Michele Karlsberg: What was one of the most surprising things you learned in creating your book?
Jess Wells: What surprised me about my last book: a re-emerging love of the fantastical. My latest book, A Slender Tether, is set in France in the 1300s. It’s three ‘tales’: a ficto-biographical novella of the brilliant intellectual Christine de Pizan, as a study of ambition and disillusionment; a novella of entirely fictional characters grappling with identity, freedom and visibility set in a paper mill (that still exists and that I visited); and a short story in between, in my mind, like the jam between bread. What surprised me about this middle story, “The Gong Farmer,” is its whimsy, its fabulist tone, its leaning toward magical realism.
There’s something terrifically liberating about writing something that’s fantastic, which lets its toes hang over the cliff of reality. It’s dangerous (Will anyone believe me? How close can I get). It’s surprising and, especially after researching Medieval history, it is just darn fun. It has some of the spontaneity that I think you tend to lose the more you know about the mechanics of writing and the more you focus on the output of your writing ‘career.’ It’s also more of a fable than my writing generally is, and I really enjoyed being overt about the storytelling aspect of the piece.
I’m a huge fan of magical realism; I think Gabriel Garcia Marquez was one of the world’s finest writers ever, and that Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion is great magical realism. In fact, my previous book, The Mandrake Broom, was also set in the Middle Ages, but this time, dramatizing the fight to save medical knowledge during the witch-burning times had originally included more magical realism than survived the editing process. (It’s far more difficult than it seems!) All that’s left of it is a potion for longevity given to the protagonist by her mother, and, in me, an enduring love of the fantastic.
Jess Wells is the author of 12 volumes of work, including four novels and four books of short stories, her latest two in historical fiction. She is the winner of a San Francisco Arts Commission Grant for Literature, and a four-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.
Alex Woolfson: You can’t get more “niche” than the kind of comics I write and publish—“big budget” action stories with real heroes who just happen to like other guys. Basically, I wanted to create the same high-quality escapist adventures straight folks have been able to enjoy for years, something no mainstream publisher would fund. One of the most surprising things I learned creating my graphic novels was how much the Internet has leveled the playing field for LGBT creators.
Before I started, I didn’t know any artists, but using online forums, I found talented pencilers and colorists from around the world, eager to work on these kinds of projects. I posted up my first comic, the science-fiction thriller Artifice, for free on the Web, one page a week—and within a year built an audience of over 7000 readers a day. Using Kickstarter, I then raised $36,551, which allowed me to print an Artifice paperback that looked as good as, if not better than, what a mainstream publisher would put out. The next year, I raised over $133,000 for the first volume of my ongoing super-hero action-romance webcomic, The Young Protectors, out this spring. And I now sell my work to a worldwide audience through Amazon and my own online store, turning my “niche” comics into a real source of income.
Twenty years ago, when you needed the permission of industry gatekeepers, this wouldn’t have been possible. But it turns out that lots of people around the world share my dream of seeing adventures with LGBT heroes—and the Internet now lets us join forces to make those dreams real.
Alex Woolfson lives and writes in the Bay Area. You can read his comics for free online at artificecomic.com and youngprotectors.com
Michele Karlsberg Marketing and Management specializes in publicity for the LGBT community. This year, Karlsberg celebrates twenty-five years of successful book campaigns.
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