Interviews
Tor.com RocketTalk podcast
On the Tor.com RocketTalk podcast, Justin Landon interviews N.K. Jemisin and me about reader, writer, and publisher bias. How do our own blind spots influence the choices we make? How does that impact society? How can we do better? If I must say so myself, this is a great discussion
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/08/rocket-talk-episode-23-kate-elliott-and-nk-jemisin
Author - Interview with Kate Elliott
Interview with Author Magazine
Bill Kenower, Interviewer
OPEN INTERVIEW
“What I try to accomplish is that the characters are seeing the world through their relationship with the setting and the landscape. They’re not seeing the world through my eyes. I’m not standing above and imposing my view on them. I’m trying to create a world in which they fit the same way I fit in my world.”
At Tor.com: Sleeps With Monsters: Kate Elliott Answers Six Questions
Liz Bourke, interviewer.
OPEN INTERVIEW
"I think it is important to make sure we do not diminish the work of women in the field, that we don’t let them slide away into oblivion or into that space where they are considered as of lesser importance, never as game changing or influential as male writers. There is a risk because of embedded historical and cultural defaults to assuming that male work means more and is by nature more influential in any field."
At Tor.com: An In-Depth Interview With Author Kate Elliott
Peter Orullian, Interviewer
OPEN INTERVIEW
“A thing I think epic fantasy can do well is to analyze and examine power and how power corrupts and how people avoid corruption or learn to wield power as responsibly as possible. As well, I like epic fantasy best when it also examines who gets to wield power, who is excluded, who invisible, and how the order of society may change over time.”
At orbitbooks.net: An Interview With Kate Elliott on Cold Magic
OPEN INTERVIEW
“I think one treads a fine line as a writer. To deal with historical cultures I strove for as much accuracy as possible although I was always aware I was writing a fantasy world. At the same time, I worked to show respect for the deep cultural traditions of all the cultures mentioned in the book. However, I also accepted that there is simply too much for one person to know, especially when dealing with multiple cultural strands, and that there would be nuances I simply fail to grasp. I tried to draw my novel out of historical cultures; that is, I tried to speculate on what the Cold Magic world would look like if things had worked out differently in a “past” of an alternate and very magical Earth, so I am not trying to portray cultures as they are today in our world.”
Interview With Kate Elliott, Author of the Spiritwalker Trilogy
OPEN INTERVIEW
“The idea that men and women by definition write about different things or approach how they write stories differently is itself an idea that reinforces stereotypes about theoretical essential male and female differences (I’m not talking about the biology of reproduction here, obviously). As a child I wanted to read about adventures and to imagine myself having such adventures. For a long time I therefore basically had to read about males doing those things, whether men or boys, and had thereby to identify with males.”
At Dave Brendon’s Fantasy & Sci Fi Weblog: An Interview With Kate Elliott/Alis A Rasmussen
OPEN INTERVIEW
“Change is a thing, neither good nor bad. Change is inevitable. To paraphrase Heracleitus, ‘no one can step into the same river twice.’ People’s tastes, interests, and the way they approach writing has changed as society has changed. Glen Cook’s Black Company series was perhaps a harbinger; I also believe C. J. Cherryh’s writing has done a lot to influence the current ‘grittier’ state of the field.”
At Donna Maree Hanson’s blog: Beta Reading Interview No. 12—Kate Elliott
OPEN INTERVIEW
“As a writer, we have to try to look past our own issues to see if the critique being offered to us can help us improve the manuscript. Sometimes it is hard to accept what someone has said [...] and sometimes we have to stick by our guns and NOT change something to fit someone else’s preconceptions and issues.”
At Rowena Cory Daniells’ blog: Meet Kate Elliott...
OPEN INTERVIEW
“The entire artistic genre of mash-ups is a product of the new media and very much a part of the new century. I think that books that have a mashed-up quality therefore fit right into the new artistic sensibilities. Publishers, writers, and readers all seem more interested in cross genre and mash-ups. I don’t think they’re at all unusual any more.”
At Civilian Reader: An Interview With Kate Elliott
Stefan Fergus, Interviewer
OPEN INTERVIEW
“My parents and extended family are my biggest influences in terms of how I look at the world and approach what I want to write about. As a child of an immigrant growing up in an ethnic household, I’ve always been interested in the dynamic between cultures, the process of assimilation into the new versus the retention and prolongation of the old, as well as the ways in which cultures interact, change, and conflict when they come into contact.”
At Fantasy Book Critic: Interview With Kate Elliott
OPEN INTERVIEW
“While there are many ‘traditional’ elements to the novels I write, I also work to bring stories and characters into the epic fantasy (and epic space opera, when I’ve written it) that are normally not considered to be part of ‘the tradition’. Whose lives are ‘worth’ examining? Whose stories get neglected or overlooked because they aren’t deemed ‘important enough’? Who decides what matters? As a writer, I get to decide for my own books, and I always try to challenge my own expectations and assumptions about who needs, and gets, a voice.”
At Absolute Write: An Eye for Detail: An Interview With Kate Elliott
by Moira Allen
OPEN INTERVIEW
“Despite the care with which Elliott blends factual detail and speculative fiction, she does not believe that fantasy writers are writing ‘history.’ A writer's goal should not be to attempt to literally recreate another time and place, as this goal is impossible. ‘I'm not sure we can ever truly know how a person in the past thought or acted; we can only make guesses, or assumptions, based on our own reading of the evidence--or we can speculate based on nothing much at all.’ ”
The Slush God Speaketh (John Joseph Adams)
OPEN INTERVIEW
" I wanted to take some well known character “figures,” such as the child with mysterious parentage, the child with hidden powers, the bastard child who is worthy, and so on, and explore what could be done with them both in terms of throwing a twist into the reader’s expectations and in terms of examining how their lives would sort out if subjected to ‘real world’ rigor."
Alternative Reality Web Zine (interview by S.K. Slevinski)
OPEN INTERVIEW
" I think when we write that we are talking about ourselves, that we are interacting with our own time far more than we are actually projecting into the past or future. I'm not sure that science fiction is really "about the future" as much as it is about us right now and how we understand the world and what we speculate about the universe and how and why and where things could change and if they should and whether they will. That's what I would call it speculative fiction, which I think science fiction can do exceptionally well at its best. Fantasy? Sometimes we do seem to be dealing with the timeless issues of morality, virtue, good and evil, abandonment, the quest, and so on. But how we present and explore these themes invariably reflects the place we're writing from."
The Dragon Page podcast, Cover to Cover #193 (with Kate Elliott & Elaine Isaak)
OPEN INTERVIEW
