Unlikely Story

An Unlikely Interview with Nicolette Barischoff

In Follow Me Down, your characters’ field of study is preternatural obstetrics. You’re tackling ideas that don’t necessarily get a lot of play in fiction, particularly the idea of childbirth as a formal academic subject. Childbirth, and specifically women helping other women give birth, is often depicted as an oral tradition passed down from generation to generation. It’s something for women to work out among themselves, and not a worthy subject for the hallowed halls of academia, which don’t concern themselves with messy things like the birthing process. Were any of those things you set out to consciously explore in your story? If not, what drew you to writing this tale?

I didn’t specifically set out to write a story that addressed these things (though I’m obviously gratified to realize I’ve done so.) I suppose I considered the College of Theogony to be very Greek in its sensibilities and its attitudes towards learning, especially as regards the practice of medicine. We know that female doctors were a regular presence during birth, acting as “cutter of the cord” alongside less generally educated midwives, so childbirth in antiquity wasn’t ghettoized from the rest of formalized medicine as it later became. The ins and outs of safe childbirth were part of the formal education of the female doctor.

I also think the Greeks were a people who liked textbooks. They liked to have their wisdom written down: How to Write a Good Play. How to Form a Utopian Society. Why are Men Hairier than Women?. I tend to believe that if a skilled practitioner of any discipline thought something was worth passing down, he had a scribe put it on paper and called it So And So’s Complete Treatise on Something Or Rather. It just made sense to me that a tradition of formalized education would have sprung up around the birthing of demi-gods, at a time and place when certain gods had a reputation for getting frisky with mortals. I sort of imagine that the tradition was brought to Europe (and then the New World) via the spread of Christianity and its own signally important Superum birth.

Incidentally, I also did not set out to write a story with an all-female cast. One of the (many) characters who ended up on the cutting room floor was a male colleague of Ramona’s who took a more relaxed, amused attitude toward Kora Gillespie’s exploits.

But in the end, the story was about Kora and Ramona, and what to do with your fear when the thing that you fear cannot help but be what it is. Everything else had to go.

You recently wrote a blog post about the natural fit between speculative fiction and academic settings. As you say, it’s the perfect place for authors to test rules, build worlds, and explore the hows and whys behind the way things happen events in their stories. Now that you’ve laid the groundwork for their base of knowledge, do you foresee taking Kora and Ramona out into the wider world to apply their skills in future stories?

Hm. Perhaps. I think Kora would have to grow up a little bit for that to happen, though. I don’t see Kora’s “mischievous imp” antics continuing to be entertaining for the length of multiple stories. Sooner rather than later, she is going to have to grow up (already has begun to grow up by the time we leave her in Follow Me Down) so the question then becomes, would we still find Kora compelling if she wasn’t a troubled (and troubling) vulnerable little girl anymore? I’d have to think about what growing up would mean for a personality like Kora Gillespie’s, what her journey to adulthood would look like, what such a person would have to offer a wider world… which I suppose would be quite fun to do… so, yes. Absolutely. Why not?

Do you have a favorite magical school from literature? If that school offered you admission, do you see yourself gravitating toward a particular subject or specialty? If you were offered a teaching position at that school, is there anything new you’d add to the curriculum?

Jordan College (part of Philip Pullman’s alternate Oxford in the His Dark Materials series) was definitely tugging on me when I created the New York College of Theogony and Preternatural Obstetrics (I don’t think it’s a secret that there’s quite a bit of Lyra Belacqua in Kora Gillespie). I’ve always thought Jordan College was a perfect example of that inherent contradiction within all academic institutions: It is a place dedicated to learning, something which in its purest form requires free exploration, and the challenging of accepted rules and boundaries. And yet, Lyra is actively discouraged from wandering its expansive grounds, or from asking inappropriate questions. In other words, she’s expected to stay put, and to only desire to learn what she’s told she must learn.

I love the atmosphere of a place that offers so many lofty nooks and crannies in which to break its own rules. It’s hard to imagine studying anything in particular at Jordan College. I think most learning in that universe comes from the conversations you shouldn’t hear, and the books you shouldn’t open, and the costly-looking golden trinkets you shouldn’t mess with. I see myself more engaging in that purer form of learning, scrabbling up into towers and down into ancient tombs with my daemon familiar at my side. (A North American box turtle, in case you were wondering. I’m sure you were.)

