406. The Mermaid, The Witch, and the Sea: Gender, Pirates and More with Maggie Tokuda-Hall

[music]

Sarah Wendell: Hi there. Thank you for inviting me to hang out with you. I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and this is episode number 406 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. Today, Tara and I are speaking with Maggie Tokuda-Hall, who is the author of the new book The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea. We loved this book, which you may have seen in our review online. So we talk about who and what inspired her to write this book, how she explores gender identity and pirates, and how stories define us.

Now, I want to note that there are incidents of torture and violence in the book, and we mention them during the conversation on and off. Just be warned about that.

I will have links in the show notes at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast as to where you can find our review and a copy of the book for your very own if you haven’t already.

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And I have one more thing to tell you about on my list here, handy-dandy, right next to my microphone. You should see me: I’m totally curled up in a chair; I have a blanket. It’s, it’s supposed to be spring? It is not spring. There’s pollen, and it’s cold. I find this very insulting. But I have another thing to tell you about.

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I will have links to all of the books we mention – and there are many – and I will have links to the book that we’re talking about, because you’re probably going to want to read it after this conversation.

But don’t worry; this conversation is largely spoiler-free, as all of us were trying very hard not to spoil key elements of the book while also talking about it and hopefully giving you an interest in reading it. So don’t worry; we’re not going to spoil any of the major, major details.

I will end this episode with a terrible joke that was provided by Lisa from our Patreon, and it is so bad. I love it so much, so don’t miss that after the episode.

But now, let’s get started: on with Tara and my interview with Maggie Tokuda-Hall.

[music]

Maggie Tokuda-Hall: Hey! I’m Maggie Tokuda-Hall, and I’m the author of The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea, a mediocre amateur baker, and I have an objectively perfect dog!

Sarah: Every dog is objectively perfect, of course!

Maggie: Yeah. [Laughs]

Sarah: All right, a dog enters the podcast, we will be very excited; just please note that that’s the case.

Maggie: Okay.

Sarah: So when the idea was proposed to me that we interview you and I reached out to Tara and I said, Tara, would you like to talk about this book? I don’t know if I can fully articulate how excited Tara was about this whole idea.

Maggie: [Laughs]

Tara: That’s not fair –

Sarah: And then –

Tara: – I was super chill.

Sarah: Oh –

Tara: I was really cool about it. How dare you?

[Laughter]

Sarah: No. Her inner thirteen-year-old and my inner thirteen-year-old were not really well contained at this point.

Tara: No.

Sarah: So congratulations on the book! Congratulations on publication!

Maggie: Thank you!

Sarah: Has, has release week during the quarantimes been a bit surreal?

Maggie: Yeah, you know, it’s bittersweet. I was an independent bookseller for, like, close to a decade –

Sarah: Ohhh!

Maggie: – and I live in the Bay Area, and you know, I have a, a pretty tight-knit group of friends here. A lot of us are writers, and not having a release party was a pretty big bummer, but because we did a virtual launch, I got to do it with Charlie Jane Anders and Victoria Schwab, and that was so flipping cool! So, you know, six one way, half a dozen the other. Like, Victoria wasn’t going to fly in from Scotland to come to my launch party originally, so –

[Laughter]

Maggie: – so it was pretty cool! So, you know, it’s, it’s weird, and I also don’t, didn’t, I still haven’t received my author copies, so I had to buy copies of my own book to see it? [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh no! That’s right, all of their distribution centers are not operational!

Maggie: Yeah, and very fairly, they’re like, we’re not prioritizing free books right now, and, you know, I get it. That is completely legit! On the other hand, I’m a baby, and I wanted to hold my books! [Laughs]

Sarah: Well, yeah! Did you still have that moment of, oh my gosh, I’m holding it in my hands?

Maggie: Yeah, it was very sweet. Actually, the mom of a little girl who I used to give pitching lessons to when I was in high school and played softball, and that was, like, how I made my money on the side? Drove it over to me, ‘cause she’s, I put up, like, a sad sack post. I’m like, I don’t have my book to hold, but it’s okay. And she was like, well, that’s not right, and she pre-ordered it like a thousand years ago and drove it over, and it was –

Sarah: Aww!

Maggie: – the kindest gesture.

Sarah: And it’s, it’s different when you hold it in your hands, isn’t it?

Maggie: It totally is! It’s pretty cool. And it felt really different. I have a picture book that’s out called Also an Octopus, and it came out in 2016, and I’m very proud of that book. It’s illustrated by Benji Davies, and he did an amazing job. But it is a really different feeling when it’s a novel. Like, I spent eight years off and on working on this book. You know, like, that’s a really different feeling of it coming to fruition. [Laughs]

Sarah: The first question Tara and I wanted to ask you is, you just mentioned you were working on the story for eight years. What led you –

Tara: Mm.

Sarah: – into this story? Was there something –

Maggie: Yeah!

Sarah: – that created this world, or were you just like, gender-fluid pirates, the sea, that, I’ll just escape to that world for a while?

Maggie: [Laughs] It definitely didn’t start like that. So I mentioned I was an independent bookseller for a thousand years, give or take, and in that time I met this girl named Clare? She was an insanely voracious reader. I met her when she was nine years old, and when she was eleven her parents hired me to start tutoring her in creative writing, and I just, I love her. She’s such a brilliant reader and a brilliant kid, and she’s a brilliant writer, and now she’s twenty-one years old, but when she was like twelve or thirteen, she was a really big fantasy reader, and it was becoming clear that she was queer, and one of the things that we talked about a lot was sort of like, man, I love this world; it would be really cool if ever the romance was not straight, like ever, so I started writing this book really just for her. That was my only goal –

Sarah: Aw!

