LM Zaerr was a professor of mine in graduate school and is now a wonderful writing group member who is crafting wonderfully warm and imaginative stories. For this interview, we focused on her experience as a medievalist and how that has influenced her fantasy writing:
Thank you for being interviewed for Noglesque, LM! Your biography mentions that you are a medievalist as well as a writer, that you have written a book on storytelling, and that you have performed medieval tales. Would you like to give a bit more detail on your background?
Growing up, I loved fantasy. My sister and I told stories and sang improvisational operas during long walks in the forest. I read and wrote with all my joy. I knew I couldn’t earn a living writing fantasy, so I went back to the source of the fantasy genre, medieval literature. As a medievalist, I gained a more nuanced understanding of medieval tales. I found celebrations of gender flexibility, transcendent spiritual visions, whimsical parodies of chivalric tradition, and romping plots. In 2019, when I had enough money to support myself, I turned to writing seriously.
How does your knowledge of medieval literature influence your storytelling?
For me, medieval literature has opened imaginative pathways I would not have found reading later literature. I thought I wanted to transform medieval stories into contemporary fiction, but medieval values are often unpalatable, and emotion is expressed in foreign modes. There’s Princess Josian in Sir Bevis. Disney would never touch her. She squats down to poop onstage, turns herself into a leper, hangs one husband with a sash, and retrieves another husband from a new wife by playing the vielle. I don’t want to tell Josian’s story (She’s already told it), but I want her down-to-earth vitality to resonate in my writing. I have drenched myself in a rich and strange tradition, and now I want to explore and curate my own story impulse.
How does your experience with performance figure into your writing?
As a professor, I performed tales and music in schools, at luncheons, on a cruise ship, at coffee shops, in a grocery store, and even at a cowboy bar. In this way, I gained experience shaping stories for diverse audiences with little or no background in medieval culture. I also experienced the thrilling dynamic of live performance, like holding hands in a spinning circle for the joy of holding together when we’re pulled apart. I want to bring that centripetal energy into my writing, that energy of connection, by trying to embody the rhythms and patterns of live performance in writing to create a sense of presence.
Which medieval storytellers and which works would you most want to introduce to readers unfamiliar with the area, and why? What value do these works have today?
Marie de France says that writers speak obscurely in their books so that those who came after can find the significance out of their own wisdom. The more time you spend exploring the meaning of a text, the more subtle your mind will become. Her Lais (stories) offer the opportunity to hone your mind. Each story is simple by itself, but when you look at all the parallels, the images that occur in shifting contexts, the ring, the black stone, women entrapped who get out or don’t get out. Reading her stories broadens my mind. I’ve read her Lais for decades, and I’m still finding new treasures, unexpected perspectives.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight offers a similar complexity. Gawain’s symbol is a pentangle, an interlinking star of virtues, but those five virtues come into conflict in the story, and he is forced to make choices without easy answers, a dilemma we all face today. The language itself interlocks his internal conflict with the beauty and brutality of the world he faces.
The fourteenth-century Syrian Arabian Nights (Husain Haddawy trans., Everyman’s Library 87, 1990) is a great place to find the strange and wonderful. It’s wise to read it with a kind of mental counterpoint. What does it mean to be a slave girl in this story? What features are repellent, and are there aspects that make it worth reading anyway?
Who are some of your favorite contemporary writers? Do you see your work as influenced by or in conversation with them, and if so, how?
Neil Gaiman (particularly Stardust) makes worlds solid enough I can snag my sleeve on the rose bushes and characters I can tramp alongside. Kelly Link harnesses a wild imagination into fun and powerful stories. My own imagination gallops off among the crystal spheres a little too wildly, and its good to see ways to rein it in. I love TJ Klune for his welcoming worlds and warm acceptance of the other. I was furious with Patrick Rothfuss for not finishing his Name of the Wind trilogy because his prose is so exquisitely detailed and laden with emotion. Katherine Addison creates gentle characters motivated by love in a world of court intrigue. Shannon Chakraborty and Chelsea Abdulla draw on the tradition of the Arabian Nights, illustrating ways to bring ancient stories into contemporary modes.
If someone wanted to get a feel for your work, what stories would you suggest they start with?
In “The Doomsday Book of Labyrinths” (Uncharted), I started with a medieval tax record (called the Doomsday Book) and thought about what it would be like to be a tax assessor in a foreign land. Then I put aside the Norman Conquest and instead set my story in a labyrinth market, and Crispin can only find his way through his own labyrinth by learning the limits of what can be assigned monetary value.
“Cherries in December” (Wyngraf, issue 2) explores the power of vielle music to summon reality from another place. I play the medieval vielle, and I’ve found many references to the power of music played on that instrument, what it can accomplish. Maddy learns in the course of the story how that power can be corrupted, and she has to make a choice how she wants to use it.
“The First Edge Sings” (New Myths) tells the minotaur story from the point of view of a middle-aged Ariadne. She explores the labyrinth, knowing that the brother she has never seen, the monster, is lodged there. What she finds devastates the world she thought she knew.
Do you have advice for writers who are just getting started?
Take time to celebrate accomplishments, and that means having manageable goals to celebrate, a life goal of 1,000 words in a day or a short story draft by Saturday. It’s surprising how quickly achievable life goals add up to something bigger. It’s also good to recognize where you have control and where you don’t. If you set out to get a particular story or novel published, you might be disappointed when it doesn’t happen. But if you set out to collect fifty rejections in a year, you can easily accomplish that and celebrate it when you do … and find yourself surprised at how much your engagement in the market has helped you develop as a writer.
What are you working on currently?
I’m imagining a world where music has physical embodiment, not as sound, but as beings who influence us in different ways, sometimes benign or whimsical, sometimes perilous. I plan to set two or three adventure stories in that world, where these trovins force characters to face aspects of themselves
Thank you so much for agreeing to the interview, LM! It was a pleasure.
LM Zaerr is a writer and medievalist. As a professor, she wrote a book on medieval storytelling, sang forgotten tales, and lured students into medieval legends and abandoned them there to challenge dragons, rescue Lancelot, and figure out how to play gwyddbwyll. Now she finds new stories and transforms old ones. Her work has appeared in Uncharted, Wyngraf, and New Myths, among other venues. Visit her at https://www.lmzaerr.com/
As always in Noglesque, I like to end with a few notes about my own work and community news:
I am completing a third novel right now—can’t wait for folks to read it as well as the second novel that is currently with my agent.
My third short story collection, One Eye Opened in That Other Place, is out from Flame Tree Press. This means that the entire collection of collections is now complete! Links to all my books can be found on my Linktree
In honor of Trans Rights Read-a-Thon, Ghoulish Books is offering Bury Your Gays and Bound in Flesh for free here for one week. Bury Your Gays was already going to be my next read, so I thought this was wonderful!
My friends with the HOWL Society are still running a Kickstarter for their new work for the next few days. You can check it out here