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Interview with Malinda Lo

Malinda Lo was my editor years ago when I first began writing for AfterEllen.com. Though she was one of the most intelligent, accessible and reliable editors I had ever worked with, I knew not to contact her on Fridays because that was the day she was “working on her book.” As it turns out, those Fridays paid off and resulted in her ingenious debut novel, Ash, a queer retelling of the classic fairytale Cinderella.

Lo was born in China and moved to Colorado as a child. She is the former managing editor of AfterEllen.com and was a recipient of a Sarah Pettit Memorial Award for Excellence in LGBT journalism by the National Gay and Lesbian Journalists Association. Ash was recently selected for the Fall 2009 Kids’ Indie List, received a starred review in Kirkus and Publishers Weekly said, “Lo offers an important twist on a classic story that will appeal to a wide readership, especially those looking for a girl romance.”

We spoke with Lo about Ash, her next book project and how working at AfterEllen.com inspired her writing.

AfterEllen.com: Congratulations on the publication of Ash and on getting married. It’s been a busy year for you!

Malinda Lo: I am busy … It’s been overwhelming.

AE: But all good.

ML: All good.

AE: Let’s talk about Ash. How were you first inspired to write this story?

ML: I first began thinking about the book nine years ago, in September 2001. I actually always wanted to write a retelling of Cinderella because as a kid I loved the fairytale. One of my favorite writers, Robin Mckinley, retold Beauty and the Beast and Sleeping Beauty, but she never did Cinderella. I wanted to write the book that I always wanted to read so that is where I got the inspiration to write Ash.

AE: Did the timing have anything specifically to do with September Eleventh?

ML: You know, I wrote about this in my journal. I was very direct and I was very affected by that because I lived in New York before 2001. At that time, I was living in California, but I had lived in New York for two years. I lived in Battery Park City for one year and I used to ride the train from the World Trade Center everyday to work. I remember watching the images on TV of the firemen going into the Trade Center and the pictures of the 9 West store with all these ashes all over it. It completely floored me because I used to go to that shop all the time.

AE: Is that connected to Aisling’s name Ash?

ML: That’s true. I didn’t actually mean to do that. But it affected me a lot and I started to think about what I was doing with my life. I was in graduate school at the time and it was really not my favorite thing in the world. I’d always wanted to be a writer and I had written fiction as a teen. I wrote three fantasy novels when I was in high school and then I didn’t write fiction for a long time. I was trying to do other stuff, but none of it ever really fulfilled me.

AE: What were you studying in graduate school?

ML: I was in social and cultural anthropology, in a PhD program. When I started doing research on Ash I went to the library and [studied] folklore. I definitely approached the book from an anthropological perspective.

AE: There are several variations of Cinderella – from antiquity to, I was surprised to learn, a Japanese version where Cinderella escapes her evil stepmother with the help of Buddhist nuns and joins a convent. Did a particular version inspire you?

ML: This is kind of dorky, but I loved the Drew Barrymore movie version Ever After. [Laughs]. Cinderella in that movie is actually very self-reliant. She’s really into politics. I haven’t read any retellings in book forms that spoke to me.

AE: Reading your book made me want to go back and reread the original or even watch the Disney movie.

ML: I watched a lot of Cinderella movies. There are even more Cinderella movies than books, as far as I can tell. Every time they came out with a new one I watched it. It was really interesting to see what they would do. The Disney one is fascinating to watch as an adult. I loved that when I was a little girl.

AE: One thing I really loved in your version is that the Fairy Godmother is a man named Sidhean who knew Ash’s mother. Can you talk about why you decided to write this character in this way?

ML: I had done research on folklore and fairytales that folklorists had collected from the Irish and English countryside in the late 19th century and all of the fairies in those folktales were creepy, evil, people. They were not “bibbidy bobbidy boo.” I noticed that there were a lot of similarities between the fairies in Irish mythology or folklore and vampires. There are a lot of stories where they’ll drink blood and they are also very close to the dead. A lot of times they’re considered to be “not quite living.” There’s a very interesting connection between vampires and fairies in our present day aliens – I’m not kidding, with the lights on the hills, the abductions. Simultaneously I was watching a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and I think that was around the time of season six when Spike really became huge. I loved spike. So, honestly, my first inspiration for Sidhean was Spike. But he changed a lot.

AE: One thing I appreciated about their dynamic is how Ash’s feelings for Sidhean and for the Huntress Kaisa, whom she falls in love with, really seem to model a young queer woman coming to terms with her sexuality and the confusion of looking at these two people and seeing how they fit into her world. Was that intentional?

ML: Ash in some way is falling in love with both of them. But the way she falls in love with Kaisa is different qualitatively than her experience with Sidhean. It probably does parallel a lot of what young queer girls experience in terms of figuring out what she wants.

AE: Her feelings and relationship with Sidhean are almost circumstantial. It’s built out of her loneliness and isolation and striving for connection, whereas with Kaisa it is different.