Maggie: – was I’ll write a book for Clare, and then she will have a fantasy that has, like, the queer elements that she wants and all the other things that she likes, like murder and kissing and magic and rules, ‘cause she loved, like, a big-stakes fantasy, and it only, and it took me like eight years.

[Laughter]

Maggie: So I didn’t really, like, nail it for getting it to her as a child, but that’s how it started, and then I really finally finished the first draft while I was traveling with my husband? We, I quit my job at Apple at the time, and we drove down the west coast of South America for like a year and a half? And I will say a lot of the settings and the kind of aggressively anti-imperial stance, anti-colonialism stance that the book takes comes from all that travel in South America.

Sarah: Wow. I mean, I can tell, I can tell, but, like, lining it up like that, it’s very, very clear.

Maggie: Yeah. [Laughs]

Tara: That’s pretty cool. I mean, I know, I, I can kind of identify with that kid a little bit, because part of why I made, like, really big grabby hands when I saw the book on NetGalley is I mostly read f/f books, and it’s hard to find lesbian pirate books, and I found, like, it was so cool to read it and see, well, there’s kind of that, but, like, there’s also this genderfluid pirate, which really spoke a lot to me. So what I guess I want to ask next is, was there anything that you were reading that was also influencing when you were writing, and why do you feel like this is an important book right now?

Maggie: It’s funny to think about it in the context right now, because I was writing it in really close to its current form like four years ago? So it was really the book that was on my mind four years ago? [Laughs] The books that I was reading while I was writing it were mostly nonfiction. I was trying to make sure that I didn’t rip off anyone? I think it’s really easy to do it by accident, especially when you’re doing things like writing magic rules? And so the books that were most influential to how I thought about the worldbuilding in this story were Guns, Germs, and Steel and 1492? I mean, the boo-, I did read some fantasy. I read N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy and Victoria Schwab’s Shades of Magic, and it was a real priority of mine, because I respect and love those books so much, to make sure I wasn’t stealing from them.

[Laughter]

Maggie: Like, every day was, like, a gut check of like, you didn’t steal anything, did you, like a dummy? So –

[Laughter]

Maggie: ‘Cause those worlds’ magic, you just hear them and you’re like, yeah, that makes sense. Like, yeah –

Sarah: Yeah!

Maggie: – that, that’s how magic works, and I believe it.

Sarah: Yep!

Maggie: [Laughs] Yeah, so –

Tara: Mm-hmm!

Maggie: So those books were influential in their way as well, of being, like, I wanted it to feel the way that those books did, but be entirely its own so that neither of those authors would ever pick it up and be like, this bitch.

[Laughter]

Maggie: And for the different types of sort of gender identities that span through the book – ‘cause Florian or Flora is genderfluid or bigender and doesn’t really – like, exists within bi-, binary gender almost in that they identify as a, a man or a woman sort of dependent on context? And so they never –

Sarah: I sort of, I sort of saw her –

Maggie: Yeah.

Sarah: – as being like on a boat rocking back and forth.

Maggie: Yeah! And I think I feel that way, I think that’s a really apt metaphor, because I feel for a lot of people that is the way that we feel about gender. I know for myself, that’s certainly been the way that I feel about gender, where it really is dependent on context for how I relate to that particular part of my identity? But I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t devaluing the experience of, like, people who are nonbinary as in completely removed from the construct of either male or female, not bouncing back in between? Or trans? And that’s why the Pirate Supreme is they/them throughout the whole book. There’s no question, it’s just a different gender –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Maggie: – and both of those gender express-, or gender identities, I think, are completely valid and exist in the same worlds, and so I wanted to make sure that they existed in mine.

Sarah: I wanted to tell you that – I don’t talk about my kids a lot in the context of my website, but I took my kids, who are pre-teens and teenagers, to the pediatrician, which is a place, I imagine, you’ve been quite a lot, ‘cause –

Maggie: Yep.

Sarah: – you have a small human. And –

Maggie: [Laughs]

Sarah: – our pediatrician has forms that once the kids are old enough to write, they have a form that they fill out where they get asked questions like, are you worrying, how do you feel about this, or do you wear a helmet when you ride your bike? And their intake forms now – and I don’t know when they made this change because I hadn’t seen the, the teenage ones – ask what gender do you identify as, with multiple options, plus lines to write in. What are –

Maggie: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – your pronouns? And then it asks, what’s your assigned gender at birth, and then there’s multiple options as well, to allow for all of the different variations of humanity, and I went to the receptionist, and I’m like, this is, this is amazing!

Maggie: Yeah.

Sarah: And listening to you talk about characters who exist in multiple fluid or, or just permanent existence beyond the binary that we sort of grew up with, it, it makes me so happy that not only are there books like yours, but there’s also forms that are like, yep! This is real! Just like magic, this is real. This exists.

Maggie: [Laughs] I, I mean, I feel like that’s the direction we’re all moving, is, like, very slowly kind of like throwing off the shackles of binary gender being the kind of standby rules that we force kids into, and I think teens who exist right now are doing the work for us in a lot of ways of being really clear about who they are.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Maggie: I think the decision to make Flora genderfluid originated from me being concerned that if I wrote a strictly, sort of like classically Sapphic romance, it didn’t give Clare, the kid who I wrote it for, room to change?

