’s okay, because it’s all connected, because everything that we construct about our reality is a story, and –

Arkady: Exactly.

Sarah: – either in the construction of your story, you see institutional racism in work, or you have the ability and the privilege to not see it at all –

Arkady: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – but if you don’t see it, then it’s not there, so if it’s not there, then how could it possibly exist? Because you don’t see it!

Arkady: And if someone tells you it’s there, and that means that you have to re-evaluate your life, your choices, and your behavior in –

Sarah: And your worldview, for lack of a better word.

Arkady: – and your worldview –

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: – and for someone who has had that privilege, that re-evaluation is going to be pretty upsetting –

Sarah: Yep.

Arkady: – if not fundamentally sort of life-altering.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: And people don’t like doing hard things, which is normal.

Sarah: [Laughs] It’s so true! I was going to say, and it’s hard; it’s really hard work.

Arkady: To get back to, like, when you were initially saying that you have to figure out how to introduce the information in a way that, that fits into the world that the person already has –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Arkady: – it’s not really about getting someone to change their mind. It’s about figuring out what, where are the places in their storyworld that can be expanded a little bit? Where can the rules be widened, adjusted, changed? It’s not yet the, well, actually, climate change is real! It’s the, what, what do you see that makes sense to you that leads towards an organic realization that the perceptions of the world around mean this thing?

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: So this is why it’s really hard to do conflict resolution, and it’s really hard to do deep political persuasion, and why these projects are multigenerational and also incredibly important, and why people should pay more attention to narratologists.

[Laughter]

Arkady: It would help if the narratologists would talk more about things that are germane to everyday experience. I loved working as a narratologist, like, incredibly much. I had such a good time when I was doing this professionally. I spent two years in Sweden on a project called Text & Narrative in Byzantium, ‘cause I was a Byzantine historian, and we were looking at the ways that people a thousand years ago or two thousand years ago thought about what kinds of stories required what kinds of truth, like, what kinds of evidence –

Sarah: Wow.

Arkady: – and it was great! And, like, I can go on and on about the way that a particular historical text that, like, is one of the ways we know what happened in the year 1100 is also a literary text with, like, tropes in it and what that means, but that’s, that’s academic work. It’s super cool academic work, and I love it, and I think it’s valuable, but it’s not accessible to everybody, and one of the things that I think narratology could be is something that gives us a lot more tools to understand the world? And to do that, we need to start, like, going out from, how can we use this way of systematically looking at narrative to look at, like, our cool stuff that we love, to, how can we use systematic ways of looking at narrative to think about how humans interact with the world and with the stories they perceive?

Sarah: Right. And how can you take terms like storyworld and – what was the word for point of view?

Arkady: Focalization.

Sarah: Thank you! – focalization and translate that –

Arkady: It gets hard! [Laughs]

Sarah: Yeah, it, it – translate that into, okay, this is why this news story works on you, and this is why this particular argument works so well on you. And it’s, it’s interesting, because – because it was Valentine’s Day recently, I was doing a lot of reading about romantic relationships, which, as you might imagine, is something that I think a lot about –

Arkady: Uh-huh.

Sarah: – and the two things that I love doing when I’m looking at a romance novel are – when I’m looking at it critically – are asking, okay, why do I believe that these two people work their business out and are going to be together? But also, why is it this trope that really works for me? Why is this my catnip? Why is it this, like, why –

Arkady: Yes!

Sarah: – why is it the minute you say that two people got stuck in the snow, I am there? Give me, take, take, take my money! Give me the book; let’s go. Like, why is that the thing that works on me? I can look at that in terms of the fiction that I enjoy, but I can also look at that in terms of the arguments and the narratives about the world around me that also work on me and question –

Arkady: Uh-huh!

Sarah: – how come I’m susceptible to that? I also have a, an ancillary question that’s a bit off-topic of what you’ve been saying, but I’m wondering if gender plays a role in narratology, because one of the things you were talking about was how difficult it is to do the hard work of being like, oh crap, maybe I was wrong! Whereas women so very often – and people who identify as women – are taught to doubt themselves all the time, to doubt their perceptions of reality. Does gender influence or come into the study of narratology at all?

