interviews

Carmen Maria Machado on speculative writing, the crisis of fiction, and speaking from the margins

Photo by Derek Lee on Unsplash

As a queer author, I’ve used speculative writing since childhood to explore, explain, and examine my experiences. The stories I’ve written through the years almost always contain magical or fantastical elements relating to my feeling of being different from those around me. I never did this consciously, and when I noticed the pattern I wondered if there was some link between queerness and speculative writing. Does speculative writing provide a unique platform for expressing the queer experience? Carmen Maria Machado, having written the speculative into queer works of fiction and nonfiction, seemed like the obvious person to answer this question.

Machado’s writing demonstrates how the speculative can function as both mirror and magnifier for the queer experience. Across her body of work, the uncanny, the strange, and the mystical become ways to articulate life outside normative frameworks, while the elasticity and hybridity of genre make space for queer desire, fear, and embodiment in all their complexity. Her writing suggests that the speculative is a way of refracting reality, illuminating how queerness shapes our understanding of the human experience while rejecting heteronormativity even within genre itself.

I spoke with Carmen over Zoom about the ways speculative writing can serve as language and metaphor for queer life. Our conversation touched on the diagonal experience we share as queer authors, the “Bury Your Gays” trope, her methods for crafting speculative stories, and the queer media that shaped her growing up.

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Jayda Skidmore: I see speculative writing as creating a framework for the queer experience within language and metaphor. Can you define what writing the speculative means to you?

**Carmen Maria Machado:**I feel like genre labels are ultimately arbitrary. It’s not like they’re not interesting; they are interesting, for all kinds of reasons. But to me, the speculative occupies a large number of labels and sub-labels that people give to non-realism and can mean all kinds of things.

People who are queer and who belong to any number of groups outside the mainstream are operating from a place of diagonal experience.

By the time I was coming of age as a writer, that was the word I felt the most comfortable using to describe what I was writing. I would say it’s very loosely non-realist work that also engages with the real world in some capacity. So, I would not call Game of Thrones speculative fiction; I would think of that as epic fantasy. I think of speculative fiction as being in the same general areas as liminal fantasy and magical realism. It has a genre element, a non-realist element, but it’s rooted in our world. That’s probably it, in my opinion, but these are all very nebulous terms. The meanings shift.

JS: Thinking about your own writing, how do you feel the speculative elements relate to queerness and queer trauma?

**CMM:**I think that people who are queer—and people who belong to any number of groups that exist outside of the mainstream—are operating from a place of diagonal experience. It’s diagonal from other people who don’t share that identity. I think speculative fiction is a way of accessing that weird diagonal experience.

Certainly, I think queerness and the disinterest in realism are related. A lot of it has to do with wondering: How do you tell stories? I don’t think it’s about trauma, either—trauma is part of it, but it has to do with queer joy, and the queer experience as neutrally defined. Basically, that you can see things other people can’t see.

I’m reminded of this time when I was growing up. My mother loved the movie Fried Green Tomatoes, and it was a huge part of my childhood because my mother would watch it whenever she ironed. I remember seeing it as an adult after coming out and being like, “These are lesbians!” But I went my whole life without realizing it. I remember saying to my mother, “Do you realize that these characters are lesbians?” and she was like, “No, they’re not.” And I was like, “Mom, they are.” And we got into a huge fight, and she accused me of reading into it. I was like, it’s not that I’m reading into it. It’s just that I can see what you can’t see. It’s so obvious to me, and of course, it’s not obvious to her as a straight lady, right? That’s what I’m talking about—you have this way of seeing things that other people can’t necessarily access.

But again, I think that’s true of not just queerness. It’s also true of other identities. One way you can write and talk about that is by thinking about how you look at the world the same way every day, and then one day you look at it and it’s slightly different, something has changed.

JS: You mentioned that it’s not just about queer trauma, which I agree with, but the way I come at my queerness in my writing is through a lens of fear. I’ve encountered other queer people who feel their use of the speculative isn’t about fear, but rather about the lack of language for their experiences in a heteronormative society. How has speculative writing lent itself to expressing your queer experience?

