Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Never Now Always
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Frew, Desirina Boskovich
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://desirinaboskovich.com/
CITY: Springfield
STATE: MO
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.theonceandfuturepodcast.com/blog/2017/9/26/interview-desirina-boskovich-talks-about-her-new-book-never-now-always * https://www.linkedin.com/in/desirina/
RESEARCHER NOTES: Home is in Missouri!–DP
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Emory University, bachelor’s degree, 2005; also graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop, 2007.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, novelist, short story writer, and consultant. Works as a communications and marketing consultant.
WRITINGS
Also editor of the anthology It Came From the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction, Cheeky Frawg, 2013. Contributor to anthologies, including The Way of the Wizard and The Apocalypse Triptych, and Aliens: Recent Encounters and Heiresses of Russ 2012: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction. Contributor of fiction to periodicals, including Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Lightspeed, Nightmare and Kaleidotrope. Contributor of nonfiction to periodicals and websites, including Lightspeed, Weird Fiction Review, the Steampunk Bible, Wonderbook, and the Huffington Post.
SIDELIGHTS
Desirina Boskovich studied English and creative writing in college. She works on communications and marketing campaigns as a consultant, primarily for non profits and higher education. She is also a science fiction, fantasy, horror, and speculative fiction author. According to Boskovich, she decided to become a writer at the age of five after being introduced to picture books. She was drawn to write speculative fiction after reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and the rest of the “Narnia” series of books by C.S. Lewis.
“I’m drawn to speculative fiction for the same reasons I’ve always been – my underlying conviction that the world we see is a very small sliver of what is, that we’re sleepwalking, mostly, and the universe is vast and terrifying and beautiful and much stranger than we could possibly imagine,” Boskovich noted in an interview with Gwendolin Kiste for the Gwendolin Kiste website, going on to note later in the same interview: “Often it feels to me that the language of magic, of fantasy, of horror, of the weird, is truer and more familiar to me as a depiction of my life than anything that pretends to be ‘realistic.'”
In addition to authoring the coffee-table book The Steampunk User’s Manual: An Illustrated Practical and Whimsical Guide to Creating Retro-Futurist Dreams with Jeff VanderMeer, Boskovich is author of the debut novella Never Now Always. The story revolves around Lolo, who serves as the story’s narrator. Lolo is a “rapt child,” one of the young people being studied by the Caretakers, aliens who keep the children in labs to study human memory. The children have been cleaned of their memories, which they can only recall during something called “memory duty.” These episodes involve the children’s monstrous-looking caretakers strapping them down and forcing them to relive past memories that they cannot recall under normal circumstances. “Boskovich doesn’t shy away from the brutality of this new and strange world, nor from the effects it has on the children forced to live in it,” wrote Martin Cahill for the Strange Horizons website.
Lolo begins keeping a diary, written with her own blood, which also prompts her to have other memories. She does to the realization that there is a world outside the laboratory facilities, one with sunshine and grass. Lolo decides to rebel and find her sister, also housed somewhere in the same facility. To do so, she recruits her best friend and roommate Gor with the intention of all three escaping. “Lolo’s voice is gripping, sometimes pared down to its bones and sometimes expansive and beautiful,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor. In his review for the Strange Horizons website, Cahill called Never Now Always “harrowing, heartbreaking work, as Boskovich pulls away layer after layer of Lolo’s resolve, working her protagonist down to the nub, until the truth is laid bare.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, May 29, 2017, review of Never Now Always, p. 49.
ONLINE
A.C. Wise, http://www.acwise.net/ (June 21, 2017), A.C. Wise, “An Interview with Desirina Boskovich.”
Desirina Boskovich Website, http://desirinaboskovich.com (April 9, 2018).
Gwendoline Kiste, http://www.gwendolynkiste.com/ (August 25, 2017), Gwendoline Kiste, “Never and Always: Interview with Desirina Boskovich.”
Mad Scientist Journal Online, http://madscientistjournal.org/ (May 10, 2017 ), review of Never Now Always.
Nightmare Online, http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/ (August 1, 2014), E.C. Myers, “Author Spotlight: Desirina Boskovich.”
Once and Future Podcast, http://www.theonceandfuturepodcast.com/ (September 26, 2017), “Interview: Desirina Boskovich Talks about Her New Book Never Now Always.”
Springfield Creatives Website, https://www.springfieldcreatives.com/ (April 9, 2018), “Desirina Boskovich Frew,” author member profile.
Strange Horizons, http://strangehorizons.com/ (January 8, 2018), Martin Cahill, review of Never Now Always.
Tor.com https://www.tor.com/ (November 7, 2014), Desirina Boskovich, “A Discussion on The Steampunk User’s Manual.
Unnerving, https://www.unnervingmagazine.com/ (September 15, 2017), Eddie Generous, “Interview with Desirina Boskovich.”
Never and Always: Interview with Desirina Boskovich
Welcome back! Today, I’m thrilled to spotlight author Desirina Boskovich. Desirina’s work has appeared in numerous outlets including Clarkesworld, Nightmare, and Lightspeed, among others. Earlier this summer, her new novella, Never Now Always, debuted from Broken Eye Books.
Recently, Desirina and I discussed her evolution as an author as well as her inspiration for Never Now Always.
A couple icebreakers to start: when did you first decide to become a writer, and who are some of your favorite authors?
DesirinaI first decided to become a writer at age 5. I think I had just discovered chapter books. I don’t quite remember how I learned the term “writer” – maybe I asked my mom where books came from – but somehow I found out about the job title and instantly decided I would become that.
Favorite authors… there are the classics such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ursula LeGuin, Shirley Jackson, William Gibson, Jeanette Winterson, David Mitchell. In the past few months I’ve been reading the crap out of some page-turners, which seem to be just what I need in these trying times. I am loving Megan Abbott, Gillian Flynn, Ruth Ware, Ruth Rendell and others in the thriller/mystery genre.
What draws you to speculative fiction? Do you remember the first speculative story you ever read?
The first speculative story I read was definitely The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, followed by the rest of the Narnia books. My parents read a few of these to me and my sister before I was old enough to read them myself and I read the rest as soon as I could (probably just after I decided to become a writer). I did not have a good childhood and these books were my comfort and escape. I’ve written elsewhere about my love for those books and the influence they’ve had on me. They definitely imparted a love for the weird, fantastical and uncanny.
I always gravitated toward science fiction and fantasy as a young reader. One book that I still remember is This Star Shall Abide by Sylvia Engdahl. That story blew my mind.
I think now I’m drawn to speculative fiction for the same reasons I’ve always been – my underlying conviction that the world we see is a very small sliver of what is, that we’re sleepwalking, mostly, and the universe is vast and terrifying and beautiful and much stranger than we could possibly imagine. I want a piece of that, as much as I can find it. And often it feels to me that the language of magic, of fantasy, of horror, of the weird, is truer and more familiar to me as a depiction of my life than anything that pretends to be “realistic.”
Never Now AlwaysWhat was the inspiration behind Never Now Always? As you were writing the early drafts, did that initial vision evolve, or did the finished story match how you first imagined the novella?
I started with this idea that I wanted to write about something I personally find unsettling, even horrifying. What I thought about then was the horror of trying to hold onto an important part of my mental landscape, a memory or a story or a knowledge about myself, and not being able to. Knowing I would lose it, or knowing I’ve lost it, and the powerlessness of that, the invasion, the loss. So I ran through a few scenarios and ended up with this one. I had the basic outline of the novella before I started drafting. I think the finished story turned out pretty close to that, except it took me a long time to find a language that felt natural to my characters and their world.
