Episode 132: Transcript
Episode: 132: A Sense of Place with Jessica Johns
Transcription by Keffy
Annalee: [00:00:00] Charlie Jane, what are you gonna do with yourself now that the Willow TV series is over and Disney is taking it off streaming?
Charlie Jane: [00:00:07] I am seriously in mourning. Like, I mean, it's bad enough that they didn't pick it up for a second season because after finally watching season one with you, I'm like, I need more. I need—
Annalee: [00:00:17] Same.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:17] To see where this is gonna go, I need to see them fight the Wyrm. I need to know that Graydon is gonna be okay. Graydon is such a lovely character and like they left… I don't wanna get into too deep into spoilers, but they left Graydon in a really scary place.
[00:00:31] Also, on a personal note, a TV show that I worked really hard on, Y: The Last Man was removed, or has been removed probably by the time you hear this from FX on Hulu at the same time. And it just feels weird to have something that you put a year and a half, two years of your life into, that you put a lot of thought and energy and blood and sweat and tears and love into, and it just vanishes from the internet. It feels like a betrayal of what we thought streaming was gonna be about. I'm gonna be honest.
Annalee: [00:01:00] Yeah, it's really true. It makes me angry and here is my plan. Okay, I'm setting up a pro-union democratic alternate world, which you can reach through a portal whose coordinates I will pass on to you later. And this is a world where all shows will be available for streaming.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:18] I love it.
Annalee: [00:01:19] The creators will be paid a fair wage for their work and streaming residuals. So that's where we're all headed in our new portal fantasy.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:26] I hope this portal is just something that you can dial into through the internet and just watch TV in the alternate universe. I mean, maybe it also includes TV shows that were canceled in this universe, but we can watch more seasons of them in the other universe.
Annalee: [00:01:39] Exactly.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:39] Like season two of Julie and the Phantoms is just waiting for us on the other side of the portal.
Annalee: [00:01:44] That is right.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:44] I'm never getting over that. I am never getting over that show being canceled.
Annalee: [00:01:49] No, we're, Kenny Ortega stans for life and especially for that show, so.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:53] Oh my God.
Annalee: [00:01:54] On that note, I'm Annalee Newitz.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:56] I'm Charlie Jane Anders.
Annalee: [00:01:58] You're listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. This week, we are sadly not gonna go to Tir Asleen where Willow takes place, but we are gonna talk about places like Tir Asleen, the imaginary and real places where stories take place. And this is because I personally think that setting often really gets downplayed in the writing process.
[00:02:21] So we're gonna talk about why it's important and how places in stories can behave like characters and sometimes even form the backbone of a narrative.
[00:02:30] And later on in the episode, we're gonna be joined by Jessica Johns, who's the author of Bad Cree, which is an incredible new novel, which deals with a very specific place in Treaty 8 territory in Northern Alberta, Canada. So, we'll be talking with her about what it means to evoke a real place through world building.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:49] Also on our mini episode next week, we're gonna be talking about anthropomorphization, which is something that my cat is very familiar with. He's always like, stop anthropomorphizing me. Actually, he likes it. I think he likes being anthropomorphized. But anyway, so anthropomorphization.
Annalee: [00:03:00] Does he? I don't know.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:03] I mean, I project onto him that he likes being anthropomorphized.
Annalee: [00:03:06] We're gonna talk about that.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:07] Okay. And so anthropomorphization is a very fancy word describing what happens when we project human ideas and sort of human feelings and identities onto non-human life forms, like my cat and even inanimate objects. It can be a good thing to do in a story, but also it can be kind of a bad thing. And you know, my cat's excited because we're gonna get right into it.
Annalee: [00:03:29] And by the way, did you know that this podcast is entirely independent and funded by you, our listeners, through Patreon? That's right. If you become a patron, you are making this podcast happen. Plus, you get audio extras with every episode. You get access to our Discord channel where we hang out all the time.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:46] All the time.
Annalee: [00:03:48] Everything about how to anthropomorphize cats as well as cool books to read. Think about it. All of that could be yours for just a few bucks a month and anything you give goes right back into making our opinions even more correct.
[00:04:00] So find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:02] All right, let's get into it.
[00:04:02] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]
Charlie Jane: [00:04:38] So Annalee, what does it mean to build up a sense of place in a story?
Annalee: [00:04:43] I think that places are narratives. They're not just the backdrop. They're not just the thing that you paint that goes behind the characters that are walking around in front of it. And really the easiest way to think about this is to consider how important maps can be for a story.
[00:05:04] This is a real trope in fantasy writing. You often get a fantasy novel that has a map in the beginning. Sometimes the map is really important, sometimes it isn't. But usually it tells you something about where our characters are gonna go, not just physically, but also as a kind of character arc.