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Maggie: It really did kind of grow out of wanting to make sure that she felt included, no matter who she decided she was or found out she was.

Sarah: One of the major themes in the book is story, and –

Tara: Mm.

Sarah: – there’s one section I highlighted the absolute heck out of in my, in my digital copy: the idea of know your truth, not your story. Which was like the, the literary equivalent of being punched in the ribcage?

Maggie: [Laughs]

Sarah: Like, like, ouch! Okay, yes, understood. And, and in the, in the book, there’s the idea of how you shape your story and that there’s magic in the ability to shape your story and then shape the story that other people tell about you, even if that’s not entirely the truth, and there’s so many layers about knowing your story and knowing your truth. Was that something that you’d thought about before writing, or is it, did that evolve out of the book, or is that something that, like, your, what I call the Crockpot in the back of my brain –

Maggie: Yeah.

Sarah: – did that, did your unconscious come up with that? ‘Cause it’s really resonant, and it folds back on itself so many times in this book!

Maggie: Yeah. It’s just an idea I’m obsessed with. It’s not even in the back of my mind; it’s something that I think about constantly. You know when you meet somebody and you can tell that their personal mythology is something that you just don’t understand?

Sarah: Yes?

Maggie: [Laughs] Or you’re like, wow, the story you have created about yourself, I have absolutely no concept of how it relates to reality in any way. And it’s not that reality is some kind of objective truth, but, you know, most, I would say most people you meet kind of hover in a, the Venn diagram of the story they’ve created about themselves and what other people would accept as reality, it’s not a complete overlap, but it’s like, you know, they’re, they’re close. And then you meet people where they’re completely separate? Like, they’re just two circles sitting next to each other?

Sarah: [Laughs] Yes!

Maggie: And so that way of thinking about people didn’t come out of this book. It’s something that I think about all the time, and I think that is by merit of coming from a family full of storytellers? Everyone in my family, both sides, are, like, extremely adept at telling stories, and that was the way that we related to each other, and there are stories that we tell about our own family; there are stories that sort of like persist about each one of us that somehow define us in the way that the rest of the family sees us? Like, for example, when I was a little kid I played that card game War with my grandfather? You –

Sarah: Right.

Tara: Mm-hmm.

Maggie: It’s, like, the dumbest game. And I guess I looked at him at some point when I was like four or five, and I was like, I love you, Grandpa, and I’ll even love you if you win. [Laughs] And that was, like, the story –

Sarah: Oooh!

Maggie: – that he loved to tell about me, and it became kind of like the story that in some way defined my character, and I think even at a pretty early age I was like, oh man, that’s hilarious that I said that; I’m objectively awesome, but, like –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Maggie: – it’s not necessarily – [laughs] – like, really who I am in a full way. It’s just this kind of story that we tell about me.

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Maggie: And so it’s something that I’ve always thought about a lot and always loved as an idea, and because I wrote the lion’s share of the first draft of this story after the 2016 election, I was particularly tuned into the ways that particular narratives didn’t need to have a relationship with truth at all –

Sarah: Yeah!

Maggie: – so long as they felt right to some people –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Maggie: – or justified something that they thought about themselves and the way that they defined nations and the way that we think of ourselves, and so that was very much on my mind at that moment, because Trump is one of those people with the self mythology that’s just a circle standing next to the reality.

[Laughter]

Sarah: It’s so true! It’s so true!

Tara: That’s really interesting, though, because it doesn’t feel like anybody is using that, like, for ill in the book. Like, it doesn’t feel like fuckery is happening as a result of it or anything like that. And I found that it was really empowering, the idea that there might be a story that’s ascribed to you, but you can still work to change your own story in, in many other ways.

Maggie: Yeah! Absolutely. I hope that it’s super empowering to teenagers particularly who are in the moment of their life where they’re constructing that narrative the most consciously? But –

Sarah: Yeah.

Maggie: – I did try to juxtapose it with stories about the imperials and the stories that they tell about themselves versus the reality that you see in the world? So Evelyn comes in with a lot of baggage of, like, yeah, we’re the civilized ones. We go out and we clear out things that don’t make sense or are unnecessary, and then when she goes into the world she kind of sees the cruelty and the greed and, you know, the, the violence that that kind of attitude begets, and I hope that it begs the question of, you have the freedom to tell your own story and to figure out what that is so that it is the closest to your own personal truth as you can find, but you should also be aware of the stories that are being told about nations, about groups of people, and know that those were constructed as well and may not have a relationship to the truth the way that you think that they do.

Sarah: Wow.

Tara: Hmm! Yeah, this is definitely like, if I know somebody that has a teenager – I was checking with, like, my boss and another coworker; I was like, how old is your kid again? And I’m like, buy this book. They can read it in two years!

Maggie: [Laughs]

Tara: He’s too young right now!

Maggie: Yeah, someone was like, I bought it for an eleven-year-old! I was like, maybe don’t!

[Laughter]

Maggie: I think that’s a little young! I, like, I appreciate every book sale, and I highly encourage anyone who’s listening to this podcast to buy between five and a hundred copies, but –

Tara: [Laughs]

Maggie: – like, in my – everyone knows their own kid, but I do think that eleven is a little young, because I did purposely write the violence to be horrific, and I did purposely write the sex to be titillating, so it’s up to you if you want your eleven-year-old in on that.

Tara: Yeah. My advice was, I don’t know, man; your mileage may vary, but there is actual torture in it.