You’ve written both short and long fiction. What factors help you to determine what length a project should be?
I think when I write short fiction I’m writing toward a single powerful image or emotion or scene – sometimes the ending, not always. The rest of the story is designed to support that, to bring it about. I want it to be short because I don’t want to waste any words getting to that moment of power.
With a novel, I start with a set-up that intrigues me and I see where it goes. I usually don’t know what the end will be. So I have to write a while to find my way there.
In your work, you’ve explored themes that focus on identity, loss, and childhood. What draws you to these ideas in particular, and are these the themes that you see guiding your work in the future?
I grew up in an abusive home and my childhood was traumatic. I think from my earliest I’ve been trying to navigate this great loss at the center of it all – a life lived without the anchor of safety in childhood, of parental love. It is a great loss because it’s something that I think every human demands instinctually, from the moment we’re born or perhaps before, we want our parents to love us and make us safe. You can grow up without it but you know always that you missed out on something irreplaceable. And that, I guess, feeds into identity. I am who I am because of that past, in ways good and bad. I try to lean into the good and I do my best to leave behind the bad.
I think my work will always center on these themes, but hopefully I’ll find new ways to explore them. Lately I’ve become obsessed with psychological thrillers about women, that explore family dysfunction and buried traumas through the framework of suspense, danger and bloodshed. I really want to write one soon and I think that’s a very interesting way to delve into the same ideas.
Out of your published work, do you have a personal favorite?
One is “The Island,” published in Nightmare Magazine, which explores the themes mentioned above. Another is the more recent “The Voice in the Cornfield, the Word Made Flesh” from F&SF, which is something I really pushed and stretched myself to write.
What projects are you currently working on?
I am halfway through the second draft of a novel, which I hope will be finished soon. It’s weird science fiction that’s a little bit cyberpunk and a little bit eco-apocalypse.
I am also collaborating with Jason Heller on a nonfiction book titled Starships & Sorcerers: The Secret History of Science Fiction, which will be published by Abrams Books. The book will be illustrated and contain tons of gorgeous imagery, and contributions from a bunch of very smart people, too.
Tremendous thanks to Desirina Boskovich for being part of this week’s author interview series. Find her online at her author site as well as on Twitter and Facebook.
Happy reading!
I’m a 2005 graduate of Emory University with a degree in English & Creative Writing, and a 2007 graduate of the Clarion Writer’s Workshop, a six-week bootcamp for speculative fiction writers.
Since 2009, my short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Lightspeed, Nightmare and Kaleidotrope. My stories have also been published in anthologies such as The Way of the Wizard and The Apocalypse Triptych (edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey), and reprinted in Aliens: Recent Encounters and Heiresses of Russ 2012: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction. Audio versions of my work have been featured on Podcastle and Drabblecast, and in 2010 I read at the New York Review of Science Fiction Reading Series.
My editorial debut, It Came From the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction, was published by Cheeky Frawg in 2013; it features some of Finland’s top speculative fiction writers.
Together with Jeff VanderMeer, I co-authored The Steampunk User’s Manual (a follow-up to The Steampunk Bible), which was published by Abrams Image in 2014.
My nonfiction pieces on music, literature, and culture have appeared in Lightspeed, Weird Fiction Review, The Steampunk Bible, Wonderbook, and the Huffington Post.
JUNE 21, 2017 · 9:00 AM ↓ Jump to Comments
An Interview with Desirina Boskovich
Desirina Boskovich was kind enough to drop by to talk about her new novella, Never Now Always, published by Broken Eye Books (out on June 27, available for pre-order now!). To start things off, I’ll make introductions by cribbing from Desirina’s author bio…
Desirina Boskovich’s short fiction has been published in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare, F&SF, Kaleidotrope, PodCastle, Drabblecast, and anthologies such as The Apocalypse Triptych, Tomorrow’s Cthulhu and What the #@&% Is That?. She is also the editor of It Came From the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction (Cheeky Frawg, 2013), and together with Jeff VanderMeer, co-author of The Steampunk User’s Manual (Abrams Image, 2014). Her next project is a collaboration with Jason Heller — Starships & Sorcerers: A Secret History of Science Fiction, forthcoming from Abrams Image.
Never Now AlwaysWelcome and congratulations on the publication of Never Now Always! Without giving too much away, would you care to give a taste of what the novella’s about?
Thank you! The story centers on Lolo, who finds herself trapped in a futuristic labyrinth, surrounded by children like herself, and their alien Caretakers. She can’t remember how she came to be here or what came before; worse, her memories fade and fragment from day to day, so even much of her time in this place is a blur. The Caretakers appear to be experimenting on the children’s memory, but to what purpose, no one knows.
Together with her best friend Gor, Lolo embarks on a desperate search for her lost memories, and then her lost sister, who she is convinced is also somewhere near.
Hopefully this isn’t too spoilery, but I’m fascinated by the parallels you draw in Never Now Always between the nightmarish scenario Lolo finds herself in, and the idea of children being powerless in a world of adults. I’m also interested in your recurring themes of memory, time, and the power of stories. Were these themes you consciously set out to work with, or ones you found emerging as the story unfolded?
I think these themes have always been at the center of much of my work. I don’t know that I ever consciously set out to work with them, but they seem to be what preoccupies me, and they keep emerging again and again.
I know I am not one of those adults who thinks longingly of childhood or feels nostalgia for those days of “carefree innocence.” None of the hardships I’ve experienced as an adult can come close to the constant terror and dread of my childhood with an abusive parent: spending every waking moment trying to navigate a complex set of rules that can change at any time; never knowing when things will go wrong; never feeling safe, never knowing refuge, never having anywhere to hide. And always sensing vaguely that this isn’t right, this isn’t how things are supposed to be, but not really knowing anything else.
I guess, in that sense, Lolo’s predicament is an embarrassingly literal exploration of my own trauma. And those few beautiful and blissful memories she recalls mean so much to me, probably too much — an excavation or an echo of that pure and perfect childhood that could never really be.
(My brother just gave his therapist a copy of the novella with the instructions, “Read this, you’ll understand.” I’m not sure how that makes me feel.)
But anyway. Moving past that childhood and building a life that feels safe has been the greatest undertaking of my life so far, and “memory, time and the power of stories” — as you phrased it — feel central to that. And all the stories that feel most personal to me explore these ideas one way or another.
Up until now, you’ve primarily written and published short fiction. Is Never Now Always the first step in a new direction, perhaps a novelish direction, or is more a case of the story being the length it needs to be?
Heh. I’ve primarily published short fiction. I also have more than a dozen incomplete novels on my hard drive, which is my excuse for not being more prolific in the short fiction department. Idk. Writing a novel is hard.
But I hope Never Now Always is the first step in a new direction of actually publishing longer stuff.
The novel I’m working on now is Weird science fiction (with a touch of the mystical) about three young people in a cyberpunk-esque surveillance city, surrounded by an eco-apocalypse of unknown origins. I’m in the revising stage and hope to have a final draft this year.
Shifting gears a bit, how did It Came from the North come about? Were you working with translated fiction, Finnish work written in English, or both? What was your strategy in selecting works? Was there an overarching thesis, or did you take a ‘best of’ approach?
At the time I was a consulting editor for Cheeky Frawg, helping review submissions and pitching in on copyediting and proofreading, stuff like that. The Finnish anthology was a project that Ann and Jeff VanderMeer had been wanting to do for a while. They asked me if I was interested in serving as editor for the project and I said “Definitely!”.