[00:05:24] One of the examples I think of a lot is the map in the beginning of Vernor Vinge’s novel Fire Upon the Deep, and it's very different from a fantasy map. It's actually quite simple. It almost looks like maybe Vernor drew it on a napkin or something, and it's a picture of our galaxy and the galactic disc is facing us. So, it's kind of just a line. And then we're looking at all of the different regions around the galaxy where characters have set up space stations and various habitats. And in his world, there are different regions of the areas above the galactic plane that allow technology to work faster and faster.
[00:06:11] And so if you're down in the galactic disc, it’s the slow zone. Everything just kind of sucks. Basically, you just have like Google and the internet and then like once you get above the slow zone and into an area that's called The Beyond, suddenly you have things like smart matter. You have the ability to have you know, general AI. All kinds of manufacturing become possible.
[00:06:37] And immediately when you look at that, first of all, what you realize is this is a novel where the galaxy is gonna be a character. And indeed, he makes good on that. Like we see all kinds of great ways that characters from across the galaxy are communicating or not communicating.
[00:06:52] And so I think that that's one way that a place becomes a character is through kind of evoking different spaces in a region and showing that the different spaces allow us to do different things. And then of course there's just classic fantasy maps like you get in gaming, like the Sword Coast in Dungeons & Dragons.
[00:07:11] That's where the new D&D movie takes place. But that's also where most of us are playing our games right now because that's the main setting. And so, I've been all up and down the Sword Coast, I have like a great sense of what the Sword Coast is like. Where you can find ice giants on the Sword Coast, where you can get a good cup of coffee. And again, it gives us a sense of possibility, where we can go, what kinds of stories we can tell.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:37] Yeah, as opposed to the sword coaster, which is just the thing you put down to keep your sword from scratching your tabletop.
Annalee: [00:07:43] That's a real tiny sword or really big coaster.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:47] It’s actually a really long.
Annalee: [00:07:49] Sword-shaped coaster. shaped
Charlie Jane: [00:07:49] It’s a long coaster. Plus, you know, it—
Annalee: [00:07:53] So scabbards are right out, we're just right into coasters. No, it’s good.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:57] In polite society, Annalee. In polite society—
Annalee: [00:07:58] Okay.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:00] We use sword coasters.
Annalee: [00:08:01] All right.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:02] Yeah. And so, I mean, in our episode about epic fantasy, we talked a lot about maps and the moment you pick up a book with a map in it, you know that you're going to be getting to know the terrain and the features of the landscape super well and that it's gonna matter in the story. At least, usually. Actually, it annoys me a lot when I pick up a book and there's a map in the front and then I get to the end of the book and I'm like, I didn't need that map. They didn’t actually—
Annalee: [00:08:26] I know. Why is that map there?
Charlie Jane: [00:08:28] The map kind of made a promise that the book didn't keep. But usually when there's a map, you kind of know what you're gonna get. But you get books that go even further. Like recently, The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd is a book that's about maps, where maps are kind of a character in the story and the relationship between the map and the actual place is, kind of the whole story hinges on that in a really interesting way.
[00:08:51] Also, sometimes you read a fantasy novel or any kind of genre novel where you get super elaborate detailed descriptions of a place. The one I often think about is Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, for example. And, you know, China Miéville really invests a lot of time in making sure that you know the ins and outs of New Crobuzon, however you're supposed to pronounce that.
[00:09:16] And there are definitely times when the, like you kind of said, the character arc is mirrored by the progression across the landscape and the topography reveals what the characters are going through. And this is especially true when there's a big journey where we go someplace and then kind of come back again, like in The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, or you know, when you're going on a quest, like the classic example is Lord of the Rings. The map kind of tells us where the characters are going and how they get there, but also kind of what they're going through on the journey.
Annalee: [00:09:46] Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's interesting because in Lord of the Rings, especially, which I think really set the tone for a lot of recent stories about quests, they’ll have like a really horrific experience in some place that's like spiky or full of danger or like really cold or full of spiderwebs. And then Tolkien will make sure to give them a soft, relaxing, idyllic place. Usually someplace run by elves, you know, and they'll kind of go and they'll have a rejuvenating time, and they'll have food and they'll get to take a bath and it’s kind of like punctuated equilibrium or something where they get to have this moment of calm before they face a new scary place. So, there’s an alternating between a soft, restful place and a scary, spiny place.
[00:10:39] Also, I think, in quest narratives, one of the really big tropes is turning a place into an aspiration. And there's so many stories where the plot of the story is, we're going to the planet, or we're going to the territory, or we're going to the promised land, or we're going to the land beyond the portal. And it comes up a lot, I think, probably in the west, because we do have a lot of stories about promised places. And it's interesting because the classic story of Ulysses, which comes from Greek storytelling and mythology is about a promised land, which is from the past. It's about Ulysses trying to get home. That's the whole thing he's trying to do on his quest. He's like, you know, I keep having to run into all these sirens and there's like the cyclops and all this other crap. And I'm literally just doing it because I wanna get home to my farm and to my wife and just hang out and drink wine and eat yummy bread or whatever they're gonna do with their farm.