Of course, the two institutions have spiritually very little to do with each other. Jordan College is a very severe, restrictive, patriarchally-centered environment, almost fearing the learning to which it has devoted itself. In Theogony, I think I found something which captured the same kind of vivid, old world adventure-rich milieu, while being a much more progressive, inherently optimistic and well-intentioned place. Theogony does not actually intend to be fearful or restrictive. But these differences in intention mean little to someone like Kora, who still finds herself in trouble more often than not. In a sense, I think I wanted to show the limitations of even the most well-intentioned academic institution in dealing with any sort of unstructured learning.

Pick an author whose work you enjoy (past or present) and tell us about the book they never wrote, but you wish they had (e.g. Tolstoy’s long-awaited and even longer page count sequel to War and Peace.)

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden is, and ever will be, one of my favorite novels. It’s a story about all things that can make a human heart anemic and hard and ungracious, and unlikable. And it’s a story about renewal, and coming alive after spending so long thinking you were dead, the strange things that end up drawing us out of the dark, and saving our lives. So I’m always frustrated when I come to the end and remember there’s not more of it.

It might just be that I love it so much that I would live in it for weeks on end if I could, shut away in a garden with an unpleasant, lonely little girl and her creepily prescient bird (there’s a little bit of Mary Lennox in Kora Gillespie, too). But I always imagined there was a much longer work in there that more thoroughly explored the story’s magical overtones, and perhaps gave us a chance to see what kind of adult Mary became. Sometimes I think what I want is a fantasy novel set on the dark, sprawling grounds of Misselthwaite Manor, with Mary as a mature sort of gothic fantasy heroine. I’ll have to see if anyone’s writing something like that.

We all start somewhere, and the learning curve from first publication is a steep one. What’s your first ever published work, and how do you feel about it now?

It wasn’t that long ago, actually. My first sale was just last year, to Long Hidden. So, I don’t really have enough distance from it to have a radically different perspective. It was the beginning of me as a genre writer. I used to think I was a “Capital L” Literature writer, even though almost everything I read and loved was fantasy. Other people’s expectations are a hard thing to break free of, and most people in my life kept nudging me in the direction of Classical Literature. A good friend and mentor told me about LH, and I was still picking at an idea I developed during a Chinese Folk Religion class, so I thought I’d give it a try. It was my first attempt at genre, save for some college assignments. But when the book came out, I found myself in a Table of Contents with such beautiful, dazzling stories, and I knew I’d found my people. I haven’t looked back since.

Twenty years is a geological microsecond, but is a vast stretch for a person, no matter how quickly it seems to slip away, and it can be interesting to think about what one’s characters might be doing twenty years in their futures. Do you see anything interesting in any of your character’s futures that you’d be willing to share with us?

Ramona might object to the idea now, but looking ahead, I see absolutely no reason why she wouldn’t take a more mature Kora abroad with her as her assistant. Kora has a unique and valuable gift that allows her to know when a woman’s dreams are disturbed by supernatural visitors, and to offer direct emotional support then and there. I don’t see Ramona allowing that to go to waste. Perhaps the two of them are destined to become a sort of traveling practice, assisting on a sort of emergency basis when crises arise in places like Chiloe.

What else are you working on have coming up you want people to know about?

God willing, a benefit anthology I contributed a short piece to called Angels of the Meanwhile should be out before the end of the year. It’s full of poems and stories by such amazing authors as Ellen Kushner, Catherynne M. Valente, Amal El-Mohtar, and my Academia ToC buddy Rose Lemberg.

I’m currently working on a few things, one of which is a sort of Canterbury Tales collection of stories imagined up by a bunch of cousins quarantined together with chickenpox. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, though.

Oh, and you should all read Accessing the Future. It’s a seriously good and important anthology.

