Anatomy of a Novel: A Conversation with J.M. Sidorova by …

J.M. Sidorova was born and grew up in an apartment building in Moscow. Her family did a four-year stint in Singapore for her father’s work, then in West Germany. She […]

J.M. Sidorova was born and grew up in an apartment building in Moscow. Her family did a four-year stint in Singapore for her father’s work, then in West Germany. She ultimately landed in the US, where she has spent most of her adult life. She moved to Seattle in 1990 and earned her PhD in molecular biology. Sidorova’s very first publication in English was a literary short story, “Standard Deviation” in a magazine called Eclectica.

“ . . . Curiously, my first name somehow evolved to Marko, and Google AI eagerly warns not to confuse this Marko with Julia.” In 2009, she attended the Clarion West workshop. “That was a fateful six weeks. After that, I did several one-day classes/workshops with the authors I love to keep learning from: Karen Joy Fowler, John Crowley, Paul Park, Daryl Gregory, Connie Willis, Nancy Kress.” Clarkesworld published “Messenger” in the August 2010 issue; “The Witch, the Tinman, the Flies” came out the same month in Asimov’s.

She came out with a number of short stories following these in an assortment of venues, such as “Deus Absconditus” in GigaNotoSaurus (August 2012) and “Agnosia” in Gordon Van Gelder’s anthology Welcome to Dystopia (OR Books, 2017). But it was 2013 novel, The Age of Ice (Scribner), that made a bigger splash. The Age of Ice landed on the Locus Recommended Reading List, earned her interviews and coveted reviews (including a review in the Los Angeles Times written by Elizabeth Hand), and even resulted in a spot in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia.

It’s fair to say that a lot of folks who love science fiction gravitated toward that book, as well as the much shorter ebook original in the same world, The Colors of Cold (Scribner, 2013). J.M. Sidorova is also an artist. “When I had more time on my hands, I used to paint in oils. Portraits and stuff, the old-fashioned way. One day, I’ll get back to that.” A long time ago, she was a cook at a field station on the White Sea.

But by day, she is a molecular biologist. “That’s my entire professional life, if you will, and it is alternatively cool, interesting, and boring—and nerve-wracking—in so many ways.” Sidorova still lives in Seattle. “The city keeps growing on me, I guess, which is fortunate because the original reason I came here was somewhat accidental. It could have been some other city. But this city happened to have a major cancer research center, and it was the time when Soviet scientists were finally allowed to go to work abroad, and I was training to become a scientist and was married to a scientist, and so we went.” J.M.

Sidorova’s newest novel is The Witch of Prague, “A work of magical realism set during the 1968 Prague Spring,” due this month from Homeward Books. Were your parents big readers? Did they encourage you to read, as well as to write fiction? Yes. Though I don’t remember them talking about the books they read, they led by example. This was an innate order of things—your father and your father’s father before you had been collecting a library and passing it forward, and so you had generations of books, they could well be the walls of your home.

So they didn’t have to encourage me, just surround me with books. More or less, the family library was housed in my room. They got the writing fiction part as a side effect of reading fiction. I wrote my first book, an illustrated chapbook about a dog, at the age of seven. What were the works and who were the authors that inspired you when you were growing up? What stories do you see as important to you as a writer?

Oh, too many to recount! Let’s go by age: in the undifferentiated age, nine or ten years old, Ernest Thompson Seton, Wild Animals I Have Known, made an impression. Now I know Thompson Seton was the founder of a “sentimental animal story” genre. Ancient Greek myths and legends were another one—a favorite read and reread when sick with cold or flu. There were photographs of Greek sculptures throughout the book, and I painted big, colorful underpants over all those barely fig leaf-covered parts.

Progressing to teens, a more self-aware time and a period when you get to meet all the distinguished tropes and timeless archetypes for the very first time. And these encounters, conveyed through these particular story incarnations, they stay with you forever. Just sticking to speculative fiction, let’s say, Stanisław Lem, “The Mask”: a female android assassin awakening to self-awareness that is also in love with her mark?