Arkady: Yes, it does, but again, not as much as it could.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: There are strands of feminist narratology, but they, at least in my experience – which is somewhat limited, so I apologize, feminist narratologists, if I haven’t actually read your work that does the thing I wish you did – it seems somewhat limited to discussions of particular literary or film objects.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: Like, how can we talk about this in ways that acknowledge particular feminine narratives –

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: – and narratives of women, and how do narratives of women work? In terms of cognitive narratology, I think there has not been all that much work done on the way that the socialization of women and basically all female-identified people change the way that we think about stories.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: I – it’s work that could be done, but I think it also might end up being really gender-essentialist as a piece of work?

Sarah: Yeah, that’s true.

Arkady: Like –

Sarah: It makes me think about gaslighting as a narrative format.

Arkady: Yes!

Sarah: Like, what is the, what is the narrative format of gaslighting that is so consistently effective on people?

Arkady: Mm-hmm. It’s the thing where you’re told that your, your part of the storyworld, your source domain is wrong.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: Is that it doesn’t match up with the, the, the target domain, and in this case the target domain isn’t a book you’re reading or a film you’re watching. It’s the world you’re experiencing outside.

Sarah: Right, and it’s the authority of the person who’s telling you that you’re wrong, that their, their interpretation of events is right, and your –

Arkady: Yeah.

Sarah: – your experience is incorrect.

Arkady: Your experience is incorrect, and the really, like, deeply pernicious thing there is that when you’re being gaslighted, you’re being told that your perceptions that you carry around with you every day are incorrect, that you don’t remember things as they happened, that you don’t understand things as they happened –

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: – that your narrative is not true.

Sarah: And fundamentally flawed.

Arkady: Yeah.

Sarah: Which is, you know, pretty traumatic.

Arkady: Extremely.

Sarah: Wow! So now I want to see, like, a, a conversation between narratologists and people who work with abuse victims and studying the actual structure of these pernicious, as you call them, narrative structures that undermine so much healthy interaction with the world? Like you said, everything is a story in one way or another.

Arkady: Mm-hmm. Well, there’s a discipline of psychology called narrative-based therapy, which I think does some of this work?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Arkady: I have never done it –

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: – or read about it, so I can’t speak to more than its existence, but I do think that in the world of therapy, there’s some real attention to narratives and the stories that we tell about ourselves.

Sarah: And in so many of the, of the genre fiction narratives that, that we look at, as in science fiction and fantasy and romance and mystery and thrillers, there’s almost always a restoration of order, that there’s a –

Arkady: Yeah.

Sarah: – satisfactory conclusion that, in all narratives, we seem to be seeking that, that ending!

Arkady: People like things to resolve.

Sarah: Yeah!

Arkady: They like to know that –

Sarah: [Laughs] Yes, we do!

Arkady: This is sort of like the, the, the tagline of the article I wrote: people like stories to make sense –

Sarah: Yes!

Arkady: – and one of the ways that make sense is that they have an arc that we understand –

Sarah: Yes.

Arkady: – that it happens in an expected way, so there’s an inciting incident, and then there’s developments, and then there’s a climax, and then there’s a resolution. Which is a very Western mood of narrative arc, and there’s other ones in the world that are just as, as powerful.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Arkady: But that’s the one that we often run into, like the sense of craving resolution.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Arkady: And there’s a real problem with craving that kind of resolution and living in the real world, because the real world doesn’t –

Sarah: Resolve, no. [Laughs]

Arkady: – do that all that much.

Sarah: It doesn’t resolve very well.

Arkady: We don’t get these nice narrative arcs, and that can be frustrating, but it can also be traumatic.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Arkady: Like, the idea that the story stopped making sense, the story that you thought was what was happening to you –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Arkady: – like, maybe you thought you were in, like, a, I don’t know, a, a Bildungsroman meet-cute romantic comedy where someone moves to New York to make it big in show business.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: Maybe that’s your story.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: You’re like, I, I’m doing that story. I am leaving my small town, I am moving to the big city, and I have a dream and a plan and a couple hundred bucks and one friend, and I’m going to do it! And it doesn’t turn out the way that the story tells you that it might. Which is not to say it doesn’t turn out well, but it doesn’t follow the narrative beats.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: Maybe you don’t get a big break; maybe what happens is your third week in New York you get pneumonia and have to go to an urgent care clinic and meet an accountant sitting next to you in the lobby of the urgent care clinic, and, like, it turns out that this guy’s really the guy you were looking for –

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

Arkady: – and you and he move to Connecticut and have a baby.

