The Drollerie Press Blog Tour Rolls Through Town Again, And Everybody's Talking About Mothers

[dr_pretentious]

We got to thinking about Mother's Day on the Drollerie Press authors listserv, and decided we'd all play with ideas about mothers and motherhood for this month's blog tour posts. I ended up writing an essay, soon to appear on Heather Ingemar's blog, about the impossible ideals of the Good Mother and the Good Writer. I'll post the link, and the links for the rest of the tour posts, later today.

This month I'm hosting my longtime critique partner David Sklar, whose livejournal blog you can find at thunderpigeon. You can find his novel, Shadow of the Antlered Bird, at all the usual e-book outlets. He also has short pieces in the YA anthology StereoOpticon and the forthcoming anthology Needles and Bones, and other things in other places. I like to describe his novel as a dark fantasy road trip buddy movie in which one of the buddies is on the run from his own catastrophic error in sorcery. Delicious stuff.

After the delightful character interviews with Tam, the hero of Shadow of the Antlered Bird, that came out of the March blog tour (here and here), David and I thought it would be a hoot for me to try a conventional parenting-magazine-style interview with Tam's scary Never-Mess-With-a-Queen-of-Faerie mother. David got far enough into character that we began to wonder how I'd ever escape from the interview without getting turned into a toad. All I can say is, no wonder Tam is so desperate to escape his mother's tutelage.



Sarah Avery:
How do you find time to balance your responsibilities as a mom with all your other commitments?

Elhionna: Time is fluid; I can gather what I need.

SA:
You have--I hope you don't mind my saying so--a timeless beauty. How did you get your figure back after becoming a mom? What's your skin-care regimen?

E:
You make no sense. Why should I look any different from the way I do?

SA:
::consults her stack of mommy magazines and tries a different tack::
It's hard raising a biracial kid. How did Tam's being half-human and half-fae influence your decisions about his education?

E:
Well, I let that troll take Tamneth to visit his father.

SA:
Listen, lady, why are you holding out on me? What's up with the laconic answers? I know you're not exactly a big consumer of parenting magazines, but seriously: why did you agree to this interview in the first place, if you didn't want to talk? Your son has a whole book out that's mostly from his perspective--and a fairly anti-mother perspective, too, I might add--so one would think you'd welcome the chance to balance that out.

E:
::seething::
You dare?

SA:
Well...yeah. Humans can't really help it. For what it's worth, I sincerely don't know what you wanted to get out of this interview. You're an entirely different kind of mother than any human could be, but you're a mother nonetheless. You love Tam more than he can comprehend, whether he wants you to or not at any given moment, even when he baffles you or makes catastrophic mistakes or rebuffs your attempts to prepare him for the world. What do you wish you could say to human mothers, if you could say one thing to all of them?

E:
I have warned you once. Yet you presume to tell me how I feel for my child. Whence comes this hubris?

SA:
Good point. So maybe I've completely misread you, or maybe the narrator's unreliable. It would probably be hubristic for me to ask how you feel for your child, too. Is there anything you would like to say?

E:
Be vigilant. The world is filled with dangers to your child.

SA:
::backing cautiously out of the glade, anticipating toadification::
Okay...um...Happy Mother's Day.
::runs like hell::

Comments

[kistha.livejournal.com]

LOL!!!

What an "interview"

[nancyg1950.livejournal.com]

This is absolutely priceless. I love it!!!

[annathepiper]

HA! Well done!

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

You people are crazy.

In a good way :D

[thunderpigeon.livejournal.com]

Uh, thanks.

And thanks to all other compliments here.

Personally, I'm kind of stunned that Sarah was able to make this work with what little I gave her. I called the night before to say, "We've hardly gotten anywhere, do you want to finish the interview on the phone?" and we ended up coming up with a plan that was mostly Sarah's to present the interview as if there were actually something there.

[violet-moon25.livejournal.com]

This is definitely much funnier than a parenting magazine (though they are pretty big on the dangers-to-your-child-are-everywhere theme). I am still picturing you running away with notebook in hand and laughing.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

You gave me what Elhionna would have given me, which is why it works even though it's not much. Those email exchanges really did feel like I was corresponding with someone who was not you.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Actually, the whole faerie changeling thing freaks me out. Holly Black's Tithe is a fabulous book, but the whole infant abduction thing bugged me so much I don't think I'll be able to read her again for a long time. (Now there's an unfortunate success--her writing was so evocative that she's cost herself a reader for the duration of my kid's childhood. I don't think that even falls in the category of A Good Problem To Have.)

So the moment David allowed Elhionna to bring up dangers to Gareth, I was immensely relieved that we'd run out of time to keep the interview going.

[thunderpigeon.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Wasn't thinking about it in specific relation to Gareth. It's just...that is the obsession that drives Elhionna in the book, so it seemed like the most likely answer to your question.