[00:11:45] And the other type of aspirational place comes from the Old Testament in the Bible where the Jews are wandering around in the desert, in Exodus. If you managed to make it to the second chapter of the Old Testament, you know that they're wandering around and literally that's what they're doing, is they're looking for a place that they, the promised land, that exists in the future. And it's always in the future. And indeed, they do kind of eventually find it, spoilers for a really old book. But still, in a lot of Jewish prayers, we still talk about how there's a promised land in the future. And so, it's these two dueling promised lands, or destinations that, that often, in stories, get kind of flipped around.
[00:12:34] But we see those tropes coming up again and again and one of my favorite table flips of these stories is where you have a story about characters who are questing for a place and they get there and it totally sucks.
[00:12:49] Kim Stanley Robinson has a great novel called Aurora, which is about a generation ship that is heading toward a planet that they're hoping humans will be able to populate. And they get there and it's just, it's been this insane journey that has cost them pretty much everything. It’s been, like, I don't know, 10 or 12 generations of people. So, they're really far away from home and they get to the planet. It's like uh-oh, the planet is full of prion diseases. Now we have to go back home.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:21] Womp womp.
Annalee: [00:13:21] Womp womp. There's a lot of stories that do that, you know, for example, in The Magicians where they're trying to get to Fillory, which is kind of an alternate world promised land, and they get there and they're like actually in the show there's like cocaine in the air or heroin in the air. And so, the reason why everyone thinks it's the promised land is because they're all high while they're there. So that's another great twist that you get.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:48] Man, that show was weird. I love how weird that show got. Yeah, and you know, there's the Brazilian science fiction show 3%, which you can watch on Netflix. I highly recommend the first season or two. And it's all about this kind of competition where the best of the best. And it's like, basically undermining the idea of meritocracy from the beginning. But like the so-called best of the best get to go to this special place where everything is wonderful and you have all this amazing technology and it's like this post-scarcity place, but only for like the elite quote unquote. Everybody else kinda lives in slums.
[00:14:22] And of course you do get there and it turns out to not be that great. But it turns out to be complicated because in some ways it's everything that you were promised. It's just people are still people, there’s still terrible politics. It's still kind of oppressive in its own way.
[00:14:38] And I think in a speculative fiction story, it's interesting to think about, on the one hand, places that are basically mundane, but they are perturbed or interrupted by the fantastical, like the fantastical intrudes on a world and stands out and becomes a feature of the world versus like places that are inherently fantastical, themselves, where like the fantastical is kind of embedded in the world.
[00:15:00] It's like the difference between, I don't know, urban fantasy where a mundane city contains a fantastical element that's often hidden or sequestered and secondary world fantasy where the whole world is like suffused with the fantastical, and there are geographical features like the skeleton of a dead god or dragon skulls lying around.
[00:15:17] Off the top of my head, you know, on the one hand you've got, Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk, which takes place in Chicago and it's recognizably Chicago, but there's like, angels and demons and things running around, and it gets kind of, and there's like a whole secret world that most people don't know about.
[00:15:35] And then on the other hand, you've got The Owl House where the whole time they're living on the skeleton of this dead titan that turns out to actually be really important. And it's just like, oh yeah, there's the head, there's the like, we’re on the skeleton. It's super weird.
Annalee: [00:15:50] Yeah, it's funny because that image of the island that's inside the ribcage of a giant skeleton.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:56] Oh my God.
Annalee: [00:15:56] That's something that we see in Perdido Street Station by China Miéville.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:00] Right.
Annalee: [00:16:00] Which we mentioned earlier. There's a district in the city that looks like that and I always wondered if Owl House, if the designers had been thinking of that or I mean, you know, it might be just convergent evolution, but it's still, it's and incredible image and it really makes sense that if you had gigantic skeletons like that, you would totally build a city inside.
[00:16:25] I also think that place can provide an atmosphere that changes the way we read the story. So, you have a narrative that because of where it's set suddenly, you know exactly what kind of narrative it is. And one story where this is really striking is Malka Older’s new book, which is called The Mimicking of Known Successes and—
Charlie Jane: [00:16:51] It’s such a great book.
Annalee: [00:16:55] It’s a fantastic book and it really does have an amazing sense of place because Jupiter is being occupied by people who are living in its upper atmosphere. And the way they get around is they build these train tracks that orbit the entire planet. So, the planet has like a whole bunch of, almost like bracelets all around it, and they build their habitats off of these train tracks and train stations. And what Malka does in that book, because really, it isn't a book about how awesome Jupiter is and all this stuff. It's a murder mystery. It's just a straight up murder mystery with a really amazing Sherlock-esque detective. And her girlfriend, who's also an incredible scientist and has a lot of insight into all of the work that they're doing.
[00:17:43] And so, When the characters get together and they discuss the mystery, because they're on Jupiter, it's constantly foggy and windy and cold.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:52] Oh my God.