OMG! Also by Lem, Solaris: an impossible chasm between an alien and human mind and what delicate and brutal shortcuts can bridge it—maybe, tentatively? Sign me up! Jorge Luis Borges—oh my, you can write like this, in pure ideas and sweeping, century-spanning brushstrokes? And then, yes, The Lord of the Rings series, read for the first time in college and then reread regularly: wow, high fantasy CAN be written like a World War II tale!

At what point did you decide to make a serious go of writing professionally, of getting work out there and trying to get published? I don’t know about a serious go. Because the way it used to go and still does, you can be dead serious about it, but it never depends entirely on you; you could still never get anywhere with it. I was never, like, OK, I’m going to make this investment of time and training and become a professional, and it is going to pay off handsomely.

Instead, it was: I am out of my twenties and am adulting now, and had a pretty big transition, what with starting a life in another country; and somehow, I am still writing. So I guess I’ll keep writing. Sort of like Forrest Gump: I’ll just keep running. I just had to switch to writing in English, that much was clear, so I did. Naturally, it took a while, and it was hard to take myself seriously along the way: Are you really trying to write fiction in your second language?

What are you, a Nabokov or something? Hands down, my biggest leap of faith and luckiest break was attending the Clarion West workshop because this made me take myself a bit more seriously as a writer. And did you know—shortly thereafter, Clarkesworld published one of my Clarion short stories, which is also my personal favorite, as a matter of fact. That was one of those good moments of life. But back to how the life story goes, by the time I was a sixteen year old in the USSR, I had this default understanding that you don’t try to publish.

You just don’t. You won’t get published. The best you could do was write something and give it to a close circle of like-minded friends. But then perestroika hit, and the USSR collapsed, and suddenly it was a different game. I was already here in the US at that moment, but I submitted a novella to a literary magazine in Moscow, and it got accepted. It was about a court official in the twelfth century Byzantine Empire who is gay and hopelessly in love with his emperor.

To publish a gay love story in Russia? It would have been unheard of just two years prior to that (and is likely unheard of again now). At the time, it certainly planted the idea: yes, writing can be followed by publishing, in theory at least. You’ve had a few short stories come out over the years. Is your process for writing shorter fiction very different from your process for writing novels? Novels are exponentially harder to write, I think, so really, I don’t know why I keep writing them (I have two novels in the works right now).

Some people will say that a short story is harder because there is no room for error, everything has to be lean and serve a purpose, whereas a novel is a more loose kind of thing where some segments do not need to work so hard as long as the whole comes together in the end, kind of. Personally, I don’t feel this way. I fret over every single word either way, and I think that there are so many more ways to botch a novel than a short story.

So maybe that means that my process is the same for both. You are a scientist who writes science fiction as well as fantasy. The Witch of Prague is where historical fiction encounters the fantastic. Does your scientific background come into play in certain ways in a book like The Witch of Prague, or does this book provide a way to leave scientific rigor behind and escape into situations that are less real?

Probably the latter more than the former. However, much as I’d like to, I can’t escape far enough. There is a compulsion to remain in this world and to follow historical fact. I guess this could be called scientific rigor, and if so, it’s a burden, to be honest. On the other hand, I also believe that magic feels closer, more possible and real, if you embed it in the common, recognizable reality, rather than exporting it to some tertiary world.

Which means that I have a perennial need, if not to inhabit, but at least to contemplate this slightly alternate, slightly off-kilter reality—alongside the real one. The Witch of Prague takes place during Cold War Czechoslovakia, the 1968 Prague Spring. Why this place, why this time, what drew you to inhabiting this space? This novel’s inception goes back ten years (which now feels like a different world), and some choices were akin to rolling a very loaded dice, but dice nonetheless.

For example, since I wanted to use elements of my mom’s young adulthood, the project was always tethered to the whereabouts of the middle of the twentieth century. To layer magic over a Cold War historical drama was my original intent, but the time and place were not predefined. So why 1968? I don’t want to go into too much sociopolitical commentary here, but metaphorically speaking, it’s like sins of your family lie heavier on your mind than sins of some other family.