[Laughter]

Maggie: Literal torture! Although, to be fair, that torture ripped straight from the headlines. Like, that’s not something that they need to go past a paywall to, to be aware of in the world.

Sarah: No, and also, there’s, like, a throat-slitting in chapter one.

Maggie: Yeah, it is –

Sarah: Right off the bat, you know what you’re getting.

Maggie: Yeah, I did, that was actually a very conscious craft choice, because I knew there was going to be violence in the story, so I wanted to turn off anyone who was not into that right away.

Sarah: Yeah.

Maggie: Just like, hey –

Sarah: Yeah, like, okay!

Maggie: – this is the world we, we’re in right now. If this is too much, it’s time to go home. [Laughs] And that’s totally fair! I, I don’t think anyone should have to read about violence that doesn’t want to, so I wanted to be clear. That was the closest I could come to a content warning on the cover. Just, page one.

Tara: One thing I’ve been wondering, if you don’t mind clarifying, is just how old is Flora at that point, and how long are they actually on the ship for? Like, I haven’t really been able to tell, like, how long it is and what age is she at different points?

Maggie: Yeah. So Flora doesn’t know how old she is, but –

Sarah: Aw.

Maggie: – I always imagined her to be fifteen or sixteen? And having come aboard the ship when she was eleven or twelve. So the scene that takes place –

Sarah: Aw.

Maggie: – in the prologue would be when she’s like thirteen.

Tara: Jesus.

Maggie: Yeah, I know, it’s grim. But – [laughs] –

Sarah: You know, colonialism and, and, and empirical building of colonies is like a happy fun time, so yeah!

Maggie: Yeah, people loved it universally. It was good for everyone. And –

[Laughter] 

Sarah: Very popular.

Maggie: Yeah.

Sarah: Ooh, gosh, that makes my heart hurt for her all over again.

Maggie: Sorry. I know, I really –

Sarah: It’s okay! It’s, it’s reality!

Tara: Yeah.

Maggie: [Laughs]

Sarah: So I want to ask you about the, the portrayal of gender, and it, and it’s really amazing to me, because I just received an email very recently from a listener to the, to the podcast who is not only looking for more nonbinary representation in romance, but also looking for nonbinary representation that’s just not one, that’s not one particular flavor of nonbinary, which we’ve already –

Maggie: Yeah.

Sarah: – talked about, and I, I, it’s so, it is so lovely to get a request that’s very specific and be like, I know exactly the book you need.

Maggie: [Laughs]

Sarah: Just make sure I know how old you are, you know, reading-wise. With, with Flora’s shifting gender and the, I have to say, just, Pirate Supreme is the greatest gender-neutral title? I, I think –

Maggie: Thank you!

Tara: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: I –

Maggie: God, that was such a hard title! I tried so many, and none of them worked!

[Laughter]

Maggie: So thank you!

Sarah: Okay, so first of all, all people who wish to adopt a non-, nonbinary identity should be able to go by Pirate Supreme.

Tara: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: And I, for a while, was struggling with the fact – I live in, in Maryland, which is far enough south, and I went to college in South Carolina at a women’s college, so I have a full vocabulary of sir and ma’am and when to apply it, but those are obviously gendered terms, and I couldn’t come up with a respectful term to say You to someone. Like, in Spanish you would say usted –

Tara: Right.

Sarah: – but there’s nothing like that in English, so I was like, Your Eminence is, is good. Your Excellency, also gender-neutral –

Tara: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – but now I think I’m just going with Pirate Supreme. That’s it now.

Maggie: I’m not going to stop you!

Sarah: Yeah, exactly!

[Laughter]

Sarah: So there are all these different ways of exploring gender in terms of freedom and limitation in the book. That, there, there are so many. Like, they, they, like I said, they fold back on themselves. What led you into these characters, and what were some of the things you considered in addition to Pirate Supreme? ‘Cause you’re really good at naming things.

Tara: [Laughs]

Maggie: Oh God, I can’t tell you what a relief that is to hear. I almost don’t want to tell you them, ‘cause you seem impressed –

[Laughter]

Maggie: – with what I landed on.

Tara: What were the worst ones?

Maggie: Originally they were called the Pirate King, and that King was a gender-neutral –

Sarah: Right.

Maggie: – honorific a la Patricia Wrede’s Enchanted Forest chronicles, which I loved –

Sarah: Right.

Maggie: – and were super formative for me, and my editor was like, that is a lot of layers down, and I think you’re going to lose people.

[Laughter]

Maggie: Like, they’re just going to think that they is confusing if they have a male, you know, honorific –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Maggie: – or traditionally male honorific, and so – oh God – I basically emailed nonbinary friends and was like, help me!

[Laughter]

Maggie: And eventually we landed on Supreme. To the idea of how gender functions in this book, I feel like I have to point to nonbinary writers who are doing really cool work in the science fiction and fantasy space. Like, JY Neon Yang, Sarah Gailey, and Annalee Newitz are all super cool and – I don’t know; I just feel like before I take up any space being like, here’s how I thought about it, I should point to people who, you know, these are more directly their stories and their point of view, and they’re doing really cool work. When I thought about it, I felt like I was just chasing questions –

Sarah: Mm-hmm?

Maggie: – that I have from my own life. Like, why do we act differently with our gender identity dependent on context? I remembered being friends with guys in high school and feeling like they were totally different people with me than they were when they were surrounded by other men? The way that toxic masculinity is contagious, and the way that it demands conformity, and the way that violence can be a part of that conformity is something that’s really confusing and interesting and sad to me. And so I don’t know that I necessarily sat down to write nonbinary characters in, like, a big way? It was more – I mean, with Flora I did, but the way that it ends up being in the book I think is just by merit of chasing questions I, I still don’t know the answers to.

