(Editor’s note: This interview by L.H. Salant took place in 1997. I commissioned it for the magazine I was editing at the time but the piece never made it into print. This is its first publication anywhere.)

CAROL EMSHWILLER has been writing fiction since the mid 1950s and is known today as a premier author of short stories. Her three published collections, Joy in Our Cause, Verging on the Pertinent, and The Start of the End of It All, showcase her remarkable talent for creating a spectrum of worlds revealing the numerous idiosyncrasies of human (and sometimes other) life. While much of her work falls within what’s traditionally labeled science fiction, Emshwiller has published close to half of it in literary magazines—her writing experiments with voice, language, and plot often enough to mark her as a true (and gifted) original. More recently she’s turned to novels as a form of expression. Ledoyt, her most recently published longer work, will be followed in July of 1998 by its sequel, Leaping Man Hill. Emshwiller has been living in New York City area for her entire writing career. A native of Michigan, she met and married artist and illustrator Ed Emshwiller. Their marriage eventually evolved to a bicoastal relationship-because of his increasing involvement in both teaching art and in the medium of film, Ed settled in California while Carol remained in New York to write and teach writing as well (in fact, she was my writing instructor in the early ’80s). Only a few years ago her husband died, and Emshwiller underwent a significant transition both in her life and in her approach to writing. Today Carol Emshwiller not only retains her status as a writer of note, but has broadened her range and her appeal to readers of science fiction, unusual mainstream fiction, and now, interestingly enough, westerns.

L.H. Most of your writing over the last forty years or so has been in the short story format. What would you say accounts for that?

CAROL It has to do with the perspective I had before Ed died. While before, I didn’t really think of writing a novel, now, I can’t not write novels. The whole spirit of how I do things now is very different. Even my first novel, Carmen Dog, written before his death, is really more of a series of pieces, kind of like the “Perils of Pauline”; you get to the end of one peril and go to the next one. After my husband died, I started reading novels, which I hadn’t done much of before. And I felt I wanted to write in that form.

L.H. Why is that?

CAROL I think it was because my spirit changed. It’s somewhat hard to explain—I opened up to possibilities I hadn’t seen before or hadn’t considered before.

L.H. What had you been considering while you were still doing only short stories?

CAROL I was more precise in my writing. Short stories don’t allow you to be long-winded; you can hardly do any asides. You have to make every word count. It’s a different way of thinking, a different technique.

L.H. Not only is your way of thinking different now, but it seems as though your entire approach is as well. This new novel and its sequel are completely different in style or form from anything else you’ve written; in fact, they’re basically westerns.

CAROL Yes, they are. Ed and I spent a lot of time together out west in the mountains. When he was still alive, not only was being out west a vacation, but I guess more to the point, I thought of being there as a part of my life inseparable from being with him—something that, in a way, I took for granted. I didn’t make any real use of that environment in my work because it was probably too close to me to use, too much a part of not really me, but us. After he died my feeling about the land, and the animals and people who lived there had to change because he wasn’t part of me anymore. But the land was still there, and it was still part of me.

L.H. So it sounds like what happened was a transformation; enough distance grew between you and the environment so that you could not only write about it, but wanted to, maybe even had to. Maybe what evolved was a fusion of closeness and distance—the closeness that had always been there, and the new found distance that came as a result of Ed not being with you anymore.

CAROL Yes, that’s it.

L.H. You recently started a fantasy short story for an anthology whose editor requested something from you and after resolving to create a shorter piece found yourself with a 68 page novelette!

CAROL Right; it looks like longer writing is pretty much inescapable at this point. But I was very glad to return to the realm of speculative fiction; in fact, even though I’ve now written two western novels, I feel like I’ve always been part of the science fiction community.

L.H. What accounts for that?

CAROL A few different things. First of all, science fiction gives the writer an openness greater than in any other form or genre of writing. Basically, you can do anything. I don’t think you have as much freedom to do what you want like that in mainstream fiction; a lot of readers consider most mainstream fiction to be pretty much cut and dry. You certainly don’t have that openness in mystery fiction because as a writer, you have to start with a solution and work backwards. But science fiction doesn’t limit you. You can imagine whatever you want to. Secondly, I like writing that lets me create allegories. I’ve always been attracted to the deeper meanings of things and in science fiction, I get to invent situations that make use of these deeper meanings, or point to them. Finally, I’ve always liked the concept of “otherness”, the possibility of a different way of thinking or a different perspective other than the ‘normal’ or expected way. That doesn’t have to mean alien, necessarily, but it can. When it doesn’t it does mean a person who thinks or feels in ways that convention has little to do with.

L.H. But doesn’t literary fiction also let you create parables or explore these deeper meanings?

CAROL Yes, it does; it can. But I’ve found that if I wanted to publish my work in literary magazines, it couldn’t have too much plot because then it would be considered more “science fictiony” and the literary magazine wouldn’t take it. You pretty much have to have more refined language, and/or be sharper stylistically for a literary magazine to accept your work. Science fiction lets a pretty good writer get published, which means one who can create a good solid plot and believable characters, but not necessarily one who can do super sharp things with style and language. I think I was published in both genres because I really liked to play around with plot and language—which appeals to literary magazines—but also come up with strange enough ideas to appeal to science fiction magazines.