That’s from a personal standpoint. And as a writer, again, metaphorically speaking, you are drawn to the moments in history when all this largely invisible, plausibly deniable sausage-making of geopolitical metabolism suddenly blows the lid off, and the contents just lie there, exposed. What I did not envision ten years ago was that Prague Spring/invasion could be a story that would be happening again, now.

What can you tell us about the main character, Alica? What do you find most interesting or compelling about her? I have to admit that as time goes by, I am having less and less patience for loudmouthed and overconfident characters. Alica’s self-confidence is pretty low, as far as I can tell, and she does not hide the fact. But that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t have agency and doesn’t act boldly and decisively when push comes to shove.

She’s someone who can be terrified but will still step forward. She doesn’t even know how little she expects from life, and in this sense, she is almost not of this world. These elements, to me, are more interesting to work with than certain other combinations of traits. What kind of research did you do for this book? And were there a few cool or fascinating things you discovered that didn’t make it into the final draft?

Oh, there is a ton of information available. There was the usual reading of primary sources, but you could also watch documentary footage and listen to the recordings of radio broadcasts. A rock concert featuring homegrown Czech bands. A voice of a teenager who is reporting from the streets of Prague after the tanks moved in. I watched Czech movies from the sixties and Agnieszka Holland’s 2013 movie Burning Bush.

I could also go back to my childhood memories for some mundane details. As for the cool and fascinating things, they were mainly discovered when researching the Unicorn Tapestries for the novel. These are real historical tapestries, and I have their fictional doppelgänger in the book, and everything about their appearance and the mystery of their symbolism is true to the original, the only fictional elements are how they had wound up in Prague instead of the Cloisters in the Met.

But I have to say that I managed to squeeze every one of these cool discoveries into the final draft. Among the things that had been written and then excised are fragments of Alica’s own fantasy tales that she had composed growing up. These pieces have now grown into a whole other novel that I am working on. What, for you, is The Witch of Prague ultimately about—what is the heart of the story?

I guess if I think of it in terms of inception because the heart needs to be beating for this whole thing to start forming around it (sort of like Dr. Manhattan from the Watchmen movie reassembling one organ system at a time after the accident). So, the heart is about a mentorship that at once works miracles (figuratively and literally) and is terribly flawed. But since I first detected that heartbeat, so to speak, this story also has grown all kinds of other organ systems.

Its nervous system, its brain, for example, is preoccupied with lies. From the little personal ones to the countrywide ones, for which everybody has to pretend as if they are the truth. And the story’s gut is queasy with an image of a hunt; who is hunting, who is hunted. What were the biggest challenges in writing this book? Did your experiences with your prior novels help? Alica is my first first-person POV female character in a novel-long format, believe it or not.

So, in that sense, the novel before this one (The Age of Ice) did not help at all; it was a first-person male POV of someone who is quite jaded. Besides, I wanted The Witch of Prague to be different from the latter in several ways. A big challenge was not to make Alica be like me, just by accident, because of some lazy narrative choices. I would spend a long time figuring out how she would react to this or that, what emotions she would be experiencing, and how she would be handling them.

There were also instances of wrestling between an author and the narrative: I, the author, would really want to arrive to a “gets the boy, saves the world” ending, but the narrative didn’t want to budge. Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about you, your work, or The Witch of Prague? There is another book by the same title. It was written in the late nineteenth century by an American writer named F.

Marion Crawford, and it still has a life on the Internet. The title twinning is not coincidental: that book is mentioned and plays a part in my book, but it does not mean there is any relationship or continuity or endorsement of any kind. But if you Google the title, don’t be surprised or mislead to read F. Marion Crawford and wonder: what on earth?! Arley Sorg is an associate agent at kt literary.

He is a two-time World Fantasy Award Finalist and a two-time Locus Award Finalist for his work as co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. Arley is also a SFWA Solstice Award Recipient, a Space Cowboy Award Recipient, and a finalist for two Ignyte Awards. Arley is senior editor at Locus, associate editor at both Lightspeed & Nightmare, a columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and an interviewer for Clarkesworld.

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