At that point my main exposure to Finnish speculative fiction was through Leena Krohn, the utterly brilliant author of Tainaron (which I wrote about in Weird Fiction Review) and Datura (one of the Cheeky Frawg books I helped copyedit, which meant I was lucky enough to be one of the first people to read the English translation). Since then, Cheeky Frawg has released Leena Krohn: The Collected Fiction (2015), which includes several new English translations, and is a truly impressive volume.
Anyway, being new to Finnish speculative fiction, I dove into the project and read as much as I could. I read works that were originally written in English, as well as works in translation. I read previously published works, solicited additional work from a number of authors and also read original work in an open submissions period.
I don’t think there was an overarching thesis; I chose works that resonated with me, that I felt were memorable and vivid, that I connected with emotionally. At the same time, I did want to select stories that would come together as a coherent whole. What emerged was an aesthetic of weird, quirky and surreal stories with a strong emotional core.
By the way, It Came from the North includes an excerpt from Johanna Sinisalo’s Not Before Sundown (published under the title Troll: A Love Story in the U.S.), which I found a very engaging and immediately captivating entry to her work. But I also absolutely freaking adore her novel Birdbrain, which is so weird, disturbing and subtly terrifying. It’s really a masterful work and I want everyone to read it, too.
A question I like to ask my fellow Canadians is whether they feel there’s a national character to Canadian speculative fiction. After working on this anthology, do you think there’s a particular national character to Finnish speculative fiction? Are there certain themes, tropes, settings that you don’t see as often elsewhere, or that make a work particularly Finnish?
I hesitate to make any pronouncements on what makes a work particularly Finnish — such an insight is probably better left to one of the many amazing Finnish writers working today.
But one theme that did particularly emerge for me is the uncanniness of nature, how big and deep and fantastic and strange it really is. This idea that the weirdness of the natural world is in its own way kind of speculative and kind of magical. I think that really comes through in the Sinisalo novel I mentioned above, Birdbrain, where the landscape is both its own character and a reflection of the human characters, radiating tension and dread. And then on the other hand, Krohn’s Tainaron uses the framework of a city of insects to build this beautiful and powerful meditation on life and death, metamorphosis and transformation.
I would venture to say that this fascination and exploration of nature and what it means stems from the territory of Finland itself… a country that’s 3/4 forest, home to nearly 200,000 lakes, and positioned partly above the Arctic Circle, with extremely dark winters and extremely bright summers.
Incidentally, I will be visiting Finland for the first time this summer to attend WorldCon in Helsinki. I couldn’t be more excited. I hope to spend at least a couple days exploring nature too.
In general, one of my favorite questions to ask authors is about their non-writing related work. Authors are notorious for working strange jobs, for example J.D. Salinger’s stint as the entertainment director on a luxury cruise line. What’s the most unusual job you’ve ever had, and did it inspire any stories or teach you anything you’ve used in your writing?
This is a wonderful question. I regret to admit, though, that I’ve worked very few unlikely jobs. In high school and college, I worked as a restaurant hostess, a library worker and then an administrative assistant.
My first real job out of college was as a copywriter at an allergy products company. I wrote lengthy and enthusiastic reviews of allergy-proof bedding, air purifiers, vacuum cleaners. I have forgotten more about the dust mite than most people will ever know. It was a strange time.
But honestly my most formative job was as a fledgling freelance copywriter in the heady days of 2006-2008. Because I was a baby freelancer and my whole portfolio was basically glowing copy about allergy products, I spent some time taking whatever work I could get, little one-off projects, through those online find-a-freelancer sites. The economy was so different then; looking back it feels like they were pretty much just giving away money. And everyone seemed to have some kind of get-rich-quick scheme, some internet side-hustle, some scam they were running.
So those were the kind of projects I worked on (I had to eat). Churning out content for hypnotherapy and diet fads and dot.com ventures and pyramid schemes. (So many pyramid schemes.) I was very young then and my perspective was limited but I could feel it, that something was coming. There was this sense of living on borrowed money, borrowed time. Everyone was talking about how we could all will our deepest desires into being if we just believed hard enough. I formed this idea of America as a naive, exuberant, delusional place, distinctly fueled by our fantastical optimism.
I tried to write a novel about it, anchored by the characters I encountered through those freelance gigs, but the story was too big. It’s an idea I keep coming back to. But as more time passes the story just keeps getting bigger too.
I will write that novel one day, though. I promise.
What are you working on next? Anything else you want folks to know about or keep an eye on?
The big exciting news is that I’m collaborating on an illustrated nonfiction book with Jason Heller: Starships & Sorcerers: The Secret History of Science Fiction, which will be published by Abrams Books. This book will feature lots of beautiful imagery and tell the stories of unsung creators, forgotten tales, books and films that were imagined and never made, shows that were canceled too soon. It’s a very fun project and I’ll be talking a lot about it over the next year.
On the short fiction front, I have two stories forthcoming. “Here Comes the Flood” will be in the anthology 2084 from Unsung Stories. “Cargo” will be in the anthology Ride the Star Wind from Broken Eye Books.
And of course, there’s that novel I’m working on.
Thanks for stopping by!
Thanks for having me, and for your thoughtful and interesting questions! It was a delight to talk about Finnish fiction again… and I hope I will see some of your readers in Helsinki this summer.
Interviews
Interview with Desirina Boskovich
September 16, 2017
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Eddie Generous
Unnerving Magazine Interview Series: I talk with Desirina Boskovish, author of Never Now Always, out not from Broken Eye Books, but prior to recording she did a Q&A for me... back when using type was still the fashion on Unnerving. But then life got in the way and it didn't get posted, so I figured I'd build on the questions and cover everything a with a little more depth. So have a read and have a listen. Also, I apologize in advance if my occasionally audible allergies bother anyone.
UM: Never Now Always is a visual read, pulling to mind scenes from films, specifically Cube, The Matrix, and Logan’s Run, were there any films that you consciously pulled from in creating the scenery and atmosphere for this story?
DB: I actually haven’t seen Logan’s Run, so not that one! I definitely think there’s something of The Matrix in there, though. I love those scenes where the camera pans away and slowly reveals that whatever you’re looking at is just one tiny part of something that goes on forever, too vast to really even take in. I think I’m always trying to do that in my writing but of course it works much better in film.
Dark City was a big influence, probably more thematically, but also on the aesthetic of the aliens. Another huge visual influence for me is not a film but a manga – Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame!. I found his depiction of a far-future mega-structure to be utterly compelling and that vision has infiltrated much of my work.
A third visual influence for this story – this is embarrassing, but – I think might be early installments of the video game Halo. The endlessly repeating corridors of those alien spaceships. That idea of an inhospitable place that was not designed by humans nor for them. Functional without being even vaguely comforting or appealing. And the repetition of it.
UM: There are a number of stories concerning cordoned and institutionalized humanity, what makes yours different, why did you write it?
DB: Well, first – let me challenge the underlying premise a bit. I know some writers are really preoccupied with the idea of originality, telling a story that’s never been told before. But truthfully, I’m not. I think striving to be unique is a weird kind of hubris, honestly.
I look at it like this: there are a lot of stories about “cordoned and institutionalized humanity” because there is something about this concept that seems to be universally unsettling and disturbing to us. There’s a reason we, both storytellers and audiences, keep coming back to that well again and again, because there’s something there that speaks to something deeper. Let’s say it’s asking a question we still haven’t figured out how to answer. And we are going to keep asking it until we’ve managed to resolve the terror or guilt or trauma it references.
Like many people, I’m fascinated and frightened by the idea, too, and I write for myself first, so it was natural to want to dig into this a bit, and tell a story that’s already familiar. I would say it’s “different” because it comes from me, and like every other person on this planet, I have my own memories and stories and traumas to explore through the framework of this archetypal story.