Tara: One of the things I thought was really interesting with Flora too is that, as much as it was for her safety at first, how Rake kind of devised that for her, I thought it was a really kind of poignant and just really sad moment when she reflects on how it’s also kind of a trap? Like, she doesn’t get to fully have any of the benefits of being male or female because of how she slips between the two.

Maggie: Yeah. Yeah! Again, that’s – just chasing the question – that was, like, work that, or answers that I started sort of wondering about when I was chasing the same questions of, like, what does it mean to be male, what does it mean to be female, what does it mean to perform masculinity versus performing femininity? What does it mean when you perform one that you weren’t assigned at birth? What does it mean – you know, like, all these contradictions, things that people do all the time. And so for Florian, like, being male makes him feel, like the performance of masculinity on the ship makes him feel safe, but he is still the smallest sailor on the Dove. Like, his personal safety isn’t assured; that violence is always looming, and I don’t think that that would go away even with an expert performance and the expert performance that he gives.

Tara: So right now my brain has kind of spun off into – I’m trying to remember the name of the really, really, really bad pirate.

Maggie: Fox.

Tara: Right!

Maggie: [Laughs] He was my least-favorite character to write. What a bummer he is.

[Laughter]

Tara: Ah, just the worst. Why did he end up leaving her alone?

Maggie: Why did Fox leave Flora alone?

Tara: Yeah!

Maggie: I think it’s by merit of Rake’s protection? Like –

Tara: Mm.

Maggie: – Rake kind of forces the masculinity onto Flora as a way to protect her, and that’s effective, but it’s really Rake’s authority that is the most potent protection that he has.

Sarah: Yeah. That was, that was my reading of it, even in the beginning, when Rake is the one who’s very honest with Flora, or Florian at that time, that Fox isn’t going to respect another person’s autonomy just because they’re a person. They’re going to respect the boundaries of fear, like knowing the consequences of, from this other man –

Maggie: Exactly.

Sarah: – what, what they would be. Yeah, he’s going to –

Maggie: Yeah.

Sarah: – he’s going to respond to toxic masculinity because that’s the only language he speaks.

Maggie: Exactly, yeah. Yeah. That’s such a good way of putting it! Like, Fox only speaks toxic masculinity. [Laughs]

Sarah: Yeah, that’s his, that’s his –

Maggie: That’s his only language, that’s his only tool, which is why he was the least fun character to write. Even the nameless captain was more fun to write, because at least he was, like, sort of deliciously an asshole?

[Laughter]

Maggie: I  –

Sarah: But a flamboyant asshole is fun to read about!

Maggie: Yeah, like, you can’t have pirates without having one flamboyant asshole is my opinion. And it – [sighs] – you know, and part of me wonders, like, why did you have to have a completely toxic masculine character in the story at all? And I just don’t feel like I live in a world where that person isn’t present, even in my imagination, which is so grim and so sad. [Laughs]

Sarah: But it’s also true!

Maggie: It may speak to, like, the limits of my own imagination, but, like, I genuinely don’t see a world with violence and imperialism and magic and any of the things that are in this book without there being truly malicious actors of incredibly toxic masculinity.

Sarah: Well, I mean, colonialism is a giant manifestation of that same toxic inclination.

Maggie: Exactly! This idea that somehow Daddy knows best? [Laughs]

Sarah: Yeah!

Maggie: Daddy State, Daddy literally – I don’t know how you want to look at it –

Sarah: Daddy Church. Yeah.

Maggie: Yeah. But it’s all bad – [laughs] – and I don’t like. In case it wasn’t clear in the long-ass fantasy book I wrote about it.

Sarah: And I don’t know if this is true for you, Tara, but for me, when I read Fox I was like, ugh, I know that guy.

Tara: I mean, we all know that guy.

Sarah: Right? Like, you can’t –

Tara: Like –

Sarah: – write a fantasy world without being like, oh, that one. Ugh, yeah.

Maggie: I do feel like there’s people like Becky Chambers who just imagine a better world, and –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Maggie: – I really appreciate her for that. It’s so wonderful to see someone write hope through example, like, in a beautiful way. And I do think it’s, like, a limit of my pessimistic imagination that that’s not the way that my mind works. Everything that’s horrible in this story, all the most horrible bits, come from reality. The torture scene – I hope this isn’t a spoiler, and I won’t say who it happens to, but someone gets waterboarded, and again, that’s not, like, a thing I made up. That’s not even a thing that has gone away. It’s not even some sort of medieval torture, and when I looked into it, I found that that’s actually a practice that goes back to Dutch colonialists in South Africa. I was like, of course it does!

Sarah: Of course it does.

Maggie: Of course it does, because colonialism begets such incredible and unfathomable violence! And so, I don’t know, I do hope that for how horrible some of the things that happen to people in this book are, people are able to remember (a) that most of those things come from reality, and that (b) they have some limited amount of power in lim-, like, trying to stop it. Like, there’s, teenagers have that power because they’re the leaders of the next generation. And I don’t know, I don’t know that future presidents are necessarily reading my wonky fantasy novel, but if they are, I hope that they come away with it with, like, a real horror at violence and at state violence.

Tara: Well, and even, I think some, some of the, not necessarily explicit violence, but there is some stuff there too around, like, how easily Evelyn is sold off by her parents –

Maggie: Mm-hmm.