Annalee: [00:17:52] And they will go inside and cuddle up next to the heater and have tea, and instantly it evokes that Sherlock Holmes vibe. And so even though you're on Jupiter, instead of your brain going to like, oh, I'm in a sci-fi novel about Jupiter, and I expect certain kinds of adventures to take place.
[00:18:13] Instead you're like, oh, I'm in 19th century London and I expect a domestic kind of drama surrounding this murder, and indeed that's what the story is about. But Malka Older really uses the setting to help orient us in what type of story it is and does just an incredible job. And in the process, I think, allows us to see Jupiter in a really different way, too, and gives us a sense of like, actually what would it really be like to live on Jupiter? It wouldn't be what you think. So, I love that about it.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:46] Yeah, I love a story where there's a really strong atmosphere and where the sense of place kind of roots you in what the characters are dealing with and it just feels like it's just dripping with personality. One of my favorite books in the last few years is The House of Rust by Kadija Abdullah Bajaber. It takes place in Mombasa, a seaside city in Kenya where the author actually lives, and every page is suffused with lovely details of life in Mombasa. They create like this really warm, rich atmosphere that kind of keeps you anchored as things get really surreal and strange and there's like talking crows and talking cats and a ship made out of bones and everything.
[00:19:29] And I feel like that is a thing. When an author is writing about a place where they actually live, it creates a strong sense that this story really happened because the details feel so impossible to deny.
[00:19:39] I found, personally, that when I write stories set in San Francisco and mine all the intimate stuff that I know about this city, it kinda helps me in a way, too, when I turn around and write fictional cities, because I think about the lived in feeling that I'm able to get when I write about San Francisco.
[00:19:56] And I'm like, how can I get that in a fictional place? I don't know, do you think it helps when someone's writing about a real place that they know? Do you think that that makes the city more of a character in the story?
Annalee: [00:20:08] Yeah, I mean, I wrote a novel called Future of Another Timeline, which is set in the city where I grew up, in Irvine. And it's set roughly around the time that I grew up, which is important because of course, places change over time and that's part of the story that the place tells you is about its own history. And so, for me, it was really important in Future of Another Timeline to create a mood that was really rooted in these specific places that I remembered some of which are totally gone now, and it kind of spread out into other parts of the novel.
[00:20:48] I mean, it's a time travel novel and the characters are going to all different crazy places, including they're going to ancient Lebanon and other locations that are perhaps less familiar to readers than maybe suburban California would be. And every time I took characters to a location, I would ask people who were experts in it about what that place was. What they would see in that place. Not just like, oh, there's mountains, but like, are there nightclubs? For example, I was, I have a character who's in North Carolina and actually, I asked you because you had lived in North Carolina, and I was like what was the—
Charlie Jane: [00:21:31] And I knew all the gay bars.
Annalee: [00:21:33] I know. I was like, tell me the name of a gay bar.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:36] And you were like, oh, well there was this place called Flex. And so, I have the characters go to Flex and it's so funny because I got emails from people who were like, what? You knew about Flex? And of course, I was like, yes, I know all.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:48] Man, that place was a hole.
Annalee: [00:21:52] Yeah. And it is a hole in the novel, too. Although it was funny because when the story is set, Flex hadn't opened yet. And so, the guy who was really excited that I mentioned Flex was like, Ooh. So, in an alternate timeline, Flex opened earlier, right? And I was like, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:06] Oh, that’s my bad.
Annalee: [00:22:08] It totally, totally did. No, but that's actually fine because it was an alternate… it's an alternate history. So, Flex just had a longer lifespan.
[00:22:16] But for me, like I actually did, even for the places I was writing about in Irvine, I did do a lot of looking at old maps, looking at pictures of it. I talked to some friends of mine who had been to the same places and been to the same record stores that I described, and I was like, do you remember what the record store looked like? How big was it? I really wanted it to feel… I felt like that place was so important to making me who I am and is so important to making these characters who they are, that I wanted it to just be… Like, I literally wanted the pizza place to have the right name, Lamppost Pizza. It had to be that. It had to be Knollwood Burgers. Those were places that we hung out.
[00:23:00] And there is something like, almost an invocation spell when you like use the real names of places and the real names of places that maybe are gone. Like that just helps put you in that space. But I also think that places can be characters that have their own opinions about things. So, it's not always just about, like for me, recreating Irvine. Really, it’s about showing how these people are interacting with it. But Irvine itself, I didn't feel was like a character in that story.
[00:23:38] Whereas other stories, like for example Boots Riley's movie, Sorry To Bother You, which is set in Oakland. Oakland feels like a character and the main character in that movie, Cassius Green, who goes from being a telemarketer to being this kind of corporate shit ball who is participating in some really shady programs to indenture people and eventually do some other even more invasive things to workers. He feels like an embodiment of Oakland, Cassius Green, because he's someone who's gone from being like a scrappy guy who hangs out with artists, hangs out with union organizers, and then he goes corporate and he turns against his own community. And that is the story of Oakland. Like Oakland has for a long time, been a hotbed of radical political movements. It's the birthplace of the Black Panther movement, and it's really… Not the comic book, Black Panther movement, the actual Black Panther movement that inspired the comic book character.
