Not to be a huge pessimist, but Trump being elected just confirmed something: we live in a sexist, racist, white supremacist bullshit society.ĬMM: I’m physically in New York City right now. And there were a lot of circumstances that led to that that I don’t even care to think about super hard, because it’s so stressful. The tragedy of Trump is that he rose as high in power as he did. But he is also not singular: tyrants are a dime a dozen.

OM: Villiam, who’s the lord of Lapvona, definitely has some things in common with our former president, but was I really thinking about it as metaphor? I just wanted to escape into another world that was even more fucked up than the world I was living in, but also had some magic and some depths and weirdness that I thought could express something that I couldn’t otherwise.ĬMM: Trump feels so singular. There’s something deliciously ambivalent about Lapvona at the end you’re like, well, things are weird. When you said fairytale, it feels correct, because for me there’s an intuitive logic in a fairytale, a sort of unfurling. You can do research, but on some level, you’re just imagining yourself into a fantasy world. I’m actually writing poetry right now, quickly and impressionistically and in one sitting – I’ve got a lot of stuff going on right now, and it feels like I need these little places to put it.īut I was thinking about Lapvona: I do feel like writing historical fiction is a lot like writing fantasy. I would much rather write fiction, as it turns out.

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