Speculative Realities in Smothermoss: Interview with Alisa Alering
Grab your copy of Smothermoss by Alisa Alering here.
Satori: Smothermoss is so packed with nature, girlhood, class struggles, queerness, magic, the uncanny… and the writing is so confident, lyrical, and grounded in sensory detail. The scents and tastes of this world overwhelm me, and I feel like I’m there with Sheila and Angie. And the ending is so satisfying! Everything changes for the two sisters, but fundamentally their personalities stay the same. It’s beautiful and I love it, so thank you for sharing this world with us!
Alisa: Thank you! I really appreciate the things that you called out just there—the list of things that I want people to see in Smothermoss. The magic, the girlhood, the queerness, the nature, those are the topics that are important to me too.
S: When did the idea for this novel emerge for you?
A: I think it snuck up on me, in that the idea had probably been there for a long time, but I didn’t recognize it as an idea. It was quiet, and it was just Angie and Sheila. They didn’t have names, and they were these two girls. I write from an image, so I see them in my head as a static image of these two opposing girls who I know are sisters. I was writing short stories and I was writing other things, and I had a note that I would go back to that. I thought they were characters in a short story, but they weren’t. They were a novel!
It was a matter of finding out everything else that takes place, except maybe the murder because that’s based on a real event. Everything else came out from finding out who Angie and Sheila were.
S: That’s so interesting that you start writing from images. Are there any specific speculative elements that came to you as images in the process of writing? We have the rope, the rabbits, and so many other strange and wonderful elements.
A: So when I say I write from an image… I don’t know if you are at all familiar with Lynda Barry, the cartoonist? She does a lot of creative inspiration work about an image as the source of creativity. I don’t think that’s true for everyone, but it works well for me. I see this thing in my head, and then it’s like a crystal ball. You see the thing in there, and you try to find out what else is around it.
Other than magic, the most visual element is Angie’s cards, and those are something that I did draw myself when I was a kid. Of course, they weren’t magical, but I would draw monsters. You know how in school when you draw the Thanksgiving turkey? You can draw an upright bird by using the side of your hand, you draw around it like this, and then you put legs on it and a little beak. I started drawing these bird monsters because I had been shown that in school. Those were real. They were something I could see in my memory. But what if they were cooler? What if they were scarier, what if they had more to them? That was very visual.
The rope around Sheila’s neck, I knew there was something that constrained her. Part of my image of her was this line across her neck, and how do you explain a line? Well, it’s a rope. It’s the thing that’s holding her back.
S: I love that. In what ways do you feel the speculative can be a catalyst for intersectional feminism, girlhood, and the inner workings of Smothermoss?
A: I appreciate that you notice the class issues. This is one of those lesser talked about subjects in literature. Having moved class in my life, I feel like those boundaries have become more obvious to me now. Speculative fiction works very well for showing all kinds of imbalances and feelings of otherness. There are many writers of color who are doing great work with their use of speculative fiction to define their place in the world.
If we’re talking about queerness or poverty or any kind of otherness, it’s how you’re made to feel, but there’s maybe a way to express that positively.
There’s always trade-offs. If you’re an outsider, you lose access to power and privilege, but—and these don’t always balance out—there are some advantages to being an outsider, and you usually have a clearer vision of what’s going on around you. Sometimes otherness can lead to alternative paths that you wouldn’t have seen if you were in the mainstream. And if you connect with a minority community, you can get an extra-strong sense of community that you are not getting from the wider world. And it means you don’t take everything for granted.
That’s why the speculative device works. If you start out thinking you’re in the mainstream, and then you accept what’s given to you, and then you’re told that you don’t belong in that world, you start questioning what you see and believe. You thought the world was a certain way, but you’ve learned that it’s not that way, so you wonder, what else is that way? It opens the door to the speculative.
S: Moving on to Sheila’s raw and visceral hunger throughout Smothermoss. Hunger to escape, queer hunger, literal hunger… it’s something I resonate with as a nonbinary writer. I’m curious if Sheila and Angie, as characters, speak to any particular aspects of your intersectional identities?
A: I was thinking about Sheila first, oh but Angie! She’s the foil! I’ll start with Angie. Angie doesn’t second-guess herself and doesn’t overthink anything. She wants, and she does. She’s a simple machine in that way. She has her sexual fantasies, she doesn’t have any shame, she believes in herself (perhaps to her own detriment). But she does want. She doesn’t want to save the world, she wants to save herself. But she wants to be the hero. She wants to capture the bad guy. She wants to be on top. In some ways, it’s a hunger. And in real time, if she wants the extra pancake, she’s gonna take it. She wants, she takes.
Everything’s the opposite for Sheila. Everything’s turned inward. She feels all these burdens that she can’t acknowledge her hungers, which might even be stronger than Angie’s. Maybe they’re stronger because they’ve been repressed.
Obviously, in a rural area in the 1980’s, there’s a good reason for not admitting to her queer hunger and her feelings for her classmate. There aren’t even any words for it, for her. There aren’t role models, there’s hardly the idea of being a lesbian other than the playground joke. I certainly know people who are older than me who were thirty-five when they heard the word lesbian! It’s hard to remember that it could have been that way so recently. Sheila does have all these strong desires, but she doesn’t have anywhere to put them. For reasons, some real, some imagined, she doesn’t think that it’s safe to express them.
S: Thank you. One more question. Is there something that you wanted readers to take away from Smothermoss that was important to your writing experience, or you have been wanting to speak to?
A: I’m left with the question that the whole book struggles with, which is the conundrum of being an outsider in a place that’s important to you. How do you reconcile or resolve that you can love a place or some aspects of it, but it doesn’t love you back? Like yes, the environment is great for these reasons, and it sustains me, but I feel suffocated and I can’t live there. For people who are different in all kinds of ways, sometimes smaller communities feel off-limits or not possible, even if other aspects of people’s personalities embrace that community. I don’t think that there is an answer, but that’s the question the book wrestles with.
Alisa Alering is the author of Smothermoss, published by Tin House Books in July 2024. Alisa grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania and now lives in Arizona. After attending Clarion West, their short fiction has been published in Fireside, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Podcastle, and Cast of Wonders, among others, and been recognized by the Calvino Prize. A former librarian and science/technology reporter, they teach fiction workshops at the Highlights Foundation. You can purchase Smothermoss here.
Satori Good is a writer and cat parent from Lawrence, Kansas. Their speculative fiction appears in Studies in the Fantastic and New Moon Magazine. They are the Assistant Editor in Chief for So to Speak and a first-year MFA student at George Mason University.