I know that parts of this novella definitely emerged because of my discomfort and unease with parts of my work as a science writer. I would venture to say that a huge part of our obsession with the idea of institutionalized humanity is our shared guilt about animal testing, which continues now in scientific labs around the world and has undoubtedly saved countless human lives, but is nevertheless hard to see as anything but cruel and monstrous.
I do think there are a few aspects that make this story a little different for me than others I’ve encountered: the exploration of the power of memory and the emphasis on the bonds of siblinghood.
UM: This story falls into the un-category of slipstream, sampling from science fiction, fantasy, and at moments, horror. Where do these undefinable stories fit into the world of publishing, and say it reaches a big-box bookstore shelf, which shelf would you put it on and why?
DB: I’d shelve it in science fiction, I guess. At its heart, it’s a science fiction story, though it uses some literary devices and horror tropes. And the fantasy I think comes from the fact that it’s a science fiction that posits a universe so vast and strange and uncanny, really, that a feeling of the fantastic must always be with us if we want to see that universe as it really is.
UM: Please outline how you got to where you are as a writer.
DB: I’ve been writing stories since I was a child, and reading everything I could get my hands on. As a kid that was lots of YA science fiction and fantasy, plus a ton of 18th and 19th century classics. Then in high school I became enamored of the post-modernists – Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Mark Z. Danielewski, and so on. I think all those influences probably emerge in my stories in different ways.
In college, I discovered “grown up” science-fiction in the form of cyberpunk – William Gibson’s Neuromancer blew my mind – and decided to try my hand at that; I was a major in Creative Writing at Emory University, so I also had opportunity to practice my craft in several workshops. In 2007, I attended the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, which was an amazing and life-changing experience that I can’t recommend highly enough for the aspiring SF writer.
In 2008, I made my first sale; the now-defunct Realms of Fantasy bought “Sand Castles,” a story I’d written at Clarion. Soon after that, Clarkesworld bought my story “Celadon,” also written at Clarion; though my second sale, it ended up being my first published story, since online markets tend to have faster turn-around than print magazines. Since then, I’ve been slowly and steadily publishing a few short stories per year, and also writing and discarding many failed novels.
UM :What’s forthcoming from you?
DB: In the next year or so, my story “Here Comes the Flood” will appear in the anthology 2084 from Unsung Stories (http://www.unsungstories.co.uk/2084-the-anthology/), and my story “Cargo” will appear in the anthology Ride the Star Wind from Broken Eye Books (http://www.brokeneyebooks.com/store/c16/Ride_the_Star_Wind.html).
My current big project is Starships & Sorcerers: The Secret History of Science Fiction & Fantasy, which I am co-authoring with Jason Heller for Abrams Books.
Listen to the second half on Soundcloud or on iTunes
Find out more about Desirina at her website: desirinaboskovich.com
INTERVIEW: Desirina Boskovich Talks About Her New Book 'Never Now Always'
SEPTEMBER 26, 2017 IN BOOKS
I first met Desirina Boskovich at World Fantasy Convention in 2014, when she was celebrating the release of The Steampunk User's Manual with Jeff VanderMeer. She seemed like an thoughtful, intelligent, and quiet person, and I thoroughly enjoyed having conversations with her. Even without having read her fiction, I could tell Desirina had a unique perspective on life.
Her novella Never Now Always has just come out from Broken Eye Books, and I was immediately captured by her prose style. It is an amazing, beautiful, and strange story that I'll concede might not be for everyone, but I found it to be very refreshing and eery, brutal yet comforting in a way. Desirina is a master at using language in a provocative way, plunging the reader directly into the story.
I recently had the opportunity to interview Desirina about her book and her writing. Please welcome her to Once and Future!
Melanie R. Meadors: You have a new novella available now from Broken Eye Books, called Never Now Always. Could you tell us a bit about it? How did the idea develop?
Desirina Boskovich: Never Now Always is a weird novella about children without memories. They are trapped in a vast structure with unemotional alien caretakers, but they don’t know how they came to be there or what happened before. The story centers on one girl named Lolo who begins to remember bits and pieces, and devises a way to hold onto these memories. She remembers her sister and this leads her on a journey to search for her.
The idea that’s central to this for me is not so much the trauma of having forgotten but the trauma of knowing you’ll forget. The loss of self that comes with memories you know you can’t hold. I started there and explored a few scenarios (which I might use in another story) before stumbling my way into this one.
MRM: You have a lot of short fiction out there in the world, on many websites and in magazines. Do you have a favorite piece?
DB: I don’t have one favorite piece, but there are a couple I do feel strongly about. “The Voice in the Cornfield, the Word Made Flesh” in F&SF. “Deus Ex Arca” in Lightspeed Magazine. Those stories feel closest to my authentic voice and the kind of work I aspire to do. My most popular story is “Heaven Is A Place on Planet X,” which has gotten more response than anything else I’ve written.
MRM: Never Now Always is your debut novella. Did you find that the shift to longer work needed a different writing mindset? Did you plan on this being a longer work or did it just turn out that way?
DB: It was always intended to be a novella. I have written novels before, although I haven’t sold any, and I think I approached it more as a short novel than as a long short story. Now if I could approach a novel like a long novella, I might actually have something.
MRM: Never Now Always is considered one part science fiction, one part horror, and all weird. Could you help readers understand what “weird” fiction is? What are some examples?
DB: It’s a good question. Of course, the answer is probably different for each person. For me, weird fiction challenges the boundaries of what is real and what is speculative. It takes the world I know and puts a strange filter on it. Or it takes a world totally unlike the world I know and makes it feel terribly, startlingly familiar.
Weird fiction explores the ragged edges of everything. And I tend to think it reflects a certain worldview: that there is no “real world.” The objective universe is bizarre and uncanny and stranger than we can possibly imagine. There are a million unseen currents flowing beneath and around and through the happenings of everyday.
Sometimes when we confront the strangeness shot through everything it’s horrifying and sometimes it’s beautiful, and it always makes us feel like we’re losing our footing, like we aren’t what we thought we were, and neither is this place. That’s the feeling I’m searching for whether I’m writing science fiction, fantasy or horror, and so it all tends to mix together.
Brian Evenson is one of my favorite writers of weird fiction and I think he has a particular skill for presenting a seemingly mundane scene, and infusing it with this outsized dread and horror and anxiety, a feeling so powerful it feels like it has to be caused by something supernatural. It’s like in a nightmare -- if you’ve ever had a nightmare where you’re just utterly gutted with horror and dread about something, and then you wake up and try to articulate why it was so scary, but it’s not the thing, it’s your feeling about the thing.
Other fantastic writers of weird fiction are Livia Llewellyn, M. John Harrison, Caitlin Kiernan and China Mieville.
MRM: Your novella, I would say, has a strong voice to it. Is this something that just comes naturally to you, or is it something you’ve worked to hone over the years?
DB: Actually, the most challenging part of writing this novel was developing the voice, which I think is different from the voice of much of my previous work.
The voice I’ve aspired to in much of my work tends to be factual and understated, evocative yet sparse. I want to write like an iceberg, 90 percent of it under the surface.
The novella is written in a much more stream-of-consciousness style. I felt the only to make it work was to put the reader as close to the mindset of my main character Lolo as possible and I wanted to pull the reader into that feeling of disorientation. It’s hard though because Lolo has very few reference points; her narrative resists chronology and she has so few metaphors to draw on. I kept trying to write and feeling the voice was too bland and too forced. I had a few false starts.