**CMM:**I think it’s all of it. It’s about trying to put a container or language to the ineffable. That includes things like desire and also things like trauma and fear and sadness and grief.

When I was writing my memoir, I was trying to capture a super specific experience of pain that is related to queerness, but not in ways you would expect. Not just, “I’m gay and it went badly.” There’s the dynamic of what it means to be hurt by another queer person, which is a really specific flavor of betrayal. It has to do with learning how to explain and talk about it. It has to do with how to think about it.

I feel like I’m a queer person and the way that I’m approaching writing about bodies and desire and being alive just doesn’t feel fully rooted in this plane. That’s part of what makes it hard to articulate. I write about desire as uncomplicated, in terms of its sexuality. No one’s really angsting over being gay. Not that that’s not important to have represented. It’s just not what I’m interested in. Queer sex or being bisexual are things I’m interested in articulating and expressing on the page, but in the sense that they’re not commented upon. It just simply is.

JS: That’s something that I really enjoy about your writing. I love the way queerness is just inherent. It’s not the only or entire purpose behind these characters. It’s justthem**. They justare.**

**CMM:**In a lot of my writing—even when I was keeping a LiveJournal for 10 years of my life, from fifteen to twenty-five—I was writing, probably way too publicly, about sex and stuff I was interested in. People liked it and responded to it, when really, I was writing about the thing that was burning inside of me.

This might be so niche, but when I was writing on LiveJournal about being bisexual in college, for example, I actually had a huge blowout conflict with an aunt of mine who somehow, through her daughter I guess, found my LiveJournal. This would’ve been around 2005. My aunt basically was like, “You can’t tell people you’re gay. You can’t. It’s okay to be gay, but you can’t just tell people that. Don’t you want to have a job? Do you want to live your life?” All I could think was, “Whoa, what an insane way of approaching the world.” I was like, “I’d actually rather be out and happy and not afraid to talk about who I am.” So, I feel like I’ve always been incentivized towards writing what I want to write about, in the way I want to write about it, and doing so in this very unapologetic way. I hate the phrase unapologetic, but truly doing it in an unapologetic way. When one commits like that, I think readers feel it.

JS: I’ve read discussions you’ve had about feeling drawn to the space between reality and the fantastic, that it’s close to how you see the world but elevated. How do speculative elements color your perception of the world? How do they manifest in your lived experience?

**CMM:**I am the kind of person who has always engaged in a lot of mental play—I’ve been doing this since I was a child. All children engage in play, and if you’re very lucky, that capacity continues into adulthood. That was a huge part of my identity as a child. I’d read a scary book, for example, and then be up all night because I felt it so strongly—I was always really responsive to my environment in this way.

I’m just a human being trying to write about my experience. No individual person can stand in for their entire community.

I’m prone to a lot of weird thoughts and funny thoughts and what-ifs. I have this way of being able to take an image or an idea and just run with it. In Her Body and Other Parties, I have a story called “Eight Bites,” which came to me through two channels. I had been asked to write a Little Mermaid pastiche, which was ultimately rejected, so, I was like, okay, I’ll just put it in my book. Then I also was reading this memoir, Stranger Here: How Weight-Loss Surgery Transformed My Body and Messed with My Head by Jen Larsen. It’s about gastric bypass surgery. In the memoir, Larsen has some detail where she says something like, “I had lost X-number of pounds. It was like I had lost a whole person.” Then I thought, oh, what an interesting concept. Most people read that and think, “Right, the weight that she’s describing she lost is the equivalent weight of another person.” But my brain was imagining a person coming out of her. And I was like, “Wait, so it’s like there’s two of her? The part of her body that she lost is its own separate entity?” My brain just immediately goes there. I don’t even stop in that middle place. I understand what the image is trying to say, but I’m already eight steps ahead. I do that a lot, where I’ll just see a thing or have a weird idle thought, and then the story just manifests. Not even manifests, but kind of spirals out.