[00:24:44] And at the same time, Oakland is transforming really rapidly. It's being gentrified. A ton of tech companies are coming in there, a ton of other corporations. And so, it's like this divided city and it really is. Cassius Green feels like he embodies Oakland. And I'm super excited about Boots Riley's new TV show, which is coming out very soon, called I'm a Virgo, which is about a Black teenager who grows to be like 12 feet tall and his parents are hiding him in the house because they're like, what the hell is gonna happen to a giant Black man? We’ve gotta protect this kid. But eventually he gets out and that's the story of the show.
[00:25:24] But again, it feels like that's a story about Oakland. It's about what happens when Black men have power and become visible and become big? And so, I love that. And I feel like that is very much about using a place to talk about social change over time, to talk about communities over time, but then also have characters that kind of personify that place.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:50] Yeah, and you can definitely get an effect where a character, kinda stands in for the place or has this symbolic or close relationship with a place where the character actually becomes kind of a genius loci or the embodied spirit of a place.
I think about N.K. Jemisin’s recent duology about New York City, which starts with The City We Became.
Annalee: [00:26:12] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:12] Which is a really profound example of this. It's got these characters who represent different boroughs of New York who have to kind of join together to save their home from this Lovecraftian force. And Jemisin’s deep knowledge of New York really brings this story to life. And when you get very literal about a place having a mind of its own, then you can get to there being local gods, but also you can have hauntings, which are another way to bring a place to life.
Annalee: [00:26:38] Yes, I think that hauntings are tremendously important to stories about place. And one way to think about this is that we explore places through hauntings by personifying a place in ghosts. And I think about, as a funny example, the British show, Ghosts, which also has an American version, which I didn't watch, but I did watch the British version.
[00:27:08] And it's a cute comedy about a couple who are trying to fix up a very, very old estate and turn it into like an event space or like a B&B type place. And one of the people in the couple turns out, I think she gets hit on the head or something, and then she can see ghosts. So, she can see that this house is inhabited by a group of ghosts who represent different historical periods in the house's history.
[00:27:36] So there's like a neolithic guy who lived there long before any kind of house was there. There’s a Renaissance person. There's somebody from like the 1990s who's a Tory politician, somebody from the ‘70s. So, there's a whole group of people, and they all have a stake in what happens to the house. They're very concerned about what she's doing with it. A little bit like Beetlejuice which also has this couple who are very concerned about what's happening to their house after they die.
[00:28:07] And those are kind of funny examples, but I think there's also more serious examples like the movie Poltergeist which I think is super interesting because it table flips the usual haunted house idea where typically it's an ancient house, a very old house that has all of these things that have happened in it. But in Poltergeist, it's a brand-new house, a brand new suburban home that's literally been built like seconds before the characters move in. But it is built on an Indian burial ground. This is a common trope that we're actually gonna talk about a little bit more with Jessica Johns when she joins us.
[00:28:45] But what is being evoked there is the idea that the land itself has a stake in what happens to it, and they don't want these suburbs being built. The land is like, no. And indeed, spoilers for a really old movie, the house is eventually like sucked into a giant maw, leaving nothing behind.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:09] Love it. Yeah. I think that part of what's interesting about thinking about sense of place is that bodies are sites of trauma. Our bodies carry trauma with us. And you have places where you can kind of feel the trauma that your body has been through, but places also carry the scars of trauma and you can look at a place and see the traumas that have happened there and see the literal, often literal scars on the landscape left behind by wars, atrocities, natural disasters, benign neglect, not so benign neglect. And I feel like it's always interesting to kinda look at a place and be able to see where crimes have kind of happened there.
Annalee: [00:29:51] Yeah, it's so funny. One of my favorite places in a movie is the spaceship in Alien. Where, in the first film where they arrive. And you can see that there's been this horrific thing that's happened. There's this exploded skeleton of an alien. We don't know how old it is. You know the crashed spaceship. And so that sets the tone for a movie that's basically a haunted house movie, but it's set in this ancient spaceship initially, and then of course the, the quote unquote ghost, the monster follows them onto their more modern spaceship.
[00:30:25] But I also think that, looking at this from a different perspective, I think that part of the trauma that you see in a place that you were suggesting is when the land is being used, when the land is being victimized. When we have like an extractive relationship with the land, or like a transactional relationship with it.
[00:30:49] And this is a central concern in Dune. You know, Dune is a series named after a place that has been horrifically abused, the planet Arrakis, for resources. And the indigenous people of that planet have had to move underground in order to escape from the way that the surface of their planet is being mined repeatedly. And of course, the local animals are also being harmed by this, the worms.