Journal of Unlikely Academia Issue 12, October 2015

Table of Contents

Follow Me Down by Nicolette Barischoff
Minotaur: An Analysis of the Species by Sean Robinson
The Librarian’s Dilemma by E. Saxey
The Dauphin’s Metaphysics by Eric Schwitzgebel
Soteriology and Stephen Greenwood by Julia August
And Other Definitions of Family by Abra Staffin-Wiebe
Candidate 45, Pensri Suesat by Pear Nuallak
The Shapes of Us, Translucent to Your Eye by Rose Lemberg

Editors’ Note:

Welcome, dear readers, to Unlikely Story #12: The Journal of Unlikely Academia. This time around, rather than offering you a specialized subject, we are exploring the pursuit of knowledge itself. From the hallowed halls of venerable supernatural institutions, to fieldwork on an alien space station, and the shelves of your university library and beyond, the authors in this issue are celebrating learning in all its forms.

Here you will find scholars searching for the truth behind monsters, and monsters searching for the truth within themselves. You’ll find librarians struggling to set information free, and teachers struggling to open the doors of learning to everyone equally, especially those society most often overlooks and forgets. You’ll find metaphysical questions, the place where art and myth intersect, issues of translation, and an unorthodox and extremely personal method of studying alien culture.

So sit up straight, tuck in your shirt, spit out that gum, and pay attention. Yes, this will be on the test. Luckily, the test only has one question — did you enjoy these stories? If so, please tell your family, your neighbors, your friends, and random strangers on the street. There’s always room for a few more bodies in the Unlikely Story classroom.

Cover art by Patricio Beteo

An Unexpectedly Unlikely Announcement

We’re happy to announce that Unlikely Story is now a SFWA qualifying market.

I can either babble on incoherently about this, or shut up now, and the latter option seems the wiser.

To see the full list of SFWA qualifying markets, visit:

Membership Requirements

Announcing… Clowns: The Unlikely Coulrophobia Remix

As you may remember, a few months back we ran a Kickstarter to fund an expanded version of our April Fool’s mini issue, The Journal of Unlikely Coulrophobia. The Kickstarter was successful, and we opened the floodgates to another round of clown submissions. It took some time, but we diligently worked our way through the many excellent stories sent to us, and made some tough choices along the way. Now, we’re thrilled to announce the full line up for Clowns: The Unlikely Coulrophobia Remix!

The Table of Contents will include the five stories originally published in Unlikely Story #11.5: The Journal of Unlikely Coulrophobia.

Five Things Every Successful Clown Must Do by Derek Manuel
Perfect Mime by Sara K. McNeilly
A Million Tiny Ropes by Virginia M. Mohlere
Everyone’s A Clown by Caroline M. Yoachim
Break the Face in the Jar by the Door by Carlie St. George

Joining those stories are seventeen brand new pieces of flash fiction, plus a smattering of new clown facts (still to be determined -- we haven’t forgotten about the authors who submitted them, we promise!). Those new stories, in no particular order, are:

The Game by Mari Ness
Thou Antic Death by Kristen Roupenian
Mr. Boingo Saves the World by J.H. Pell
Melpomene’s Heirs by Evan Dicken
Stilts by Line Henriksen
A Distant Honk by Holly Schofield
Gags, Bits, and Business by T. Jane Berry
Clown’s Syndrome by Joe Nazare
A Silent Comedy by Cate Gardner
Queen and Fool by Dayle A. Dermatis
Clowns of the Creosote Plains by Chillbear Latrigue
Pushpin and Pullpin by Charles Payseur
An Argument for Clowning on the Sabbath by Jeff Wolf
Whaling with Clowns by Chris Kuriata
Clown Shoes by Cassandra Khaw
God’s Children by Jason Arias
Clown Car, Driven Once, Never Emptied by Karlo Yeager Rodriguez

We can’t wait to share this amazing anthology with you! In the meantime, keep an eye on twitter and this blog. More details about the anthology, Kickstarter rewards, and our upcoming Unlikely Academia issue, will be coming soon.

Congratulations, Kat Howard!

We’re thrilled to see Kat Howard’s All of Our Past Places from Unlikely Story #9: The Journal of Unlikely Cartography included among the finalists for this year’s WSFA Small Press Award. Congratulations to Kat and all her fellow nominees. We’re proud to have published such a wonderful story, and happy to see it gain wider recognition. The winner will be announced this October at Capclave. We’ll be keeping our fingers crossed until then!