Sarah: Yep.

Arkady: And you never do the thing, but you’re happy. And the, being able to make, to, like, shift from one narrative to another is a skill that a lot of people don’t have any practice in doing –

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: – and it can make it very hard to give up things that aren’t working and also really hard to try things that you’re scared of.

Sarah: That’s very true. Also makes me think about the perennial, repeating discussion among romance readers online in, in, talking in different spaces like Twitter – [laughs] – especially around Valentine’s Day, which is, like, the worst time of year to have anything to do with the romance genre, just let me tell you. It’s, I, I bet for science fiction and fantasy and paranormal that Halloween can get a little annoying too, but Valentine’s Day is like a big, big judgment fest on all things romance, and there’s always this, well, what happens if a romance doesn’t have a happy ending? How come you don’t accept that ending? I’m like, because it’s not a romance! That’s the whole point! [Laughs]

Arkady: Stated rules of the genre say that –

Sarah: That this is the rule!

Arkady: – at the end there is a happy ending!

Sarah: Right! Like, and you can do that, but it’s not a romance. And readers will be incandescently nuclear rage angry if you promise a romance and then don’t deliver on that ending, because you have –

Arkady: Yeah!

Sarah: – you have broken the unstated contract of calling it a romance means this is what I can expect in the end.

Arkady: And that is, this is why, despite the fact that I write a lot of romantic relationships in my fiction –

Sarah: Uh-huh.

Arkady: – I absolutely would not call them romances, because that’s not the contract with my reader.

Sarah: Right!

Arkady: The contract with my reader is, you’re going to get a resolution to the political intrigue and the murder mystery.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: The contract with my reader is not the two characters who hooked up are going to be happy at the end.

Sarah: Right. And that, and, and part of the genre label comes with those expectations.

Arkady: Absolutely! That’s a good thing.

Sarah: Which are very important, right, and like you said, life doesn’t work out that way, but it’s really nice going into a piece of genre fiction that you know the major elements of the story are, are going to be resolved in a way that you will find satisfying, you hope, in the hands of a good writer and, and in a well-edited product, you’re going to find that resolution and that arc, beginning-middle-end, that you’re looking for.

Arkady: There’s a genuine pleasure to experiencing –

Sarah: [Whispers] Yes!

Arkady: – a narrative arc that you know is going to happen, though you don’t know how it’s going to happen.

Sarah: Yes! It’s so true! Thank you. I’m, I’m constantly explaining this to people. Yes, I know how every romance is going to end. I don’t know how they’re going to get there, and that’s the good part!

Arkady: Exactly.

Sarah: That’s the good part!

Arkady: That is the good part, and so – [laughs] – I used to freelance edit for an indie romance press, like when I was in grad school and needed spare cash, so I read a ton of them, and that was the thing that, like, made the, me understand what the project was –

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: – of the genre, was, like, the point is not surprise. The point is, I get to feel these particular things in this particular order.

Sarah: Yep. And it’s a safe space for that emotional engagement for me as a reader, because I know that emotionally investing all of my empathy into these characters will be, will be created in a world where my investment is made knowing that it’ll be okay in the end, that I won’t –

Arkady: Yeah!

Sarah: – I won’t be betrayed and, and then have to deal with the opposite of, of the romance, the, and to deal with the grief or the loss or the absence. Like, if I go in expecting grief, that’s not what I’m looking for in romance; I’m going to read a different genre.

Arkady: Exactly. And you, you choose the narratives you want to consume because they have specific rules.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: And that’s true for romance. I think very strongly, sometimes more than other genres, romance has more clear rules –

Sarah: Yes.

Arkady: – than a lot of other genres, but a lot of genres have rules that if you break them, people are just going to, like – I’m thinking of that, that Nopetopus GIF where the octopus says NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE.

Sarah: [Laughs] Yep, I’m out! NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE.

Arkady: Yep. I mean, you can break the rules in science fiction really easily.

Sarah: Yeah.

Arkady: All you have to do is not ade-, is break your own rules.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: Like, the, the rule in science fiction, the strongest rule in science fiction is if you set it up, you have to keep to it.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: You can do almost anything.

Sarah: Like, as you – [laughs] –

Arkady: It doesn’t necessarily have to be, like, scientifically plausible. I’ll argue all day with people who tell me that I have to be scientifically plausible. No. It just has to be self-contained within its own rule system.