ML: Yes, I think the Sidhean relationship is partially circumstantial because he is the person to pay attention to her. I considered Kasia Ash’s first experience of really falling in love. I thought of it in terms of first love and not necessarily first lesbian love. But I guess it’s hard to separate those when you’re writing as a queer writer.

AE: I was also struck by how the concept of two women as a couple was not necessarily stigmatized or unusual in this society. When Kaisa tells Ash the fairytale about the woman who falls in love with another woman, Ash is not surprised or shocked. Even the prince seems opened minded about the possibility of women falling in love with each other.

ML: I definitely thought about that a lot. In editorial revisions with my editor we talked about it and it was clear to me from the beginning that I didn’t want to have a world where there was homophobia. I wanted Ash to have a fairytale. I didn’t want her to have a coming out story. It was a coming of age story in which she falls in love and the person she falls in love with just happens to be female. I decided to not make it an unusual thing.

AE: Was that difficult to write or imagine?

ML: No, I think it would have been much more difficult to write a homophobic world where I’d have to deal with coming out issues. I think that would have detracted from the fairytale quality.

AE: She has enough problems.

ML: [Laughs] exactly. She has enough problems.

AE: Dreams play a big part in the story.

ML: I did think about dreams. The name Aisling is a traditional Gaelic name and it means vision or visions. I actually did think she would have visions. Some of the dreams didn’t make it into the final book. But the ones that did remain, I think, were important to the story.

AE: In the book there is strong focus on storytelling – storytelling as an act, the controversy and politics of storytelling, the way a story can change through it’s telling.

ML: I definitely had a focus on telling stories as fairytales, but what you just said, no, [laughs] I didn’t actually think of that.

AE: I thought it was relevant because you were adapting this classic story, which requires some courage in itself. Did you have any reservations about taking on this beloved fairytale?

ML: I did at the very beginning because I thought if I made her a lesbian I’d never be able to sell the book to a publisher. I thought it was going to make it unsellable. Clearly I was wrong, but once I decided to do it, I had to go all the way with it. And then I had the benefit of working at AfterEllen for the next five years and seeing how much people wanted to read books with lesbians in them in positive ways that weren’t stereotypical.

So that was really good for me because I think otherwise I would have been too chicken to submit it.

AE: Did the queer aspect of Ash pose any problems with trying to sell the book?

ML: I had interesting reactions. I had one agent tell me the fact that she is just gay didn’t make it different enough. My agent, obviously, thought it made it just fine. I think that people reject books for a variety of reasons. My agent and publisher have been behind it from the beginning in the state that it’s in. They always wanted it to not be a coming out story.

AE: Why is that?

ML: I think there’s a feeling that coming out stories have been done. Not that we have enough of them, but if you’re going to do a coming out story it has to be a little bit different now. I think they want to move beyond the idea of the problem novel, especially in YA fiction where you realize you’re gay, you have all these problems, you deal with it, you come out. But I think that my book is different in that respect because you don’t have a big coming out.

AE: I think it’s interesting that someone would think a lesbian Cinderella is not different enough. That’s pretty damn different.

ML: [Laughs] I thought the same thing.

AE: What’s your new book about?

ML: The new book is a companion novel. It’s set in the same world but several hundred years before Ash. It is about the first Huntress in that kingdom. The origin of the huntresses is explained.

AE: So you’re not re-telling another fairytale?

ML: Right. It’s basically a quest novel. A typical, fantasy quest, but this time with gay people.

AE: Do you think you’ll do anymore fairytale retellings?

ML: I’d like to.

AE: Any story in particular?

ML: I do have a story in mind for an adult novel, but it’s just an idea now so it’s probably better that I leave it in my head.

AE: You are obviously rewriting these stories from a queer perspective but you’ve also written a lot about the representation of race in the media and in literature. Do you feel responsible to change other aspects of these stories, whether in terms of race or culture and even class?

ML: The race question is interesting because I kind of envisioned Ash and Kaisa as being Asian. I describe Kaisa as having dark hair and green eyes, so she couldn’t be fully Asian, but she could be half Asian. And Ash as well. I didn’t describe it specifically partially because I thought the gay thing was going to be enough of a problem. I didn’t want to add race on top of that so I didn’t make the race obvious. I did tell my editor. She did know that I envisioned her as Asian and the book cover, I’m happy to say, does not exclude that possibility.

For my next book, it’s clearly based on ancient China so I kind of threw caution to the wind and I hope that it works out.

AE: What’s one question that you wish people asked you about the book?

ML: I always ask everyone I interview that question, but I cannot come up with a response myself. I’m really excited to have everyone reading it and I’ve gotten some comments from queer readers now that I just love. I’m happy that people like Kaisa. I was worried she wasn’t going to work for people. I really thought it was important she was a charming figure.

AE: It would never have occurred to me that she wouldn’t work.

ML: A lot of the responses that I get from straight teen readers don’t mention her name at all. They mention Sidhean a lot, which makes sense, but I hope she works for more people than gay people.

AE: It’s great that [the book was released] in September. Full circle. Nine years later.

ML: That’s right.

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