Tara: – and how disposable she is. I’m trying to think how to say this without getting into spoilers. But while I mean disposable by her parents, but also, like, when you finally meet her fiancé Callum, there’s really something there around, like, does anybody hit her? No. But, like, she is being given away for really –

Maggie: Yeah.

Tara: – kind of crass means.

Maggie: Yeah. I, I don’t want to get into spoilers either, but the way that she is, her value is considered in the world I think is an act of violence as well, and I think is an extension of the way that patriarchy can be violent to women without ever raising a hand, and that is also something I think about a lot in life and in writing, you know, a long book that is – [sighs] – hopefully meant to deflate some of what patriarchy has taught us about imperialism, about men who know best. And so I hoped with Evelyn’s arc – I’m trying to say this carefully too so that it, it doesn’t give stuff away – but that she provides a way of looking at how you could be surrounded by patriarchy for your whole life and still be able to poke holes through it.

Sarah: I wanted to ask, where did the idea of packing up her stuff in her coffin?

Maggie: History! History! Again –

Sarah: I thought so!

Maggie: History.

Sarah: I was going to ask, what’s the source on that?

Maggie: That is from a ghost tour I took in, in New Orleans. [Laughs]

Sarah: Hot damn!

Maggie: I know. This is so, like, did I ever research it to verify it? No. Do I believe it’s true? I’m gonna. So I took this ghost tour – [laughs] – and they were saying that French girls were shipped over to New Orleans to meet their husbands, and their families would pack all their shit in a casket to prove that they were serious about the, like, till-death-do-us-part aspect of marriage? As, like, a show of good faith? But on the other side, people would see these empty coffins being unpacked and then brought into homes? And that’s where the idea of there being vampires in New Orleans came from.

Tara: What?

Sarah: Whoa!

Maggie: I know! Again, did I ever verify this? No! I just thought it was so cool that I’m choosing to believe that it’s real. [Laughs]

Sarah: Whoa!

Tara: Yeah, okay.

Maggie: But that idea of, like, we’re giving you away, but forever, and your death is a part of that, I thought was such an on-the-nose way of thinking about patriarchy that I had to steal it.

Tara: Yeah, there’s definitely no greater, like, you’re not welcome back; there’s no take-backsies on this marriage.

Maggie: Yeah!

[Laughter]

Tara: Nope.

Maggie: So yeah, no, I, I totally stole that from, from a ghost tour.

Tara: Oh geeze!

Maggie: Highly recommend stealing material from ghost tours. There’s always amazing stories.

Tara: When we’re allowed to go on ghost tours again some day?

Maggie: Oh yeah, sorry.

Tara: That’s all right.

[Laughter]

Tara: So your, your book follows different perspectives at different times, including, I was delighted to see that we get to actually get the perspective of the sea itself. But there really are, like, a handful of different characters, so why those characters, and why does it shift between them?

Maggie: Yeah. So Flora and Evelyn, I mean, for kind of obvious reasons, because it’s a love story between the two of them and I think that they have equal parts in making it go and, you know, I wanted to live on both sides of that, because I felt like if you heard the story entirely from Evelyn’s perspective, the inner turmoil that defines Flora or Florian’s character would be completely lost on you? That’d be sort of bewildering to a reader? And if it was told only from Flora/Florian’s perspective, you may never come to empathize with Evelyn, who comes from so much privilege and, you know, is insanely lucky, and which her own brother points out, like, has had a pretty good run of good luck for her whole life. And so that was the decision to tell it from the two of them, and then the other, one of the other pirates and Genevieve, who is the Lady maid, and there were things that were happening in the story that Flora and Evelyn couldn’t be present for, but if you show up all of a sudden and those things are all happening, the info dump that it would take to explain that would be so onerous and terrible that that would be awful. And also, like, low-key, I’m hoping I get a sequel, and if I do, it’s going to be told from Genevieve’s perspective.

Tara: That was what I was hoping!

Maggie: Yeah!

[Laughter]

Maggie: I think she is one of the side characters who I’m most interested in. She’s a person from a place that has been colonized brutally by the imperials, but she has made the decision to, like, really go with the imperial way of life. Like, she’s super into it. She, her mind has been colonized, and I think, you know, if I ever get a sequel, it’ll be about the decolonization of Genevieve’s mind.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Tara: Well, you can tell your publisher that Tara says –

Maggie: [Laughs]

Tara: – write me a book! Thank you.

Sarah: Wow.

Maggie: Oh, and, sorry, and the sea because that was fucking fun, man.

[Laughter]

Maggie: ‘Cause it’s my book and I can do what I want! [Laughs] And also ‘cause, like, I don’t know, when you write, the whole fun of it for me is getting to embody something that you are not at all. Like, it’s, it’s an exercise in extreme empathy in a lot of ways, and so writing the sea was always the most fun for me, because it was the least of myself and the most demanding of sort of the limits of my own imagination that I could muster, and so I had ton of fun writing those scenes. And I think it’s kind of cool to think about a force of nature being something that is sentient. This is going to sound –

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Maggie: – like a left turn, but I promise it, it relates: my mom’s hobby is pulling invasive, non-native plants from California state parks to reduce fire risk, because plants that are from California, that are native here, burn smart. Like, they’re meant to burn every two or three years, so when fires happen – ‘cause it’s a fire climate here – they go up and they come down really fast. With invasive plants like Eucalyptus trees, they aren’t meant to burn, even though they thrive in this environment, and so they will do things like literally burst into flames and make the fires way worse, way more destructive, and last for way longer. So this idea of nature having proprietary knowledge, like having memory and having it being optimized for something, was so cool to me, and that was where the idea for the mermaids being the sea’s memory came from. So they –

Tara: I love that so much. That was one of my very favorite things about the book. When I read that, I was like, that is the coolest fucking thing I’ve read in a while.