[00:31:18] And also we see this in the show, The Mandalorian, which. Has a bit of a Dune-like feel in some ways because it is about the planet Mandalore, what's gonna happen to Mandalore? The original inhabitants, a lot of them are living underground because the planet has been mined for Beskar, which is like, I guess the best, that's why it's called Beskar. I don't know. It's like a metal that's like, The best. So that was my super great joke about Beskar, Charlie Jane.
[00:31:52] Charlie is making the greatest face in the Zoom right now. She's just like, she's like, can I eat my lips?
[00:32:00] In my work, in The Terraformers, my recent novel, I was really interested in thinking about people who have a more extractive relationship with the planet. They're just trying to take its resources or turn it into a tourist resort. And then there's other people who are like, no, I wanna have a mutual relationship with this place. I wanna keep the ecosystems in balance. I wanna live in balance with the ecosystems. I wanna sustain this planet over time. And to me that's like a central conflict in our relationship with the land a lot of the time.
[00:32:39] Yeah. So if we think about place as narrative and place as character, this really helps us understand how our characters in our stories are in relationship with places and that what they do with the places they go to, and with the places they journey through, it's kind of like writing relationships between two characters.
[00:33:03] And coming up after the break, we're gonna talk about this with Jessica Johns, who has written a lot about a place that she knows very well.
[00:33:12] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.
Annalee: [00:33:17] Jessica Johns is an award-winning author and a member of the Sucker Creek First Nation in Alberta. She doesn't just publish fiction and nonfiction. She's also creating visual art, performing her work live, and is on the editorial board of Guts, an anti-colonial feminist magazine. Her first novel is called Bad Cree, and it came out earlier this year.
[00:33:37] Welcome, Jessica.
Jessica: [00:33:39] Hi. Thank you so much for having me.
Annalee: [00:33:41] So your novel, Bad Cree is one of my favorite things that I read this year, and it features a very creepy monster who is tied to a specific place in northern Alberta. And your main character, Mackenzie, is living in Vancouver. Starts having visions tied to this monster in this place that gets so intense that she knows she has to go home and deal with it.
[00:34:03] And often in a story full of fantastical elements like this, readers expect that we'll be like journeying to an imaginary place, going through a portal or something like that. But that's the opposite of what happens to Mackenzie. And it feels like the closer she gets to the supernatural creature haunting her family, the more real and vivid the places become.
[00:34:22] So I wonder if you could talk about what it's like to world build a real place in a story that has so many fantastical elements.
Jessica: [00:34:32] Yeah, so that's such a great question. Thank you for engaging so thoughtfully with Bad Cree, as well. This is my debut novel, so it’s just very special to me. I'm hoping I continue to publish works in my life.
Annalee: [00:34:49] Yeah, me too.
Jessica: [00:34:53] And also, you know, I don't think. Yeah, I think this is a very special experience that I won't forget. And one of the reasons is because I prominently feature my home territory. My home territory, Treaty 8, High Prairie, which is a real place where my family is from, and a place that I know very, very well, plays a very significant character in this novel.
[00:35:24] I think that for me it was really difficult for me… Because I initially did want to, I wanted to set it in Treaty 8 for a number of reasons. The first being that I was talking about the creature that is also a part of this novel is one that is built and created from greed. And that tied in really well with Alberta industry. In Alberta, the oilfield industry is very prominent, and so I've grown up thinking a lot about the complicated ways that it is to live on land and in your own territory where resource extraction is so prominent. And the complicated relationship communities and people have with this industry.
[00:36:24] And so for me, so I was going to originally, though it was gonna be in Treaty 8, it was going to be in sort of a fictional town that I made up.
Annalee: [00:36:35] Mm-hmm.
Jessica: [00:36:35] And that… it was really difficult for me to do that. I felt very yeah. It just, it felt very difficult to breathe life into that. And I don't know if it's because my own craft as a writer is still being developed or if just the place that I was always thinking about from the jump was always High Prairie.
[00:37:03] But I also had a conversation with Eden Robinson, who is the author of the Trickster series and very prominently displays also, though it is a fictional work, real places such as Vancouver and indigenous communities on the coast of B.C. And in my conversation with Eden, I remember her saying, writing about a place I know is part of the magic. It's part of what made this. And made writing these works so genuine to me.
[00:37:44] And that really stuck with me. And I just thought in the end, yeah, I'm going to base this on a place that I know really well and world build off of. Though based in reality, world build off of those realities into ultra realities into this sort of like, fantastical other world that's happening in these woods around the area.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:14] Yeah. So we talked a lot in the first half of this episode about writing about real places and how that could be a springboard for writing about fantastical places. So I'm really excited to hear you say that. And I’m interested in, you talk about developing your craft in terms of creating a sense of place.
[00:38:30] What do you think makes an effective evocation of a place? Like is it particular descriptions of things? Is it food, is it smells, is it particular kinds of people that you meet? Or actual place names that you sprinkle in there? How do you go about doing that?