I wanted this stream-of-consciousness to be dense, vivid, lyrical, both sort of wise and naive, surreal and whimsical and also true, like Bjork concluding her explanation of how television works with the too-real remark “You shouldn’t let poets lie to you.”
I thought Lolo was like someone who learned lots of words from books but doesn’t exactly know how to use them. And in a way I unlocked it by thinking about how I feel when I have brain fog, which used to happen fairly often when I was dealing with a chronic illness; how I would mentally reach for a word or a phrase and come up with something close but off. Then just say it that way because I was too tired to keep trying to think of it. That’s how Lolo’s mind is working as she struggles to surface from the fog of false memory and achieve clarity.
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MRM: Your writing tends toward the “anything but typical” side. Do you ever struggle with questioning, “What if this never sells?” or “What if this doesn’t reach anyone?” Do you have any advice for someone who has some self-doubt about their work?
DB: I do get frustrated sometimes because it seems that the stories I’m most proud of can be hardest to sell; of course when I do work that I like, I want people to read it.
The truth is I’ve tried to write novels that I think could be easy and commercially successful, but as soon as I start working on it and fall in love with it, I want to make it as good as I can, and I want to make it my own. And then it just gets weirder and weirder and stops being the easy thing I thought it could be. And then I’m like “I’m not a good enough writer to even do this” and in other news, I currently have zero published novels to my name.
But the good news is, I don’t depend on my fiction to pay the bills, so I have all the time in the world to write the best and truest story that I can, and I think that’s really the most important thing. Go to the core of yourself, face the things that terrify you, explore your deepest darkest places. Write from your heart and your gut and your scars. Write the story only you could write.
Because otherwise, why even bother?
MRM: You attended the Clarion Writer’s Workshop, which gets a lot of praise. What was your experience there? Is this something you’d recommend to budding writers?
DB: Oh, man. Yes. 100%. The experience was absolutely essential to my writing and my fiction career. I can still recall at least a half-dozen pieces of writing advice I received during those six weeks that probably saved me years of shitty drafts. I started writing fantasy because of Clarion; before I was solidly sci-fi. I sold three of the six stories I workshopped there, all to pro markets (my first sales). I learned about genre stuff like cons and fandom and what JJA’s rejection letters meant, all of which I had literally never heard about before (I knew nothing about fandom). And several of the teachers I met there have remained my supporters and mentors throughout the years and their help and kindness has been so, so valuable. Clarion was life-changing for me.
MRM: What would you consider to be your literary influences?
DB: YA science fiction and fantasy from the 70s and 80s, post-modern lit fic, cyberpunk SF, magic realism, supernatural horror, the Weird. Authors who’ve particularly influenced me include Don DeLillo, Mark Z. Danielewski, Jeanette Winterson, Leena Krohn, Kelly Link, David Mitchell, William Gibson, Jeff VanderMeer, China Mieville.
MRM: Do you have any writing rituals that help you get in the mood to create stories? What is your workspace like?
DB: My perfect writing ritual is this: wake up early in the morning as the sun is just rising, get my coffee, don’t look at email, and begin chipping away at the story as I sip my coffee and become awake. When I do this and it’s quiet and no one interrupts me I can get a couple thousand words down. Unfortunately I have a husband and two dogs and an addiction to email so this literally never happens.
I work from home as a communications consultant so I have to work hard to build a division between the creative work I do for pay and the creative work I do for myself. I find that when I’m working for a client I like to be sitting at a desk and generally being professional, but when I’m writing fiction I like to be very comfortable, like sitting in bed comfortable. Somehow that takes me out of a self-aware and environment-aware state and into the interior state where my fiction actually starts to flow.
During the winter I was having a bit of a breakdown and I built a blanket fort in my office, complete with a lamp and pillows and tissues and snacks. This was a really fantastic place to write. It was especially fantastic because it was very difficult to crawl in and out of, so if I turned off the router before I went in, I couldn’t get internet without going through a whole bunch of rigmarole. After a while I took it down because in my somewhat distraught state I had used very dirty blankets to build the fort and the interior stank very badly of musty dog.
This winter, when it gets cold again, I may have to re-build the blanket fort, but I also have a new puppy now so it might be a learning curve to teach her not to trash my writing tent on a daily basis. We’ll see.
MRM: Have you read anything recently you’d recommend to readers?
DB: “The Ice Twins” by S. K. Tremayne. Brilliant atmosphere and prose styling, disturbing plot. I’m still thinking about it and I’m not sure how I feel about it, but I consider that a sign of a worthwhile read.
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Desirina Boskovich's short fiction has been published in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare, F&SF, Kaleidotrope, PodCastle, Drabblecast, and anthologies such as Aliens: Recent Encounters, The Apocalypse Triptych, and Tomorrow's Cthulhu. Her nonfiction pieces on music, literature, and culture have appeared in Lightspeed, Weird Fiction Review, the Huffington Post, Wonderbook, and The Steampunk Bible. She is also the editor of It Came From the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction (Cheeky Frawg, 2013), and together with Jeff VanderMeer, co-author of The Steampunk User's Manual (Abrams Image, 2014). Find her online at www.desirinaboskovich.com.
Desirina Boskovich Frew
desirina.frew@gmail.com
www.desirina.com
I work on communications and marketing campaigns, mostly for nonprofits and higher ed. Most of that work is telling stories about the amazing things their students, scholars, staff members, and stakeholders are doing to make the world a better place. Past and present clients include Arizona State University, the Wikimedia Foundation, the Georgia Research Alliance, Oglethorpe University, Glasgow Caledonian University, Georgia Tech, Georgia Department of Economic Development, and the World Health Organization.
I also write science fiction (and fantasy, and horror, and other weird and creepy stuff), and nonfiction pieces on the same. I'm the editor of an anthology on Finnish weird fiction (It Came From the North), and co-author of a coffee table book on Steampunk, the creative process, and DIY (The Steampunk User's Manual). My novella Never Now Always is available for pre-order from Broken Eye Books.
Author Spotlight: Desirina Boskovich
by E.C. MYERS
PUBLISHED IN AUG. 2014 (ISSUE 23) | 1632 WORDS | RELATED STORY: DEAR OWNER OF THIS 1972 FORD CREW CAB PICKUP
Maybe it’s just me, but there’s an air of wish fulfillment to “Dear Owner”—it’s a letter to all the insensitive people in the world who ignore or help create the daily horrors we deal with. What inspired you to write this piece?
The term “wish fulfillment” makes me laugh, but I guess it’s true, in a way. I’ve been living in crowded places for years now, and after a while it really begins to wear you down. There’s always at least one person nearby—usually several people—who probably don’t really mean to be assholes, but they don’t care enough to be considerate, either. They have this casual entitlement, like they’re approaching the world with this mindset of “Yeah? Who’s gonna stop me?” By now I’ve had all the awful neighbors: the drunken brawlers, the meth-head partiers, the neglectful pet-owners, the hallway smokers. They do whatever they feel like doing, which makes everyone around them a little bit more miserable than they would be otherwise. It makes me want to move to the woods.
Anyway, “Dear Owner” was in fact inspired by real life, as I personally spent several months being rudely awakened at 4:30 a.m. by an inconsiderate engine-revver parked outside my bedroom window. (As I later discovered from some neighbors, said engine-revver was not just disturbing me, but everyone in my twelve-unit building. Like you said: daily horrors.) I’m typically an extremely even-tempered person. But rouse me from a peaceful slumber and I’m instantaneously filled with murderous rage. Like just complete, irrational, crazy-person rage, with an added dose of total despair. I also have sporadic bouts of insomnia, which makes it worse, because it can be hours before I fell back asleep. So what better way to occupy the restless tortured hours than with elaborate fantasies of revenge?
