Sword and Sorceress 33 Author Interviews: Pauline J. Alama

Enter a wondrous universe…the latest volume of Sword and Sorceress, featuring stories from new and seasoned authors. Herein you will find tales of fantasy with strong female characters, with some version of either martial skill or magic. Not all the protagonists will be human, and sometimes the magic will take highly original forms, but the emotional satisfaction in each story and in the anthology as a whole, remains true to the original vision. The release date will be November 2, 2018.

ePub: https://www.books2read.com/u/b62gG6

Kindle: https://amzn.to/2NitlHH

Deborah J. Ross: Tell us a little about yourself.  How did you come to be a writer?

Pauline J. Alama: I had great teachers.  My second-grade teacher, Mrs. Dorothy Mutch, assigned a lot of creative writing, which led me to the life-changing discovery that writing stories was like playing pretend, except better, because I got to keep my pretend game, show it to other people, sometimes even see it light them up the way it lit me up to create it. What could be better than that?

DJR: What inspired your story in Sword and Sorceress 33?

PJA: I love the ocean, so I decided that was where my sword-and-sorcery buddies Ursula and Isabeau should go next. I think I also had in mind a poem by James Joyce that I sort of vaguely remembered, “I Hear an Army,” with images of riders coming up out of the sea. Now I look back at the poem and I think I may have misunderstood it as well as misremembering it, but that’s all right: I gathered what I needed from it, like a bee from a flower. Sometimes only half-remembering a source is best for creativity. The landscape of the story is partly Rhode Island, where I spent some time musing over different forms of seaweed, and partly Normandy, where I visited Arromanches, one of the D-Day beaches, walking barefoot in the sand beside my history teacher husband, listening to him talk about a very different sort of army coming out of the sea.

DJR: What authors have most influenced your writing?  What about them do you find inspiring?

PJA: The adventures of Ursula and Isabeau, damsels-errant in a fantasy-medieval landscape, owe a great deal to the medieval and Renaissance romances I studied in graduate school, especially the twelfth-century Arthurian romances of Chretien de Troyes, the lais of Marie de France, and the Italian Renaissance romance Orlando Furioso by Ariosto. I love the wild adventures, the weird and beautiful imagery, and the sense that as a modern reader, I’m always a traveler in a strange land when I enter these stories. And the humor, too; humor doesn’t always translate well from a medieval text to a modern reader, but it’s hard not to laugh at Perceval riding his horse into Arthur’s court, or two of Ariosto’s knights romantically fighting each other over a woman who they don’t notice has ridden away from both of them at the first opportunity. In more recent—or less ancient—literature, I am especially indebted to a couple of children’s writers: Lloyd Alexander, who introduced me not only to the joys of fantasy, but of heroic language; and Diana Wynne Jones, whose wonderfully imaginative and nuanced stories I discovered as an adult.

DJR: Why do you write what you do, and how does your work differ from others in your genre?

PJA: I’m fascinated by heroes. I can’t understand why so many people find villains more interesting. Villainy is easy. Goodness is complicated. To be a hero is to dance on a knife-edge, balancing all the competing claims of everything you’re committed to protecting.

DR: How does your writing process work?

PJA: For my writing process to work, I have to slay the dragon of self-doubt that always stands ready to eat my heart—or at least put it to sleep long enough to let a story escape its teeth.

DJR: What have you written recently? What lies ahead?

PJA: Right now I’m working on a story about Sir Galahad and the Grail.

DJR: What advice would you give an aspiring writer?

PJA: Don’t read advice to writers. Read authors you admire and let their methods seep into your bones. When your bones start to sing, you’re ready to take pen in hand.

Pauline J. Alama doesn't only write stories about the ocean, but no reader of her novel The Eye of Night (Bantam Spectra 2002) can be surprised to find her returning to the theme. Her heroic duo of damsels-errant, warrior Ursula and enchantress Isabeau, have appeared in four other volumes of Sword and Sorceress. The events of "Wrestling the Ocean" occur between "Unicorn Heart" (Sword and Sorceress 31) and "Women's Work" (Sword and Sorceress 32). Pauline’s work has also been published in Abyss and Apex, Fantasy Scroll Magazine, and numerous anthologies.