Jessica: [00:38:46] Well, for me it was really important that I imbued a sense of agency into the land itself. And a part of the reason for that was because truly, I conceptualize this land as living. I understand this land as living. I understand, more than just a character in a novel. This land is something in real life. Is a place that I am in relationship with and to all the time.
[00:39:20] So, in thinking about how I wanted to represent that in the novel, I really was thinking about how does a place have agency when often in literature, place is thought of as just setting. And for me it's not, it's very much, how do I talk about, without being didactic or, how do I talk about reciprocity. Because a part of this is that Mackenzie, the main character, has been away from her home for a number of years, and when she returns back, it's very changed. It's very different, as is she.
[00:40:05] And so I was thinking to myself, what does it mean when you're separated from like a loved one for a period of time who maybe you have a complicated relationship with and you see them again and physically they've changed, emotionally they've changed. How do you reconnect with somebody in that sort of situation? So I really thought about that. And in many parts of the novel, the land sort of does its own thing, without giving too much away, her and her sister and her cousin go into these woods that sort of change around them. The water does things very much on its own accord.
[00:40:49] So for me, I think, going back to your question, it really invokes all of those things. Sight, sound, and really, feeling. How do you feel about a place when you're there on not just a surface level, but, emotionally? How are you connecting or reconnecting or failing to connect to a place. And I thought about that. Yeah, I thought about that a lot as I was writing.
Annalee: [00:41:20] That’s so great. I love all the ways that the prairies kind of come to life in this novel. And one of the things I was really struck by was the way some of the places are given Cree names, some are given English names, sometimes they're given both names, and it kind of goes back and forth depending on who's speaking. You used political names like saying Treaty 8 Land, and I was wondering, were you thinking about this? Were you picking and choosing, when you would use which kinds of names? Did it depend on who was talking or was it kind of like geographical code switching or?
Jessica: [00:41:58] Yeah, I thought about this a little bit. I think for a number of things, like, you know, the name of the lake in Cree. It was important to me that it retained its original name. Referring to the geographical area or the political area of Treaty 8 before the imposition, before Canada imposed itself on this land sovereign indigenous nations made treaties with the crown and that precedes Canada. Those are agreements that we went into as sovereign nations. And so that is what I recognize.
[00:42:46] And also that is what this character whose point of view we're hearing from the whole time, that's whose political view we're seeing.
[00:43:01] And I was also thinking, because this is somebody who, she wasn't raised with a lot of cultural knowledge. So what she knows, she's upfront about saying like, when she used to go for walks in the woods with her kokum and her kokum taught her the names, the Cree names for plants. That's why she knows those names and that's why she names them. There's many plants she doesn't know the Cree names for because she doesn't have all the knowledge for that. So it's kind of showing the reality of somebody who has some knowledge and doesn't have all of it.
[00:43:44] Or also there are some English words that, because they're very new, don't have Cree words for them yet. And so, yeah, just thinking about who she is as a character and where she's at, what she would know as a Cree person, what she might not, having been disconnected from some traditional teachings.
[00:44:10] So it was really just thinking about, yeah, in her reality, what would she know and what wouldn't she? Because for example, the stories of the wîhtikôw, she doesn't know all of that. That stuff she has to figure out sort of in the fictive present of the novel as you're going through it.
[00:44:33] So yeah, a lot of that was very intentional and it was very intentional to the character and what her knowledge base would be.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:46] Yeah. So speaking of the monster in this story, earlier in the episode we were talking about hauntings and how a place being haunted is one way of getting to understand the place and the history of the place.
[00:44:56] I was wondering like, why did you pick this particular monster and the form that it takes in the story?
Jessica: [00:45:03] First of all, I think there are some things that, I wanna say indigenous people, but I don't want to pan-indigenize. So, I'm just gonna say Cree people, because those are the people I know best.
[00:45:17] We do some things really, really well, and that is we can tell a really, really good joke and we can tell a really, really good, scary story. And so growing up, I just have been around a lot of really great spooky storytellers and so I'm just kind of, I was just really interested and a bit obsessed with wîhtikôw stories and you know, there's a lot of contemporary writers who have written about wîhtikôw stories. Richard Van Camp is one of them. So I knew I wanted to write a horror-esque novel. And so that felt very fitting and also, because I was writing about a landscape that is in reality, very entrenched in industry, I was thinking a lot about trauma. I was thinking a lot about hurt and violence.
[00:46:22] And the interesting thing about this novel is that though the wîhtikôw is the bad thing, the bad creature, this bad force in the story, it's actually not the main evil. It's a product of industry. It's an after effect of this other bigger violence. And because of that, it's sort of like they’re fighting a minion versus the big bad thing because that big bad thing still exists after the the novel ends.
