Interview with Nalo Hopkinson

Nalo Hopkinson, Interviewed by Lynda: Williams Dec 7, 2004

[Full Transcript]

Summary

Nalo Hopkinson read at Mosquito Books, in Prince George, B.C., on Dec 7, 2004, at the invitation of Dr. Robert Budde of the UNBC English program. She was interviewed about her writing earlier that day by fellow author Lynda Williams, who runs the web development lab at the Centre for Teaching and Learning at UNBC. Pictures were taken at Nalo's reading, on the evening of Dec 7.

Nalo read from her Christmas story, "A Young Candy Daughter", donated as a benefit for the Caribbean hurricane relief fund, as well as her critically acclaimed novel, The Salt Roads and other works.

Transcription by Amanda DaSilva.

Survival by Julie E. Czerneda

Julie Czerneda's Survival combines a fantasy-rich sense of wonder with good background science. I also enjoyed the west coast B.C. setting and the wacky world of research focused graduate students and their supervisors. One of the many details that I liked about the "near future" setting, was the way that strict conversationist rules are so much a given, for the era, that one can actually dislike the stuffy types in charge of seeing they get upheld. Her heroine, Mac, is a refreshingly serious-minded young woman who derives a lot of satisfaction from her work and really never wanted to know very much about aliens. Aliens, unfortunately for Mac, come looking for her. As does a dashing government agent who is not thrilled about the assignment until it starts looking like pay dirt. The characters and friendships of the book make it a warm place from which to explore a very alien biology with world-destroying quirks up its sleeve.

Survival is book one of the Species Imperative series. The next book, Migration, is due out this summer.

The Dying Poem by Robert Budde

"The question becomes, am I part of the script? Am I in it?"

the dying poem is prose poetry, like Robert Budde's earlier novel Misshapen. It is less about events in the world, than the interplay of those events and the meanings they dress themselves in, as they are absorbed by people trapped in the involuntary art of living. Or in the case of the dying poem, seduced by the finality of death.

I recommend reading this book slowly, in sips. It makes sense as overlays of lives and images. Art and artists. It is about death, and the meaning death can give to a life that had worn itself thread bare with the hunt for meaning, with only indifferent success. But it is not a celebration of nihilistic ennui. It is about three artists, Henry, Jay and Dee, whose lives are drawn together over the enigma of Henry's suicide, and ultimately resolved through art itself. They cannot touch each other except through their art, as if on another plane, where only the abstract is real.

The poetry of the book, cast as prose, is gentle and lush despite the harsh subject, sparingly told.