JS: InDream House as Prologue**, you quote Saidiya Hartman who says, “How does one tell impossible stories? … Advancing a series of speculative arguments.” Do you think queer stories are impossible stories to convey?**

**CMM:**I don’t think any story is impossible to convey, and yet I also think that conveying a story is ultimately always an exercise in approximation. That is just the reality of experience, right? You have an experience, it’s this singular thing, and even in the moment where you try to translate it into words—whether you’re speaking them or writing them—you’re already pulling away from the experience.

Again, you have to write what burns inside of you, the thing that speaks to you, the thing that you must say, or else you will die, to paraphrase Audre Lorde. But this idea of, what must you say? When you are trying to say an approximation of something in proximity to another person who shares that experience, they will understand the thing you’re saying. For example, you’re like, “I’m a queer person who had a queer experience. I’m trying to articulate that experience in some capacity.” Another queer person is going to see that and understand it.

Part of the joy of reading and writing is that moment where you read something and there’s this jolt of recognition. You’re like, “I didn’t know anyone else had that thought before. I didn’t know anyone had that experience before, and here’s someone who understands, who has experienced the same thing I thought I was alone in experiencing.”

JS: In the chapter “Dream House as Omen,” from In the Dream House, you end with the words, “Fear makes liars of us all.” I pondered that quote a lot in relation to my thoughts about queerness and fear, and using the speculative as language for the anxiety I feel regarding my queerness. It got me thinking about the relationship between lies and fiction—what do you think about that relationship? Does it impact queer narratives?

**CMM:**I would not say there’s any relationship between lying and fiction, even though I know that’s a quirky little thing people like to say: “I’m a professional writer. I lie for money,” or whatever. That isn’t actually what writing fiction is. Writing fiction is an attempt—ideally—at approaching some kind of truth.

In the case of my memoir, the lie I’m speaking about is that I promised my ex I wouldn’t write about the things that were happening—and I did, both in fiction and nonfiction. Fiction is another way of approaching the truth. It just has different tools that are available and a different way of impacting people. People read fiction differently, there are different parameters around it, but it is another way of trying to tell a true story.

I think that right now, fiction is in crisis. Not the genre—not as though the novel is dying—but the idea that how we think about fiction, the approach to writing fiction, is in crisis. All these conversations about who’s allowed to write what, and what it means to write from your own life, or write from someone else’s life, or write about a story you heard once and use that in fiction, puts us in a weird moment. I don’t think people understand what fiction is and how it’s written. It’s created a lot of confusion around the rules, if any exist, around fiction writing.

JS: I completely agree. Going into that a bit more,In the Dream House shows trauma a queer person can experience, and there’s a conversation within the LGBTQ+ community about the overrepresentation of queer trauma versus happiness—it’s the Bury Your Gays trope. How do you balance the need for positive representation with the realities of queer trauma?

**CMM:**Conversations about representation are so profoundly broken that I actually find it alarming. This is kind of what I’m talking about with fiction being in crisis. It is not your job—“you” being the general “you”—to represent anything in any particular way, right? Your job is to write art, which is not to say that you can’t do a bad job at something. On one hand, certainly I do not want all queer literature to be defined by trauma. That would be insane. But also, it is not inherently bad if someone is writing about queer trauma or, for example, decides to kill a gay person in their text.

This is going to make me sound 10,000 years old, but I think we’re overcorrecting in this very “social media” way, where people understand the Bury Your Gays trope and why it’s problematic, and then for some reason the mental course corrective is, “If you kill a gay character off, then you are being homophobic by engaging in this trope,” which is an insane thing to say. It’s not true.

Articulating that a trope exists and how it exists is just a way of saying we should notice when certain types of stories are cropping up in a place. What does that mean and why is that? That’s why I wrote the chapter about queer villainy in the memoir [“Dream House as Queer Villainy”]. I was thinking about the question, what does it mean when I’m essentially writing a book saying, “This really fucked up thing happened to me in this lesbian relationship.” Technically, that is engaging in bad media representation of my community. But I am not the representative of all gay people. I’m just a human being trying to write about my experience.****The desire to turn individual people into totems or representatives of their entire community is such folly. Even when it’s positive, it never goes well. No individual person can stand in for their entire community. When you make them do that, that in itself is homophobic, racist, etcetera.

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