L.H. In Leaping Man Hill, the sequel to Ledoyt, you put a lot of attention on horses, one in particular, almost as though the horse was conscious in the way a human being would be. Is it fair to say that this ‘otherness’ extends to animals in essentially the same way it does to an alien or a ‘different’ kind of human being?

CAROL Yes, that’s right. In the new novel I really wanted to feel what the horse feels. Horses are amazing animals; they can feel pain-not just physical but emotional-and even fall in love. One of the things I wanted to convey was a horse’s full range of experience—he’s actually a sort of horse-man, or man-horse, so here I’m kind of combining the western with some fantasy elements.

L.H. This fullness of range of experience is, I think, something that one usually doesn’t have the opportunity to express in a short story. Did you want to be able to do this when you changed your approach to writing?

CAROL That’s right. A short story is a pared down piece of writing that typically doesn’t let you really explore a character in any great depth. In many of my stories the adventure or idea was the reason for the story, like the driving force for its existence. Now I feel like I want to give readers anything and everything I can about my characters. This wasn’t true so much before.

L.H. And this need that you have now to emphasize characters, or characterization-how did that happen?

CAROL I think it happened because I’ve always had a strong family orientation, and around the same time Ed died, all three of my children were out of the house. So I felt like I had to create a family for myself and I did with Ledoyt which I would have to call a female western—the main character is a woman and there are kids, too-not something you’d find in a typical western.

L.H. But this perspective, emphasizing wide open spaces, the desert, animals—that wasn’t how you thought before, meaning, that wasn’t the environment you would automatically place a short story’s characters in.

CAROL No, it wasn’t. My personal environment before my husband’s death was more often than not an urban one because that’s where I lived—New York. I didn’t even think about setting a story in anything remotely resembling a desert. And as for animals, I didn’t like horses, didn’t like ranches, thought animals like that were just these brutish things roaming around. But then after Ed died, my daughter convinced me-well, actually, she forced me-to go to this ranch out west and after two days I was hooked. And that was pretty amazing because I hadn’t written for a whole year; I was pretty passive, except for my teaching. I felt for quite a while like I had lost not only Ed, but also the desert, the mountains, all of that. And so I would watch cowboy movies on TV, and see the desert as much as I could on my small screen and then finally when I went out there, thanks to my daughter, I knew that my entire personal environment had been completely transformed.

L.H. So that’s when you started reading novels like Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove and Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, things you never would have read before.

CAROL Yes, that’s when I started reading these long, conservative works, which was a big change from what I used to read. You know, when you’re a writer who used to be influenced by Samuel Beckett, Henri Michaux, Julio Cortazar, and Franz Kafka, reading Larry McMurtry is quite a switch!

L.H..     So would you say that science fiction itself was not a major influence on your work, even from the beginning?

CAROL Well, in the first ten years of my career, yes, I would have to say it was, because during that period I was basically imitating other science fiction writers. But after that I think I developed a stronger voice and that was when I would say that no, science fiction wasn’t a major influence on my writing-even though, as I said before, I think I’ve always been a part of that world.

L.H. One thing I find interesting is that even though your personal environment in your writing has changed dramatically—from story to novel, from urban to desert, from individual to family—your method of writing is still the same. You start with maybe a single idea, or a line, or a thought, and write it down and see what happens, where that takes you. So you don’t really outline any of your writing. But isn’t that harder to do when you’re writing a “real” novel than when you’re doing a short story?

CAROL Nope. Because I’m used to it. When you’ve been writing for some time, you get a feel for how to put a story together and after reading those novels, I combined my experience writing for some number of years with my need to create a family for myself, really develop characters, with my method of starting with a single thought or character. And I think it worked, at least for these novels, Ledoyt and Leaping Man Hill. But it didn’t happen that easily—certainly not the first one, anyway. Ledoyt took four years to write, and its sequel took two years.

L.H..     Do you think you’ll do a science fiction novel?

CAROL I think so. I think if I do, it will combine this perspective on wide open spaces and family with this need I have for allegory. It could be that this new novelette is a forerunner of future, longer science fiction work which I haven’t really done before.

L.H..     You’ve been teaching for quite a while. Is there anything you would advise someone who wants to write science fiction?

CAROL Not a whole lot. You don’t have to be the best writer in the world, but the ability to plot pretty well is a big help. It also helps to go to something like the Clarion workshop, either East or West. The thing is, there isn’t any one rule for how to write. You can start with a single idea, like I do, or you can outline, or you can combine the two. After you’ve been writing for a while I think you get more of a feel for how to write what you want. When I teach I focus on the mechanics of writing and on plotting and now, probably more than before, on characterization. And some students are pretty surprising. That’s always a good feeling. ?

(Photo of Carol Emshwiller at her 90th birthday party; © Melissa C. Beckman)