In real life, my problem was eventually resolved with a several polite yet persistent phone calls. But real life is boring.
I Googled the 1972 Ford Crew Cab Pickup . . . That is an interesting-looking vehicle. It seems to be shorthand to understanding the owner’s personality and behavior, from the protagonist’s viewpoint. Does that truck have any special significance?
It was important for me to distinguish the fact that this vehicle is being driven by choice. It’s antique, it’s iconic, and it’s not at all practical—neither easy to drive nor easy to maintain. For the owner of the truck, it’s a statement of identity, something he takes pride in. Not just a vehicle, but a precious possession and a weekend hobby too.
For me this is an important aspect of the story, because it presumes a lot more intentionality on his part—it gives him more power in the situation. If, for instance, he was driving a beat-up 1988 Honda Accord, held together with string and duct tape, this situation would have much different subtext. We’d think maybe he detests this coughing, sputtering, backfiring, exhaust-spewing vehicle as much as anyone else, he just can’t afford anything better. So he’d be infinitely more sympathetic, at least to me. Instead, it’s clear that for whatever reason, he chooses to drive this vehicle. Maybe it’s, like, this macho posturing; a purposeful way of taking up more space than he deserves. Like lavaballing, but on the road.
And it had to be a crew cab, or the final act of the story wouldn’t work. So that narrowed down the options considerably, as crew cabs don’t seem to be as common in older trucks as they might be today.
Finally, there’s just something quintessential about Fords.
Some of the most intriguing aspects of “Dear Owner” are that it has two victims, and the ultimate revenge and empowerment of the protagonist is to make her tormentor as powerless as she is. There’s no doubt that the owner of the pickup truck is guilty, but I found myself wondering about his story. As the author, did you imagine this story from his perspective? What’s his seemingly aimless life like?
Yes, I did. The point where I really began to sympathize with him came when we see his house: small, shabby, unkempt, the driveway overgrown with weeds. Suddenly I saw him—really saw him—and I felt nothing but compassion. Because I know how it feels to be depressed, and lost, and poor, where every day feels like an immense fucking struggle and it’s all you can do to get out of bed, put one foot in front of the other, keep moving forward. The story suggests that he’s drinking on the job, driving home drunk—which makes him less sympathetic in some ways, but at the same time I see someone who is just at the end of his rope. He doesn’t really care about anything, not even himself. The protagonist just wants some courtesy, but perhaps that’s too much to ask from someone who’s overwhelmed by his own daily struggle to survive.
And then all the little things that she does to fuck with him: these are just additional annoyances in a life that’s already practically unbearable. He’s used to bad luck, unexpected misfortunes, bad customers, unpaid bills. These are things he’s given up fighting. To me, the ending is almost a foregone conclusion, because both of them—but him, just as much as her—have been drowning for a long time already.
By the end of the story, my sympathy is almost completely with him. The protagonist sets up a test expecting him to fail. In her self-absorption and self-pity, she never even tries to really talk to him face to face. There’s also a strong element of classism and superiority in the way she views him; she thinks his lack of concern demonstrates contempt for her, and maybe it does, but she has always viewed him with contempt herself. She assumes he’s completely insensitive, but maybe he’s just drowning in his own pain. Maybe, even, he’s lost someone, too.
There’s a saying that goes, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” If either character had taken this idea to heart, the story would have turned out much differently.
The ending of “Dear Owner” is done masterfully—a surprise that both feels inevitable and packs a punch. How did this story develop from concept to its final version? What’s your writing process?
I’d been trying to figure out how to write an epistolary horror story for a year at least. I still have another idea that I can’t quite make work, but one day I will. Anyway, I think it was my unsuccessful scrapping with that idea that gave me the inspiration for this one; the approach and the concept just kind of came together. This story, like most of my short stories, was a vague idea that really happened in the writing; there were very few changes from the initial to final drafts.
At first, I was thinking about it as a sort of series of letters, whether answered or unanswered, escalating in tone and urgency. But then I decided that would perhaps become too repetitive and tedious, and it would be better to just write one long letter, referencing earlier ones. This approach made it a little easier to shape the narrative, I think.
One of my main preoccupations in my work has always been ambiguity—challenging my own original perception of the story without fully dismantling it, and constructing endings that can be read in more ways than one. This story was no exception. My goal was to create a character (the letter-writer) who is initially sympathetic, but whose behavior becomes more and more disturbing, until the reader is no longer sure where their sympathies should lie, who is the antagonist and who is the victim.
By the final sentences, this becomes a horror story from the perspective of the villain, a deranged killer who inflicts extreme violence in response to a relatively small perceived slight. But even villains are the heroes of their own stories. I think it’s always important to remember that.
What work do you have out now or forthcoming, and what are you writing now?
I am very excited about The Steampunk User’s Manual, forthcoming from Abrams Image in October. It’s a combination art book and how-to guide that I coauthored with Jeff VanderMeer (and a follow-up to The Steampunk Bible by Jeff VanderMeer and S.J. Chambers).
I am also super-psyched for The End is Now, the next volume in The Apocalypse Triptych, edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey. The End is Now will include the next installment to “Heaven is a Place on Planet X,” my contribution to The End is Nigh (and which you can read for free at Wired.com). In other news, another short story titled “The Witch and the Wolves” is forthcoming from Triptych Tales sometime this year, and Drabblecast will be producing an audio version of my recent Kaleidotrope story, “Tree, Fire, World.”
As to what I’m working on now, I’m plugging away at two novels. One is young adult science fiction (my four-word pitch is “1984 meets The Thing,” but I’m a bit worried because no one really seems to know what that means). The other is a kind of psychological horror story after the American Gothic tradition.
A Discussion on The Steampunk User’s Manual
Desirina Boskovich
Fri Nov 7, 2014 5:00pm Post a comment Favorite This
At DetCon1 I finally got a chance to meet Diana M. Pho, founder of the popular Steampunk blog Beyond Victoriana, editor at Tor, and contributor to The Steampunk User’s Manual. We met for a wide-ranging conversation covering everything from the upcoming book to the current state of Steampunk.
An abridged version of our conversation appears below, edited slightly for space and clarity.
On the difference between The Steampunk User’s Manual and Jeff VanderMeer’s previous volume, The Steampunk Bible…
Boskovich: One of the main things we wanted to do with The Steampunk User’s Manual was focus more on actually making stuff. We interviewed more than eighty artists in all different fields… art, textiles, fashion, design, storytelling, music, performance. We asked them a lot of questions about their creative process and how they get inspiration and how they do their work, getting into every step of the creative process, and using their answers as inspiration and information. Like… How do you start? How do you finish? How do you push through obstacles? The Steampunk User’s Manual focuses a lot more on actually doing creative practices yourself.
Pho: What I find really fascinating, just listening to your explanation, is how The Steampunk User’s Manual seems to be some sort of bridge to not only The Steampunk Bible, but also Jeff VanderMeer’s Wonderbook, in talking about artistic inspiration.
I think it’s fascinating because we’re at a point with Steampunk as a community, where it’s questioning its identity and its purpose. Regardless of what cultural or political affiliations you may have in connection with Steampunk, one of the strongest aspects that everyone agrees with is that it acts as a form of artistic inspiration. I think the way we’re looking at Steampunk now, it manifests itself as an art movement more than anything else.
