1 photo by Audrey Cho
Jennifer Stevenson
Issue #36
The author of Trash Sex Magic switches the lit market for the mainstream with an eye-boggling fantasy romance trilogy. Here, she shows us a little leg on the politics of writing romance.
By Ling Ma
Published: June 1st, 2008 | 10:17am
Jennifer Stevenson has developed a scrappy nature from years of bouncing her stories around in the publishing industry. Born into a newspaper family, she eschewed tradition to become a fiction writer. In 2004, her debut novel, Trash Sex Magic, became a literary cult hit, brimming over with crazily lyrical Midwestern nature imagery and featuring the best sex scene between woman and tree ever put down in ink.
Constantly evolving, Stevenson has since reinvented herself as the author of a fantasy romance series for the mass market. The trilogy, starting with The Brass Bed, follows tough-talking Chicago cop Jewel Heiss, who investigates paranormal activity by day and embarks on bedroom adventures with a sex demon and con artist by night.
Sticking the tape recorder in her front shirt pocket, Stevenson talks up a storm while puttering around the kitchen, whipping up corn biscuits and bacon.
Trash Sex Magic is widely acknowledged as a “literary” fantasy novel. It’s more stylistically innovative than anything you’ve published. What were the differences in approaching something like Trash and then something that’s mass-market and plot-driven?
With Trash, I was indulging the collegial fiction writer’s passion for lush prose, extravagant imagery, and to hell with anybody who can’t keep up. At the time I was writing, I was attending science fiction conventions and hanging with the New York Review of Science Fiction crowd. I felt considerable encouragement in these pretenses, and there was a market for it. I loved doing that, letting all the worries about the reader go, and just wallowing in language.
Sadly, the bottom dropped out of the literary fantasy market directly after I sent the book to TOR Books. Since then, I’ve been paying more attention to my reader. Mostly I take the same attitudes, though — the same about sex, nature, and how people, la terra, and el mundo are all connected. They work best when they work together.
I learned very rudimentary forms of plot as a kid, reading those Sweet Valley High books. In the first chapter, they’d always mention Jessica and Elizabeth’s sparkling blue eyes “like the Pacific ocean.”
I had to join Romance Writers of America to learn what the parts of a plot are. Romances are not the only kind of book there is, but people say if you learn one structure, you learn them all. Romances have the same structure as relationships.You meet somebody, you may not like them right away, but you get to know them. A relationship forms, and a physical side develops. Sooner or later, you get married. Romance is kind of a political genre. Romance takes the position that men and women can form committed relationships and spend their lives happily ever after. You don’t have to be gay to think differently, you just have to be divorced [laughs]. Anybody who’s divorced will argue strenuously how it’s not necessarily a good idea for men and women to live together.
Your trilogy can be considered fantasy romance. What is that genre?
It’s a story that has magic in it but also has a love story. It’s also the same as paranormal romance. One of the functions of fantasy and science fiction is to take an emotional fact about humans and make it concrete. Somebody who sucks the life out of their whole family and they leave everything behind them gray and empty — this is the vampire.
You’ve mentioned Joe Haldeman’s observation of Vietnam vets, whose retellings of war experiences become increasingly fantastical over time. Do you think fantasy helps to cope with post-traumatic stress?
Absolutely. There are some post-traumatic survivors of child abuse who say, “Daddy diddled me when I was little.” Then there are people who say, “I was kidnapped by aliens and probed.” We’re talking about the same phenomenon. The alien abductees are suffering from a similar problem, that they may have also been abused as children — but it is actually safer and more loyal as a good child to say, “Oh, evil Satanists did this to me” than it is to point a finger at your close relative and say, “They did something sordid that happens every day.”
Did studying therapy in grad school inform how you work as a writer?
Studying family therapy was particularly educational. My therapy instructor used to say, “When I’m done teaching you, you’ll know how people’s sex life goes by watching them have dinner in a restaurant.” Which is another motivation not to become a therapist, because I like eating in restaurants.
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