[00:47:02] They didn’t come together to take down the oil field industry. They came together to take down something that's a product of that that was terrorizing them. So it's sort of, that's sort of sad and futile, you know, but also, I was thinking about how oftentimes with violence, what are we left to deal with after violence happens? Violence isn't a singular event, it's many, and the repercussions of violence is massive and thinking about the repercussions of this particular violence, of land extraction, of resource extraction on communities, they're huge, and this is one particular thing that this family has to deal with that, I mean, the bigger industry wouldn't even know about. They wouldn't even think about it happening, and it was a major event for these characters, you know? So that was just interesting to me to think about.
Annalee: [00:48:12] Yeah, it's funny because, so, the indigenous community is being haunted by a monster that's created by basically settler extractive practices. I mean, it's, it is associated with, I think, settler capitalism and all of the fun things that that brings. And it felt to me like a table flip on a really common trope that we see in horror stories like white settler horror stories where there's some kind of haunting because of an Indian burial ground.
[00:48:44] And this is like, we talked about Poltergeist earlier in the episode as a perfect example of this. And I was wondering, were you engaging with this trope at all? Were you thinking about it? And yeah, I wonder if you could just talk about that?
Jessica: [00:48:56] Thank you so much for catching it because yes, very intensely engaging with that trope.
[00:49:02] Horror, historically there can be a lot of, I guess, problematic cliches within horror. There are a lot of tropes as well that I think about quite often. And I was raised on, I love horror. I was raised on horror and I love Stephen King and he has a lot of, he loves an Indian burial ground. He just loves the Indian artifacts. He's obsessed with them. And it was really, you know, it felt very, yeah, it felt very subversive to think about what haunting means for indigenous people.
[00:49:46] Because the haunting, first of all, is an everyday haunting. We're dealing with colonialism, which is ongoing violence as well all the time. And so what does that look like when our traditional grounds, when our traditional territory and our traditional land is haunted because of settler colonialism and other things as well. You know, Mackenzie sort of almost falls into sort of trope-y tendencies at the very start of the novel.
[00:50:19] These things, these dreams are happening to her. She's quite fearful and the first thing she does is call her aunt to be like, what's going on with me? And it sort of sets up this expectation of this, like wise and stoic indigenous person who's going to impart some wisdom of like, oh, it's this and you must blah, blah, blah.
[00:50:42] And instead the aunt is just like, I don't know. That's fucked up. That's wild. Yeah. I have no idea what's going on. Would love to help you. Can't give you an answer. And you know, other tropes like the crows, crows are often used in horror, particularly for, you know, evocative of, you know, a lot of creepy eerie things. And thinking about what crows mean for Cree people and how we would interpret them, how Mackenzie interprets them at first, and how that changes because of what she grows to know about them.
[00:51:23] So, yeah, there were a couple of things that I thought, you know, how are these elements traditionally used in a context that me and people like me would understand?
Charlie Jane: [00:51:37] Yeah. So I guess, final question. Are there any other stories that have like a really great sense of place that you really love? That you think do sense of place really well?
Jessica: [00:51:46] Yeah, so I mentioned just before, Eden Robinson's The Trickster series and also Monkey Beach. She does, I think honestly her work was just really influential for me in how I went about writing about place. And that work has just really stuck with me throughout my writing career to date.
[00:52:12] And most recently I read a novel called The Islands of Belonging [transcription note: The Island of Forgetting] by Jasmine Sealy, where there’s generational stories that take place in Barbados and how she captures place, also, in such a complex and layered and tender way is so fantastic. So those two are top of mind for me.
Annalee: [00:52:47] Those both sound great. We will put those in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining us, Jessica Johns. People can find Bad Cree anywhere where good books are sold and bad books, I mean, whatever, you know, books from all alignments. Is there any place that folks can find your work online?
Jessica: [00:53:06] I can't remember where. Lots of earlier poetry can certainly be found online. Some of my shorter pieces of fiction, if you just like Google my name and, you know, fiction or poetry, it will come up. I can't remember exactly where right now. I'm sorry.
Annalee: [00:53:29] Totally fine. So, Google Jessica Johns and treats await.
[00:53:35] So yeah, thank you so much for joining us.
Jessica: [00:53:36] Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Annalee: [00:53:41] You've been listening to Our Opinions are Correct. Thank you so much for joining us. Remember, you can find us on Mastodon at OurOpinions@Wandering.Shop. You can find us on the other places at @OOACPod, and of course, you can always find us on Patreon where we would really appreciate your support, patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.
[00:54:05] And you can find this podcast on all places where fine podcasts and not so fine podcasts are purveyed. Please leave us a review. We really appreciate it. It really helps people find us. Plus, we just like to hear what you thought.
Charlie Jane: [00:54:18] Yeah.
Annalee: [00:54:19] And yeah. And thank you so much to our wonderful producer, Veronica Simonetti. Thanks to Chris Palmer for the awesome new music. And talk to you later. If you're a patron, we'll see you on Discord. Bye!
Charlie Jane: [00:54:30] Bye!
[00:54:30] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]