Sarah: Right. When you wrote in the Tor article that if no readers blink when your handwavium whisks your protagonist away through the wormhole, you’ve built a storyworld convincingly that worm-, wormholes are a thing, the whole idea of handwavium gave me no end of delight. [Laughs]

Arkady: It is not my phrase –

Sarah: No! [Laughs]

Arkady: – I did not invent that.

Sarah: I know!

Arkady: I don’t know where that, that came from.

Sarah: I’ve seen it before!

Arkady: It’s been around for a long time.

Sarah: Yes!

Arkady: I love it, though.

Sarah: I know I’ve seen it before, and I’m like, that is the perfect example! It’s the best way to describe, all right, I don’t know where that came from, but yeah, okay, sure, I’ll buy it. Mm-hmm! Yep, you’ve convinced me so far. It also seems to me that the study of narratology also hinges a bit on trust, if that’s the right wor-, if that’s the right word, between the person who’s creating the narrative and the person who’s consuming the, the narrative.

Arkady: Now that’s interesting. Narratologists would very much disagree with that.

Sarah: Really! Oh.

Arkady: Yeah. I think it’s, in a way it’s implicit that, like – well, it’s because narratologists aren’t actually interested in, in narratives that are successful or not. Like, they’re not –

Sarah: Oh, that’s interesting!

Arkady: Yeah, the-, they’re not really trying to – they’re not writers.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: [Laughs] And, and this is the thing that, that tripped me up endlessly when I first started working on this, ‘cause I am a writer. I was like, but this doesn’t help me. This is not a craft technique.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: And it’s not about that. A narratologist doesn’t really care if the contract between the reader and the writer is kept. They care how the contract is kept or broken.

Sarah: Oh, that’s so interesting. Whereas, for readers who are interacting with a genre that they believe in, the fact that the contract was not kept is, like, the paramount issue.

Arkady: Yes! That’s because the reader is a very different, is performing a very different task than the narratologist.

Sarah: Absolutely.

Arkady: The narratologist is, is a scientist of narrative, and the reader is an experiencer.

Sarah: Right. And there’s a weird sort of third space, I think, that I sometimes occupy, where I read it, and then I analyze my own reaction to it, and how did this pattern work on me, and what is the pattern that I saw, and why is it that this particular sequence worked, and then when it changed here I was, like, no longer on board? What happened to break my experience?

Arkady: Hi, I’m sorry to tell you that you are a critic.

Sarah: Oh yeah, I know. It’s a problem.

[Laughter]

Sarah: I have, I’m asked a lot, do you ever read for pleasure? I’m like, yeah, all the time! Like, my whole job is reading for pleasure, but then when I’m done I’m like, all right – tsk, tsk, tsk – how come that didn’t work? What happened?

Arkady: Yeah. This is actually something that as a writer I sometimes struggle with. I read a lot more nonfiction and a lot less fiction when I’m, like, in the depths of a writing project –

Sarah: Absolutely.

Arkady: – because the, the ways the narratives work are different, and I don’t have to think about technique the same way. Like, I, right now I’ve just been reading nonfiction, like, consistently for the past two months while I’m trying to finish this novel, and I love reading nonfiction, it’s great, and it’s so much easier.

Sarah: Yeah.

Arkady: I don’t have that critical – I do have the critical facility that clicks on and then, and the how does the narrative work facility, but it’s not so constant.

Sarah: That makes sense. Now, I do want to ask you about your writing. You have a new book and a new series starting in, in March. Congratulations!

Arkady: Thank you!

Sarah: Can you tell me all about it?

Arkady: Absolutely!

Sarah: Tell me all the things.

Arkady: I’ll happily tell you about it! So this is actually my first published novel. I’ve published a bunch of short stories, but this is my debut novel. It’s, the title is A Memory Called Empire. It’s the first of at least two – there’s a duology, and maybe there will be more – and it is a sort of – I think I, I described it once as House of Cards in space?

Sarah: That sounds great. [Laughs] I think that’s a great book!

