Kelley Eskridge Talks About Writing Solitaire
What’s the book about?
It’s the story of Jackal Segura, a young woman raised to believe that her identity is based on her role in her community, her connection to others. In the course of the book, she loses that connection: she finds herself utterly without human contact for years, and she’s profoundly changed by the experience. Then she’s shoved back into the world and has to make choices about who she is. Is she someone who can reconnect with the world? And does she want to?
Or you could say that it’s a story of fall and redemption. Or the struggle between hope and fear. Or a kid who grows up in a number of hard ways. At heart, it’s about a person who makes an internal journey that changes her, which is what I think is the core of all good story. The rest is detail- — who is she? How did she get to this place? What choices does she make? How does it all work out?
That doesn’t sound much like speculative fiction.
Why not? Story isn’t genre, although I think sometimes people confuse them. And I see genre more as a marketing device than as a legitimate way of categorizing fiction.
Having said that, I chose to frame this story within a speculative context because it’s such a wonderful playground for exploring the internal landscape. Speculative fiction allows metaphor to become real in a way that isn’t possible in other kinds of fiction, and there’s a huge freedom in that. In Solitaire, the ‘internal journey’ isn’t a figure of speech for Jackal’s confrontation with her own fears and yearnings-it’s an actual event, that I hope is interesting both in itself and also in the multiple layers of meaning and metaphor that are brought to bear within it. In the book, Hope is a thing that one can be as well as have; one of Jackal’s greatest lessons is that ‘being hope’ is a constant work in progress.
And there are other elements in the book that make it speculative: the burgeoning global government that is both idealistic and cynical, and the technology that allows Jackal to be imprisoned within her own mind. I don’t think the uneasy relationship between commerce and politics is speculative at all.
Let’s talk about commerce. There’s a lot of focus in the book on Jackal’s corporate training, and on the internal workings of business in general. Where does that come from?
All of Jackal’s training is based on my experience as a facilitator and process manager in various corporate incarnations. Most recently, I worked as the Director of Special Projects and then Vice President of Project Management for Wizards of the Coast, which is the world’s leading publisher of trading card games and role-playing games (Magic, Pokémon, Dungeons & Dragons). I was responsible for a lot of complex process in a speed-of-light environment, across a spectrum of people-executives, artists, designers, writers, marketing and sales staff, operations and production specialists, business managers and financial analysts. I learned a lot. The dynamics of people in corporations fascinates me: tens or hundreds or even thousands of strangers trying to manage consensus on a daily basis (which is my baseline definition of business). In business as in life, people make choices about where to focus and how to behave: Jackal’s skills are real, and they assist in making those choices. It’s challenging work, and much more pragmatic and less warm and fuzzy that people often assume. I loved it, but I love writing more.
You’re now working full time as a writer. What are the challenges there?
There’s a wonderful essay that was given to me (“The Talent of the Room” by Michael Ventura) that talks about writing being the act of sitting in the room and working — but that a writer cannot only sit in the room, because it is life outside the room that fuels the writing. The essay expresses this much more elegantly. I think it’s one of the most true things I know about writing so far. I have to do the work, and I have to do the life.
This is not a hardship because I love life. I will stubbornly wrestle with pain and fear and failure when I must, but at my core I am a seeker of joyful experience. Life is short and the world is wide, so I drink a lot of beer and eat a lot of tasty food and have as many interesting conversations as I can. However, the room is always waiting. The challenge is to balance my attention.
And you live with a writer, as well.
My partner is Nicola Griffith. She’s a powerful writer. I’m blessed to have someone with whom I can share a working vocabulary, who understands what I do and can help me learn to make it better, and whose work is different from mine so that there’s never a sense of one person winning at the expense of the other. She’s also very good at food, beer and conversation, so I’m lucky in life as well as in work.
What writers do you admire?
J.R.R. Tolkien. Patrick O’Brian. Stephen King. Ursula K. Le Guin. John D. MacDonald. William Shakespeare. They are writers of broad imagination and a clear love of being human, who are capable of a great particularity-the details that make a character or event so specific that it couldn’t possibly be anything else, and at the same time so accessible that it becomes possible for me as a reader to live it. These writers see with such clarity. They aren’t afraid of quiet moments and big feelings. They catch me and stir me up. They make me glad to be alive. And they are interested in the same internal landscape that compels me as a writer.
Recently, I’ve really enjoyed work by Andrea Barrett (“Servants of the Map” is a brilliant story, really nicely done); Tony Earley; Shirley Jackson; Kim Stanley Robinson; James Lee Burke. Laurie King. And of course Nicola, who is brilliant. And I treasure all the writers who ever led me as a reader to experience a moment of honest, saturated life in a story.
Is that what writing is for?
Yes. For me, the best stories are about real, complex people living a life whose colors are brighter or whose shadows are more opaque, whose particulars are heightened in some sense. This lets the writer explore some aspect of being human and report back in a way that takes me right there. Bam, I’m another person in a life that is similar to mine, or very different: a life where I’m making hard choices, having huge joys, seeing new things or old things in new ways. The more saturated the life of the story, the more rich my experience. Saturated doesn’t mean pyrotechnic; it means that the writer’s engine is on full, that she is engaged with something risky that she will strive to see as clearly as she can. A human moment fully imagined and honestly told.
Writing is connection. If a work of mine can resonate with a reader, then for that moment we are connected across time and space and experience. It means that I’ve sat in my room and traveled some piece of that internal landscape, and brought it back and said to the reader Do you see? And years later, in another place, she has read it and thought, Yes, I see. How amazing is that?