When you talk about all these different artists, musicians, makers, crafters, and how they all fall under this umbrella of creativity… I think we’re also investigating Steampunk not just as a genre, but as a school of art. Which is kind of crazy to think about, in a sense, because there is no salvaged aesthetic at any formal art school. But it’s also undeniable that the level of creativity people are expressing and have incorporated into a sort of ideology makes it seem more cohesive as a school than anything else right now.
Boskovich: I think the comparison to Wonderbook is really interesting. Because, of course Wonderbook has a lot of concrete stuff about the writing process, but I feel like one of the things that made Wonderbook so popular this past year is that it’s also about the mindset you have as you approach creative work, and getting into that playful, imaginative space. We tried to do something similar with The Steampunk User’s Manual. Of course we can’t tell people, for example, Here’s how you become a painter, and we’re not going to get that much into the nitty-gritty… It’s more about getting into that creative mindset, and the problem-solving and creative tools to approach it.
Of course, we do also have practical stuff in the book, like step-by-step projects, but it’s both. The hands-on, and the higher level. The mental game that you bring to art.
As far as what you say about Steampunk being a school… I think “Do It Yourself” really informs all of that. We talked about that with interviewees, too—the “Do It Yourself” aesthetic and how that really sets Steampunk apart.
On Steampunk’s continued relevance and sense of purpose…
Pho: Earlier we were also discussing the role of retro-futurism, and how it’s tied to various ideas about where we think the future is… why do we keep looking to the past when discussing the future? Is it nostalgia? Is it a way of trying to find alternative pathways by looking to something we did in the past?
More and more I feel like even if you’re sick and tired of Steampunk, even if you think it’s dead… the ideas that Steampunk embodies about the potential of human creativity, and scientific forethought, and mindfulness of history, are still being pushed forward.
Boskovich: It’s interesting because Steampunk is about looking back and also about looking forward. Then when you bring in multiculturalism, as we’ve been talking about, it’s also looking sideways, because every culture has their own past and their own future, and that brings in so many more perspectives. It just expands the pasts and the futures.
Pho: One of the biggest aspects that will impact our lives is the effects of globalization. What does it mean when you have technology where people from China can instantly connect with people from Israel? Would things that happen in Africa have a greater impact? When you have the missing girls from Sudan become global news in ways that probably wouldn’t have been the same fifteen/twenty years ago? You have this instant connectivity and engagement across different countries and peoples, and what does that mean?
Already, I feel like there’s a lot of conversations where Western nations look down on non-Western nations as they technologically develop, saying, “Oh look at Beijing all covered in pollution, and all their rivers are a total wreck.” This idea, that as these countries develop they’re somehow still inferior to Western nations because they’re trying to lift themselves up? I think that’s a conversation that is completely ridiculous. Partly because these countries also have opportunities to choose different pathways. You don’t have to repeat all the atrocities that other nations have done. I think it’s important to open up those conversations more. I know this is something that goes beyond Steampunk, but just talking about… How do nations industrialize? How can people impact the type of ecological plans or developmental plans that their governments are considering?
In one sense, it seems far-reaching to even discuss these ideas, but I think it’s extremely important to consider the ramifications. You can treat Steampunk and art as a game or a hobby, but nonetheless it’s a form of human expression. It’s about communicating something that’s currently happening right now. If we don’t think about the ways that we are concretely interacting with these ideas that are driving us, then it’s like shouting to the void, almost. Why are we reacting this way? I think those things are important to explore.
Boskovich: We were talking about the different paths into how we express our technology. I think that’s behind the motivation to keep appending the “punk” suffix to new words like biopunk, or nanopunk, or all those kinds of things. Once you start thinking about it with steam, you start thinking about it across the board. All of the different ways that society can look, society can be organized. All the different ways we can use technology to fuel our endeavors. I think stuff like biopunk is getting into that from another angle. Maybe there’s a better way to do it then what we’re currently doing?
Pho: I don’t think the use of the “punk” suffix has become tired, but I think people just like adding it without fully understanding why they’re adding it. I think there are definitely people who are involved with Steampunk (and Cyberpunk beforehand) who did realize, this is why we’re into it, this is why we’re adding the “punk”; it’s not just cute. I would like to see people consider that more.
Boskovich: Yeah, what does the “punk” actually mean? Are we representing that “punk” aspect? I really appreciated the contributors who discussed that in their interview. The Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing is one band we talked to and they were like, “We are putting the punk into Steampunk.” I think they started envisioning themselves as a punk band from that era, with all the kind of political messages that would go with that.
Pho: I do think ways that people express the punkness also vibes with current conversation. I know for example, The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing—some of them identify as having non-binary gender and sexual identities, and so did people from the punk movement, too.
It’s fascinating to see when people say that they’re punk, how they’re reacting to narratives that are permeating our culture. What are they punking against? You’ll see it’s not just rebellion for rebellion’s sake, but it is questioning gender, questioning sexuality, questioning this dominant white supremacy that is engulfing our culture, especially the media. Literally fighting corporations, will they eat us alive? I think any science fictional subgenre that ends itself with “punk” has that potential, just because they identify themselves that way.
I also realize that not all punk subgenres are necessarily progressively-oriented, because their participants haven’t fully considered what it means to be rebellious. Especially depending on where you’re from and how you’re doing your art, and what your art means to you and those forms of expression.
On using Steampunk as a force for good…
Boskovich: There was a quote you had in your interview for The Steampunk User’s Manual, where you were talking about people using Steampunk for practical applications that have greater social impact. The one you mentioned as an example is something that Bruce and Melanie Rosenbaum from ModVic were working on. [A bit of background: Bruce and Melanie created a nine-week course called Steampunkinetics for young people with autism spectrum disorders to learn Steampunk design skills. As Steampunk interior designers themselves, they also contributed to The Steampunk User’s Manual with a feature piece on “The RetroFuture Home.”]
I was wondering if you have any other examples of that, people using Steampunk as something that’s actually practical, rather than just being a cool thing or a thought experiment, and can immediately benefit people in the real world.
Pho: Especially in the past year I’ve seen a lot of Steampunk charity events like raising money for cancer research, raising money for organizations that help women suffering from domestic violence, and programs that help the queer community. I think bit-by-bit, various Steampunk groups have become more socially aware and are using Steampunk to help support various progressive causes. I’m really happy to see that, by the way.
I know that Bruce and Melanie are still out developing programs with UMass Lowell and using Steampunk as a teaching method for students. I also know that Kevin Steil did a soft launch, I believe, of the Steampunk Museum, because he really wants the arts and the people involved in the community to be seen and respected as educators, and be able to have their art used as tools in the classroom.
Personally, I was recently contacted by a professor in Germany, who wants to use Steampunk literature to teach multiculturalism to her students. People are definitely seeing the practical potential of Steampunk beyond a weekend warrior activity that you do with your friends or at a convention.
Boskovich: That’s really cool. Did you have any recommendations for the German professor?
Pho: I recommended some books that have already come out, including The Steampunk Bible and Steampunk Revolution (the anthology edited by Ann VanderMeer). Of course, Steampunk World (the recent multicultural anthology edited by Sarah Hans). And various options. We’re also going to discuss more about what it means to live in a multicultural society, what systematic hierarchies of oppression exist that people may or may not see, that people from marginalized backgrounds still suffer from? Engage her students in something that’s fun and interesting, and really makes them think.
I also find it pretty amazing to get outreach from abroad because it shows that it’s not just the US and North America that are really having these conversations, it’s people in other countries. It also reminds me about how earlier this year Kevin Steil did the “Steampunk Hands Around The World” Blogging Campaign, where over eighty bloggers from twenty different countries across eleven languages went and blogged about Steampunk and Steampunk communities, and what they’re doing in their own local communities as well. It really shows there is a dedicated group of people who are looking at the genre and at the aesthetic and using it in ways that have the potential to make it more of a global movement than it has been, even a couple of years ago.