Arkady: It’s a, I’m, I’m really super into John le Carré, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Arkady: – all of that, like, really internal spy narrative stuff, and I love space opera, and I love Star Wars and, like, big-scale, beautiful, aesthetically lush settings in the far future, and then I wanted to write like a Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, like, set there, so that’s, that’s the book. It’s a, it’s also a book about empire and assimilation and a book about narrative in a lot of ways. It’s about what happens to someone when they realize that the narratives they love are narratives that have been imposed on them by an imperializing culture and what to do –

Sarah: Ohhh my.

Arkady: – if anything.

Sarah: Wow. That’s a, that’s a lot.

Arkady: Yeah! It’s a question I think about all the time, so it ended up being really, like, deeply thematic, and I mean, part of it is I’m an American, so I come from an imperializing culture –

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: – where American narratives have spread all over the world and get everywhere, but I’m also Jewish, so I come from an assimilated and threatened culture that is inside that imperializing culture.

Sarah: Roger that. Me too, both counts.

Arkady: Yep.

Sarah: Although I convert-, I converted, so I changed my narrative.

Arkady: Welcome to the tribe?

Sarah: Thank you! I, I came for the food.

Arkady: It’s pretty good.

Sarah: It’s real good.

[Laughter]

Arkady: But, so, and then I studied, as a Byzantinist, I studied the interaction between Byzantium, which was an imperializing culture, and Armenia, which was an imperialized culture from many directions –

Sarah: Wow.

Arkady: – but also maintained a real, like, sense of its own integrity as a culture and still does to this day, with a, a long history of its, of its own. And so these questions are really important to me; like, what, what do you do when the narrative you love is the narrative that’s destroying your culture?

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: And is that love, like, real? Yes. What do you do about it? Can you change it? Should you change it? Yeah. So all of that got into this book, which makes it sound like it’s very polemical, but it’s not. It’s kind of a political thriller. There’s riots and, like, an attempted murder and a poetry contest with political implications.

Sarah: Dude! So cool!

Arkady: Somebody gets poisoned by a flower.

Sarah: As you do.

Arkady: Yep! [Laughs]

Sarah: So who are the, the characters that are in this story that are driving it?

Arkady: So there, the protagonist is named Mahit Dzmare. She is the new ambassador from a small mining station in space – completely self-contained, so sort of like a permanent generation ship – called Lsel Station, and she is the ambassador from Lsel Station to the giant interstellar empire right next to Lsel Station, the empire of Teixcalaan. Teixcalaan is kind of a weird mishmash of the Mexica, the Aztecs’ Byzantium, and the Mongols immediately post Genghis Khan, except in space. She goes to the capital city of the empire, because the person who used to have her job has apparently disappeared –

Sarah: Uh-oh.

Arkady: – and the empire is demanding a new version. And when she gets there, it turns out that he’s not disappeared, he’s dead, and people may wish to kill her also, aaand –

Sarah: That’s a problem.

Arkady: – there’s kind of a succession crisis going on, and her predecessor in her job was deeply involved in it, and there’s secret proprietary technology and a really enterprising military general who’d like to be emperor instead. Chaos ensues.

Sarah: Dude, that’s a lot. That sounds amazing! So is this going to be a series, or –

Arkady: There is at least a sequel, which I am about two-thirds of the way done writing right now. The sequel is called A Desolation Called Peace, which is a quote I stole from Tacitus, because that’s the best way to get good titles is to steal someone very, very old. It comes from –

Sarah: Obviously! [Laughs]

Arkady: It comes from a quote in, in Tacitus which is describing the Roman Empire. It’s not in Tacitus’s voice, ‘cause Tacitus is a Roman; he’s invented a, a, a character who is a, a Celt being conquered by Romans –

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: – and he puts this phrase in his mouth, which is, the Romans make a desert, and they call it peace. And –

Sarah: Oh, dude.

Arkady: I know, right? And the word for desert and the word for desolation in Latin are, like, you can translate it either way; it’s like a desolate place.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Arkady: So I was, I was reading Tacitus again and just had this moment of, oh, that’s the second book; okay. ‘Cause the second book is about war and about, like, whether it’s possible to really communicate with people who are really, really different from you.

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: And what you should do if that turns out to be not true – that you can’t.

Sarah: [Whispers] Whoa. [Normal voice] That’s a lot to tackle. That is really cool.

Arkady: Well, I hope I pull it off. At the moment I still have, like, an entire other third of the book to write, and it’s a little bit like, oh God, what did I do to myself?

[Laughter]

Sarah: No pressure!

Arkady: Yeah.

