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Celebrating Our Elders: Interview with Jessica Amanda Salmonson

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Photo credit: Rhonda Booth

Jessica Amanda Salmonson is a recipient of the World Fantasy Award, Lambda Award, and ReaderCon Certificate. She loves rats and chihuahuas (they’re the same thing) and currently has three big monitor lizards. She’s vegetarian, but no longer radically so, and strives to be something of a Zoharic scholar.

Did you start out writing or working in the horror field, and if so why? If not, what were you writing initially and what compelled you to move into horror?

I always wrote fantasy and horror. These few questions are all about being old, which is not primary in my life or in my writings. I’ve written of people of all ages at every stage of my own life, and focusing on author’s age exclusively doesn’t seem apt to get very near the heart of any writer. But it can be a cool topic, even for younger folks, who equally deserve to be asked about nothing beyond getting old if they’re lucky to live that long. 

Who were your influences as a writer when you started out and who, if anyone, continues to influence you?

My early influences were as a child. By age 13 I was already devouring short story paperbacks. Everyone from William F. Nolan and Ray Bradbury to Bernard Malamud and I. B. Singer influenced my feeble childhood efforts, and everyone encountered the big fat year’s best anthologies edited by Judith Merril.

How have the changes in horror publishing over the past decades affected you?

When I first gained commercial success, there was never a time, then or now, that the commercial industry struck me as heartwarming and good, never encouraging individualist voices. 

Do you think you’ve encountered ageism? If so, how do you counteract or deal with it?

Seems to me horror has always been an old fogy genre.

What do you wish you knew when you were just getting into the field?

“Try not to give a shit when it goes horribly wrong.” 

Do you have any advice for writers just starting out?

“Try not to give a shit when it goes horribly wrong.” 

Do you think older characters are represented fairly and honestly in horror fiction?

Approaches are so extremely varied there’s no answer to this except story by story. But in the hands of really good writers, characters are going to be interesting whatever their age. 

What are some of your favorite portrayals of older characters?

I’m not usually thinking about characters’ ages, so haven’t given this a lot of thought. But off the top of my head, Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray. “The Judge” in Cormac McCarthy’s gothic western Blood Meridian. Stephen King’s Gramma. Grendel’s mother, or any fairy tale featuring Baba Yaga. 

Do you have anything you’d like to add that we haven’t asked?

I started writing the Penelope Pettiweather, Ghost Hunter stories when I was quite young, projecting someone “opposite” of myself in every way, including elderly when I was not. I was still writing about her when I got old, and discovered she wasn’t so opposite of me after all, I’d merely foreshadowed myself. 

 

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