Maggie: Thank you! And it, it comes from nature. This idea that, you know, nature is so huge, it needs to kind of store its memory in these other beings, like, within itself, like plants, or in this case mermaids, and that when you take it away, you’re robbing nature of this proprietary knowledge of this memory, and there’s nothing kind of more arrogant and reflective of the imperialist or colonialist attitude than that way of just coming into nature and ruining it. I mean, like, well, I want this, so this is the way this is now. And so I thought that was kind of a cool way to explore that

Tara: Can we talk about the mermaids for a second?

Maggie: Please!

Tara: Because they are not, they are not beautiful like Ariel and her sisters?

[Laughter]

Maggie: No. I am a huge fan of grotesquerie just in general. [Laughs] But I’m particularly a fan of it when it subverts things that are traditionally associated with male gaze and desire, and there’s nothing more closely entwined with that than mermaids. Like, the i-, like, they –

Tara: Mm-hmm.

Maggie: – embody so much of our ideas about the ocean being beautiful and sexy and having all this mystery and this, like, mysterious female body. Where is her vagina? Nobody knows! Like, that kind of aspect of mermaids I don’t actually find super enticing, and my experience in a female body hasn’t been one that is beautiful and mysterious. It’s been gross, and so when I thought about representing something that is in itself sort of a cipher for the way that we think about both female bodies and nature and the ocean, I, like, I had to get gross with it. It just had to be disgusting.

Tara: I love that so much. I got – just, like, a tiny digression – I had my head almost pop off with anger earlier this year because we showed The Little Mermaid to our daughters – I have a five-year-old and an eight-year-old – and the five-year-old after that was like, yep, and now I know that, like, mermaids are basically princesses, and boys can only marry girls, and I’m like, how, how the fuck did you get that out of –

Maggie: [Laughs]

Tara: – an hour and twenty minutes? [Laughs] Oh my God!

Maggie: Boy, that’s brutal!

Tara: Right? Like, the Disney industrial complex –

Maggie: There’s a really great parenting book called Cinderella Ate My Daughter that I highly recommend by Peggy Orenstein, who wrote Girls & Sex and Boys & Sex? I think she’s the most brilliant writer about parenting and gender. I just, she’s great. I highly recommend it. And she specifically talks about Disney movies. And princesses.

Tara: I’m sending myself a sample right now! Thank you very much!

Maggie: Mm-hmm.

Tara: So yeah, I’m kind of excited for, my kids are obviously way too young for your book right now, but I cannot wait until they’re old enough, because it’s exactly the sort of, like, I want them to read books that not only lay out, this is what the patriarchy doing and what it means for you, and we’ve already started having those conversations with my eight-year-old where it’s like, I’m really sorry, but you’re going to be treated as less than a person by a lot of people because you’re a girl.

Maggie: Mm.

Tara: And so to have these other books that are there that can just really sort of flip a lot of those ideas on their head or give the finger to it, I think it’s really, it’s exciting for me as a parent because I definitely didn’t grow up with those books as a little girl in the ‘80s.

Sarah: Nope!

Maggie: I mean, no, neither did I, and that was – the impetus for writing it a lot was really for Clare, was for a child that I saw was specifically asking for them. Thank you, by the way. That’s incredibly kind to say. The, I really do hope, like, anyone feels like they see themself in the story, but particularly teenagers.

Sarah: Yes! Which is absolutely a, a, a theme in, in the book. Also, recognizing when you’re wrong or that there is the possibility that you’re wrong.

Tara: Mm.

Sarah: Because for some characters in your book, they’re, they’re never wrong. They can’t be wrong. Wrong? Not a thing!

[Laughter]

Sarah: Not going to happen.

Maggie: And you know, that’s how most of feel, right? Like, we’re, like –

Sarah: Yeah!

Maggie: – I’m doing my best all the time, and I don’t know – I also feel like I’m wrong all the time, so I don’t know that I could write a book where characters weren’t wrong.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Maggie: ‘Cause I just, I feel like the, the harder a stance I’ve taken about something, the more gloriously I’m proved wrong in the long run.

Sarah: Oh yeah! Oh yeah, it’s like the feeling of righteous indignation is a rare thing. You get that like once or twice in your whole life.

Maggie: Right, and then ultimately –

Sarah: It’s very rare.

Maggie: – like years later you’re like, oh, it was me.

[Laughter]

Maggie: And I guess I’ve just put my foot in it enough times in my life that that’s something that I carry with me all the time.

Sarah: Oh, for sure. Do you have a favorite scene from this book? Is there one that you go back to that just, that you really love?

Maggie: [Deep breath]

Sarah: Bit of an unfair question; totally unfair. I apologize.

Maggie: Yeah, no, it’s just, there’s, like, different ways to answer it, ‘cause there’s, there’s the scene that started the whole book, which is the scene with the mermaid being brought onboard, and Evelyn yelling at everyone to send it back? To put it back in the ocean? To save it, and – so I always have a fondness for that scene, because the whole story wouldn’t exist without that, and that was where, for me, everything started? But the scenes that I probably had the most fun writing, the witch Xenobia was the character who I delighted in writing the most, and she tells stories to explain how magic functions in the world, and her stories are their own kind of magic, and those stories were the most fun to write. Like, those, those were always, like, a real pleasure for me.