Sarah: Just all of your brains from multiple perspectives going, yeah, yeah, yeah, we can do this! Let’s do it! Let’s do it; we got this!

Arkady: Uh-huh.

Sarah: So I always ask this question: what are you reading or have you read that you would want to recommend to people who will be listening?

Arkady: Okay, so I, I pulled a list.

Sarah: I love this!

Arkady: Oh –

Sarah: Bring it on.

Arkady: I want to start with a fantasy novel which I think would be really, really appealing to romance readers –

Sarah: Ohhh?

Arkady: – which is Chelsea Polk’s Witchmark, which came out last year. It’s set in a sort of alternate universe post World War I, and it has an m/m romance at its heart, and it’s also about, like, PTSD and trauma and family dynamics and politics, and it was, it’s, it’s Chelsea’s first novel, and I am amazed that it’s Chelsea’s first novel, ‘cause it’s so, so, so good, and I was utterly delighted by it. Oh, and there are bicycle chases also.

Sarah: [Laughs] Oh, brilliant!

Arkady: Yeah.

Sarah: Oh, that’s cool!

Arkady: So that, that’s the first one, and then the other stuff I’ve been reading lately in terms of fiction, I’ve been reading a bunch of sort of modern crime fiction? I’ve been reading the Irish author Tana French, whose most recent book just came out, which I, I haven’t read yet, but the book I want to recommend is called The Trespasser. So this is a, I guess you could call it a police procedural, but it’s a very unusual police procedural, because it has this intense internal focus on its protagonist and her mental state and her interpretations of events, based on what may be sort of accelerating unreliability and not being entirely sane, at the same time trying to solve a mystery that is actually about her own past. And the writing is exquisite, and the attention to detail is amazing, and the relationship between the protagonist and her partner on the force is incredibly compelling, while not being romance, but I also love friendships between men and women. Like, that’s a really, a thing I really love to read in, in stories, and just, Tana French, although I – she’s so good.

And I’ve got, like, one weird one.

Sarah: Bring it! I want to hear all about it.

Arkady: So this is a nonfiction book written by a professor of mine – [laughs] –

Sarah: Ooh!

Arkady: – named, her name is Jana VanderGoot. She is a landscaper architect at the University of Maryland, and the book is called Architecture and the Forest Aesthetic, and what it’s about is how cities and forests might actually be things that could be combined together in a future that is more resilient. It’s a way that you could make a hyper-urban place also a really, really green one. Not just green in the not-carbon-emissions way, but green in the visual way?

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: Like the transposition of plants onto these built environment structures and what that would do to the way that we think about what a city is, what we think about a forest as being, and I just find it really mind-expanding to look at this in this way, ‘cause I’m a city person, I grew up in Manhattan, and I love, like, towers of glass and steel, and then I think about, like, what Singapore looks like today, and Singapore is towers of glass and steel covered in green and flowers.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Arkady: And I just wonder, could we go there? Could we do that? And this book helps me think about that a lot, so it’s something I recommend. It’s published by Rutledge, which means it’s more available than a lot of academic texts –

Sarah: Right.

Arkady: – would be. It’ll definitely be a thing that your library can get you.

Sarah: Oh cool! Thank you!

Arkady: Very welcome.

Sarah: These are very cool recommendations.

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of the episode, and while I was mixing the intro, the recycling truck has come and gone! I am victorious over dog barking interruption this morning. ‘Course, now that I’ve said that, like, five UPS trucks and a FedEx truck are going to show up, but that’s okay! I made it through!

If you would like to find more about Arkady Martine, you can find her at arkadymartine.net and on Twitter @ArkadyMartine. I will have links to her website and her Twitter handle and some of her writing in the show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast!

You can always get in touch with me at [email protected] or at 201-371-3272. You can leave a message, leave a voicemail, tell me a joke, ask for recommendations, whatever. I love hearing from you, so thank you for being in touch with me.

This week’s podcast is brought to you by Believe in Me by Ella Quinn. Thanks to their large extended family and unconventional courtships, the Worthingtons have seen their share of scandal and excitement. Brimming with passion, adventure, and wit, the sixth installment in Ella Quinn’s USA Today bestselling series puts her signature blend of high society hijinks and high-stakes romance on full display, since there’s never a dull moment when laughter and romance rule the day and a lady refuses to settle for anything less than true love. Believe in Me by Ella Quinn is on sale now wherever books are sold and at kensingtonbooks.com.