The Steampunk User’s Manual: An Illustrated Practical and Whimsical Guide to Creating Retro-futurist Dreams by Jeff VanderMeer and Desirina Boskovich is available now from Abrams Image. Get lots more updates at here, and download the story “An Officer and a Gentleman” from Richard Ellis Preston, Jr.’s site here!
Desirina Boskovich is a science fiction and fantasy writer whose stories have been published in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Kaleidotrope, and more. She’s also the editor of It Came From the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction.
Diana M. Pho (or in other speculative lights, Ay-leen the Peacemaker) works at Tor Books, runs the multicultural steampunk blog Beyond Victoriana, pens academic things, and tweets. Oh wait, she has a tumblr too.
Never Now Always
Publishers Weekly. 264.22 (May 29, 2017): p49.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Never Now Always
Desirina Boskovich. Broken Eye, $9.99 trade paper (98p) ISBN 978-1-940372-27-3
Boskovich's haunting novella is a stylized meditation on time, memory, and the bonds of family, both by blood and by choice. Lolo, Gor, and the rest of the "rapt children" live in a closed warren of rooms. They eat and exercise when directed by the Voice, sleep in bunks, and discuss their dreams of villages on the moon or in the canopies of great forests. They have been emptied of their memories, except during "memory duty," when they are strapped down by their monstrous caretakers and forced to relive otherwise inaccessible parts of themselves. The routine is disrupted when Lolo remembers two things: her sister, Tess, and the act of writing. She begins to keep a diary etched in her own blood, and recruits Gor to help her find Tess and escape. Lolo's voice is gripping, sometimes pared down to its bones and sometimes expansive and beautiful. Boskovich (The Steampunk User's Manual) poses questions rather than answering them, and the story's brevity might leave some readers bereft at its end, but the evocative prose breathes strange life into inanimate details. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Never Now Always." Publishers Weekly, 29 May 2017, p. 49. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494500717/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6536d3a3. Accessed 15 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494500717
Review of Never Now Always by Desirina Boskovich by scarywhitegirl • May 10, 2017 • Reviews • 0 Comments
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Never Now Always by Desirina Boskovich (Broken Eye Books, 2017) is a young adult novella that explores memory, time, and family. Lolo is one of the “rapt children,” young people who are studied by aliens known as the Caretakers. The Caretakers keep these children in their labs because they are interested in learning more about how humans process memories. During one of her memory sessions, Lolo recalls that she has a sister, and after that moment, she rebels against the Caretakers’ normal system in a desperate search for her missing sister.
Never Now Always, told mostly from Lolo’s perspective, but occasionally from her sister’s perspective, is a dizzying tale fraught with confusion from the protagonists, but written clearly enough for the reader to tease out bits and pieces of what is going on. It is the sort of book that can be a very quick read, but also one that would likely stand up well to multiple readings, which may make some of the plot elements even more clear.
This book is billed as a young adult novella, but some of the themes within the book, like family and identity, might make it seem a bit more like a middle reader book. However, the ending of the book (which I don’t want to give away) convinced me that this book is much more appropriate for young adult and adult readers.
Never Now Always is available for pre-order at Amazon or the Broken Eye Books website, and will be released on June 27, 2017.
The publisher provided us with a free copy of this publication in exchange for an honest review.
NEVER NOW ALWAYS BY DESIRINA BOSKOVICH
BY: MARTIN CAHILL
ISSUE: 8 JANUARY 2018
Memory is a chimera. It is air turning into water turning into earth. It can be a weapon with which to cut, or a needle with which to knit. It can balm and soothe as much as it can enrage and reap. It can strengthen us, and it can bring us down. It can heal us as much as harm us. Memory is not just one thing, but it does one thing above all: it reminds us of who we are, and who we can be. In her novella, Never Now Always, Desirina Boskovich wrestles with this amorphous truth, and—with cutting prose, desolate worlds, sympathetic characters, and alien beings—drags the power of memory into the light.
Never Now Always is not your typical story, though that’s not a huge surprise coming from an author like Boskovich, who’s well known for her strange worlds and haunting prose, and wears the influence of the New Weird on her sleeve. Taking place in an unknown and dreamy dystopian setting, Never Now Always is concerned about the life of a girl named Lolo. She is one of the many children that live in a facility, and her best friend is named Gor, who sleeps below her in their bunks and comforts her after a long day. In this facility, her and the children like her are watched over by beings called Caretakers. Humanoid, with no mouths and three small, lidless, black eyes, they escort the children throughout the facility for experimentation, supplemented by a soothing Voice that directs, and speaks for, them. When the Voice calls your name, which you can feel as a rightness in your body, you must go with the Caretakers, and you must remember.
The Caretakers care, yes, but they care about what can be known. And unknown. Lolo, like every child, is forced to remember; to be injected and fall into her mind, to experience the world which came before the Caretakers’, and tell them what she sees. As quick as she remembers, her keepers just as quickly make her forget.
Except Lolo cannot forget some things. There was a world before her present. Grass. A sun. Food. A dog. A family. A sister. A sister who is somewhere in the facility. A sister she must find, no matter that she can’t trust her mind. What follows this revelation is an eerie, beautiful, and brutal exploration through an alien landscape, as Lolo struggles to find her sister, her way out, and the truth behind what she knows and what she thinks she knows.
Boskovich doesn’t shy away from the brutality of this new and strange world, nor from the effects it has on the children forced to live in it. Lolo is constantly strapped down to a chair, and forced to undergo experimentation, forcefully shoved into her own mind in a desperate attempt to catalog the past. Her sister, we come to learn, may have actually lost her mind in some ways, and is kept apart from the other children for some unknown purpose; she doesn’t know Lolo when she sees her. The Caretakers are quick to put down dissent, and have no compassion, compunction, or remorse for what their grand purpose may be. The setting is unremittingly dystopian, then. But the heartbreaking part is that these children cannot have a word for that. The horror is that these children only remember echoes of their lives, echoes of language, of self; cities that once stood tall and shining; a silver moon in the night sky; families that loved them so dearly. They grasp at these like songs on the wind—and, like those ephemeral tunes, they slip from them too easily.
Boskovich leans fully into the horror and desperation of this world. But the hope of Never Now Always is that the dystopias we find ourselves can be combated, though they may not necessarily be overturned on the first attempt. Over and over again, we see that the biggest hope Lolo has is that sometimes she can remember; she feels the burning hope that they have not taken everything from her, and as long as there is some small part of her awake and aware—that can act to undermine those who would hurt her and her friends, her family—then that work of resistance is worth pursuing. She is constantly finding small ways to act against the current authority: she steals tools so she can write on the walls what she remembers, she explores the facility after bedtime to comb its halls for her sister, and she wilfully attempts to break out, knowing it may result in her own end. It is harrowing, heartbreaking work, as Boskovich pulls away layer after layer of Lolo’s resolve, working her protagonist down to the nub, until the truth is laid bare: as long as you can remember even a little bit, you can resist.
Much like The Dark Tower’s cyclical story, Never Now Always isn’t so much about the end as it is about the journey to get there. There can be no end to the fight, to resisting the regime; there can only be the next moment you get up from the floor and decide to fight back. In this moment of our own world, when authoritarian forces are working to pit their will against the collective memory of their people, it is our duty to remember; it is our duty to fight, no matter the outcome. We fight, because we remember.