EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLING AUTHOR, KATHRIN HUTSON

When did you first know you were meant to be a writer?

I’ve known it since I was ten. That seems to be when the switch of my “meness” turned on (and I really don’t remember much of my life before that age anyway). I woke up the morning of my tenth birthday with the epic realization that I could literally write whatever I wanted and make it end the way I wanted it to end. All this stemmed from a two-week period of reoccurring nightmares about my favorite movie at the time, Fern Gulley.

Apparently, I disliked the ending so much that I brought it back into my dreams, tried to change it, but never could.

But realizing that this was what authors— and storytellers of any ilk—actually do, that they make the stories begin, flow, and end the way they wanted, was the lightbulb moment of inspiration for me. So I sat down on my birthday and started to write.

Over the next two years, that little spark of inspiration became a whopping 183 pages of dark, morose, violent, intensely ageinappropriate fantasy about fairies (and dead mothers, dying fathers, a world ravaged by disease). It will never see the light of day, and I will not go back to revisit the story. I will, however, say that it sparked both my love of writing and my dedication to the craft over the years. And I’ve been writing dark, morose, violent, tear-jerking, occasionally humorous fiction ever since.

What is it about the speculative fiction (science fiction and fantasy) genre that appeals to you?

Any fan of fantasy and sci-fi, in my opinion, has a love of “strange new worlds”. When I was a kid, these worlds were escapes for me— unknown places I could explore and grow to love with the characters; fantastical realms where anything was possible; magic and aweinspiring creatures and heroes/heroines I could connect with because they wanted the same thing I did. To be special. To have meaning. To figure out what the heck their part to play really was within the grand scheme of things.

I love that about speculative fiction. Even if I’m not specifically writing about magic, there’s still a certain level of it within the art of making the impossible come to life on the page and seem so very, very real. The same holds true for sci-fi as well, which I define personally as including technology/biology/ biotech that seems like magic but isn’t entirely beyond the realm of possibility in the future of our planet or solar system or beyond.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t admit that I enjoy writing fantasy and sci-fi far more than literary fiction or even non-fiction simply because of the wider range of control I have over a given world, it’s laws (magical and/or technological), and how the characters interact within those parameters. Even with Urban Fantasy, where the setting is most often within our own current cities and towns, as if the secret world exists right under our noses, I have more freedom to play with how I want that secret world to look, smell, feel, sound, and operate. Research is my least favorite part of any project (it doesn’t even make the “enjoyment” list), but it’s still

necessary to bring that level of reality into the surreal. Yes, even when I’m creating an entirely new Epic Fantasy world. The blending of possible with the impossible is where all the real magic happens.

How important to you is it to have diverse characters?

Diversity is incredibly important to me, as is representation for a number of marginalized communities I either care deeply about or am a part of myself. The Blue Helix books probably have the most diverse cast of characters—all different races, sexual orientations, gender identities, health and disability levels. I started writing Book 1, Sleepwater Beat, with the intention of providing insight through diversity in my main character on a number of different points. We meet Leo Tieffler as a homeless, devil-may-care loner in her early twenties; she is a queer woman, an ex-drug-dealer, the product of childhood trauma and abuse, a victim affected by her father’s drug use, and a woman with an extraordinary ability to make anyone who hears her use a certain type of word believe anything she says—her beat.

These topics and highlighting representation in this way through Leo was incredibly important to me. She’s probably got more of me and my life experiences intertwined in her story than any of my other characters to date (or possibly tied with Jessica Northwood from my newest Accessory to Magic series). Beyond that, though, I also wanted to highlight and showcase other social issues through creating a fictional group of people who all have similar abilities to Leo’s—they can spin a beat, elicit physical responses in people who hear them speak a certain way. It’s the “superpower via storytelling”, in a way. And these people like Leo are ostracized, discriminated against, feared, hated, and even hunted for possessing this ability with which they were born and over which they have very little control, if any.

When I realized Sleepwater’s story wasn’t actually finished and started working on Book 2, Sleepwater Static, I decided to focus more on diversity and representation when it came to writing about race, racism, racial injustice, and the horrors still suffered by so many people in this country and across the world based on nothing more than the color of their skin.

The best route for me was to write the book from the perspective of a seventy-one-year-old white woman in the south with a Black partner and a biracial child, fighting for what she believed in both for her family and for those crossing her path who have the same beat-spinning ability as she does (and I couldn’t have picked a better character to get to know and love and cry with than Bernadette Manney).

The trick to writing diversity isn’t about finding what should be different about one’s characters or even what can be different. It’s about finding the common thread of humanity that exists in all of us no matter who we are, who we love, what we look like, or where we come from. After that, the representation in a cast of characters becomes something as natural to who they are within the story as having tattoos, being “the jokester”, or hating to wake up before 7:00 a.m.

Read the complete interview with Kathrin Hutson at: www.TopShelfMagazine.net