Sarah: So I always ask this question: what books are you reading that you want to tell people about?

Maggie: Okay. So I’m reading The Proposal by Jasmine Guillory, and everything by her is always a delight, and this is no exception. I just finished The Honey-Don’t List by Christina Lauren, which was also super fun. They’re my favorite rom-com team? Like, I read everything that they write? Sorry, I assumed you wanted to hear about some of my romance recommendations. [Laughs] I’m also reading When We Were Magic by Sarah Gailey, which is brilliant and has one of the best opening paragraphs of any book I’ve ever read.

Sarah: Oh, I have that on my TBR! Thank you for the rec!

Maggie: Oh God, it’s so good!

Sarah: Eee!

Maggie: Yeah. It’s, like, exceptionally good. And then I recently read Vicious by V. E. Schwab, and it was a delight. It held my attention, even though I only have like five minutes to read at a time right now, because, as I mentioned, I have an almost-three-month-old baby? So –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Maggie: – getting back into reading’s been, like, a struggle, and that book fixed the struggle for me.

And I didn’t read it super recently, but just because every chance I have to scream about it, I do: Say Nothing – by an author’s whose last, or first name I always forget, but his last name is Keefe – is the story of one murder in Northern Ireland, but more grandly about the way that British forces colonized, or, like, tried to keep Northern Ireland colonized, and I think if any of the themes are interesting to you from this book, that is a really great book to read to see how they are true in history, and that’s also true for Guns, Germs, and Steel and 1492, which I think also provide, like, a pretty good idea of that. Also An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, which I didn’t read, I’m embarrassed to say, until after this book was long done. But it’s very helpful for understanding the way that colonialism works.

Sarah: Thank you so much. That’s a, okay, not only is that a great list, but, like, I am now so excited to read the, the Sarah Gailey book. [Squees]

Maggie: Oh my God, literally everything by Sarah Gailey is perfect and wonderful, and I love it? [Laughs] So if you haven’t read Upright Women Wanted, that’s also an awesome one that’s short and fun, and the American Hippo series is on audio, and the guy who reads the audiobooks has, like, the greatest, gravelliest voice, and so amazing audiobooks also, if you need an audiobook recommendation. ‘Cause I usually do one paper book, one electronic book, and one audiobook at a time, so I always need audiobook recommendations.

Sarah: Oh cool. Tara, anything you want to add?

Tara: No. Just thank you. This was so much fun, and I’m sorry if I embarrassed myself.

Maggie: How did you, how would you have even?

Sarah: – low-key –

Tara: Oh my God.

Sarah: – embarrassing of yourself I’ve ever seen!

Tara: [Growls] I can’t –

Maggie: I don’t know what you possibly could have done that would have been embarrassing, and as a person with zero chill, I would just like to say, you acted very chill.

Sarah: [Laughs]

Tara: Oh, thank you. It’s, it’s, it was all, it’s not Canadian something. I don’t know.

Maggie: [Laughs] Y’all, thank you so much for having me here. It’s always a pleasure, but I love your guys’s site, so it really made my day to get invited onto the, the podcast.

[music]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this week’s episode. Thank you to Maggie for hanging out with us, and thank you to Tara for connecting with us. We had several time zones involved in this, and I’m amazed I did the math correctly, so thank you to my brain for doing the math! [Laughs]

If you would like to get in touch with us, you can email me at [email protected]. I love hearing from you, and so many of you have sent me recipes? Not just, like, what to do with all of my extra eggs, but, like, hey, would you like to make this cake? Here are some brownies! Ohhh, dude. I think I might have to put together another food porn episode, ‘cause it’s amazing, the recipes you’re sending me! Thank you.

And if you want to call and tell me a bad joke, you can do that too. 1-201-371-3272. Yes, that’s right. Leave me a message. Tell me a bad joke. I love those. I have one in just a moment. It’s terrific…how bad it is. [Laughs]

I want to thank Kensington Books, publisher of Wind River Undercover, for underwriting part of this episode. You can find out more about Wind River Undercover at kensingtonbooks.com, and I will have links to the book in the show notes as well.

Thank you also to our wonderful Patreon community for keeping the show going each week. If you would like to have a look at our tiers, rewards, and our funky fun feed of upcoming interview gossip that I have shared? Well, it’s not really gossip, ‘cause it’s, like, they know they’re going to be on the show, but when I have upcoming guests I let the Patreon community know, because they have brilliant questions. If you want to join the group: patreon.com/SmartBitches.

I will have links to all of the books we mentioned. I know there were many of them; fear not, they will all be in the show notes, and you can go shopping.

And I always end with a bad joke, and it is time for the bad joke. Are you ready for the bad joke? It’s real bad. This is from Lisa, who is part of our Patreon, and Lisa, you’re amazing. This is incredible. You ready? It’s really bad.

Who can drink five gallons of fuel without being sick?

Who can drink five gallons of fuel without being sick?

Jerry can.

[Laughs] I love it so much! It’s so, so bad! Ah, jerrycan. Thank you, Lisa! You are unquestionably fabulous. Oh gosh, jerrycan! [Laughs more]

On behalf of all of us here, we wish you the very best of reading. Thank you for inviting me to hang out with you each week. I am honored to keep you company during the quarantimes.

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. You can find more outstanding podcasts to subscribe to at frolic.media/podcasts.

[shifty music]