This week’s podcast transcript is sponsored by Christina Lauren and Frolic Media’s The Know-How Series. If you are an aspiring author, someone who’s experiencing writer’s block, or you’re just plain curious about writing and want to learn from two of the top romance novel authors, this series is for you. The Know-How is an online educational series that goes beyond the pages with influential authors and personalities to explore the craft of writing and building a personal brand. The Know-How launched with bestselling authors Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, the writing duo known as Christina Lauren. The writers and self-proclaimed best friends discuss their unique writing process, keeping characters fresh, and crafting steamy love scenes together, and more in the nine-part series. The Know-How’s first installment, “Creative Writing with Christina Lauren,” is available for $29.99 at frolic.media, but, hello! Listeners of this podcast right here receive a special twenty-percent discount by entering code SBTB at checkout. Yes, that is correct: you can sign up for “Creative Writing with Christina Lauren” for $29.99 at frolic.media and get twenty percent off that price with code SBTB.

If you have supported the show with a monthly pledge of any amount, thank you so very much. As I mentioned in the intro, I learned a wonderful perspective from @TerminallyNerdy and Nomo, @Neomeruru – Neo, Neomeruru – seriously, I am bad at pronouncing things. If I’m saying that wrong I apologize, but that’s probably a character name and I don’t know it, so I’m sort of like tilting my head confusedly? Either way, they talked on Twitter about the incredible power of every Patreon pledge, particularly the dollar pledges, so if you’ve ever thought, oh, I really can’t do a pledge; that’s a lot of money, that’s okay. Any pledge at any amount is deeply, deeply appreciated. You are saying that what you enjoy has value and that the value is large enough for you to pay for it, even at one dollar per month. That is a massive, massive appreciated gift. Thank you for that.

If you want to have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches, you can find out what your options are, and every member of the Patreon community helps me develop questions, suggests guests for the show, and helps pick our books for the monthly – no, not monthly, quarterly. Monthly is way too frequently for a book club; I’ll be real – quarterly book club. You can join us at patreon.com/SmartBitches. Every pledge is deeply appreciated, and thank you, thank you for yours.

Our music is provided by Sassy Outwater. You can find her on Twitter @SassyOutwater. This is “Celtic Frock” by a UK duo called Deviations Project, which is a producer named Dave Williams and a violinist named Oliver Lewis, and until extremely recently the best link I had for them was on MySpace, which gives me no end of joy. They also have their own Wikipedia page, which is almost as cool as having a MySpace page. I think this website needs a MySpace page. I’m going to email Amanda, and she’s going to be like, what is wrong with you? [Laughs] Anyway, you can find their album Ivory Bow at Amazon, iTunes, or wherever you buy your fine music, and you can find Deviations Project at deviationsproject.com.

Coming up on Smart Bitches this week, we have a lot of things, so many cool things. First, if you are listening to this on the day of release, Friday, March 15, there’s a special edition of Covers & Cocktails brought to you by 1001 Dark Nights and their new Kristen Proby collection. Then, next week we have Caption That Cover, Stuff We Like, a Rec League on time travel – remember when every book was time travel? I remember I could not escape time travel romances. Lot of fuchsia, lot of teal, lot of gold, lot of big hair and ruffly dresses, and a lot of time travel. Anyway. We will also have new reviews, Books on Sale, and Help a Bitch Out. You are most cordially invited to come on by and hang out with us.

As I mentioned, I have links to all of the books we talked about and some of the academic titles we mentioned at the show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast.

Now it’s time for a terrible joke. If you listen all the way to the end for the terrible joke, I try to make the terrible jokes so bad that it’s worth listening to the end, ‘cause if you listen to the end I super appreciate it, and you get a reward, which is a joke that you can torture people with. Are you ready? All right, here we go. [Clears throat]

Did you hear about the two mummies who farted at the same time?

Yeah, two mummies farted at the same time.

They had a Tutankhamen.

[Laughs] Toot in common! Yeah. It’s terrible; I love it. [Laughs more] Can’t wait to torture my family tonight at dinner! That is from Reddit user /fullpatch, and thank you, because Tutankhamen! [Still laughing]

All right, so to you and all of your farty mummies, on behalf of everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend, and we will see you back here next week!

[groovy music]